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 Darryl Pinckney on Joan Didion

February 10, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 2

Colm Tóibín: Fighting Over Picasso

Yiyun Li: Jon McGregor’s Aftermaths
Adam Kirsch: German Song and the Color Line
Anne Diebel: Peter Thiel’s Power
Vivian Gornick: Tess Slesinger’s Thinking Couples
Gavin Francis: Demystifying the Prostate
Laura Marsh: The World According to le Carré
 HOLBEIN
CAPTURING CHARACTER
FEBRUARY 11 THROUGH MAY 15, 2022
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Madison Ave. at 36th St.
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NYReviewBooks_Hobein_FullPage_MorganLibrary.indd 1 12/20/21 10:50 AM

Contents
4 Darryl Pinckney Our Lady of Deadpan
8
12
13
Yiyun Li
Jacek Dehnel
Michael Tomasky
Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor
Poem
Can He Build Back Better?
DAYS OF
16

19
Colm Tóibín

Laura Marsh
A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943 by John Richardson,
with the collaboration of Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga
Silverview by John le Carré
INFAMY
22 Adam Kirsch Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms
by Kira Thurman
24 Hermione Lee On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times by Michael Ignatieff
26 David Shulman The State of Israel vs. the Jews by Sylvain Cypel, translated from the French
by William Rodarmor
28 Joyce Carol Oates Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from the Portuguese
by Margaret Jull Costa, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno
29 Jessica Greenbaum Poem
30 Gavin Francis A Cultural Biography of the Prostate by Ericka Johnson
Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 by Fred D’Aguiar
32 Michael Hofmann Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky
34 Peter Brown New Rome: The Empire in the East by Paul Stephenson
The Rich and the Pure: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society
in Early Byzantium by Daniel Caner
The Last Great War of Antiquity by James Howard-Johnston
The Formation of Christendom by Judith Herrin
38 Vivian Gornick Hearts vs. Minds
BR E ND A N S IM M S A ND
40 Jonathan Mingle This Is Chance!: The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered CH A R L IE L A DE R M A N
City She Held Together by Jon Mooallem

43 Anne Diebel
The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh Raffles
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin HITLER’S
46
CONTRIBUTORS
Letters from Nina Howe, Robert Zaretsky, Fabian Krautwald, and Joshua Hammer
AMERICAN
PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor
of History Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augus-
tine of Hippo: A Biography and, most recently, Treasure in
HERMIONE LEE’s latest book, a biography of Tom Stop-
pard, will be published in paperback in March. GAMBLE
YIYUN LI is the author of six books of fiction and two books
Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity.
of nonfiction, including, most recently, Tolstoy Together. She Pearl Harbor and Germany’s
JACEK DEHNEL is a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and teaches at Princeton. March to Global War
painter. His latest books published in English are Aperture,
LAURA MARSH is the Literary Editor of The New Republic.
a selection of poetry, and the novel Mrs. Mohr Goes Miss-
ing, cowritten with his husband, Piotr Tarczy Ĕ ski. ANN JONATHAN MINGLE is the author of Fire and Ice: Soot,
FRENKEL and GWIDO ZLATKES’s recent translations Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World. He is
from the Polish include the autobiography Riding History to working on a book about the construction of new fossil fuel “An absorbing new book. . . . It
Death by Karol Modzelewski and Against the Devil in His- infrastructure.
tory: Poems, Short Stories, Essays, Fragments by Aleksander
reminds us how contingent
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author, most recently, of
Wat.
Breathe, a novel, and Night, Neon: Tales of Suspense and even the most significant
ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator with QRI in Mystery. She is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the English historical events can be, how
New York City. Department at Rutgers in the spring of 2022 and the 2020
GAVIN FRANCIS is a primary care physician in Edinburgh. recipient of the Cino del Duca World Prize. many other possibilities lurked
His latest book, Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence, DARRYL PINCKNEY’s latest book is Busted in New York beyond the familiar ones that
was just published in the UK. and Other Essays. A new edition of Blackballed: The Black
VIVIAN GORNICK is the author, most recently, of Unfin- Vote and US Democracy was published in 2020. actually happened.”
ished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader. DAVID SHULMAN is the author of Freedom and Despair: — NE W YOR K T IME S
JESSICA GREENBAUM’s third book of poems, Spilled and Notes from the South Hebron Hills, among other books. He is
Gone, was named a best book of 2021 by The Boston Globe. a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem BOOK R E V IE W
and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016.
MICHAEL HOFMANN is a poet and translator from the
German. His latest book of poems is One Lark, One Horse, COLM TÓIBÍN is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Profes-
and his Clarendon Lectures, Messing About in Boats, were sor of the Humanities at Columbia. Vinegar Hill, a poetry col-
published last year. He teaches at the University of Florida. lection, will be published in April. “A gripping tale, expertly told.”
ADAM KIRSCH is an Editor at The Wall Street Journal’s MICHAEL TOMASKY is the Editor of The New Republic — F R E DR IK L O GE VA L L ,
weekend Review section and the author of The Blessing and the and of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is working on a
Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the 20th Century. book about politics and economics. author of Embers of War
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On the cover: Una Ursprung, Avalanche, landscape #26, 2020. © Una Ursprung. The paintings on pages 17 and 18 are © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists
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3

Let sadness tell you what to read. “We
tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Joan Didion begins her essay “The
White Album” by recalling a time
when, she says, she had mislaid the
script of life. She who had reread all
of George Orwell on the beach of the
Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu is
talking about her loss of faith in the
intelligibility of narrative: “I suppose
this period began in 1966 and contin-
ued until 1971.” Her evocation of what
the late Sixties were like in her feckless
part of Los Angeles displays the gifts
of her style, starting with a Califor-
nia Old Settler dryness. She may have
had an attack of “vertigo and nausea”
in the early summer of 1968, and she
may have been an outpatient at the
psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospi-
tal in Santa Monica, and the long ex-
cerpt from her psychiatric report that
she inserts into her story may, indeed,
have said that she was suffering from
a depressive view of the world, but her
passivity is a front, her dangerous ob-
server’s disguise.
Didion remembers that an acquain-
tance referred to her large, peeling
house on Franklin Avenue in Holly-
wood as being in a “senseless-killing
neighborhood.” On October 30, 1968,
not too far away, Ramon Novarro, a
silent film–era actor, was murdered by
two hustler brothers; and for many peo-
ple Didion knew, she says, the Sixties
ended on August 9, 1969, when word
spread through her neighborhood that
Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s preg-
nant wife, and four other people at a
house on Cielo Drive had been mur-
dered the night before. It was on July
27, 1970, that Didion found herself
choosing a dress for Linda Kasabian, a
member of the Manson family (whom
she’d interviewed, presumably), to wear
as a witness for the prosecution in the
Manson trial. It was 11:20 when she de-
livered the dress to Kasabian’s attorney
outside his office on Rodeo Drive. He
was wearing a porkpie hat. “‘Dig it,’
Gary Fleischman was always saying.”
Didion’s precision of detail is structure,
balance of tone.
The White Album was published
in 1979 and was the first collection of
nonfiction by Didion that I read. A few
of the essays in it I had maybe come
across before in The New York Review,
but it enlarged the idea of her that I’d
gotten from the women protagonists in
the two of her three early novels that
I’d read, Play It as It Lays (1970) and A
Book of Common Prayer (1977). Did-
ion was not shy about killing off a her-
oine at the end of the story if she had
to. Joan “Bad Vibes” Didion, someone
called her after reading her first non-
fiction collection, Slouching Towards
Bethlehem (1968). In those days, peo-
ple said that a magazine needed only to
report the news and trends from New
York City to succeed nationally, and
part of the mystique of Didion for me
was that she reversed the formula and
told us what was happening or had hap-
pened out there.
She was sitting on the floor in a Sunset
Boulevard studio, counting the seventy-
six control knobs on an electronic panel
and watching the Doors wait and wait
for Jim Morrison. In her Los Ange-
les, dinner was at nine, unless it was at
4 The New York Review
Our Lady of Deadpan
Darryl Pinckney
Joan Didion, 1987; photographs by Dominique Nabokov
11:30, twenty for sushi, or a table some-
where else for fourteen. Desires, rather
than plans, could change in a moment,
because David Hockney might stop
by, because somebody had the where-
abouts of Ultra Violet that night. The
Living Theater would have to wait until
cigarettes were finished. People she had
not much relation to came and went in
her house. Janis Joplin wanted brandy
and Benedictine in a water tumbler.
She kept in a drawer a list of the license
numbers she’d written down of panel
trucks she’d seen circling the block. “In
another sense the Sixties did not truly
end for me until January of 1971, when
I left the house on Franklin Avenue and
moved to a house on the sea.”
D idion is one of two women included
in Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson’s land-
mark anthology, The New Journalism
(1973). Her husband, John Gregory
Dunne, is among the volume’s several
showmen of subjectivity. In the 1970s
you couldn’t catch the subway at the
72nd and Broadway station without
someone in your group pointing to
branches in a triangular patch of dark
across the street and saying that that
was Needle Park and that Joan Didion
and John Gregory Dunne had written
the screenplay for The Panic in Needle
Park (1971). It was known that they had
an East Coast life and a West Coast life,
a book world and a film world, which
seemed to make them exceptions in
both. She wasn’t an outsider so much as
she managed to remain unclaimed by
the worlds she moved in.
In the Seventies, we kept comparing
ourselves to the Sixties, wanting either
to fulfill the decade’s promises or to get
over it, stop tripping. The chapter in
which Eldridge Cleaver accuses James
Baldwin of wanting to have a baby by
a white man was all I’d read of Soul on
Ice (1968). Cleaver published Soul on
Dominique Nabokov
Fire, his hustle of the Christian conver-
sion narrative, in 1978, and the rumor
was that the Black Panther fugitive had
come back from exile and surrendered
in order to get the royalties from Soul
on Ice held in escrow. After so much
unquestioning support for the Pan-
thers, including Baldwin’s, The White
Album’s title essay, composed, Did-
ion tells us, between 1968 and 1978, is
striking in its sobriety of mind about
black revolution.
She summarizes the origins of the
Black Panther Party in Oakland in
1966 and the early-morning confron-
tation in Oakland a year later between
Huey P. Newton and John Frey, a
white police officer, that led to Frey’s
death. Newton and another police of-
ficer were wounded in the gunfire. In
the spring of 1968, when Newton was
awaiting trial for murder, Didion was
allowed to see him:
I am telling you neither that Huey
Newton killed John Frey nor that
Huey Newton did not kill John
Frey, for in the context of revolu-
tionary politics Huey Newton’s
guilt or innocence was irrelevant.
I am telling you only how Huey
Newton happened to be in the Al-
ameda County Jail, and why rallies
were held in his name, demonstra-
tions organized whenever he ap-
peared in court.
She isn’t sure the likable Newton un-
derstood that he was of more use to the
revolution behind bars than he was on
the street.
Cleaver has press credentials, like
Didion, and the two other journalists
present in the hot room of fluorescent
light. What Cleaver wants from Newton
are statements, messages to the outside,
prophecy to be interpreted as
needed. . . . “There are a lot of
people interested in the Executive
Mandate Number Three you’ve
issued to the Black Panther Party,
Huey. Care to comment?” And
Huey Newton would comment.
“Yes, Mandate Number Three is
this demand . . .”
Everything sounded like quotation or
pronouncement, Didion says. Newton
would not talk about himself. The per-
sonal was to be avoided, “even at the
cost of coherence.” Safety lay in gen-
eralization, she notes. Yet she appre-
ciated the Panther proposition “that
political power began at the end of the
barrel of a gun,” and even more that
Newton in an early memorandum had
been specific: “Army .45; carbine; 12-
gauge Magnum shotgun with 18” barrel,
preferably the brand of High Standard;
M-16; .357 Magnum pistols; P-38.”
She couldn’t scale that cinder block
wall of Panther rhetoric; there hadn’t
been anywhere on the surface to get
hold of. Newton’s repetitive Marxist
phrases were an autodidact’s recita-
tion, and after she gives examples of
how conformist that was, she provides
an excerpt from the testimony before
the Alameda County grand jury of the
nurse who was in charge of the emer-
gency room at the Oakland hospital
where Newton sought help after getting
shot by one of the police officers that
October morning in 1967. The nurse
wouldn’t let “this Negro fellow” see a
doctor until he’d registered and shown
her his insurance card. He shouted that
he’d been shot and was bleeding, but
she insisted. The nurse’s testimony il-
lustrated a “collision of cultures” for
Didion, and she pinned a copy of the
testimony above her desk, until she
learned that Newton did have an insur-
ance card for that hospital system.
One morning in 1968 she went to see
Cleaver in his San Francisco apartment.
She had to ring the bell and step into the
street where she could be scrutinized
from the apartment and then buzzed in.
Kathleen Cleaver was in the kitchen fry-
ing sausages; he was in the living room
listening to Coltrane; and there were
people everywhere, in the hallways, on
the telephone, standing in doorways.
Soul on Ice was being published that
day. Didion says they talked of Cleaver’s
advance, the size of his first printing, the
advertising budget, in what bookstores
copies were available:
It was a not unusual discussion
between writers, with the differ-
ence that one of the writers had his
parole officer there and the other
had stood out on Oak Street and
been visually frisked before com-
ing inside.
Just as liberal Hollywood was “a kind
of dictatorship of good intentions,”
so Didion viewed the disorder of the
student strike at San Francisco State
College in the fall of 1968 as an “ami-
able evasion of routine” for everyone
except the black militants, who at least
were dictating the rules. She’d been to
meetings and debates in Los Angeles
in 1968, her house had been a meet-
ing place for Communist screenwrit-
ers in the 1930s and 1950s, and she is
 Exploring Black Experiences

February 10, 2022 5

put off by the vanity and irrelevance of
goodwill in these Hollywood experi-
ences and Hollywood histories. In the
postscript-like essay “On the Morning
After the Sixties,” Didion concludes
that if she thought going to the barri-
cades would affect man’s fate she’d go
to the barricades, “but it would be less
than honest to say that I expect to hap-
pen upon such a happy ending.”
Murray Kempton liked to say that
Didion was not one of nature’s liber-
als. He pointed out that it was William
F. Buckley Jr. who first published her,
in the pages of his National Review. It
is hard to stay on your feet in a pull-
ing tide. Susan Sontag never reprinted
that essay on her trip to Cuba in 1970.
I doubt that Didion has little Caster-
bridges like that. For one thing, she
didn’t get ideological enthusiasms; in-
stead she got phone calls from former
neighbors into Scientology. To think
about the Sixties, Didion returns to the
Fifties, to Berkeley and the humanism
and skepticism that were her genera-
tion’s points of intellectual reference.
She reviews the “litany of trivia” about
the domestic in the literature of second-
wave feminism, recognizing that it was
“a key technique in the politicizing of
women who had perhaps been condi-
tioned to obscure their resentments
even from themselves.” The personal
may be social, but individuals cannot
be the solutions to social problems that
we want them to be. The fault is in our-
selves. People will let people down.
The Sixties had Didion define what
she called her commitment to the ex-
ploration of moral distinctions and
ambiguities. She once described how
she liked to look first at the small items
at the bottom of the newspaper page,
to read the page from the bottom up,
and to read the newspaper from back
to front. The reflections she proposed
came together from patient, impartial-
seeming scrutiny of the language peo-
ple expressed themselves in, of what we,
noisome society, meant, consciously
and otherwise. The detachment of the
observer guarded against the kind of
disillusion that brings writer’s block,
modest expectations of human behav-
ior being self-protective as well as phil-
osophical. But for a writer associated
with control, manipulation, coolness of
voice, Didion’s work is full of feeling.
An essay that exemplifies her in-
dependence as an interrogator of the
American scene is “New York: Senti-
mental Journeys,” which first appeared
in the January 17, 1991, issue of The
New York Review and was then in-
cluded in her collection After Henry
(1992). It is an extraordinary examina-
tion of a miscarriage of justice in New
York City.
On April 20, 1989, a woman was
found unconscious in Central Park near
the connecting road at 102nd Street:
Her skull had been crushed, her
left eyeball pushed back through its
socket, the characteristic surface
wrinkles of her brain flattened.
Dirt and twigs were found in her
vagina, suggesting rape. By May 2,
when she first woke from coma, six
black and Hispanic teenagers, four
of whom had made videotaped
statements concerning their roles
in the attack and another of whom
had described his role in an un-
signed verbal statement, had been
charged with her assault and rape
and she had become, unwilling and
6 The New York Review
unwitting, a sacrificial player in the
sentimental narrative that is New
York public life.
The public outcry against the de-
fendants was intense, the presumption
of their guilt vehemently asserted by
politicians and press: “Teen Wolfpack
Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec on
Jogging Path.” Two trials in 1990 re-
sulted in their convictions. Crimes are
news to the extent that they offer “a
story, a lesson, a high concept,” Did-
ion says. The trial, the Daily News an-
nounced, was about “the rape and the
brutalization of a city.” For Didion, it
was about a city “rapidly vanishing into
the chasm between its actual life and its
preferred narratives.” She concentrates
on how the accused were presented in
the news as opposed to the images of
the victim, “a young woman of conven-
tional middle- class privilege and prom-
ise whose situation was such that many
people tended to overlook the fact that
the state’s case against the accused was
not invulnerable.” None of the defen-
dants had police records, which, Di-
dion observes ruefully, was somehow
seen as an achievement. There were
confessions, but no forensic evidence.
T here are competing, conflicting
narratives in her analysis. For black
people, the case could be read as a
confirmation of their victimization and
of the white conspiracy at the heart
of that victimization. The Amsterdam
News called the trial “a legal lynch-
ing.” Black people when asked said
they believed the confessions had been
wrenched from the accused. The crim-
inal justice system could not function
equitably when a black man was ac-
cused of raping a white woman. Didion
is conscious of the “emotional under-
tow” derived from the taboos in black
American history associated with the
idea of the rape of a white woman. For
blacks, rape was at “the very core of
their victimization.” She discusses the
differences in the handling of assault
cases involving white women and black
women, the vulnerability of women to
the well-meaning official procedures in
rape cases, the recent deaths of other
white girls by misadventure in the city,
and why the case of the Central Park
jogger set off such public anger.
Didion argues that the case allowed
the white middle class, unnerved by drug
culture and violent crime, to express its
rage against thugs without guilt: “It was
precisely in this conflation of victim and
city, this confusion of personal woe with
public distress, that the crime’s ‘story’
would be found, its lesson, its encour-
aging promise of narrative resolution.”
The attack on the jogger passes into a
narrative about confrontation and Gov-
ernor Mario Cuomo’s characterization
of the crime as “the ultimate shriek of
alarm.” The narrative was about what
was wrong with the city and the solu-
tion to the problem. What was wrong
with the city, in the press and TV re-
ports, were the accused. The solution
was to partake of the symbolic body
and blood of the jogger: “The imposi-
tion of a sentimental, or false, narrative
on the disparate and often random ex-
perience that constitutes the life of a
city” means that much of what happens
will be lost in a “sentimental reading of
class differences and human suffering.”
“New York: Sentimental Journeys”
is one of the bleakest portraits of New
York City in the age of crack and AIDS
and “wildings” and its first black mayor.
The real problems of the city could go
on being ignored: the adverse effects of
the financial crisis of 1987 on the city’s
psyche; the city’s underlying criminal
ethic; its undermining customs of pa-
tronage, like in a third world city; and
a bureaucracy reduced to voodoo. Yet
Didion concedes that “a New York
come to grief on the sentimental stories
told in defense of its own lazy crim-
inality” will nevertheless go on, not
learn, because “the city’s inevitability
remained the given, the heart, the first
and last word on which all the stories
rested.” “New York: Sentimental Jour-
neys” was a dramatic dissenting opin-
ion at the time. The victim’s injuries
had been life-threatening, but the righ-
teousness of the rage alerted Didion’s
suspicion that a troubled city was being
driven by a lust for the cathartic. She
kept her balance and was not pulled by
the tide. The five black youths were ex-
onerated in 2002, when an inmate in a
state prison suddenly confessed to the
rape, and the confession was then cor-
roborated by DNA evidence.
Robert Silvers, coeditor of The New
York Review, was particularly proud
of this essay. In The Fifty-Year Argu-
ment, Martin Scorsese’s documentary
about the Review, Didion laughs that
the more trouble she had with it, the
longer he wanted it, trusting every turn
and digression she would make. It has
a novel’s scope and is about New York
City rather than race, which unsettled
me at the time. I was used to the racial
aspect being the primary focus of the
Central Park Five story and was im-
pressed that she cast as cold an eye on
the black activist Al Sharpton as she
did on District Attorney Robert Mor-
genthau, pulling back to a wide view of
the “grave and disruptive problems” of
the city: “problems of not having, prob-
lems of not making it, problems that
demonstrably existed, among the mad
and the ill and the under-equipped and
the overwhelmed, with decreasing ref-
erence to color.”
B ob adored her and she brought out
the best in him as an editor. Didion’s
pieces on El Salvador in the early 1980s
helped to relieve his and his coeditor
Barbara Epstein’s problem of whom to
trust on Central America (in the days
before the brilliant Alma Guillermo-
prieto). They’d been determined not
to get duped over Nicaragua; they had
some regrets over some of the pieces
about Vietnam that they’d published.
Barbara compared Didion’s political
reportage to Mary McCarthy going to
Hanoi and meeting with dismay and
distaste the language of the North
Vietnamese government. She and Bob
treasured Didion for the way she lined
up and then knocked down what some-
one was saying, or trying to get away
with saying.
In “Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of
History,” her critique of the war on ter-
ror, published in these pages in 2003,
Didion is contemptuous of the easy,
galling ironies that the Bush admin-
istration’s deadly policies supply her
with. In this essay, she is alive to “a dis-
connect between the government and
the citizens.” And as eager as Bob had
been to get Didion to cover, say, a Re-
publican National Convention, her not
being one to be taken in maybe came
from an Old Settler ambivalence about
electoral politics. It was people at their
worst. Politics were power relations;
the rest was a mug’s game. (“Now, Dar-
ryl. Shut up!” she said way back there
as I defended a pre–welfare reform,
pre-Monica Bill Clinton early in his
first term.)
The seriousness of her reportage ad-
justed for me the light on her early fic-
tions and confirmed that she had been
up to something in them. Everything
was deception, a strategy, and behind
those fictional portraits of diffidence,
fragility, the sensitivities of women who
lived too well and thought too hard,
stood an authorial ruthlessness. She
was not afflicted with the disease that
hindered some contemporary women
novelists on a mission—that of liking
their heroines too much. “Writers are
always selling somebody out,” Did-
ion said. We were used to writers who
employed techniques of fiction in their
nonfiction, whereas the reportorial or
the clinical—what to call it?—became
an ever more pronounced element in
her later novels. The writer admits
to being the narrator of Democracy
(1984), her novel set largely in South-
east Asia at the end of the Vietnam
War. The narrator rather talks into her
own frame, into the story of a senator’s
wife’s long romance with a CIA guy
capable of love. The allusion to Henry
Adams’s novel of Washington political
intrigue, Democracy: An American
Novel (1880), is to the point, but Did-
ion’s woman, unlike Adams’s widow
who is too useful to men, doesn’t have
to ask herself whether America is right
or wrong.
The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)
is about Didion’s hatred of the all-
conquering male. It is a novel about pol-
itics, Florida/Cuban/contra-style. The
authorial voice is blunt about what it
doesn’t want to waste time on, but this
very thing in the narrator’s voice—“not
quite omniscient,” it says of itself—is
what leaves you somewhat puzzled.
Like sitting before a box so wonder-
fully wrapped that you just assume that
what’s inside is something you really
want, and you open it to find a gift more
in the giver’s taste than in yours, but it’s
not one of those times when the giver’s
taste is in question. In the case of The
Last Thing He Wanted, the giver’s taste
is better than yours.
E lizabeth Hardwick called Didion a
poet of “the airplane and the airport.”
In an essay in Slouching Towards Beth-
lehem about coming to New York for
the first time, Didion can name the
model of aircraft she deplaned from.
Hardwick was fascinated by the aes-
thetic challenges Didion’s sensibility
set before her in the novel form, how
to devise a structure for “the fadings
and erasures of experience” that were
her subject: “This author is a martyr of
facticity, and indeed such has its place
in the fearless architecture of her fic-
tions. You have a dogged concreteness
of detail in an often capricious mode of
presentation.” And yet it reassures the
reader, is a part of the muscular confi-
dence of the narrator. Hardwick used
to speak of what she called Didion’s
“masculine knowledge,” an interest
in systems and how things are put to-
gether, an asset in composition that she
believed Didion shared with George
Eliot.
I see her in black at Barbara’s round
dining-room table in low light and the
February 10, 2022 7
slow white cigarette smoke of the pe-
riod. John Gregory Dunne and Murray
Kempton are booming at each other,
West Hartford, Connecticut, and Balti-
more, Maryland, North and South, fir-
ing their cannons. Lizzie and Barbara
are in that mood where one refuses to
give ground to the other, and so they
are talking at each other, at the same
time, getting louder. I look across to
Joan and mentally wag my tail, wait for
a sign, a shared gesture of Get a load
of this. Her elbows are on the table and
her chin on crossed hands. Nothing,
not an eyebrow.
Our lady of deadpan: “During the
years when I found it necessary to re-
vise the circuitry of my mind I discov-
ered . . .” Her genius was at exploring the
paradoxes and contradictions in the sto-
ries we tell ourselves, and then the sort
of double tragedy that would befall a
Didion character happened to her, and
storytelling became something else.
Blue Nights (2011) is a lamentation for
her troubled daughter, an indictment
of herself for somehow failing her as
a mother. The memoir is anguished
about what she does not say, cannot
yet say, in that earlier memoir about
the death of her husband, The Year
of Magical Thinking (2005). Dunne
and Didion came home one night and
he suffered a heart attack as he was
about to make them drinks. It does not
say: We came home from the hospital
where our daughter lay in a coma, and
he suffered a heart attack. Didion said
in Griffin Dunne’s documentary Joan
Didion: The Center Will Not Hold that
she was trying to cope, that to write
had been her trying to cope with it.
She throws out an arm, almost involun-
tarily, as she explains.
Barbara used to say that Joan was
completely dependent on John, that he
protected her, took care of her, was not
competitive with her, made her writing
possible, but as frail as Joan appeared,
she was tough as iron. Work, like gin,
dims pain, Didion said. Those kinds
of women were fine if something hap-
pened to the husband, Barbara said.
That turned out not at all to be her
fate. I think of her friends, especially
those New York women, who banded
together after his death and set up for
her a life in which she was tenderly
looked after.
Katherine Anne Porter wrote of
Katherine Mansfield, “I see no sign that
she ever adjusted herself to anything or
anybody, except at an angle where she
could get exactly the slant and the light
she needed for the spectacle.” In this
pandemic, certain deaths have added
weight: this is the passing of, this is the
end of, she was the last of . . . Q

Lean Fall Stand
by Jon McGregor.
Catapult, 278 pp., $26.00
Jon McGregor published his first novel,
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable
Things (2002), at the age of twenty-
six. Set on an urban street in northern
England, much of the book takes place
over the course of a single day, at the
end of which a fatal accident happens.
Life—in the mundane manners of tea
drinking, house painting, ball playing,
bed making, lovemaking, telephoning,
eavesdropping, looking and watching,
not looking and not seeing—is spilled
into public view, while mysterious joys
and secretive pains remain out of sight,
like precious organs tucked inside a
body.
There is a familiar narrative formula
in fiction: something dramatic, tragic,
or otherwise life- changing happens
and the novel explores the aftermath,
showing how the characters’ lives
are affected by the event. In If No-
body Speaks of Remarkable Things,
McGregor changes this formula, plac-
ing that event in the last few pages.
This leaves little space for its after-
math to be explored in a conventional
way, and with good reason: even
though we often use the word “un-
imaginable” to describe the pain and
suffering that might follow a tragedy,
they are not necessarily that difficult
to picture.
In fiction as well as in life, oftentimes
we attempt to reach backward from the
aftermath of an event to the time be-
fore it, searching for clues and patterns.
These attempts are not entirely trust-
worthy: they highlight some things,
omit others, and risk rewriting the past.
McGregor counters such a revisiting
gesture, devoting almost the entire
novel to describing in minute detail
the ordinary actions of each of the res-
idents of the street—including a World
War II veteran and his wife, a man who
lost his wife to a fire and is bringing up
their daughter by himself, a group of
club-goers whose reveling ends after
daybreak, a university student and her
roommates, immigrant families with
three generations living under the same
roof, children playing cricket and a lit-
tle boy on a tricycle, a lone young man
who collects junk and attempts to make
In the Beforemath
Yiyun Li
Jon McGregor; illustration by Ciara Quilty-Harper
art out of it—as they move through the
day, just as they would any other day,
in and out of one another’s sight. These
ordinary moments, rendered in poetic
prose, are nothing but extraordinary.
Tightly coiled, McGregor’s sentences
often seem to be on the cusp of spring-
ing into a paragraph, a chapter—and
yet each retains an untrespassing
efficiency:
The buses in the depot, waiting for
a new day, they are quiet, their met-
alwork easing and shrinking into
place, settling and cooling after
eighteen hours of heat and noise,
eighteen hours of criss- crossing
the city like wool on a loom. . . .
The night-fishers strung out along
the canal, feeling the sing of their
lines in the water, although they
are within yards of each other they
are saying nothing, watching lumi-
nous floats hang in the night like
bottled fireflies . . .
To attune to the sensitivity of Mc-
Gregor’s words—each sentence, each
clause, each punctuation mark (or lack
thereof)—a reader has to slow down
to a near stillness, almost as if holding
one’s breath in and one’s finger out to
be touched by a hummingbird’s beak.
At one point the veteran and his wife
board a bus while a young girl watches
them, unobserved:
And if either of them were to look
over their shoulder now they would
see the young girl standing on the
corner, watching the bus grind its
way up the long hill out of town,
lifting an imaginary hat from her
head and trying to wink. But nei-
ther of them are watching, they’re
too busy settling themselves in
their seats, she straightening her
dress, he removing his hat and
smoothing his thick white hair,
both of them shuffling into a com-
fortable position.
And behind them, on the cor-
ner of her street, the young girl
tries again, two winks coming out
at once, and she frowns and holds
one eye open with a finger and a
thumb while she lifts an imaginary
hat from her head.
In this passage, framed by the two lift-
ings of an imaginary hat, no more than
ten seconds pass; the entire sequence
of the girl’s actions is seen by no one.
One of her brothers, at the end of the
novel, will be hit by a car—witnessed
by many people in the street—but that
event haunts me less than this one. Mo-
ments like this, rescued by McGregor’s
attention, require reciprocating atten-
tion from the reader. To read slowly is
to read with imagination and memory.
Are we not all living with the recollec-
tion of being a child, with the desire to
be seen in our kindest and most expres-
sive moments, and yet fated not to be
seen?
In the aftermath of the accident,
perhaps the girl herself will forget this
earlier moment on the street corner,
a small loss overshadowed by a mon-
strous one. What a comfort that Mc-
Gregor has not let incidents such as
this one, which do not have a position
in the chain of cause and effect, slip
into oblivion.
My only quibble with the novel is
that the accident—though placed at the
end—is alluded to periodically through-
out, giving the narrative a slight flavor
of artificial urgency: we are reminded,
with each allusion, that we are reading
about a time when the world is still in-
nocent of one senseless tragedy. But
life itself, at any given moment, is al-
ways innocent of some senseless trage-
dies, dooms small and large.

8 The New York Review

D ooms are never far off in McGregor’s
novels. Even the Dogs (2010) opens
with a man found dead in an unheated
flat in an unnamed industrial English
city; within the first few sentences of
Reservoir 13 (2017), it is revealed that
a thirteen-year- old girl has gone miss-
ing from an English village where she
and her parents have been on a winter
holiday. Both of these books could be
described as explorations of the after-
math of an event of the kind that one
reads about in the newspaper—local
rather than national—before moving
on to the next column: a gallery opened
in town, three hundred cassette tapes
of oral history recordings were discov-
ered in the basement of the municipal
historical society, a cyclist was injured
by a car at an intersection and died in
the hospital.
The word “aftermath” derives from
aftermowth, and originally referred to
a second crop of grass that grows after
the first has been mown or harvested.
If there is aftermath, there should
be beforemath, too. But what does
beforemath mean? A time like the one
explored in McGregor’s first novel, per-
haps, when what is growing cannot be
called first growth or old growth yet,
because no mowing has taken place to
mark it. But how dependent is a narra-
tive on that potentially artificial or ar-
bitrary moment of mowing?
In each of the thirteen chapters of
Reservoir 13, another year passes since
the disappearance of the teenage girl,
with seasons unfolding reliably, na-
ture writing a cyclic narrative on the
meadow, by the river, and in the woods.
The villagers hold the mystery of her
disappearance in their collective con-
February 10, 2022
sciousness, but it’s not at the center of
their lives. Children grow up; people
fall in and out of love, commit petty
crimes and cruelties against one an-
other, and mask their affection and
kindness to one another with the non-
chalance of the accidental. A woman
cares for an elderly neighbor’s dog
while trying to cause as little pain or
humiliation as possible:
[Cathy] knocked on Mr. Wilson’s
door and asked whether Nelson
needed a walk. He said that would
be a great help, and asked whether
she’d have a cup of tea first. A rou-
tine of theirs, this, to make the ar-
rangement seem temporary, when
in fact Cathy had been walking
Nelson most days for years.
A butcher’s shop is foreclosed on,
a yoga center opens, a potter’s cre-
ations—unappreciated and unsold—
are shattered on the ground during
an outburst of despair. New lambs are
born, some with more difficulty than
others. The thirteen years after the
girl’s disappearance are not that dif-
ferent from the thirteen years before
it. The girl is never found; the mystery
remains unresolved.
Reservoir 13 begins with a pair of
lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
McGregor’s novel, circular and dif-
fused like Stevens’s poem, is unusual
in showing that aftermath is not nec-
essarily very different from before-
math: they are both times people live
through, separated by an arbitrary mo-
ment. It’s a novel about the many des-
tinies of multiple characters, none of
them elevated with endowed purpose
or meaning, but each described atten-
tively. Its tapestrying effect brings to
mind Middlemarch, and also the fiction
of contemporary writers such as Eliza-
beth McCracken and Tom Drury.
Lean Fall Stand has a more linear
structure than McGregor’s earlier
novels. It consists of three parts, each
named for a verb, the part of speech
that is most time- conscious. At the
start of “Lean,” a three-man surveying
team is separated by a sudden, blinding
storm while out taking photographs of
some cliffs near Lopez Sound, not far
from their isolated research station in
Antarctica. But there is a circular ele-
ment to the narration as the chapters in
this section alternate among the three
characters: Thomas and Luke, both
young researchers on their first Antarc-
tic expedition, and Doc, a veteran with
thirty years’ experience as a technical
assistant or guide.
That the men are thousands of miles
away from home and several hours
from the main base, where help would
come from, does not change the fact
that people and what they represent—a
past made into memory, and a future
when this day’s memory will be shared
as a story of adventure—are the natu-
ral reference points of the characters’
thoughts. Solitude is perhaps more of
a physical state; our minds are rarely
void of people. As Thomas tries to get
his bearings, unable to see anything
through the wind and snow, he lies flat
on the ice and listens to the sound of
the storm:
He had heard this described as
like being inside a jet engine. As
though people knew what being
inside a jet engine was like. Peo-
ple said these things, but the words
didn’t always fit.
Luke, alone with the snowmobile and
also unable to see anything, tries un-
successfully to make radio contact with
Thomas and Doc. He ponders:
People were going to ask him a
lot of questions about Antarc-
tica, when he got home, and one
thing he wouldn’t be able to tell
them was that a lot of time it was
pure boring. Beautiful, yes. Awe-
inspiring and majestic or humbling
or whatever else you wanted to call
it, but once you were done looking,
the actual experience of being here
day after day was kind of long.
We are, in these chapters, close to the
researchers’ consciousnesses, which
creates a false hope: surely the novel
will let us see all of them return home
safely and share this adventure with
their families and friends.
Doc, meanwhile, is having a stroke
without knowing it. After a near fall
from an ice cliff, he has trouble moving,
is confused, and even in his thoughts
his language starts to break down, los-
ing grammar, vocabulary, continuity:
All slow and now the engine loud.
All slow and now press face jacket
9

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The Secret Autobiography
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The Life of Camilla Williams,
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Reflections of W. H. Hudson
(1841–1922): The World’s
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edited by Dennis Shrubsall
Woman’s Life on a Southern
Tobacco Farm: The Story of
Sallie Mae Taylor, 1893–1977
The Political Life of a German
Journalist, 1911–1948
by William H. Rey
Mildred Bennett, Archivist
of Willa Cather’s Papers:
My Autobiography
Nobel Novelist Knut Hamsun
during the Nazi Occupation:
The Chapter Omitted from
His Wife’s Autobiography
Autobiographical Narration
of Fear and Friendship
in the Soviet Union
by Vladmir Shlapentokh
Life History of an Ethiopian
Refugee (1944–1991)
by Taddele Seyoum Teshale
A Poet’s Son Recalls
His Father, Robinson Jeffers
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Personal Moments in the Lives
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crease squash face, fall, fall, snow. ous landscapes, has to relearn how to go through a day without a full-time
Weight. White. White. Heavy. belt his trousers and put food into his caretaker.
White. Was up, was down. Heavy. mouth. He also has to regain basic lan- McGregor’s depiction of speechless-
White. Muffle. Muffle. Slow, slow. guage skills. In extended passages of ness, both metaphorical and physical,
Tink. Skidoo hit rock, turned over. dialogue, McGregor demonstrates with makes the novel much more interesting
Luke. Feeling gone right side face painstaking attention how difficult than if he had provided a page-turner
all down body. Falling. Weight. it is for Robert to communicate with about a botched expedition in Antarc-
Silence. White. Mouth full. Snow the rest of the world, as when a speech tica. Though most of us might not have
pack tight. Wait. Up. Down. Float- therapist shows him a picture of a ship: firsthand experience of that continent,
ing. Low thing. Snow sling. Heart we are familiar with its often majestic
beat slow snow low light gone. “Is this a shoe? A shoe, Robert?” stock images: the ocean, the sky, the
Footsteps little far. Footsteps big “Ssh. Yes. Sshh.” ubiquitous ice, penguins, humans with
near. Shout. Pull. Fight. Shout. Pull “This is something that floats special equipment that grants them
over, turn over. Breath. Big breath. on the water, Robert. Does a shoe access to the landscape. Such a place
Mouth open, cold air. Lungs burst. float?” might prompt a cliché—at a loss for
Breath, breath, breath. Stand. “Shhh.” words—as might tragedies of all kinds
Lean. Fall. “Is this a ship?” (and perhaps blisses of all kinds).
“Yes!” But anyone tempted to speak that
For a few pages we are trapped in this
language. What’s going on? We don’t
understand, just as Doc does not. Per-
haps he is dying, perhaps we are listen-
ing to the ravings of a man at death’s
door. When will clarity return to an-
chor us?
Yet even in our wish for lucidity
we are also reeling from a chapter in
which the clear and logical language
used by Thomas as he floats away on a
piece of ice is a drastic contrast to the
whirlpool of words in Doc’s thoughts.
When Thomas refers to the training
he received before the trip, we sense
the succinctness of the bullet points:
“The phrase floe- hop came to mind. . . .
If he could find an adjacent floe, and
move across to it, he could keep mov-
ing that way to the land.” Further and
further adrift, he still finds the precise
words to describe his surroundings, re-
ferring to a nearby leopard seal: “Cir-
cling would be too strong a word. It
was maintaining a presence.” Thomas’s
language sounds so reasonable that we
are nearly convinced he could swim in
the icy ocean to shore and trek the gla-
cier to safety.
In interviews, McGregor has said that
he wanted to write about a trip to Ant-
arctica in 2004 but didn’t figure out
how until now. To recreate the world
of an Antarctic expedition—the spec-
ificity of equipment, protocols, and
procedures; the varieties of landscape, William Dreser: Psaracolius curaeus (Molina), 1855
weather, flora, and fauna; the natural
history of the continent and the human “Ship. Good. Ssh—ship.” She phrase carelessly, as though it could
history of exploration and exploitation; made more notes. She turned to convey something substantial, would
all the different ways a day could go Anna, suddenly, and smiled. She perhaps reconsider after reading
wrong; and the aloneness and lone- held up a picture of an aeroplane. Lean Fall Stand. What does it mean
liness a person might feel when such “Puh—puh—puh.” for someone to be truly at a loss for
a life, so near nature, is also the most “You can say this already?” words? During the immediate period
artificial and tedious—might require “Pay-lane. Red. Red pay-lane.” after Robert’s return to England, his
a novel with the length and breadth of most consistent answer to any query
Moby-Dick. McGregor opted out of There is an abysmal gap between is a combination of “yes,” “of course,”
writing that book. those who take language for granted “obviously,” and “Christ”:
In Antarctica, Doc may have been and those who have lost that ability.
representing humankind facing ex- When Anna first learns about Robert’s He pulled at the collar of his shirt.
traordinary nature. But in the second stroke, she turns to her close friend Anna asked if it was uncomfortable.
part of McGregor’s novel, “Fall,” the Bridget, whose husband—a colleague “Yes! Yes! Obviously, Christ!”
narrative swiftly shifts to England, of Robert’s—died in an earlier acci- “Okay. I was only asking.”
where Doc, known to his family and dent in Antarctica. Grief for the dead “Of course, of course, yes,
friends as Robert, has returned to re- is nonnegotiable, but it also offers a yes.”. . .
cover from his stroke. Here the novel graspable reality, a certainty, that is not “Nice pants, Dad.”
becomes the story of Robert and Anna, available to Anna. Anna confesses to “Yes, obviously, obviously.”
his wife—a scientist who has centered Bridget, “I don’t know if I want him to
her entire marriage to Robert around come home.” Nothing is obvious, nothing can be
his absences and brought up their two This is not selfishness or lack of taken for granted, and a brain that has
children mostly on her own. They are love. Any funeral director or grief many reasons to scream “no” to life can
waging a different war against nature, counselor may use such language with only manage a “yes.” This especially
this time within Robert’s brain: against the bereaved: I want you to remember complicates matters when the research
aphasia, the loss of a person’s ability to him as when he was alive, not how he institute has to investigate and decide
understand language or express oneself died. Such words would be of little use if it was Robert’s error that contributed
in speech. to Anna. The nearly speechless and to the death of his colleague:
Coming back from a near death can immobile Robert is still filled with
be a humiliating process. Robert, the life. He dreams of going on the next “And the medical team said they
experienced navigator of treacher- season’s expedition, yet he cannot found you in this area, towards
The New York Review
 The Robert B. Silvers Foundation
is ppleased to announce
The Recipients of the 2021 Silvers-Dudley Prizes for
Literary Criticism, Arts Writing, and Journalism.
The Robert B. Silvers Prize The Grace Dudley Prize The Robert B. Silvers Prize
for Literary Criticism for Arts Writing for Journalism

Elaine Blair Vinson Cunningham Alma Guillermoprieto

Los Angeles, CA
“Whether unraveling the sexual myths of
contemporary literature or praising
authors who have otherwise generally
been misunderstood, Blair’s long-form
essays on writers and writing are lucid
and elegant dissections of style.”
Brooklyn, NY
“Cunningham’s incisive, bold and witty
style, and his combination of authority
and generosity in his reviews of plays
both old and new, make his a
particularly welcome voice today.”
Bogotá, Colombia
“Fearless, bold and compassionate,
Guillermoprieto has documented
violence and crime across Latin America
with tenacity and grace over the past
four decades, setting the highest
possible benchmark for reporting of
this kind.”

Merve Emre Jason Farago Nesrine Malik

Oxford, England
“At once a spirited critic and a devoted
scholar, Emre’s writing on authors both
contemporary and past combines intense
attention to the text and an impressively
wide frame of reference, always revealing
unexpected layers of literary meaning.”
New York, NY
“Farago’s spry and incisive criticism
takes on the art world at eye level,
ignoring the noise and combing out
the fluff to look, carefully, at the
work itself.”
London, England
“Malik’s voice—pointed, vigorous,
uncompromising—speaking out on
vital humanitarian and political
issues, makes her one of the most
distinctive journalists at work today.”

Becca Rothfeld Ingrid Rowland Thomas Meaney

Cambridge, MA
“Rothfeld’s writings on a wide range
of books shows an impressive
independence of mind—and great
wit. Whether reviewing Bohumil
Hrabal, Jonathan Franzen, Paul
Celan, or Sally Rooney, she is at once
knowing and subtle, always
rewarding the reader with fresh and
vigorous insights.”
Rome, Italy
“Illuminating history and deflating
myths, Rowland’s learned, sly criticism
brings encyclopedic knowledge and
keenly uncompromising perception to
bear on works ranging across several
millennia—from ancient Rome to
contemporary architecture.”
Berlin, Germany
“Meaney’s authoritative writing on
Germany and Continental politics and
culture melds an impressive intellect,
wide historical knowledge, and a fresh
reporting style to explain the densely
entwined currents of contemporary
politics in Europe and beyond.”

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established by a bequest of the late Robert B. Silvers, a founding editor
of The New York Review of Books, with the aim of supporting writers working in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, the
intellectual essay, political analysis, and social reportage. Such support takes the form of the annual Silvers Grants for Work in
Progress, given since 2019, and the Silvers-Dudley Prizes, bestowed annually beginning in 2021.

Rea Hederman, President Daniel Mendelsohn, Director

February 10, 2022 11

 Priestley Head, within sight of the “Well, obviously.” “Can you see, Doc? Over here?” “Yes, yes. Ha! Yes.”
skiway?” “Right. And Luke was found a “Obviously, yes.” “I think, Doc, we’re interested
“Yes. Yes.” few hundred yards beyond Priest- “It’s a long way from the field to know what they were doing over
“A tent was located here, beyond ley Head, disorientated but other- hut. It’s a long way short of where there. What Thomas was doing
Priestley Head, along with a dam- wise well.” Thomas was eventually recovered, on the ice in the first place, and
aged skidoo.” “Yes, yes.” at the far end of Lopez Sound.” why they were travelling without
satphones.”
“Yes.”
“Had there been any planning
regarding the access onto the sea-
IN RESPONSE TO THE LADY AT A READING ice? Any risk assessment?”
Robert widened his eyes sud-
WHO ASKED WHAT THE JOB OF A POET IS denly and made a puffing sound.
He turned his hand in the air. The
The job of a poet is to sit in the morning at a desk gesture could have meant: I don’t
and sift through the news that crackles with other peoples’ lives. know. Or: What can I tell you? Or
even: These reckless young peo-
The job of a poet is to imagine entering those lives ple! It was impossible to know.
like putting on someone else’s clothes.
The clothes pinch. The clothes are pinched for food they are pinched for drink they hope.
M cGregor’s carefully composed di-
alogue, filled with the repetition of so
The job of a poet is to imagine a control line
few words, had an eerie effect on me:
with deciduous or coniferous trees trampled grass a face behind a burdock leaf
for several days my own inner dialogue
some eyes some chinks on the body of the border a poet must imagine the sound was often composed of the same words,
of wet shoes and the feel of wet socks on both the left and the right ice-cold foot. as though I, too, was discovering how
they could express drastically different
The job of a poet is to examine words and phrases distrustfully and poets ask themselves emotions yet remain unreadable to the
because who else can they ask what does the body of a woman with non-Slavic features mean world. I wanted to put the right words
a poet must try out these words and wonder if the poet’s own body was found into Robert’s mouth, to speak for him,
near the control line would the handwritten report describe the poet’s features as Slavic to expedite his thinking process, and I
or non-Slavic. was conscious that in those moments I
was in the same predicament as Anna.
“He always had to reach for the
The job of a poet is to try these words like the slipper on the weary Cinderella
words,” McGregor writes, describing
on people whom the poet loves and whose features are sometimes completely Slavic
how Robert feels. “As though they’d
or somewhat non-Slavic or not Slavic at all; a poet must try these words out been put on a high shelf in the stores.”
on the poet’s own mother who also has certain features a poet must try these words on her hair (The word he searches for at that mo-
eyes nose against that dead body with its dead look try them against her living body and alive look ment is “cold.”) The last part of the novel,
and this makes the poet go cold at the desk. “Stand,” follows Robert and Anna into
a larger setting: they join a support
The job of a poet is to discern in the words visible traces of a corpse being dragged from Poland group for people suffering from aphasia.
to Belarus not just the contours of a map but also broken twigs torn Robert and the other patients, all reach-
blades of grass a silver snail trail next to a sole its entrails smeared ing for words on various high shelves,
on a brown leaf; a poet must visualize a beetle that momentarily stopped clash with one another, skirt around one
another, create encounters both tragic
on its six legs seeing a corpse being dragged from Poland to Belarus and then turned
and comic. Readers impatient with the
back swaying slightly; a poet must feel and smell the wet meadow rotting bark
slowness of the group’s progress won’t
and the touch of metal because be alone: Anna and other caretakers in
the room feel the same. By not creating
the job of a poet is to read that next to the body were three children between 7 a shortcut either for the characters or for
and 15 years of age as well as a man and an older woman and a poet cannot stop readers, McGregor makes us experience
reading but must continue stumbling through these wet and muddy lines their confusion, frustration, and shifting
and a poet must try being ages 7 and 15 and all the ages in between moods between despair and hope.
in that place in the woods that place of darkness place of dampness that place Caretaking—in the broad sense of
where the corpse was dragged a corpse that is the corpse of the poet’s own mother offering a helping hand to a friend, a
about whom it is hard to say if her features are Slavic or non-Slavic a poet must try being seven neighbor, a family member, or even a
stranger—is a recurrent theme in Mc-
years old standing next to the mother’s body as it looked then a poet must try this.
Gregor’s writing. Anna, as the sole
caretaker for Robert (and seeing her
The job of a poet cannot stop here so a poet reads on that own career eroded and halted), pon-
they were forced to walk on foot to the border and then to cross the Polish- ders the naming of her role when she
Belarusian border at gunpoint that is the metal; a poet must think about how joins Robert for the group meeting:
a corpse is dragged is it pulled by the armpits or the ankles is it pulled “Supporters. This was a new one to
with gloves or bare hands do the hands lose their grip along with the wet and muddy shoes Anna. It was usually carers, or occa-
in that place of darkness in the woods; a poet must think about whether the shoes the blackberry brambles sionally partners. Supporter was more
the burdock the eyes of the children between 7 and 15 years of age the eyes neutral, perhaps.” And perhaps it’s a
of the man and the older woman are in the way whether the holster or the walkie-talkie presses more realistic definition for what one
into the ribs whether any discomfort is felt whether the uniform pinches is soiled or dishonored. human being can do for another.
In the end it is the other aphasia pa-
tients, with the help of the supporters,
All this is the job of a poet and it goes on all day and then the poet goes to sleep and
who begin to gain access to Robert’s
dreams about escorting children between 7 and 15 years of age at gunpoint and escorting mind. Together they put on a theatrical
a man and an older woman at gunpoint and dreams of trying on contaminated clothes and production—limited by their physical
dreams of trying on a uniform and trying that cold thing that terrifies one in bed and linguistic capacities—recounting
and dreams of returning home after a night’s work in a car with a bobblehead dog on how Robert’s last day in Antarctica
the dashboard and taking off his pinching uniform having food and drink and watching the children went wrong. It is a different kind of
who in the dream are his children they are the children of the uniform and they are between 7 storytelling, imagined from the cen-
and 15 years of age and he watches his wife with her Slavic features and armpits by which ter of the storm, with Robert and the
her body could be dragged and ankles by which her body could be dragged shoes sliding off other patients all trying to achieve the
and the poet never wakes up from that cold that mud those woods. near impossible in the aftermath of
near-fatal events. Inside their damaged
brains and hampered bodies they can
—Jacek Dehnel
sense, as a memory so vividly relived,
(translated from the Polish by Ann Frenkel and Gwido Zlatkes) their healthy and eloquent selves. The
beauty of their minds, like that of the
girl waving at the bus at a street corner
without being seen, is preserved. Q
12 The New York Review
 Can He Build Back Better?
How to assess the Joe Biden presidency
one year in? The economy is booming
as it hasn’t in decades: between Janu-
ary and October 2021, real GDP grew
at an annualized rate of 7.8 percent and
disposable income grew 3 percent after
inflation. The unemployment rate,
6.3 percent when Biden took office,
was just 3.9 percent in December. Fi-
nally—and I could go on—6.1 million
jobs have been created since Biden’s
first day. That’s four million more than
under Donald Trump and both Bushes
combined.
Yet these economic facts—and they
are facts—hardly inform the popular
view of how Biden is doing. Since late
August, when the president’s approval
rating flipped from positive to negative,
the media coverage has been relent-
lessly pessimistic. This is not entirely
without justification. Biden’s troubles
started with the botched Afghanistan
withdrawal. He then encountered a se-
ries of setbacks. Politically, congressio-
nal infighting and indecision have left
important voting rights and domestic
spending bills stalled, culminating in
a mid-December announcement from
West Virginia senator Joe Manchin (a
veritable copresident all last year) that
he opposed the current form of Biden’s
most important piece of domestic leg-
islation, Build Back Better, the large
public investment bill that would fund
many new or expanded programs.
The defeat of Terry McAuliffe in
the governor’s race in Virginia—which
Biden carried by 10 percent a year
earlier—was an ominous indication of
eroding support for Democrats in states
they had considered safely in their col-
umn. And the global coronavirus pan-
demic rages on, despite the glimmer of
hope last summer that we were moving
beyond it. It has created supply- chain
delays, an ongoing inflation spiral, and,
with the Omicron variant, grave dis-
ruptions in travel and education.
These are the realities that have
dragged Biden down. Rarely have a
president’s approval numbers dropped
so precipitously in his first year. Biden
had a hefty 52–42 approval rating
six months into his term. Six months
later, those numbers have essentially
reversed. Donald Trump was never in
positive territory. Barack Obama lost
more ground than Biden—incredibly,
he had just a 22 percent disapproval rat-
ing when he took office—but as he fin-
ished his first year, he was still narrowly
above 50 percent approval. George W.
Bush’s approval shot up after the Sep-
tember 11 attacks, nine months into
his first year in office. Bill Clinton lost
around 20 points through mid-1993 but
made much of it up by year’s end. If we
go back before that, we’re in a different
era—before polarization, before cable
news became so omnipresent. So in the
age of modern politics, Biden has set a
record for having gone so quickly from
enjoying the confidence of the majority
of Americans to having, for the mo-
ment at least, lost it.
But this is not just a question of num-
bers. The sense among many liberals
is that the Democrats, and the broader
project of bringing to life a new era
of Keynesian public investment, are
doomed. The high expectations that
February 10, 2022
Michael Tomasky
Joe Biden promoting his Build Back Better legislation at a facility run by the
International Union of Operating Engineers, Howell, Michigan, October 2021
resulted from Biden’s win and the par-
ty’s recapture of the Senate and that
surrounded the administration’s early
days—when Biden was making those
(mostly) terrific appointments; issu-
ing the executive orders that left even
Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez marveling;
passing the Covid relief bill, also known
as the American Rescue Plan (ARP),
which helped people get through the
pandemic and greatly expanded the
child tax credit; distributing vaccines
with competence; talking about chang-
ing the “economic paradigm” with an
explicit vow to transfer wealth from the
rich to the middle class—have crashed
to earth. Governing is not easy, espe-
cially with such narrow majorities.
I think this despair is an overreac-
tion. I also think it only helps the other
side. We are confronting dangers that
are without precedent in this country,
dangers that Democrats and demo-
crats, if I may put it that way, must be
alert to. But being alert to danger and
wallowing in despair are very different
things.
T his discouraging situation is, in part,
Biden’s own fault. He badly misjudged
the Afghanistan withdrawal. His ad-
ministration sent mixed signals from
the Centers for Disease Control on the
necessity of masks as the Delta variant
hit, and the CDC offered guidance on
booster shots that many found confus-
ing. The administration has been slow
to get vaccines to the developing world.
But most of Biden’s problems em-
anate from outside the White House.
Congress is in part to blame—specif-
ically, a few members of Biden’s own
party. Passing the president’s legisla-
tive agenda was not supposed to be this
hard. We got a hint of the difficulty to
come in March, as Congress crafted
the ARP and Manchin almost stopped
the bill dead over the size of its unem-
ployment payments and the length of
time they would last. His West Vir-
ginia Senate counterpart, Republican
Shelley Moore Capito, told reporters,
“I have no idea what he’s doing, to be
quite frank. Maybe you can tell me.”
He ended up compromising.
not all of them agree with me on
Nicholas Kamm/AFP /Getty Images
everything.”
So the leftmost senator was on board.
But from the beginning there were
numerous questions about the most
fiscally conservative Democrats, Man-
chin and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona.
They were certainly cagey. Then Au-
gust 11 brought a crucial and encour-
aging development: the Senate passed,
50–49, a budget resolution laying out a
$3.5 trillion spending framework over
ten years. Manchin and Sinema sup-
ported it. No one thought this necessar-
ily committed them to $3.5 trillion, but
most insiders took it as a sign that they,
and some House moderates, would
whittle the package down by perhaps
a half-trillion to a trillion dollars, be
content to call that a win for moderate
common sense, and vote yes. It would
be done in September or October, I re-
member thinking.
Here we are, weeks into 2022. Build
Later that month, in Pittsburgh, Back Better has not passed and, as I
Biden delivered the most important write, might not pass. At best, it will
address of his young presidency, rolling pass in a deeply shrunken form, fund-
out a two-part plan, which he called ing far fewer priorities than Biden had
the American Jobs Plan and the Amer- envisioned (although probably fund-
ican Families Plan. In the meat grinder ing a few of them for a longer time
of Congress, these mutated into the period). Why wasn’t Biden able to get
“hard” infrastructure bill—which will this through his own party? I see three
fund road, bridge, and rail construction culprits.
along with many green energy initia- First, there are the maddening losses
tives—and the “human” infrastructure by Democratic Senate candidates who
bill, known as Build Back Better. But were defeated in 2020 despite raising
in his Pittsburgh speech Biden sounded barely conceivable amounts of money
as populist as a Democratic president and vastly outspending their Republi-
has sounded in a very long time: can opponents. In Maine, Sara Gideon
outspent GOP incumbent Susan Col-
Today, I’m proposing a plan for lins $63 million to just under $30 mil-
the nation that rewards work, not lion—and lost by 9 points. Gideon took
just rewards wealth. It builds a fair in more than she could even spend,
economy that gives everybody a ending the campaign with a $15 mil-
chance to succeed, and it’s going lion surplus. In North Carolina, Cal
to create the strongest, most re- Cunningham outspent GOP incumbent
silient, innovative economy in the Thom Tillis $51 million to $25 million.
world. It’s not a plan that tinkers He lost narrowly, by under 2 points,
around the edges. It’s a once-in- but he lost all the same. In South Car-
a-generation investment in Amer- olina, Jaime Harrison spent a stagger-
ica, unlike anything we’ve seen or ing $130 million to Republican Lindsey
done since we built the Interstate Graham’s $97 million and still lost by
Highway System and the Space double digits. Amy McGrath outspent
Race decades ago. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. The-
resa Greenfield outspent Joni Ernst in
The ARP, passed in March, cost $1.9 Iowa. Both lost badly.
trillion. Biden’s new plan didn’t have a Something is very wrong with the
price tag that month, but everyone ex- way these campaigns are run if they can
pected a number that would far exceed raise that much money, mostly from
that of the ARP. small donors, and not even come close
The progressive wing of the Demo- to winning. Raising tens of millions
cratic Party was flush with optimism. and spending three quarters of it on TV
“We think there is ample room to get ads, which is customary, is clearly dead
the number up,” Representative Pra- as an electoral model, at least for Dem-
mila Jayapal, chair of the Congressio- ocrats in purple or red states. Someone
nal Progressive Caucus, said. In June needs to invent a new version of how to
Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the campaign in those places. What it has
Senate Budget Committee who lost to do with Build Back Better is this: if
the Democratic nomination to Biden just two of those five had won, Manchin
but worked with him to create “unity and Sinema wouldn’t have mattered—
task forces” to lay out policy prior- Go vote no, Chuck Schumer could have
ities, floated the idea of a $6 trillion said to them; I have my fifty votes.1 Two
plan. By mid-July, Biden and congres- more Democratic senators would also
sional Democrats settled on $3.5 tril-
lion. Sanders initially denounced that 1
This is assuming Gideon, Cunning-
figure and then, within twenty-four ham, et al., as first-year senators, would
hours, endorsed it. “It’s not that I’m have been better team players than
more pragmatic,” he said. “It’s that Manchin and Sinema. Vice President
there are fifty members of the Dem- Kamala Harris, in this scenario, would
ocratic caucus. And unfortunately, cast the tie-breaking fifty-first vote.
13
have increased the chance of filibuster
reform, which would have made it pos-
sible to pass voting rights legislation.
Culprit 2 is the structure of the Sen-
ate, in two senses. First, in the outsize
power it gives to those last couple of
senators whose votes a president needs
in order to pass his program and who
can therefore exact a high price for
their support. And second, because of
the filibuster requirement of sixty votes
to clear “cloture” and proceed to a final
vote. In Biden’s first year, the filibuster
has been discussed mainly with respect
to voting rights. But it blocks any ambi-
tious legislative agenda—meaning that
it affects only the Democrats, since the
Republicans have no legislative agenda
to speak of.2
The most persuasive way for Biden
to have presented his program to the
American people would have been in
a series of targeted pieces of legisla-
tion that were easily comprehensible
to the average voter. This is how the
New Deal was passed. First up was
emergency banking legislation, then a
law establishing what became the Ci-
vilian Conservation Corps, then the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Na-
tional Industrial Recovery Act, and
so on. Imagine if Biden had been able
to move from the Covid relief bill to a
green jobs act, a rural broadband act, a
universal prekindergarten act, a subsi-
dized childcare act, a Medicare expan-
sion act, a prescription drug act, and
more. Each of these would have been
2
See my review of Kill Switch by former
Senate Democratic aide Adam Jentle-
son, The New York Review, April 8,
2021.
“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
14
wildly popular, readily understand-
able, and easy to sell, and this would
have created a sense of momentum and
accomplishment.
But because of the filibuster and im-
placable Republican opposition, this
was impossible. None of these bills
presented individually could have
passed the cloture threshold. So Dem-
ocrats had to stuff everything they
could under the opaque and uninspir-
ing rubric of “reconciliation,” which
focused attention on the overall price
tag and made the bill easy to mock as
big-spending socialism. After Manchin
withdrew his support for Build Back
Better in December, some observers
spoke of breaking the legislation into
smaller pieces, but such discussion ig-
nored the reality that each bill would
need sixty votes. Furthermore, Senate
rules limit the use of reconciliation to
one or at the very most three bills a
year.
Culprits 3a and 3b are Manchin and
Sinema, but especially Manchin, as
Sinema has muted her criticisms of
Build Back Better in recent weeks. As
the year ended, Manchin remained the
sole obstructionist. Why? There are
many possibilities. That Trump won
his state by 39 points. That Manchin
founded a coal brokerage company
that has made him a wealthy man,
which some say explains his opposition
to the climate change measures in the
bill. That he faces little resistance from
Democrats in West Virginia, who are
mostly afraid of him and whose num-
bers have dwindled. That he takes in a
significant amount of corporate cash,
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including from the oil and gas indus-
tries. That he is out of touch with the
concerns of poor West Virginians (he
drives a Maserati Levante, which costs
upwards of $80,000).
There may be something to each of
those reasons, although after Manchin
announced his opposition to Build
Back Better, he did get a rebuke from
the president of the United Mine Work-
ers, who pointed out several provisions
in the bill that would benefit West Vir-
ginians and asked him to reconsider his
position. But I think Manchin’s actions
are best explained by his background.
His family owned a large carpet busi-
ness in Fairmont, West Virginia, and he
retains the mentality of the small busi-
nessman. He is a Democrat because he
was born in 1947 in West Virginia—a
time and place where nearly everyone
was a Democrat because of the prog-
ress Roosevelt’s New Deal had brought
to the state. I know; I was born there
in 1960, and my father, a prominent
trial lawyer, knew Manchin’s uncle, a
flamboyant secretary of state whose
two chief missions, until a corruption
scandal ended his career, were to visit
senior centers to kiss nonagenarian
ladies and to defend the state’s honor
whenever some outlander made a joke
about it.
Manchin has remained a Democrat,
but his mindset is that of the frugal and
flinty employer suspicious of his em-
ployees. He revealed this very clearly
on September 30, when he told report-
ers that work requirements were, to his
way of thinking, essential for his sup-
port: “I cannot accept our economy, or
basically our society, moving towards
an entitlement mentality.”
The Democratic Party as a whole
has, since the Great Recession, come
to embrace a more social- democratic
vision of the welfare state, approaching
a consensus that free-market economic
policies have ravaged much of Amer-
ica and it’s finally time to build a so-
cial safety net that includes paid family
leave and other policies that have long
been in place around the world, 3 a pro-
cess that Build Back Better is intended
to begin. Few states have had it worse
than West Virginia, where many small
coal towns that once had bustling main
streets are now destitute and consumed
by the opioid crisis. Residents of these
towns desperately need assistance and
investment, especially as the market for
coal dwindles.
Manchin is not a Republican—for
example, he has said he supports roll-
ing back the Trump tax cuts of 2017.
And he did vote twice to convict
Trump of high crimes and misdemean-
ors. But his September remarks, and
his comments to colleagues that he
believes many parents are using their
child tax credit payments to buy drugs,
reveal a worldview that emphasizes
scrutinizing personal morality over
ending corporate exploitation of vul-
nerable populations. This is a pretty
conservative way of seeing poor peo-
ple’s struggles.
T he next source of trouble for Biden
has been the Republican Party. Yes,
3 assaulted democracy, and Trump and
Not just Europe, by the way. Mater-
nal and paternal leave to care for a
newborn are offered in nations such
as Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Chad,
and numerous others in the developing
world.
there was a surprise show of bipartisan-
ship on the “hard” infrastructure bill,
which even Senate Minority Leader
McConnell supported (as did the
chamber of commerce in Louisville,
Kentucky). That was a tremendous
accomplishment—the largest such bill
since Eisenhower created the Inter-
state Highway System—and proof that
some Republicans still value highway
improvements more than they want to
destroy Democrats.
But the Republican Party of our
time revolves around one man. Trump
may have lost the presidency and been
chiefly responsible for his party losing
control of the House of Representatives
in 2018 and the Senate in 2020. But
since his defeat, Republicans remain in
thrall to him, as he sits in Mar-a-Lago
and stews about the 2020 election being
“stolen.” As of Christmas, he had en-
dorsed eighty-three candidates in the
2022 Republican primaries, many of
them either personal bootlickers or the
opponents of candidates he perceives
as insufficiently loyal. Most of his en-
dorsees boast about having his support,
and it helps most of them in the polls.
As such, the Republican Party is
largely dedicated to restoring Trump to
the White House in 2024. This trans-
lates to opposing and undermining
Biden however possible (except on in-
frastructure like roads and bridges),
first and foremost on the matter of
Covid vaccination. In the United
States, party identification is the chief
indicator of whether someone gets the
vaccine. Republicans may refuse the
shots in the name of “freedom,” but
they also know very well that fewer vac-
cines equals more virus equals more
trouble for Biden. That Biden, who has
implored Americans to get vaccinated
many, many times since taking office,
is paying the political price for the anti-
social behavior of those who want to
lay him low is a bleak irony.
President Obama, too, got little co-
operation from congressional Repub-
licans. But the pre-Trump Republican
Party was still somewhat committed
to basic principles of democratic prac-
tice and process. No one questioned the
results of either the 2008 or the 2012
presidential election, for example, and
from 2011 until the end of Obama’s
second term, Republicans controlled
the House but made no effort to open
impeachment proceedings against him,
despite some loud clamoring over vari-
ous “scandals” in the right-wing press.
I say “somewhat” because the party did
engage in antidemocratic practices—ag-
gressive gerrymandering, McConnell’s
denial of even a hearing for Supreme
Court nominee Merrick Garland, and
more. But the congressional Repub-
lican Party, with a few crazy-uncle
exceptions, did accept Obama’s legiti-
macy as president.
That has changed. From rank-and-
file voters to state-level officials to
the House of Representatives, most
Republicans claim that Biden’s pres-
idency is the illegitimate product of a
rigged election. In their world, democ-
racy is an inconvenience. Or rather, in
the parallel-fact universe these people
inhabit, it is Biden and the Democrats
and the mainstream media that have
his loyalists who are defending and
saving it. The most shocking poll result
I’ve seen in some time was delivered
last October by Marist College, which
found that, by 42 to 41 percent, Ameri-
The New York Review
can adults see the Democratic Party as
a greater threat to democracy than the
GOP.
It’s hard to know how many elected
Republicans really believe that Trump
was the rightful 2020 winner or that
voter fraud is a rampant problem in
America. It’s shocking to see Trump’s
associates openly flouting the subpoe-
nas issued by the Select Committee to
Investigate the January 6th Attack on
the United States Capitol, and to think
that we’ve reached the point at which a
committee of Congress may issue sub-
poenas to a few of its own members—
and that those members, too, will
disobey the body in which they serve.
And it’s next to impossible to believe
that Republicans writing bills like the
one in Arizona, which shifted author-
ity to defend election-related lawsuits
from the secretary of state (currently
a Democrat) to the attorney general
(currently a Republican), really think
they are behaving democratically.
Their actions speak quite clearly.
Unfortunately, the offensive against
Biden and democracy is likely to grow
far more intense. If the Republicans re-
capture the House in the midterm elec-
tions, as seems likely, they will do all
they can to discredit Biden. They may
begin with oversight hearings that seem
justified—on the Afghanistan pullout,
for example. But they’ll move quickly
to subpoenaing West Wing and Cabinet
officials in search of pseudo-scandals,
and they’ll almost certainly move to
impeach Biden over something—pos-
sibly involving his son Hunter’s past
business dealings or the current hand-
some prices his paintings fetch through
his New York gallery. (Georges Bergès
BLACK VOICES BLACK FUTURES
AMERICAN HISTORIES AND FUTURES OF RESISTANCE
“A righteous indictment of
racism and misogyny.”
—Publishers Weekly
“We are better because of
this book.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, author of
Stamped from the Beginning and
How to Be an Antiracist
www.ucpress.edu
February 10, 2022
had better prepare himself to be prob-
ably the first art gallery owner in the
history of the republic to be handed a
congressional subpoena.) The chair-
man of the House Judiciary Commit-
tee—which decides whether to open
impeachment proceedings against a
president—is likely to be Jim Jordan
of Ohio, one of the two or three most
aggressive Trump lickspittles in the
House. And Republicans will instantly
shut down the select committee inves-
tigating the January 6 insurrection. It
will be an ugly two years.
After Congress and Trump-devotion,
the third source of Biden’s woes is the
media, or our two medias, the right-
wing one and the mainstream one. This
is about far more than Biden. It’s not
clear to me that the media as presently
constituted can defend democracy.
It’s now apparent that the avowedly
right-wing media has more power to
set the national agenda than the main-
stream press. The Marist poll results I
cited above provide one of many avail-
able examples that support this con-
tention. The idea that the party that’s
trying to protect and expand voting
rights is wrecking democracy isn’t just
a misconception—it’s the result of an
orchestrated assault on reality. And
yet nearly half of Americans believe
it. This is the power of the right-wing
media at work: Fox News, of course,
but also Newsmax, One America News
Network, Breitbart News, The Blaze,
The Federalist, The Daily Caller, The
Washington Free Beacon, right-wing
talk-radio hosts, Christian radio, and
the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which
“A legend in the making!”
—DJ Kool Herc, The Father of Hip Hop
pushes pro-Trump, right-wing views
across the television and radio stations
it owns in dozens of markets.
All these outlets are agenda- driven
in a way the mainstream media are not.
The mainstream media certainly lean
liberal but regularly run tough stories
on Biden and Democrats; the right-
wing, pro-Trump media will basically
never say a bad word about Trump or
any Republican, except of course Liz
Cheney and other apostates, and are
constantly feeding their readers and
viewers stories about alleged liberal
duplicity, lack of patriotism, and so on.
And now Trump is starting his own
media company, to be run by retir-
ing representative Devin Nunes, who
earned the job by defending Trump and
attacking his critics when he chaired
the House Intelligence Committee.4
How will it cover the 2024 campaign?
I don’t know that the mainstream
media have the power to counter all
this, or even the will. In early Decem-
ber, the Washington Post columnist
Dana Milbank wrote a much- discussed
column in which he asked a data ana-
lytics company to examine more than
200,000 mainstream news articles
about both the Trump and Biden presi-
dencies, analyzing the tenor and place-
ment of adjectives in the stories. The
findings, Milbank wrote, “confirmed
my fear: My colleagues in the media
are serving as accessories to the mur-
4 next three years will show us which side
For a thorough discussion of Nunes’s
success at raising millions of dollars by
peddling various deep-state conspir-
acy theories, see Jake Bernstein, “The
Fundraising Pulpit,” The New York
Review, April 23, 2020.
“This essential collection of
Lawson’s visionary teaching
is more necessary today than
ever.”
—Marian Wright Edelman, founder
and president emerita,
Children’s Defense Fund
der of democracy.” During 2020, when
the Trump administration’s response
to and dishonesty about the pandemic
led to hundreds of thousands of deaths,
when he refused to denounce white
supremacists at a debate and launched
serial assaults on democracy, he got
slightly more favorable coverage in the
mainstream media than Biden has re-
ceived since August. Something is seri-
ously wrong with our definition of what
constitutes “news” if the media can’t
be, in Milbank’s phrase, “partisans for
democracy.”
I still think Biden can rebound. Three
developments could dramatically shift
the political winds: the passage of some
version of Build Back Better, an easing
of inflation, and a return to something
like normal on the virus front. If these
happen, Biden could well be riding a
comeback wave by next fall. Certainly,
even a diminished Build Back Better
bill, combined with the Covid relief
and hard infrastructure bills, would le-
gitimately rank him with FDR and LBJ
as having overseen major expansions
of the social safety net. Voters tend to
like these things once they’re passed
and implemented. (Obamacare is now
viewed favorably by nearly 60 percent
of Americans.) It’s also important to
remember that millions of citizens
strongly oppose Trump and Trumpism
and broadly support Democratic pol-
icy priorities—even if this America is
outshouted by Trumpist America. The
has the greater resolve—or whether, in
a battle in which only one side is play-
ing by the traditionally understood
rules, resolve is what matters. Q
—January 13, 2022
“An indispensable addition to
the canon of work on Black
masculinity.”
—William Jelani Cobb, author of The
Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and
the Paradox of Progress
15

A Life of Picasso:
The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943
by John Richardson,
with the collaboration of Ross
Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga.
Knopf, 308 pp., $40.00
In the 1920s and 1930s several groups
and individuals sought Pablo Picas-
so’s loyalty. Among them, John Rich-
ardson writes in A Life of Picasso: The
Minotaur Years, 1933–1943, was André
Breton, whose “blandishments, in the
form of public statements, private let-
ters, and published essays, began even
before the official founding of surreal-
ism” in 1924. In “Painting and Surreal-
ism” (1925), an essay illustrated solely
with works by Picasso, he wrote, “If sur-
realism must chart itself a moral line of
conduct, it needs only find where Picasso
has gone and where he will pass again.”
In 1929, when Breton excommuni-
cated dissidents, including Georges
Bataille, from the Surrealist movement,
the two sides fought for the soul of Pi-
casso. Michel Leiris, one of the anti-
Breton faction, wrote that Picasso’s
work was too down to earth, “never
emanating from the foggy world of
dreams, nor does it lend itself to sym-
bolic exploitation—in other words, it is
in no sense surrealist.” In 1930 Bataille
dedicated an entire issue of his maga-
zine Documents to Picasso. Richard-
son writes that in 1936, when Breton
began to have differences with the poet
Paul Éluard, “competition for Picasso’s
friendship probably contributed to their
feud. In a March 16 letter, Breton con-
fessed to feeling ‘jealous of the evenings
[Picasso] spent with Paul Éluard.’”
In Spain, the right wing also had its
eye on Picasso. In 1934, while he was in
San Sebastián on the last visit he would
ever make to the country, Picasso en-
countered the writer and editor Er-
nesto Giménez Caballero, who was,
according to Richardson, “formerly
one of the most progressive intellectu-
als in Spain” but had “experienced a
radical epiphany and reinvented him-
self as a fascist ideologue. . . . He had
tried and failed to entice Lorca into
his net, and in August 1934 he would
try winning Picasso over to the fascist
side.”
Giménez Caballero met him again
the next day in the company of José
Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of
the fascist Falange movement, to whom
Picasso complained about the failure of
the Republican government to come up
with the funds to insure a retrospective
of his work in Spain. Primo de Rivera
assured him that he supported the ret-
rospective, and Picasso later accepted
an invitation from these men to the
inaugural dinner of a club called GU
without realizing that it “was the pro-
pagandist arm of the Falange.” Later
he said, “I knew the people wining and
dining me that night were very danger-
ous and as I remember I boarded the
train for France that same evening.
And that was my last day in Spain.”
Part of the value of Richardson’s work
on Picasso—this final volume, pub-
lished two years after his death in 2019,
is the fourth in his biography of the
artist—is his painstaking examination
16
Picasso’s Obsessions
Colm Tóibín
Illustration by Hugo Guinness
of evidence, taking no one, least of
all Picasso, at their word. Richardson
writes about his claim that he left for
France “that same evening”: “This was
not true. Far from returning by train to
Paris, Picasso had stayed on to be feted
by these ‘very dangerous’ people.” Soon
he was attending bullfights in Barce-
lona in the company of Leiris, and he
did not return to Paris until September.
In these years, Picasso was seeking
to separate from his wife, Olga Khokh-
lova, and hoping to spend more time
with Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom
he had a daughter in 1935. Richard-
son quotes him telling the painter Ja-
cint Salvadó, “You see, Olga likes tea,
caviar, pastries, and so on; me, I like
sausage and beans.” He also quotes
Françoise Gilot, who was Picasso’s
lover for a decade beginning in 1943:
Olga’s social ambitions made in-
creasingly greater demands on his
time. In 1921 their son Paulo was
born and then began his period
of what the French call le high-
life, with nurse, chambermaid,
cook, chauffeur and all the rest,
expensive and at the same time
distracting.
Some of Picasso’s early portraits
of Olga—such as Olga in a Mantilla
(1917), Olga in an Armchair (1917), and
Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1923)—
offer her a distant and formidable dig-
nity; they suggest that she is someone
who commands respect rather than a
woman with whom the artist is in love.
Part of this may arise from Picasso’s
lack of interest in psychology as he
sought to move from Cubism toward a
neoclassical style. “Picasso’s portrayal
of Olga may seem unflattering,” the art
historian Michael FitzGerald writes in
his essay “The Modernists’ Dilemma:
Neoclassicism and the Portrayal of
Olga Khokhlova,” but this harshness
stems from his attention to style, not
personality.* Richardson, on the other
hand, connects the tone of Olga in a
Mantilla with Picasso’s later depictions
of her:
Despite its iconic importance as the
first portrait of her, it is not particu-
larly affectionate. Olga’s reproach-
ful eyes and pursed lips look ahead
to the cruel, exorcistic portraits
Picasso would paint of her fifteen
years later, when the marriage had
soured. With hindsight, one can
discern a certain inevitability.
In 1929, when Picasso painted Large
Nude in a Red Armchair, there was no
trace of the serenity apparent in the
earlier portraits. Instead, Olga appears
as a set of elongated shapes, her mouth
facing the sky in an ungainly howl. The
armchair, Richardson writes, “looks
about as protective as an electric chair.”
Two years earlier, Picasso had begun
his relationship with the seventeen-
year- old Marie-Thérèse. His portraits
of her are filled with tenderness and
passion. Picasso dramatized the gap
between his visions of the two women.
For example, in a painting based on the
death of Marat that was done in July
1934, he has a woman—Olga—with
a viciously contorted face brandish a
knife over the body of a possible ver-
sion of Marie-Thérèse.
In October 1935 Picasso wrote a
note to himself about how to make an
image of Olga looking in a mirror more
grotesque: “In the picture of April
30 . . . put on the floor a comb contain-
ing between its teeth some hairs and
some lice on her hair too . . . and if pos-
sible on her hair some crabs (pleasant
idea to add to the lot).” In 1938 he had
*Picasso and Portraiture: Representa-
tion and Transformation (Museum of
Modern Art, 1996), p. 306.
Olga appear “in a surreal crucifixion
scene . . . in which she drinks the blood
of the impaled figure.”
T here are times in Richardson’s book
when he is too anxious to join Picasso
in his view of the women in his life,
referring, for example, to Olga on the
very first page as “a termagant” and in-
sisting on the very last page that Dora
Maar, a later lover, “thrived on pun-
ishment.” Still, one of the reasons why
Richardson’s life of Picasso is essential
is that he is always willing to seek bi-
ographical sources for Picasso’s images.
He leaves it to the reader to conclude
that many of the paintings that are
filled with hatred are not among Pi-
casso’s best, that the tensions and high
emotions that poisoned his personal life
are sometimes too graphically apparent
in them, with no room for mystery, or
indeed subtlety. He also leaves it to the
reader to face the uncomfortable fact
that other such paintings have a star-
tling energy, a rich and dynamic power.
Toward the end of 1935, Picasso met
Dora Maar. In her memoir of her life
with Picasso, Gilot recalled:
Pablo told me that one of the first
times he saw Dora she was sitting at
the Deux Magots. She was wearing
black gloves with little pink flowers
appliquéed on them. She took off
the gloves and picked up a long,
pointed knife, which she began to
drive into the table between her
outstretched fingers to see how
close she could come to each finger
without actually cutting herself.
“Picasso’s intense fascination with
Dora’s face,” Richardson writes, “a face
that would soon become a major motif
in his work—is first seen in the small
portrait drawings” done near Cannes
in the summer of 1936. “The charcoal,
india ink, and crayon drawing from
September 5 of Dora being ravished
by Picasso in the guise of a minotaur is
one his most viscerally erotic images of
her.” But there are also drawings that
are bloated and quite ludicrous, such as
one from August 1936, in which Dora,
wearing a headscarf, is opening a door
with a key. On the other side is Picasso
as a Greek god carrying a dog.
Picasso, having been forced to give
his country house to Olga, found an-
other house outside Paris for Marie-
Thérèse and their daughter, Maya.
Later, in an interview, Marie-Thérèse
said, “Picasso would come from Fri-
day to Sunday evening. He worked and
worked, like an angel. We lived this
way for years.” During the week, he
was in Paris with Dora.
In January 1937, during the Spanish
Civil War, Picasso was asked by repre-
sentatives of the Republican govern-
ment to paint a mural in the Spanish
Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. He
eventually agreed, thinking at first
that he would create a large image of
a painter’s studio. But he made little
progress in March and April of that
year, producing just twelve preliminary
sketches of a painter and his model.
On April 26, a market day, the town
of Guernica in the Basque country was
bombed by German planes. The attack
The New York Review
was designed to kill as many civilians
as possible and to destroy a place that
was sacred to the Basques. On April
29 Picasso, who had already been told
about the bombing, read an account of
it in the Communist Party newspaper
L’Humanité by the journalist George
Steer: “When I entered Guernica after
midnight houses were crashing on ei-
ther side, and it was utterly impossible
even for firemen to enter the centre of
the town.”
Soon Picasso ordered a huge canvas.
The young Catalan painter who deliv-
ered it at ten o’clock in the morning
remembered:
Picasso was already up and overex-
cited, asking me why I was arriv-
ing so late and shouting at me. We
unrolled the canvas and stretched
it, then nailed it to a frame. On the
floor lay a dozen drawings. I barely
had time to fix the first half of the
canvas when Picasso climbed on
a ladder and started drawing with
charcoal.
Dora Maar photographed the painting
at each stage of its development, her pic-
tures becoming, Richardson writes, “the
first photographic record of the creation
of a modern artwork from start to finish.”
Picasso, who had made his first sketches
on May 1, finished the work on June 4.
I n his analysis of the imagery in Guer-
nica, Richardson is convincing when
he asserts that it is “pervaded with Pi-
casso’s own problems and preoccupa-
tions,” rather than depicting aspects of
the bombing or the town. His interpre-
tation of the figure of the woman hold-
ing the lamp in the painting is new and
involves several other works. In the pre-
vious volume, he identified the woman
in Picasso’s 1933 sculpture Woman with
a Lamp, also known as Woman with
Vase—which the painter later chose to
be on his grave—as Marie-Thérèse. In
this new volume, he proposes “a new
identification of the girl who presides
over the artist’s grave. It is no less than
his long- dead sister, Conchita.” Con-
chita, aged seven, died of diphtheria in
1895, when Picasso was thirteen. As she
lay ill, according to Richardson,
Pablo had vowed to God that he
would never paint again if his sis-
ter’s life was spared. He did paint
again. . . . The beloved child’s early
death would cast an inescapable
shadow over virtually all of Picas-
so’s relationships with women. . . .
According to [his wife] Jacqueline
Roque, half a century later, the se-
cret of the broken vow had never
been divulged to anyone else but
the women in his life.
Richardson acknowledges that
the figure in Woman with a Lamp
“does not represent a seven-year- old;
[Picasso] preferred to immortalize
her as a grown woman.” He does not
give a source for this. In the engraving
Minotauromachie (1935), he sees the
young girl holding the light as repre-
senting “Conchita, and her presence
is central to the meaning of the com-
position. . . . The flame represents the
art Picasso had vowed to abandon if
Conchita lived.” This interpretation is
certainly possible, but since he offers
no evidence for it either, it remains in
the realm of conjecture.
February 10, 2022
In Guernica: The Biography of
a Twentieth- Century Icon (2005),
Gijs van Hensbergen writes, “Marie-
Thérèse’s Grecian profile was instantly
recognisable in the woman holding the
lamp.” Richardson, on the other hand,
writes:
Understanding the artist’s votive
obsession and the significance of
his broken vow, we can now iden-
tify the image of his long- dead
sister Conchita. . . . Conchita no
longer figures as a child, as she
does in Minotauromachie, but has
been transformed into an adult
who thrusts out the sacred lamp
clutched in her hand in order to
have it lit by the Mithraic sun.
Pablo Picasso: Woman at the Sideboard, 1936
In the weeks when Picasso worked
feverishly on the painting, he continued
to spend the weekends in the country-
side with Marie-Thérèse. Thirty years
later he remembered:
Every chance I got to take a break,
I would go out into the country
for a breather. But I would begin
to draw and paint from the mo-
ment I got there. And what did I
paint, coming fresh from the work
on Guernica? Flowers and fruit—
never anything else.
Although Picasso would return to
painting the women who obsessed him
in the aftermath of Guernica, Rich-
ardson reads other paintings, such as
Woman with a Cockerel (1938; see il-
lustration on page 18), as evoking “the
atmosphere of helplessness and hyste-
ria soon to become reality not only in
Spain but throughout Europe.”
Just as Picasso had made an image
that included both Olga and Marie-
Thérèse, he did a portrait of Dora
that slowly merged with an image of
Marie-Thérèse. The figure in it, Rich-
ardson writes, is “black-haired and (2011). It, too, was the fourth volume in a
big chinned” like Dora, “but in most study of Picasso’s work and was published
other respects it is a portrait of Marie- after the author’s death. Like Richard-
Thérèse. Her breasts bulge out and her son, Palau had been a friend of Picas-
expression is bland and cheerful, the so’s. His approach tended to be more
antithesis of Dora’s usual demeanor.” intuitive and less analytical than Rich-
Picasso began the Weeping Woman ardson’s. Because, unlike Richardson,
series of portraits of Dora while he was he could use color illustrations on every
still at work on Guernica. He later said, page, his books offer a more concrete,
“For me she’s the weeping woman. For graphic account of Picasso’s progress.
years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, We see more vividly in Palau’s book
not through sadism, and not with plea- Picasso’s obsessive engagement with
sure either; just obeying a vision that Marie-Thérèse. What is strange is
forced itself on me.” Dora, it seems, did that on the very day that he created
indeed weep. In April 1937, for exam- his Dream and Lie of Franco, a sort
ple, she asked Picasso to forgive her for of antifascist cartoon, he also painted,
in tender tones, an oval portrait of
those scenes, do not take them her. What is strange too is that cer-
seriously, you have to take them tain paintings that seem distant from
each other in style and texture, such as
Musée national Picasso, Paris/ RMN -Grand Palais/Adrien Didierjean/Art Resource
Marie-Thérèse with Garland of Flow-
ers and Portrait of a Woman with Beret,
were actually done on the same day.
Both these paintings dramatize the
sitter’s eyes and pale skin, but the first
one is all naive suggestion, soft colors,
the mild face encased by a single black
line from left eye to right ear, while in
the second, with a red background and
a red beret, her gaze is more worldly
and sophisticated, like the painting it-
self. The two could have been made de-
cades apart or by different artists.
There are other times in these years
when we can further observe Picasso’s
interest, repetitive and restless, in the
pictorial possibilities offered by Marie-
Thérèse. Between April 9 and April
30, 1936, for example, he worked obses-
sively on images of her, beginning with
a painting of her at a dressing table on
April 9, with another version two days
later, then the following day the same
scene recreated, but this time Marie-
Thérèse is in the form of a primitive
piece of sculpture against the realistic
table. The following day, Picasso worked
on two further portraits of her, and
then two days later painted an exciting,
amorphous set of shapes that he called
Woman and also a beautifully painted
double head, with an eye in each head,
called Head of a Woman. Five days later,
he painted a portrait of Marie-Thérèse
reading, and two days after that a poin-
tillist version of her writing a letter.
It might be easy to read these paint-
ings against the background of the
news from Spain and the threats from
lightly, as a joke. I will try to cor- Germany, and to suggest that they were
rect myself. Behave with me as you painted in so many styles and with such
have behaved with me before, that speed because the time for that would
is, if I haven’t already ruined ev- soon be scarce. But there is something
erything; come find me whenever too direct and natural about the way
you want, I will wait for you as long each choice of image and pictorial sys-
as you want me to, years if you so tem was made, each variation worked
desire . . . I will not cry, I will not out. There was no evidence that Pi-
scream, that is over now. casso was thinking about war or the
news of the day at all as he made these
Picasso had allowed Olga to be “iden- paintings. Instead he was gazing bus-
tified with the monstrous, horselike ily, greedily at Marie-Thérèse’s face as
women that appeared in his paint- though nothing else would ever matter.
ing since the 1920s”; now, Richardson When war broke out in Europe, Pi-
writes, as he fell out of love with Dora, casso was in Antibes with Dora, work-
he “fixated on the pictorial deformation ing on Night Fishing at Antibes. The
of her face, both on canvas and in the artist and writer Roland Penrose, who
series of newspaper paintings and draw- was with him, wrote:
ings executed between 1941 and 1943.”
He was particularly irritated to
have been interrupted just as he had
Although the first three magisterial begun to see more clearly the path
volumes of Richardson’s biography su- his new work was to take. Joking
persede any other version of the painter’s with us he said they must be mak-
life in the years leading up to 1933, this ing a war just to annoy him when he
last volume, roughly half the size of the was starting on a good line.
others, can be most usefully read along-
side Josep Palau i Fabre’s Picasso 1927– Jaime Sabartés, his secretary, said,
1939: From the Minotaur to Guernica “What he dreaded in war was its
17
menace to his work; as though peace
were indispensable to this being who
cannot live without mental strife.”
In July 1939 Picasso had installed
Marie-Thérèse, their daughter, Maya,
and Marie-Thérèse’s mother and sister
in Royan on the French Atlantic coast.
On September 1 his chauffeur drove
the painter, Dora, his dog Kazbek,
and Sabartés and his wife to the same
town, where they lodged in a dingy
hotel. Picasso at first had his studio in
the comfortable house he rented for
Marie-Thérèse, and thus he saw her
every day. “Dora remembered Royan
as hell,” Richardson writes. “Letters to
her mother indicate that she was miser-
able from nearly the moment they ar-
rived.” Although the two entourages,
which soon included Breton’s wife and
daughter, gradually got to know one
another, Dora and Marie-Thérèse kept
apart.
That November, a Picasso retrospec-
tive, which included Guernica, opened
at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. Alfred Barr, the director, cabled
Picasso: “COLOSSAL SUCCESS. IT
ATTRACTS ENORMOUS CROWDS,
60,000 VISITORS, SURPASSING [1935]
VAN GOGH EXHIBITION.” Picasso,
in the meantime, was, as a Spanish
citizen, concerned about his safety in
France and set about obtaining French
citizenship. “His application,” accord-
ing to Richardson, “was denied on the
basis of a trumped-up report . . . claim-
ing that Picasso, at a Saint- Germain
café, had been overheard criticizing
French institutions and openly sup-
porting the Soviet Union.” In his po-
lice file it was also noted that “he had
failed to fight for France in World War
I; he supported the Republicans in the
Spanish Civil War.” Richardson adds:
“Without French citizenship, the fear
of extradition would continue to hang
over the artist’s head.”
In June 1940 Nazi troops arrived in
Royan and established themselves in
the hotel next to a studio that Picasso
was renting. Much of his work was in
storage in a Paris bank vault; he was
warned that his absence from the city
meant that it could be easily seized.
Others had gone back to Paris, such as
Éluard and his wife Nusch, who were
Picasso’s close friends, as well as Lei-
ris. On August 25 Picasso decided to
return, moving into the large studio
where he had painted Guernica and
making it his living quarters. Dora
traveled with him. In December Marie-
Thérèse and her family moved from
Royan to a Paris suburb.
When Picasso arrived in Paris, he
found notices posted on the door of
his studio and his apartment “claiming
authority to confiscate his works in lieu
of unpaid Spanish taxes.” Although he
had received American offers of asy-
lum and the promise of a Mexican visa,
he decided not to leave France. Later in
the war, he told Gilot:
I’m not looking for risks to take,
but in a sort of passive way I don’t
care to yield to either force or ter-
ror. I want to stay here because I’m
here. The only kind of force that
could make me leave would be
the desire to leave. Staying on isn’t
really a manifestation of courage;
it’s just a form of inertia. I suppose
it’s simply that I prefer to be here.
So I’ll stay whatever the cost.
18
Paris in late 1940 was, the photogra-
pher Brassaï recalled, a city
of queues and ration tickets, of
curfews and jammed radios, of
propaganda newspapers and films,
a Paris of German patrols, of yel-
low stars, of alerts and searches, of
arrests and bulletins of executions.
But according to Richardson:
Prewar social routines would
never entirely disappear from the
Saint- Germain- des-Prés neighbor-
hood. . . . Picasso was back at his
old haunts. . . . At lunchtime, he
was often spotted at the Catalan
beside Dora, Éluard, and Cocteau.
Pablo Picasso: Woman with a Cockerel, 1938
That November, a friend wrote to
Matisse, “Picasso is just as he always
was—a true Bohemian, taking his
meals here, there and everywhere.”
J ust as Picasso had enjoyed the atten-
tion of both factions of the Surrealists,
just as he had enjoyed the rivalry be-
tween Olga and Marie-Thérèse and
the even more intense rivalry between
Marie-Thérèse and Dora, he now drew
energy from the divisions between Élu-
ard, who had joined the Resistance,
and Jean Cocteau, who, Richardson
writes, “was reinventing himself as a
social superstar.” Cocteau “had sided
with the sophisticated collaborationist
JONATHAN D. SPENCE
(1936–2021)
We mourn the death of Jonathan D. Spence,
a long-standing contributor and friend.
gang of chic socialites and celebrities. telephone access to him, in case of
Éluard, on the other hand, belonged to any emergency that might befall Pi-
the left-wing circle of surrealist writers casso.” One day, when he received a
and clandestine Resistance activities.” call, he made his way to the studio and
Although Picasso accepted hos- found two Nazi officers, who quickly
pitality from pro- German hosts and departed as soon as they saw his papers:
hostesses, he was careful to avoid fig-
ures such as Coco Chanel, who began Dubois found Picasso’s studio in
a romance with a Nazi intelligence disarray, paintings ripped and
officer, and the socialite Marie-Laure roughed up. The artist remained
Noailles, who took up with an Austrian impassive, smoking a cigarette as
officer. (“She wasn’t at all pro-Nazi,” he told Dubois: “They have in-
Claude Arnaud writes of Noailles in sulted me as a degenerate, a Com-
his biography of Cocteau, “or even in munist, a Jew. They kicked in my
favor of collaboration; she just wanted canvases and said to me, ‘We’re
to be fashionable.”) coming back. That’s all for now.’”
Picasso enjoyed mocking Cocteau.
He told Brassaï, “For as long as I have Dubois wrote that the Nazis did not
known him, his pleats have always return after that visit, but Gilot, in her
memoir, wrote that they came “every
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart/bpk Bildagentur/Art Resource
week or two” on the pretext that the
studio belonged to a Jewish artist. One
of these visits gave rise to a story, possi-
bly apocryphal, that when an intruding
Nazi found a photograph of Guernica,
he asked Picasso, “Did you do that?”
Picasso, it is claimed, replied, “No, you
did.”
Officially Picasso was not allowed to
show his work during the Nazi occupa-
tion of Paris, but according to Arnaud,
the censors had been able to order
that one of his paintings be taken
down from its place in the Galerie
Charpentier. At the same time
they could be found everywhere
at the Galerie Louise Leiris [for-
merly owned by Picasso’s dealer
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who, as
a Jew, had to go into hiding]; cer-
tain German officers . . . even came
to admire them in Picasso’s studio.
Picasso never stopped working
during the war years. He was careful;
he was often silent. Cocteau, on the
other hand, repaid his debt to Breker
by attending the opening of an exhibi-
tion of his nudes at the Jeu de Paume
in April 1942 and publishing a “Salute
to Breker” in a literary paper, causing
Éluard to write, “Freud, Kafka, and
Chaplin have been banned by the same
people who honor Breker. You were be-
lieved to be among those forbidden. . . .
The best of those who admire you and
love you have had a painful surprise.”
“Picasso paints more and more like
God or the Devil,” Éluard wrote to
Penrose after the liberation of Paris.
been perfect . . . Cocteau was born . . . “He has been one of the rare painters
ironed.” In 1957, when Richardson who have behaved well and he contin-
and his partner Douglas Cooper were ues to do so.” Picasso accepted no sup-
invited to lunch by Picasso, with Coc- port from the Nazis, and a few times he
teau coming for coffee, Picasso warned performed small acts of bravery, such
his guests, “Don’t, for God’s sake, let as attending the memorial service for
him embrace you. He’s suffering from a his old friend Max Jacob, who died in
nasty skin disease that he caught from a concentration camp in the spring of
the Germans during the war.” 1944. But he did not speak out or do
Both Cocteau and Picasso had pow- anything to assist Jacob, who was born
erful protectors during the occupation, Jewish, when he was arrested.
including Arno Breker, Hitler’s favor- By this time, Dora was out of his
ite sculptor, and André-Louis Dubois, life. He began his affair with Gilot in
a former assistant director of the Na- the second half of 1943, when she was
tional Police who was now “working twenty-two. “Her arrival on the scene,”
undercover for the police force.” Du- Richardson writes, “brought about the
bois, Richardson writes, “arranged for long denouement of Dora Maar’s reign
Dora and Sabartés to have permanent as maîtress- en- titre and self-sacrificial
victim. . . . He had destroyed Dora,
beaten her to bits, and cut her up in
paint.” With the help of the psychoan-
alyst Jacques Lacan, she began to heal
herself. Eventually, she became a fer-
vent Catholic. Richardson gives her the
last word, but it is unclear whether she
was joking or not when she said, “After
Picasso, there is only God.” Q
The New York Review

Silverview
by John le Carré.
Viking, 215 pp., $28.00
In the classic espionage novel, there
are certain day jobs that make an ideal
cover for spies: foreign correspondent,
trade delegate, cultural attaché. But the
star intelligence officer in John le Car-
ré’s recent, posthumous novel, Silver-
view, has a more fitting job for her times.
At the height of the “war on terror,”
Deborah Avon is the jingoistic head of
a foreign-policy think tank—a quango,
in British technocrat parlance—whose
sole aim seems to be outdoing its more
influential American counterparts in
sheer bloodlust. Her neighbor, Julian,
buys her story. So he’s surprised, when
she dies, to see shadowy men removing
computers and a safe from her house.
These are “the people she worked for,”
Deborah’s daughter explains.
“In her quango?”
“Yeah, right, got it. Her quango.
The Men from the Quango. Title
of my next book.”
The joke captures a fact that must
have troubled le Carré in his later years:
British government intrigue by the 2010s
was no longer particularly subtle. Brit-
ain since Blairism has abounded with
public-private partnerships and awk-
ward acronyms (“quango” is an ac-
ronym built on an acronym, short for
“quasi-autonomous-NGO”); it has not
exactly lent itself to the kind of closely
observed, atmospheric spy novel for
which le Carré was so beloved. Just
imagine: The Spy Who Came In from
the Quango; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Technocrat.
Starting with Call for the Dead in
1961, le Carré built his reputation on
an intellectually enticing vision of the
cold war, in works that presented the
conflict as a chess-like game played as
if in the realm of abstraction by dour
gentlemen. Perhaps no other writer
enriched the popular imagination of
intelligence work as much as le Carré,
who gave the public a colorful vocab-
ulary with which to talk about it. His
novels contain the first recorded uses
of the terms “honey trap,” “lamplight-
ers,” and “scalphunters”—coinages so
apt that real spies began to use them
to describe their work. He popularized
the terms “tradecraft” (specialized spy
techniques) and “mole,” meaning—as
the soulful informant Irina puts it in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)—“a
deep-penetration agent so called be-
cause he burrows deep into the fabric
of Western imperialism.”
With a flair for slowly revealing the
workings of a detailed conspiracy, le
Carré brought his genre to a cerebral
new level; the elegance of his plots may
even have suggested that spying re-
quired more sophistication than it did.
The double agent Kim Philby reported,
in a letter to Graham Greene in 1982,
that he found Le Carré’s plots “more
complicated than anything within my
own experience,” though “they were
good reading after all that James Bond
nonsense.” The books draw their imag-
inative power from the nondescript, ex-
hausted ambience of cold war secrecy,
personified by characters with decep-
February 10, 2022
The Nonconformist
Laura Marsh
John le Carré; illustration by Carson Ellis
tively complacent names: Roy Bland,
George Smiley. The grayness on the
surface invites the notion of intricate
goings- on just beneath.
The end of the cold war did not leave
le Carré without a subject, as critics
so often worried. His novels of the
1990s and 2000s survey a world run at
the behest of arms dealers (The Night
Manager), murderous pharmaceutical
companies (The Constant Gardener),
and money launderers (Single and Sin-
gle, Our Kind of Traitor) as it slid into
endless war (Silverview). The crisis le
Carré had to confront was the altered
mood of the times. Gone was the softly
fading, somberly governed Britain of
his novels and in its place was a slick,
alienating new order—a shift that le
Carré had long seen coming, and fer-
vently disliked. Because more than
spying, more than secret life itself, in
le Carré’s most enduring novels—espe-
cially Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—the
dreaded prospect of change is the cen-
tral tension.
Le Carré learned early not to take
stability for granted. Born in Dorset in
1931, the young David Cornwell (John
le Carré was a pen name) appeared to
enjoy a typical British upper- class up-
bringing, passing from prep school to
boarding school to Oxford, with skiing
holidays in St. Moritz along the way.
His father, Ronnie, owned racehorses
and threw lavish parties at the family
home, a mansion named “Tunmers”
in Buckinghamshire. In fact, Ronnie
was not a hedonistic aristocrat but a
prolific con artist, who never lost traces
of his West Country accent despite his
attempts to mimic the clipped tones
of the ruling class. He went to jail for
fraud in the 1930s. Soon after Ronnie’s
release le Carré’s mother left. He was
five; he didn’t see her again for sixteen
years. Meanwhile, he and his brother
were raised by a succession of “love-
lies,” the women Ronnie serially ro-
manced and swindled.
It’s little surprise that le Carré never
developed a taste for the kind of spy
novel that came dressed in evening
wear and brandishing a cocktail; he
had lived the world of Casino Royale
as a child, traipsing through Europe
after a father who risked perilous sums
on the roulette boards of Monte Carlo
and being enjoined to lie for him when
creditors came knocking. Instead, he
made virtues of restraint and even
dreariness. The two institutions that
seem to have had the greatest influence
on his sensibility—school and the Brit-
ish secret services—were both some-
what straitened when he entered them.
When he arrived at St. Andrew’s prep
school at the age of seven, the teach-
ers were largely “older men called out
of retirement,” Adam Sisman reports
in his 2015 biography, John le Carré.
The younger teachers had all been
sent away to war. Though le Carré was
miserable at St. Andrew’s and later
at Sherborne—between the regime
of corporal punishment and games
of rugby fought “almost literally to
death”—school and its upper- class rit-
uals offered stability and a place where
he could hide in plain sight.
Wealthy, educated boys of the pe-
riod were trained to express themselves
in a strangely evasive, upbeat manner
(barking “Super!” and “Fine!” no mat-
ter how dire the situation they faced,
and professing to find things “extraor-
dinary” that did not interest them at
all); le Carré, who had more to con-
ceal than most, copied their behavior
exactly—“even to the extent of pre-
tending I had a settled home life with
real parents and ponies,” he wrote in
his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel.* The
stiff upper lip gave him a way to de-
flect awkward questions about his real
background. It was the first time that,
like a spy, he affected a completely
conventional appearance while in fact
picking his way through a tumultuous
reality.
Le Carré became a junior officer in
MI5 in 1956, when he was twenty-five—
though he had worked for the agency
informally since the age of sixteen,
including by keeping tabs on his left-
leaning peers when he was at Oxford.
Like St. Andrew’s, MI5 felt like a place
out of time, its upper echelons “staffed
by ageing survivors of the glory days
of 1939–45” and its middle ranks filled
with “former colonial police and dis-
trict officers left over from Britain’s
dwindling empire.” Living for a van-
ished past, his colleagues took little
interest in their jobs; one of his near
contemporaries, the future MI5 chief
Stella Rimington, remembered older
colleagues being drunk all day and
heading home in the early afternoons.
It was, in other words, an archetypal
midcentury bureaucracy: big and lum-
bering enough to harbor plenty of in-
competence; old and battle-scarred
enough to appear ageless and inde-
structible. In truth, the service as it
then existed was on the brink of col-
lapse and would be reformed after a
series of breaches, but in the moments
before its transformation, it appeared
comfortingly immovable to le Carré.
At twenty-five, he was attempting to
put down roots—he had tried being
a schoolteacher, was trying to write,
and was newly married—and he felt
“rather relieved” to be working for
MI5 again, “as one might be return-
ing to a crotchety wife after prolonged
absence.” And again, he saw a deeper
appeal in the dullness of the organiza-
tion. “I relished the notion of appear-
ing to be someone dull, while all the
time I was someone terribly exciting,”
he recalled in 1986.
It’s the dull characters in le Carré
who give the novels their finely tuned
emotional range. There is George Smi-
ley on his way to work in the middle of
the night in Call for the Dead. In the
back of the taxi, he folds his coat tightly
around himself—an unremarkable act
but full of feeling that only he is aware
of: “The warmth was contraband, smug-
gled from his bed and hoarded against
the wet January night.” Or there is the
schoolboy Jumbo Roach, at the begin-
ning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
who has been deemed “dull, if not ac-
tually deficient” by those around him
*See Neal Ascherson’s review in these
pages, “Which le Carré Do You
Want?,” October 13, 2016.
19

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offers a fascinating perspective on Hong
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Morning Post, Jason Wordie, historian,
Hong Kong.
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Hung’s prose is clean and leisurely. The
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All books are available at Amazon
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20
but who can immediately sense, in his
teacher, a wounded spy, “a great at-
tachment that had failed him and that
he longed to replace.” It’s hard to think
of another spy novelist so attentive to
intuitions like these, which do not di-
rectly serve the plot but show flickers of
the characters’ individuality and create
the impression—so central to the aura
of mystery he builds up in the books—
that most of the time the essence of a
person, their small satisfactions and
unexplained sadnesses, is hidden.
F rom his first novel, le Carré’s spies
are wary of modernizers who want
to remove any room for individuality
from working life and strip away ev-
erything that makes them distinctive.
When George Smiley makes his first
appearance, in Call for the Dead, he is
already something of a throwback—a
quiet, physically unremarkable man
who has “entered middle age without
ever being young.” Like le Carré’s real-
life colleagues, Smiley has seen better
days: his World War II adventures are
behind him and he is not “material for
promotion.” He cannot stand his new
boss, an expensively dressed “career
man.” Only a few pages into the novel,
Smiley is mourning the passing of a
more solid era:
Gone for ever were the days of
Steed-Asprey, when as like as not
you took your orders over a glass of
port in his rooms at Magdalen; the
inspired amateurism of a handful
of highly qualified, under-paid men
had given way to the efficiency, bu-
reaucracy, and intrigue of a large
Government department.
This early version of Smiley is rueful.
Alec Leamas, the agent who poses as a
defector to East Germany in The Spy
Who Came In from the Cold (1963),
is more angry than sad. As he walks
into the secret service headquarters at
Cambridge Circus, a personnel officer
asks him to show a pass, and tells him
to “fill out a slip.”
“Since when have we had passes?
McCall knows me as well as his
own mother.”
“Just a new routine. Circus is
growing, you know.”
Leamas said nothing, nodded at
McCall, and got into the lift with-
out a pass.
There’s a sense in both books that
Britain had emerged just about intact
from World War II, only to become an
outpost of the United States. Smiley
blames the new obsession with effi-
ciency on “the NATO alliance, and the
desperate measures contemplated by
the Americans” in their prosecution of
the cold war. Leamas, too, resents the
American influence over British state
business. At one point an East Ger-
man handler asks him if he was “one of
the mysterious cold warriors,” and he
replies, “savagely,” that he was really
only an “office boy for the bloody
Yanks, like the rest of us.”
It took several years for le Carré’s
publishers to understand why his spies
had to be so unhappy, their manner so
grim. The discussion of his pen name
showed their desire to shape him into a
faster-paced thriller writer. (He could
not write under his real name because
he was still working as a spy when he
published his first three books.) As
Sisman recounts in his biography, the
young writer liked “John le Carré”—
simple, elegant, a little French. But his
publishers urged him to try a name
that sounded more hard-hitting, with
an American flavor: “Hank Brown”
or “Chunk Smith.” Even after the suc-
cess of The Spy Who Came In from the
Cold, some reviewers found his writing
“overpoweringly literary.” When he
submitted the manuscript for his fourth
novel, The Looking Glass War (1965),
his editor asked for what Sisman calls
“more action and less gloom” in the
rewrites.
But the gloom was the point, more
than the action. Le Carré’s most mel-
ancholy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Spy, is bathed in anxiety about the
fading of the old ruling class as power
passes to a cadre of untrustworthy ca-
reerists. There are few novels in which
so many people are so frustrated about
the way they are being told to do their
jobs. When Smiley, now retired, meets
his old colleague Roddy Martindale
for dinner in the book’s second chap-
ter, it’s easy to forget that their adver-
sary was, supposedly, the Soviet Union.
All Martindale can talk about is office
politics. The service has yet another
disingenuous upstart boss—Percy Al-
leline, a smooth-talking nonentity who
takes all the credit and does none of the
work. “Living off the wits of his subor-
dinates,” Martindale laments, “well,
maybe that’s leadership these days.”
Smiley’s former deputy Peter Guillam
is unhappy too. Under Alleline’s re-
organization, he tells Smiley later in
the book, “our autonomy is cut to the
bone.”
Though each of these novels drew
flattering comparisons to Graham
Greene, who also wrote elevated spy
fiction, they share with midcentury
works of social criticism such as The
Organization Man and The Lonely
Crowd a sharp distaste for conformity.
As much as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
is an espionage novel, it is an office
novel, centered on disgruntled employ-
ees. Le Carré’s characters are doubly
affronted because, in order to play the
game and ascend the ranks, they have
to relinquish not only their individu-
ality but also their sense of national
identity. (For Bill Haydon, the traitor
in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this is
a bridge too far—once he realizes that
whatever the outcome of the cold war,
Britain will no longer be a major power,
he loses his allegiance to the West; he is
not interested in working on behalf of
the United States.)
Le Carré paints Smiley’s Ameri-
can counterparts in The Honourable
Schoolboy (1977) as humorless military
tough guys with crew cuts and monosyl-
labic names (“Sol,” “Cy,” “Ed”). Mag-
nus Pym’s earnest American neighbor,
Grant Lederer III, in A Perfect Spy
is an “unlovable” striver from South
Bend, Indiana, for whom intelligence
work means sifting through data on a
computer, rather than the practice of
tradecraft. Anyone who wants to be
successful has to court the Americans,
chatting with them over dry martinis
and acting like it’s an honor to be in-
volved at all.
By contrast, le Carré’s heroes in the
Smiley novels take pride in being out-
sidery—a scattering of former insiders
who keep up the old ways. At the start
of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smi-
ley is preparing for retirement in the
Cotswolds, content to be “out of date,
but loyal to his own time.” His most
talented officer is another retiree, the
veteran Russia watcher Connie Sachs.
When he looks her up, she’s living in a
poky apartment heated by a dirty coke
fire, with a mangy spaniel at her feet.
Half drunk, she gives a teary speech
about the loss of the British Empire:
“All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye,
world.” Jerry Westerby, the agent Smi-
ley sends into the field in The Honour-
able Schoolboy, is another holdover.
The second son of a lord, he is the
cheery, vacuous sort of Englishman
who might have been a colonial admin-
istrator in an earlier period; instead
he’s a journalist and occasional spy in
East Asia. Though well into middle
age, he talks the way le Carré did as a
school child, with automatic exclama-
tions of “Gosh, super” and “Terrific”
that suggest an unnameable loss.
These downwardly mobile public
servants were plausible heroes for a
waning imperial power that was rap-
idly reining in its ambitions. Smiley and
Guillam do not pretend to have the au-
thority that their pre-war predecessors
did—as Guillam comments, in the old
days “control sat in heaven and held the
strings. Remember?” The most le Car-
ré’s spies can hope for is to be called out
of retirement for a last mission. They
step in not to save the world but to sal-
vage their own credibility. The books
don’t pretend that Britain is important
for anything it does anymore but seek
refuge in a fuzzier idea of what Britain
is: a place where the past is glorious, no
one thinks too hard about the harms
the British Empire inflicted, and any-
thing that represents tradition is con-
soling, no matter how dilapidated. The
dust and abandoned tea bags that Peter
Guillam disturbs when hunting for old
files. The “disgusting breakfast of un-
dercooked sausage and overcooked
tomato” that Smiley eats at a bed-and-
breakfast. The plate of smoked salmon
he later produces from a tiny refriger-
ator. The smell of Connie Sachs’s dog
by the fire.
Silverview has many of the elements
of those classic books, though it is set
closer to the present. Its main charac-
ter, Julian Lawndsley, is a well-to- do,
slightly lost young man who, like Jerry
Westerby, resorts to outbursts of po-
liteness when he feels uncomfortable.
Julian is a sort of retiree himself: hav-
ing quickly made enough money for
a lifetime, he quits his job in finance
and opens a tiny, ailing bookstore in a
seaside village. There he meets a man
named Edward Avon, who claims to
have been friends with his (now de-
ceased) father at school and wants to
inveigle himself into Julian’s bookstore
business. It’s almost comically obvious
that he is a spy: he appears for the first
time in a homburg hat and dripping
raincoat, as if costumed rather than
dressed.
Julian and Edward’s entanglement
unfolds in parallel with the story of
an intelligence officer named Stewart
Proctor, who is investigating Edward
and his wife, Deborah. “A stalky, be-
spectacled man in his mid-fifties” with
“a long beakish head,” Proctor is Sil-
verview’s version of George Smiley.
Like Smiley, he has an unassuming
manner but is renowned among his
peers for being able to identify leaks
from inside the service. Like Smiley,
The New York Review
he has seen his less talented but more
ingratiating colleagues rise above him
in the hierarchy while he does all the
work. Like Smiley, he has an unfaithful
wife. It isn’t hard to guess how the two
strands of the plot will come together,
or that Edward is just as untrustworthy
as he seems.
The closest the book comes to vin-
tage le Carré is when Proctor drops in
on a pair of old spies, a married couple
named Philip and Joan, in a replay of
Smiley’s visit to Connie Sachs. Under
the pretext that he’s gathering notes for
a training exercise, Proctor asks them
to take him through their memories
of Edward: where he came from, who
recruited him, where he might have
gone wrong. More revealing than their
stories, though, are the retirees them-
selves. Proctor had imagined them
living in “a charming Somerset cot-
tage covered in clematis.” Instead, the
house, a “lurid, green-tiled bungalow,”
is an eyesore. And his old comrades,
once “the golden couple” of the Brit-
ish intelligence services, have changed.
Philip is “bowed over a stick” and Joan
has become “a horsy woman in elastic-
topped slacks and a t-shirt with a wide-
angle print of Old Vienna across her
expansive bosom.” (Connie is also
wearing “trousers with elastic at the
waist” when Smiley summons her.)
This couple and this house could be
in almost any of le Carré’s early nov-
els. Yet Joan and Philip, like the other
characters in Silverview, have a habit
of immediately supplying the informa-
tion needed to further the plot. Though
there are hints that they realize that
Proctor, the service’s “chief sniffer-
dog,” has an ulterior motive, they don’t
think twice about giving him a com-
plete biography of Edward: from the
childhood that made him a “fanatic”
to the mid- career trauma that turned
him against his country and prompted
him to start stealing state secrets from
the hawkish Deborah and passing
them to a terrorist organization. Case
solved.
Philip and Joan don’t just make the
logic of the plot more explicit; they also
articulate the underlying attitudes of
many of le Carré’s books more clearly
than his characters generally do. On
the rising tide of bureaucracy, Joan
opines, “They’ve got a whole new lan-
guage. And line managers. And bloody
Human Resources instead of a per-
fectly decent Personnel Department.”
Joan elaborates an antiwar stance, with
her rather glib take on the Yugoslav
wars of the 1990s: “Six tiny nations
squabbling over Big Daddy Tito’s Will.
All fighting for God, all wanting to be
top dog, and nobody to like.” Philip
confesses that the work of the British
intelligence services in his lifetime did
not, in the end, amount to much: “We
didn’t do much to alter the course of
human history, did we?. . . I reckon I’d
have been more use running a boys’
club.”
It all concludes a little too neatly,
the characters each a little too eager
to drop the pretense of intrigue. The
mood of Silverview is brisk and know-
ing compared with the melancholic,
regretful tone of many of the Smiley
books. The pace never really lets up.
Everyone speaks and thinks in the
same short, irritated sentences. Deb-
orah’s daughter, Lily, on her mother’s
secrets: “Mum said she didn’t want me
to tell a living soul, so I didn’t. Plus I’m
indoctrinated. By your lot. I’m signed
up.” Julian on his former career in fi-
nance: “I came, I stole, I conquered, I
got out. End of story.” One character
anticipates “an enormous and enduring
stink.” Later, a different character pre-
dicts “an unparalleled, five-star cluster-
fuck.” The layers of abused loyalty, of
mounting disappointment, are missing.
Everyone has had enough.
I t isn’t really le Carré’s fault if Silver-
view is a less enigmatic novel than we
might expect. For one thing, le Carré,
who died in 2020 at the age of eighty-
nine, never decided to publish the
book. He wrote the novel sometime in
the mid-2010s—after A Delicate Truth
(2013) and before The Pigeon Tunnel
(2016)—but kept it in a drawer. In an
afterword, le Carré’s son Nick Corn-
well, who writes as Nick Harkaway, ex-
plains that he found it after his father’s
death. He implies that the book was
a completed work that his father had
redrafted several times. He thought it
was worth publishing, even if there’s no
indication that le Carré himself ever
considered it a finished work.
Given the state of Britain, too, in
recent years, it makes sense that the
goings- on in Silverview have a brit-
tle quality. Everything Smiley and his
author disliked had become the domi-
nant culture. The contest that had been
going on in the background between
old and new was over. Le Carré lived
to see his country run by management
consultants and PR gurus, many of
them the bullish sons of the aristoc-
racy—a class that has consolidated its
power once more in recent decades.
The clearest indication of the range of
years in which Silverview could be set is
a shopkeeper’s assumption, on hearing
Julian’s plummy accent, that he “went
to Eton . . . same as the government”;
in 2010 David Cameron became the
first Old Etonian in nearly fifty years
to serve as prime minister (nine years
later Boris Johnson became the sec-
ond). Another revelation that emerged
after le Carré’s death, also courtesy of
Nick, is that, alienated by Brexit and
enraged by Britain’s entry into the Iraq
War, he took Irish citizenship in his
final year. (His maternal grandmother
had been Irish.) One of the last photos
of him shows him sitting at a table and
grinning, wrapped in the broad green,
white, and orange stripes of a large
Irish flag.
It was an earlier version of Britain
that spurred le Carré’s imagination;
he was at his best when his characters
didn’t know quite what to make of their
moment or one another. By the end of
Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, George
Smiley has still not quite explained Bill
Haydon’s betrayal, a messier business
than Edward Avon’s. As Smiley takes
the train home, he has “a wistful no-
tion of liking Haydon and respecting
him: Bill was a man, after all, who had
had something to say and had said it.
But his mental system rejected this
convenient simplification.” Is it Bill he
will never fully know, or himself? Fin-
ished, at least for now, with the busi-
ness of spying, Smiley is left with the
smaller intrigues of ordinary life: the
insoluble problems of his wife, his mar-
riage, and what he is supposed to do
next. Q

“Whoever would have thought that William Shakespeare could help us prevent
murder in the twenty-first century? In this extraordinary book, James Gilligan and
Holding a Mirror David Richards shepherd their readers through a riveting and brilliantly written
journey, explaining how the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon can offer unique insights

up to Nature into the origins of violence. I simply could not put this down!”
Professor Estela V. Welldon, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists,
Honorary Member, American Psychoanalytic Association, UK
Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare
“Were I able to persuade my political colleagues to imbibe the wisdom of one book,
this is it. What Girard did with the novel, Gilligan and Richards do for Shakespeare,
making him accessible and essential for understanding and responding to personal
Holding a Mirror up to Nature

and political violence. It is both brilliant and transformational.”

John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych, House of Lords, Westminster, UK

JAMES GILLIGAN, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, NYU, wrote Violence

(1996), Preventing Violence (2001), Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than
Others (2011), a Times Literary Supplement ‘Book of the Year’, and co-authored
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2016), a New York Times best-seller. His
advice has been sought by President Clinton, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, the World
Health Organization, and the World Court.

DAVID A.J. RICHARDS is Professor of Law at New York University. He

is the author of over 20 books including: Free Speech and the Politics of Identity
(1999), Disarming Manhood: Roots of Ethical Resistance (2005), The Deepening
Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (Cambridge University Press,
2009, with Carol Gilligan),Why Love Leads to Justice: Love Across the Boundaries
(Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Image credit: © National Portrait Gallery, London

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February 10, 2022 21

 Black Voices, German Song
Singing Like Germans:
Black Musicians in the Land of
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms
by Kira Thurman.
Cornell University Press, 351 pp., $32.95
In his book Wagnerism (2020), Alex
Ross writes about what he calls “Wag-
ner scenes” in literature—episodes
in which a young concertgoer is spir-
itually transformed by an encounter
with Richard Wagner’s music. One of
Ross’s most fascinating examples is
“Of the Coming of John,” a chapter in
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black
Folk (1903), in which Du Bois turns
to fiction to describe the intellectual
awakening of a young Black man from
a small town in Georgia. John Jones’s
epiphany comes when he attends a per-
formance of Lohengrin in New York
and feels a new world opening up: “The
infinite beauty of the wail lingered
and swept through every muscle of his
frame, and put it all a-tune.” In his ec-
stasy, he inadvertently touches the arm
of the white woman next to him, where-
upon her male companion complains
and Jones is ejected from the hall.
The bitter moral of Du Bois’s tale is
that for a Black American of his time,
high culture is a trap. Studying Greek
and geometry at college gives Jones a
“dignity” and “thoughtfulness” that
are visible in his appearance. But it
also makes him “feel almost for the
first time the Veil that lay between
him and the white world,” Du Bois
writes, as Jim Crow America prevents
him from using or enjoying his knowl-
edge. “Does it make every one—un-
happy when they study and learn lots
of things?” asks Jones’s sister when he
returns home. “I am afraid it does,” he
says. To which she replies, “I wish I was
unhappy”—conveying Du Bois’s sense
that the life of the mind is worth suf-
fering for.
“Of the Coming of John” helps make
sense of Du Bois’s puzzling decision to
attend the Bayreuth Festival in 1936,
when it was closely associated with the
Nazi regime. Writing about the experi-
ence in his essay “What of the Color-
Line?,” Du Bois acknowledged the
moral complications involved, noting
that on his daily walk he passed the for-
mer home of Houston Stewart Cham-
berlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, who “did
more perhaps than any one to establish
in Germany the theory of Nordic su-
periority.” Chamberlain’s racist, anti-
Semitic opus The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century was an important
influence on Hitler, and Cosima Wag-
ner, the composer’s widow, had been
one of the führer’s crucial early sup-
porters. Yet Du Bois writes admiringly
about her and describes Bayreuth as a
shrine to “the spirit of Beauty,” com-
paring it to Chartres Cathedral. As
for Wagner’s operas, he has no doubt
about their humanity and universality:
“No human being, white or black, can
afford not to know them, if he would
know life.”
If Du Bois wasn’t deterred by Nazi
Bayreuth, it was partly because he had
a lifetime of experience separating the
treasures of the human spirit from the
institutions that administered them.
For John Jones, the fact that a racist
opera house was the only place to hear
22
Adam Kirsch
Marian Anderson studying a musical score with the pianist Kurt Johnen, Berlin, 1931
Lohengrin didn’t mean that the opera
itself was tainted. On the contrary, the
music was the best critique of the bar-
barism that surrounded it.
Du Bois found that for an African
American, Nazi Germany was actu-
ally more welcoming than the United
States. After five months visiting the
country, he observed, “It would have
been impossible for me to have spent
a similarly long time in any part of the
United States, without some, if not fre-
quent cases of personal insult or dis-
crimination. I cannot record a single
instance here.” “What of the Color-
Line?” originally appeared in Du
Bois’s column in an African American
newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and
he details for his readers the terrifying
anti- Semitism that was visible every-
where in Germany in 1936, calling it
“an attack on civilization” comparable
to the Spanish Inquisition and the Af-
rican slave trade. He insists, however,
that on his travels there, “I have been
treated with uniform courtesy and
consideration.”
T he idea that Black artists and intel-
lectuals could escape American racism
by moving to Europe is familiar from
literary history: Richard Wright and
James Baldwin, for example, spent
their later lives in France. In Sing-
ing Like Germans, the historian Kira
Thurman adds a new dimension to the
story by focusing on African American
classical musicians who studied, per-
formed, or settled in German-speaking
Europe. Many of them made avowals
just like Du Bois’s. “In Europe there is
Marian Anderson Papers, University of Pennsylvania
of it, a cause for delighted surprise or
violent condemnation, but it always re-
quired some kind of interpretation.
When African American artists
began to appear on European stages
in the late nineteenth century, con-
cert promoters used their race as a
selling point. Sissieretta Jones may
have claimed that in Europe no one
cared about the color of her skin, but
when she came to Berlin in 1895 she
was billed as “the Black Patti,” after
the popular Italian diva Adelina Patti.
Thurman discovers that a singer named
Jenny Bishop was using the same nick-
name in Berlin at the time, a source of
amusement for the local press. “They
both appear to be right,” one journalist
wrote, “because the one is as Black as
the other, and the one sings [as] beauti-
fully as the other.”
Part of what these artists were sell-
ing was their story. Thurman quotes a
profile of Jones in a Berlin newspaper
that explained how a “simple Negro
maiden” was discovered by Thomas
Edison, recorded on his newly invented
wax cylinder, and then taken under the
wing of First Lady Frances Cleveland,
who hired a music teacher for her and
arranged for her debut concert in the
White House.
Thurman describes this account as
“wildly fabricated and sensational.” In
fact, Jones, who was raised in Provi-
dence, Rhode Island, was trained at the
New England Conservatory of Music.
But if it tells us nothing of value about
the singer, it’s quite informative about
German expectations and fantasies.
Thurman dwells particularly on the
no prejudice against my race,” said the detail that Mrs. Cleveland challenged
soprano Sissieretta Jones, who toured Jones’s music teacher to see if proper
Germany in the 1890s. “It is the ar- training could “overcome the unpleas-
tist[’s] soul they look at there, not the ant, strange, and unmelodic guttural
color of his skin.” sound” of her speaking voice. Here was
Josephine Harreld studied piano a perfect colonialist fable of European
and conducting in Salzburg in 1935, culture overcoming African nature.
when Austria was under fascist rule, German critics implicitly affirmed
but “the only experience of racism she that binary when they insisted, intend-
shared came from white Americans,” ing it as a compliment, that Jones wasn’t
Thurman writes. One fellow student, a really Black. “The only thing ‘Black’
Smith graduate, refused to sit with her about her is the beautiful shining hair,”
at meals because, Harreld related in a one reviewer said, while another pro-
letter to her parents, “her family has tested that the “adjective ‘Black’ seems
Negro servants. So for that reason she to us unnecessarily impolite.” To insist
cannot overcome her prejudices.” on the singer’s race would be to sug-
Many Black musicians felt elated and gest that she hadn’t transcended it, as
liberated to be living for the first time any Black person would have to do in
in a country without a history of slavery order to participate in German musical
and segregation. But the reality of the culture. German audiences were also
German musical world was more com- simply unfamiliar with how African
plicated, as Thurman shows in this im- Americans looked and often expressed
pressively and thoughtfully researched surprise at how the category “Black”
book. Singing Like Germans covers was defined. “A twist: Miss Jenny
roughly a century starting in the 1870s, Bishop actually has a chocolate-brown
a period when Germany underwent coloring, and the epithet ‘Black Patti’ is
repeated cataclysmic changes, and the therefore out of place,” one critic wrote
experiences of Black musicians varied about Jones’s rival.
greatly by time and place. Marian An-
derson’s lieder evenings in Vienna be-
fore the Anschluss belonged to a world M ore significant than the appear-
different from that of Ella Lee’s debut ance of performers was whether the
as Tosca in Communist East Berlin in music they made “sounded” Black. In
1961. the chapter “Singing Lieder, Hearing
What remained constant was the Race,” Thurman shows that German
ideology of German music—the belief writers habitually, perhaps uncon-
that the works of Bach and Mozart, sciously, described Black voices as
Beethoven and Brahms, were the prod- sounding “black, purple, or blue—all
uct of a unique national genius. For dark hues.” A review of a Marian An-
an African American to perform that derson concert in 1930 described the
music could be interpreted as a tribute contralto as having “a dark, blue-black
to the German spirit or a desecration voice” that “sounds somewhat unusual
The New York Review
to our ears, exotic.” Roland Hayes, a
tenor renowned in the early twentieth
century for his interpretations of lieder,
was described by a Viennese critic in
1923 as “somewhat guttural.”
It’s possible that German listeners
really were hearing something new and
distinctive in these performances. For
audiences used to singers who were
native German speakers, Anderson
and Hayes might well have sounded
“exotic” in ways that were hard to
specify. Still, it’s clear that, as Thur-
man writes, “audiences often relied on
biological notions of racial difference
to understand a performance of clas-
sical music.” In one of the book’s rare
passages of direct musical description,
Thurman—a classically trained pia-
nist who grew up in Vienna—analyzes
Hayes’s recording of Schubert’s song
“Du bist die Ruh,” which was made late
in his life and “does not represent the
African American tenor in his prime.”
Even so, anyone who listens to it can
hear that “guttural” is the last word
that describes Hayes’s singing; Thur-
man notes its “feathery soft smooth-
ness.” This is one of many examples in
Singing Like Germans of how difficult
it is to simply hear music, without dis-
torting preconceptions.
Before World War I, German reac-
tions to Black musicians were some-
times condescending or disdainful,
but in the interwar period they turned
menacing. After the Treaty of Ver-
sailles, German resentment crystal-
lized around the presence of soldiers
from Algeria and Senegal in the French
forces occupying the Rhineland. Giv-
ing Black troops authority over white
Europeans was thought of in Germany
as a crime against nature, a “Black
Horror.”
When Hayes came to Berlin to per-
form in 1924, he became a focus for this
anger. A Black man singing Schubert in
a hall named after Beethoven seemed
to some Germans like a cultural re-
prise of the occupation, and the Amer-
ican consul warned Hayes not to come.
He did anyway, taking the stage to “the
sounds of booing and jeering,” Thur-
man writes. But according to press
reports, when he began by singing the
gentle “Du bist die Ruh,” his perfor-
mance immediately disarmed the audi-
ence, and by the end of the night he was
loudly cheered. Here was a story to feel
good about, showing that music could
be a universal language, transcending
the illusory differences of race.
The Nazis, however, weren’t inter-
ested in such happy endings, and as they
gained power, protests against Black
musicians became more aggressive.
Thurman contrasts Hayes’s concert
with one given by the Pittsburgh-born
singer Aubrey Pankey in Salzburg in
1932. Local Nazis posted flyers urging
people “not to enable a Negro to take
the daily bread of German artists,” and
while Pankey performed, a crowd out-
side sang nationalist songs and “tried
repeatedly to storm the building but
were blocked by the police.”
Thurman quotes a review of the con-
cert published in a right-wing newspa-
per the next day: “Whenever you see a
Negro, you get the feeling that he has a
quiet longing for his grasslands. . . . You
believe him right away that he—in the
true sense of the word—feels utterly
out of place in Europe.” It’s hard to rec-
oncile such abuse with Du Bois’s testi-
mony that he experienced no racism in
Nazi Germany.
February 10, 2022
After the Allied victory in World
War II, Black performance in Ger-
many took on new political meanings.
One of the most interesting episodes
Thurman writes about came in Sep-
tember 1945, when the Berlin Philhar-
monic performed under the baton of a
Black conductor for the first time. (The
pianist Hazel Harrison had become the
first Black woman to perform with the
orchestra in 1904, but this milestone
was forgotten.) Rudolph Dunbar, a na-
tive of British Guiana who studied at
Juilliard and made his career in Lon-
don, was invited with the approval of
the occupying Americans as a pointed
rejection of Nazi racism and the cult
of German music. Thurman quotes
an American official who called Black
A poster of the soprano Sissieretta Jones, also known as ‘the Black Patti,’ 1899
musicians “the best assets in the reori-
entation of Germans.” To make the
message even clearer, Dunbar con-
ducted in uniform—he had been a
war correspondent for the Associated
Negro Press—and the program in-
cluded the Afro-American Symphony
by the Black composer William Grant
Still.
The concerts were a success, but
Dunbar was skeptical about the audi-
ence. “They flock to my concerts not
because they want to hear my music,
but because they want to hear how a
Negro makes music,” he observed to
the writer Ruth Andreas-Friedrich,
who recorded their conversation in
her diary. She wrote that Dunbar was
“beautiful like a panther,” another
example of language inadvertently be-
traying German assumptions about
Africa and Europe, nature and culture.
But the most glaring irony was
that Dunbar had opportunities in
American- occupied Berlin that he
would never have found in America
itself. (The Metropolitan Opera didn’t
perform under a Black conductor until
1972, when Henry Lewis led a per-
formance of La Bohème.) During the
cold war, Communist East Germany
embraced Black musicians to rebuke
American racism, much as the Ameri-
cans embraced Dunbar to rebuke Ger-
man racism.
Paul Robeson, an outspoken Com-
munist sympathizer, performed a lieder
concert in East Berlin in 1960, with
“Ol’ Man River” on the program
alongside Bach and Bartók. The East
German press played up the event as
proof of Communist antiracism, but
Thurman writes that this strategy had
Library of Congress
its own pitfalls. A staged press photo-
graph showed Robeson talking to an
eight-year- old girl named Anka, who
supposedly asked him to stay in the
GDR; it was published in one East Ber-
lin newspaper with the caption “Paul
Robeson, Your Big Black Friend,” con-
descending absurdly to both Robeson
and the reader.
T his points to the central, unan-
swered question in Singing Like Ger-
mans. Thurman has uncovered a great
variety of German responses to Black
musicians, and she interprets almost all
of them as expressions of racism. This
includes not just the explicit hatred of
Nazis and the prejudice of provincial
nineteenth- century critics, but also
responses that were intended to be af-
firmative and enthusiastic. Thus, after
condemning German listeners who
thought that singers like Anderson
and Hayes sounded Black, Thurman
also condemns those who thought they
didn’t sound Black, such as one Vien-
nese critic who praised Hayes: “Not as
a Negro, but as a great artist, he cap-
tured and moved the audience.”
Thurman argues that such a com-
pliment assumes “that whatever was
Black could not also be universal.” Yet
when another Viennese critic writes
that Anderson’s singing showed “how
the human heart speaks intelligibly to
everybody,” Thurman criticizes the
comment’s “universalizing tones” as
predicated on a belief in the “supposed
foreignness of [Anderson’s] musician-
ship.” As in many current discussions of
race and cultural appropriation, there is
a vicious circle at work here: insisting
on difference is a problem, but so is in-
sisting on the absence of difference.
Part of the problem is that Singing
Like Germans is mostly about how
Germans thought about Black musi-
cians, not the other way around. This
may simply be due to the nature of the
available evidence: musicians generally
don’t theorize about their calling, so
there will always be more written about
them than by them. What Thurman
does quote from letters, diaries, and
memoirs, however, suggests that many
African American musicians shared
the belief that German art music repre-
sented a higher spiritual realm. About
his alma mater, Fisk University, the
historically Black college in Tennessee,
Du Bois wrote that “no student ever
left Fisk without a deep and abiding ap-
preciation of real music.” “Real music,
of course, meant classical music, and
usually the music of German compos-
ers,” Thurman notes.
Indeed, the Black classical musicians
we meet in Singing Like Germans were
at pains to distinguish themselves from
popular and folk musicians. Thurman
shows that in the 1920s, Anderson’s
public image was formed in opposition
to that of Josephine Baker. Both sing-
ers became famous in Europe at the
same time, but the latter represented
“erotic primitivism,” while the former
was “pious, modest, respectable.” The
difference had to do not just with their
personalities but with their genres: clas-
sical music was refined, bourgeois, and
European, holding itself aloof from the
vulgar American energy of jazz.
A more interesting contrast, perhaps,
would be between Anderson and Bes-
sie Smith. The two singers were con-
temporaries—Anderson was born in
1897, Smith in 1894—and both made
their first recordings in 1923. But while
success for Anderson meant perform-
ing Brahms and Wolf for an audience of
a few hundred Viennese connoisseurs,
Smith’s blues records sold by the hun-
dreds of thousands, and she became the
highest-paid Black entertainer in Amer-
ica. In the process, she helped redefine
American music as African American
music, as it would remain through the
twentieth century with blues, jazz, rock
and roll, R&B, soul, and hip-hop.
By comparison, Anderson, Hayes,
and other classical musicians in Sing-
ing Like Germans look a little like the
neo-Latin writers of the Renaissance,
who staked their fame on a tradition-
ally prestigious language at just the mo-
ment when almost everyone stopped
reading it. Thurman offers valuable in-
sights into how Germans viewed these
Black artists, but it would be still more
interesting to know how they viewed
themselves. Q
23
 Regarding the Solace of Others
On Consolation:
Finding Solace in Dark Times
by Michael Ignatieff.
Metropolitan, 284 pp., $26.99
In 1793 the French mathematician,
intellectual, and moderate revolution-
ary the Marquis de Condorcet, who
had hoped that the Revolution could
bring about a peaceful era of equality,
justice, and human rights, and who for
denouncing the bloodthirsty despo-
tism of Robespierre and the Jacobins
had been banished and threatened
with death, was in hiding in a house in
Paris. He had been taken in by a cou-
rageous landlady, Mme Vernet. On
the day Condorcet learned that thirty
of his moderate colleagues had been
guillotined, he broke down and wept,
lamenting his outlawed state. Mme
Vernet told him that the Jacobins
could make him an outlaw, but that “no
one could expel him from the human
race.”
To be a member of the human race is
to undergo loss, anguish, bereavement,
betrayal, failure, aloneness, and the
fear of death, and Michael Ignatieff’s
remarkable and moving new book, On
Consolation, written out of the dark
times of a world pandemic, tells some
dramatic stories of the worst that can
happen to human beings and the worst
they can do to one another. But to be
human is also to look for meaning, joy,
and consolation. As Ignatieff noted in
his earlier book The Needs of Strang-
ers, where some of these thoughts had
a first outing, “We are the only spe-
cies with needs that exceed our grasp,”
needs for “metaphysical consolation
and explanation.”
To be human is also, in some cases,
to possess extraordinary courage, en-
durance, intellectual power, imagina-
tion, and capacity for hope. Condorcet,
an admirable specimen of the human
race in spite of the wretched failure of
all his hopes and ideals, continued to
the end to express a belief in progress
and in a future time when
science, industry, and political
economy would make plenty avail-
able to all. Emancipated by knowl-
edge, human beings would live in
freedom and peace; and war, the
scourge of civilization, would die
away.
Condorcet’s illusory rational utopi-
anism is one of many possible “con-
solations” under examination here.
Ignatieff doesn’t want to prescribe
one over another but to understand
how consolation has been configured
at different times, in different eras of
thought, and to suggest what we might
learn, or what consolation we might
derive, from these examples of “the
human experience.”
The consolation business is a
crowded market. There are many books
out there, presumably of help to many
readers, on how to come to terms with
suffering and bereavement and how to
bear grief, with titles like It’s OK That
You’re Not OK and I Wasn’t Ready to
Say Goodbye and I’m Grieving as Fast
as I Can. Out of the pandemic have
come timely aids like This Too Shall
24
Hermione Lee
El Greco: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586 –1588
Pass and Alone Together: Love, Grief,
and Comfort in the Time of COVID -19.
There are books on how to understand
your emotions, such as David Whyte’s
Consolations: The Solace, Nourish-
ment and Underlying Meaning of Ev-
eryday Words (2015). There are books
of intellectual advice, like Alain de
Botton’s personal take on “how to be-
come wise through philosophy,” with
encouraging thoughts on Epicurus,
Montaigne, et al., in The Consolations
of Philosophy (2000).
And there are some notable books
by writers who have brought the pow-
ers of their imagination and language
to bear on the experience of bereave-
ment, among them C. S. Lewis’s A
Grief Observed (1961), Joan Didion’s
The Year of Magical Thinking (2005),
Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013),
and Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing
with Feathers (2016). Readers respond
intensely to such books because they
often find their own lives reflected in
them, but told in ways that they couldn’t
have imagined and that provide their
own form of consolation.
Ignatieff’s approach to consolation is
not quite like any of these. He is du-
bious about the therapeutic mode that
treats suffering “as an illness from
which we need to recover” rather than
a condition that may deepen our under-
standing of the meaning of life. Late
in the book he quotes the view of the
great, implacable Emily Dickinson on
what is often called “the healing power
of time”:
of ideas of consolation, whether these be
Stoic, Hebrew, Catholic, or Protestant,
Enlightenment or rationalist, Marxist,
liberal, or secular. So the book is his-
torical, proceeding in great jumps from
the book of Job to European writers of
the twentieth century (and giving sharp
and succinct accounts of the collapse of
the Roman Empire, or the French Rev-
olution, or the American Civil War).
It is also conceptual, analyzing the
main words that are associated with
consolation. Consolation can mean
faith (though there are plenty of people
in this book for whom faith is a false
Church of St. Thomas, Toledo
consolation). It can be a demand for di-
vine validation, or a counter to a sense
of meaninglessness, or the ability to
write a narrative of self-realization. It
can be the bearing of witness, or the re-
sult of steadfastness, or a commitment
to living in truth. Above all it is linked
to hope and to solidarity.
But On Consolation is more about
individuals than abstract definitions.
This is a book of life stories, some more
consoling than others. Ignatieff begins
with the Old and New Testaments at
their most alarming. The appalling
story of Job and his God-sent tribu-
lations is described, as hopefully as
possible, as “a demand for divine vali-
dation,” a refusal of false consolations,
and a protest against being condemned
to “meaninglessness.” The Psalms,
so full of lamentation and anguish at
God’s inscrutability, teach us, Ignatieff
says, the relationship between despair
and hope. Saint Paul, with his traumatic
conversion and his relentless mission
to turn an obscure sect into a universal
They say that “Time assuages”— faith, a mission fraught with persecu-
Time never did assuage— tion and bitter disappointments, finds
An actual suffering strengthens consolation, according to Ignatieff, in
As Sinews do, with age— the love and fellowship of the faithful.
From the Bible we turn to some se-
Time is a Test of Trouble— vere classical examples. Here is Cice-
But not a Remedy— ro’s masculine code of Stoicism—men
If such it prove, it prove too mustn’t cry or show weakness—which
There was no Malady— provided consolation by showing
off your capacity for “manly . . . self-
The book starts on a personal note control” for the admiration of your
with Ignatieff’s attendance at a choral male peers, but which didn’t prevent
festival in Utrecht in 2017, where he him from falling into inconsolable de-
was giving a talk on “justice and poli- pression when his daughter died. Here
tics” in the Psalms, which were being is Marcus Aurelius writing his confes-
sung in different musical settings. He sions in “fear and loneliness” after a
was overcome by the emotional effect life of successfully running an empire
they had on him, a nonbeliever, and on and subduing barbarians. Here is Boe-
others like him. How do religious texts thius, at the terminal point of that em-
and religious music still provide con- pire’s decay, drawing on Greek, Roman,
solation and “tears of recognition” in Hebrew, and Christian traditions from
what he thinks of (though others might “the memory palace of his erudition,”
disagree) as a largely secular era? The putting his faith in “philosophical rea-
book took shape out of that question, soning” while awaiting a horrible death,
which begged to be asked all the more and finding consolation in “the writing
intensely during the pandemic. itself.” Ignatieff notes that any consola-
But on the whole he is not autobi- tion these writers provide others comes
ographical, though the dismal hospital from their “candor” about
deaths of his own parents, decades ago,
lie behind the book’s affecting final the loneliness, discouragement,
chapter on Cicely Saunders, founder of fear, and loss that make us seek
the palliative care movement. Nor does consolation in the first place. For it
he tell us where and how we should find is consoling to know that not even
solace. His own working life—as a his- an emperor can get through the
torian of ideas; as the biographer of Isa- night, alone with his thoughts. That
iah Berlin; as a broadcaster, memoirist, is something we can share with him.
essayist, and novelist; as an unsuccess-
ful Liberal politician in Canada; and There’s more pleasure to be had from
as rector, in turbulent times, of Central Montaigne’s humane, worldly enjoy-
European University in Hungary—has ment of the physical experiences of the
fed his interest in the intellectual context everyday, his attention to “the demands
The New York Review
of ordinary life and the people around
us,” and his holding on, in the face of
mortality, to the consolations of “diver-
sion” and hedonism, of simply “living
and creating.” And Ignatieff admires
the philosopher David Hume’s matter-
of-fact acceptance of his mortality,
which, in the late eighteenth century,
ushered in “a new way of dying.”
Hume also figured in The Needs of
Strangers as a revolutionary thinker who
“waved away the blindfolds of Christian
consolation.” Ignatieff doesn’t accept
his view that we have no natural need
of “metaphysical consolation,” but he
respects it. In both books, he tells the
story of Hume on his deathbed, joking
with Adam Smith about his imminent
journey across the River Styx. Hume
imagines asking Charon for just a bit
more time—to “correct the editions of
his works,” or to wait and see “man-
kind delivered from superstition.” “But
he could guess Charon’s answer: ‘That
won’t happen these two hundred years.
Into the boat this instant, you lazy loi-
tering rogue.’”
H ume’s resolute atheism (which hor-
rified some of his death-fearing friends,
like Johnson and Boswell) provides one
kind of consolation even while reject-
ing dependence on it. Though Ignatieff
chose not to write about Isaiah Berlin
in On Consolation, Hume’s deathbed
equanimity echoes Ignatieff’s account
of Berlin in old age, briskly dismissing
the consolations of philosophy:
As for the meaning of life, I do
not believe that it has any. I do not
at all ask what it is, but I suspect
it has none and this is a source of
great comfort to me. We make of it
what we can and that is all there is
about it.
But the search for the meaning of life
is hard for human beings to relinquish,
as much in the public as in the private
sphere. Ignatieff’s chosen philosophers,
revolutionaries, politicians, and think-
ers of the modern world—Condorcet,
Marx, Lincoln, Max Weber, Camus—
construct their testimonies not only out
of personal needs but in relation to the
condition of the world and their desire
for social change. Marx hoped for a new
age of freedom and reason emerging
from “the revolutionary rise of the pro-
letariat,” while he was able to call only
on “stoic endurance” in his own trou-
bles, like his wife’s death from cancer.
Lincoln encouraged opposing sides to
“join together” and “find some com-
mon understanding,” to embark on rec-
onciliation and not vengeance, after the
nation’s tragically divisive war. Weber
urged the next generation, during and
after Germany’s defeat in World War
I, to shoulder “the responsibilities of
politics.” Camus discovered, through
his contacts with the Resistance during
the German occupation of France (for
which his “plague” became a metaphor),
that our only resource is “our reliance
upon and our need for each other.”
These are all, in their extremely differ-
ent ways, positions carved painfully out
of dark times of conflict and despair.
The book doesn’t eschew tragedy.
To show us consolation as something
struggled toward, not easily arrived at,
it gives us unsparing scenes of grief,
death, torture, and cruelty, of which
the most shocking, perhaps, is the story
told by Camus in 1943 of the German
February 10, 2022
prison chaplain on a train with French
prisoners, one of them a teenage boy,
going to their execution. The priest
consoles the boy (“I will be with you
and so will God too”), but when he
manages to escape, the priest alerts the
guards so they can recapture the boy
and take him on to his death. Camus’s
rage at such “false consolation” is chan-
neled into The Plague, a book “about
resistance in the face of evil.” Ignatieff
takes his own strong line about the les-
sons in resistance we might draw from
these examples, for instance from Lin-
coln’s attempts to “bind up the nation’s
wounds”: “He struggled with exactly
what we struggle with: the tidal force
of political malice that recurrently rises
New York Public Library
Francesco Pozzi: Cyparissus, circa 1878
and threatens the hard-won civility on
which a democracy depends.”
I gnatieff’s strongest emotions, and
some of his most tragic examples, are
found in the stories of his twentieth-
century European and Russian he-
roes, Primo Levi, Anna Akhmatova,
Miklós Radnóti, Václav Havel, Czesław
Miłosz. Their endurance under duress,
in Nazi concentration camps or under
Stalin, as political prisoners or exiles, is
at the heart of the book’s message:
It is not doctrines that console us
in the end, but people: their exam-
ple, their singularity, their courage
and steadfastness . . . people [who]
show us what it means to go on, to
keep going, despite everything.
This sense of “solidarity,” of a human
“chain of meaning” or “fellowship
of witness,” tells people—sometimes
wordlessly—that “they are not alone,”
but part of “a common world of feeling.”
That recognition of the “human
chain” (the title of Seamus Heaney’s
last and profoundly consolatory book
of poems, though not mentioned by
Ignatieff) can be brought home by the
smallest, most mundane of encounters.
Ignatieff uses three nameless women
among his examples. Camus, inspired
by his illiterate Algerian mother to cre-
ate the silent, watchful old woman who
sits patiently by a ghastly deathbed in
The Plague; Havel, moved to a sense
of kinship with strangers by seeing,
when he was in prison, the banal plight
of a hapless TV weather presenter un-
able to be heard on air and plunged
into panic-struck embarrassment; and
Cicely Saunders taking the words of a
working- class woman about her pain
(“all of me is wrong”) as the basis for a
holistic program of care for the dying—
all are links in that “chain of meaning.”
The chain can connect us through
time, as when Levi, in Auschwitz in
1944, recites Ulysses’ lines in Dante’s
Inferno (“You were not born to live
your life as brutes”), written in the
fourteenth century under the influence
of Boethius’s The Consolation of Phi-
losophy, composed eight hundred years
before that. For the chain to be forged,
people must bear witness, poems and
letters and memoirs must be circulated,
texts must be preserved and edited and
translated.
Ignatieff is eloquent on the crucial
importance of these textual survivals,
whether he’s writing about the Psalms
or about Radnóti. The Jewish Hungar-
ian poet, who had survived months of
hard labor in a copper mine in Serbia,
was being force-marched across Hun-
gary in the autumn of 1944. Whenever
he could, he kept on writing short, la-
conic poems, which he called his “Pic-
ture Postcards,” on bits of cardboard
picked up on the road. He was shot
in the head and his body thrown into
a shallow grave, from which, after the
war, his papers were exhumed, kept
safe by a local Jewish butcher, handed
back to his wife, and published in time
for her to see him recognized “as one
of the greatest poets of Hungary and
Europe.” Ignatieff, in some anguish,
suggests that those inspiring and cou-
rageous writers are now being betrayed
and forgotten, at a time when “what
they witnessed and suffered is disbe-
lieved.” We owe it to those heroic fig-
ures to remember them, and this book
makes a good job of it. “History has no
consolation to offer,” he concludes som-
berly, “but it does leave us with duties.”
It’s a high-minded, even solemn tone.
As I read On Consolation, often much
moved, I couldn’t help calling to mind
some more caustic approaches to the
subject. Ignatieff’s thoughtful attempt
to understand Saint Paul could be con-
trasted with Virginia Woolf’s savage
excoriation of him in her 1938 essay
Three Guineas as a prototype for Na-
zism (“He was of the virile or dominant
type, so familiar at present in Germany,
for whose gratification a subject race or
sex is essential”). Ignatieff’s account of
Job pales beside Anita Brookner’s lac-
erating commentary:
Job is not only wronged, he is
duped. . . .
God chooses to come in the shape
of a whirlwind, either because He is
enraged by the banality of the dia-
logue to which presumably He has
been listening, or to divert atten-
tion from His previous absence. . . .
God demands an unconditional
worship, beyond causality, beyond
reward, beyond understanding.
Job, by this reasoning, is con-
demned to go uncomforted.
It’s intriguing, too, to set Ignatieff’s
book alongside Julian Barnes’s witty,
skeptical, forensic explorations of the
consolations offered for death in Noth-
ing to Be Frightened Of (2008), in which
he follows Flaubert’s grimly unflinch-
ing recommendation that “by dint of
saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gaz-
ing down into the black pit at one’s feet,
one remains calm.” Barnes opts, more
often than not, for “disconsolation.”
I gnatieff might have chosen other ex-
amples. His book is almost entirely
in and about the European tradition,
apart from the chapter on Lincoln.
As he says, “Another book could have
been written about what Europeans
learned from Asian, African, or Mus-
lim sources of consolation.” It is light on
women, though there are some strong
historical heroines—like that landlady
of Condorcet’s or Marx’s devoted and
long-suffering wife, Jenny—in the mar-
gins. It’s not especially interested in the
consolations of nature. It is aimed at an
audience with a wide range of cultural
references and an interest in the history
of ideas. And it concentrates on writ-
ers, though there’s a fine chapter on El
Greco’s 1580s painting The Burial of
the Count of Orgaz, which speaks to the
thousands of people who come to see
it every year of “the human longing to
escape, to be taken up into heaven, and
to enjoy the blessing of timelessness.”
There is also one chapter on music.
Writing about music and consolation is
a risky business, as there is such a vast
literature on the way music affects our
emotions, and we all know that one
person’s musical consolation is another
person’s anathema. But music does
provide Ignatieff with the best exam-
ple of how works created in a religious
context can still have their effect on a
secular audience by reminding them of
traditions of thought that “situate indi-
vidual suffering within a wider frame,”
and by providing them with “great lan-
guages of consolation” that can “hold
out a promise of hope that makes our
unbelief somehow irrelevant” and help
us to feel, in our grief, “that we are not
marooned in the present.”
It allows him to write, too, about
those forms of consolation that take
us into silence and aloneness. Ignatieff
chooses Mahler as his example because
of Mahler’s conviction (like Wagner’s)
that “music should attempt nothing
less than to provide meaning for men
and women living after the death of the
gods.” He gives a tender account of the
Kindertotenlieder, Mahler’s song cycle
on the death of children that so tragi-
cally anticipated the death of his own
daughter. And he uses Mahler to go
beyond the idea of the human chain to
the more difficult idea of our ultimate
solitariness. Ignatieff is much consoled
by solidarity, but he also recognizes
the inevitable necessity of aloneness.
I’m reminded of the verse in Edward
Thomas’s “Lights Out” (1917), one of
my own “consolation” poems:
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.
Ignatieff describes how at the end-
ings of Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied
von der Erde, Mahler takes us into the
space beyond notes and words, where
we’re each of us alone, as we will be in
our dying: “Mahler brings the listener
and the music to the very edge of si-
lence, as if to mark the place where mu-
sic’s consoling work has to end, and the
listener must go on to find meaning on
his own.” Q
25

The State of Israel vs. the Jews
by Sylvain Cypel, translated from
the French by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 360 pp., $27.99
November 10, 2021: Twenty Israeli
settlers, armed with guns and clubs,
their faces masked, descend upon the
hamlet of Halat al-Dab’ in the South
Hebron hills. They attack the Pales-
tinians who live there, smash windows,
cars, and whatever else they find. Six
Palestinians are wounded, at least one
from gunshots. There are Israeli sol-
diers nearby who make no attempt to
interfere and who leave the area while
the pogrom is going on. I use the word
deliberately. What happened that day
in Halat al-Dab’ is not different in
kind from the pogrom in Nikolayev, in
Ukraine, in the early years of the twen-
tieth century, when my grandmother’s
brother was killed by Cossacks.
September 28, 2021, Simchat Torah,
the end of the Sukkot holiday: Dozens
of masked settlers storm the tiny Pal-
estinian encampment of Mufagara,
also in the South Hebron hills, wreak-
ing havoc. Basil al-Adraa, an activist
from the nearby village of at-Tuwani,
reported that the settlers
went from house to house, and
broke windows, smashed cars with
knives and hammers. A large stone
they threw hit a 3-year-old boy,
Mohammed, in the head, who is
now in the hospital. The soldiers
supported them with tear gas. The
residents fled. I can’t forget how the
villagers left their houses, terrified,
the children screaming, the women
crying, while the settlers entered
their living rooms, like they were
possessed with violence and wrath.
September 17, 2021: A convoy of ac-
tivists from the Israeli-Palestinian NGO
Combatants for Peace and other orga-
nizations is bringing a water tanker to
a village near at-Tuwani, which has no
access to running water. The army vio-
lently attacks the convoy with tear gas
and stun grenades. Six activists and a
journalist are wounded; one of the ac-
tivists is thrown to the rocky ground by
the senior officer in command and has
to undergo surgery on his eye. Seven
Palestinians are arrested.
No one should think that these
events—a random selection—are aber-
rations or exceptions to the rule. They
are now the norm in the occupied Pal-
estinian territories. Settler violence,
backed up by Israeli soldiers, happens
every day. Government ministers and
high-ranking officers, including the
army chief of staff, Lieutenant General
Aviv Kochavi, make bland statements
condemning the violence but do noth-
ing to stop it. Some of them actively
support it. The goal, by no means a
secret, is to expel Palestinians from
their homes and lands and, eventually,
to annex as much of the West Bank as
possible to Israel.
Any means to achieve this goal is
acceptable. The minister of defense,
Benny Gantz, has recently outlawed six
Palestinian human rights organizations
on the pretext that they are connected
26
Lost Illusions
David Shulman
Israeli settlers in the illegal outpost of Evyatar, near the Palestinian village of Beita,
West Bank, June 2021
to Hamas.* The vehemence with which
the government and the security goons
have defended this pretext is evidence
that they know it is false—yet another
attempt to stamp out Palestinian pro-
test and dissent. Some readers might
be reminded of the days when the
ACLU was attacked by Joseph McCar-
thy as an alleged Communist front
organization.
All of this is Israel in 2021. So what
is a onetime liberal Zionist like Sylvain
Cypel supposed to make of it? His fa-
ther, Jacques Cypel, was an outstand-
ing leader of labor Zionism in France
and also the editor of the world’s last
Yiddish-language daily newspaper,
Unzer Wort. (It closed down in 1996.)
The young Sylvain, bilingual in French
and Yiddish, grew up in Bordeaux
and Paris, where he was a member of
a labor Zionist youth group. He went
to Israel after high school, served as
a paratrooper in the Israeli army, and
studied at the Hebrew University of Je-
rusalem. After living in Israel on and
off for twelve years, he returned to
France, where he eventually became a
senior editor at Le Monde and then ed-
itor in chief of Courrier International.
In The State of Israel vs. the Jews,
Cypel describes the change that came
over him in the years following the
1967 war:
I had always thought that when Is-
rael was founded as a refuge for the
persecuted Jews of the world, jus-
tice had been on the Israeli side. . . .
But I was gradually discovering
that the expulsion of the Palestin-
ians and the seizing of their land
had been deliberately brutal.
By the time he left Israel, he was an
anti-Zionist, hence ostracized by some
former friends. He clearly couldn’t tol-
erate the cognitive dissonance that so
many of us in the Israeli peace move-
ment have to live with. As he puts it,
“Israel was evolving into something no
idealist could stomach: a racist, bul-
lying little superpower.” The raison
d’être of his book lies in documenting
and substantiating this thesis.
*See Raja Shehadeh, “What Does Is-
rael Fear from This ‘Terrorist’?,” The
New York Review, December 2, 2021.
only seven years after Algeria achieved
Amit Elkayam/The New York Times/Redux
independence—he was shocked to
hear Israeli students who “talked about
the Palestinians exactly the same way
French settlers there [in Algeria] used
to talk about the Arabs.” French Jews
on the left had mostly, sometimes pas-
sionately, opposed the French colonial
war in Algeria. Now it was all happening
again in Palestine, even if the historical
parallel was inexact. (The French colo-
nists in Algeria had, at least in theory, a
home country they could return to, un-
like nearly all Israeli Jews.)
For Cypel, just out of the Israeli
army and haunted by recent memory,
the result was the discovery of the
“yawning gap between the promise and
the reality of Zionism.” But for people
like me, who still remember the late
1960s and early 1970s in Israel, before
the settler movement began, those years
call up memories of the old, moderately
humanistic, mildly socialist Israel. Make
Cypel’s trajectory is not unusual. no mistake: the underlying project of
I know quite a few originally left- dispossession, or “thinning out” the
oriented, idealistic Zionists who have Palestinian population, as it was then eu-
been similarly disillusioned and who phemistically called, was very much un-
have given up on the Jewish state. Some derway. And the occupation had clearly
of them think that from the very begin- taken root. Israel was no utopia, yet it
ning, the Zionist movement was caught was utterly unlike the shameless hyper-
up in, indeed defined by, a teleology of nationalist state we have today. Cypel
increasingly violent crime against the shows us, in strident but truthful tones,
Palestinian “other” who inhabits the the dystopian world of an ethnocratic
same small chunk of land on the Med- polity immersed in systemic repression,
iterranean coast. I don’t subscribe to institutionalized hatred toward Palestin-
this overdetermined view. ians, and quotidian criminal acts in the
But Cypel’s story has a particularly occupied territories, where a colonial
French, or rather French Jewish, di- settler regime is firmly in place.
mension, spelled out in a chapter of He also gives us chapters on other
his book subtitled “The Blindness kinds of transgressions, like the sale
of French Jews.” France was the first of sophisticated Israeli spyware to the
European country to emancipate the world’s most cruel and despotic states,
Jews (in 1791; their rights were con- among them South Sudan, Saudi Ara-
firmed and expanded in the following bia, and Myanmar, for use against their
decades), and the Jews of France had own citizens—a business, he writes,
good reason to identify with the liberté, that earns “Israeli companies an
fraternité, and égalité of the French amount estimated by various sources
Revolution, even if these slogans were at between $1 billion and $3.4 billion
often honored in the breach. But with a year.” He describes the increasing at-
the influx of more than 300,000 French- tacks on Israeli human rights activists
speaking Jews from Algeria and else- by the state security forces; the rehabil-
where in the Maghreb during and after itation and relegitimation of Kach, the
the Algerian War of Independence of overtly racist party of thugs founded
1954–1962, the French Jewish com- by Meir Kahane, now once again rep-
munity underwent significant changes. resented in the Knesset by the Otzma
Many of the new immigrants to France Yehudit (Jewish Power) party; and the
carried with them bitter memories of antidemocratic legislation initiated by
their formal status as dhimmis, a tol- the Israeli right, such as the “nation-state
erated but humiliated minority, under law” that enshrines inequality among
Islam. They took vicarious pride in the Jews and non-Jews within the state.
rise of Israel and even felt a slight taste Jewish privilege—and the concomitant
of revenge on their Arab oppressors. discrimination against Israeli Arab citi-
And while French Jews are by no zens—are now no longer a latent, though
means uniformly “Israelized”—the term widespread, Israeli dream but a legal
used by the historian Pierre Birnbaum reality. All of this leads Cypel to quote
to refer to an unthinking commitment to with approbation—as the book’s epi-
the ethnonationalist program of the Is- graph—the late Tony Judt’s statement
raeli right—Cypel has only harsh words in 2003 that “the depressing truth
for the community and especially for the today is that Israel is bad for the Jews.”
organization that claims to speak for it, This seems a lot like saying that Italy
the Representative Council of Jewish is bad for the Italians, which may well
Institutions in France. He also mocks have been true, in some sense, from
French Jewish intellectuals for their pub- the 1920s through the early 1940s but
lic silence when it comes to Israel. can hardly be an enduring theorem; or
that the United States under Trump was
bad for the Americans. Most states, es-
T here is another element in the trans- pecially ethno-nation-states, are quite
formation of this former Zionist into a fe- often bad for their citizens, and it
rocious critic of Israel. Cypel remembers sometimes, indeed often, seems that a
from his childhood the war the French self- destructive telos is built into the
fought to maintain their colony in Alge- very notion of an ethnocratic nation-
ria. As a student in Jerusalem in 1969— alist polity. But Judt’s statement, and
The New York Review
Cypel’s citation of it, smack of Jewish
exceptionalism. For centuries the Jews,
with good reasons to habitually fear the
worst, have viewed any event in light of
the question “Is it good or bad for the
Jews?” Now they have a state of their
own, and the question is still there. It
might be better to ask if Israeli policies
are good for Israeli citizens and for the
Palestinians who share with them the
land west of the Jordan River. To the ex-
tent that Jewish communities through-
out the world support current Israeli
policies, they, too, bear some responsi-
bility for the evils of the occupation. On
a good day, I sometimes manage to be-
lieve that a time will come when Israel
will revert to its roots in the humane
side of the Jewish tradition and the uni-
versal values articulated by the Hebrew
prophets. That day seems far away.
T here is not much point in rehears-
ing here the well-known litany of state
terror and abuse that define the Israeli
occupation. The information is there
for all to see, in Cypel’s eloquent J’ac-
cuse and elsewhere (the website of
the Israeli human rights organization
B’tselem, for example). The disjunc-
tion between the ethical vision of the
biblical prophets and the reality of life
in the West Bank and Gaza has already
opened up a fissure between Israel and
some progressive Jewish communities
in the Western world, especially in
America (not yet, perhaps, in France,
if Cypel is right). That gap, I believe,
will widen. It also exists in the liberal,
younger wing of the Democratic Party
in the US. That doesn’t mean that the
Judt- Cypel axiom is acceptable to
these critics of Israeli policy. It does
mean that new and perhaps more ef-
fective forms of pressure on Israel are
beginning to take practical form.
It is important to note, however, from
an internal Israeli perspective, that the
days are over when presenting the crimes
in the occupied territories to the Israeli
media, and thus to the wider public,
might have some positive, constraining
effect. Put simply, no one really cares.
More precisely, judging by the results of
the four recent elections, something like
a third to half of the population ardently
support the policy of repression, expul-
sion, and escalating violence directed
at Palestinians. Many among the other
two thirds or so are unhappy with this
policy, but only a tiny minority are pre-
pared to do anything to stop it.
That passivity and/or indifference
constitute the heart of the problem.
They are far worse and infinitely more
consequential than anything the settlers
or soldiers can do. Without the com-
pliance of the vast majority of Israe-
lis, state-sponsored terror on the West
Bank could not continue to run wild.
One can sometimes hear the clucking
of tongues—not much more than that.
Perhaps the great defender of human
rights Michael Sfard is right when he
says that someday, when the occupation
has finally ended, nearly everyone in
Israel will claim retroactively that they
were against it from the beginning.
A form of mass protest did develop
in Israel over the last two years with
the aim of removing Benjamin Net-
anyahu from office—certainly a wor-
thy goal. For months, many thousands,
sometimes tens of thousands, came
to Jerusalem every Saturday night to
demonstrate outside the prime minis-
ter’s residence. Ultimately, they suc-
February 10, 2022
ceeded, at least for now. But Netanyahu
was an easy target. How much men-
dacity, venality, and sheer selfishness
on the part of a leading politician does
it take to get a decent citizen into the
streets? However, it was not the occu-
pation that moved many of these pro-
testers. They wanted to rid themselves
of a prime minister who, in order to
remain in power, was undermining the
entire fabric of state institutions, in-
cluding the courts, and who had culti-
vated a culture of rabid hatred for any
opponent, from within or from without,
along with a personality cult such as
one sees in authoritarian regimes.
Urgent ethical quandaries remain to
torment those of us who live in Israel.
What about the minimal moral basis
of statehood, and the social contract
rooted in some notion of decency, that
political theorists from Locke to Rawls
and Walzer have posited? What hap-
pens to a state in which moral abomina-
tions serving utilitarian considerations
become routine? Does such a state for-
feit its legitimacy? Can it redeem itself,
and if so, how? Or is sheer force, in the
end, immune to ethical considerations?
Cypel quotes Netanyahu:
In the Middle East, and in many
parts of the world, there is a sim-
ple truth—there is no place for
the weak. The weak crumble, are
slaughtered, and are erased from
history while the strong, for good
or for ill, survive. The strong are
respected, and alliances are made
with the strong, and in the end
peace is made with the strong.
I ’d like to bring such questions down
to a concrete, more personal perspec-
tive. There is, unfortunately, no lack of
instances we could examine. Here is one
not atypical of the Israeli-Palestinian sit-
uation—the case of Harun Abu Aram,
twenty-four years old, from the village
of al-Rakiz in the South Hebron hills.
On January 1, 2021, Harun’s neigh-
bor Ashraf was fixing a roof over his
sheep pen. Five soldiers, apparently
summoned by the settlers of the nearby
illegal outposts of Avigail or Chavat
Maon, came to the village, invaded
Ashraf’s house, and discovered there,
horror of horrors, a small electric gen-
erator. (Al-Rakiz is not attached to the
electrical grid.) The soldiers seized the
generator. Ashraf protested. A scuf-
fle developed. Harun’s father, Rasmi,
came running to help his friend and,
like Ashraf, was beaten and kicked
by the soldiers. Harun, hearing what
was happening, rushed to the scene.
For a few minutes, there was a tug- of-
war between the soldiers and the Pal-
estinians, and the generator changed
hands several times. Then one of the
soldiers, standing to the side and in
no danger, shot Harun at point-blank
range, hitting him in the neck. He fell
to the ground, his spinal cord severed
between vertebrae six and seven.
The soldiers, now the proud owners
of the generator, set up a roadblock at
the main road in and out of the village.
Here comes the worst part of the story.
Rasmi and Ashraf managed to get
Harun into a car in order to drive him
to a hospital, but the soldiers, including
the one who shot Harun, stopped the
vehicle and shot at its tires, punctur-
ing one of them. Miraculously, Ashraf
managed to drive the car on three
wheels past the roadblock and into
the village of at-Tuwani, where Harun
was transferred to another car, which,
after running into another military
roadblock, finally got him to a hospital.
The doctors said that if they’d come ten
minutes later, Harun would have died.
Harun is paralyzed from the neck The Calvin & Rose G Hoffman
down. After many months in hospital, Prize for a Distinguished
he can again breathe without assistance. Scholarly Essay on
He is now in a specially equipped house
in the town of Yata and requires twenty- Christopher Marlowe
four-hour care. His life is ruined. Before
Entries are now invited for the thirty-second
the incident, he was about to be mar-
Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Prize to be
ried. The army demolished the house
awarded in December 2022.
his father had built for the young cou-
ple, one of many recurrent demolitions The closing date for entries to be received is
1st September 2022.
in al-Rakiz. The soldier who shot Harun
has not been punished, and the State of If you wish to enter the competition, an
Israel has refused to take any responsi- application form and further details must
bility for Harun’s fate or to cover any of first be obtained from:
the enormous costs of his hospital stay. The Hoffman Administrator
This is a single instance among thou- The King’s School
sands. The essential point is that what-
ever the soldier who shot Harun was
25 The Precincts
Canterbury
thinking—maybe he panicked, maybe
he was taught to hate Palestinians—the Kent CT1 2ES
incident illuminates the inner logic of England
the Israeli occupation as a whole. A
Email: bursar@kings-bursary.co.uk
Palestinian should not have a genera-
tor, nor should he fix his fence or sheep The Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Marlowe Memorial
pen. A Palestinian must never protest Trust is a charity dedicated to research into the life
or disobey a soldier. A Palestinian can and work of Christopher Marlowe (no. 289971)
be killed by settlers or soldiers with im-
punity. A Palestinian will never receive
justice in the military courts that oper-
ate in the territories. And so on. Given
that logic, what happened to Harun,
and to countless other Palestinians
over the past decades, was natural, in
fact inevitable. It is wrong to class it as
a tragic mistake. Once the soldiers en-
tered the village on their ugly mission,
all the rest unfolded along familiar
lines. The ultimate malice, no doubt a
decision on the part of those same sol-
diers, took place at the two roadblocks.
Charles de Gaulle, reelected pres- SHAKESPEARE SONNET 116
ident in 1958 to keep Algeria French, MÖBIUS BRACELET
came to realize that the very survival Several lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet
of France as a civilization among the 116 are engraved on this sterling silver
nations of the world required that it möbius bracelet: “Let me not to the mar-
extricate itself from Algeria. Israel has riage of true minds admit impediments.
yet to achieve a similar understanding Love is not love which alters when it al-
about the occupied Palestinian territo- teration finds, or bends with the remover
ries. Even one Harun vitiates the state’s to remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
claim to common decency and indeli- that looks on tempests and is never shak-
bly stains its ethical core. And Harun is en; it is the star to every wand’ring bark,
by no means alone. whose worth’s unknown, although his
I don’t believe in a statistical calcu- height be taken.” Bracelet is approximately
lus of morals. Any evil act has its own 2½" wide. Made in the U.S.A.
intrinsic horror, its own lurid integrity. #05-LS02B • $125
We will never be able to tally up the
number of crimes committed by Is-
raelis against Palestinians and weigh
them against the crimes committed by
Palestinians against Jews, as if one side
could “win” in the giant sweepstakes of
victimhood. Ultimately, the two sides
will either lose everything together or
win together, despite their shared be-
lief that the conflict is a zero-sum game.
What we can say is that the Israeli
side is still, after fifty-five years, main- EDWARD GOREY STERLING
taining in the Palestinian territories a HEART CAT PIN
system that ruthlessly causes the death This gently romantic 1⅞"wide x 1½"long
or wounding of innocents in large num- sterling silver pin is a perfect gift for
bers, just as it continues to steal more Valentine’s Day or an anniversary, or any
and more Palestinian land with the occasion when one wants to express affec-
backing of the Israeli courts. It would tion, or something stronger. Edward Gorey’s
also be fair to say that the situation is signature is on the back of the heart. The
deteriorating from day to day. Those image is from an unpublished series of
who know that situation firsthand also drawings by Edward Gorey.
know that there is no possible way to
#05-EGHCP • $86
justify it or to make sense of it without
resorting to a claim that eternal Israeli Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
supremacy over all Palestinians is a TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
worthy and attainable aim. Q 646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
—January 12, 2022
27

Empty Wardrobes
by Maria Judite de Carvalho,
translated from the Portuguese
by Margaret Jull Costa,
with an introduction
by Kate Zambreno.
Two Lines, 183 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Empty Wardrobes is an appropriate if
brutally reductive title for this unspar-
ing depiction of the lives of women in
mid-twentieth- century Lisbon, exe-
cuted by the Portuguese writer Maria
Judite de Carvalho (1921–1998) as pre-
cisely and without sentiment as an au-
topsy. Originally published in 1966, it
is the first work by Carvalho to appear
in English, in what seems an excellent
translation by Margaret Jull Costa.
Deftly and cunningly written, narrated
by an observer who glides in and out of
the text with the patrician disdain of a
Nabokov character, Empty Wardrobes
is gradually revealed to be a double
portrait: at its core are two middle-
aged Portuguese women—two “empty
wardrobes”—ironically linked by their
relationship to a preening cad who
treats both of them badly and walks
away blithely untouched by either.
Though in her impassioned introduc-
tion Kate Zambreno describes Empty
Wardrobes as “a hilarious and devastat-
ing novel of a traditional Catholic wid-
ow’s consciousness,” there is not much
that is even mildly amusing in Carval-
ho’s steely, unadorned prose; certainly
there is little Catholic consciousness in
the incurious Dora Rosário and virtu-
ally nothing of the familiar domestic
impedimenta of Catholicism. Dora
doesn’t observe the sacraments, even
confession and communion; we never
see her attending mass; if she is con-
cerned with the condition of her soul,
we are not made aware of it; her “re-
ligion” is the observation of unvary-
ing routine performed with “eyes . . . as
dull as an empty house or unnaturally
bright when she became excited.”
Zambreno also describes the novel,
for all its domestic interiority and appar-
ent indifference to history, as a “deeply
political” work of fiction reflecting “the
ambient cruelty of patriarchy, an op-
pression even more severe in the God,
Fatherland, and Family authoritarian-
ism of the Salazar regime [1932–1968]
in Portugal.” Indeed, a stifling sort of
ether wafts from the cramped interi-
ors of Empty Wardrobes: Dora is first
the manager of an antiques shop with
few customers, then a saleswoman in
a cheap furniture store selling “basic
pinewood furniture, mattresses, sofas.”
Yet it’s difficult to see how her con-
genital dullness can be attributed to
the reign of a patriarchal dictator, for
surely an adult so lacking in autonomy
is a special case; her daughter, who is
determined to live a very different sort
of life, tells her, “You married a man
who was poor and lazy. . . . I’m going to
marry a rich, energetic man who loves
me.”
Maddeningly naive, passive, and
unquestioning in her continued de-
votion to the deceased husband who
left her penniless and with a child to
raise, Dora is, at thirty- six, already
“ageless and hopeless,” in her daugh-
ter’s words. She is dissected by Manu-
ela, the cold- eyed and unsentimental
28
Left Behind in Lisbon
Joyce Carol Oates
Paula Rego: In the Comfort of the Bonnet, 2001–2002
narrator, as if she were a laboratory
specimen:
She was always a woman of few
words. She never said more than
was strictly necessary—the bare
indispensable minimum. . . . She
would sit quite still then, her face a
blank, like someone poised on the
edge of an ellipsis or standing hes-
itantly at the sea’s edge in winter,
and at such moments, all the light
would go out of her eyes as if ab-
sorbed by a piece of blotting paper;
for all I know, she may still be like
that, because I never saw her again.
And later:
She had neat, regular features, but
had never done anything to help
nature. Never. She seemed, rather,
to be unconsciously intent on ham-
pering it. You could describe her
face as lackluster: matte skin, pale
lips, dull, straight brown hair tied
back. . . . She took so little trouble
over how she dressed that even her
body went unnoticed.
Not sympathy but a detached sort of
cruelty characterizes Manuela’s in-
terest in Dora, which invariably turns
upon Dora’s flaws and her defeated
prospects; canny, icily detached, and
near- omniscient, Manuela’s perspec-
tive seems identical with the author’s,
ings for one another and remain hos-
Paula Rego/Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
tile and estranged. Manuela thinks,
with characteristic disdain, “I thought
that perhaps what [Dora] needed was
a good shake or, better still, an X-ray,
so we could see if she did actually have
more inside her than just lungs and a
digestive system.”
I n her premature but life- defining wid-
owhood, Dora is a Portuguese equiva-
lent of those pathetic persons “outcast
from life’s feast,” in James Joyce’s poi-
gnant phrase. She is emotionally and
sexually bereft; her “threadbare coat,
with runs in her stockings, [and] un-
tidy hair” unsex her as mercilessly as
her need for money deprives her wid-
owhood of romantic nostalgia. Dora
reminds us of those lonely, left-behind
Dubliners inhabiting the penumbra
of Joyce’s richly peopled Irish world,
involuntarily celibate casualties of a
repressive Roman Catholicism that
provided no meaningful occupation
for unmarried women apart from the
convent.
We may also think of Brian Moore’s
most “painful case”: the luckless her-
oine of Judith Hearne, for whom vir-
ginity has become a kind of curse and
episodes of drunken forgetfulness her
only solace. With a kindred subtlety
and sympathy Colm Tóibín has written
of more contemporary Irish outcasts
from life’s feast, notably the widowed
Nora of Nora Webster in her similarly
claustrophobic, tight-knit, and con-
scribed small-town Irish world; and
there are the achingly lonely unmar-
ried Englishwomen in the novels of
Anita Brookner, wraithlike figures
scarcely distinguishable from one an-
other in their yearning for a love that
might provide them with some measure
for we never see Dora behaving in a of self- definition in a man’s world.
way that refutes Manuela’s judgment. Such figures of female pathos are
Indeed, the narrative “I” in Empty virtually the only inhabitants of Car-
Wardrobes is paradoxical: as a voyeur valho’s Lisbon, as sparely presented
in Dora’s life Manuela is both nowhere as a landscape by de Chirico, but they
and everywhere, only briefly in Dora’s lack the inner lyricism of Tóibín’s and
presence and the rest of the time imag- Brookner’s women. They certainly
ining scenes that (presumably) take lack the ferocious resentments and
place beyond her scrutiny. Disarmingly strategies of self- determination found
Manuela says of herself: in the female characters of Carvalho’s
contemporary Doris Lessing. Apart
I’m not part of this story—if you from Dora there are two other wid-
can call it that—I’m a mere bit- ows—empty wardrobes—as well as
part player of the kind that has not Manuela; these are women whom life
even a generic name, and never has also left behind, without men and
will have, not even in any subse- without meaningful employment or
quent stories, because we simply interests. “When single women reach
lack all dramatic vocation. a certain age, they’re so . . . frightening.
They wither away, don’t they?” Dora’s
She calls herself, not apologetically daughter, Lisa, asks tactlessly. Dora’s
but with a kind of pride, a “sterile mother-in-law, Ana, at least has money,
woman”—a woman who hasn’t wanted which gives her empty life a measure
children. of freedom. Dora’s Aunt Júlia, another
In a more conventional novel, cer- widow—“a small, serene, pleasant
tainly in one exploring feminist bonds woman, slightly stooped. . . . A hiero-
of sisterhood within a stultifying patri- glyph that was more like a meaningless
archal culture, as in the fiction of Elena doodle”—takes refuge in hallucinatory
Ferrante, we would likely see Manuela, memories and silly dreams of flying
abandoned by her longtime lover for saucers, which Dora professes to envy:
a younger woman, joining forces with “At least she believes in something.”
Dora; and each woman, victimized by (Aunt Júlia is characterized as an el-
men, would become stronger as a con- derly, senile woman, so it’s something
sequence. But Carvalho is not inter- of a shock when we learn that she is
ested in feminist romance, any more only in her late forties!) And Lisa,
than she is interested in traditional advantaged by a heedless youth and
romance: rivals within the patriarchy, beauty, impetuously marries the very
women have no instinctive sisterly feel- man, more than twenty years her se-
The New York Review
nior, who has ruined what remained of
her mother’s atrophied life.
Few scenes in Empty Wardrobes
are dramatized, as if Manuela, recall-
ing the banality of her subject, can
scarcely be troubled to evoke them.
She resorts instead to desultory sum-
maries: “And so it was. [Dora] got the
job, bought the books, and she did
learn, earning enough money over the
subsequent years to send her daugh-
ter to a school for rich kids.” Mired
in a mourning for her husband that
seems a consequence more of an inad-
equacy of imagination than of genu-
ine feeling for him, Dora is incapable
of initiating change in her life: things
are done for her, and to her. A kindly
friend arranges for her to have the
undemanding but (improbably) well-
paying job in the antiques store, which
spares her the ignominy of having to
beg for favors and money from her
late husband’s friends. In this position
she drifts like a sleepwalker, in an
unvarying routine; no time seems to
pass in her stultified life except for her
daughter growing out of childhood
and into an independent adolescence.
After a decade of widowhood Dora’s
sole expression of autonomy is to have
her hair styled and to purchase some
new clothes, provoking a male acquain-
tance to inquire, “What the hell has
happened to her?” As in Tóibín’s Nora
Webster, a still-youthful widow seems
to be about to reenter the world after a
prolonged emotional stasis, surprising
everyone who knows her; but Carvalho
has another, more humiliating fate in
mind for Dora.
Empty Wardrobes is a short novel
that seems longer than it is, for it moves
with glacial slowness, as if in the grip of
inertia. Years pass in Dora’s life in the
space of a paragraph, yet she remains
unchanged, a cipher. New clothes, a
new hairstyle, will not infuse life into
so shallow an individual. Cynically
Manuela observes:
In the olden days, some women
would shut themselves away in
their houses for good when their
husbands died. Some didn’t even
let the sun in, perhaps because
they would find its cheerful face
too shocking. Dora Rosário went
to work . . . but when she returned
home at the end of the day, it was
as if she had never left.
D ora’s deceased husband, Duarte,
whom she had absurdly idolized, had
prided himself on his very lack of
ambition:
I’m not the kind of man who wants
to rise in the world at the expense
of others, or indeed of myself.
That smacks too much of wheeling
and dealing. . . . Nor am I going to
stand up in the marketplace list-
ing my many qualities and putting
a price on them. I just let myself
drift, that’s all I can do and all I
want to do.
Here at least is the very antithesis of
machismo, one thinks, until it becomes
clear that swaggering male vanity can
take many forms.
There is no spiritual or religious
quality to Duarte’s indifference to the
marketplace; he isn’t an ascetic who
has repudiated a materialistic life, only
the coddled son of a well-to- do mother
February 10, 2022
who has indulged and enabled his nar-
cissism. Dora understands this but
lacks the courage to object: “Had she
said anything . . . it would have spoiled
everything”—that is, the folie à deux
of a marriage in which the husband
is placed on a pedestal for the wife to
admire regardless of his flaws. Though
it’s stated repeatedly that Dora loves
Duarte very much, we see little evi-
dence of any physical or emotional at-
traction between them; Duarte seems
as lackluster and sexless as Dora, an
underimagined character in an under-
imagined narrative. When he becomes
ill he is dispatched within a paragraph,
leaving Dora stunned:
When Duarte died, and Dora real-
ized that he was lost forever, it was
as if the earth around her shook,
and only the tiny scrap of earth be-
neath her feet remained still. Her
world, already sparsely and rather
poorly populated, was suddenly
deserted.
Dora wants her grief to remain “uncon-
taminated,” but with only a small pen-
sion from Duarte’s employer to support
herself and her daughter, “thus began
her calvary, her daily round”—search-
ing newspaper ads for jobs, begging for
small sums of money from everyone
she knows, who soon come to resent
her even as they pity her.
This collision of the widow’s private
grief with the public fact of her dimin-
ished financial state, as a catalyst for
Dora’s quasi awakening, comes as a
ODE TO FEBRUARY
IN NEW YORK
Even in week
one you show up
scuffed and muddy
it’s just your nature
and no one
likes you
but we drive
through your town
of boot and
bouillon factories
into March with
its shoe store
and soup restaurant.
Forty-five years
ago a friend
advised I dress
up for you or
be an emotional
goner—so true!
From within the
walled city of your
calendar month
the special editions
sail back over
unread because
being more experienced
than us who look down
our noses at you
you take
the high ground
and cultivate compassion
grant us permission
to not look
welcome development in the novel. It
is bluntly completed by her mother-
in-law’s decision to apply a “fixation
abscess” to her: “You need such an
abscess, and I’m the cruel doctor
who’s going to create it and make you
suffer.” In the novel’s most dramatic
scene, Ana tells Dora that Duarte
had been thinking of leaving her be-
fore he became ill, to live with another
woman:
A work colleague of his, I think,
although I can’t remember her
name anymore. He’d made up his
mind. For once in his life, he was
going to take the initiative, a real
novelty. . . . I didn’t try to dissuade
him. I thought perhaps that other
woman might make something of
him. But then he fell ill. . . . She
was a small, nervous woman, like
a very intelligent mouse.
Following this revelation, which
comes a decade after her husband’s
death, Dora is catapulted into an al-
tered consciousness that inspires Car-
valho to her most precise and poetic
language, suggesting the novel’s latent
possibilities, largely unexplored:
She wanted to sleep, to escape
herself, to escape the new life she
would now be obliged to live, but
the paths into sleep were more dif-
ficult, more complicated than ever.
Cul- de-sacs, long rivers with no
tributaries and no sea, no sources
either, rocky mountains that she
yet again at
the photos or relive
the country’s
close call;
having been doled
the fewest days
you know enough
is enough of
the year before
so I vote you as
officially starting
the year
and resolve to see
your strengths. Even
your two r’s
analogy for
the way we stub
our toes getting
through time—
how like real life
you are. We are
hopeful creatures;
what covers up
the mess also
feeds the bulbs
and we need that
to elevate our
self-image which
can be terribly low
just now, so
thank you.
—Jessica Greenbaum
would have to scale in order to see
over to the other side, to another
landscape.
Is Dora really courageous enough
to venture into this foreign landscape?
Can she transform the deep hurt of
her husband’s infidelity into a repu-
diation of him, and of her prescribed
role as his widow? Carvalho leads the
reader to expect liberation when, in an
ironic reversal, Dora’s trust in a male
acquaintance, Ernesto, by chance the
longtime lover of Manuela, leads to a
near-fatal car crash that leaves Ernesto,
the driver, untouched but Dora physi-
cally disfigured, with a scar that runs
“diagonally from her forehead to half-
way down her cheek.” Her humiliation
is complete.
E mpty Wardrobes is a bleak, embit-
tered novel holding little possibility of
happiness except through delusion; not
even a sisterhood of outcasts is possible
for the women scorned by men. Man-
uela observes with chilling detachment
as Dora falters in her attempt to estab-
lish a rapport with her:
[Dora] couldn’t find quite what it
was she meant, and I didn’t help
her in the search. . . . It was raining,
and she was a gray woman, slightly
bent, lost in a plundered city de-
serted after the plague. I noticed
that she walked uncertainly, hes-
itantly, teetering slightly, as if she
were a little drunk or had not quite
woken up from a long nap.
Shrewd and coolly distanced from life
as she imagines herself, Manuela is
nonetheless “absolutely flabbergasted”
and “lost for words” when Ernesto
informs her bluntly that he is leaving
her to marry the seventeen-year- old
Lisa.
As Manuela has observed earlier,
“The calm waters of an apparently
stagnant river can, at a certain point,
form a torrent but then, later, continue
serenely on their way.” So, too, the
trancelike stasis of Empty Wardrobes
is interrupted by a flurry of drama—a
belated revelation of an infidelity, a
devastating car crash—and the final-
ity of despair, which will then subside
into the banal and everyday. At the
novel’s end one waits in vain for Man-
uela to at least embrace the scarred
Dora in recognition of their common
loss; but Manuela, too wounded to
give solace to another, stands stiffly
apart as Dora leaves her apartment.
Pride dooms Manuela to solitude as
rain continues to fall, “passively, from
an old and ailing sky, bleary- eyed
and weary with life. Now that I lived
alone, it was a day like so many oth-
ers. Another number to be subtracted
from my account.”
Since relatively little Portuguese
fiction is translated and published in
the US, Empty Wardrobes is of par-
ticular interest to American readers.
One might wish for more nuanced
characters and a more capacious rep-
resentation of Portuguese life, which is
surely more varied and engaging than
suggested here, but there is no doubt-
ing the authenticity of Carvalho’s vi-
sion and the originality and severity
of her voice, as scathing and pitiless
in her depiction of “empty” women as
in her depiction of oafish swaggering
machismo. Q
29
 Intimate and Invasive
A Cultural Biography of the Prostate
by Ericka Johnson.
MIT Press, 239 pp., $27.95 (paper)
Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020
by Fred D’Aguiar.
Harper, 323 pp., $26.99
At the small family practice in Edin-
burgh where I work as a physician, I
happen to be the only male staff mem-
ber—all my medical, nursing, and ad-
ministrative colleagues are female.
Perhaps that’s why I see a great many
men about their prostate problems and
carry out a disproportionate number
of prostate examinations. The atti-
tude of most men is an odd mixture of
anxiety and jokey bravado; they find
it easier to make wisecracks about the
prostate than to confess their fear of
disease. I’m reminded of a routine by
the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly,
who joked about reaching an age when
his doctor had lost interest in his balls
and become curious instead about his
ass (cancer of the testes being a young
man’s disease).
You can feel the prostate through
the thin wall of the rectum, about a fin-
ger’s length inside the anus. Visualizing
it isn’t easy: imagine a tiny doughnut
that sits just under the bladder. Urine
passes through the hole in the middle.
The usual size comparison (for a young
man’s healthy prostate) is that of a wal-
nut. I count the prostate as normal when
it’s soft, smooth, symmetrical, with a
groove running vertically down the mid-
dle, and not jutting back into the rectum.
The gland has a variety of func-
tions. It secretes between a quarter
and a third of the fluid that constitutes
semen—most of the rest is produced in
the seminal vesicles—and its muscular
elements contract at ejaculation to expel
semen into the urethra and out of the
body. It operates as a kind of junction
box or valve that controls the flow of
fluids, ensuring that urine doesn’t pass
out to the testicles during urination and
that semen doesn’t go up into the blad-
der during ejaculation. It helps protect
against urinary tract infections, and for
some men it’s an erogenous zone.
Women too have glandular tissues
around the urethra (known as Skene’s
gland) that during orgasm expel fluid
into the urethra or the vagina itself.
Though this gland is sometimes re-
ferred to as the “female prostate,” it
rarely causes medical problems. For
transgender women taking feminizing
hormones, the prostate is very unlikely
to cause the kind of problems that I’ll
be discussing in men.
The tissues of the prostate are sensi-
tive to circulating levels of testosterone,
which stimulate it to grow, and so the
prostate increases in size throughout life
as long as the testes continue to produce
that hormone. Prostate cancers, because
they’re made of prostatic tissue, usu-
ally grow in response to testosterone as
well. By the age of seventy, up to three
quarters of men have prostatism (some
degree of prostatic obstructive symp-
toms), which in its more severe forms
entails poor urinary flow, difficulty ini-
tiating urination, dribbling after urina-
tion, and nocturia (having to get up at
night to pee). These can all be caused by
30
Gavin Francis
Rachel Domm: Spinach Tortellino on Blue, 2019
the gradual growth of prostatic tissues
and resultant pressure on the bladder,
as well as the tightening of the space
through which urine has to pass. To
widen this channel and improve flow,
a surgical procedure called transure-
thral resection of the prostate (TURP)
is commonly carried out on older men.
For a small proportion of men, these
symptoms will turn out to be caused
not by this gradual growth but by can-
cer within the gland. If that’s the case,
radiotherapy can help, as can surgery
to remove the entire prostate—with
attendant risks of incontinence, impo-
tence, and loss of ejaculation. For some
men, the loss of the prostate as an erog-
enous zone is cause for grief. A recent
article in The New York Times calls for
urologists to be more sensitive to the
psychosexual effects of such surgery, in
particular for gay men.*
Sometimes the cancer can be con-
trolled by hormonal manipulation,
shutting off the supply of testosterone
that encourages the cancer to grow. As
a result, men sometimes begin to grow
breasts, lose their libido, and become
impotent. Cancer of the prostate has
a tendency to spread to the bones, and
I’ve known several men over the years
for whom bone pain or a fracture in
a tumor-weakened bone, not trouble
with urination, was the problem that
brought their cancer to my attention.
One fractured his femur while getting
up from the toilet; another fractured
his spine when he fell off a chair. Pros-
*Steve Kinney, “Prostate Cancer and
New Care for Gay Men,” The New
York Times, December 7, 2021.
Rachel Domm
tate cancer is the second most common
type of cancer diagnosed in the US
(after breast cancer), and it was esti-
mated that almost 35,000 American
men died of it in 2021 (5.6 percent of all
cancer deaths). It’s an ancient problem:
evidence of prostate cancer has been
found in the bones of Egyptian mum-
mies and Scythian kings.
T hough the prostate has been causing
trouble for as long as we have records,
it wasn’t noticed by anatomists until
1536, when Niccolò Massa of Venice
described a gland situated just under
the bladder. In 1600 a French physi-
cian, André du Laurens, called it pros-
tatae, which means “the ones who stand
before,” i.e., before the bladder. He
thought the gland existed in two sym-
metrical parts (hence the plural), and
it wasn’t widely considered to be single
(thus “prostate”) until the early 1800s.
Doctors studying this newly discov-
ered gland realized that it had some-
thing to do with reproduction and
sexuality. Until the late eighteenth cen-
tury it was widely believed that female
orgasm was necessary for conception,
and the prostate was thought to bring
this about by splashing seminal fluid
onto the cervix with pressure. Almost
as soon as the gland was known, it be-
came the subject of jokes and moral
opprobrium: prostatism was believed
to be caused by masturbation, sexual
promiscuity, coitus interruptus, or, in
older men, having more sex than was
considered proper for their age. In an
era before antibiotics, many men suf-
fering chronic venereal disease would
have experienced scarring of the ure-
thra, the symptoms of which are very
similar to prostatism.
Ericka Johnson, a medical sociologist
and professor of gender and society at
Linköping University in Sweden, has
charted the evolution of these ideas in A
Cultural Biography of the Prostate. She
describes the ambivalence with which the
prostate and prostatic disease have been
seen across the centuries: both as objects
of taboo and joke-worthy shame, and as
haunting terrors to which men are afraid
to confess. It’s of course customary to
make jokes about things we find embar-
rassing, and even Johnson’s publishers
can’t resist a joke about prostate exam-
inations: the cover of the book sports a
blue manicule, its extended index finger
poised beneath the O of PROSTATE. It’s
difficult to imagine a publisher choosing
to illustrate a cultural history of female
sexual organs with a finger sliding men-
acingly toward an O, but perhaps the
choice simply emphasizes one of John-
son’s points: that diseases of male sex-
ual organs have been and continue to be
considered very differently than diseases
of female sexual organs.
Johnson has been studying men’s
health for the past fifteen years. The
prostate and its problems came up
again and again in her reading, as did
a phrase: “It is probably the prostate
that is haunting him.” It’s a formulation
I haven’t heard used in English but that
she reports as common in her native
Swedish. “What could be more inter-
esting than a gland that haunts?” she
asks. She decided to investigate more
deeply and received funding to recruit
nine colleagues from disciplines that
spanned medical sociology, the history
of medicine, anthropology, sexual ther-
apy, and feminist studies. It was a fruit-
ful collaboration. “Anthropology- and
sociology-trained researchers engaged
with urologists, nurses, psychologists,
and sexologists, sometimes thinking
along with them, other times using
them as informants,” she writes.
Johnson and her team discovered
how, before modern surgery and anti-
sepsis, men with severe prostatism died
early of either urinary retention (which
can lead to kidney failure) or what was
known as “the catheter life”—using
nonsterile primitive catheters to empty
their bladders. She reports that the re-
sultant scarring and infection led to a
mortality rate of 8 percent a month, and
that surgical operations at the time had
a mortality rate of 40 percent. Various
other therapies were tried: electricity
passed between the rectum and testes,
metal rods inserted into the bladder,
and, in the late 1800s, castration. “In
the practice of removing the testicles,
one can see a parallel to the way the
female body was being treated by med-
icine at the time,” Johnson notes.
Many studies have been made of
the tendency to remove or other-
wise treat the female sexual and
reproductive organs in an attempt
to cure other health problems that
were plaguing the patient. Removal
of the uterus and/or ovaries has
been put forward as a solution to
tumors and growths in the uterus,
but also as a treatment for general
The New York Review
 female malaise, discontent, “hyste-
ria,” or even masturbation.
It makes sense that early perspectives
on anatomy and physiology imagined
the prostate and uterus as parallel or-
gans: both are muscular tissues highly
responsive to sex hormones. But in
another way this makes no sense at
all, and to read medical history is to
become aware of just how quickly the
assumptions by which each age under-
stands the body become obsolete. Just
as Johnson uncovers similarities in the
approaches that physicians have taken
toward the prostate and the uterus,
she looks at the differences between
the ways rectal and vaginal examina-
tions are taught in Swedish medical
schools—a difference I recognize from
my own training in Scotland:
While the gynecological examina-
tion was embedded in lectures and
course literature about care for the
patient’s discretion, respect for and
wonder at their reproductive anat-
omy, and concern over any poten-
tial emotional history of abuse or
fear the patient might be carrying
with them into this intimate and
invasive examination, the pros-
tate examination was taught and
conducted as a straightforward,
disease-focused process which the
patient (and, to a large extent, the
medical student) was expected to
perform in a perfunctory way.
Approaching vaginal examinations
with care and sensitivity does seem
merited and appropriate, and the men
I see for prostatic examinations seem
to expect a disease-focused encounter.
But rectal exams are also intimate and
invasive, and Johnson wonders whether
the difference in approach to the pros-
tate and the uterus has evolved because
of the supposed differences between
male and female patients. Older men
are, she says, the group generally per-
ceived as the standard for whom tradi-
tional medical care is designed. “We
don’t imagine them to be a group prone
to have experienced abuse or traumatic
events in the past,” she writes, and so
middle-aged and elderly men are, para-
doxically, the group for whom the few-
est allowances are made.
T hroughout the 1800s, if you suffered
urinary troubles, a visit to the doctor
could get you a diagnosis of prostati-
tis, prostatisme vésical, le prostatisme,
prostatic hypertrophy, prostatorrhoea,
or prostatic obstruction. In her conver-
sations with urologists, Johnson finds
that our diagnostic categories today can
be just as opaque and indistinct, and
our theories about causes just as con-
fused. “I have heard of modern doctors
who will still blame a wild youth for
an older man’s problems,” she writes,
“though this is more often associated
with riding motorcycles in the cold and
damp than with promiscuity.”
A Cultural Biography of the Prostate
devotes an entire chapter to prostatitis,
a diagnosis frequently given to men who
suffer from chronic pelvic pain, even
when there is little or no evidence of in-
fection or inflammation. It’s no easy mat-
ter to demonstrate the growth of bacteria
within prostatic fluid, and the urologists
in my city encourage me to assume bac-
teria are present in any man who suffers
chronic pelvic pain and whose prostate
February 10, 2022
gland is tender when I put my finger on
it. They recommend that I presumptively
eradicate the bacteria with four to twelve
weeks of strong antibiotics. But as Tim
Parks described in his brilliant mem-
oir Teach Us to Sit Still (2010), pelvic
pain can have other origins than infec-
tion—in Parks’s case, chronic muscular
strain. Johnson cites a study estimating
that 90 percent of chronic pelvic pain in
men falls into this noninfective category,
but most men still end up on antibiotics.
(Johnson approvingly quotes Teach Us
to Sit Still, but not the book that Parks
cites as the inspiration for his own jour-
ney of recovery, David Wise and Rodney
Anderson’s A Headache in the Pelvis,
first published in 2003.)
Johnson disapproves of the diag-
nostic silos of modern medicine, and I
nodded in agreement at her account of
how bodies with prostates and uteruses
are too often funneled to very differ-
ent specialists when suffering essen-
tially the same symptoms. The field of
urotherapy has arisen to address this
gap—urotherapists are usually physio-
therapists who have specialized in the
relief of pelvic muscle tension. Nine
out of every ten men with symptoms of
prostatitis might be getting the wrong
treatment; clearly doctors need to do
better at managing chronic pelvic pain,
wherever and in whomever it occurs.
Misinformation and misunderstand-
ings spread to conversations around
the PSA test, too. Prostate-specific an-
tigen (PSA) is a protein that maintains
the fluidity of semen, to better facilitate
the motility of sperm. Small amounts of
it leak from the prostate into the blood,
where it can be detected. Cancerous
prostates tend to leak more of this PSA
into the blood than healthy prostates,
but not always; for Johnson, the PSA
is a “test that congeals . . . angst into a
worry which eats away at many men.”
On a weekly basis I’m approached by
men who’d like a PSA blood test, “just
to check” and because they believe it will
accurately screen for cancer. But the ma-
jority of men with elevated PSA will not
turn out to have cancer, though they’ll
endure scans, follow-up blood tests, and
biopsies in order to be sure. Checking
the PSA does mean that dangerous can-
cers can sometimes be identified early,
but it can also lead to extremely invasive
tests and aggressive treatments that in
many cases aren’t really needed. A large
proportion of prostate cancers grow so
slowly that it’s possible for a man who
has one to live out his life without ever
needing treatment.
In the ten minutes I have allocated
for each patient, I often have to embark
on what feels like an introductory class
in statistics, but there are some helpful
visualizations available that illustrate
just how unreliable PSA tests can be for
someone who is otherwise asymptom-
atic. As Johnson writes, “People want
it to find cancer and save individual
lives, but they also critique it for finding
too much cancer and destroying lives
when applied across a whole popula-
tion.” Some of the urologists Johnson
interviews refuse to have a PSA test;
one tells her that to get it would be to
start “down that slippery slope.” When
celebrities whose cancer has been ser-
endipitously revealed through a PSA
test go public, they often drive anxiety
in the wider population, as do various
patient pressure groups. This is confir-
mation bias in action.
I’ve also known men who have had
surgery unnecessarily through poorly
interpreted PSA tests: one patient of
mine became infertile from surgery
he almost certainly didn’t need. Men
like this are reluctant to speak out or
complain about treatments that turned
out to be needless for them, because
they’re embarrassed to admit to im-
potence and incontinence, and they’re
aware that those same treatments
might yet prove lifesaving for others.
Because these men are often older, it’s
too often assumed that their fertility or
sexual function no longer matters.
T hirty years ago, Anatole Broyard, a
former editor at The New York Times
Book Review, wrote a series of reflec-
tions on his prostate cancer. He was di-
agnosed in August 1989 and died of the
disease fourteen months later. In 1992
his reflections were published together
with some other writings under the title
Intoxicated by My Illness. “Intoxicat-
ing” isn’t usually how we think about
illness, but the image and the allitera-
tion are characteristic of Broyard—a
showman of letters who wrote about
the indignities of hospital treatment
with audacity and candor, and who
seemed to have wanted in his writing to
prioritize celebration over consolation,
revelation over commiseration.
It’s among my favorite books, and
one I’ve recommended to patients and
medical students alike for its elegantly
conveyed insights into the experience
of becoming a patient. One of many
memorable passages describes the kind
of doctor Broyard would have liked
best. He wanted one skilled in the
use of metaphor, able to describe the
“ruin” of his body in more poetic terms
than those ordinarily used by doctors,
with language like “Art burned up your
body with beauty and truth” or “You’ve
spent yourself like a philanthropist
who gives all his money away.” Broyard
also sought a doctor capable of seeing
through any bluster he might put on to
cope with something “powerful and de-
monic” like illness: “To get to my body,
my doctor has to get to my character. He
has to go through my soul. He doesn’t
only have to go through my anus.”
In Year of Plagues, a memoir of
prostate cancer diagnosed and treated
through the pandemic year of 2020,
the poet Fred D’Aguiar similarly longs
for a medicine infused with metaphor,
for physicians capable of meeting his
questions of mortality with authen-
ticity rather than clinical detachment.
Broyard wondered if literary criticism
could wither cancer, while D’Aguiar is
more circumspect:
I wonder if art is up to the task of
healing. If autosuggestion helps
in any perceptible fashion, or if a
positive outlook is tantamount to
my mind fiddling while the Rome
of my body burns. For I burn with
cancer.
Thankfully for the reader, metaphor is
what D’Aguiar, not his physician, ex-
cels at. He teaches creative writing at
UCLA , and as a poet he loves to reside
in uncertainty and doubt, in Keats’s
celebrated negative capability. But as
a patient he wants what we would all
want in his situation: rock-solid cer-
tainty. Can his cancer be cured, or can’t
it? “My skin, my flesh and bones, my
nerve suit of consciousness, we are all
going down together on the Titanic of
my being. Let the music play on.”
His symptoms come on slowly
throughout the autumn of 2019; he
finds great difficulty navigating public
space with a reduced bladder capacity:
Every time I embarked on a task—
it could be anything, a meeting or
car journey or shopping expedi-
tion—I wondered when my blad-
der would announce its presence.
And what an announcement: a
twisting of my innards located in
the area behind my pubic bone, a
sharp sense of a wild flame from a
naked torch deliberately glanced
against my body but improbably
from inside my body, a burst of this
sharp feeling that radiated down
my legs and up my back.
After three or four months of this,
D’Aguiar drags the flame of his cancer
into a UCLA clinic, where a semiretired
oncologist
unceremoniously stuck his index
and middle finger into my anus and
up my rectum, and swiped along
the tube as if to wipe my interior
clean. That was a new feeling, of
some blind, doubleproboscis crea-
ture released in my rectum and
bumping into its architecture to
forge deep into me.
His prostate is twice the size it should
be, and blood tests suggest cancer.
During the long series of tests and the
torment of waiting to find out if his can-
cer has spread, he wonders whether his
experiences of illness are inflected by
race, but no—he does not experience the
illness as a Black man but as a man unac-
customed to illness: “I have to NgNJgƭ wa
Thiong’o my mind; that is, decolonize
the mental frame of my cancer, which
has colonized my body.” With a Viet-
namese clinician he exchanges banter
about the legacies of American colonial-
ism, about the luck of being able to “reap
the benefits rather than the penalties of
a colonial or imperial encounter,” but re-
mains convinced that American health
care is broken. Even with his good
insurance, D’Aguiar can’t be treated
effectively without hefty co-payments:
The richest capitalist nation in
the world works by bleeding its
citizens at every turn. . . . It makes
sense that the poor and Black in the
nation die earliest of all groups and
the rich live long and healthy lives.
In 2020, as the death toll from Covid
mounts, particularly among Black peo-
ple, D’Aguiar is torn between terror
of his cancer and terror of the virus.
His urologist stops answering e-mails,
and the LA hospitals become over-
whelmed, so it looks as if his surgery
will be postponed. But then, about two
thirds of the way through the book,
his operation is performed—six hours
under anesthetic in which his pros-
tate, vascular ganglia of the pelvis, and
“nearly three dozen” lymph nodes are
cleared in a harvest D’Aguiar imag-
ines as a series of scythe cuts, “pen-
dulum to the left and clear, pendulum
right, clear,” until he wakes up in the
recovery room. His surgeon reports
that everything cancerous that could
be found has been removed. It will be
three months before he will know if the
operation has been successful.
What follows are strange weeks of
convalescence in which D’Aguiar is
31
empty and exhausted, cloaked in a
relentless sadness without tears. His
book casts a valuable spotlight on what
is so often glazed over in illness narra-
tives: the importance of giving time to
convalescence and the uneasy conso-
lations that can be found in the trans-
formation of perspective that severe,
life-threatening illness can bring.
Y ear of Plagues is a complicated book,
given over to fugues and furies against
the cancer itself, which is visualized as
a character with whom D’Aguiar can
dialogue. His cancer admonishes him:
You do not have to keep pumping
those drugs into your body that
slow you down. They only give you
hot flashes, cold sweats, constipa-
tion, headache, dizzy spells, and
breathlessness. . . . Forget about
your prostate.
In places it becomes a howl of grief, be-
trayal, and indignation, articulating the
Clairvoyant of the Small:
The Life of Robert Walser
by Susan Bernofsky.
Yale University Press, 378 pp., $35.00
Readers—fans, devotees—of Susan
Bernofsky’s nonet of Robert Walser
translations and cotranslations (from
Masquerade in 1990 to Looking at
Pictures in 2015) have been alerted for
some years now to a biography in prog-
ress (“she is now at work on a biogra-
phy”), and perhaps wondered whether
they would ever see such a thing. I
know I did. It’s self- evidently a good
idea: an English life of the Swiss cult
author, and, for the translator, a way
of valorizing and preserving decades
of unique, irreplaceable thought and
attention, making visible an otherwise
largely unilluminated service to an
original. If a picture is worth a thou-
sand words, how many translations
does a biography weigh?
Well, here it is, I’m happy to say,
an accurate, independent, and well-
researched English life of the pauper,
walker, novelist, and most heteroge-
neous of authors (I can think of no form
he didn’t try his hand at, in his burbling
tenacity and economically conditioned
desperation: plays, poems, short sto-
ries, essays, and his most characteris-
tic Prosastückli, or inimitably jaunty,
whimsical, parodic short prose), also
micrographer and asylum dweller; a
life made by Bernofsky from Alps as
much as archives—no sparing of shoe-
leather here—and still without the pro-
lixity that spoils so many biographies
these days.
There are a few minor caveats: one
might have wished for a book that
didn’t refer to its subject as “Robert”
throughout; a better title than the
charmless and bossy Clairvoyant of the
Small, which does not do for Hellseher
im Kleinen, a Walser- derived phrase of
W. G. Sebald’s. “Miniaturist and clair-
voyant,” maybe. (One does and doesn’t
32
emotional and existential devastation of
a cancer diagnosis. When he begins to
grow breasts and feels his gender iden-
tity liquefy, D’Aguiar eloquently ex-
plores the bodily transformations that
so interest Johnson and her research
team: “I feel neither male nor female.
My crotch attached to clear principles
of pleasure along a masculine trajectory
has retreated into pure functionality.”
For Johnson, “the prostate is surpris-
ingly present—even in its absence—in
our cultural imaginary.” Her book is
valuable for summarizing the shifting
attitudes toward this strange, hidden
gland, and illuminating how far we still
have to go. D’Aguiar’s memoir shows
just how much progress has been made
in prostate treatment in the past thirty
years: men with prostate cancer (and
good insurance) now have access to de-
tailed 3D scans to map the full extent
of the cancer, and robot-assisted sur-
gery to clear it. Broyard died not much
over a year after diagnosis. D’Aguiar
concludes his memoir with the words
“for now, I live.”
In the Pencil Zone
Michael Hofmann
Robert Walser hiking from St. Gallen to Trogen, Switzerland, January 1937
want to make him sound twee.) Or else
something entirely different. One can’t
help feeling sorry for the word “small”
here as an adjectival noun—it sounds
so self- congratulatory. As an adjective,
everywhere I can think of, it’s the guar-
antor of an outstanding title: Epitaph
At root, Ericka Johnson’s fascination more than a hundred will be suffer-
is with the ways in which experience of ing from prostate problems at any one
the prostate and of prostate cancer are time, and as many as twenty will be
culturally inflected, interpreted, and living with prostate cancer or coping
managed by the medical profession with the aftereffects of its treatment.
and by society at large. She writes as Prostate problems are common enough
an academic but brings insights from that every week I sign reams of pre-
other parts of her life. She describes scriptions for the drugs that mitigate
the indignation she felt, when pregnant them, and every month or so I have to
and when potty-training a toddler, at write up or administer the hormone in-
the lack of public toilet infrastructure jections that shrink the cancer. Within
in her hometown, convinced that it the time constraints put upon me, I al-
had been designed with the needs of ways believe myself to be sympathetic
men in mind. In the course of her re- to my patients, considering them as
search she came to realize her error: sexual beings no matter their age, no
it had been designed only with some matter their sexual preferences, and
men in mind, young men with large- aware that prostate cancer is an iden-
capacity bladders. Her book may be tity threat as well as an existential
too academic in style for some gen- one. But these books have made me
eral readers, but it is to be applauded look again at my practice and reassess
for its ambition; it seeks to broaden the care and respect with which I ap-
the discourse around men’s health in proach these men and their worries.
the clinic and the academy. I hope her In medicine there’s always room for
work influences attitudes in the public improvement; as physicians faced with
sphere, too. the ailing prostate, we need to do so
Of the two thousand male patients much more than simply put our finger
registered with my medical practice, on it. Q
Carl Seelig/Robert Walser Foundation/Keystone
oil), remained a son and brother all his
life. It’s odd to read Bernofsky’s occa-
sional passing references to “friends.” I
think she’s being charitable, because I
don’t know who they might be, beyond
the much younger Carl Seelig, Walser’s
subsequent biographer and literary
executor, who, from the goodness of
his heart and admiration of the writer
Walser had been, took him out of his
asylum on Sundays for huge walks and
huge meals several times a year for
twenty years, and left impressionistic
transcriptions of the experience in his
anxious, tender Walks with Walser.*
But other than that? I really don’t
know.
Whereas family stayed with Walser
all his life: his father, whose business
failed and who lived on; the mother
who was committed (“gemütskrank,”
says a Swiss biographer—perhaps “de-
pressed”) and died when the boy was
still in his teens; the one brother who
sickened and died even before that;
another who went mad; the one level-
headed one who became a banker; the
one who killed himself later; and Karl,
the nearest to him in age, the success-
ful—and wonderful—illustrator and
set designer, to whom he was periodi-
cally closest, descending on him when
he was in Stuttgart and Zurich, and
with whom he lived on and off for most
of the Berlin period (1905–1913).
Karl Walser—closest and then unex-
plainedly furthest away—and the two
sisters, Lisa and Fanny, the former of
whom he also lived with for a time when
she was a schoolteacher in charge of the
children of the staff in an asylum, and
who in the end signed the committal
papers on her brother in 1929. These,
of a Small Winner, The God of Small or a fair few of them, figure in Walser’s
Things, Small Things Like These. first novel, The Tanners (which Ber-
Walser (1878–1956), the seventh of nofsky translated), and in many of the
eight children of a shopkeeper in the stories and prose pieces, sometimes
Swiss town of Biel (toys, paper wares,
household goods; later, when he’d *Translated by Anne Posten (New Di-
fallen upon hard times, wine and olive rections, 2017).
The New York Review
lightly disguised, sometimes not, some-
times somehow both at once. Family
was sustenance and history and drama
from which one was never released,
and I sometimes wonder if Walser ever
really understood anything other than
his own dark, thin, bony clan.
Because outside of family, there
were only patron–client relationships,
which again appeared in various ver-
sions, though he saw through them all,
and knew them for what they were.
And they were nothing else. And that
was the rest of life. It began with the
schoolteachers. (Walser left school at
fourteen.) He had a memory of hav-
ing written nice essays, and thought
he could carry on doing that, per-
haps, later. A swiftly improvised list
of themes might go something like
this: walking, crime, work, looking,
beauty, women, nature, sophistication/
pretension, money, stories, art.
T hen there were the employers
who took on the young Walser
as a commis, or clerk, setting
him to write out columns of
figures or addresses or letters;
typewriters were not yet in gen-
eral use. Much of his younger
life, he was a temp. A temp of
the most temporary kind. He
even worked somewhere called
the Copyists’ Office for the Un-
employed in Zurich. He would
save a little money, then quit
to write poems or stories for
a few weeks in a room or hut
somewhere, until hunger reduced him.
(Knut Hamsun’s pride was much more
violent and straightforward than Wal-
ser’s, who could be cringing and abject,
but he is surely a point of comparison.)
There were bankers, insurance peo-
ple, people in shipping and art, people
in elastics. He perplexed them or their
underlings when he left their employ-
ment, taking with him his virtuoso
penmanship in a variety of styles, often
highly decorative. These styles are im-
portant, and Bernofsky writes about
them perceptively and with compas-
sion. Truly, Walser is a handwriter who
dreamed of succeeding as an original
author but was often forced to return
to copy work and clerking.
Presentation mattered to him, per-
haps excessively so, with pieces often
centered on a page, and all of them of
identical length. Later, in the 1920s,
so much drama is implicit in his for-
saking of his pen for stubs of often ill-
sharpened pencil, and his cultivation of
the so- called Bleistiftgebiet, the Pencil
Zone or Pencil Terrain, and then in his
subsequent adoption of microscript,
where the choice of paper had an ex-
pressive pathos (invitations, rejections,
honorarium slips) and the letters them-
selves were so tiny and stubby that for
a long time they were taken to be code;
they were finally deciphered by a pair
of Swiss scholars, Bernhard Echte and
Werner Morlang, working with indus-
trial lenses called thread counters.
Bernofsky notes: “It isn’t clear whether
[Walser] himself could easily read a
draft no longer fresh in his mind.” Was
the microscript a form of burial or
merely concealment?
Along the way we meet a few other
human oddities, though they should
still be classed as patrons, sometimes
in the negative. The sofa-bound actor
Josef Kainz, on whom the (very briefly)
aspiring young performer calls, only to
February 10, 2022
be waggled in the direction of the door
by the maestro’s expressive foot. The
professional inventor Carl Dubler, who
later figures in Walser’s second novel,
The Assistant (typically, minimally
masked as Carl Tobler), in which the
Walser character turns up as a mixture
of secretary and au pair and gets to wit-
ness the inventor’s benignly megaloma-
niac enterprise hitting the rocks. Like
a stowaway not on the Titanic but on a
rowboat, or better, a raft.
But the most perfect embodiment
of the patron was of course the pub-
lisher—people with control over
money, paper and type, influence and
timing, all at once. Not least because
they cast their shadow over the whole
of Walser’s existence. There was noth-
ing of his that they couldn’t touch, the
magazine editors who (to his way of
thinking) picked him up and dropped
Félix Vallotton: Landscape in the Jura Mountains
Near Romanel, 1900
him, the book publishers who offered
so much less than a living wage and
feared his unpredictable behavior at
their soirees.
Small wonder, maybe, that Walser
would sometimes aspire to the very
purest version of alienated labor, and
offer his services, apparently sponta-
neously, as a valet to this or that puzzled
young writer, who might have supposed
himself in the presence of some kind of
equal; and, while in Berlin, in 1905, that
he put himself through butler school,
an episode briefly crowned, as it were,
by his seeing actual service in a castle
in Upper Silesia, as though pure func-
tion would anonymize him and anneal
his humiliation. There were the NCOs
in the Swiss army, in which, no sur-
prise, Walser served his time willingly
and enjoyably; he was law-abiding, had
a strong sense of obedience, liked the
outdoors, and, perhaps more than any-
thing, liked having his food provided
for him. Observers often commented
on his health and strength.
His experience in the army, the ex-
tended periods when he was living with
his brother and his sister, and in his two
asylums, where he seems not to have
been unhappy (knuckled down to glu-
ing paper bags, and expressly asked for
no preferential treatment), all suggest
that given personal, financial, or some
enlightened institutional support, he
might have relished a more comfort-
able existence. As a matter of brute
materialism, it was Walser’s misfortune
and his heroism that he was obsessed
with liberty, and paired this with a de-
termination to support himself with his
writing, which, after a while, and when
he was no longer young, couldn’t sup-
port him.
The last and least of the patrons were
the doctors, who in some galling in-
stances also fancied themselves as writ-
ers and invited him to celebrate their
success, or who understood writing (or
as with Walser, no longer writing) as an
infallible index of mental health—or
illness, as the case might be. Walser’s
famous, Bartleby-like remark that he
was not there to write but to be mad
is, Bernofsky says, apparently apocry-
phal, but like other aspects of his story,
it has its own truth and can no longer be
wished away.
A special subset of the patron is the
landlady. The landlady in Walser is a
sort of half-ironized goddess. Often
a sex goddess. Just as Walser was for
long periods a temp, so too he was a
lodger when he wasn’t an inmate or a
self-appointed visitor. He moved from
city to city, from canton to canton, from
street to street, with his one suitcase.
Bernofsky has compiled a list of his ad-
dresses, scores of them, over four
Städel Museum, Frankfurt
pages. He moved all the time,
and when he was unhappy or ill
at ease, he moved even more, as
often as once a month. His land-
ladies could be the recipients of
his helpfulness, his solicitude,
his eerie courtesy—a quality
one could call, punningly, do-
mestic terrorism. He was greatly
interested in their laundry, their
shoes, their feet.
Women could be counted on
anyway to precipitate oddity in
him. He makes the finical likes
of Rilke and Kafka and Bruno
Schulz seem like Blazes Boylan:
He wanted to kneel at her feet
and tie her shoes, to be the hand-
kerchief with which she blew her
sweet little nose, and to lift her in
his arms the next time they went
for a hike together and came to a
wall that required clambering over.
The incident that in 1929 finally precip-
itated the end of his liberty was when
he proposed marriage to one land-
lady, and then to her sister, and then
asked them, singly or together, to kill
him with a large knife. He was hearing
voices, he said, and was not unhappy to
be committed.
The diagnosis was schizophrenia;
Bernofsky has her doubts. In a book
that seems to deepen and find itself as
it goes along, her impressive last forty
pages, “The Quiet Years: 1929–1956,”
show her at her most resolutely delicate
and forbearing:
There is no such thing as an un-
eventful year from the perspective
of the person living it, even when
the life in question appears from
the outside relatively uniform.
An entire book could be devoted
to Robert Walser’s asylum years,
which constitute a full third of his
lifetime.
Bernofsky’s coauthor throughout the
book is Doubt.
Or did he. . . . Little is known. . . .
This fictional visit must have corre-
sponded to a real-life one. . . . But
he must have felt something. . . . We
don’t know whether Robert made
this trip. . . . Why they decided to
part ways remains unclear. . . . The
record of his life in Berlin thins out
in 1908 and remains thin until his
departure in 1913. . . . It’s unknown
whether his insubordination had
consequences. . . . He may have
begun one or more novels during
this period.
The rackety figure who wore garish
clothes, behaved strangely in civiliza-
tion (especially when he was in Ber-
lin with his brother Karl, two Swiss
rubes), the slightly wild character fa-
miliar from the same endlessly retailed
anecdotes—smashing the Caruso re-
cords at the publisher Samuel Fisch-
er’s, going up in a balloon, picking a
fight with Frank Wedekind, walking all
night before parking himself with near-
strangers for weeks on end—is toned
down, and almost tuned out.
Diagnostic or apodictic authorial
phrases are far to seek. Bernofsky sees
normality extending into the asylum
years, rather than madness leeching
into the earlier life. It is the Swiss biog-
rapher Robert Mächler who tells us that
none of the Walser children had chil-
dren themselves and who rejects out of
hand the possibility that Walser was gay
(the least of our worries), not Bernof-
sky. There is a delicacy in her approach,
a will-to-kindness, an openness to
other, previously rejected possibilities.
The result is that we get a book that is
(by design) not a scintillating or hard-
edged character study. That is not so
much the “who” as the “how” or mainly
the “how not” of Robert Walser—the
movement of this eccentric Brownian
particle through zones of poverty, inde-
pendence, mannerliness, provocation,
and a sort of manic positivity. It can feel
as anonymous as following a cursor. The
ups and (mostly) downs of Joe Free-
lance. In a 1995 monograph, the Swiss
writer and dramatist Jürg Amann has it:
Indeed he has at his disposal both
the sleekness of a future prospect
and the self-neglect of a down-and-
out. The one who stands here and
opines must be seen as a highly
individualized absence of individ-
uality, is his proud and contemptu-
ous characterization of himself.
“A highly individualized absence of
individuality.” This is where we are.
Walser is not ours to discover anyway.
We, I think, sentimentalize him in, as
Bernofsky has it, his “resistance to the
pernicious commodification of con-
temporary life.” Far from following
him (the horror, the horror!), it seems
to me we have commodified him, con-
verted him into a sort of cuddly mascot
for us, in our Brooklyns and Hoxtons,
a kind of alibi, a protesting exo-soul.
“Why, anyway, should people think
I’m well?” he wrote in the Stückli
called “How Are You?” Exactly. His
gifted contemporaries understood
him better than we have any chance of
doing, and saw him at his worth, too:
the brilliant, saintly editors who “got”
him and pushed him for as long as they
reasonably could, many of their names
still alive today (they are no villains)—
Franz Blei, Bruno Cassirer, Ephraim
Frisch, Siegfried Jacobsohn, Eduard
Korrodi, Kurt Pinthus, Max Rych-
ner—and the writers: Max Brod, Franz
Kafka, Robert Musil, who quite rightly
found his work “not a suitable founda-
tion for a literary genre,” and Hermann
Hesse, who wrote in a review that forty
years ago stopped me in my tracks on an
early boxed set of paperback Walser, “If
he had one hundred thousand readers,
the world would be a better place.” Well,
now he probably does, and is it? Q
33

New Rome:
The Empire in the East
by Paul Stephenson.
Belknap Press/
Harvard University Press,
432 pp., $35.00
The Rich and the Pure:
Philanthropy and the
Making of Christian Society
in Early Byzantium
by Daniel Caner.
University of California Press,
410 pp., $34.95
The Last Great War of Antiquity
by James Howard-Johnston.
Oxford University Press,
446 pp., $45.00
The Formation of Christendom
by Judith Herrin,
with a new preface by the author.
Princeton University Press,
530 pp., $24.95
These four books describe a remark-
able society that once stood like a co-
lossus between the Danube and the
Euphrates, and was governed from its
newly built capital, Constantinople
(modern Istanbul). In the year 450 CE ,
at a time when the Roman Empire was
about to vanish from Western Europe,
there emerged a different Rome, a
Roman Empire of the East, which sur-
vived for a millennium.
For Christians of the East (including
the Orthodox Slavs) and also for Mus-
lims, this Rome—the New Rome of
Constantinople—was the only Rome
that mattered. By contrast, East Rome
has tended to linger awkwardly on the
margins of standard narratives of the
history of Western Europe. We are
often told that the Roman Empire fell
in the fifth century, but we are less often
told that the entire eastern half of the
empire survived, including the wealthy
regions of Egypt, Syria, and Asia
Minor. This Roman Empire of the East
is usually spoken of as “Byzantium”
(from the city overlooking the Bospo-
rus that Constantinople replaced) and
its inhabitants are called “Byzantines.”
But “Byzantium” is a modern term
when applied to the eastern empire. It
is frequently used to keep at a distance
a Rome too big and too surprising to
fit the narrow confines of our habitual
worldview.
All four of these books challenge
this Eurocentric perspective. They are
major contributions to our knowledge
of the sheer richness and importance
of the world of East Rome in its initial
headlong centuries. The first three, in
particular, concentrate on the period
before the Arab invasions of the early
seventh century. This was, of course,
not the end of the story. The empire ex-
perienced an astonishing resurgence in
the eighth and ninth centuries and con-
tinued, in one form or another, until
1453. But here we are concerned chiefly
with its first three centuries.
Paul Stephenson’s New Rome: The
Empire in the East covers the period
from 395 to 700 CE . He brings the
world of New Rome alive with ex-
ceptional learning and a magnificent
openness to modern scientific methods
34
The Other Rome
Peter Brown
Emperor Justinian presenting a model of Hagia Sophia to the Virgin and Child;
detail of a mosaic in the vestibule of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, tenth century
that breathe life into conventional nar-
ratives of political and social history.
For instance, pollen analysis of lake
sediment in Asia Minor now enables
us to follow, with remarkable precision,
the expansion and contraction of culti-
vated land and decisive shifts from one
crop to another—changes that directly
affected the overall prosperity and tax
base of the empire. Weather and land-
scape are captured in time. Even the
sun wobbles: it is revealed to be “an
erratic provider of energy,” owing to
years of uncanny dimness caused by a
veil of ash thrown into the atmosphere
by distant volcanic eruptions (in 536
and again in 540).
But rather than flattening the human
element, Stephenson’s approach takes
us directly into the heart of East
Roman society. We meet those most
immediately affected by weather and
soil—peasants and village headmen—
before meeting emperors, bishops,
generals, and the colorful array of
courtiers whom we usually associate
with the word “Byzantium.”
These villagers were sturdy folk who
struggled to wrench from the unfor-
giving earth the wealth that supported
glittering cities and great Christian
shrines. Cycles of low solar energy,
combined with the arrival of endemic
plague in 541, strained to the utmost
the resilience of the inhabitants of East
Prismatic Pictures/Bridgeman Images
and latrines”—which were often open
to the air like a public bench, carved in
monumental marble and adorned with
witty poems—as well as “the busy in-
terest of decurions,” the civic notables
who handled the affairs of the city.
Part of Stephenson’s story is how
the brash new megacity founded by
Constantine in 324 “bludgeoned the
other great cities into submission” and
thereby drained them of lives of their
own. Constantinople was an unquiet
place, jolted by earthquakes and swept
by fires. Behind its marble façade, the
city (like Ottoman Istanbul a thousand
years later) was a tinderbox of wooden
houses. Hence the dread of riots ac-
companied by arson. When one such
riot was suppressed with great brutal-
ity, a chronicler wrote, with evident
relief, “Excellent order and no little
fear prevailed at Constantinople and in
every city of the Roman state.”
The skyline of modern Istanbul is still
dominated by the Hagia Sophia, built
by the emperor Justinian, who ruled
from 527 to 565. This massive shrine,
which radiates solidity, was built after
a major uprising—the famous Nika
(Conquer) riot in 532—left the center
of Constantinople in ashes and 30,000
killed by imperial soldiers. The erec-
tion of Hagia Sophia was an awesome
act of bravado—in Stephenson’s words,
“the greatest single building ever to have
been constructed” in the ancient world.
With characteristic mastery of detail, he
adds that the immense central dome was
engineered to produce a “wet” sound—a
reverberating boom “that washed across
and immersed worshippers”—through
an echo effect of eleven seconds’ du-
ration (compared with two or three
seconds in a modern concert hall).
Stephenson has a gift for picking out
vivid bits of evidence from archaeo-
logical discoveries in Istanbul. At the
Rome. But the human fabric held. Only Byzantine dockside buried under sand
as we approach the year 700 does the at Yeni Kapı, we meet Constantinople’s
battle with nature and with human en- canines. They are not the lean, long-
emies appear to end in defeat. All over jawed hunting hounds that we see in
the Balkans and Asia Minor, the cit- the classical mosaics of the rich. They
ies fell silent, ground down by disease, are snub-nosed little things, like the
warfare, and the collapse of trading Maltese terriers shown on the graves
networks; the once- open villages came of Roman women and much beloved by
to huddle on hilltops, and the olive ladies of the court of the Tang emper-
trees—which require a long time to ors of China, where they were known
take root and proximity to markets to as “dogs of Rome.”
make them profitable—vanished from
the hills of western Syria. It would be
more than a century before the empire, So how did the inhabitants of this
or what remained of it, regained its empire see themselves? Stephenson’s
momentum. account of the social evolution of East
Rome gives the impression of a society
in search of solidarity. Earlier attempts
T hough his book is admirably up-to- had failed. The cities of East Rome
date on the rural settlements of the were no longer held together through
eastern empire, Stephenson’s heart lavish giving by their wealthier mem-
is with the urban centers. The more bers, as had been the case in the classi-
privileged inhabitants of East Rome cal pagan system of civic philanthropy,
witnessed the ancient cities’ last grand known to scholars as “euergetism,”
flare of glory and then the long cen- which had blossomed in the second and
turies of their decline. In 500 CE they early third centuries. Euergetism had at
still formed a network “that churned least made poor town dwellers feel that
with life.” They “looked, smelled and they were part of a citizenry, endowed
sounded alike. Their porticoed streets with privileges and amenities not en-
were covered with writing and echoed joyed by noncitizens. Two centuries
with noise, their public waterworks later, East Romans found themselves in
gushed and trickled, splashed and a less caring world. In this more frankly
plinked.” In them could be found “the plutocratic society, dominated by the
school and library, the thronged stoa imperial capital at Constantinople, ser-
and flowing aqueduct, the noisy baths vice to the emperor brought greater
The New York Review
rewards than loyalty to the city and its
citizenry. Civic philanthropy withered,
and the rich became ever more distant
from the poor as well as from the farm-
ers and local notables on whose labor
and loyalty the splendid wealth of the
empire depended. How could such a fis-
sured society hold together?
Daniel Caner’s The Rich and the
Pure: Philanthropy and the Making
of Christian Society in Early Byzan-
tium provides an answer to this ques-
tion. Offering far more than a study of
poor relief, it examines the meaning of
religious gifts not only to the poor but
also to the pure—the ascetics, clergy,
and great monastic communities on
whose prayers East Roman society was
deemed to depend. Deeply learned and
carefully considered, Caner’s book is a
masterly exploration of “the first truly
affluent, complex Christian society.”
What we find is a society whose
imaginative resources were very dif-
ferent from our own. For the elites
(many of whom were newly Christian-
ized but still shared with Jews and pa-
gans a common outlook on the world),
what mattered most was that heaven
and earth should stay connected. They
needed to be sure that God Himself
was not distant from them. This was no
small concern. Modern people tend to
worry about whether or not God exists.
East Romans worried about the exact
opposite: Did God know that they ex-
isted? A Being as majestic and remote
as any emperor, God might turn away
entirely from the human race. In 614,
as a Persian army closed in on Jerusa-
lem, a monk in the Judean Desert had a
vision of Christ turning His Face away
from those who prayed to Him as He
bled on the Cross at Golgotha. God
had made Himself distant. Now they
were on their own.
A need to keep heaven and earth
together had driven the contested
church councils at Ephesus (in 431) and
Chalcedon (in 451), and continued to
drive opposing varieties of Christian-
ity throughout this period and beyond.
These councils were by no means de-
voted to abstruse speculations. They
addressed a great fear: Christian theo-
logians argued that if God and human-
ity had not been somehow joined in
Christ, then human beings could claim
no kinship with God, no sense of the
warm fellowship of a shared nature—
they would be forced to face unaided
the impassive cliff face of divinity.
Hence the importance of correctly
defining the balance of human and di-
vine in Christ. For He was the bridge
between heaven and earth: only He
could approach God as a fellow God
and yet be open, as a human, to human
prayer and suffering. The upholders of
the Council of Chalcedon (whose for-
mulae came to be supported by the em-
perors and eventually emerged as the
standard belief of the Catholic and Or-
thodox Churches) said that human and
divine were held in equipoise in Christ,
as if in a state of permanent agreement.
For those who opposed Chalcedon—
the overwhelming majority of Chris-
tians in Egypt and much of Syria and
Asia Minor—this was not guarantee
enough. They believed that only the
unique fusing of divine and human into
a single and undivided nature could be
sure to bring God fully down to earth
and to lift humanity fully up to God.
They were called “Miaphysites”—sup-
porters of the single nature of Christ.
For a Miaphysite, to settle for anything
February 10, 2022
less would be a return to the old night-
mare—allowing heaven and earth to
drift apart, with pure, unmixed divinity
forever separate from (indeed, maybe
even disdainful of) mere humanity.
T his concern explains the urgent need
to touch heaven through people who
mirrored on earth Christ’s intercession
in heaven. The limestone hills in the
hinterland of Antioch were dotted with
the pillars of so- called stylite hermits—
monks who stood on columns or at the
windows of high towers. Each was be-
lieved to be engaged in constant prayer
on behalf of humankind. They were
thought to have brought God down to
earth by praying for the many ills of so-
ciety and, at times, intervening with the
powerful and rebuking the rich.
The fifth- century originator of this
form of asceticism, Symeon Stylites,
was one such intercessor. Far better
than any previous study (including my
own of 1971, which presented the holy
men of Syria mainly as patrons and
arbitrators1), Caner has grasped the
fascination of a figure such as Symeon:
overlooking one of the richest and most
relentlessly exploited landscapes in the
Roman East, ascetic holy men were
there to remind God of the great pain
of the world.
But the monks and clergy were not
merely intercessors with the divine.
They also looked deep into their own
society. The ascetic literature of East
Rome is remarkable for its attempts
to reach across the gulf between rich
and poor on earth. Widespread anx-
iety about this gulf was addressed by
sermons, saints’ lives, and spiritual
advice tinged with unprecedented pa-
thos. This literature of compassion
was written by supporters of Chalce-
don and Miaphysites alike, but it was
often expressed most poignantly by the
latter: for them, humanity, with all its
sufferings, had entered into the very
heart of God through Christ. And so
every human being could be seen, like
Christ, to be the bearer of a hidden god,
whom the rich and powerful flouted at
their peril. In the sixth century John of
Ephesus—a staunch Miaphysite and
dissident alternately wooed and bul-
lied by pro- Chalcedonian bishops and
emperors—remembered some of the
monks of his native Amida (modern
Diyarbakır, in eastern Turkey):
They did not in the case of anyone
who came to them hold him to be
a mere man of flesh, but though a
mean and poor body, he appeared
in their eyes as God who became
flesh. And so they were eager to . . .
honor him as if he were Christ.
Nor were these monks insensitive
to the dark origins of the wealth that
supported their monasteries. Caner
shows how laymen, monks, and clergy
struggled to create a notion of “pure”
wealth—wealth bestowed by God to
be accepted without guilt and passed
on to holy persons, monasteries, and
churches. But not every monk could
ease his conscience in this way. John of
Ephesus remembered one such monk
1
Peter Brown, “The Rise and Func-
tion of the Holy Man in Late Antiq-
uity,” Journal of Roman Studies, Vol.
61 (1971); collected in Society and the
Holy in Late Antiquity (University of
California Press, 1982).
who surprised his fellows by mumbling
prayers at every bite of his meal “for
the men whose sweat and labor we eat.”
Altogether, the striving for commu-
nity in a hard- driven society accounts DAVID LEVINE’S
for some of the noblest passages in the
CELEBRATED CARICATURES
ascetic literature of the time, as in the
widely circulated collection The Say-
ings of the Desert Fathers:
The elders said that each should
inhabit his neighbor’s condition
whatever it might be; that he
should, as it were, dress himself in
his neighbor’s body and wear his
whole humanity, compassionately
suffering with him, sharing all his
joys and tears, being so disposed
that he wears the same body, face, DAVID LEVINE AUTHOR MUG
and soul, so that if affliction ever Caricatures by world-renowned artist David
befell his neighbor, he will be af- Levine enriched and enlivened the pages of
flicted as if for himself. The New York Review of Books for almost
five decades. Thirty-three of Levine’s most
arresting and iconic caricatures of authors
T his was the society that had to face decorate this heirloom quality bone china
what James Howard-Johnston de- mug, including the artist’s self-portrait. Each
scribes in The Last Great War of An- time you pick up one of these mugs, you’ll
tiquity: the epic struggle between East find more to look at in the wonderfully
Rome and the Sassanian Empire, based detailed illustrations which express the wit,
in Persia. For centuries these rivals had commentary, and virtuoso technique for
dominated the Middle East. From 602 which Levine’s caricatures received world-
to 630 they fought what promised to be wide acclaim.
a final struggle, and for a time it looked Authors depicted are:
as if East Rome would vanish. In the Zora Neale Hurston, William Shakespeare,
end, the war proved to be decisive in James Joyce, Beatrix Potter, Frederick
a manner that no one could have an- Douglass, Walt Whitman, Vladimir
ticipated, for it opened the way to the Nabokov, William Faulkner, James
Arab conquests that entirely destroyed Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde,
the Persian empire and seized half of Colette, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf,
the territory of East Rome. Voltaire, Rachel Carson, Samuel Beckett,
Howard-Johnston brings an approach Herman Melville, Langston Hughes,
different from those of Stephenson Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote,
and Caner. The Last Great War is not Jane Austen, W. E. B. DuBois, M. F. K.
a military history in the narrow sense, Fisher, Victor Hugo, Gertrude Stein,
but it is an unequaled study of war. In Alice B. Toklas, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Howard-Johnston’s opinion, it has be- Mary Shelley, Marcel Proust, Dante,
come almost too easy, in scholarly cir- Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lewis Carroll.
cles, to ascribe the collapse of empires Hand wash only. Suitable for use in a micro-
to internal weaknesses alone: “The suc- wave. Size: 3.54" H (90mm) x 3.34" D (85mm).
cessful application of brute force, which Capacity: 1.5 cups (350ml)
historians are often reluctant to view as
#05-DLMUG • $27.95
a determining factor, is relegated to a
subsidiary role.” In other words, in his
opinion, war matters.
Howard-Johnston views the Middle
East with a general’s eye. Every frag-
ment of evidence (not only in Greek
but also in Syriac, Persian, Arabic, Ar-
menian, and Georgian—such was the
range of the war) is examined meticu-
lously to gain insight into the intentions
of the participants. The landscapes that
determined their maneuvers are de-
scribed vividly, drawing on his exten-
sive travels throughout eastern Turkey,
northern Iraq, and Iran.
The war began almost as a civil
struggle: the Persian King of Kings,
Khosrow II (who reigned from 590 to
628), aimed to bring about a change of
government in Constantinople, in the
hope of obtaining a malleable emperor DAVID LEVINE AUTHOR NOTEBOOK
with whom to renegotiate to his advan- The same thirty-three Levine caricatures
tage the frontier between East Rome decorate this beautifully crafted hardcover
and Persia. At the time, he did not en- notebook, which includes a ribbon marker.
vision widespread conquests. There The cream paper is lined and suitable for
was no headlong rush of Persian armies ballpoint, rollerball, and fountain pen ink
spreading destruction far and wide. The (most fountain pens will not bleed through
dramatic arrows indicating troop move- or feather as so often happens with cheaper
ments in textbooks are misleading. paper so both sides of the page may be used).
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duel of wits between two remarkable
35
opponents. Khosrow II saw himself as
the descendant of a legendary dynasty
that reached back to the beginning of
time. The darling of fortune, destined
by the gods and the stars to bring order
to the world, he was served by generals
with auspicious names—Kardarigan,
“Black Falcon,” and Shahrbaraz, “Pan-
ther of the Realm.” They were as gifted,
as touchy, and as prone to take their
own initiatives as Napoleon’s marshals.
If only we knew more about them: the
collapse of their empire and the Muslim
conquest of Persia destroyed all trace of
them. The Roman emperor Heraclius
(who reigned from 610 to 641), by
contrast, was his own general. He saw
to it that he was remembered in pan-
egyric accounts of the war as covered
with sweat, his hair plastered with dust,
eager to dye the black boots of a soldier
purple with Persian blood.
In this game of bluff between widely
separated enemies, information was at a
premium. Heraclius emerged as a master
manager of news. His campaigns were
marked by sonorous appeals to Chris-
tian public opinion. The notion that
death in battle for the faith was equiva-
lent to a martyr’s death and guaranteed
entry into Paradise soon emerged in
Muslim circles, but it may have begun
in the camp speeches and war commu-
niqués of Heraclius. As a result, the last
great war of antiquity became the first
holy war of the Middle Ages.
At first the war favored Khosrow.
Slowly but surely, his generals detached
province after province from the east-
ern regions of the Roman Empire, just
to prove that Heraclius, whom Khos-
row mockingly called “the castrated
one,” was unable to defend his realm.
Jerusalem was sacked in 614 to drive
home this lesson: the emperor of Rome
and his god—Christ—could not pro-
tect their own holy places. It was a slap
in the face to the entire system of in-
tercessory piety that had led East Ro-
mans to pour devotion and money into
holy persons and shrines, the holiest of
which were in Jerusalem.
Yet having made their point, the Per-
sian commanders settled down to rule
their new conquests with a relatively
light hand. Egyptian papyrus docu-
ments, often written in Pahlavi (Old
Persian), tell a story of business as usual.
One papyrus, in Coptic, shows how a
family of village notables wrangled over
the division of their property in a lawsuit
that stretched, without hint of a break,
from the time of the Persian occupation
through the Roman reconquest and was
eventually settled in 647, by which time
Egypt was under Arab rule.
But as the war dragged on, the un-
thinkable—a world without Rome—be-
came thinkable. Before 600, the Roman
and Sassanian Empires had treated
each other as equals, calling themselves
the “two eyes” of the civilized world.2
But by 615, Heraclius had been forced
to forgo this parity. If only to play for
time, he offered to become the vassal of
Khosrow. By refusing this offer, Khos-
row went a step further. He wanted to
turn back the clock past the Battle of
Marathon in 490 BCE, to rule an empire
2 in the distant south. Howard-Johnston
For more on the relationship between
the two empires before the war, see
Matthew Canepa, The Two Eyes of the
Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship Be-
tween Rome and Sasanian Iran (Uni-
versity of California Press, 2009).
36
that stretched (as in the time of Xerxes)
from India to the Danube. He hoped to
swallow Heraclius’s empire whole.
After a further decade of war, Hera-
clius reached beyond the conventional
Middle Eastern theater of war to seek
alliances in the steppes. He made con-
tact with the Turks, who had recently es-
tablished an immense hegemony along
the Silk Road from China to the Black
Sea, joining the two ends of Eurasia. In
627 Heraclius greeted the yabghu kha-
gan—the military commander acting
for the ruler of the western Turks—
under the walls of Tiflis (modern- day
Tbilisi, Georgia). The pro-Persian gar-
rison of the city, under siege from the
joined forces of Heraclius and the kha-
gan, looked down from the battlements
on a ceremony barely conceivable a
generation earlier—a Roman emperor
‘Battle Between Heraclius and Khosrow’; fresco from Piero della Francesca’s
Legend of the True Cross, Arezzo, Italy, 1452–1466
embracing the khagan as a brother and
placing a crown on his head. A new
power had entered the scene. The de-
fiant townspeople of Tiflis placed on
the city walls a large pumpkin with the
narrow eyes, smooth chin, and bristling
mustache of a Central Asian nomad.
With the Turks behind him, Hera-
clius struck southeastward, along the
ridges of the Zagros Mountains (which
descended into Mesopotamia like the
bleachers of a giant’s amphitheater)
into the heart of the Sassanian Empire.
Khosrow was overthrown and killed in
a palace coup within months. It seemed
as if a new world order had emerged:
the two great settled empires of the
Middle East—Rome and Persia—now
had to share Western Asia with an am-
bitious nomadic power.
But which nomadic power? It ap-
peared almost inevitable that it would
emerge in the north, from the cold
steppes and deserts of Central Asia.
But this was not to be. At the far end
of Asia, a giant stirred. In 629 the Tang
Dynasty of China began a mighty push
against the nomads on its western fron-
tiers. Alarmed by this new belligerency,
the western Turks turned eastward to
protect their empire against Chinese ag-
gression. The steppes adjacent to Rome
and Iran were emptied of warriors.
As we know, other nomads emerged—
not from the north, the world of the Silk
Road, but from the hot sands of Arabia
ends his book with a description of the
rapid Arab conquests that immediately
followed the great war between East
Rome and Persia and the death of the
Prophet Muhammad in 632. In his opin-
ion, the creation of the Islamic empire would not be a mere “Byzantinolo-
was “the most extraordinary of all re- gist.” She resists the temptation to see
corded historical phenomena.” It was relations between Byzantium and the
certainly the least expected. West as a one-way export of ideas and
goods from Constantinople, as if they
were the runoff of a superior culture
T he world looked very different by the to underdeveloped nations. A large
year 700. Instead of the ancient binary part of the excitement of the book is
of Rome and Persia, three societies had its account of the pushback of the post-
emerged in the Mediterranean and the imperial societies of Western Europe
Middle East: an increasingly confident against the ideas and governmental
Latin Christianity in the West, and in methods of East Rome.
the Balkans and Asia Minor a Roman For this reason, Herrin warms to the
Empire fighting for its life against the Visigothic kingdom of Spain and values
empire of Islam. what she calls “the visigothic alterna-
Few books have studied this remark- tive.” Though the Catholic clergy of
able development with such zest and in- Spain were mostly of Roman descent
sight as Judith Herrin’s The Formation and were alert participants in the culture
of Christendom, published in 1987 and of the Mediterranean, they kept their
now reissued with a new preface by the distance from East Rome. Intellectuals
author. Its insights and wide-ranging such as Isidore of Seville (circa 570–636)
eschewed conventional views of the
Pictures from History/David Henley/Bridgeman Images
world order and treated the Roman Em-
pire (both past and present) as no more
than one kingdom among others. They
insisted that all kingdoms were equal
under Christ. No king was privileged:
each would be judged like any other
Christian. Herrin sums up Isidore’s new,
demystified view of kingship: “Unlike
past emperors, the new rulers share fully
in the human condition and must con-
vince their Christian subjects by counsel
and good example, rather than by force.”
In many ways these were old-
fashioned conclusions, but they pointed
toward a deeper change. Some of the
most sophisticated elites of Latin Chris-
tendom had already begun an “escape
from Rome”—to use the title of Walter
Scheidel’s provocative recent book. 3
The dream of an empire as old as time
and as wide as the world had faded
in their minds. It was the moment for
something new.
A sense of newness runs through
perspectives have remained challeng- Herrin’s book. It is a story of new de-
ing. It carries forward the story of partures in troubled times. For this rea-
East Rome, in a magnificent triptych son, she shuns the term “late antiquity”
embracing Latin Europe and Islam, as a description of this period, argu-
up to the year 900. I trust that readers ing that “it implies an outlook deter-
will share something of the excitement mined by the past, backward-looking,
that The Formation of Christendom in- constantly peering over its shoulder
spired when it first appeared, and that to the ancients.” I am not sure that all
it still inspires. students of late antiquity would cast
Herrin’s book established a new themselves in so melancholy a light.
sense of scale. Most general histories But Herrin is surely right to emphasize
of Christianity had concentrated on the forward-looking elements of this
the rise of Catholic Western Europe. period. And she shows how this can
Instead, Herrin conjures up a galaxy of be done. Her magnificent recent book
Christian communities that stretched Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible
from Ireland to Iraq, studded with many of Europe recaptures the excitement of
centers, like clusters of pulsating stars. discovering the history of a city where
And in this galaxy Constantinople, not East Rome and Latin Europe joined
Rome, stood at the center, “while what for many centuries in ways that defy
would become England, Germany, and our neat divisions between ancient and
France constituted its periphery.” medieval; Romans, Greeks, and bar-
To decenter Western Europe in this barians; East and West.4 It is by way of
way was a bold act. Herrin helps us books such as Herrin’s The Formation
appreciate the sheer density of the in- of Christendom and Ravenna, and the
terconnections between East and West other books reviewed here, that the
that radiated from Constantinople. At turbulent history of East Rome in its
a time when we might expect communi- early centuries can contribute to the
cations to have been seriously disrupted wider, richer history of Europe and the
by warfare—first with Persia and then Middle East that we need in order to
with the Islamic caliphates—Constan- understand our own far-from-peaceful
tinople remained a sounding box of times. Q
Christian symbols and ideas. These
traveled rapidly from one end of the 3
Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome:
Christian galaxy to the other. Far to the The Failure of Empire and the Road
north, in distant Britain and Ireland, to Prosperity (Princeton University
what happened in Constantinople was Press, 2019). See my review in these
closely observed, acted on, or contested. pages, September 24, 2020.
Herrin also decolonializes Byzan- 4
Judith Herrin, Ravenna: Capital of
tium. She makes it clear that although Empire, Crucible of Europe (Prince-
Constantinople was a center, it was not ton University Press, 2020); reviewed
a world all its own. Her training as a in these pages by Josephine Quinn,
Western medievalist ensured that she July 22, 2021.
The New York Review
  AND  
A CURRENT LISTING
Helicline Fine Art Bowery Gallery Alexandre
 KHOOR#KHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRPKHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRP 547 W 27th Street, Suite 508, New York, NY 10001 291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002
Midtown Manhattan, private dealer by appointment (646) 230-6655; www.bowerygallery.org (212) 755-2828
Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM –6PM alexandregallery.com
New Exhibition: American Art: The WPA Era and Beyond
Deborah Rosenthal: Anecdote: Paintings Vincent Smith (1929–2003): For My People
Helicline Fine Art offers twentieth-century American and European Remains on view through February 26, 2022
modernist paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. We specialize in
American scene, modernism, social realism, mural studies, industrial
landscapes, regionalism, WPA, abstraction, and more.

Gerrit Beneker (1882–1934), Constant Driving Will Win the War

oil on canvas, 30" x 40", signed and dated 1918 lower right Dark Still Life, 2021, gouache on paper, 14" x 11" For My People, 1965, oil on masonite, 49" x 46"

Marlborough Gallery LewAllen Galleries New York Studio School

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 Railyard Arts District 8 West 8th Street, New York, NY 10011
(212) 541-4900; www.marlboroughnewyork.com 1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 (212) 673-6466; www.nyss.org; Daily, 10AM –6PM
Open by appointment; to schedule, please call (212) 541-4900 (505) 988-3250
or email mny@marlboroughgallery.com contact@lewallengalleries.com; www.lewallengalleries.com Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari)
January 31–March 6, 2022
Nathan Oliveira: Emanations
Bookstein Projects congratulates Paul Resika on his exhibition at the
Over a career that New York Studio School.
spanned six decades,
Nathan Oliveira
(1928–2010) was known
for his introspective,
KDXQWLQJÀJXUDWLYHZRUNV
done in oil painting,
bronze sculpture, and
printmaking.

Gustavo Pérez Monzón

Untitled 15, 2021
mixed media on board
37 1/2" x 27 5/8" Head no. 8
95.2 x 70.2 cm (from Last Painting Series),
© The Artist 2010, 14" x 11" Paul Resika, Allegory (San Nicola di Bari) #6, 2019, oil on canvas, 38" x 50"

Yossi Milo Gallery OnPaper.Art

245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001; (212) 414-0370 (617) 610-7173; Online 24/7
info@yossimilo.com; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM –6PM
A new venue offering works on paper from all periods and genres.
Current Exhibition: Asif Hoque: New Works See our Gallery at OnPaper.Art. Visit our online show, The West Coast



February 10–March 19, 2022 Print Fair, from February 1–15 at WestCoastPrintFair.com.

AND
  
A collection of notable art and
exhibitions from around the world.

If you would like to know more

about the listing, please contact
gallery@nybooks.com
Asif Hoque
or (212) 293-1630
Guardian of the Land
of the Lost #2, 2021
Peter Milton, Julia Passing, 1967, etching, aquatint, and engraving
oil on linen
© Asif Hoque,
Courtesy of Yossi Milo
Gallery, New York

February 10, 2022 37


The great Rosa Luxemburg, radical
extraordinaire, possessed a rich appre-
ciation of life in all its glorious variety.
While the potential for socialist revolu-
tion was her passion, she was sensually
engaged by love and literature, flowers
and music, sunlight and philosophy.
She had, as well, an ardent interest
in replacing the theory- driven jargon
that dominated the speech and writing
of her fellow socialists with the lucid
plain-speak that could stir the hearts as
well as the minds of the rank and file.
She wanted working men and women
to feel the beauty of Marxism as she
felt it.
Luxemburg also loved a man who
was her polar opposite: Leo Jogiches,
a rigid Marxist whose temperament
was as angry, brooding, and remote as
Rosa’s was warm, open, and immedi-
ate. Jogiches subscribed wholly to the
credo of the Russian radical Mikhail
Bakunin, which famously declared:
The revolutionary is a lost man;
he has no interests of his own, no
cause of his own, no feelings, no
habits, no belongings; he does not
even have a name. Everything in
him is absorbed by a single, exclu-
sive interest, a single passion—the
revolution.
This made Rosa crazy. As she and Leo
hardly ever lived in the same town at
the same time, their correspondence
was vast, and on Rosa’s end often de-
spairing. She once wrote him, “When
I open your letters and see six sheets
covered with debates about the Polish
Socialist party and not a single word
about . . . ordinary life, I feel faint.”
Tess Slesinger is the prodigiously tal-
ented, left-leaning writer of the 1930s
whose fiction was often grounded in
social realism but also in a modernist
irony that Luxemburg might well have
envied, as the situation that Slesinger
repeatedly nailed would have been
most gratifying to her: a marriage
wherein the wife tries to convince the
husband that personal happiness and
the struggle for social justice need not,
indeed must not, be mutually exclusive.
Implicit in this view is the belief that if
people give up sex and art while mak-
ing the revolution, they will produce a
world more heartless than the one they
are setting out to replace.
Tess Slesinger was born in 1905 in
New York City into a well-to- do Jewish
family of European extraction. She was
educated at the Ethical Culture School
in Manhattan, then Swarthmore Col-
lege and the Columbia School of Jour-
nalism. In 1928 she married Herbert
Solow, an intellectually rigorous man
on the left associated with the Menorah
Journal, a leading Jewish-American
magazine of the 1920s and 1930s,
among whose editors and contributors
could be counted Elliot Cohen, who,
This essay will appear, in somewhat
different form, as the introduction to
Time: The Present: Selected Stories of
Tess Slesinger, to be published by Boiler
House Press in May. Copyright © 2022
by Vivian Gornick.
38
Hearts vs. Minds
Vivian Gornick
Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, Los Angeles, late 1930s or early 1940s
years later, became the first editor
of Commentary, and Lionel Trilling,
who, years later, became, well, Lionel
Trilling.
Around these people swirled a group
of marvelously neurotic literary and po-
litical intellectuals devoted to the idea
if not the reality of socialist revolution.
It was among them that Slesinger expe-
rienced the kind of sensory deprivation
that encouraged her gift for criticizing
intellectualism bereft of emotional
intelligence.
In 1932 Slesinger divorced Solow and
made her way to Hollywood, where she
embarked on a remarkably success-
ful career as a screenwriter. Here, on
a movie set, she met a producer and
screenwriter named Frank Davis who,
in 1936, became her second husband.
With Davis she had two children and
teamed up to write the screenplay for
a number of films, among them A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn. In 1945 her life
was cut short by cancer. She was just
thirty-nine years old but she’d lived
long enough to leave behind a small,
memorable body of work—the 1934
novel The Unpossessed, in which the
left-wing intellectuals Slesinger had
known were gathered and skewered,
and a collection of stories, Time: The
Present, published in 1935.
In 1971 the book of stories was re-
published under the title On Being
Peter Davis
Told That Her Second Husband Has
Taken His First Lover. Now it is again
being reprinted, this time under its
original title, and the collection is
composed of tales taken from the
first book with some new ones added,
all I believe published in her lifetime,
all distinctively Tess Slesinger. There
is the parody of clockwork efficiency
practiced in a shabby department store
during the Depression (“Jobs in the
Sky”). There is the socialite in “After
the Party” who’s had a nervous break-
down because her wealthy husband had
gone out of his mind and left a sizable
portion of his fortune to . . . the Com-
munist Party! There is the fragmented
confusion that overtakes a man in a
highly secure position when he is un-
expectedly fired (“Ben Grader Makes
a Call”). And there is the daring frag-
ment called “The Lonelier Eve,” an
evocative vision of the mental extrem-
ities to which those anomic times had
led.
Slesinger’s work has almost al-
ways been written about by men on
the left who think it belongs on their
library shelves. This, I believe, has
done Slesinger a grave disservice, as
the social and political background of
her work is just that: background. The
central meaning of Time: The Pres-
ent resides in the stories that illustrate
the shocking strangeness of sexual in-
timacy, especially among people for
whom marriage has been a rude awak-
ening. It is here, with this subject, and
mainly through her repeated use of the
internal monologue—often brilliantly
original—that Slesinger’s mind shines
and her talent reaches far.
In the story “On Being Told That
Her Second Husband Has Taken His
First Lover,” we have a woman talking
to herself as she lies in bed in the arms
of her husband, who has just confessed
to an infidelity and is anxious to know
that he will be forgiven. He obviously
thinks this is the first she will have even
imagined his cheating on her, but she
has in fact long suspected it. “So it’s
nice my dear,” she is saying to herself,
that you are always so clever; and
sad my dear that you always need
to be. Time was when a thing like
this was a shock that fell heavily in
the pit of your stomach and gave
you indigestion all at once. But you
can only feel a thing like this in its
entirety the first time.
The narrator sees the fear in her hus-
band’s face and she despises him for it,
while being gripped by her own fear
that he might leave her. Then the in-
eluctability of the situation hits her full
force: “For you see it all suddenly, you
see it there in his face, reluctant as he is
to hurt you”—he is not going to end the
affair. In fact:
He will be lost to you the minute
he walks out of your sight; he will
be back, of course, but this time
and forever after you will know
that he has been away, clean away,
on his own. You see it in his face,
and your heart, which had sunk to
the lowest bottom, suddenly sinks
lower.
To this day these lines cast a chill.
Of course not a word of these
thoughts is ever spoken out loud. In the
course of this monologue we come to
feel viscerally the treacherous under-
tow that pulls at a marriage in which
the burden of disastrously mixed feel-
ings conspires with what is said and
what is not said to make each partner
ultimately feel trapped in an alliance
with a stranger posing as an intimate.
In one version or another, this same
wife and husband appear in the sto-
ries “Mother to Dinner,” “For Better,
for Worse,” and “Missis Flinders.”
In all of them a woman, young or ini-
tiated, puzzles over the inescapable
feeling that, essentially, the man she
calls her husband is “other.” He is the
man to whom she is married, yes. The
man with whom she lies down every
night, yes. The man whose disapproval
makes her heart shrivel, yes. But what
does all that mean? Who, after all, is
he? She will never have the answers
to these questions, but marriage is the
school she attends in order to learn who
she is.
In “Mother to Dinner” we are in-
vited into the mind of Katherine, a
twenty-two-year- old bride of eleven
months who has been out shopping for
a dinner she plans to make that eve-
The New York Review
ning for her husband and her parents.
While shopping, Katherine has been
delighted to watch herself imitating her
mother’s life—the pleasure she’s taken
in choosing this cut of meat, that firm
tomato. However, the scorn of Kather-
ine’s husband, Gerald, a man of severe
intellectual standards who holds her
bourgeois mother in contempt, keeps
breaking into her daydream. She re-
calls his often having taunted her with
the prediction that because she had no
serious work, and thinks so much of lit-
tle things (like shopping for dinner), it
would not be long before she became
her mother. Would that really be so
bad? Katherine thinks resentfully. As
she walks home, she feels herself al-
ready frowning across the table at her
keenly intelligent husband “politely in-
sulting” her clueless mother.
More than frowning—agonizing over
his anticipated behavior. She thinks of
all the women she’d seen shopping and
wonders if they’re aware of “the uproot-
ing, the transplanting, the bleeding,
involved in their calmly leaving their
homes to go to live with strangers.”
Suddenly, she is attacked by loneliness
and feels a strong desire to call her hus-
band, but she knows she’ll only get his
firm, businesslike voice asking, “What
do you want, dear?” And that stops her
cold: “Probably Gerald was right, she
thought wearily—for he was so often
‘right’ in a logical, meaningless way”—
when he said that thinking, as she did,
about every small thing was “an imbe-
cilic waste of time,” an irrelevance. Yet
she can’t help also thinking, “Between
two people who lived together, why
should anything be irrelevant?”
On the other hand—and she has no
reason to not want there to be another
hand—she’s been shocked to realize
that she herself has something to an-
swer for. If she’s honest with herself, she
must admit that as much as she loves
and admires Gerald, she had expected
to regard him as her mother regarded
her father—“with a maternal tolerance
touched by affectionate irony”—and
this had put him on his guard. He was
right when he said to her, “You resent
me because you have a preconceived
idea of the rôle to which all husbands
are relegated by their wives; you’d
like to laugh me out of any important
existence.”
This last sentence is the key to many
Slesinger stories in which we have a
husband bent on devoting himself to
large, world-making concerns while
his wife wishes to “trap” him in the
insignificance of domestic happiness.
Interestingly, when Slesinger allows
the husband to speak for himself, his
position is not without merit. While
the dominating point of view belongs
to the woman, it often seems that
Slesinger wishes to mete out some mea-
sure of sympathy to the man as well;
laying blame on him is not really what
she’s up to. Even in “Missis Flinders,”
the most savage and the most woman-
centered of the internal monologues,
a ragged vein of pity for both the wife
and the husband runs just beneath the
story line.
“M issis Flinders” was first published
in 1932 in Story magazine and made a
tremendous stir because it openly used
abortion as the issue at stake in a mar-
riage that is failing for the reason most
marriages fail: emotional goodwill, if
it ever existed between this husband
February 10, 2022
and this wife, is now draining slowly themselves there is Jeffrey Blake, a
away. compulsively womanizing novelist;
Margaret Flinders, one half of a Jeffrey’s blindly adoring wife, Norah;
radically left couple, stands on the Bruno Leonard, an intellectually bril-
steps of a maternity hospital watching liant but emotionally compromised
her husband, Miles, running about in drunk (“He longed like a dead man for
the street, trying frantically to hail a sensation, envying in Jeffrey a purity
taxi so they can get home to face the of desire that he knew could never be
alienating consequences of the deci- his own”); and Bruno’s despairingly
sion they’d taken to abort the child promiscuous cousin, Elizabeth. These
she had been carrying. Margaret had people are left-wing intellectuals one
wanted this baby badly but Miles per- and all who, in the course of the novel,
suaded her that nothing was more im- gather together on various occasions
portant than ensuring their economic for the sake of creating a magazine that
(and therefore intellectual) freedom. will shock its readers into experiencing
“We’d go soft,” he had said, if they viscerally the rapacity of the capitalist
started having children. “We’d go world. Ultimately, their myriad inse-
bourgeois.” curities lead them into a quarrelsome
Yes, she repeats to herself, with the inertness that prevents the magazine
taste of iron in her mouth, they’d go from ever getting off the ground. At
novel’s end, the reader is left with an
Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, Netherlands
overpowering sense of the inescapabil-
ity of human self- defeat.
Many on the left have deplored The
Unpossessed for what was said to be
Slesinger’s unknowing presentation
of the politics undergirding its story.
When the book was published the
political philosopher Sidney Hook
supposedly said that Slesinger never
understood a word of the arguments
swirling all about her at the Menorah
Journal. Then, in 1966, Lionel Trilling,
who had liked it quite a bit, wrote in
his essay “Young in the Thirties” that
the book would have been much better
had there been more political analysis
in it. And in 2006 the late literary critic
Morris Dickstein wrote an admonish-
ing review, also on the basis of the nov-
soft, “they might slump and start liking el’s political shallowness. Dickstein’s
people, they might weaken and forgive review especially surprised me, as it
stupidity, they might yawn and forget to was hard to see how at this late date the
hate.” Having a baby meant book could still be criticized on those
old grounds when, for this reviewer at
the end of independent thought least, it seems perfectly clear that the
and the turning of everything into real meaning in The Unpossessed re-
a scheme for making money; . . . sides in the relationship between Miles
why in a time like this . . . to have a and Margaret Flinders, while the poli-
baby would be suicide—goodbye tics is the metaphorical context within
to our plans, goodbye to our work- which it unravels. The opening scenes
ing out schemes for each other and of the novel set the stage for all that is
the world—our courage would die, to come.
our hopes concentrate on the sor- Margaret is shopping for dinner—a
did business of keeping three peo- circumstance Slesinger made use of
ple alive, one of whom would be a more than once—and we are privy to
burden and an expense for twenty her thoughts as she gathers her bun-
years. . . . dles of food together and starts walk-
ing home, musing on where her life is
She had begun to see Miles as “a going. Is there any forward motion to
dried-up intellectual husk; he was ster- be reported on? Well, there’s her job
ile; empty and hollow,” as she herself as secretary to the boss at a technical
now feels, driven to mask his personal magazine called Business Manager.
anxieties behind the political rhetoric Last year, she mocks herself, the boss
of their times. And then comes an im- had signed his own letters, this year
plicating thought. Perhaps it was really she signed them, and that was progress,
that one needed to believe in oneself wasn’t it? Then, since she considers
in order to welcome parenthood—and herself a person of the left she must
neither she nor Miles did. Perhaps, after have a worried thought about the world
all, parenthood meant having the cour- situation (“Last year it seemed that
age to risk seeing oneself replicated in the Scottsboro boys must hang without
another human being—and neither of much ado”) and, after that, one about
them did. After which comes an even the inner mood of her seriously leftist
greater suspicion: “Afraid to perpetu- husband (“Last year Miles’ soul was
ate themselves, were they? Afraid of worn about the edges but displayed no
anything that might loom so large in gentle fraying in the seams”). Then, al-
their personal lives? Afraid, maybe, of most as an afterthought, “Twenty-nine!
a personal life?” what was the deadline for babies? for
Within two years of its original pub- clearing out and starting somewhere
lication “Missis Flinders” became the else?”
final chapter of Slesinger’s novel, The What comes next provides a shock
Unpossessed, which featured Marga- but not a surprise. Back at her building,
ret and Miles as leading figures in a Margaret sees that her windows are lit
small cast of characters modeled on a up, knows that Miles is home, and sud-
number of people in the circle around denly she seizes up: “O drop the bun-
her first husband. Besides the Flinders dles on the nearest stoop; turn round
and run, run back, run the wrong way . . .
run and chase the world that hides
around the corner!” Almost immedi-
ately, after these subversive thoughts,
comes a frightened turnabout:
She raced up the stairs in terror, in
doubt.
She burst the door open—and
in the pit of her being peace van-
quished regret . . . for he sat there
with his feet on a chair and with
all that she loved and all that she
hated him for written plainly on
his face; he had come home, like
a child, for his supper. He took off
his glasses and his eyes opened and
closed several times patiently like
a baby’s growing used to her light.
And she herself was taking off her
hat to stay (enormously bored,
enormously relieved) at the same
moment that she advanced to kiss
him. . . .
She would pierce his wavering
smoke-screen and purge him with
her comfort.
Thus ends chapter 1. And thus begins
chapter 2:
But comfort was salt to his
wounds. . . . All of his life women
(his aunts, his frightened mother,
now Margaret) had come to him
stupidly offering comfort, offering
love; handing him sticks of candy
when his soul demanded God; and
all of his life he had staved them
off, put them off, despising their
credulity, their single-mindedness,
their unreasoning belief that on
their bosoms lay peace. For if he
were once to give in, to let their
softness stop his ears, still the
voices that plagued him this way
and that, they would be giving
him not peace, but death; the liv-
ing death of the man who has con-
sented to live the woman’s life and
turned for oblivion to love as he
might have turned to drink.
So there we have it: social realism
laced through with the psychological
insights of modern times. Locked as
Miles and Margaret are into a set of cli-
chéd fears that equate women with the
sentimental fantasy of personal fulfill-
ment and men with the equally senti-
mental fantasy of saving the world, the
politics that grounds The Unpossessed
becomes a skeleton upon which is hung
the flesh of this consequential divide.
For him she is the end of all hope of
transcendence, for her he is the repres-
sion that stops emotional maturity in its
tracks. Ah, Rosa! Ah, Leo!
Slesinger was often compared to
Mary McCarthy, a writer who was also
given to lavish bouts of irony and irrev-
erence. But McCarthy’s irony always
carried the sting of one who takes no
prisoners, whereas Slesinger, no matter
how taunting, leaves her readers feeling
that courage and cowardice in her char-
acters are dealt out indiscriminately.
The deeper story in Slesinger is always
that of people trapped together in lev-
els of anxiety that approach dread. For
this reason her mockery stops short of
character assassination, and her feeling
for life’s unavoidable sorrow remains
haunting. Together, Time: The Present
and The Unpossessed strike a chord of
human watchfulness that more often
than not gives up the satiric for the
tragic. Q
39
 The Unimaginable Touch of Time
Fourth Avenue, Anchorage’s main commercial street, after the Great Alaska Earthquake, March 1964
This Is Chance!:
The Great Alaska Earthquake,
Genie Chance, and the Shattered
City She Held Together
by Jon Mooallem.
Random House, 315 pp., $18.00 (paper)
The Book of Unconformities:
Speculations on Lost Time
by Hugh Raffles.
Pantheon, 374 pp., $30.00
Late in the afternoon of March 27, 1964,
members of the community theater
group in Anchorage, Alaska, were pre-
paring for that evening’s performance
of Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938
play that, on its surface, is about small-
town life in early 1900s America but
that, in the words of one critic, is really
about “how mankind confronts over-
whelming disaster.” Their neighbors,
meanwhile, were closing up shops,
cooking dinner, or grabbing a beer be-
fore heading home for Easter weekend.
Shortly after 5:30 PM, Genie Chance
was driving her son downtown on an
errand when her car started pitching
violently. At first she thought she had
a flat tire. Then she noticed buildings
swaying and the road undulating and
she realized what was happening.
The earthquake lasted for almost
five minutes. When it stopped, Chance
dropped her son at their house (luckily
it was intact) and rushed to Fourth Av-
enue, Anchorage’s main commercial
thoroughfare. She found that one en-
tire side of the street had dropped ten
feet below the other. Patrons walked
out of sunken bars in a daze, looking
up. A half-hour later the sun had set,
snow was falling, and Anchorage’s
100,000 inhabitants had no idea how
bad the damage was or how many peo-
ple were dead. Power lines were down
and most of the phones were out of
service. But the radio station KENI
40
Jonathan Mingle
was still broadcasting, powered by a
generator.
For the next thirty hours, Chance, the
first female newscaster in Alaska, talked
her city through the crisis over KENI’s
airwaves. She became the de facto pub-
lic safety officer, letting listeners know
which roads were blocked, where fires
were burning, where temporary shelters
and first aid stations were located. She
told them that plaster of Paris, electri-
cians, and plumbers were needed at
the hospital. After taking a brief nap,
Chance kept broadcasting until Eas-
ter morning. She read aloud messages
from those seeking missing loved ones
and from people who wanted to let their
families know they were okay. One
man later described her voice coming
through his transistor radio as “our only
beacon of light in a night of terror.”
How Chance bound together the
young, fractured frontier city of An-
chorage is the central narrative in Jon
Mooallem’s This Is Chance!, a care-
fully reported chronicle of a mostly
forgotten disaster. At 9.2 in magnitude,
the Great Alaska Earthquake was the
strongest on record in North America
and remains the second most powerful
ever recorded worldwide. Nine people
were killed in Anchorage; at least 131
in all died because of the earthquake,
most of them in tsunamis along the Pa-
cific coast.
The death count in Anchorage was
so low in part, Mooallem explains,
because almost all of the injured had
been recovered from the wreckage by
“unofficial first responders” before
night fell on Friday: “Everywhere in
Anchorage, clusters of ordinary people
had gone to work immediately, sponta-
neously, teaming up and switching on
like a kind of civic immune response.”
A mild-mannered psychology profes-
sor and amateur mountaineer from
a local college led the search and res-
side of time: “Worries about the past
US Army/US Geological Survey
and future are unrealistic when judged
against the realities of the moment.”
Disasters scramble and toss together
not just layers of sediment, edges of
tectonic plates, buildings, and boul-
ders, but individual lives. They strip
away the illusions—both comforting
and discomfiting—that tomorrow will
be like today, that the ground beneath
us is stable, that we are alone in our
struggles. They remind us that insta-
bility, rupture, and upheaval are the
world’s default settings, and that we are
all—always—united in our shared pre-
carity. As one earthquake survivor tells
Mooallem fifty years later, “Even now,
I can look at this solid ground out my
window and know it’s not permanent.
It can change anytime. It just moves.
Everything moves.”
In 2005 an earthquake roused Hugh
Raffles from his slumber in a Tokyo
hotel room. He watched as workers
in the office building across the street
reached out their arms, “searching for
balance,” and then saw that he had
struck the same pose. He realized that
he and the office workers were com-
panions inhabiting an alternate dimen-
sion, “all together in an unstable and
intimate energy-space.”
“Something happens to time in that
cue efforts. Bystanders used their own space, too,” he writes in The Book
tow trucks and jacks to pull apart the of Unconformities, his mesmerizing,
rubble of the partially collapsed J. C. genre-melding work of history, memoir,
Penney building downtown and the anthropology, travel, and time travel.
crumbled control tower at the airport,
swiftly pulling out survivors. It breaks, ruptures, comes apart.
These vignettes can give the impres- Something similar often happens
sion that This Is Chance! is another in moments of heightened danger:
contribution to the body of literature on as your car spins out of control or
the species of solidarity that sprouts up you fall off your bike or you receive
among people who live through disas- unexpected news of a close friend’s
ters.* So can Mooallem’s extended treat- or relative’s death or, no doubt,
ment of the work of Enrico Quarantelli, when you pull back your curtains
a young sociologist who, on the Sunday to see red fountains of lava gush-
after the earthquake, flew into Anchor- ing from the Earth. Time breaks,
age with some colleagues to interview it suspends in two senses of the En-
city officials, emergency responders, glish word: slowing to almost zero
and people on the street, as part of their and leaving you actually hanging,
burgeoning research into the psycholog- like particulate spun out of liquid,
ical response to catastrophe. Quaran- no longer grounded because the
telli was a pioneer in the academic field ground no longer is the ground, no
of disaster studies, documenting how, longer balanced because there’s
across cultures and geographies, peo- no longer a spatial matrix to which
ple in such circumstances almost always your senses orient.
discover and tap into deep currents of
fellow feeling and selflessness. Catastrophes crack open our assump-
But there are early signs that Mooal- tion that time is a linear process. When
lem’s true subject lies elsewhere. In the earth shakes, tsunamis strike, or
the first few pages he reflects on the trains derail, normal time is revealed as
“terrible magic” that disasters per- the “time that is in suspension, the frag-
form on our sense of time, “moments ile time we take to be the safety of the
when the world we take for granted everyday but which is always just wait-
instantaneously changes; when reality ing, always ready to be blown apart.”
is abruptly upended and the unimag- In the first sentence of Raffles’s book
inable overwhelms real life.” we learn that in the mid-1990s his sis-
“Disasters lead to a focusing of at- ter Franki died in Scotland while giv-
tention on the present,” Quarantelli ing birth to twins and, less than three
and a coauthor wrote in 1975. The ex- months later, his sister Sally took her
hilaration that many find in their expe- own life outside London. Disoriented
rience of sudden solidarity comes from by grief, he began searching for some-
their sense of standing together out- thing to hold on to: “I started reaching
for rocks, stones, and other seemingly
solid objects as anchors in a world
*Perhaps the best work in this subgenre
is Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Made in unmoored.”
Hell (Viking, 2009), which captures The Book of Unconformities is the
with grace and depth the euphoric, uto- record of his decades-long search for
pian sense of community that emerges sense and solace from stones. Raffles,
among disaster survivors. who is a professor of anthropology at
The New York Review
the New School, journeys around the
North Atlantic, to Iceland, Orkney, the
Svalbard archipelago, Greenland, and
the margins of his home island of Man-
hattan. On a remote Icelandic beach,
Raffles picks up a smooth, rectangu-
lar piece of basalt formed from flow-
ing lava seven thousand years ago and
imagines it “on the polished wooden
ledge by my window on Ninety-first
Street alongside other stones from
other places, not so much a map of the
world as the world itself.”
That’s what he’s reaching for: the
there-ness of rock, the stabilizing
pressure of its presence. But instead
of answers and anchors, he finds only
bottomless enigmas. The stones to
which he is drawn—whether the se-
cret, half-submerged veins of marble
interlacing the Bronx with Manhattan
or a twenty-ton meteorite in the court-
yard of the Natural History Museum of
Denmark—represent vanished worlds.
In his insatiably curious quest, bits and
chunks of gneiss, sandstone, marble,
muscovite, and iron become catalysts
for musings about the other people who
may have once come into contact with
them. Everywhere he goes, he combs
this wreckage of time’s long landslide
and pulls up glinting remnants of past
lives.
On the main island of Orkney, off the
northern tip of Scotland, Raffles visits
a cluster of elegant sandstone slabs
known as the Standing Stones of Sten-
ness, heart of a once bustling Neolithic
complex. For millennia one of them,
the Odin Stone, an eight-foot-high
block with a symmetrical oval opening
partway up, drew people to perform
rituals that promised health, fertility,
and fidelity. Couples would swear oaths
on it, exchanging pennies or clasping
hands through the hole.
The twentieth-century scholar of re-
ligion Mircea Eliade argued that stones
like these are examples of what he called
“hierophanies,” objects that serve as
portals to illud tempus (that time), the
sacred plane that stands apart from the
historical march of time, the time out
of time. For the people of Orkney, the
Odin Stone was such a gateway, until
Captain William MacKay, a tenant
farmer irritated at the tourists and dev-
otees tramping across his fields, blew it
to bits in 1814. Several of the monoliths
still stand on a windswept plain above
a sea inlet, where they exert a magnetic
pull on visitors like Raffles.
One windy June day, he climbs an
ancient hilltop quarry where stonecut-
ters hewed their sandstone prizes five
thousand years ago. When he tries to
“imagine the masons punching a win-
dow in time through that long-lost
hole in the Odin Stone,” he comes to a
nourishing impasse: “The impossibility
of knowing filled me with an irrational
flush of happiness.”
This recognition of the past’s fun-
damental unknowability is central to
Raffles’s project: “Sometimes the gaps
are too wide, the people, the animals,
the objects, the worlds too gone, the
time too much for the little time we
have.” Later he explains that an uncon-
formity, according to geologists, is a
discontinuity in the deposition of sed-
iment, where two pieces of rock from
different ages, perhaps even hundreds
of millions of years apart in their prov-
enance, are brought into direct contact.
An unconformity indicates a gap in the
record embedded in the earth’s layers,
a spot where geology’s record skips.
February 10, 2022
In this way, an unconformity is “both
a seam and a rupture: a juxtaposition
that reveals a cleft that can’t be closed,”
Raffles writes. Life, too,
is filled with unconformities—re-
vealing holes in time that are also
fissures in feeling, knowledge, and
understanding; holes that relent-
lessly draw in human investiga-
tion and imagination yet refuse to
conform, heal, or submit to expla-
nation in ways we might desire or
think we need.
Despite the intractability of it all,
Raffles can’t help but imagine his way
into that breach again and again. Like
a geologist drawing out the individual
grains in some hundred-million-year-
old layer of sediment with a magnify-
ing glass, he has a particular gift for
composing close-ups of his subjects, for
making the long-lost feel immediate, as
if those ancient quarriers were slogging
right by us, cursing and grunting.
For his epigraph, Raffles borrows a
line from Roberto Bolaño’s novel Dis-
tant Star: “. . . as if time were not a river
but an earthquake happening nearby.”
It’s an arresting thought: What if time’s
ravages compelled our attention with
the same ineluctable force as an earth-
quake? What if time were experienced
not as a flow but as a phenomenon
whose energy overcomes you, terrifies
you, forces you to reach out in search
of balance?
That premise animates the wander-
ings chronicled in The Book of Uncon-
formities, which is neither a memoir nor
a meditation on grief: Raffles’s sisters
are mentioned just a few times, his own
mental states scrutinized only when
necessary to parse the particular signal
he is picking up from the earth’s deep
past. He takes us instead through the
wormholes of dusty archives, forgotten
diaries, and blurred photographs. He
invites us to speculate along with him
about long-ago, often violent encoun-
ters between disparate worlds.
Some stones become portals to chap-
ters of exploitation and genocide—
overlooked origin stories for both the
rapacious colonialist enterprise and
our modern extractive economy. We
get glimpses of Henry Hudson and his
crew first meeting then abducting and
killing a few of the Lenape people who
inhabited the island that would become
Manhattan, and of Viking raiders
bringing their Irish slaves to new farms
in Iceland.
On the island of Spitsbergen, in Nor-
way’s Svalbard archipelago, above the
Arctic Circle, Raffles coins the term
“blubberstone” to describe the traces
of rendered whales, “spilled oil con-
gealing with sand, gravel, and coal in a
rocky mass,” left by the hunting parties
and whalers who turned Svalbard’s
beaches into industrial-scale process-
ing centers from the 1600s to the 1800s.
Blubberstones—“a product of human
geology”—are outlines of the copper
cauldrons that men used to boil down
whale blubber. Raffles describes the
mechanics of the whale hunts that pro-
duced these ghostly remnants, and he
traces the wider linkages and lures by
which remote Svalbard became a cen-
tral hub of the “early modern world
economy.”
A twenty-ton meteorite named Ag-
palilik, which sits today in the court-
yard of the Natural History Museum of
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41
Denmark, leads Raffles to the village
of Savissivik, in northwest Greenland.
Agpalilik is one of many iron-streaked
meteorites deposited by the Cape York
meteor shower, which were prized by
the local Inughuit people as raw ma-
terial for knives, spears, and other
tools. These precious rocks came to the
awareness of British sailors in the early
nineteenth century. Raffles recon-
structs from diaries and other sources
the strangeness and asymmetry of their
first encounters with the Inughuit in
1818. He also writes at length about
the American polar explorer Robert
Peary’s predatory dependence on and
exploitation of the Inughuit, including
the six—one woman, three men, two
children—whom in 1897 he brought to
New York (along with three meteorites
he sold to the American Museum of
Natural History), where they were put
Raffles eschews structure, Mooallem
has a different approach: he both bor-
rows his structure and puts it on display.
His very first paragraph echoes
Wilder’s self-referential opening from
Our Town: “This book is called This Is
Chance! It was written by Jon Mooal-
lem, published by Random House,
edited by Andy Ward.” The epigraph
itself is from Our Town; the book is or-
ganized into three acts; it opens with a
cast list of characters. And in its final
pages, it hovers about Anchorage’s com-
munity theater players as they finally
stage their performance of Our Town
for their weary neighbors, ten days after
the earthquake.
As Mooallem sets this scene, he in-
terrupts himself to note that five de-
cades hence, the middle school teacher
playing Mrs. Webb will succumb to
of Anchorage—all of us, Mooallem
concludes—is “irrelevance.” The real
disaster, in his reading, is how time con-
signs all we do, love, build, and record
to oblivion. There are no earthquakes
in Our Town, but the ground still shifts
under the residents of Grover’s Corners
“in the steadiest, most predictable way
imaginable: by pushing away from them,
traveling forward in time,” he writes.
This conclusion doesn’t seem quite
right. Sure, time’s stream is relentlessly,
quietly grinding all we love and all
our works into silt. But the real reason
Wilder’s play lands like such a punch
to the solar plexus—and remains one
of today’s most frequently produced
plays, from high school to Broadway
stages—is not its devastating portrayal
of a life’s insignificance. The ultimate
disaster that Wilder wants us to con-
front is not irrelevance but inattention.
saying, is to reach across those clefts in
time while understanding that we can
never quite touch the other side. He
notes that “geology, like archaeology,
had its utopian dimension—the prom-
ise of suturing time.”
Attention alone can never fully close
that rupture. Still, Raffles shows how the
act of reaching into that void—attending
to the “worlds too gone”—can offer, if
not exactly solace or a salve for grief, at
least a way to steady oneself. When he
tries to picture those Neolithic masons
chiseling the Odin Stone, the effect is
not unlike looking mid- earthquake
through that Tokyo office window and
seeing one’s own awkward, literal search
for balance mirrored back. When the
world is toppling over, you reach out to
hold on to something or someone. It is
useful to be reminded that people have
been reaching out in this way—trying to

Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

on public display and treated as speci-
mens. Four of them died there.
These speculative forays don’t add up
to a conventional narrative arc. What
makes the book’s incantatory lists,
quick peregrinations in time, and archi-
val research all cohere is Raffles’s fierce
commitment to looking, looking closer,
and looking again. The result reads like
the product of decades of compression,
like the rocks he studies. In lieu of time
and gravity, the forces that extruded
The Book of Unconformities are com-
passion, grief, and wonder.
Structure, of course, is most writ-
ers’ rock and salvation. Raffles relies
instead on the binding force of his at-
tention. He’s after “not so much a map
of the world [but] the world itself,” and
the world itself offers only gaps and rid-
dles. He is a student of unconformities,
after all—those spliced-together zones
that defy definitive explanation and
easy structuring. His implicit premise
is that the present world, with all its
ravages and richness, its cruelties and
consolations, cannot be understood
without attending to these absences.
Fifteen years after his sisters’ deaths,
Raffles travels to the Outer Hebrides
and visits the Standing Stones of Cal-
lanish, on the Isle of Lewis. There, on
a hill not far from the house where
his sister Franki lived in the 1970s, he
ponders “the stubborn vitality of even
the most dead things” and wonders
whether a huge gneiss crag rock known
as Cnoc an Tursa was, as some archae-
ologists speculate, the sacred center of
Callanish, an ancient North Atlantic
trading and cultural hub:
Yet another axis mundi linking
worlds as unbreachable today as
they were five thousand years ago;
as unbreachable and unfathom-
able—but no more unfathomable
than the twenty-five years since
my sisters died. Standing on the
edge of time, I feel them washing
through me. If only this cleft would
open wide and swallow me, too. If
only I knew the rituals required.
Some fragile thing has broken.
Some certainty, some confidence
in the world I didn’t even know was
there.
B oth Mooallem and Raffles are grop-
ing their way toward coping strategies
for cataclysm, and their books are more
profitably read as searches for balance—
like the poses struck by those Tokyo
office workers with their outstretched
arms—than as narratives. But while
42
At the play’s end, Emily Gibbs re-
turns to her mortal life from beyond
the grave, choosing to relive her twelfth
birthday. As she watches her mother
bustle about the kitchen, absorbed in
morning rituals, Emily sees for the
first time, with mounting horror, how
she and her family and her neighbors
really live—that is, without fully regis-
tering one another’s presence. “I can’t
go on,” Emily cries out. “It goes so fast.
We don’t have time to look at one an-
other.” She starts to sob as the scope of
this disaster hits her: “I didn’t realize.
So all that was going on and we never
The Standing Stones of Stenness, noticed. . . .”
Orkney, Scotland, 2004
“Do any human beings ever realize
life while they live it . . . every, every
complications from heart surgery, and minute?” she asks the Stage Manager.
the young artistic director playing “No,” he replies, and then adds, after a
the alcoholic preacher will die a few pause, “The saints and poets, maybe—
months after Mooallem interviews they do some.”
him. This isn’t the first piece of time
travel in This Is Chance! Early on,
Mooallem relates how certain char- T his particular crisis of inattention
acters—Genie Chance’s coworkers at has taken on new meaning after nearly
KENI, the commander of the Alaska two years in which time’s passage seems
National Guard—will meet their ends to have been warped by the pandemic.
weeks or decades in the future. Covid-19 has been its own unconfor-
There is an extended riff in which mity, both world-historically and in so
Mooallem describes himself in the many private lives—a shearing in civi-
third person reporting the book, as lization’s fault lines that has left before
though he were recounting an out- and after in uneasy contact. Two years
of-body experience. He describes the not spent together, when most people
“vaguely demoralizing unease” he suddenly found themselves confronting
felt while searching through boxes of the same question: How to attend to
Chance’s diaries and mementos and what is absent?
interviewing survivors: “He started In an insight he ascribes to Genie
picturing his own boxes. He imagined Chance, based on a letter she wrote in
how many other boxes were already out the days after the earthquake, Mooal-
there, in other people’s basements, and lem offers an answer that also func-
how many people hadn’t left boxes at tions as his book’s main thesis: “Our
all.” All those gaps in the human re- force for counteracting chaos is con-
cord, all those breathing unconformi- nection.” But while Mooallem makes
ties, all that lost time. the case, as he has written elsewhere,
Overwhelmed by his own vertiginous for “laterally . . . thatching our lines to-
knowledge of how the lives of his sub- gether like a net”—look at your neigh-
jects turn out, he finally gets around to bors in the here and now and, even
rereading Wilder’s play. (In interviews, amid a pandemic, you will find solace
Mooallem has confessed that when he and connection—Raffles reveals a
read Our Town in his school days he whole other dimension available to us:
found it “sort of hokey” and only later, the deep past.
while researching his book, did he tap We don’t need an earthquake to no-
into its profundity.) As he reads one tice how cracked open the world is. Just
of the Stage Manager’s “omniscient look around. It is positively buzzing
asides” (“Mrs. Gibbs died first”), he with what’s departed. It takes a saints-
has an epiphany: “That’s me.” This and-poets degree of effort to remain
epiphany might sound canned, and at alert to life and its possibilities and
times all these self-referential feints impossibilities, the miracles unfolding
feel somewhat forced. But Mooallem’s around us, and the suffering of others,
Stage Manager device ultimately el- let alone to the intersecting paths that
evates This Is Chance! from a mere have brought us to this pass. But for the
disaster chronicle to a poignant medi- rest of us, Raffles offers a model.
tation on a higher- order disaster. The word “attention” is derived from
The larger catastrophe awaiting the the Latin ad and tendere: “To reach to-
characters of Our Town, the people ward.” One thing we can attempt, he is
punch “a window in time,” not for a lark
but to meet a profound human need—
for a very long time.
We have the wherewithal to reach
back. Rub your hand over a grinding
stone used ten or a hundred genera-
tions ago, and in that moment you tap
into a current arcing across time’s gap,
and access the sense of a larger shared
endeavor that doesn’t erase the self
but more fully situates it. The distance
closes, even if just a bit.
In The Book of Unconformities,
this sustained effort takes on the cast
of a temporal disaster response akin
to the civic immune response of those
Anchorage citizens, knitting impos-
sibly distant and disparate lives into a
shared story of suffering, depredation
and privation, survival, illumination,
persistence, and courage. Not stories,
but story.
Toward the end of The Book of Un-
conformities, Raffles quotes a pas-
sage from the anthropologist Claude
Lévi- Strauss:
When the miracle occurs, as it
sometimes does, when, on one side
and the other of the hidden crack,
there are suddenly to be found
cheek-by-jowl two green plants of
different species and when at the
same time, two ammonites with
unevenly intricate involutions can
be glimpsed in the rock, thus testi-
fying in their own way to a gap of
several tens of thousands of years,
suddenly space and time become
one; the living diversity of the mo-
ment juxtaposes and perpetuates
the ages. Thought and emotion
move into a new dimension [and] I
feel myself to be steeped in a more
dense intelligibility, within which
centuries and distances answer
each other and speak at last with
one and the same voice.
“Steeped in a more dense intelligi-
bility”: it’s an apt way to capture both
the experience of reading Raffles’s
remarkable work and the scope of his
achievement. If time is an earthquake
happening nearby, Raffles is that disas-
ter’s Genie Chance, amplifying criss-
crossing, faintly echoing voices—many
of them overlooked or discounted by
history’s gatekeepers—across forlorn
steppes, forging a kind of kinship
through the transistor radio of his
chosen stones. In his questing, com-
passionate reaching across the discon-
tinuities of geologic ages and individual
lives, Raffles gives us a voice that can,
for a time, hold it all together. Q
The New York Review
 The Dungeon Master
The Contrarian:
Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s
Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin.
Penguin Press, 382 pp., $28.00
A decade ago, a friend of mine at-
tended a party at the SoHo loft of the
Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes on
the occasion of his acquiring The New
Republic. (Hughes had left Facebook
in 2007 and gone shopping for legacy
publications; word on the street was
that he had first tried, and failed, to
purchase this one.) She drifted into
the custom-built library and noted
two shelves of well-worn titles that, in
content and range, struck her as books
that had stayed with Hughes since his
days as an undergraduate at Harvard.
But there was something impersonal
about the remainder of the substantial
collection, an impression confirmed as
she counted, among other glitches in
the simulation, seven copies of The Sa-
tanic Verses and thirteen of The Last
Tycoon. It was reminiscent of when
Jay Gatsby’s guest Owl Eyes reveals
that his host’s whole library is just for
show.
At least Hughes tried. His co-
founder Mark Zuckerberg perhaps did
not “take enough humanities courses”
before dropping out of Harvard, the
tech reporter Kara Swisher has sug-
gested. Peter Thiel, the first outside
investor in Facebook, has proved to
be made of more scholarly stuff than
either. He cofounded PayPal and has
swashbuckled—in his awkward, halt-
ing way—through countless profit-
able ventures. (His current net worth
is somewhere between $3 and $10
billion.) Along the way, he has writ-
ten provocative essays with titles like
“The Straussian Moment” and taught
courses on entrepreneurship at Stan-
ford, his alma mater. One of those
courses served as the basis for Zero to
One, an aphoristic business book he
published in 2014 that combines phil-
osophical reflection and pithy advice
on start-ups; his most recent syllabus
included works by authors as various
as Joan Didion and the political theo-
rist Carl Schmitt.
In bright and shallow Silicon Valley,
Thiel stands apart for having retained
the intellectual intensity of a bookish
undergraduate, a quality that has made
him an object of curiosity, admiration,
and mockery. He stands apart amid the
orthodoxy of tech-world social progres-
sivism as much for his conservatism as
for his business sense. In some ways, he
is an old-fashioned libertarian whose
skepticism about government is more
widely shared in Silicon Valley than
his peers would care to admit. But his
beliefs are far more varied and in some
cases outré, and his recent activity as
a political power broker has prompted
speculation about his endgame. He was
a featured speaker at the 2016 Repub-
lican National Convention and an ally
of Trump, and he has been an import-
ant supporter of various figures on the
bewildering new right. His comment
that he “would rather be seen as evil
than incompetent” referred to his con-
duct as a businessman but could just
as easily describe his growing efforts
February 10, 2022
Anne Diebel
Peter Thiel; illustration by Olivier Schrauwen
to help bring about some obscure new
order.
T hiel was born in 1967 in Frankfurt.
His father, Klaus, was a chemical en-
gineer who worked for mining com-
panies. The family moved around for
his job: from Frankfurt to Cleveland,
then to apartheid- era South Africa
and South West Africa (now Namibia),
then briefly back to Cleveland before
settling, when Thiel was ten years old,
in Foster City, California. He attended
seven elementary schools (including
a German-speaking school in South
West Africa) and mostly kept to him-
self, reading atlases and playing chess,
at first with his parents and, later,
competitively.
As a teenager, Thiel read J. R. R.
Tolkien’s trilogy ten times and played
computer games and Dungeons &
Dragons with friends. His parents were
conservative evangelical Christians,
and Peter never drank or did drugs.
They supported Reagan and so did
Peter. He leaned toward libertarian-
ism, a philosophy that had the “pres-
tige of abstract logic behind it,” wrote
George Packer in his 2013 book The
Unwinding, which includes a biograph-
ical sketch of Thiel. He was valedicto-
rian of San Mateo High School’s class
of 1985 and matriculated at Stanford,
just twenty minutes from home.
Among Stanford’s fun-loving fresh-
men, Thiel was ostentatiously seri-
ous. In front of his often hungover
dormmates, he swallowed his morning
vitamins one by one at a water foun-
tain, and he went home most week-
ends. Sophomore year, he found his
place socially. He stayed up late spar-
ring with Reid Hoffman, a progressive
from Berkeley he had met in a philoso-
phy class, but most of his friends were
conservatives. They were an “isolated
and besieged group,” Packer writes,
and they “relished” that status. Thiel
cofounded The Stanford Review and
served as its editor. The journal, pre-
tentious and sneering, attacked polit-
ical correctness on campus and leftist
ideas broadly.
Thiel stayed at Stanford for law
school, clerked for a federal appeals
judge in Atlanta (in his free time re-
reading Ulysses), and became an
associate at the white-shoe firm Sul-
livan & Cromwell in New York, a job
he found crushingly boring. He inter-
viewed for clerkships with Justices An-
thony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia but
wasn’t hired, which plunged him into
a “quarter-life crisis” in which he pon-
dered the mimetic theory of the liter-
ary theorist René Girard, with whom
he had studied as an undergraduate.
Girard postulates that human desires
are imitative in origin rather than spon-
taneous or based in need—in short, we
want something (a love interest, a Su-
preme Court clerkship) because others
want it. Even when we defeat our rivals,
we are not spared disappointment: pos-
sessing the object has not changed our
being. Resolving to escape the triangle
of mediated consciousness, Thiel left
the law firm after just seven months
and worked as a derivatives trader at
Credit Suisse for a year. At the age of
twenty- eight, he moved back to the Bay
Area to fashion a new career.
In 1995 he published The Diversity
Myth, a polemical book about campus
multiculturalism, cowritten with his
friend David Sacks, who had succeeded
him as editor of The Stanford Review—
but Thiel wasn’t banking on writing.
He started a hedge fund, Thiel Capital
Management, with $1 million raised
from family and friends, and when the
fund fizzled he got interested in tech
start-ups. In 1998 he gave a guest lecture
at Stanford on currency trading and was
approached by a twenty-three-year-old
Ukrainian-born computer programmer
named Max Levchin, who pitched him
on an idea for encrypting handheld de-
vices. Thiel agreed to invest $240,000,
and together they founded the com-
pany that became known as PayPal.
Their technology facilitated transfers
of money from one PalmPilot to an-
other or, in what quickly became the
more popular option, between the on-
line accounts of anyone who signed up
with an e-mail address.
PayPal merged with X.com, a com-
petitor founded by a South African en-
trepreneur named Elon Musk, who had
dropped out of Stanford two days into
an engineering Ph.D. After the new
company survived the dot-com crash,
Thiel resigned, telling employees he
was “more of a visionary and less of a
manager,” and Musk remained CEO.
But some employees were unhappy with
Musk’s management: he was dealing
poorly with a growing user-fraud prob-
lem and dwindling cash reserves, and he
foolishly tried to rebrand PayPal (which
was already being used as a verb) as
X (opaque, porny). While Musk was
on his honeymoon, the mutineers ap-
proached the chairman of the board,
the venture capitalist Mike Moritz,
and threatened to quit unless Thiel was
reinstalled. Moritz gave in. Thiel took
the company public in 2002 and soon
after sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion. His
stake was worth $55 million and he left
the day the deal was announced.
T hiel has said that he got into the
start-up world because he “wanted
to work with friends,” not the “frene-
mies” he had found in the hypercom-
petitive, zero-sum fields of law and
finance. At PayPal, he hired several
Stanford friends, including Hoffman
and Sacks. These and other Thiel asso-
ciates, now known as the PayPal mafia,
went on to build household-name com-
panies including YouTube, Yelp, Hoff-
man’s LinkedIn, and Musk’s Tesla and
SpaceX. In 2007 Fortune ran a photo
of the all-male group, with Thiel as don
and Levchin his consigliere. Even if the
label for this group of geeky pals from
university days is a bit silly, it gets at the
outsize power accrued by the entrepre-
neurs and investors who weathered the
first dot- com bust.
Shortly after he left PayPal, Thiel
began exploring whether its anti-fraud
software could help the US govern-
ment combat terrorism. “The aware-
ness of the West’s vulnerability called
for a new compromise, and this new
compromise inexorably demanded
more security at the expense of less
43
freedom,” he wrote in “The Straussian
Moment,” a 2007 essay that explores
the work of Locke, Schmitt, Girard,
and Leo Strauss. In 2003 he cofounded
Palantir Technologies with Alex Karp,
a law school classmate who had gone on
to complete a doctorate in social the-
ory at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Named after the seeing stones in The
Lord of the Rings and initially backed in
part by the CIA’s venture fund, Palantir
provided data-mining services to gov-
ernment intelligence agencies and com-
mercial clients. Palantir does not itself
gather data; it helps clients integrate and
analyze disparate data sets. Govern-
ment agencies have used the software
to track down fraudsters, terrorists
(Palantir did not deny a dubious claim
that it had helped the US military find
Osama bin Laden), and, more contro-
versially, undocumented immigrants.
Thiel is Palantir’s chairman and larg-
est shareholder; after he expressed sup-
port for Trump in 2016, the company
went from being described as “Alex
Karp’s Palantir” to “Peter Thiel’s
Palantir.” In 2018 Karp, its CEO and
a self- described “progressive warrior,”
was confronted by employees con-
cerned about the company’s partner-
ship with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. But he renewed the $42
million contract, arguing that the gov-
ernment, not tech companies, should
decide how and when certain technol-
ogies be used for surveillance.
Although Thiel and Karp generally
disagree on political matters (they “ar-
gued like feral animals” in law school,
Karp has recalled), they both assert
that Silicon Valley has been craven
when it comes to national security. After
Google ended a contract with the Pen-
tagon under pressure from employees
yet continued working with the Chinese
government, Thiel called Google “trea-
sonous.” Numerous tech companies
since the 1950s have served the military
and intelligence establishments, but
Palantir has been unapologetic about
doing so, and Thiel has embraced doing
this work for the state, whether moti-
vated by hawkishness on national secu-
rity or by dispassionate profiteering.
T hiel is better known as an investor
than as an entrepreneur. In 2004 he
provided Mark Zuckerberg, whom he
met through the Napster cofounder
Sean Parker, a $500,000 loan to expand
TheFacebook; the loan earned Thiel a
10.2 percent stake, a seat on the board,
and a portrayal in the 2010 film The So-
cial Network. (He has since sold most of
his Facebook stock but remains on the
board.) In 2005 he started the venture
capital firm Founders Fund, which has
backed Airbnb, Lyft, and Spotify and
currently has $6 billion under manage-
ment. (He has since founded two other
venture capital firms.) He was prescient
about the real estate crash, but after he
fumbled his bets (going long where he
should have gone short, and vice versa)
his hedge fund Clarium Capital shrank
by an order of magnitude from its peak.
Following his PayPal payout, Thiel
had begun living large in basic billion-
aire fashion. He hired assistants, a but-
ler, a cook; he flew on private jets and
attended Davos; he bought mansions, a
Ferrari, and a nightclub. (An assistant
did much of this shopping for him.)
Gradually, though, he began to “let
his freak flag fly,” as a former Clarium
employee put it, and pursued pet in-
44
terests. He donated to the Seasteading
Institute, founded by Patri Friedman
(grandson of Milton Friedman) and
dedicated to the creation of floating
city-states in international waters, and
to the Methuselah Foundation, a non-
profit dedicated to curing aging.
His interest in youth is manifold.
At PayPal, Thiel offered cryogenics
as part of the employee benefits pack-
age and declared in a 2009 essay that
he stood against “the ideology of the
inevitability of the death of every in-
dividual.” In 2016 Gawker published a
rumor that Thiel “spends $40,000 per
quarter to get an infusion of blood from
an 18-year- old,” which in turn served
as the basis for an episode of the HBO
satire Silicon Valley in which a CEO
contracts the services of a “blood boy.”
When Thiel clarified in 2018 that he
was “not a vampire,” it may not have
been entirely about blood: perhaps in an
effort to replicate the early dot-com vi-
tality, and almost certainly in an effort to
stay intellectually and socially refreshed,
Thiel has long surrounded himself with
young people of promise, particularly
young men. In 2010 he established the
controversial Thiel Fellowship, which
enticed bright students to skip or drop
out of college and pursue their business
ideas with a $100,000 stipend.
Thiel has also become involved in
electoral politics. In 2008 and 2012
he supported Ron Paul’s Libertarian
Party presidential bids, but by 2016
he favored the Republican Ted Cruz,
whose 2012 Senate campaign he’d sup-
ported. Once he realized that Trump
was going to win the Republican pri-
mary, Thiel signed up to be a delegate
for him at the convention, and donated
$1.25 million to his campaign just after
the release of the Access Hollywood
tape. As a member of Trump’s transi-
tion team, he came up with 150 people
who could disrupt the “administra-
tive state”; most were too offbeat for
Trump, and only a dozen made the cut.
(According to Steve Bannon, Thiel ar-
rived at Trump Tower to make his picks
in the company of six aides- de- camp
who “looked like male models.”)
Thiel has donated more than $22
million to the political campaigns of
a cohort whom the journalist Benja-
min Wallace-Wells has dubbed “the
Thielists” for their shared contempt
of the American elite—of which they
are, of course, members: Blake Masters
(Stanford, Stanford Law, Thiel Capi-
tal), J. D. Vance (Yale Law, Thiel’s Mi-
thril Capital), Kris Kobach (Harvard,
Marshall Scholar, Yale Law, Justice
Department), Josh Hawley (Stanford
legacy, Yale Law, clerkship for Chief
Justice John Roberts, Missouri attor-
ney general).
T he year 2016 also marked the culmi-
nation of a much stranger project. In
2007 Valleywag, Gawker’s tech blog,
published an item titled “Peter Thiel
Is Totally Gay, People.” The post was
not mean-spirited by Gawker’s stan-
dards—it actually praised Thiel and
tied his sexuality to his “quest to over-
turn established rules”—nor did it get
much attention. But Thiel was apoplec-
tic. He called Valleywag “the Silicon
Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda” and
complained about Gawker’s style of
journalism to anyone who would listen,
including an Oxford law student named
Aron D’Souza. In 2011 D’Souza pitched
Thiel an idea over dinner in Berlin: to
anonymously fund lawsuits against
Gawker until one broke its back. Work-
ing through D’Souza, whom everyone
involved called simply “Mr. A.,” Thiel
hired the entertainment lawyer Charles
Harder to identify possible plaintiffs
among Gawker’s many enemies.
Harder, who later represented Har-
vey Weinstein and the Trumps in tan-
gles with the media, brought several
suits against Gawker, the strongest
one an invasion- of-privacy case on be-
half of Terry Bollea, better known as
the 1980s World Wrestling Federation
star Hulk Hogan. In 2012 Gawker had
published a clip from a video, made by
Bollea’s best friend, a radio personality
named Bubba the Love Sponge Clem,
of Bollea having sex with Clem’s wife.
Bollea claimed the muddy grayscale
surveillance- camera footage had been
recorded without his knowledge or
consent. In 2016 a Florida jury awarded
Bollea $140 million in damages (re-
duced to $31 million in a settlement).
The case ruined Gawker, which filed
for bankruptcy and ceased operations.
Thiel announced that he had contrib-
uted $10 million to the lawsuit, remark-
ing to The New York Times that it was
“one of my greater philanthropic things
that I’ve done.”
No one really knows why he did it. His
sexuality hadn’t been a secret: he had
come out to friends in the early 2000s;
he stopped bringing women as dates to
events and started throwing parties at
which male servers wore assless chaps
or just aprons. When Thiel revealed his
role in the campaign, he told the Times
that Gawker was “a singularly terrible
bully” and that his objective was “less
about revenge and more about specific
deterrence.” He told the writer Ryan
Holiday that it wasn’t the article itself
that bothered him; it was a comment
below the post by Gawker’s publisher,
Nick Denton, who is himself gay: “The
only thing that’s strange about Thiel’s
sexuality: why on earth was he so par-
anoid about its discovery for so long?”
It is often remarked that Thiel is full
of contradictions. He’s a libertarian
who founded a company that helps gov-
ernments conduct surveillance. He’s
a critic of big tech who has supported
Facebook on its mission of world
domination. He’s a defender of free
speech—in The Diversity Myth, he and
Sacks celebrate a stunt in which a law
student (and future PayPal executive)
named Keith Rabois shouted, “Fag-
got! Hope you die of AIDS !” outside
the residence of a Stanford instruc-
tor—who worked to kill a media outlet.
But even if asserting tort claims over
harmful speech constitutes a betrayal
of free-speech absolutism that makes
Thiel’s proxy war against Gawker un-
ambiguously hypocritical, it’s still not
what makes it interesting. It was un-
hinged, almost Neronian, yet at the
same time disciplined. It was neither
profit-motivated nor idealistic, and it
makes Thiel as much a cipher as a car-
toon villain.
In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and
Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Max
Chafkin, a Bloomberg Businessweek
reporter, relies heavily on biographical
details from George Packer’s 2011 New
Yorker profile and an expanded version
that appeared in The Unwinding. This
borrowing was a necessity: whereas
Packer enjoyed full access to his sub-
ject, Chafkin got only two interviews,
off the record, separated by a decade.
Thiel might have sensed a hatchet job.
In Chafkin’s telling, Thiel was a con-
trolling, haughty kid who developed
a persecution complex. In Dungeons
& Dragons he consistently chose the
role of dungeon master, responsible
for steering the course of a given ad-
venture, and his chess set displayed
a sticker that said, “Born to win.” He
reportedly offered to take the SAT for
high school juniors at $500 per test, a
singularly mercenary piece of nerdery
(though no evidence that he carried out
the scheme is presented). He was also
bullied, and Chafkin explains his con-
trarianism as a psychological defense
mechanism, a way of “reject[ing] those
who’d rejected him.” As an undergrad-
uate Thiel imagined a “pernicious lib-
eral plot” against campus conservatives
and gathered a crew of “angry young
college men” to fight this spectral foe.
A rival chess player told Chafkin that
the only time Thiel broke concentration
during his regular dorm-room chess
matches was to dispute the lyric “No
one, no one, no one ever is to blame,”
from a song by Howard Jones, to which
Thiel countered, “There’s always some-
one to blame.” When he discovered
during his stint working in New York
that “the highbrow East Coast estab-
lishment might not want him,” he set
out on a path of destruction that cul-
minated in his support of Trump—“he
wanted to watch Rome burn,” a Thiel
associate told Chafkin. Regarding
Thiel’s sexuality, Chafkin speculates
that being closeted during and after col-
lege made him “uncomfortable in his
own skin” and prone to combativeness.
Cheap psychologizing can be the
mark of an unsteady biographer. Here
it may also indicate an ungenerous one.
Chafkin withholds credit and finds
fault, starting early and small with
the omission of Thiel’s being ranked
seventh nationally in chess in middle
school, which appears in both Packer’s
book and Chafkin’s prior reporting.
Or consider Thiel’s return to PayPal:
Chafkin describes the replacement of
Musk—a plan hatched by cofounder
Max Levchin and other senior employ-
ees who preferred their previous boss,
asked him to come back, and persuaded
the board to reinstate him—as “Thiel’s
coup,” which in turn serves as evidence
of “Machiavellian tendencies.”
Thiel, around whom floats the nebu-
lous “Thielverse,” invites a kind of as-
sociationist scrutiny. To mention that a
venture is “Thiel-backed” is to suggest
there’s something untoward about it,
regardless of how little money he gave
or how uncontroversial the company’s
activities are. Whether Thiel is directly
responsible for any given transgression
can be tough to sort out, especially when
critics describe him in such meaning-
less terms as “a node between several
networks.”* Chafkin spends several
pages on James Damore, a Google en-
gineer who became an anti-PC cause
célèbre after he was fired for writing an
internal memo alleging that the com-
pany had been discriminating against
men. When Thiel was asked by Charles
Johnson, a far-right political activist, to
back Damore’s lawsuit against Google,
he declined—yet Chafkin speculates
that he likely would have done it had
he not been occupied with other dia-
*See Moira Weigel, “The Making of
Thiel’s Networks,” The New Republic,
December 20, 2021.
The New York Review
bolical schemes. Chafkin refers to the
Cambridge Analytica scandal as “one
of the most curious chapters in Thiel’s
rise to power,” then describes nothing
more than a rogue Palantir employee’s
giving the UK firm the idea to develop
an app that could scrape data from
Facebook. Thiel was not implicated.
Some connections are stronger.
Chafkin adds to prior reporting that
Thiel, Zuckerberg, and their spouses
had dinner with Donald and Melania
Trump, as well as Ivanka Trump and
Jared Kushner, at the White House in
October 2019, when Zuckerberg was in
Washington for a congressional hear-
ing on cryptocurrency. At the time,
there was conjecture about whether
Zuckerberg and Trump had struck
some kind of deal, and Chafkin firms
up the rumor with a seemingly well-
sourced claim:
Thiel later told a confidant that
Zuckerberg had come to an un-
derstanding with Kushner during
the meal. Facebook, he promised,
would avoid fact- checking political
speech—thus allowing the Trump
campaign to claim whatever it
wanted. If it followed through on
that promise, the Trump adminis-
tration would lay off on any heavy-
handed regulations.
After the dinner, Zuckerberg
took a hands- off approach to con-
servative sites.
If the story—which Zuckerberg has
denied—is true, it speaks to the dis-
comfiting de facto power conferred
on social media platforms to regulate
speech and their slippery policies when
doing so. But even in this less tenu-
ous instance of Thiel’s nodality, it’s
not clear if he had anything to do with
the alleged deal—whereas Chafkin
claimed in an interview (though not
in the book) that Thiel “brokered”
the meeting, the Times had reported
that Kushner “pulled together the din-
ner”—or what he thought about it.
These ambiguities make it hard to
trust Chafkin as a judge of Thiel’s in-
fluence in the worlds he inhabits. Thiel,
we are told, is “responsible for creating
the ideology that has come to define
Silicon Valley: that technological prog-
ress should be pursued relentlessly—
with little, if any, regard for potential
costs or dangers to society.” Chafkin
points to Thiel’s rule-breaking streak
at PayPal—where he pursued aggres-
sive growth strategies, some of which
he picked up from Musk, and dodged
banking-industry regulations—and to
his general ruthlessness. His early influ-
ence on Zuckerberg is well established:
he advised him on cutting out his part-
ner Eduardo Saverin (Thiel apparently
didn’t consider Saverin a real founder),
though Sean Parker told Zuckerberg in
2004 that Thiel had probably learned
such “dirty tricks” from Mike Moritz.
More recent examples are less con-
vincing. Chafkin suggests that the bad
behavior of companies including Uber
and Juul is “an extension of PayPal,”
which is somehow synonymous with
Thiel himself. He also points to “a gen-
eration of techno- contrarians” who
“readily deploy (or hint at) sexism and
racism to showcase their independence
of thought”—something more easily
traced to the organic anarchy of 4chan
and 8chan than to a Gen X éminence
grise who is, all things considered, ex-
tremely offline.
February 10, 2022
Chafkin seems to be groping toward
something more interesting than the
notion that Thiel is singularly power-
ful and maleficent—the idea that Thiel
lays bare Silicon Valley’s alarming vi-
sion of self-rule, that this story is less
one of influence than one of hidden
affinity. Chafkin writes that Thiel has
tried to “impose a brand of extreme
libertarianism that shifts power from
traditional institutions toward startup
companies and the billionaires who
control them.” The heedlessness of the
tech industry—“Move fast and break
things,” as the former Facebook motto
went—is scarcely concealed by the so-
cial progressivism of its most promi-
nent figures. (And it certainly predates
Thiel.) A 2017 survey by political scien-
tists at Stanford found that tech entre-
preneurs are among the nation’s most
left-leaning Democrats, except on one
issue: government regulation, particu-
larly of the tech industry. The political
scientists who conducted the survey call
this unusual mix “liberaltarianism.”
An analysis of the ideological lean-
ings of tech figures beyond Thiel could
easily slip into an indictment of the
self-serving, mix-and-match politics of
liberaltarians and of corporate liberal
America more broadly (such as the
cheap and pervasive “identity washing”
of bloodthirsty market capitalism, as
when the defense contractor Raytheon
celebrates Pride Month). These tech
figures serve as acute examples; Zuck-
erberg bristles at the regulatory state
(though strategically embraces it when
expedient) and waffles over Facebook’s
responsibilities to society generally, all
while brandishing progressive values.
Perhaps this is why Chafkin’s plotting
of Thiel’s ideology feels overdeter-
mined, fecklessly connecting recent
developments to some distant precur-
sor (he calls Thiel’s support of Trump
“no different from the growth hacking
at PayPal”), placing Thiel at the center
of broad trends (he claims that Thiel
somehow brought the gospel of Ayn
Rand to Silicon Valley), and casting
every aspect of Thiel’s conservatism as
uniformly scandalous.
The Contrarian is most successful in
sketching Thiel’s quest, over the past de-
cade, for “real power, political power.”
It’s unfortunate, then, that the more ex-
otic aspects of Thiel’s politics become
just another part of the broadside, with
insufficient delineation between his
libertarianism (taxation is theft, ex-
cept when your company depends on
government spending), his common
cause with the post-2015 GOP (Trump,
nationalism, immigration restrictions),
and his truly radical positions, such as
his Schmittian distaste for the delib-
erative premise of liberal democracy.
These had been gathering steam for
years; Thiel declared in a 2009 essay
that he no longer believed “freedom
and democracy are compatible” and
complained of the “unthinking demos.”
“Peter’s idea of disrupting gov-
ernment is out there,” Bannon told
Chafkin, referring to some of the
names Thiel had put forth during
Trump’s transition. Thiel proposed
William Happer, a prominent climate
change skeptic, to be Trump’s science
adviser; his top pick to lead the US
Food and Drug Administration was
Balaji Srinivasan, a tech investor who
once suggested that people would be
better served by a database where doc-
tors and patients rated medications—a
“Yelp for Drugs”—than by the agency.
According to Bannon, these attempts
to dismantle the Beltway alphabet bu-
reaucracy (the “very unelected, techno-
cratic agencies,” as Thiel has described New York Review Books
them) failed because “Trump turned (including NYRB Classics, NYRB Poets,
out not to be a revolutionary.” “He just The New York Review Children’s Collection,
hired some Swamp Thing instead,” one NYRB Kids and NYR Comics)
of Thiel’s suggested nominees said of Editor: Edwin Frank
his own unsuccessful candidacy. Executive Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae,
Lucas Adams
T hiel’s image as a quixotic libertarian Associate Editor: Alex Andriesse
—a Swiss bank account in everyone’s Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During,
pocket, floating city-states, living for- Publicity Director; Abigail Dunn, Senior
ever, Ron Paul for president—is fading Marketing and Publicity Manager;
as he becomes ever more deeply and in- Alex Ransom, Assistant Marketing Manager;
strumentally engaged with the political Evan Johnston, Production Manager;
process. His backing of Trump—“It was Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
my least contrarian bet,” he has said— Yongsun Bark, Distribution.
seems to have been a halfway point on
his evolution from idealism to a kind
of trollish realpolitik. He wants a big
change, and his preferred agents of that Have you read this
change are turning out to be politicians NYRB Classics bestseller?
like Masters, Vance, Kobach, and Haw-
“I think Speedboat will find a new
ley—the “Thielists,” who like their pa-
generation of dazzled readers.”
tron are sharp, fancily educated, bored, —Katie Roiphe, Slate
and destructive. (Thiel donated to
Representative Justin Amash, a young,
legendarily sincere libertarian from
Michigan, in 2013, but not once Amash
became a vocal critic of Trump.)
The Thielists are among those who
have, with varying degrees of direct-
ness, questioned the legitimacy of the
2020 election results. Chafkin provides
scant support for his claim that Thiel
“planted many of the seeds that led
to the failed insurrection” on January
6, 2021, but Thiel does seem happy
enough to reap the benefits. This year
he and Donald Trump Jr. are cohost-
ing fundraisers for a challenger to
Representative Liz Cheney, who voted
to impeach Trump over his encourage-
ment of the Capitol rioters. This insur-
rectionist entente may be the clearest “Speedboat is one of the more
indication that Thiel is not just a busi- penetrating and oddly hypnotizing
nessman seeking tax breaks and dereg- books I know; reading it is like
ulation but is trying to make something being in a snowstorm. The
happen. To put it in Dungeons & Drag- world is transformed by the
ons terms, his agenda might be seen blanketing, stylized sensibility.”
as “chaotic neutral,” a commitment, —Meghan O’Rourke, The New Yorker
above all else, to ferment.
An aspect of Thiel’s thinking that gets “A brilliant series of glimpses into the
short shrift in The Contrarian is his ar- special oddities and new terrors of
contemporary life—abrupt, painful,
gument that technological innovation
and altogether splendid.”
has stagnated in the past fifty years,
—Donald Barthelme
notwithstanding the digital revolu-
tion. “You have dizzying change where “[A] non-linear, delicious wisp of a
there’s no progress,” he told Packer in thing, which immediately became
2011. Thiel has taken aim at Twitter (the a cult classic among writers and
Founders Fund tagline is “We wanted lovers of experimental literature.”
flying cars, instead we got 140 char- —Emily Temple, Flavorwire
acters”) and even at the social media
“Speedboat is as vital a document
company that made his career (“My
of the last half of the American cen-
generation was promised colonies on
tury as Slouching Towards Bethlehem
the moon; instead, we got Facebook,” he and The Death and Life of Great
said, to Facebook employees, in 2012). American Cities. Right down to its
Most people, including Thiel’s techno- final, just-right sentence, it’s—well,
optimist peers in Silicon Valley, are sat- it will literally knock your socks off.”
isfied with mere gadgetry and imagine —Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
more of the same for the future. But this
stagnation, he told Francis Fukuyama, “Renata Adler’s ahead-of-its-time
is not just a problem for tech; it’s linked novel Speedboat has gone from cult
to “increasing cynicism and pessimism favorite to undisputed classic.”
about politics and economics.” —The Fiction Advocate
Thiel sees opportunity in all of this,
as both a tech investor and a political SPEEDBOAT
donor, but he rarely waxes hopeful, per- Renata Adler
haps because he speaks firsthand, and Afterword by Guy Trebay
perhaps strategically, of that increasing Paperback • $14.95
cynicism and pessimism. In 2011 Thiel
had breakfast with Mitt Romney and
offered some advice on his presidential
run: “The most pessimistic candidate
is going to win, because if you are too www.nyrb.com
optimistic it suggests you are out of
45
Another random document with
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were regular carpenters—privileged men. There was no time for a
raw hand to learn anything. Every man had to do that which he knew
how to do, and in entering the yard Mr. Gardiner had directed me to
do whatever the carpenters told me to do. This was placing me at
the beck and call of about seventy-five men. I was to regard all these
as my masters. Their word was to be my law. My situation was a
trying one. I was called a dozen ways in the space of a single
minute. I needed a dozen pairs of hands. Three or four voices would
strike my ear at the same moment. It was “Fred, come help me to
cant this timber here,”—“Fred, come carry this timber
yonder,”—“Fred, bring that roller here,”—“Fred, go get a fresh can of
water,”—“Fred, come help saw off the end of this timber,”—“Fred, go
quick and get the crow-bar,”—“Fred, hold on the end of this
fall,”—“Fred, go to the blacksmith’s shop and get a new
punch,”—“Halloo, Fred! run and bring me a cold-chisel,”—“I say,
Fred, bear a hand, and get up a fire under the steam-box as quick as
lightning,”—“Hullo, nigger! come turn this grindstone,”—“Come,
come; move, move! and bowse this timber forward,”—“I say, darkey,
blast your eyes! why don’t you heat up some pitch?”—“Halloo!
halloo! halloo! (three voices at the same time)”—“Come here; go
there; hold on where you are. D——n you, if you move I’ll knock your
brains out!” Such, my dear reader, is a glance at the school which
was mine during the first eight months of my stay at Gardiner’s ship-
yard. At the end of eight months Master Hugh refused longer to allow
me to remain with Gardiner. The circumstances which led to this
refusal was the committing of an outrage upon me, by the white
apprentices of the ship-yard. The fight was a desperate one, and I
came out of it shockingly mangled. I was cut and bruised in sundry
places, and my left eye was nearly knocked out of its socket. The
facts which led to this brutal outrage upon me, illustrate a phase of
slavery which was destined to become an important element in the
overthrow of the slave system, and I may therefore state them with
some minuteness. That phase was this—the conflict of slavery with
the interests of white mechanics and laborers. In the country this
conflict was not so apparent; but in cities, such as Baltimore,
Richmond, New Orleans, Mobile, etc., it was seen pretty clearly. The
slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by
encouraging the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the
blacks, succeeded in making the said white man almost as much a
slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white
slave and the black slave was this: the latter belonged to one
slaveholder, and the former belonged to the slaveholders collectively.
The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black
slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were
plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by
his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare
physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the
slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung
into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages.
The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive
their prejudice against the slaves as men—not against them as
slaves. They appealed to their pride, often denouncing emancipation
as tending to place the white working man on an equality with
negroes, and by this means they succeeded in drawing off the minds
of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master,
they were already regarded as but a single remove from equality
with the slave. The impression was cunningly made that slavery was
the only power that could prevent the laboring white man from falling
to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation. To make this
enmity deep and broad between the slave and the poor white man,
the latter was allowed to abuse and whip the former without
hindrance. But, as I have said, this state of affairs prevailed mostly in
the country. In the city of Baltimore there were not unfrequent
murmurs that educating slaves to be mechanics might, in the end,
give slave-masters power to dispose altogether with the services of
the poor white man. But with characteristic dread of offending the
slaveholders, these poor white mechanics in Mr. Gardiner’s ship-
yard, instead of applying the natural, honest remedy for the
apprehended evil, and objecting at once to work there by the side of
slaves, made a cowardly attack upon the free colored mechanics,
saying they were eating the bread which should be eaten by
American freemen, and swearing that they would not work with
them. The feeling was really against having their labor brought into
competition with that of the colored freeman, and aimed to prevent
him from serving himself, in the evening of life, with the trade with
which he had served his master, during the more vigorous portion of
his days. Had they succeeded in driving the black freemen out of the
ship-yard, they would have determined also upon the removal of the
black slaves. The feeling was very bitter toward all colored people in
Baltimore about this time (1836), and they—free and slave—suffered
all manner of insult and wrong.
Until a very little while before I went there white and black
carpenters worked side by side in the ship-yards of Mr. Gardiner, Mr.
Duncan, Mr. Walter Price, and Mr. Robb. Nobody seemed to see any
impropriety in it. Some of the blacks were first rate workmen and
were given jobs requiring the highest skill. All at once, however, the
white carpenters knocked off and swore that they would no longer
work on the same stage with negroes. Taking advantage of the
heavy contract resting upon Mr. Gardiner to have the vessels for
Mexico ready to launch in July, and of the difficulty of getting other
hands at that season of the year, they swore they would not strike
another blow for him unless he would discharge his free colored
workmen. Now, although this movement did not extend to me in
form, it did reach me in fact. The spirit which it awakened was one of
malice and bitterness toward colored people generally, and I
suffered with the rest, and suffered severely. My fellow-apprentices
very soon began to feel it to be degrading to work with me. They
began to put on high looks and to talk contemptuously and
maliciously of “the niggers,” saying that they would take the
“country,” that they “ought to be killed.” Encouraged by workmen
who, knowing me to be a slave, made no issue with Mr. Gardiner
about my being there, these young men did their utmost to make it
impossible for me to stay. They seldom called me to do anything
without coupling the call with a curse, and Edward North, the biggest
in everything, rascality included, ventured to strike me, whereupon I
picked him up and threw him into the dock. Whenever any of them
struck me I struck back again, regardless of consequences. I could
manage any of them singly, and so long as I could keep them from
combining I got on very well. In the conflict which ended my stay at
Mr. Gardiner’s I was beset by four of them at once—Ned North, Ned
Hays, Bill Stewart, and Tom Humphreys. Two of them were as large
as myself, and they came near killing me, in broad daylight. One
came in front, armed with a brick; there was one at each side and
one behind, and they closed up all around me. I was struck on all
sides; and while I was attending to those in front I received a blow on
my head from behind, dealt with a heavy hand-spike. I was
completely stunned by the blow, and fell heavily on the ground
among the timbers. Taking advantage of my fall they rushed upon
me and began to pound me with their fists. I let them lay on for a
while after I came to myself, with a view of gaining strength. They did
me little damage so far; but finally getting tired of that sport I gave a
sudden surge, and despite their weight I rose to my hands and
knees. Just as I did this one of their number planted a blow with his
boot in my left eye, which for a time seemed to have burst my eye-
ball. When they saw my eye completely closed, my face covered
with blood, and I staggering under the stunning blows they had given
me, they left me. As soon as I gathered strength I picked up the
hand-spike and madly enough attempted to pursue them; but here
the carpenters interfered and compelled me to give up my pursuit. It
was impossible to stand against so many.
Dear reader, you can hardly believe the statement, but it is true,
and therefore I write it down; no fewer than fifty white men stood by
and saw this brutal and shameful outrage committed, and not a man
of them all interposed a single word of mercy. There were four
against one, and that one’s face was beaten and battered most
horribly, and no one said, “that is enough;” but some cried out, “Kill
him! kill him! kill the d——n nigger! knock his brains out! he struck a
white person!” I mention this inhuman outcry to show the character
of the men and the spirit of the times at Gardiner’s ship-yard; and,
indeed, in Baltimore generally, in 1836. As I look back to this period,
I am almost amazed that I was not murdered outright, so murderous
was the spirit which prevailed there. On two other occasions while
there I came near losing my life, on one of which I was driving bolts
in the hold through the keelson with Hays. In its course the bolt bent.
Hays cursed me, and said that it was my blow which bent the bolt. I
denied this, and charged it upon him. In a fit of rage he seized an
adze and darted toward me. I met him with a maul and parried his
blow, or I should have lost my life.
 After the united attack of North, Stewart, Hays, and Humphreys,
finding that the carpenters were as bitter toward me as the
apprentices, and that the latter were probably set on by the former, I
found my only chance for life was in flight. I succeeded in getting
away without an additional blow. To strike a white man was death by
lynch law, in Gardiner’s ship-yard; nor was there much of any other
law toward the colored people at that time in any other part of
Maryland.
After making my escape from the ship-yard I went straight home
and related my story to Master Hugh; and to his credit I say it, that
his conduct, though he was not a religious man, was every way more
humane than that of his brother Thomas, when I went to him in a
somewhat similar plight, from the hands of his “Brother Edward
Covey.” Master Hugh listened attentively to my narration of the
circumstances leading to the ruffianly assault, and gave many
evidences of his strong indignation at what was done. He was a
rough but manly-hearted fellow, and at this time his best nature
showed itself.
The heart of my once kind mistress Sophia was again melted in
pity towards me. My puffed-out eye and my scarred and blood-
covered face moved the dear lady to tears. She kindly drew a chair
by me, and with friendly and consoling words, she took water and
washed the blood from my face. No mother’s hand could have been
more tender than hers. She bound up my head and covered my
wounded eye with a lean piece of fresh beef. It was almost
compensation for all I suffered that it occasioned the manifestation
once more of the originally characteristic kindness of my mistress.
Her affectionate heart was not yet dead, though much hardened by
time and circumstances.
As for Master Hugh he was furious, and gave expression to his
feelings in the forms of speech usual in that locality. He poured
curses on the whole of the ship-yard company, and swore that he
would have satisfaction. His indignation was really strong and
healthy; but unfortunately it resulted from the thought that his rights
of property, in my person, had not been respected, more than from
any sense of the outrage perpetrated upon me as a man. I had
reason to think this from the fact that he could, himself, beat and
mangle when it suited him to do so.
Bent on having satisfaction, as he said, just as soon as I got a
little the better of my bruises Master Hugh took me to Esquire
Watson’s office on Bond street, Fell’s Point, with a view to procuring
the arrest of those who had assaulted me. He related the outrage to
the magistrate as I had related it to him, and seemed to expect that a
warrant would at once be issued for the arrest of the lawless ruffians.
Mr. Watson heard all he had to say, then coolly inquired, “Mr. Auld,
who saw this assault of which you speak?” “It was done, sir, in the
presence of a ship-yard full of hands.” “Sir,” said Mr. Watson, “I am
sorry, but I cannot move in this matter, except upon the oath of white
witnesses.” “But here’s the boy; look at his head and face,” said the
excited Master Hugh; “they show what has been done.” But Watson
insisted that he was not authorized to do anything, unless white
witnesses of the transaction would come forward and testify to what
had taken place. He could issue no warrant on my word, against
white persons, and if I had been killed in the presence of a thousand
blacks, their testimony combined would have been insufficient to
condemn a single murderer. Master Hugh was compelled to say, for
once, that this state of things was too bad, and he left the office of
the magistrate disgusted.
Of course it was impossible to get any white man to testify
against my assailants. The carpenters saw what was done; but the
actors were but the agents of their malice, and did only what the
carpenters sanctioned. They had cried with one accord, “Kill the
nigger! kill the nigger!” Even those who may have pitied me, if any
such were among them, lacked the moral courage to volunteer their
evidence. The slightest show of sympathy or justice toward a person
of color was denounced as abolitionism; and the name of abolitionist
subjected its bearer to frightful liabilities. “D——n abolitionists,” and
“kill the niggers,” were the watch-words of the foul-mouthed ruffians
of those days. Nothing was done, and probably there would not have
been had I been killed in the affray. The laws and the morals of the
Christian city of Baltimore afforded no protection to the sable
denizens of that city.
 Master Hugh, on finding he could get no redress for the cruel
wrong, withdrew me from the employment of Mr. Gardiner and took
me into his own family, Mrs. Auld kindly taking care of me and
dressing my wounds until they were healed and I was ready to go to
work again.
While I was on the Eastern Shore, Master Hugh had met with
reverses which overthrew his business; and he had given up ship-
building in his own yard, on the City Block, and was now acting as
foreman of Mr. Walter Price. The best he could do for me was to take
me into Mr. Price’s yard, and afford me the facilities there for
completing the trade which I began to learn at Gardiner’s. Here I
rapidly became expert in the use of calker’s tools, and in the course
of a single year, I was able to command the highest wages paid to
journeymen calkers in Baltimore.
The reader will observe that I was now of some pecuniary value
to my master. During the busy season I was bringing six and seven
dollars per week. I have sometimes brought him as much as nine
dollars a week, for the wages were a dollar and a half per day.
After learning to calk, I sought my own employment, made my
own contracts, and collected my own earnings—giving Master Hugh
no trouble in any part of the transactions to which I was a party.
Here, then, were better days for the Eastern Shore slave. I was
free from the vexatious assaults of the apprentices at Mr. Gardiner’s,
and free from the perils of plantation life, and once more in favorable
condition to increase my little stock of education, which had been at
a dead stand since my removal from Baltimore. I had on the Eastern
Shore been only a teacher, when in company with other slaves, but
now there were colored persons here who could instruct me. Many
of the young calkers could read, write, and cipher. Some of them had
high notions about mental improvement, and the free ones on Fell’s
Point organized what they called the “East Baltimore Mental
Improvement Society.” To this society, notwithstanding it was
intended that only free persons should attach themselves, I was
admitted, and was several times assigned a prominent part in its
debates. I owe much to the society of these young men.
 The reader already knows enough of the ill effects of good
treatment on a slave to anticipate what was now the case in my
improved condition. It was not long before I began to show signs of
disquiet with slavery, and to look around for means to get out of it by
the shortest route. I was living among freemen, and was in all
respects equal to them by nature and attainments. Why should I be a
slave? There was no reason why I should be the thrall of any man.
Besides, I was now getting, as I have said, a dollar and fifty cents
per day. I contracted for it, worked for it, collected it; it was paid to
me, and it was rightfully my own; and yet upon every returning
Saturday night, this money—my own hard earnings, every cent of it
—was demanded of me and taken from me by Master Hugh. He did
not earn it; he had no hand in earning it; why, then, should he have
it? I owed him nothing. He had given me no schooling, and I had
received from him only my food and raiment; and for these my
services were supposed to pay from the first. The right to take my
earnings was the right of the robber. He had the power to compel me
to give him the fruits of my labor, and this power was his only right in
the case. I became more and more dissatisfied with this state of
things, and in so becoming I only gave proof of the same human
nature which every reader of this chapter in my life—slaveholder, or
non-slaveholder—is conscious of possessing.
To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It
is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as
possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to
detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man who takes his
earnings must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to
do so. It must not depend upon mere force: the slave must know no
higher law than his master’s will. The whole relationship must not
only demonstrate to his mind its necessity, but its absolute
rightfulness. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can
fall, it will certainly rust off the slave’s chain.
 CHAPTER XXI.
ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY.

Closing incidents in my “Life as a Slave”—Discontent—Suspicions—Master’s

generosity—Difficulties in the way of escape—Plan to obtain money—
Allowed to hire my time—A gleam of hope—Attend camp-meeting—Anger
of Master Hugh—The result—Plans of escape—Day for departure fixed—
Harassing doubts and fears—Painful thoughts of separation from friends.

MY condition during the year of my escape (1838) was

comparatively a free and easy one, so far, at least, as the wants of
the physical man were concerned; but the reader will bear in mind
that my troubles from the beginning had been less physical than
mental, and he will thus be prepared to find that slave life was
adding nothing to its charms for me as I grew older, and became
more and more acquainted with it. The practice from week to week
of openly robbing me of all my earnings, kept the nature and
character of slavery constantly before me. I could be robbed by
indirection, but this was too open and barefaced to be endured. I
could see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the
reward of my honest toil into the purse of my master. My obligation to
do this vexed me, and the manner in which Master Hugh received
my wages vexed me yet more. Carefully counting the money, and
rolling it out dollar by dollar, he would look me in the face as if he
would search my heart as well as my pocket, and reproachfully ask
me, “Is that all?”—implying that I had perhaps kept back part of my
wages; or, if not so, the demand was made possibly to make me feel
that after all, I was an “unprofitable servant.” Draining me of the last
cent of my hard earnings, he would, however, occasionally, when I
brought home an extra large sum, dole out to me a sixpence or a
shilling, with a view, perhaps, of kindling up my gratitude. But it had
the opposite effect; it was an admission of my right to the whole sum.
The fact that he gave me any part of my wages, was proof that he
suspected I had a right to the whole of them; and I always felt
uncomfortable after having received anything in this way, lest his
giving me a few cents might possibly ease his conscience, and make
him feel himself to be a pretty honorable robber after all.
Held to a strict account, and kept under a close watch,—the old
suspicion of my running away not having been entirely removed,—to
accomplish my escape seemed a very difficult thing. The railroad
from Baltimore to Philadelphia was under regulations so stringent
that even free colored travelers were almost excluded. They must
have free papers; they must be measured and carefully examined
before they could enter the cars, and could go only in the day time;
even when so examined. The steamboats were under regulations
equally stringent. And still more, and worse than all, all the great
turnpikes leading northward were beset with kidnappers; a class of
men who watched the newspapers for advertisements for runaway
slaves, thus making their living by the accursed reward of slave-
hunting.
My discontent grew upon me, and I was on a constant lookout
for means to get away. With money I could easily have managed the
matter, and from this consideration I hit upon the plan of soliciting the
privilege of hiring my time. It was quite common in Baltimore to allow
slaves this privilege, and was the practice also in New Orleans. A
slave who was considered trustworthy could, by paying his master a
definite sum regularly, at the end of each week, dispose of his time
as he liked. It so happened that I was not in very good odor, and I
was far from being a trustworthy slave. Nevertheless, I watched my
opportunity when Master Thomas came to Baltimore (for I was still
his property, Hugh only acting as his agent) in the spring of 1838, to
purchase his spring supply of goods, and applied to him directly for
the much-coveted privilege of hiring my time. This request Master
Thomas unhesitatingly refused to grant; and he charged me, with
some sternness, with inventing this stratagem to make my escape.
He told me I could go nowhere but he would catch me; and, in the
event of my running away, I might be assured he should spare no
pains in his efforts to recapture me. He recounted, with a good deal
of eloquence, the many kind offices he had done me, and exhorted
me to be contented and obedient. “Lay out no plans for the future,”
said he; “if you behave yourself properly, I will take care of you.”
Now, kind and considerate as this offer was, it failed to soothe me
into repose. In spite of all Master Thomas had said, and in spite of
my own efforts to the contrary, the injustice and wickedness of
slavery was always uppermost in my thoughts, strengthening my
purpose to make my escape at the earliest moment possible.
About two months after applying to Master Thomas for the
privilege of hiring my time, I applied to Master Hugh for the same
liberty, supposing him to be unacquainted with the fact that I had
made a similar application to Master Thomas, and had been refused.
My boldness in making this request fairly astounded him at first. He
gazed at me in amazement. But I had many good reasons for
pressing the matter, and, after listening to them awhile, he did not
absolutely refuse, but told me he would think of it. There was hope
for me in this. Once master of my own time, I felt sure that I could
make over and above my obligation to him, a dollar or two every
week. Some slaves had made enough in this way to purchase their
freedom. It was a sharp spur to their industry; and some of the most
enterprising colored men in Baltimore hired themselves in that way.
After mature reflection, as I suppose it was, Master Hugh
granted me the privilege in question, on the following terms: I was to
be allowed all my time; to make all bargains for work, and to collect
my own wages; and in return for this liberty, I was required or obliged
to pay him three dollars at the end of each week, and to board and
clothe myself, and buy my own calking tools. A failure in any of these
particulars would put an end to the privilege. This was a hard
bargain. The wear and tear of clothing, the losing and breaking of
tools, and the expense of board made it necessary for me to earn at
least six dollars per week to keep even with the world. All who are
acquainted with calking know how uncertain and irregular that
employment is. It can be done to advantage only in dry weather, for it
is useless to put wet oakum into a ship’s seam. Rain or shine,
however, work or no work, at the end of each week the money must
be forthcoming.
Master Hugh seemed much pleased with this arrangement for a
time; and well he might be, for it was decidedly in his favor. It
relieved him of all anxiety concerning me. His money was sure. He
had armed my love of liberty with a lash and a driver far more
efficient than any I had before known; and while he derived all the
benefits of slaveholding by the arrangement, without its evils, I
endured all the evils of being a slave, and yet suffered all the care
and anxiety of a responsible freeman. “Nevertheless,” thought I, “it is
a valuable privilege—another step in my career toward freedom.” It
was something even to be permitted to stagger under the
disadvantages of liberty, and I was determined to hold on to the
newly gained footing by all proper industry. I was ready to work by
night as by day, and being in the possession of excellent health, I
was not only able to meet my current expenses, but also to lay by a
small sum at the end of each week. All went on thus from the month
of May till August; then, for reasons which will become apparent as I
proceed, my much-valued liberty was wrested from me.
During the week previous to this calamitous event, I had made
arrangements with a few young friends to accompany them on
Saturday night to a camp-meeting, to be held about twelve miles
from Baltimore. On the evening of our intended start for the camp-
ground, something occurred in the ship-yard where I was at work
which detained me unusually late, and compelled me either to
disappoint my friends, or to neglect carrying my weekly dues to
Master Hugh. Knowing that I had the money and could hand it to him
on another day, I decided to go to camp-meeting, and to pay him the
three dollars for the past week on my return. Once on the camp-
ground, I was induced to remain one day longer than I had intended
when I left home. But as soon as I returned I went directly to his
home on Fell street to hand him his (my) money. Unhappily the fatal
mistake had been made. I found him exceedingly angry. He
exhibited all the signs of apprehension and wrath which a
slaveholder might be surmised to exhibit on the supposed escape of
a favorite slave. “You rascal! I have a great mind to give you a sound
whipping. How dare you go out of the city without first asking and
obtaining my permission?” “Sir,” I said, “I hired my time and paid you
the price you asked for it. I did not know that it was any part of the
bargain that I should ask you when or where I should go.” “You did
not know, you rascal! You are bound to show yourself here every
Saturday night.” After reflecting a few moments, he became
somewhat cooled down; but evidently greatly troubled, he said:
“Now, you scoundrel, you have done for yourself; you shall hire your
time no longer. The next thing I shall hear of will be your running
away. Bring home your tools at once. I’ll teach you how to go off in
this way.”
Thus ended my partial freedom. I could hire my time no longer;
and I obeyed my master’s orders at once. The little taste of liberty
which I had had—although as it will be seen, that taste was far from
being unalloyed, by no means enhanced my contentment with
slavery. Punished by Master Hugh, it was now my turn to punish him.
“Since,” thought I, “you will make a slave of me, I will await your
order in all things.” So, instead of going to look for work on Monday
morning, as I had formerly done, I remained at home during the
entire week, without the performance of a single stroke of work.
Saturday night came, and he called upon me as usual for my wages.
I, of course, told him I had done no work, and had no wages. Here
we were at the point of coming to blows. His wrath had been
accumulating during the whole week; for he evidently saw that I was
making no effort to get work, but was most aggravatingly awaiting his
orders in all things. As I look back to this behavior of mine, I scarcely
know what possessed me, thus to trifle with one who had such
unlimited power to bless or blast me. Master Hugh raved, and swore
he would “get hold of me,” but wisely for him, and happily for me, his
wrath employed only those harmless, impalpable missiles which roll
from a limber tongue. In my desperation I had fully made up my mind
to measure strength with him, in case he should attempt to execute
his threats. I am glad there was no occasion for this, for resistance to
him could not have ended so happily for me as it did in the case of
Covey. Master Hugh was not a man to be safely resisted by a slave;
and I freely own that in my conduct toward him, in this instance,
there was more folly than wisdom. He closed his reproofs by telling
me that hereafter I need give myself no uneasiness about getting
work; he “would himself see to getting work for me, and enough of it
at that.” This threat, I confess, had some terror in it, and on thinking
the matter over during the Sunday, I resolved not only to save him
the trouble of getting me work, but that on the third day of September
I would attempt to make my escape. His refusal to allow me to hire
my time therefore hastened the period of my flight. I had three weeks
in which to prepare for my journey.
Once resolved, I felt a certain degree of repose, and on Monday
morning, instead of waiting for Master Hugh to seek employment for
me, I was up by break of day, and off to the ship-yard of Mr. Butler,
on the City Block, near the drawbridge. I was a favorite with Mr.
Butler, and, young as I was, I had served as his foreman, on the
float-stage, at calking. Of course I easily obtained work, and at the
end of the week, which, by the way, was exceedingly fine, I brought
Master Hugh nine dollars. The effect of this mark of returning good
sense on my part, was excellent. He was very much pleased; he
took the money, commended me, and told me I might have done the
same thing the week before. It is a blessed thing that the tyrant may
not always know the thoughts and purposes of his victim. Master
Hugh little knew my plans. The going to camp-meeting without
asking his permission, the insolent answers to his reproaches, the
sulky deportment of the week after being deprived of the privilege of
hiring my time, had awakened the suspicion that I might be
cherishing disloyal purposes. My object, therefore, in working
steadily was to remove suspicion; and in this I succeeded admirably.
He probably thought I was never better satisfied with my condition
than at the very time I was planning my escape. The second week
passed, and I again carried him my full week’s wages—nine dollars;
and so well pleased was he that he gave me twenty-five cents! and
bade me “make good use of it.” I told him I would do so, for one of
the uses to which I intended to put it was to pay my fare on the
“underground railroad.”
Things without went on as usual; but I was passing through the
same internal excitement and anxiety which I had experienced two
years and a half before. The failure in that instance was not
calculated to increase my confidence in the success of this, my
second attempt; and I knew that a second failure could not leave me
where my first did. I must either get to the far North or be sent to the
far South. Besides the exercise of mind from this state of facts, I had
the painful sensation of being about to separate from a circle of
honest and warm-hearted friends. The thought of such a separation,
where the hope of ever meeting again was excluded, and where
there could be no correspondence, was very painful. It is my opinion
that thousands more would have escaped from slavery but for the
strong affection which bound them to their families, relatives, and
friends. The daughter was hindered by the love she bore her mother,
and the father by the love he bore his wife and children, and so on to
the end of the chapter. I had no relations in Baltimore, and I saw no
probability of ever living in the neighborhood of sisters and brothers;
but the thought of leaving my friends was the strongest obstacle to
my running away. The last two days of the week, Friday and
Saturday, were spent mostly in collecting my things together for my
journey. Having worked four days that week for my master, I handed
him six dollars on Saturday night. I seldom spent my Sundays at
home, and for fear that something might be discovered in my
conduct, I kept up my custom and absented myself all day. On
Monday, the third day of September, 1838, in accordance with my
resolution, I bade farewell to the city of Baltimore, and to that slavery
which had been my abhorrence from childhood.
His Present Home in Washington.
SECOND PART
 CHAPTER I.
ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY.

Reasons for not having revealed the manner of escape—Nothing of romance

in the method—Danger—Free Papers—Unjust tax—Protection papers
—“Free trade and sailors’ rights”—American eagle—Railroad train—
Unobserving conductor—Capt. McGowan—Honest German—Fears—
Safe arrival in Philadelphia—Ditto in New York.

IN the first narrative of my experience in slavery, written nearly forty

years ago, and in various writings since, I have given the public what
I considered very good reasons for withholding the manner of my
escape. In substance these reasons were, first, that such publication
at any time during the existence of slavery might be used by the
master against the slave, and prevent the future escape of any who
might adopt the same means that I did. The second reason was, if
possible, still more binding to silence—for publication of details
would certainly have put in peril the persons and property of those
who assisted. Murder itself was not more sternly and certainly
punished in the State of Maryland, than that of aiding and abetting
the escape of a slave. Many colored men, for no other crime than
that of giving aid to a fugitive slave, have, like Charles T. Torrey,
perished in prison. The abolition of slavery in my native State and
throughout the country, and the lapse of time, render the caution
hitherto observed no longer necessary. But even since the abolition
of slavery, I have sometimes thought it well enough to baffle curiosity
by saying that while slavery existed there were good reasons for not
telling the manner of my escape, and since slavery had ceased to
exist there was no reason for telling it. I shall now, however, cease to
avail myself of this formula, and, as far as I can, endeavor to satisfy
this very natural curiosity. I should perhaps have yielded to that
feeling sooner, had there been anything very heroic or thrilling in the
incidents connected with my escape, for I am sorry to say I have
nothing of that sort to tell; and yet the courage that could risk
betrayal and the bravery which was ready to encounter death if need
be, in pursuit of freedom, were essential features in the undertaking.
My success was due to address rather than courage; to good luck
rather than bravery. My means of escape were provided for me by
the very men who were making laws to hold and bind me more
securely in slavery. It was the custom in the State of Maryland to
require of the free colored people to have what were called free
papers. This instrument they were required to renew very often, and
by charging a fee for this writing, considerable sums from time to
time were collected by the State. In these papers the name, age,
color, height, and form of the free man were described, together with
any scars or other marks upon his person, which could assist in his
identification. This device of slaveholding ingenuity, like other
devices of wickedness, in some measure defeated itself—since
more than one man could be found to answer the same general
description. Hence many slaves could escape by personating the
owner of one set of papers; and this was often done as follows: A
slave nearly or sufficiently answering the description set forth in the
papers, would borrow or hire them till he could by their means
escape to a free State, and then, by mail or otherwise, return them to
the owner. The operation was a hazardous one for the lender as well
as the borrower. A failure on the part of the fugitive to send back the
papers would imperil his benefactor, and the discovery of the papers
in possession of the wrong man would imperil both the fugitive and
his friend. It was therefore an act of supreme trust on the part of a
freeman of color thus to put in jeopardy his own liberty that another
might be free. It was, however, not unfrequently bravely done, and
was seldom discovered. I was not so fortunate as to sufficiently
resemble any of my free acquaintances as to answer the description
of their papers. But I had one friend—a sailor—who owned a sailor’s
protection, which answered somewhat the purpose of free papers—
describing his person, and certifying to the fact that he was a free
American sailor. The instrument had at its head the American eagle,
which gave it the appearance at once of an authorized document.
This protection did not, when in my hands, describe its bearer very
accurately. Indeed, it called for a man much darker than myself, and
close examination of it would have caused my arrest at the start. In
order to avoid this fatal scrutiny on the part of the railroad official, I