D U R A S. T H E D E B U T.

From renowned author of The Lover, her first novel,

never before published in English

Translated by Kelsey L. Haskett and including an essay by Jean Vallier

Coming in March 2021 from The New Press

www.thenewpress.com
 Kwame Anthony Appiah:
We Are All Veblenians Now
Diane Ravitch:
The War on Public Schools
 Smart Books for Thoughtful Readers
The Opening of the American Hooked
Mind Art and Attachment
Ten Years of “ The Point” Rita Felski
The Point “Hooked is a marvelous achievement. It is a
With an Introduction by Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg rousing book that returns to one of the main
“I am so grateful a venue as brilliantly multifaceted questions at the heart of Felski’s scholarship—
and fearless as The Point is celebrating its first how people become attached to particular
decade of intellectual stewardship. The American works of literature or art.”
mind remains open.” —James English, University of Pennsylvania
—Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Paper $22.50
Self-Portrait in Black and White
Paper $18.00

Wild Thought Thinking Out of Sight

A New Translation of “La Pensée Writings on the Arts of the Visible
Sauvage” Jacques Derrida
Claude Lévi-Strauss Edited by Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas
Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt With New Translations by Laurent Milesi
“In engaging and delightful prose, Wild “This wonderful collection brings together several
Thought lets Anglophone readers at last of Derrida’s most beautiful and wildly engaging
relish the sheer joyousness and ingenuity thoughts on the visual and performing arts. Together,
of an unparalleled intellectual adventure.” they suggest that the arts are never just art; they are
—Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen different modes of thinking and writing.”
Paper $20.00 —Eduardo L. Cadava, Princeton University
The France Chicago Collection
Cloth $45.00

The Angel in the Unspeakable

Marketplace A Life beyond Sexual Morality
Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Rachel Hope Cleves
Selling of America “Unspeakable is deeply original, nuanced,
Ellen Wayland-Smith and bold. In sharp and often witty prose,
“Wayland-Smith illuminates one woman’s Cleves uses the life of Norman Douglas as
journey from advocating traditional notions of a way to pry open deep-seated (although
women’s place and the benefits of capitalism relatively recent) assumptions about sex, age,
to questioning the underlying message of the and power.”—James R. Kincaid, University of
ads she produced.”—Kathy Peiss, author of Southern California
Hope in a Jar Cloth $35.00
Cloth $30.00

Feminisms Queer Legacies

A Global History Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives
Lucy Delap John D’Emilio
“This outstanding work takes a thematic “Makes a convincing case for the power of
approach to the topic of global feminist his- storytelling to build communities and move-
tory to provide a unified vision that main- ments, and the importance of archival records in
tains appropriate nuance. . . . It’s masterful.” preserving ‘a proud heritage of resistance.’ This
—New Books in Gender Studies sparkling account has much to offer LGBTQ
Cloth $27.50 historians and activists.”—Publishers Weekly
Paper $18.00

The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

Contents
4 Brenda Wineapple The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934 by Carl Rollyson
The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 by Carl Rollyson

8
12
Jackson Lears
Susan Tallman
The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum
Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting by Robert Storr, with a chronology compiled
AF TERMATH
by Amanda Renshaw
Philip Guston by Musa Mayer
Philip Guston Now by Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin
and a chronology by Jennifer Roberts and Harry Cooper
Poor Richard by Philip Guston, with an afterword by Harry Cooper
Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 an exhibition at Hauser and Wirth, Los Angeles,
September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020
Catalog of the exhibition by Musa Mayer
15 Claire Messud Alison Lurie (1926–2020)
16 Stephen Greenblatt Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
18 Jenny Uglow Planting the World: Joseph Banks and His Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany
by Jordan Goodman
21 J. Hoberman Mank a film written by Jack Fincher and directed by David Fincher
The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics by Sydney Ladensohn Stern
23 Geoffrey O’Brien The Hitler Conspiracies by Richard J. Evans
26 Gavin Francis Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness by Anne Harrington
This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health: A Journey into the Heartland of Psychiatry
by Nathan Filer
27 Ishion Hutchinson Poem
29 Louise Glück The Poet and the Reader: Nobel Lecture 2020
30 Cass R. Sunstein Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller
PA U L B E T T S
33 Lynn Emanuel Poem
34 Adam Kirsch The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1 by Peter Weiss, translated from the German
by Joachim Neugroschel, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson and a glossary by Robert Cohen
The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 2 by Peter Weiss, translated from the German
RUIN AND
36 Diane Ravitch
by Joel Scott, with an afterword by Jürgen Schutte
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart
RENE WAL
Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement by Steve Suitts
Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek W. Black Civilizing Europe After
39 Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
41 James Romm A History of the Jewish War, AD 66 –74 by Steve Mason
World War II
Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth by Jodi Magness
43 Gillian White Memory by Bernadette Mayer
Piece of Cake by Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh
48 Ferdinand Mount Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution by David A. Bell
“Ruin and Renewal is an
51 Kwame Anthony Appiah Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics by Charles Camic erudite, rigorously researched,
54 Letters from Tim Brennan and Andrew Delbanco
and elegantly written account
CONTRIBUTORS of the postwar remaking of
KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH teaches philosophy at NYU. His lat- CLAIRE MESSUD’s latest book is Kant’s Little Prussian Head and
est books are As If: Idealization and Ideals and The Lies That Bind:
Rethinking Identity.
Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays. Europe. . . . A masterpiece.”
FERDINAND MOUNT is the former Editor of the Times Literary
LYNN EMANUEL’s most recent collection, The Nerve of It: Poems Supplement. His most recent book is Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many — D AV I D M O TA D E L,
New and Selected, won the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy Lives of Aunt Munca.
of American Poets. Her forthcoming collection is Transcript of the Dis- London School of Economics
GEOFFREY O’BRIEN’s most recent books are Where Did Poetry
appearance, Exact and Diminishing.
Come From and the poetry collection Who Goes There.
GAVIN FRANCIS is a physician in Edinburgh. He has won several
awards for his books, which include Empire Antarctica and Adventures EMMANUEL ORDÓÑEZ ANGULO is a Ph.D. candidate in phi-
losophy at Oxford.
in Human Being. His latest book, Intensive Care, about his experience “Ruin and Renewal is
during the Covid-19 pandemic, will be published in the UK in January. DIANE RAVITCH is a historian of American education. Her most
LOUISE GLÜCK’s most recent poetry collection is Faithful and Vir- recent book is Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatiza- a marvelously subtle and
tuous Night, which won the National Book Award. A new collection, tion and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.
Winter Recipes from the Collective, will be published in the fall of 2021. JAMES ROMM is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at wide-ranging exploration of the
She is the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Bard. His book The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers
STEPHEN GREENBLATT is the Cogan University Professor of the Fighting to Save Greek Freedom will be published in June. ways in which Europe rebuilt
Humanities at Harvard. He is the author of Will in the World: How
Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,
CASS R. SUNSTEIN is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at itself materially and morally
Harvard. His latest book, Too Much Information, was published this
among other books.
J. HOBERMAN’s most recent book is Make My Day: Movie Culture
fall. after the Second World War.
SUSAN TALLMAN is an art historian living in Massachusetts and
in the Age of Reagan.
Berlin. She is currently working on a book about the prints of Kerry . . . Essential reading for anyone
ISHION HUTCHINSON is the author of two books of poems, Far James Marshall.
District and House of Lords and Commons.
JENNY UGLOW is the author of In These Times: Living in Britain
who wants to understand
ADAM KIRSCH is an Editor at The Wall Street Journal’s weekend
Review section and the author, most recently, of The Blessing and the
Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815 and Nature’s Engraver: A Life of
Thomas Bewick, among other books.
the world of today.”
Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the 20th Century.
JACKSON LEARS is Board of Governors Distinguished Profes- GILLIAN WHITE is the author of Lyric Shame. She teaches English — M A R G A R E T M A C M I L L A N,
sor of History at Rutgers, Editor in Chief of Raritan, and the author at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
University of Oxford
of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920, BRENDA WINEAPPLE is the author of The Impeachers: The Trial of
among other books. Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, among other books.

Editors: Emily Greenhouse, Gabriel Winslow-Yost Founding Editors: Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) “This book succeeds in
Senior Editors: Eve Bowen, Prudence Crowther, Publisher: Rea S. Hederman
Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen casting new light on a critical
Senior Editor, Poetry: Jana Prikryl
Editor-at-Large: Daniel Mendelsohn European legacy of liberal and
Maya Chung, Nawal Arjini, and Willa Glickman, Editorial Assistants; Aurora Ferrer and Jose Nieves Herrera, Editorial Interns; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher;
Katie Jefferis, Daniel Drake, and Will Simpson, Type Production; Kazue Soma Jensen, Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Michael moderate values, one that may
King, Technical Director; Sharmaine Ong, Advertising Associate; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice Fellegara, Director of
Marketing and Planning; Andrea Moore, Assistant Circulation Manager; Matthew Howard, Editorial Director, Digital; Angela Hederman, Special Projects;
Diane R. Seltzer, Office Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights; Max Margenau, Comptroller; Teddy Wright, Receptionist; Microfilm and Microcard Services:
again be in danger today.”
NAPC , 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.
nybooks.com: Matt Seaton, Editor; Lucy McKeon, Associate Editor.
— A N D R E W M O R AV C S I K,
Foreign Affairs
Ŷ Batya Ungar-Sargon: A Lost Era of Popular Journalism Ŷ Menaka Guruswamy: India’s ‘Love Jihad’ Myth Made Law
What’s new on
Ŷ Dan Chiasson: College Cuts Wound the Liberal Arts Ŷ Shannon Pufahl: The Trouble with Lesbian Cinema
nybooks.com Plus, David Salle and Sarah French on Robert Rauschenberg’s photographic inspiration, and more . . .
basicbooks.com

On the cover: Philip Guston, Kettle (detail), 1978 (Estate of Philip Guston/Hauser and Wirth/Philadelphia Museum of Art).
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, June, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April,
May, July, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001
and at additional offices. Canada Post Corp. Sales Agreement #40031306. Postmaster: Send address changes to The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big Sandy,
TX 75755-9310. Subscription services: www.nybooks.com/customer-service, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info, or call 800-354-0050 in the US, 903-636-1101 elsewhere.

3
 ‘A Land Where the Dead Past Walks’
Brenda Wineapple
The Life of William Faulkner: less, no refuse save the printed books.”

Magnum Photos
The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934 No such luck.
by Carl Rollyson. For a good reason. He shirked noth-
University of Virginia Press, ing. He set his infuriating gradualism
476 pp., $34.95 and his belief that the South should
work out its own salvation alongside
The Life of William Faulkner: his scorching denunciation of the white
This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 South, of slavery, of snobbery, and of
by Carl Rollyson. greed. He severely judged those white
University of Virginia Press, people who, he wrote in Absalom, Ab-
622 pp., $34.95 salom! (1936), “erected its economic
edifice not on the rock of stern mo-
The Saddest Words: rality but on the shifting sands of op-
William Faulkner’s Civil War portunism and moral brigandage.” He
by Michael Gorra. exposed the provincialism, sentimen-
Liveright, 433 pp., $29.95 tality, paternalism—and nostalgia—
that to him represented the shame and
Last spring, after the world saw the failure and, yes, even the so-called
video of the murder of George Floyd, dignity of the white South. It’s not
few Americans could turn an oblivious too hard to see him in the apparently
eye to the racism and violence that are mixed-race character Joe Christmas of
part of the brutal, inhuman legacy of Light in August (1932): “He carried his
slavery. Coincidentally, as protesters knowledge with him always as though it
demanding justice packed the streets, were a banner, with a quality ruthless,
William Faulkner rode into town, lonely, and almost proud.”
the subject of two major studies: Carl Famously, Faulkner had also said in
Rollyson’s massive, well-researched his Nobel speech that “the problems
two-volume biography and Michael of the human heart in conflict with it-
Gorra’s eloquent analysis of how the self . . . alone can make good writing.”
Civil War ricochets throughout his Certainly he was ambivalent and op-
best-known novels. positional, even with himself, about
Of course, Faulkner hasn’t been the South, which is to say about white
neglected: there are at least a dozen supremacy, racial injustice, the planter
major biographies and countless schol- culture, and women, both Black and
arly studies, essays, and dissertations. white. Ambivalence endowed his in-
He’s a veritable cottage industry. ventive prose with its haunting reso-
But these new books remind us that nance: the iteration and reiteration
we seem always to be trying to solve of points of view, perspectives, and
Faulkner, as if he were a riddle. For restive narrative voices that push his
there are competing and not always novels forward and inward at the same
compatible Faulkners: the modern- time.
ist Faulkner is an experimentalist re- Early on, Faulkner converted disori-
spected internationally by filmmakers entation and uncertainty into tools of
like Jean-Luc Godard and writers like inquiry, for he didn’t intend to write a
Gabriel García Márquez and Edouard foursquare novel verité or protest liter-
Glissant who admire his lush, long sen- ature. Instead, he reconstructed history
tences, accumulating modifiers and from the perspectives of those living in
self- correcting syntax—all the ways William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi, 1947; photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson it and trying, like him, to puzzle out
he conveys consciousness in dialogue its meaning. “Memory believes before
with itself. In 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre which had taken up Lucy’s case, to “go lic debate to be held on the steps of knowing remembers,” he observed in
said that for young people in France, slow now.” As he further explained the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, Light in August, one of his greatest
“Faulkner c’est un dieu.” to Russell Warren Howe of the Lon- where the men who had killed the novels. There, the Reverend Gail High-
Then there’s the humanistic Faulk- don Sunday Times, “as long as there’s fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 tower, whose life “had already ceased
ner who declared, when accepting the a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it.” had been immediately acquitted by an before it began,” cannot relinquish the
Nobel Prize in literature in 1950, that But if troops were sent to the South to all-white jury. Faulkner declined. “We life before him, hearing over and over
we possess “a spirit capable of compas- integrate the schools and “it came to both agree in advance that the position “the troops galloping past toward the
sion and sacrifice and endurance,” that fighting,” he continued, “I’d fight for you will take is right morally legally rallying bugles.” Four years later, in the
we will not and cannot perish because of Mississippi against the United States and ethically,” he wired Du Bois. He dazzling Absalom, Absalom!, through
that spirit, and that “the poet’s, the writ- even if it meant going out into the street insisted he was just being practical; he overlapping narrators who speak in
er’s, duty is to write about these things.” and shooting Negroes.” was concerned for Autherine Lucy’s long, sinuous sentences about the near
Critics nodded approvingly, calling him life. “If we in America have reached and faraway past, Faulkner replies to
an American Balzac who created a that point in our desperate culture the question he posed to himself: “Tell
human comedy out of the hamlets and His remarks stunned his admirers. when we must murder children,” he had about the South,” a college student
backwoods of Mississippi, the Amer- “Faulkner has delusions of grandeur,” declared after Till was murdered, “no from Canada asks his southern room-
ican who had absorbed John Donne Ralph Ellison wrote to Albert Mur- matter for what reason or what color, mate. “What’s it like there. What do
and Dickens as well as Cervantes and ray. “Sad, pitiful and stupid thing for a we don’t deserve to survive, and prob- they do there. Why do they live there.
Conrad and the Bible. “With Faulkner, writer like that to do,” Murray replied. ably won’t.” In a letter to the Memphis Why do they live at all.”
the big picture is everything,” Edmund Langston Hughes sardonically wondered Commercial Appeal, he was mocked as
Wilson praised him. “He went out on if the great white writer would soon have “Weeping Willie.”
every limb,” Eudora Welty said, “that his passport confiscated; after all, Paul The Faulkner chronicler, then, has to Carl Rollyson, professor emeritus of
he knew was there.” Robeson had lost his for remarks far less tackle the novelist’s various and often journalism at Baruch College, takes
There’s also the compromised, mor- treasonous. The noted Black journalist unpleasant, if not downright repellent, up these questions, introducing him-
ally suspect Faulkner who, in 1956, Ethel Payne reported that Martin Lu- political positions in light of the ex- self as an unabashed Faulkner enthu-
announced he was as opposed to com- ther King Jr. had warned Faulkner that traordinary meditations on race, rac- siast: “I believe he is a great writer,
pulsory integration as he had been to “the cancer of segregation cannot be ism, violence, and cruelty in his fiction. and all of his work fascinates me and
compulsory segregation. The occasion cured with the vaseline of gradualism.” How to separate the dancer from the has done so for more than fifty years.”
was the attempt of Autherine Lucy, a Faulkner quickly backpedaled, claiming dance; how to understand a high mod- A self-proclaimed “serial biographer”
young Black woman, to enroll at the he’d been drunk when he’d made his re- ernist writer who said that he hoped his whose subjects have included Amy
University of Alabama. Riots broke marks, “statements,” he claimed, “which epitaph would simply read, “He made Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Walter Brennan,
out and she was asked to leave the no sober man would make and, it seems the books, and he died”? He told Mal- Dana Andrews, Marilyn Monroe,
school; later she was expelled. But to me, no sane man believe.” colm Cowley, “It is my ambition to be, and Norman Mailer—to name just a
Faulkner said that on the matter of in- The eighty-eight-year-old W. E. B. as a private individual, abolished and few—Rollyson wrote his first book on
tegration he would advise the NAACP, Du Bois challenged Faulkner to a pub- voided from history, leaving it mark- Faulkner in 1984 and now returns to

4 The New York Review

 Explore Art
with Us
Visit Getty from home with art,
podcasts, videos, and more.
Read, watch, listen, and learn
at getty.edu/art.

1 (detail), negative 1969; print 2008, Robert Kinmont. Gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Robert Kinmont and
Alexander and Bonin, New York. © Robert Kinmont. Text and design: © J. Paul Getty Trust

January 14, 2021 5

his first love, having burrowed through Mississippi. Maud (Butler) Falkner, rape shocked readers, Faulkner was writing and telling the reader, “I want
105 boxes of research materials in the Faulkner’s mother, was an amateur hailed as the “Dostoevsky of the South.” to pause over it.” And he movingly
Carvel Collins collection at the Univer- painter whom he visited almost every That meant he’d have to answer narrates the debacles at Bull Run and
sity of Texas that Collins, a prospective day, even after he married. And despite questions about the South (What’s it Gettysburg and effortlessly slides from
Faulkner biographer, began to amass his parents’ urging, Faulkner never fin- like there?), which he did—quite con- astute analyses of Faulkner’s best sto-
as early as the 1940s. ished high school, though he briefly troversially. He said that Blacks were ries, like “Mountain Victory,” to such
Although these materials, particu- attended the University of Mississippi probably better off under slavery and novels as The Sound and the Fury, The
larly the interviews, provide Rollyson’s at Oxford and, after World War I, was that he envisioned “a kind of ‘benev- Unvanquished (1938), and Go Down,
volumes with texture, or what he calls able to enroll as a veteran. Fascinated olent autocracy’ as the ideal condition Moses (1942)—the latter “never quite
“the minute particulars that Boswell by aviation, he had enlisted in the Brit- for the Negroes.” As Rollyson says, he the novel one wants it to be,” Gorra
and Johnson extolled in their concep- ish air force in 1918, presumably be- remained an unreconstructed south- writes, “yet much of it also brings me
tion of biography,” they do not add any- cause he thought he’d quickly be in the erner. Still, two decades later, when to tears.”
thing startling to what’s already known. cockpit, but within months the war was the somewhat but not wholly changed He gently counsels the reader on
Rather, Rollyson’s signal contribution over, and he’d never left camp in To- Faulkner again answered questions, Faulkner’s use of dialect: “The ques-
to Faulkner studies is his claim that ronto. Back in Oxford Faulkner liked this time about civil rights, and said tion isn’t whether or not Faulkner has
Faulkner didn’t entirely spurn the Hol- to parade around town in his uniform; “go slow,” Rollyson generously charac- a right to this material. It’s one of exe-
lywood screenplays he worked on in a dandy with what Rollyson calls a terizes him as a white southern moder- cution. Just how does he present these
the 1930s and then again in the 1940s “performative personality,” he walked ate who characters?” No Faulkner apologist,
when he needed cash. (Chief among with a limp, pretending he’d been he also notes that Faulkner used racial
them are To Have and Have Not, Mil- wounded in the war. He composed saw the civil rights struggle in con- epithets almost every day, regressing or
dred Pierce, and The Big Sleep, as well overheated poetry and a verse play, servative terms, as did some black reverting to the Jim Crow South of his
as many uncredited ones, which Rolly- drew and designed booklets containing people, who wrote to him fearing youth; then again, “in fiction,” Gorra
son examines at length.) For by 1944, his own artwork, and soon dropped out for themselves because of the mil- writes, “he was able to stand outside
Faulkner’s reputation in America was of school again. His classmates called itancy of civil rights organizations his Oxford, his Jefferson, and see the
in shambles, and most of his books him “Count No ’Count.” like the NAACP, and many white behavior his people take for granted,
were out of print; no one much cared people, who wrote to vilify him for the things they don’t even question.”
what he said, if indeed he said anything supporting integration. But to grasp what Faulkner may have
at all. He owed back taxes, he owed his In New Orleans, where he had gone heard or believed about Reconstruc-
publishers, and he was the sole support to write, Faulkner met Sherwood An- Yet as Thurgood Marshall reportedly tion, he explains the prejudices of the
of a large extended family. derson and members of what Rolly- said of Faulkner’s advice, “go slow” academic historian William Dunning,
A native Mississippian, William son calls an “Algonquin Round Table usually means “don’t go.” who claimed that the Reconstruction
Cuthbert Falkner (he added the “u” South.” Abandoning poetry for fiction amendments were a tragic mistake.
around 19181) was born in 1897 in New and encouraged by Anderson, in 1925 Dunning produced several histories
Albany, not far from Oxford, where he sent a copy of his first novel, Sol- Although Michael Gorra’s graceful and launched the careers of graduate
he lived most of his life and which he diers’ Pay (1926), to Anderson’s pub- The Saddest Words: William Faulk- students who helped celebrate the so-
would recreate as the town of Jefferson lisher Horace Liveright, who brought it ner’s Civil War is also a labor of love, called Lost Cause, which, for white
in the fictional county of Yoknapataw- out along with Faulkner’s second novel, it’s of a far more troubled and penetrat- southerners, came to mean that they
pha, his “little postage stamp of native Mosquitoes (1927); neither was partic- ing kind. The Mary Augusta Jordan were a chosen people and their society
soil,” as he called it. The year before ularly successful, and both dealt with Professor of English at Smith College divinely ordered, with white men at its
his birth, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Su- the disillusion that the war dealt to the and the author of the richly layered apex.
preme Court legalized racial segrega- postwar “lost generation.” Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and Gorra also turns briefly to Freud’s
tion; in 1962, the year he died, James When Liveright rejected his third the Making of an American Master- Moses and Monotheism and a defini-
Meredith desegregated the all-white novel, Flags in the Dust (reworked, piece (2012), Gorra asks just how we tion of trauma; Faulkner’s characters
University of Mississippi in Faulkner’s cut, and published as Sartoris by Har- should read the vexing novelist in 2020. frequently reel from losses they haven’t
hometown, though federal troops had court, Brace), Rollyson contends that The answer lies in a nimble hybrid that experienced firsthand. He then re-
to ensure his safety. When Faulkner he “made a colossal mistake,” and blends literary analyses with history, counts walking with his wife and daugh-
was almost eleven, a mob broke into that with this book, “the subversion in biography, and personal narrative. ter in Hamburg, Germany, where they
the local jail and dragged out Nelse white hegemony in Faulkner’s fiction Focusing his considerable critical came across Gunter Demnig’s “stum-
Patton, a Black man accused of killing has just begun.” In his next novel, The acumen on the way Faulkner imagines ble stones”—Stolpersteine—that mark
a white woman. The former US senator Sound and the Fury (1929), Rollyson the past, particularly the Civil War, the place where a victim of the Nazis
William Van Amberg Sullivan boasted argues, characters such as Dilsey, the whose meaning remained unsettled, once lived. These stones supposedly as-
the next day to a reporter, “I led the Black woman employed by the white resonant, and painful for Faulkner—as sist Germans in “the process of work-
mob which lynched Nelse Patton, and Compson family, embodies “a stun- it is for us—Gorra takes the title of his ing through or overcoming through
I’m proud of it.” Between 1889 and ning rebuke to a society built on seg- book from an episode in The Sound the past.”2 To Gorra, the American
1909, “at least 293 blacks were lynched regation and on the ideology of white and the Fury. Quentin Compson’s fa- South’s confrontation with its own past
[in Mississippi], more than in any other supremacy.” ther, whose own father was a Confed- didn’t take public form until Selma or
state in the nation,” Rollyson notes, Back in Oxford, Faulkner wed Estelle erate general, tells his son that “was” Birmingham—or, as Faulkner might
and another Faulkner biographer Oldham, the sweetheart of his youth. is the saddest word of all: or as Gorra have added, until Autherine Lucy cou-
points out that Faulkner “spent the for- Recently divorced, she’d returned to says, “something that was is fixed and rageously enrolled at the University of
mative years of his life in the very midst Oxford with her two young children. unchangeable, forever in the past, an Alabama.
of the radical racist hysteria.” It was a tumultuous marriage: both of event—a mistake—that can be neither Faulkner, in Gorra’s view, possessed
Faulkner’s great-grandfather Wil- them were alcoholics, their firstborn altered nor redressed.” But in Absa- a different kind of courage: “The pen
liam Clark Falkner, a slave owner and died at just nine days old, Faulkner lom, Absalom! Quentin decides that made him honest, and from the begin-
an officer in the Confederate Army, had long affairs with younger women, again is even sadder: “Maybe happen is ning he skinned his eyes at the racial
was fatally shot in the street by a for- and he went on drinking binges pain- never once.” “That’s how it is in Faulk- hierarchy in which a part of him never
mer business partner; Rollyson hints ful to read about and indulged by long- ner’s South,” Gorra writes, “a land stopped believing.” And so he inhab-
that the reason may have been a Black suffering editors like Saxe Commins, where the dead past walks.” ited his universe of fictional characters,
slave woman with whom the Old Col- who often sat by his bedside until he so- And Gorra treads cautiously there. some of whom were far braver than
onel, as he was affectionately known, bered up. But the couple prized the run- Faulkner’s world is complicated, he: “It made him better than he was; it
may have fathered at least one child. down antebellum mansion they bought heart-wrenching, often galling. To give made the books better than the man.”
This and the fact that the Old Colonel in 1930. Built in the 1840s by a wealthy it literary and historical berth, Gorra In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with
had written several novels loom over Tennessee slaveholder, it had no elec- considers Ambrose Bierce’s bitter ac- the Wind, the southern belle Scar-
Faulkner’s life, for stories about him tricity or plumbing or central heating, count of the Battle of Shiloh. He reads lett O’Hara mourns the loss of Tara,
were the stuff of family legend, handed but over the years they refurbished Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore and her plantation home. To her, it sym-
down by J.W.T. Falkner, the novelist’s Rowan Oak, as Faulkner renamed it. the graphic Civil War diary that the pa- bolizes beauty and grace, moonlight
loquacious grandfather, a banker who On the outskirts of town, it stood at trician and Confederate Mary Chesnut and magnolias. Faulkner, though, had
reread Dumas every year and said he the end of a cedar-lined driveway that kept and that the historian C. Vann no such illusions. In Absalom, Ab-
wanted no artists in the family. Faulkner, it was said, kept in disrepair Woodward trimmed. Having intro- salom!, Thomas Sutpen bought or
Faulkner’s father, far less successful to discourage visitors. Or he would uri- duced himself to the reader as a New swindled land from the old Chickasaw
than his forebears, ran a livery stable nate in the bushes to repel nosy tourists. England Yankee, he visits Natchez and chief Ikkemotubbe even though the
and a hardware store before becoming At Rowan Oak Faulkner entered an the battlefield at Gettysburg. He recalls land was not his to sell, and on that
business manager at the University of enormously prolific period, publishing sitting as a boy in a small single-screen land he built his plantation, Sutpen’s
the brilliant As I Lay Dying in 1930, theater where he first watched Victor Hundred, which is synonymous with
1
No one really knows why, though ac- which he claimed he’d written in six Fleming’s Gone with the Wind. He
cording to Joseph Blotner, Faulkner weeks while working the night shift in deftly swerves to a discussion of region- 2
For more on confronting the past in
was the original surname. See Joseph the university’s power plant. The next alism in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country Germany and the American South, see
Blotner, Faulkner (Random House, year, the potboiler Sanctuary appeared, of the Pointed Firs, distinguishing it his “A Heritage of Evil,” The New York
1984), p. 25. and though its description of a horrific from Faulkner’s brand of regional Review, November 7, 2019.

6 The New York Review

 America’s Public Redlining Culture Aimlessness Ulysses by Numbers
Philosopher A Data History of Racial Inequality TOM LUTZ ERIC BULSON
Essays on Social Justice, and Postwar Fiction
“Tom Lutz is an explorer, a tinkerer, “Numbers in literature often have
Economics, Education, and the Future RICHARD JEAN SO a connoisseur, a peripatetic magical or secret meanings, but
of Democracy scholar, a prodigious reader, and a this remarkable book also shows
“A breakthrough in book history,
JOHN DEWEY this pathbreaking study about beguiling writer. His Aimlessness us other, quite startling modes of
Edited and with an introduction by publishing, authorship, race, and invites us to ask how, when, and literary counting, giving us the
Eric Thomas Weber recognition is essential reading.” above all why we set goals for pleasure we find only in the best
ourselves and why perhaps we critical readings: we are surprised
“[Weber] has compiled —Maryemma Graham, founding
sometimes ought not to.” and we wonder what to do with
a magnificent set of essays by director of the Project on
our surprise.”
John Dewey ... With the help the History of Black Writing, —David Wittenberg, author of
of Weber’s commentaries, all University of Kansas Time Travel —Michael Wood, author of
Americans will be able to see how Literature and the Taste of
Dewey still speaks to us today, Knowledge
with wisdom and urgency.”

—Elizabeth Anderson, author of

Private Government
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU
CUPBLOG.ORG

Hubert Harrison The Best American

The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927 Magazine Writing 2020
JEFFREY B. PERRY EDITED BY SID HOLT
FOR THE AMERICAN SOCIETY
“Long-awaited final volume ... Thanks
OF MAGAZINE EDITORS
to Perry’s definitive portrait, it will
no longer be possible to overlook The Best American Magazine
the fierce and flinty polymath who Writing 2020 brings together
was arguably the most brilliant Black outstanding writing, from in-depth
Vineland Reread A Visit from the
radical intellectual of his generation.” reporting to incisive criticism.
—Brent Hayes Edwards, PETER COVIELLO Goon Squad Reread
author of The Practice of Diaspora “Here is a mash note, a fan’s riff, IVAN KREILKAMP
a sizzling study of Pynchon’s
“A brilliant investigation into
most misapprehended book, as
Jennifer Egan’s modern classic.”
Volume I well as a persuasive argument for
its prescience and relevance. ... —Rob Sheffield, author of
Hubert Harrison
We need readers and thinkers like Dreaming the Beatles:
The Voice of Harlem [Coviello] now more than ever.” The Love Story of One Band
Radicalism, 1883-1918 —Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and the Whole World

January 14, 2021 7

slavery, which is synonymous with rapacity and carried on even yet with Sutpen’s Hundred is a dry husk that Gone with the Wind won a Pulitzer
America: “That whole edifice intri- at times downright savagery not only represents greed and moral failure. Prize for fiction. Had there been a cat-
cate and complex,” as Faulkner writes to the human beings but the valuable And Sutpen’s daughter Clytemnestra, egory for truth, Absalom, Absalom!,
in the story “The Bear,” “and founded animals too, yet solvent and efficient.” whose mother had been a slave, burns published the same year, would have
upon injustice and erected by ruthless At the end of Absalom, Absalom! the place to the ground. won it, hands down. Q

Orthodoxy of the Elites

Jackson Lears
Twilight of Democracy: society where money and

Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

The Seductive Lure of merit are conflated, even
Authoritarianism a fair meritocracy would
by Anne Applebaum. implicitly affirm that the
Doubleday, 206 pp., $25.00 rich are rich because they
deserve to be, and the
Democracy is in trouble, and poor have no one to blame
everyone is casting about for but themselves for their
someone to blame. Donald plight. As Michael Sandel
Trump’s grotesque incapac- has recently argued in The
ity to govern has made him Tyranny of Merit, one can
an easy target, but the diffi- hardly overstate the corro-
culties with democracy are sive effect of this belief on
subtler, wider, and deeper. democracy. By dividing the
One clue to their complexity population into winners
is a blog post that appeared and losers, smart people
on the liberal website and stupid ones, the mer-
Daily Kos a month after itocratic myth promotes
Trump’s election in 2016. hubris on one side, humil-
“Be Happy for Coal Miners iation and resentment on
Losing Their Health Insur- the other.
ance,” the headline blared. Any complete vision of
“They’re Getting Exactly democracy includes vig-
What They Voted For.” orous, informed debate
The dismissal is curt and about what constitutes the
callous: clearly, Trump’s common good and how to
victory provoked some promote it. But the merito-
of his opponents to dou- cratic focus on individual
ble down on their hostil- Rocky Branch coal mine, Saline County, Illinois, 2017 striving has converged with
ity toward his supporters. vestigial versions of the
But the blog post also shows—more emanating toward them from his Dem- advisers, who despite their reputation older work ethic to undermine any no-
broadly—that being a liberal Democrat ocratic opponents. And they would not as a Columbia cabal came from public tion of the common good. Even during
no longer means what it once meant. have been mistaken. The Democratic as well as private universities and from a pandemic, the notion that we are all
Sympathy for the working class has, for Party leadership has become estranged various regions of the country. John in this together remains hazy, and the
many, curdled into contempt. By 2016 from its historic base. F. Kennedy glamorized meritocracy by public interest continues to be defined
the concept of “liberal democracy,” The spectacle of liberals jeering at assembling advisers from Ivy League as the sum of myriad private interests.
once bright with promise, had dulled coal miners reveals seismic changes in universities who may have genuinely And since the meritocratic definition
into a neoliberal politics that was neither our larger public discourse. The miners thought of themselves as “the best and of “smart” tends to focus on technical
liberal nor democratic. The Democratic were “getting exactly what they voted the brightest.” But that phrase was problem-solving, meritocracy impov-
Party’s turn toward market- driven pol- for”—exactly what they deserved, in used ironically by David Halberstam, erishes the language of governance—
icies, the bipartisan dismantling of the other words. The belief that people get and the irony only deepened after Hal- reducing public discourse to bland
public sphere, the inflight marriage of what they deserve is rooted in the secu- berstam’s The Best and the Brightest techno-talk.
Wall Street and Silicon Valley in the lar individualist outlook that has legit- revealed highly educated men creating Since the 1990s, cheerleaders for glo-
cockpit of globalization—these inter- imated inequality in the United States the catastrophe of the Vietnam War. balization on both sides of the Atlantic
ventions constituted the long con of for centuries, ever since the Protestant Still, despite Halberstam’s damning have further obfuscated political dis-
neoliberal governance, which enriched ethic began turning into the spirit of indictment, during the post-Vietnam course by announcing that “the new di-
a small minority of Americans while capitalism. Yet visions of a nation of era policymakers increasingly turned vide in rich countries is not between left
ravaging most of the rest. autonomous strivers always coexisted toward meritocratic criteria as a means and right but between open and closed,”
In 2020 the Democrats made little with older ideals of community and for organizing an entire society. as The Economist put it. “Welcome im-
attempt to distance themselves from solidarity—and those ideals resurfaced migrants or keep them out? Open up
that calamitous inheritance. As early in the Great Depression to become the to foreign trade or protect domestic in-
as 2019, Joe Biden himself made clear basis, however limited and imperfect, of No one can deny the need for genuine dustries? Embrace cultural change, or
to the donor class that “nothing would midcentury social democracy. During experts to address public policy ques- resist it?” These questions made clear
fundamentally change” if he were the last four decades, the autonomous tions—the need, say, for well-informed which was the more enlightened choice.
elected and reassured the medical- striving self has returned to the center epidemiologists in a pandemic. But Elite thought leaders from Tony Blair
industrial complex by dismissing any of the success ethic, but featured in a when merit is institutionalized into to Fareed Zakaria to Paul Krugman es-
discussion of single-payer health care. new narrative that has focused less on meritocracy, it becomes an ideology poused versions of that enlightenment.
But he has made no substantial attempt plodding diligence and more on talent, that sanctifies its proponents’ sense of The open or closed duality arrays
to reassure the millions of Americans brains, and credentialed expertise. entitlement to run the nation, maybe the provincial losers in the backwaters,
who have lost jobs or homes or health The emerging outlook deployed a even the world. The current ideology of crippled by closed-minded mistrust
care in recent months. One might technocratic idiom but did not lack a meritocracy makes a further claim as of multicultural diversity, against the
never have known, by following his moral gloss. Neoliberal meritocracy, it well: that nearly all social goods can be open-minded cosmopolitan winners—
campaign, that the US was facing the turned out, was perfectly compatible distributed on the basis of reward for geographically and socially mobile
most serious and protracted economic with identity politics; the party of Clin- merit, which meritocrats have defined devotees of open borders. Those left
depression since the 1930s. So it should ton, Obama, and Biden has depended as technocratic, managerial expertise behind by globalization, who might
come as no surprise that Trump main- on frequent rhetorical bows toward that depends heavily on elite academic have reason to question the benefi-
tained his support among rural and less women and minorities as a crucial credentials. cence of free-flowing capital, can sim-
educated voters and even improved it source of legitimacy. Part of the problem with these as- ply be dismissed as bigots or failures. A
among African-Americans and Lati- With respect to political governance, sumptions is that allegedly meritocratic complex subject deserving democratic
nos. Despite Trump’s bungling, many the historical antecedents of the meri- practices do not reliably transcend class debate is reduced to a morality play.
ordinary Americans may have sensed tocratic ideal can be traced to Franklin privilege, as Ivy League admissions an- Ultimately, meritocracy melds with
indifference if not outright hostility Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” of academic nually demonstrate. But in a market a providentialist outlook that is even

8 The New York Review

 John Cage
The Missing Stone, 1989
Color spit bite aquatint with sugar lift aquatint on smoked paper
54 x 41 inches, 136.16 x 104.14 cm
Edition of 25

info@hirambutler.com

January 14, 2021 9

broader than the one that legitimated Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of De- the ground, are habits of mind that af- order. This, for Applebaum, was the
inequalities in the nineteenth century. mocracy is a contribution to this narra- flict Twilight of Democracy. It is a book grim denouement of the fragile consen-
The winners not only deserve to win, tive. Her career epitomizes the typical that reveals the very malady it sets out sus of 1999—ended friendships, splin-
they are on “the right side of history.” meritocratic blend of achievement en- to dissect, by showing how badly in- tered families, and a nativist movement
Faith in inevitable progress reinforces hanced by privilege and personal con- tellectuals can muck things up when in charge of the state.
the renewed popularity of Joseph nections. For a would-be transatlantic they subordinate intellectual values to Yet the second social gathering,
Schumpeter’s notion of “creative de- intellectual, she was to the manner ideology. Her model would seem to be twenty years on, gave her some grounds
struction”—all those factories closed, born. Her father is a partner in the Julien Benda’s 1927 book La Trahison for resurgent hope. The most encour-
jobs lost, communities hollowed out Washington law firm of Covington des clercs—usually translated as The aging sign, she says, came from
are merely the temporary price the and Burling, which represents a wide Treason of the Intellectuals. Benda’s
working class pays for entrepreneurial range of multinational corporations; use of clercs was intended to be both one group of guests [who] hadn’t
innovation that will eventually bring her mother was a program coordinator dismissive (mere clerks) and descriptive been born at all, or had only re-
greater riches for all. The market’s in its at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (before (thinkers whose ideas served powerful cently been born, in 1999. These
heaven, and all’s right with the world. it was dissolved in 2014). She attended interests). He offered a rationalist’s brief were our sons’ friends from school
The rise of neoliberal politics was the elite Sidwell Friends School, then for transcendental truth and against and university, an eclectic mix of
not a uniquely American development. took a BA at Yale in history and lit- what seemed to him the dominant Poles, other Europeans, and Amer-
Meritocratic mantras justified widen- erature and an MA in international tendencies of the previous several de- icans—from Warsaw, Bydgoszcz,
ing inequality in other societies that relations from the London School of cades—the worship of force, the ele- Connecticut, and south London. . . .
embraced market- driven policies, no- Economics. Her writing has frequently vation of experience over thought, the They mixed English and Polish,
tably the UK and France. But Amer- appeared in these pages, The Econo- “adoration for the contingent, and scorn danced to the same music, knew the
icans, especially those left behind by mist, The Washington Post, and now for the eternal.” The indictment was same songs. No deep cultural dif-
globalization, faced a unique threat. The Atlantic, where she is a staff writer. scattershot and not always accurate, but ferences, no profound civilizational
Since many joined the military in She has published a history of the So- what was most important to Benda’s clashes, no unbridgeable identity
search of economic security, they were viet Gulag, which won a Pulitzer Prize, later admirers was that he had seen the gaps appeared to divide them.
the most likely to become enmeshed in and two accounts of Stalinist crimes in future—the rise of fascism, with its con-
the futile wars on terror, extended into Eastern Europe.* She is a member of tempt for reason and its anti-intellectual Maybe these teenagers are “harbingers
a disastrous campaign to democratize the board of directors of the National cult of incessant action. Rarely have in- of . . . something better, something that
the Middle East. The stage was set for Endowment for Democracy, which has tellectuals been cast in such a prominent we can’t yet imagine,” she muses. Or
Donald Trump. been backing American interventions role in the drama of world events. maybe not.
abroad since the Reagan years. And she The problem for Applebaum as for What is most remarkable about these
has been a fellow at the market-friendly Benda is that they are both clercs, and two social gatherings is the level of eco-
Promising to end endless wars and Washington think tank the American their focus on people like themselves nomic privilege—mobility, opportu-
rebuild American industry, Trump of- Enterprise Institute, where her hus- leads to a neglect of everyone else’s nity, choice—that Applebaum assumes
fered false hope to those who had been band, the Polish politician Radisław experience. Twilight of Democracy is a given among her guests. The book
left jobless by the global flow of capital Sikorski, has also held an appointment. shuttles back and forth between chatty, is largely about highly educated, com-
and damaged in body or mind (or both) Applebaum has been in the right anecdotal accounts of encounters with fortable Europeans, well fed and well
by the idiocies of imperial adventure. place at the right time. Her rapid big players at parties, restaurants, and read. Those Poles who embraced Law
He played shamelessly to racist, mi- rise to prominence reflects her well- bars and cloudy, abstract formulations and Justice after 1999 do not fit into
sogynist, and xenophobic fears, but he positioned start but also the resonance about everyday life—“demographic the conventional explanations for the
also gave his dispossessed supporters a between the revived cold war atmo- change,” “wage decline”—which look resurgence of the European right, ac-
chance to vent their rage against the ar- sphere in Washington and her own and sound as if they have been formu- cording to Applebaum; they were un-
chitects of empire and the meritocratic geopolitical perspective. She associates lated on the fly, in a first- class seat high affected by the recession of 2008 or the
elite who dismissed them as “deplor- herself with “the Republican Party of above the Atlantic. refugee crisis of 2015:
ables” clinging to religion and guns. John McCain,” which means center- Applebaum’s narrative moves from
His election shocked Democratic Party right on domestic policy and recklessly wholeness to fragmentation, conclud- They are perhaps not all as suc-
leaders into a panicky, incoherent, and interventionist in foreign policy. Like ing with an ambivalent coda. The cessful as they would like to be,
ultimately unsuccessful effort to ex- McCain, Applebaum seems rarely to bookends of her tale are two parties but they are not poor and rural.
plain their loss as a result of Russian have seen a problem, at least overseas, she and her husband gave, on New They have not lost their jobs to mi-
collusion with the Trump campaign. that couldn’t be solved by bombing. Year’s Eve, 1999, at their dilapidated grant workers. In Eastern Europe,
But the Democrats failed to provide Applebaum is an ideologue in the ser- country estate in Poland, and another they are not victims of the political
any serious policy agenda, focusing in- vice of a militarist foreign policy, and in August 2019, the estate now con- transition since 1989, or of politics
stead on simply demonizing Trump. ideologues prefer the aerial view. This siderably spruced up. The first event in any sense at all. In Western Eu-
They stuck to the same strategy in preference can have unlovely results, occurred in a time of hope amid linger- rope, they are not part of an impov-
the run-up to the 2020 election. Even as was demonstrated in 2014. After ing poverty; market economies were erished underclass, and they do not
as the pandemic forced business fail- the US-backed uprising removed the beginning to sputter into life across live in forgotten villages. . . . On the
ures, foreclosures, and mass layoffs, elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Eastern Europe, and dreams of a new, contrary, they have been educated
they remained mainly the party of Yanukovych, pro-Russian separatists prosperous liberal order buoyed the at the best universities, they often
“not-Trump”—inert to the needs and in eastern Ukraine began agitating for spirits of the guests. “You could have speak foreign languages, they live
anxieties of the working class. Biden’s secession, with some support from Rus- lumped the majority of us, roughly, in in big cities—London, Washing-
advice to coal miners, echoed by Rahm sia. Applebaum, convinced that Russia the general category of what Poles call ton, Warsaw, Madrid—and they
Emanuel in his advice to retail em- had launched a full-scale invasion of the right—the conservatives, the anti- travel abroad.
ployees, was the technocratic toss- off: Ukraine, believed it was the summer of Communists,” Applebaum says. “But
“Learn how to program, for God’s 1939 all over again, when Ukrainians at that moment in history, you might These are the clercs who are fomenting
sake!” No wonder the coal miners re- should have been preparing for “total also have called most of us liberals. unrest against the centrist consensus.
sponded with stony silence. A leader- war” rather than innocently awaiting Free-market liberals, classical liberals, One can get no sense, from Apple-
ship void faced the American people as catastrophe. Gesturing darkly toward maybe Thatcherites.” Even those less baum’s account, of why the population
Covid-19 threw the crisis of democracy Putin’s alleged plans for a nuclear at- committed to right-wing economics might be ripe for unrest.
into high relief. But the crisis was pres- tack on Eastern Europe, she urged the believed in democracy, which she links
ent long before the virus appeared. Ukrainians to get it right this time. For- with belief in the rule of law, NATO, and
For intellectuals on both sides of tunately, no one took her advice, but the the EU—an odd assemblage, as the last For a book about democracy, Twilight
the Atlantic, the first warning sign was episode reveals a cast of mind that has two institutions are hardly democratic. of Democracy contains surprisingly
the Brexit vote, followed by Trump’s characterized militarist intellectuals “In the 1990s, that was what being ‘on few ordinary citizens. On the rare oc-
election. The threat was magnified by in the US for more than a century—a the right’ meant.” casions they appear, they are casually
the rise of right-wing demagogues in breathtaking indifference toward the But the Polish center-right consensus dismissed. Applebaum reveals little in-
Eastern Europe and Brazil. The most consequences of their own words. Few soon fractured, Applebaum reports: terest in or knowledge about American
common defensive strategy, especially sights in Washington are more familiar some of the party guests maintained politics, but that doesn’t stop her from
among those who positioned them- than an intellectual urging “total war” their center-right views, a few still oc- making sweeping assertions regarding
selves within a nebulous “center,” was from the safety of the keyboard. cupied the center-left, but a good many the people she is writing about:
to ignore the possibility that their own embraced the nativist Law and Justice
values, ideologies, and policies may Party. Once it came to power in 2015, In the United States, they do not
have helped to provoke a populist re- Applebaum’s air of abstraction, her Law and Justice created a one-party live in communities ravaged by
action. Self- examination was not on detachment from the details of life on state—dominating public discourse opioids, they do not spend much
the agenda; no one acknowledged how with state-run media, replacing civil time in midwestern diners, and
completely democracy had been un- *See Gulag: A History (Doubleday, service professionals with party hacks they do not, in fact, match any of
done by neoliberal policies and ideol- 2003); Iron Curtain: The Crushing of and independent justices with pliable the lazy stereotypes used to de-
ogy. Instead it was time to sound the Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (Allen cronies, identifying old and new pari- scribe Trump voters at all—includ-
alarm: the barbarians were at the gates; Lane, 2012); and Red Famine: Stalin’s ahs (Jews, homosexuals) to reaffirm ing some of the lazy stereotypes
civilization itself was imperiled. War on Ukraine (Doubleday, 2017). the rightness of the dominant social they have invented themselves.

10 The New York Review

The question “How does she know?” nomic inequality explains why so many The world of abstractions is where A pplebaum’s ideological fervor an-
comes to mind, especially when one countries took illiberal turns in 2015– Applebaum lives. Democracy, free imates her attack on two familiar tar-
realizes that she has not produced a 2018—“why, at that exact moment, ev- markets, and meritocracy all get the gets—familiar, at least, to defenders of
single concrete example. Nor, transpar- erybody got very angry.” Yet she does aerial view. This is evident in her un- American empire. One is “moral equiv-
ently, has she spent much time in mid- not really explain it, either. She ges- critical perspective on meritocracy— alence”; the other is “whataboutism.”
western diners. tures toward how the clercs helped ma- beginning with her inability to see how They are closely related; both depend
To be sure, it is possible to exagger- nipulate the popular longing to belong, this idea conceals and legitimates un- on the exceptionalist assumption that
ate the size of Trump’s working- class and she acknowledges the divisive and equal access to elite credentialing in- the United States is on the right side
base; much of his support came (and fragmenting effect of social media. But stitutions. Anyone who has spent any of history—a uniquely virtuous nation
comes) from traditional country- club she ignores the equally fragmenting and time at those institutions (as Apple- immune to the moral standards used to
Republicans. Yet Trump’s promise to divisive impact of a meritocratic neolib- baum and I both have) knows how they judge other countries’ conduct.
end our endless wars, however mis- eral ideology that implicitly tells people can foster exceptionally inspired teach- This worldview surfaces most plainly
leading, tapped into a deep vein of they are falling behind because they de- ing and vibrant intellectual communi- in her assault on Trump’s amorality:
popular resentment—as poll results serve to. And she remains persistently ties—but also how they can function
reveal. Francis Shen of the University indifferent to material issues—the wid- as sluiceways for the already privileged Since he doesn’t believe Ameri-
of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of ening class divide, shrinking safety net, to take positions in elite economic and can democracy is good, he has no
Boston University analyzed election and stagnant wages promoted by the cultural institutions. Furthermore, the interest in an America that aspires
results from the 2016 election in three neoliberal commitment to austerity, problem is not only the unfair imple- to be a model among nations. In a
crucial states—Pennsylvania, Wiscon- as well as (in the US) the race-based mentation of meritocratic ideals but 2017 interview with Bill O’Reilly
sin, and Michigan—and concluded that their inherently corrosive impact on of Fox News, he expressed his ad-

Andrea Artz/laif/Redux
“even controlling in a statistical model democratic fellow feeling—their ten- miration for Vladimir Putin, the
for many other alternative explana- dency to sanctify the successful few Russian dictator, using a classic
tions, we find that there is a significant and disparage the struggling many. form of “whataboutism.” “But he’s
and meaningful relationship between a Yet for Applebaum, the notion of a killer,” said O’Reilly. “There
community’s rate of military sacrifice meritocracy simply means rule by the are a lot of killers. You think our
and its support for Trump.” Many of talented; any departure from it means country’s so innocent?” Trump
those communities, moreover, voted for government by losers. The cronyism replied. . . .
Obama in the two previous elections. practiced by the Law and Justice Party This way of speaking . . . is an
This inattention to detail weakens “represents the end of the hateful no- argument for moral equivalence,
Applebaum’s interpretation. She re- tions of meritocracy, political compe- an argument that undermines
duces a complex populist ferment in tition, and the free market, principles faith, hope, and the belief that we
the United States especially, but also that, by definition, have never benefited can live up to the language of our
in Britain and France, to a creation the less successful.” The successful are Constitution.
of conniving politicians manipulating successful because the principles they
an illiberal population. How does one live by benefit the successful: there is It is also an argument, she charges, that
explain the center-right clercs’ turn to some truth here, but there is also the allows Trump to believe that he can do
right-wing nationalism? she asks. Were meritocratic fantasy common to the en- whatever he wants, “just like everyone
they “always closet authoritarians”? Or titled, the faith that competition always else.”
did they “somehow” change during the rewards the most “fit.” Still, Apple- Trump’s amoral embrace of pure
first decades of the new century? Avoid- baum concedes, competition is not for power politics is indeed a menace. But
ing “grand theory,” she offers “a theme: everyone: “A rigged and uncompeti- his nihilism is not the only possible con-
Given the right conditions, any society tive system sounds bad if you want to sequence of an honest reckoning with
can turn against democracy. Indeed, if Anne Applebaum, London, 2017 live in a society run by the talented. the murderous and antidemocratic his-
history is anything to go by, all of our so- But if that isn’t your primary interest, tory of American foreign policy since
cieties eventually will.” But Applebaum carceral state that polices the shambles what’s wrong with it?” To describe 1945. The list of democratically elected
does not specify what the “right condi- created by those policies. pre-Trump America—say, during the governments overthrown and leaders
tions” are or might be; instead, she turns Bush- Cheney years—as “a society run assassinated by the CIA, not to men-
to a discussion of the universal, timeless by the talented” is to descend to ab- tion its failed attempts to accomplish
habits of mind that ensure that “the ap- T his blind spot becomes apparent in surdist farce. those goals, is long—consider Iran,
peal of authoritarianism is eternal.” So Applebaum’s misinterpretation of the But ultimately Applebaum is less in- Guatemala, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam,
we are back at 35,000 feet, maybe higher. gilets jaunes in France. Originally an terested in talent than she is in ideol- Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq,
Our guide on this celestial journey is outbreak of popular protest against a ogy. She pines for the “idealism” that Venezuela. Then there is a shorter but
Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist regressive fuel-tax hike, the yellow-vest inspired the “young conservatives” still impressive list of countries that the
whose term “authoritarian predisposi- movement widened its platform to urge who were preparing for power in the US has reduced to rubble and social
tion” does a lot of interpretive work for the revival of a tax on large fortunes, to US in the 1990s: chaos—North Korea, Vietnam (again),
Applebaum. Ideological differences, in oppose the privatization of flourishing Iraq, Libya. Everybody does not do
Stenner’s view, are merely reflections of public institutions, including hospitals, This wasn’t the nostalgic conser- this; the United States does, which is
varying cognitive styles. “Authoritar- and in general to put questions of fiscal, vatism of the English; this was why global surveys repeatedly have
ianism appeals, simply, to people who social, and environmental justice onto something more buoyant, more shown that the US is widely believed to
cannot tolerate complexity,” Apple- the public agenda. It also provoked American, an optimistic conserva- be the greatest threat to world peace.
baum writes; “there is nothing intrin- violent repression by the police and tism that wasn’t backward-looking To recognize the bloody history of
sically ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ about crude oversimplification by the media, at all. Although there were darker US foreign policy is not to equate this
this instinct at all.” This is the rarefied which characterized it as homophobic, versions, at its best it was energetic, nation with amoral oligarchies but to
atmosphere of the meritocratic elite, anti- Semitic, racist, and fascistic— reformist, and generous, predi- call it to account for violating its own
where political disagreements evapo- even while the yellow vests continued cated on faith in the United States, professed ideals and aspirations. If
rate into elusive distinctions between to win the support of well over half the belief in the greatness of American “American democracy is good,” as Ap-
those who can tolerate complexity and population. democracy, and ambition to share plebaum believes, if its public figures
those who cannot. Applebaum sees the social ferment that democracy with the rest of the truly aspire “to be a model among na-
For Applebaum, the bland formula- in France as an episode in intellectual world. tions,” then they should be willing to
tions of behavioral economics justify history, casting the technocrat Emman- grapple with the significance of their
contemptuous dismissal of the sup- uel Macron as a defender “of a Repub- Yet the “optimistic conservatism” of own history, including the many crimes
posed authoritarian social type. As in lican France that still stands for a set of the fin de siècle was the outlook that committed in the name of American
the upbeat narrative of globalization, abstract values, among them impartial brought us the invasion of Iraq, the le- democracy. That would be a funda-
for her left and right have been dis- justice and the rule of law,” and pitting gitimation of torture, and the unprec- mental departure from the exception-
placed by open and closed—but not him against the xenophobic nationalist edented, unconstitutional expansion alist faith in America’s unique virtue, a
quite. The authoritarian disposition is Marine Le Pen, the social conservative of executive power under Bush and heresy unthinkable to the foreign pol-
“not exactly the same thing as closed- Marion Maréchal, and the gilets jaunes. Cheney. In league with liberal inter- icy establishment and the intellectuals
mindedness. It is better described as “Sometimes the struggle becomes vi- ventionists, these “energetic, reformist, who legitimate it. Deliverance from
simple-mindedness,” she says. Au- olent,” Applebaum writes. “When the and generous” conservatives ushered exceptionalism is not likely to happen
thoritarians “dislike divisiveness. They gilets jaunes—yellow-jacketed, anti- in the calamitous policy of regime anytime soon, but it is crucial to keep
prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of di- establishment anarchists—rioted in change—a euphemism that conflates imagining it—if only to sustain the idea
versity—diversity of opinions, diversity Paris in the spring of 2019, they smashed imperial ambition with the “ambition of international cooperation required
of experiences—therefore makes them a statue of Marianne, the female sym- to share [American] democracy with by climate change, pandemics, and nu-
angry.” So it should come as no surprise, bol of the Republic, the embodiment the rest of the world.” In this con- clear proliferation. For American de-
she says, that immigrants and refugees of the abstract state.” Apparently the text, sharing is a bad joke. The regime mocracy to survive, its clercs are going
inflame the authoritarian impulse. violence done to the protesters was less changers are in effect saying, You know to have to disengage from orthodoxy,
But in her view neither hostility to- significant than the “violence” done to you want to be like us, and if you don’t, stop talking only to one another, and
ward immigrants nor increasing eco- a symbol of republican France. we have the guns to persuade you. start listening to heretics. Q
January 14, 2021 11
 Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone
Susan Tallman

Estate of Philip Guston/Hauser and Wirth

Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting
by Robert Storr, with a chronology
compiled by Amanda Renshaw.
Laurence King, 360 pp., $85.00

Philip Guston
by Musa Mayer.
Laurence King, 119 pp., $19.99 (paper;
to be published in February)

Philip Guston Now

catalog of an exhibition at the
National Gallery of Art and three
other museums in 2022–2024, by
Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison
de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin, with
essays by Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli,
Trenton Doyle Hancock, William
Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed,
Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art
Spiegelman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija,
and a chronology by Jennifer Roberts
and Harry Cooper.
National Gallery of Art/ DAP,
265 pp., $60.00

Poor Richard
by Philip Guston,
with an afterword by Harry Cooper.
National Gallery of Art/ DAP,
87 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Philip Guston: Studio Landscape, 1975
Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971
an exhibition at Hauser and Wirth, the game, because a lot of people are Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the letter, while the National Gallery di-
Los Angeles, September 14, going to hate these things.” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. rector Kaywin Feldman (who inherited
2019–January 5, 2020. And they did, publicly and privately. Stretching the full length of Gus- the show when she took over in 2019)
Catalog of the exhibition Guston retreated to his home and stu- ton’s career and sporting dozens of asserted that “Guston appropriated
by Musa Mayer. dio in Woodstock, New York, returned rarely seen works, the “Philip Guston images of Black trauma” and likened
Hauser and Wirth, 187 pp., $50.00 to teaching, and spent his last, enor- Now” exhibition should have been a the show’s supporters to conservatives
mously productive decade churning victory lap. But its June 2020 opening kicking up a fuss over Yale’s expansion
If a century and a half of avant-garde out mad, masterful, largely unsalable was delayed because of Covid-19, and of non-Western art history options: “It’s
art has taught us anything, it is that paintings of people and things behav- then in late September the museum di- that fear of this changing moment.” The
transgression comes with a time stamp. ing badly. He died in 1980, just as his rectors announced they were shelving Tate’s leadership passed the buck back
Stylistic innovations that once re- odd storytelling began to look less it “until a time at which we think that across the Atlantic, explaining that they
pelled grow pretty (Monet), subjects like an embarrassment and more like the powerful message of social and ra- were acceding to American concerns,
that scandalized get dismissed with a liberation. cial justice that is at the center of Philip and stated, “Tate does not self-censor,”
shrug (Manet). Whistler’s Nocturne in Today those late, querulous paintings Guston’s work can be more clearly in- then suspended Godfrey, apparently for
Black and Gold may have looked like are counted among the most influential terpreted.” They planned to “rebuild having gone public with his concerns.
a pot of paint flung in the public’s face, American artworks of the twentieth the retrospective” and “present a re- The curator and former Venice Biennale
as John Ruskin griped in 1877, but by century. The artist, critic, and curator considered Guston exhibition in 2024.” director Francesco Bonami, noting that
1905, when Camille Mauclair lodged Robert Storr describes the “revelation” Their statement did not mention Black the directors’ decision might prompt the
the same complaint against the Fauves, of seeing Guston reproductions as a Lives Matter or the Ku Klux Klan, but general public to think the art was actu-
Whistler seemed a model of gentility. graduate student during the aesthetic its fuzzy PR-speak had the whiff of po- ally racist, said, “If I were in the Guston
So how is it that Philip Guston, dead asperity of the 1970s: “They found the litical panic, and they soon confirmed Foundation’s shoes, I would have sued
these forty years, is still pushing our cracks in my secondhand ideas about that the problem lay with two dozen pic- the four museums for defamation.”
buttons? Until a few months ago, he art . . . and flooded my porous imag- tures that included, or could be thought
seemed to conform to the anticipated ination.” Often tagged a “painter’s to include, white hoods.
arc—early show of talent, challenging painter” (a way of saying he is more The art world was stunned. To change Then, in November, the museums
departure from status quo, posthumous cherished in the studio than in the sales “Philip Guston Now” to “Philip Gus- announced a new opening date, two
popularity. An eminent Abstract Ex- room), Guston is also a writer’s painter ton Sometime Later” was one thing, years earlier, in 2022, though denied it
pressionist, he had flummoxed the art and has inspired a wealth of thoughtful but a four-year “rebuilding” sounded was a response to the backlash.1 It now
world in 1970 with a late- career tack criticism and personal accounts. Night like a gut rehab. Storr, Mayer (who had appears the show will proceed without
into figuration, nudging paint into the Studio (1983) by his daughter, Musa been closely involved in the show’s de- dramatic changes to its contents. A sig-
shapes of bottles and bricks and com- Mayer, and Guston in Time (2003) by velopment), and the Tate curator Mark natory to the Brooklyn Rail letter, the
ical, conical white hoods with over- Ross Feld should be required reading Godfrey swiftly posted objections. An artist-gallerist David Dixon, floated the
sized hands and the creepy softness for any aspiring memoirist in the orbit open letter in The Brooklyn Rail de- idea that what looked like tone-deaf flip-
of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Between of a self- consciously great artist. Poets manding the show’s reinstatement was flopping might be strategic brilliance:
lovely painterly passages, the patched cherished him; Philip Roth dedicated signed by an intergenerational, inter-
and dowdy hoods smoked cigars, drove Zuckerman Unbound to him. racial array of artists, critics, curators, By closing the Guston show before
around town, worked at easels, and and dealers. The museum directors opening due to the Klan imagery,
beat themselves up, in both senses. were accused of cowardice (opinion di- the outcry is now focused on the
When first exhibited at Marlborough The fiftieth anniversary of the Marl- vided as to whether the nightmare they
Gallery in New York, these paintings borough show has brought a fresh feared was BLM protests or boogaloo
1
were so unprecedented people found bounty of research: an online catalogue bois selfies), of condescending to the According to Feldman, the 2024 date
it hard to describe them, never mind raisonné, a portable paperback survey public, and of scapegoating the Guston had been “pulled out of the air in haste.”
make sense of them. “It’s as if De Chir- by Mayer (to be published in February), show to distract from their own failures The new schedule is: the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, May 1–September
ico went to bed with a hangover and Storr’s monumental Philip Guston: to diversify their collections, profes-
11, 2022; the Museum of Fine Arts,
had a Krazy Kat dream about America A Life Spent Painting (eight flab-free sional staff, and social circles. Houston, October 23, 2022–January
falling apart,” the Village Voice critic pounds), and the multi-author catalog Each side accused the other of in- 15, 2023; the National Gallery of Art,
John Perrault wrote in one of the few of the sweeping “Philip Guston Now” sufficient wokeness: “Rarely has there Washington, D.C., February 26–August
conciliatory reviews, adding, “It really retrospective organized by the National been a better illustration of ‘white’ cul- 27, 2023; Tate Modern, London, Octo-
took guts to make this shift this late in Gallery of Art with Tate Modern, the pability,” averred the Brooklyn Rail ber 3, 2023–February 4, 2024.

12 The New York Review

 censorship, whereas if they had of the ugly bedrock of American vio- Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Guston and exhorted, Guston’s floated and
just opened normally, there surely lence, while Trenton Doyle Hancock formulated elegiac allegories that were scintillated. “Color,” wrote Leo Stein-
would have been public criticism (who has used comic-strip Klansmen in earnest and adept, a titch clever, and berg of a 1952 painting, “has the weight
of the Klan imagery, itself. Hence, his own work) takes note of the Klux- perfectly suited to their moment. In of hushed odors.” Storr is particularly
this retraction and reaction now er’s unexpectedly mournful slump, the 1945 he won first prize for painting at helpful on these paintings, describing
completed, they can re-schedule eyeholes that suggest “the limited con- the Carnegie Institute, in 1946 he was their formal development in terms po-
and open the show ASAP with a sciousness of a catfish,” and the mood profiled by Life magazine, in 1947 he etic (“as with any abrupt dissolution of
public prepped, more grateful and of “quiet unease” in the aftermath of was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow- solid matter, the dust remained”) and
now attentive to the subtleties and bloodlust. For Guston, a Jewish kid ship, and in 1948 he won the Prix de pragmatic (reminding us of the ruin-
nuance of Guston’s use of the po- growing up in Los Angeles during the Rome. At thirty-five he was one of the ous cost of free-form experimentalism
tentially incendiary content. Klan’s heyday, the hood represented prominent painters of his generation, with oil paints), and placing them in
both a symbolic racist menace and the but, Storr writes, “he balked.” the context of contemporary thought.
In the meantime, as a result of the anti-Semitic terrorists around the cor- A spread in Philip Guston Now cap- Like everyone, Guston read Sartre, and
brouhaha, “Philip Guston Now” has ner. Far from a straightforward piece of tures the mechanics of that balk in he thought of painting as a struggle to
been cast as an “anti-racist exhibition” agitprop, Drawing for Conspirators is three images: a 1947 drawing packed discover something real, undistorted
and Guston’s oeuvre framed as an in- an ingenious concatenation of Christian with masks, crowns, bits of architecture by dumb desire or imitation. (“I am a
strument of directed political action. iconography, current events, modernist and faces; a second drawing in which moralist and cannot accept what has
The museums have promised to pres- moodiness, and childhood dread. particulars have been swept away, leav- not been paid for, or a form that has not
ent Guston’s “powerful message of ing vestigial triangles and dotted arcs; been lived through. Human conscious-
social and racial justice” so it can be and a painting, The Tormentors, whose ness moves, but it is not a leap; it is one
“clearly interpreted,” and those urging T he youngest child of immigrants slabs of black and red are laced with inch.”) But the bleakness of existential-
reinstatement have often done so on from Odessa, Guston (né Goldstein) spidery lines and rivet-like spots—a ism was leavened for Guston by John
the grounds of Guston’s relevance to was ten when his junkman father com- battleship built by crazy- quilters. In Cage’s Zen-inspired pursuit of methods
our current, belated racial reckoning. It mitted suicide. His attentive mother, Italy on the Prix de Rome, he traveled, that accepted rather than directed. For
is, however, hard to read—or even leaf noting his penchant for drawing, signed studied Piero and Tiepolo, and drew Guston, this meant an openness to being
through—these books without wonder- him up for a correspondence course everywhere. His marks bunched up in both guided and obstructed by materi-
ing whether “racial and social justice” in cartooning. He didn’t stick the quavering confederations and eventu- als: “The great thing about painting and
is the best yardstick for this restless and course, but published cartoons in the ally left their subject matter behind. drawing, as opposed to thinking about
relentlessly curious body of work, and “Junior Times” section of the Los An- The trouble with figurative art, he con- it, is the resistance of matter.” Cage was
whether its clear interpretation is either geles Times from the age of thirteen. cluded, was that it “vanishes into rec- a friend, but it was his colleague and fel-
feasible or desirable. At Manual Arts High School, he was ognition.” Remove the recognizable low traveler Morton Feldman who be-
Guston’s biography provides ample exposed to European modern art and and you can begin to see the push and came Guston’s critical touchstone. They
proof of his political convictions—his buddied up with Jackson Pollock. At pull of impulse, recanting, and recon- shared an instinct for clustering and
loathing of the Klan, of Richard Nixon, the nearby Otis Art Institute he met figuration that constitute painting and, asymmetrical balance, a desire for an
of violence against the powerless. It his future wife, Musa McKim, and left by extension, life itself. art “in which there existed almost noth-
also leaves no doubt as to his Ozy- after just a few months. But Guston ing,” and a fascination with transposing
mandian artistic ambitions, which had was a prodigy and could find the mas- parts until their relationships hovered at
a drive and logic of their own. Yoking ters he needed in library books and on By 1950 he was back in New York, the edges of perception.
the ambitions to the convictions was, gallery walls—Piero della Francesca, making paintings in which brush- Guston’s star rose again—he was
he found, insipid: “What bores me,” he Masaccio, Picasso, de Chirico. strokes moved together and apart, as picked for the second Documenta ex-
said in 1974, “is to see an illustration of His sense of political urgency and erratic and coordinated as a murmu- hibition in Kassel in 1959, the Venice
my thought. . . . I want to make some- his love of quattrocento frescos came ration of swallows. While many Ab- Biennale in 1960, and a one-man retro-
thing I never saw before and be changed together in mural painting. Having stract Expressionist canvases thrust spective at the Guggenheim in 1962. The
by it. So that I go in the studio and I see met the Mexican muralist David Al-
these things up and I think, Jesus, did I faro Siqueiros in California, Guston
do that? What a strange thing.” and two friends secured a commission
This comment was made late in his for a large mural in Morelia, Mexico:
life, when his studio was filled with an explosive depiction of victimiza-
“A fascinating novel of
strange things. Fortunately, three of tion from the Inquisition to the Klan,
the new books—Philip Guston Now, it took six months to paint. 2 He then HQRUPRXVDPELWLRQWKHVRUW
Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, moved to New York City at Pollock’s RI ERRN P\ SURJUDP ZDV
and Philip Guston—explore Guston’s urging, changed his name to Guston FUHDWHGIRU«<RX·YHQHYHU
lesser-known early career, when his de- (apparently a preemptive attempt to VHHQDQ\WKLQJOLNHLWµ
sires to better the world, to master paint- please Musa’s parents), and found work
ing, and to make things strange were in
open competition. Philip Guston Now
with the WPA’s Federal Art Project,
producing cunningly composed, illus-
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT
leads off with a pair of almost preter- trative friezes for public housing and KCRW Bookworm
naturally assured works from 1930, post offices. The WPA Pavilion at the
when Guston was just seventeen. Like 1939 World’s Fair was crowned with
the showpiece of an apprentice seeking Guston’s big-boned American workers ´$Q DPD]LQJ QRYHO D OLWHU
admission to the guild, his Mother and wielding microscope and jackhammer.
DU\ PDVWHUSLHFH WKDW UHDGV
Child seems calculated to show off his He was at the heart of the New York
gifts as a draftsman, his understanding art world, which was increasingly the OLNH D WKULOOHU 7KH PRVW IXQ
of color and composition, and his aspi- global art world in exile. In 1941, how- UHDGLQJ,·YHKDGLQDJHVµ
rations—a subject purloined from the ever, Guston and Musa decamped to
Renaissance, monumentalized figures the Midwest, where he took teaching STEVEN MOORE
from Picasso, and a somnolent urban positions in Iowa and then at Wash- Author of William Gaddis
stage set from de Chirico. Drawing for ington University in St. Louis. In his
Conspirators uses a similar composi- art, the cloudless public-service pitch
tion, but the central figure is swathed of commissioned murals gave way to
in KKK robes, the clambering infant painterly reverie. Martial Memory
is now a length of heavy rope, and the (1941) and If This Be Not I (1945) show 7UDYHOLQJEHWZHHQWKHZRUOGVRIYHQWXUHFDSLWDOÀQDQFH
distant lamppost has been replaced by a children (including his daughter Musa WKH-XiUH]GUXJZDUVDQGWKHP\VWHULRXVEHDXW\RI*XD
lynching tree and hanging body. as a toddler) masked and crowned with
QDMXDWR0H[LFR NOVEL EXPLOSIVES LVDÀHQGLVKO\IXQQ\
Along with two lost paintings (one paper, armed with trashcan-lid shields
destroyed in 1933 by the Los Angeles and tea-kettle helmets, in pageants of MR\ULGHRIDQRYHOZLWKRQHVPDOOFDWFKWKHGHHSHULQWR
Police Department’s anticommunist enigmatic desolation. The example of WKHERRN\RXJRWKHPRUHGDQJHURXVLWJHWV
Red Squad), Drawing for Conspira- Max Beckmann provided new tips in
tors has been adduced as proof of the the use of props—a cigarette, a trum-
young Guston’s ethical bona fides—a pet—as portents. In the aftermath of JIM GAUER LVDPDWKHPDWLFLDQSXEOLVKHG
muscular, unambiguous counterweight SRHWDQGSRVVLEO\WKHZRUOG·VRQO\0DU[LVW
to the later sad-sack dumpling hoods. 2
Its explicit depiction of the murder of a
The two friends were Reuben Kadish 9HQWXUH&DSLWDOLVW
and Jules Langsner. The mural still ex-
Black man, however, was a big reason ZZZ]HURJUDPSUHVVFRP
ists. Long hidden by a false wall, it was
the museums flinched. In the exhibition rediscovered in 1973, but as Guston
catalog, which includes essays from ten had signed it with his birth name, Phil- &RPLQJ)HEUXUDU\
contemporary artists, Glenn Ligon lip Goldstein, the connection to him
considers the drawing as an exposition was not recognized until the 2000s.

January 14, 2021 13

paintings, however, were changing: self. . . . But painting is “impure.” Bad habits litter the paintings— an ocean liner providing for your every
brushstrokes clumped together, color It is the adjustment of impurities empty bottles, persistent cigarettes, need: the text is thorough, insightful,
got louder and then disappeared. The which forces painting’s continuity. the compulsion to take up all the space and graceful; the inclusion of two full
push-pull of form began to look less We are image-makers and image- in the room. In several paintings Gus- talks by Guston is a boon; the repro-
like swallows flocking than like boys ridden. ton lays his bean head down beside a ductions are lavish. The distinctive
fighting, and then like disembodied half- dome of parted hair, his metonym virtue of Philip Guston Now lies in
heads silhouetted in fog. By the mid- “Image-ridden” just about sums up for his wife. In some images the hair- its plenitude of voices—four curators,
1960s, with his marriage in crisis and the late work, in which paint seems to head is bedraggled and lost (the im- ten artists—each teasing a different
American aggression on the rise at pile and stretch itself into subjects of ages made after her 1977 stroke are hair of the shaggy dog Guston left be-
home and abroad, Guston was ques- its own choosing. More than once Gus- especially searing), and in others she hind. Some, like Godfrey’s “Jewish
tioning the sense of “going into my stu- ton likened painting’s uncanny agency rises from the sea like Eos lighting the Image-Maker,” provide a new means
dio to adjust a red to a blue.” to a golem. How else to explain the world. Mayer gives a sensitive account of looking at familiar work, others bear
He stopped painting, removed him- gangs of bent, pipe- cleaner legs that tie of this marriage in Night Studio—its personal witness. Both of the larger
self from the epicenter (this time to themselves in knots, dangle over walls, choreography of intermittent callous- books include outstandingly useful
Florida), and drew. He made “pure or turn their shod feet to the sky in a ness (him), unwavering reticence (her), timelines at the back.
drawings” that tested the weight and theatrical pushing up of daisies? Or the and devotion (both, in their own ways).
tension of just one or two lines. And cycloptic bean with its furrowed brow, What redeemed him, for later genera-
some days he would let those lines off an unsubtle stand-in for the artist, mul- tions, was self-awareness. Peter Fischli of And what about those hoods?
the leash to do as they liked, and found tiplied and afloat on a wine- dark sea? Fischli and Weiss, best known to Amer- Storr and Mayer use the term “met-
they liked fetching things—a book, a Or the lightbulbs and clock faces— ican audiences for the Rube-Goldberg- amorphic” to describe the persistent
shoe, a light bulb, a clock. By 1967 Gus- memento mori of the industrial age— meets-conceptual-art film The Ways mutability of Guston’s late phase, and
ton had lost faith, Storr writes, “in the even the hoods failed to stay put after

Estate of Philip Guston/Hauser and Wirth/Tate, London

wonderfully disembodied, unencum- their star turn in the Marlborough
bered formal language” of abstraction. paintings. The Hauser and Wirth ex-
When he returned to painting, he was hibition “Resilience” and its catalog,
excitedly encumbered. by Mayer, looked at his output in 1971.
In Philip Guston Now, William Ken- In Italy, he painted bricks and spolia,
tridge pays homage to “the first mirac- cartoon fountains and lollipop trees,
ulous three years” when Guston took and even the few hoods that appear
“all the lessons of the abstract expres- are shown in mellow red, their threat
sionists and [brought] them back into dialed down by hue.
the studio, dragging the world behind Returning to America, his political
him.” Guston brought other lessons rage erupted in a different direction
as well—George Herriman’s busy- with a run of anomalous ink drawings,
body line from Krazy Kat, Piero’s taut collectively titled Poor Richard, in which
space, Beckmann’s gravid props. As a a scrotum-faced Nixon goes adventur-
seventeen-year- old, he had aimed at ing with Spiro Agnew (a nosed hood)
a seamless fusion of borrowed parts; and Henry Kissinger (a pair of clunky
now he sutured them into a seamed glasses). The National Gallery has now
and scarred monster that was, like published Poor Richard in a natty, gift-
Mary Shelley’s, roiled by anger, grief, book-sized paperback, demonstrating
and confusion, and like Hollywood’s, that putting out a book in which the
unapologetically hokey. thirty-seventh president of the United
States is shown inserting his penis-nose
into the hood-hole of his vice-president
If it is hard for us now to understand Philip Guston: Monument, 1976
causes less institutional worry today
the sense of grievance provoked by than exhibiting bemused hoods riding
these paintings in 1970, it is because hanging about in sullen rooms? Things Go (1987), admits that all that around in cars. While the Nixon draw-
we tend to think of abstraction as an None of these things is happy, but carrying-on about painterly struggle ings are, Chris Ware noted, “genuinely
aesthetic choice rather than a moral Guston’s delight in them is inescap- had seemed “a bit ridiculous to us.” In weird” in their hilarious, hallucinogenic
one. Just eight years earlier, though, able—his cartoonist’s pride in captur- Philip Guston Now he writes about a spleen,4 they are also clear: we know
Guston himself had joined other ab- ing the body language of a stubborn lithograph he bought, in which a cloud of who the players are, we know what Gus-
stract painters in quitting Sidney Janis boot, his punning riffs on shapes. The fists and trash-can lids hovers over a low ton thinks of them, and we know they
Gallery to protest Janis’s groundbreak- piled legs recall genocides, and also, horizon. It’s a playground punch-up in are not us. We are off the hook.
ing exhibition of “factual paintings Art Spiegelman reminds us, the “plop heaven, a picture of purity sullied. “This The hoods are not so easily seques-
and sculpture”—soon dubbed Pop take” when a cartoon character jumps is so great,” he concludes. tered. Like the cigarettes and bottles,
Art. To artists who had spent decades or is pushed out of the frame, leaving In Pit (1976) Guston’s cycloptic bean like the eye that looks insatiably but
struggling to wrest something that felt only the lower legs in the picture. Plea- lies at the bottom of a hole bristling never grows a hand to fix what it sees,
“true” from obdurate matter and from sure and shame share the same visual with legs; a ladder leads up, but the eye the hood signals a history of poor de-
a canon based in illusion, Pop’s lever- tricks. It’s a short step, it turns out, faces down. The pit may be a mass grave cisions and ineffectual resolutions that
aging of prefab source material seemed from a paintbrush to a cat- o’-nine-tails. and it may be a joke, reckoning with may or may not include mob violence. It
lazy, and its popular accessibility sus- “Omnivorous, narcissistic, bril- existential dread while mocking the is the kind of bad that can find a home
pect. By these lights, Guston’s blobby liant, sometimes verbally fluent to the chest-beating self-importance of exis- beneath all kinds of headgear. This is
cars and daft villains looked like cyn- point of glibness and flattery, horridly tential dread. In The Line (1978) a veiny why it is hard to shoehorn these paint-
ical slumming, no matter how nice the lonely, someone for whom nothing hand reaches down from the clouds to ings into a critique of institutionalized
brushwork. was enough and too much at the same mark the earth—God as artist (or vice racism: Guston just doesn’t seem very
He had endured critical drubbings swamping moment” is how Ross Feld versa)—but the style, Mark Godfrey interested in collective guilt.
before, but this was of a different order. described his friend. But of all the sur- notes, is “more Monty Python than Mi- His 1978 comment “I perceive myself
A spiteful attack from the revanchist viving Abstract Expressionists, only chelangelo,” and the line might be the as being behind a hood” has been re-
critic Hilton Kramer could, eventually, Guston, Storr points out, turned a mir- liberating one of Harold and the Purple peated a lot lately, usually as evidence
be laughed off (“Jesus, what if he had ror on the persona of the artist, in all Crayon or the constricting one of Wil- of his awareness of his own complicity
liked it, then I would have really been in its hard- drinking, hard-painting, self- liam Blake’s compass-wielding Urizen in a system that benefits white people.
trouble”), but even close friends saw the destructive grandiosity. 3 in Ancient of Days. Tragedy, metaphys- That he despised racism is, again, well
conflation of paint, politics, and slap- ical truth, the transcendent solipsism of documented. But with regard to the
stick as a betrayal of principle. Morton 3
The machismo of this persona has been the studio—all the sustaining claims of hoods, he went on to explain how in
Feldman never spoke to him again. widely discussed, but both men and high art are set up and knocked down the late 1960s he found he could use
There had, however, been earlier women painters of the New York School like bowling pins, only to be set back up the bogeyman of his childhood as an
signs of apostasy. As far back as 1960 bought into it. Storr acknowledges that so the game can be played again. imaginative prompt: “What would it be
Guston had grumbled about the dogma “many of the bar-crawling core of the Each of the new publications pro- like to be evil? To plan and plot. Then
of “pure” abstraction and its proscrip- Abstract Expressionists were alcoholic ceeds at a different pace. At just 120 I started conceiving an imaginary city
tion of visual intimations of experi- womanizers” but also notes that “the densely illustrated pages, Mayer’s being overtaken by the Klan. I was like
ences not physically present on the handful of women who played this game Philip Guston is an expertly informed a movie director. I couldn’t wait.”
canvas: back at them—notably Grace Harti- speedboat. Storr’s book by contrast is This is the discomfort zone in which
gan, Lee Krasner, and, above all, Joan
Mitchell—were just as ambitious, lusty, “Philip Guston Now” got trapped: the
There is something ridiculous and and tough-talking.” Without doubt, harder, be better, and accept less in the littoral where one person’s history and
miserly in the myth we inherit it took a lot more energy for women way of acknowledgment, their values
from abstract art: That painting to claim a seat at that sticky bar table. and aspirations were not dissimilar to 4
“Caricature: Or, Guston’s Graphic
is autonomous, pure and for it- But even while the women had to work those of their male counterparts. Novel,” NYR Daily, February 6, 2018.

14 The New York Review

another person’s metaphor overlap. If bling and shape-shifting. That is, after in the dark, if it had a whistle, which image and interpretation. With luck,
this pushes our buttons, it should— all, what art does: Moby-Dick is, and is it doesn’t. It’s not that kind of kettle. the exhibition will live up to its intelli-
not because one is right and the other not, about cetaceans. Instead, it is just steaming in the dark, gent and beautifully produced catalog.
is wrong, but because sometimes both In one quietly poignant late painting, alerting no one, throwing its funny ev- If so, viewers may come away not with a
are right. Guston dispensed with the dismem- anescent swirl into the air, a random “clear interpretation” or with a sense of
“I had no illusions that I could ever bered body parts, booze, and whips. force with untold consequences. righteousness affirmed, but with some-
influence anybody politically,” Guston The only thing sitting on the red ground Harry Cooper, the lead curator of thing like the dizzy exultation Guston
told students. “That would be silly. I is a small, dumpy tea kettle, exuding “Philip Guston Now,” writes that Gus- voiced in a 1978 letter to Ross Feld:
mean, this is not the medium.” Paint- a wriggling vapor trail into the black ton “distrusted the symbol,” which is “We do not know what we thought we
ing is, however, the medium of dou- sky. It could be an image of whistling to say, the idea of a stable link between knew—Yes!” Q

Alison Lurie (1926–2020)

Claire Messud
The brilliant comic novelist, critic, and an argument was being prosecuted on

Dominique Nabokov
children’s literature scholar Alison false terms. Or, in a restaurant, note
Lurie, who died on December 3 at the that a dish was poorly prepared, and in
age of ninety-four, contributed a review what way. Having deflated pretension
of Anthony Powell’s What’s Become of and bombast, she would then sit back
Waring? to the second issue of The New again in her chair and listen.
York Review, in June 1963; her sixty- London was a place that Lurie
third and last review in these pages—of adored, and although it was never her
Edmund Gordon’s biography of Angela primary home, she had a flat there.
Carter—appeared in March 2017. This Knowing that she often rented it out, I
amounts to more than half a century of suggested that my sister, who’d moved
witty and illuminating explorations of to the UK, get in touch with her about
subjects as diverse as fairy tales, fash- it. Thus my sister became Lurie’s tenant
ion, philosophy, and literature. Always for several years and eventually bought
mordantly funny, she was also erudite, the flat, a light-filled top-floor aerie in
compassionate, and a superlative stylist. Maida Vale, not far from the Regent’s
In the tradition of twentieth- century Canal. Lurie left many things when
British social satirists such as Powell, she sold it, including her books on the
and David Lodge, she had a piercing shelves—volumes of James, Kafka,
eye for the foibles, aspirations, and mis- Joyce, Moravia; those of contemporar-
demeanors of the intellectual classes. ies and friends, such as Antonia Fra-
Her best-known works, The War Be- Alison Lurie, New York City, 1985; photograph by Dominique Nabokov ser, Alice Thomas Ellis, Jane Gardam,
tween the Tates (1974) and Foreign Af- Diana Melly; various editions, includ-
fairs (winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize lows: “You have an impulse to interfere In the classic fairy tale there are ing foreign ones, of her own novels.
for Fiction), are campus novels. The in people’s lives, but you don’t want to four principal roles for women: the There is something especially intimate
latter is about the sabbatical romances interfere in the lives of your family and princess, the poor girl who marries about a writer’s library. My sister kept
of American professors in London; its friends because that’s not right, so you the prince, the fairy godmother or all Lurie’s books, and it has felt like a
female protagonist—Vinnie (Virginia) interfere in the lives of imaginary peo- wise woman, and the wicked step- gift for our family to share them.
Miner, a professor at Corinth Univer- ple.” As a professor of creative writing mother or witch.
sity—is, at fifty-four, neither young nor at Cornell (where she was also a spe-
beautiful, making her a radical choice cialist in children’s literature; she coed- Over time, she herself took on the role My husband and I last saw Alison
for a romantic heroine. At one point ited the seventy-three-volume Garland of fairy godmother or wisewoman to Lurie a year ago in Key West, where I
Vinnie thinks to herself, as she sits Library of Children’s Classics), Lurie those she cared about—knitting at was teaching for a week, and she and
alone on a bench at the zoo: found that she could potentially af- Gilmore’s bedside when she was hospi- Edward invited us to their house. We
fect the directions of young writers’ talized with a serious illness or, as Rose sat in the courtyard in the shade of the
In most novels it is taken for lives by interfering in the lives of their remembers her, “making potholders, or splendid, peeling gumbo limbo trees
granted that people over fifty are imaginary people. The writer Jennifer sewing new elastic into the waistbands and ate delicate finger sandwiches
as set in their ways as elderly apple Gilmore, who studied with her in the of old skirts . . . endlessly curious, hands with our tea. We talked about London,
trees, and as permanently shaped MFA program, told me that Lurie said, always busy.” about my sister and the flat, and about
and scarred by the years they have “You will not be a story writer. What Lurie could be formidable. When I Anthony Powell, her good friend there.
weathered. The literary convention you have to do is connect that old lady first met her in the 1990s, at a New York We also discussed passages from Vasily
is that nothing major can happen to in your story and that young destruc- Review–related evening, she seemed Grossman, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky;
them except through subtraction. tive girl in the other story, and then you rather frightening: her downturned my husband’s essay collection, which
They may be struck by lightning have a novel.” “I fought this,” Gilmore mouth (caused by a forceps injury at she had been reading; and her own book
or pruned by the hand of man; said, “but of course she was right.” birth) lent her a superficially stern as- of essays, Words and Worlds: From Au-
they may grow weak or hollow; Another writer, Ann Beattie—like pect that made her wit seem more tobiography to Zippers (2019).
their sparse fruit may become mis- Rose a friend from Key West, where waspish. My impression was that she This past year seemed so long in
shapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. Lurie spent part of each winter for did not suffer fools. When I next saw many ways, but in others, so short: our
They may endure these changes nearly fifty years—described Lurie in her and her husband, Edward Hower, marvelous conversation last January—
nobly or meanly. But they cannot, an e-mail as “generous in all ways”: some years later at the Sewanee Writ- the sort of eager but informal literary
even under the best of conditions, ers’ Conference, I didn’t expect that she conversation that you think life will
put out new growth or burst into She always hoped other people would remember me, but she did, and be filled with but isn’t—was, in social
lush and unexpected bloom. would be happy, or happier—even engaged warmly in conversation. (Won- terms, a recent event, and it’s hard to
in terms of things that might ulti- derfully, they had rented for the week a believe that such an inspiring person
As Lurie—who was in her late fif- mately seem a bit silly, like win- crimson Dodge Charger, a muscle car, has left us for good. Phyllis Rose of-
ties when Foreign Affairs was pub- ning a prize, or if someone moved and we delighted at the incongruity.) fered me Lurie’s own advice for coping
lished—demonstrated again and again to a place more agreeable to them Whenever we met, I was impressed with this loss:
throughout her long career, the very act (she liked that word, “agreeable”), by her frankness and sometimes un-
of noticing this convention can allow or got a dog. settled. What didn’t she notice? Rather What I feel about her death she
for its transcendence. like the television detective Columbo, taught me to feel, talking about
Lurie believed that the profound and she could seem in groups abstracted, James Merrill, who was one of her
the everyday could not be separated, even dotty, in retreat from the gen- most treasured friends: “I don’t
When I heard about Lurie’s death, in literature as in life. In her essay eral conversation with her eyes on the really think of him as dead. I think
I immediately started corresponding “Witches and Fairies: Fitzgerald to Up- ceiling or the floor. Then suddenly he has just decided to move to
with friends who knew her. The essay- dike,” published in these pages in 1971, she would lean forward and interject Australia and is vexingly out of my
ist and biographer Phyllis Rose told me she analyzed the female archetypes a rapier-sharp opinion or observation. life for the moment.”
that Lurie had described one of her of fairy tales and their appearance in She might say that a writer didn’t ex-
motivations for writing novels as fol- twentieth- century fiction, observing: press himself lucidly. Or point out that Q
January 14, 2021 15
 A Wisewoman in Stratford
Stephen Greenblatt
Hamnet and flesh’s rage,
by Maggie O’Farrell. And if no other misery, yet age?
Knopf, 305 pp., $26.95 Rest in soft peace, and, asked,
say, “Here doth lie
Maggie O’Farrell’s moving historical Ben Jonson his best piece of
novel Hamnet is a story of deep loss— poetry.”
the death of a child, struck down by an For whose sake henceforth all his
incomprehensibly virulent epidemic— vows be such,
and its impact upon a marriage that was As what he loves may never like
already buckling under almost intoler- too much.
able strain. The story’s surprise turn
is that, though the grief-stricken wife It is striking that Shakespeare, as far as
succumbs for years to crippling depres- we know, left nothing comparable to so
sion and though the husband absconds direct an expression of parental grief.
and disappears into his work, the mar- Though this is the same author who
riage miraculously survives, recovers, wrote startlingly intimate poems to
and becomes stronger. The wife and the young man and the dark lady and,
husband in question are Anne Hatha- in the words of a contemporary, circu-
way (or Agnes, as she was named in her lated these “sugared sonnets among his
father’s will and as O’Farrell calls her) private friends,” Shakespeare seems
and William Shakespeare. to have drawn an impenetrable cur-
The novel begins in the provincial tain around his feelings, whatever they
market town Stratford-upon-Avon, were, for his family.
where the eleven-year- old Hamnet, the In 1616, as he lay dying at the age
Shakespeares’ only son, is alarmed by of fifty-two, Shakespeare signed, in a
the sudden eruption of strange symp- shaky hand, a will that made many be-
toms on the body of his twin sister, quests, sentimental and otherwise. To
Judith: “He stares at them. A pair of his younger sister Joan he bequeathed
quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, £20 “and all my wearing apparrell,”
ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to along with the right to live in part
hatch. One at her neck, one at her of the house on Henley Street—the
shoulder.” The swollen lymph nodes, house in which she and her brother
or buboes—the dread signs of bubonic had grown up—for a nominal rent. To
plague—seem to have come from no- John Heminges, Henry Condell, and
where, but in a tour de force of contact- Richard Burbage, fellow actors and
tracing O’Farrell reconstructs the shareholders in the Globe Theater,
chain of random events and haphazard he bequeathed twenty-six shillings
encounters that could have led the fatal and eightpence each to buy mourning
bacterium Yersinia pestis to the Shake- Illustration by Joanna Neborsky rings, and he gave the same sum to
speare house on Henley Street: his lifelong friend Hamnet Sadler “to
married a woman eight years older when his eleven-year- old son Hamnet buy him a ringe.” To Thomas Combe,
The flea that came from the Alex- than he, and by the time he reached fell gravely ill from unknown causes, the twenty-seven-year- old relative of
andrian monkey—which has, for twenty- one, he had fathered three chil- but even that is by no means certain. a business associate, he left the sword
the last week or so, been living on a dren. This much is clear. And then he The boy died in August and Stratford that likely would have gone to his son
rat, and before that the cook, who evidently abandoned them, leaving was a two- day ride from London, so it Hamnet, had he lived.
died near Aleppo—leaps from the them in Stratford, where he was born, is possible that when word reached the These provisions—including the sum
boy [in Murano] to the sleeve of and heading off to the capital to write playwright it was already too late. Had of £10 to “the poore of Stratford”—are
the master glassmaker, whereupon or to act or to do whatever it was that there been any warning signs? Did he the record of a thoughtful man who has
it makes its way up to his left ear, he imagined he was going to do. True, get the news by letter? Or did someone accumulated a great deal of property to
and it bites him there, behind the as the years passed, he returned from speak some such words as are heard in dispose of, from the “broad silver gilt”
lobe. London from time to time, presumably a brief exchange in The Winter’s Tale: bowl in his grand house to the “barnes,
to visit his wife; his eldest daughter, Su- “Your son . . . is gone.” “How, ‘gone’?” stables, orchardes, gardens, landes,
And so it goes, on and on along trade sanna; the twins Judith and Hamnet; “Is dead.” tenementes” that he owned through-
routes by land and by sea, until it and his aging parents. And, as his If these words from a late play are out Stratford-upon-Avon and its sur-
reaches Warwickshire in 1596. wealth increased, he sent money back somehow linked to what Shakespeare rounding villages. He was explicitly
To readers living in the shadow of a to Stratford, resettled his family in a actually experienced in 1596, they are concerned to keep Thomas Quiney, the
virus that made its way from a wet mar- very large brick-and-timber house, and displaced from autobiography and husband of his daughter Judith, from
ket in Hubei province to the nursing made a succession of local real estate absorbed into someone else’s story; getting his hands on the money she
home around the corner, the story has and commodity investments. this is how the terrible news reaches would inherit. And he was equally ex-
a ghastly timeliness, though it is some To that extent he remained con- a character named Leontes. There plicitly concerned to settle most of his
consolation to note that the bubonic nected. But it is telling that there were was no general inhibition in this pe- substantial estate on his elder daughter,
plague that struck Europe repeatedly no more children born to Agnes and riod from writing directly from per- Susanna, married to Dr. John Hall, and
from the fourteenth century onward Will, and there is no evidence that the sonal experience; quite the contrary. on her male heirs.
was far more lethal than what we have busy playwright shared his rich inner When an outbreak of bubonic plague What is famously notable is the ap-
been experiencing, and that, unlike world with his wife or that he involved took his seven-year- old son Benja- parent absence of any significant be-
Covid-19, it attacked the young and the himself in the daily lives of his offspring. min, Shakespeare’s friend and rival quest to his wife of thirty-four years.
old with equal ferocity. Archival records suggest that actors Ben Jonson gave voice in an exquisite Various explanations have been of-
O’Farrell brilliantly conveys the hor- who came from the provinces more typ- twelve-line poem to his bitterly painful fered, most plausibly that by custom and
ror and devastation the plague brought ically brought their families to London leave-taking: perhaps by law she would, as his widow,
to individual households—such as and settled them there. And if the son- have been entitled during her lifetime
Shakespeare’s, as she imagines it—and nets have any autobiographical truth to Farewell, thou child of my right to enjoy a portion of his estate. Still, a
to entire communities. There is no ev- them, his most intense emotional and hand, and joy; glance at comparable wills drawn up
idence of what actually killed Shake- sexual interests lay outside the bounds My sin was too much hope of by people in Shakespeare’s milieu calls
speare’s son in 1596, but plague is a of his marriage. Between the family in thee, loved boy. attention to what seems to be miss-
reasonable hypothesis. An outbreak the house on Henley Street in Strat- Seven years thou wert lent to me, ing. From the will of his friend Henry
in Stratford in 1564, the year of Shake- ford and the poet in his rented rooms and I thee pay, Condell: “I give devise and bequeath
speare’s birth, took the lives of around on Silver Street in London, there seems Exacted by thy fate, on the just all & singuler my freehold Messuages
a fifth of the population, and the dis- to have been an almost unbridgeable day. landes Tenementes and heredita-
ease recurred throughout the century distance. O, could I lose all father now! For mentes whatsoever . . . unto Elizabeth
with nightmarish frequency. why my welbeloved wife.” From the great
The surviving records of Shake- Will man lament the state he actor Richard Burbage: “He the said
speare’s life are scanty; those of his wife Biographers presume that Shake- should envy? Richard, did nominate and appoint his
still scantier. At the age of eighteen he speare must have rushed home in 1596 To have so soon ’scaped world’s welbeloved wife Winifride Burbage, to

16 The New York Review

be his sole Executrix of all his goodes indebted to a 2007 book by Germaine cluding his parents, and head off on nounces his intention to return to Lon-
and Chattelles whatsoever.” Likewise Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife. In Greer’s his own to London. As the novel de- don. But even in the midst of her anger,
the theatrical entrepreneur Philip account Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare picts them, Shakespeare’s mother was Agnes, as O’Farrell suggests, must
Henslowe: “I give and bequeath unto was an impressive person who has been narrowly conventional and his father, a have understood what was impelling
Agnes Henslow my loving wife, all and dismissed, belittled, and slandered by glover, was a drunken, irascible brute. him to leave. “You are caught by that
singuler my Landes, Tenementes, he- centuries of misogynistic male histori- To escape from them was a necessity. place, like a hooked fish,” she tells him:
reditamentes and Leases whatsoever.” ans and critics. “The Shakespeare wal- But the budding playwright wanted his
William Bird, the lead actor in the Earl lahs”—among whom, I regret to say, I beloved Agnes to join him. It was she, “What place? You mean London?”
of Pembroke’s Men: “All other of my prominently figure for Greer— in O’Farrell’s reckoning, who always “No, the place in your head.
goods and chattells whatsoever . . . I found a reason to delay: “Until spring I saw it once, a long time ago, a
give and bequeath unto my dearly be- have succeeded in creating a Bard comes. Until the heat of summer is whole country in there, a land-
loved wiefe Marie Bird.” And the actor in their own likeness, that is to say, over. When the winds of autumn are scape. You have gone to that place
Thomas Downton, also of Pembroke’s incapable of relating to women, past. When the snow has melted.” Her and it is now more real to you than
Men: “I do make & Constitvte Iayne and have then vilified the one motive was to preserve the lives of their anywhere else. Nothing can keep
my welbeloved & Constant wife my woman who remained true to him precious children, to guard them from you from it. Not even the death of
sole Exectatrixe of all my personall Es- all his life, in order to exonerate the hazards of the disease-ridden city. your own child.”
tate.” The list could go on. him. To this end she was willing to subor-
The sense of something missing is dinate her deep love for her husband. After her husband leaves, Agnes suc-
heightened rather than relieved by a Speaking for myself, I never thought And it is here, in her predominating cumbs to what we would now call clin-
single line evidently inserted, after that Shakespeare was “incapable of re- maternal solicitude, that the novel finds ical depression. And lest we think that
the document was already drawn up, lating to women,” only that he seems to its real life. such depression is a novelist’s historical
into Shakespeare’s will: “I gyve unto have been incapable of relating to his For disease and death haunted not anachronism—that parents in the early
my wief my second best bed with the wife. And I have never been inclined to only the crowded cities of Tudor En- modern period must have been hard-
furniture.” That’s it. No “loving,” no vilify Agnes or to blame her in any way gland but also its country towns and ened to the death of children, since it
“dearly beloved,” no “well-beloved for her husband’s neglect or aversion. leafy rural settlements. Given the was so terribly common—we might
and constant,” let alone any hint of With considerable energy and re- general state of Renaissance medical consider the diary of Richard Napier, a
the sentiment that led his friend John sourcefulness, Greer combs the sur- knowledge, a sick person stood a bet- seventeenth- century Buckinghamshire
Heminges to direct that he be buried as viving records for signs that Agnes was ter chance with the plant-based cures astrological physician. The historian
near as possible “to my loueinge wife an accomplished and steadfastly loyal of a wisewoman such as O’Farrell’s Michael MacDonald, who deciphered
Rebecca.” When Shakespeare contem- wife. Shakespeare scholars have not, Agnes than with the hideous cuppings Napier’s voluminous notes and ana-
plated his final resting place, he wanted so far as I know, embraced her sugges- and purges of the best Padua-trained lyzed them in a remarkable 1981 book
only to lie undisturbed: “Blessed be tion that Agnes was responsible for the physician. Little Hamnet, frightened called Mystical Bedlam: Madness,
the man that spares these stones, And creation of the First Folio or that she by the sudden illness of his twin sis- Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-
cursed be he that moves my bones.” may have written a still-undiscovered ter, is right to be desperately seeking Century England, found that the phy-
will leaving money “in trust to be spent his mother. But she is out in the fields, sician treated numerous parents, and
on further publishing of her husband’s more than a mile away, collecting herbs especially mothers, who were “ever
Maggie O’Farrell constructs a very work,” but O’Farrell, for one, has been for her healing practice. By the time leaden with grief” after a child’s death.
different story from the unhappy mar- inspired by Greer’s effort to imagine she returns home, the symptoms on the As William Paulet, the Marquis of
riage suggested, to me at least, by these a wife more substantial than the one little girl’s body of bubonic plague are Winchester, had written in 1586, “The
scattered archival traces. To be sure, in James Joyce described as a “boldfaced unmistakable, and with every passing love of the mother is so strong, though
her telling, the absent father does not Stratford wench who tumbles in a corn- moment they are getting worse. the child be dead and laid in the grave,
return to Stratford in time to witness field a lover younger than herself.” And Narrating severe illness is for O’Far- yet always she hath him quick in her
the terminal illness of Hamnet. He ar- the result is a satisfying and engaging rell a personal specialty. In her 2017 heart.”
rives in time only for the laying out of novel that conjures up the life of a memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Such is the burden, brilliantly de-
the corpse and the bleak funeral. Then, strong, vulnerable, lonely, and fiercely Brushes with Death, she describes a picted, of O’Farrell’s Agnes. Her de-
to the intense distress of his wife and independent woman. childhood illness that left her bedrid- pression lasts for years, and, though it
muttering something inadequate about den for a year and from which she was feels as if it could never get worse, it is
his theater company, his season, and his not expected to recover, and, still more intensified when she learns, to her hor-
preparation, he soon leaves again for O’Farrell does Greer one better harrowing, she depicts in excruciating, ror, that her husband has written a play
London. But that apparent abandon- by depicting Agnes as what the Re- searing detail her infant daughter’s that bears her son’s name. (The names
ment is folded into what O’Farrell imag- naissance would have called a “wise- immune-system disorder: Hamnet and Hamlet in this period
ines as a story of deep, enduring love. woman,” that is, a healer with special were interchangeable.) How, she asks
Though she is in a distinct minority, powers. Those powers derive for the Her skin is bubbling and blistering, herself, could he have been so callous
O’Farrell is not the first to imagine it so. most part from a deep understanding each breath a struggling symphony as to exploit for mass entertainment his
Already in the nineteenth century some of the medicinal properties of plants, of whistles and wheezes. Her face, family’s intimate tragedy?
biographers suggested that the best but there is something uncanny about under the scarlet hives, under
bed would have been reserved for visi- what she can do. The first time Agnes the grotesque swelling, is ghastly
tors and that the second-best bed must and Shakespeare meet—at the country white. In the novel’s climactic scene, Agnes
have had sentimental value. Hence, in farm where the teenage Shakespeare I think: she cannot die, not now, travels to London to confront her hus-
Hamnet, Susanna takes over some of is tutoring her stepbrothers in Latin— not here. I think: how could I have band. There, in the midst of the general
the household tasks from her grieving Agnes takes his hand and, gripping the let this happen? urban filth and confusion, she has two
mother and, at her father’s bidding, buys flesh between his thumb and forefinger, revelations. Her first comes when she
new furniture for the house, but Agnes mysteriously divines his inner nature. O’Farrell brings this direct personal rushes to his rooms. She does not find
“refuses to give up her bed, saying it was She discovers experience to bear as she imagines all him there, but, crucially, she finds no
the bed she was married in and she will of Agnes’s frantic efforts to save her sign that anyone besides the playwright
not have another, so the new, grander something she would never have daughter and her irrational but un- has been there. This is the room of a sol-
bed is put in the room for guests.” expected to find in the hand of a bearable feelings of responsibility. Ul- itary writer—no trace of a lover, male
As for the absence from the will of clean-booted grammar-school boy timately, as we know, it was not Judith or female. On his desk there is a letter
terms of endearment, these are mere from town. . . . It had layers and who died but her twin brother. (Judith to her that he has begun but left unfin-
conventions, and the most eloquent strata, like a landscape. There in historical fact lived to the age of ished. The second and still greater rev-
writer the world has ever known would were spaces and vacancies, dense seventy-seven, dying in 1662.) Here the elation comes when she pays her penny,
hardly have needed or welcomed re- patches, underground caves, rises novel has recourse to the occult forces thrusts herself amid the heaving crowd,
course to such trite phrases. The deep- and descents. . . . She knew there that had earlier accounted for Agnes’s and enters the wooden O of the Globe.
est emotional bonds may be precisely was more of it than she could prescient reading of her young suitor’s There on the raised stage she sees her
those that are literally inexpressible. grasp, that it was bigger than both hand. Hamnet silently and mysteriously husband, his face made up in ghastly
Within his own family O’Farrell’s of them. wills himself to take his sister’s place in white, playing the part of a ghost, the
Shakespeare—who is never referred to the clutches of death, leaving Judith to ghost, as the characters around him say
in the novel by name but only as “he” It is easy to forgive O’Farrell the shop- recover as if her mother’s herbal reme- and the crowd repeats, of Hamlet:
or “her husband” or “the father” and worn phrase “bigger than both of dies had saved her.
the like—is a man of conspicuously few them” since it gestures toward what The recovery only intensifies Ag- To hear that name, out of the
words. Even his courtship of Agnes, must have seemed, to anyone capable nes’s tormenting guilt, for she feels that mouths of people she has never
as O’Farrell depicts it, is a string of of perceiving it, indescribably strange she somehow failed to focus her atten- known and will never know, and
monosyllables and silences: “‘I . . .’ he about Shakespeare’s inner landscape. tion adequately upon the boy, and she used for an old dead king: Agnes
begins, without any idea where that The magnitude of that landscape, plunges into a grief that is not unmixed cannot understand this. Why
sentence will go, what he wants to say. in O’Farrell’s account, is what drew with anger at her husband for not being would her husband have done it?
‘Do you . . .’” Shakespeare to Agnes but what also there when she most needed him. Her
As O’Farrell acknowledges, her vi- drove him to leave her and their three anger intensifies when, having laid his Thoroughly disgusted, she is readying
sion of the Shakespeare marriage is children and the rest of his family, in- son in the ground, Shakespeare an- herself to leave when she is transfixed

January 14, 2021 17

by the appearance on stage of another the father, dead. He is both alive novel also knows, as Agnes cannot, marriage saved? I doubt it. But I too
character, a boy, or rather a young and dead. Her husband has brought that in offering himself in place of the am convinced that Shakespeare drew
man, with the precise mannerisms him back to life, in the only way he other, Shakespeare has in effect done upon his grief and mourning to write
of the dead Hamnet—“walking with can.” for his son what his son did for his the astonishing, transformative play
her son’s gait, talking in her son’s To perform this extraordinary feat, gravely ill sister. What Agnes can and that bears his son’s name. With her
voice”—and at just the age he would she suddenly understands, her hus- does know is that through the power touching fiction O’Farrell has not only
have been, had he lived. For a mo- band, in taking on the role of the of art her husband has redeemed him- painted a vivid portrait of the shadowy
ment she is utterly baffled, and then ghost, has taken his child’s death and self and saved whatever he could of his Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare but also
the meaning of it all comes over her: made it his own: “He has put himself lost son. found a way to suggest that Hamnet
“Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two in death’s clutches, resurrecting the Did it actually happen this way? Al- was William Shakespeare’s best piece
people, the young man, alive, and boy in his place.” The reader of the most certainly not. Was the moribund of poetry. Q

The Imperial Gardener

Jenny Uglow

Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales

Planting the World: Keen to join Cook’s second expedi-
Joseph Banks and His Collectors: tion on the Resolution, which set out
An Adventurous History of Botany in the hope of finding a large continent
by Jordan Goodman. in the Southern Ocean, and sure that
William Collins, 520 pp., $32.99 his status would allow him to do as he
pleased, Banks gathered a huge entou-
In 1772, aged twenty-nine, the English rage for the voyage, including a French
naturalist Joseph Banks gave up trav- chef. He also persuaded John Montagu,
eling abroad. He had sailed around the Lord Sandwich—a fishing crony and
world with Captain James Cook on the fellow clubman and socialite, and now
Endeavour and had just returned from Lord of the Admiralty—to let him alter
Iceland. That was enough. Apart from the ship to carry the plants he planned
a short trip to the Netherlands in 1773, to collect. When the Resolution then
he stayed firmly on British soil for the proved too top-heavy to be seaworthy
rest of his life. It was not, however, the and had to be returned to its original
end of his involvement with global ex- state, the furious Banks chartered an-
peditions. In Planting the World, Jor- other ship, the Sir Lawrence, and took
dan Goodman demonstrates Banks’s his entire party off to Iceland. The
determination to send botanists across country, he felt, was new to botanists
the seas whenever an opportunity of- and zoologists, but his particular quest
fered—to Africa and China, South was to see Iceland’s volcanoes, as vol-
America and Australia. His aim was to canology was a topic of growing debate
increase knowledge and to build up an in discussions about the formation of
unrivaled private collection of plants, the earth; as well as Icelandic lava, he
but also to promote British mercantile brought home priceless manuscripts of
and imperial ambitions, and—a more Icelandic sagas and two dogs—Hekla
personal goal—to make the royal gar- and Geysir.
den at Kew the outstanding botanical Goodman recounts Banks’s youthful
garden in the world. adventures briskly and soberly, but a
The son of a wealthy Lincolnshire lively account in Toby Musgrave’s The
landowner, Banks was born in 1743 and Multifarious Mr. Banks suggests why
educated at Harrow and then Eton, he initially suffered from a damaging
where his passion for botany began as reputation as a dilettante in the scien-
an escape from boring classical studies, tific community.1 Gossip buzzed about
and where he made friends who would his engagement to Harriet Blosset, the
later create a powerful network in high ward of the famous horticulturalist
government office, much as old Etonians James Lee, whom he often consulted at
still do today. At Oxford, he again gave the Vineyard nursery at Hammersmith.
natural history precedence over clas- Harriet diligently knitted waistcoats
sics, so much so that he hired the bot- for Banks all the time he was away on
anist Israel Lyons to give lectures. Like the Endeavour, only to be ditched upon
many members of his social class, he did his return and paid off with the enor-
not finish his degree—when his father mous sum of £5,000 (causing Banks a
died in 1761, he was rich enough not spot of bother with Lee, but they still
to bother. Instead he plunged into the collaborated in later years). Another
social and scientific world of London, story concerned an illegitimate child,
becoming a fellow of the Royal Society and yet another told how the Resolu-
in 1766. While studying the collections Joseph Banks; mezzotint after a painting by Benjamin West, circa 1773 tion had stopped at Madeira to take on
at the British Museum, he met the as- board a certain Mr. Burnett, who had
sistant librarian Daniel Solander—a Java on the way home) for the natural and New Zealand. The long voyage not heard that Banks had left the ex-
pupil of his hero, Carl Linnaeus—who history. The overt aim of the expedition was a collector’s dream, and when pedition. Mr. Burnett turned out to be
became a lifelong associate and friend. was to observe the transit of Venus in the expedition returned to England one of his mistresses in disguise.
In 1766 Banks traveled to Labrador Tahiti, where they spent three months, in July 1771, the dashing Banks, even But from then on Banks settled
and Newfoundland, collecting speci- an indulgent stay for the womanizing more than Cook, was lauded as a hero. down. In 1777, a year after he was
mens of flora and fauna and minerals Banks, who often spoke of the delights A month later he was introduced to elected to the Royal Society, he moved
with his old schoolfriend Constantine of the uninhibited Tahitians, “enjoying George III, who became a close friend to Soho Square with his sister, Sarah
Phipps. Next, helped by his personal free liberty in love.” and came to rely on Banks for the care Sophia Banks—an inveterate collector
connections, he persuaded the Royal of the royal gardens at Kew. Within a herself—where he installed his great
Society and the Admiralty to let him decade Banks’s connection to Kew, library and herbarium. The following
join the Endeavour expedition. At his Once the observations—used to cal- then run by the Scottish gardener Wil- year he was elected president of the
own expense he took a team of eight culate the distance between the earth liam Aiton, was a central feature of his
men, including Solander and two art- and the sun—were complete, sealed life. In 1796 he told the Spanish am- 1
Toby Musgrave, The Multifarious Mr.
ists: Alexander Buchan (who died in Admiralty instructions ordered Cook bassador that for years he “exercis[ed] Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, the
Tahiti) for the landscapes and Sydney to explore the southern Pacific territo- a kind of superintendence over His Natural Historian Who Shaped the
Parkinson (who perished from fever in ries of New Holland (now Australia) Royal botanic gardens.” World (Yale University Press, 2020).

18 The New York Review

Royal Society, and in 1779 he married tary, that it might serve as a base for
the heiress Dorothea Hugessen, add- transporting convicts.
ing to his already substantial wealth. In 1785 the government seized on
At the same time he leased (and later a new destination, Das Voltas Bay in
bought) the estate of Spring Grove on
the heathlands at Heston, just north of
modern Namibia. Before a ship could
leave to examine the site, Banks made
politybooks.com
London, where he laid out gardens and sure that a naturalist or gardener
built greenhouses and hothouses. would be on board, choosing a young
Pole working at Kew, Antoni Au (who
later styled himself “Anthony Panta-
Leaving Banks on shore, Goodman, leon Howe” and “Hove”). Das Voltas
Pandemic! 2
a historian of medicine and science, turned out to be barren, windswept,
now an honorary research associate at and entirely unsuitable, but Howe sent Chronicles of a Time Lost
University College, London, turns his back seeds of almost one hundred spe-
attention to the “adventurous history” cies from various stopping points on Slavoj Žižek
of the botanists, naturalists, garden- the West African coast, and from then
ers, and ship captains who carried out on he joined Banks’s stable of collec-
“[The] master of the counterintuitive
his vicarious plant-hunting across the tors. (Banks later increased his West observation.”
world, shining a light on individuals African collection when he arranged The New Yorker
whose achievements are relatively un- for Linnaeus’s student Adam Afzelius
celebrated. The book is particularly to go to Sierra Leone in 1792, following Paper | $19.95
strong on the minutiae of planning, ne- the request of the abolitionist William
gotiating, and financing these ventures, Wilberforce—a founding director of
and on the disasters that so often beset the Sierra Leone Company, whose aim The COVID-19
them.
The earliest project developed from
was the settlement of freed slaves—for
a good botanist “conversant with Trop- Catastrophe
Banks’s suggestion that Francis Mas-
son, Kew’s official collector, sail on
ical plants” who could survey the area.) Second Edition
Cook’s second voyage to collect plants Richard Horton
from the Cape of Good Hope. Cape After the failure of Das Voltas, at-
plants had been in British collections tention swung back to Botany Bay, and “Powerful, beautifully written and reflective”
since the seventeenth century, but when Banks found himself planning details Devi Sridhar, University of Edinburgh
Banks and Solander had stopped there with Captain Arthur Phillip, com-
with the Endeavour, they realized the mander of the First Fleet and soon the Paper | $16.95
mild climate favored unusual plants first governor of New South Wales. He
that might flourish more easily at Kew also provided cuttings of vegetables,
than the tropical palms that needed a fruit trees, and herbs, and seeds of Another End of the
vegetables, wheat, barley, rye, and oats
greenhouse and artificial heat.
In the Cape, Masson worked with for the settlement. In return, whenever World is Possible
another pupil of Linnaeus’s, Carl Peter the fleet landed for provisions, Phillip Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens &
Thunberg, and briefly with the fine bot- sent back seeds and plants in packet
anist Lady Anne Monson (who was en ships heading to London, including, Gauthier Chapelle
route to India with her husband). Over from Rio de Janeiro, a complete ipe-
three years he sent countless packets of cacuanha plant (whose root, ground to
“utterly radical”
seeds and dried plants back to London, powder, was used in European medi- Rupert Read, author of This Civilisation is
and in 1775 he returned with a large cine) preserved in rum. Finished
collection. The four hundred new spe- In New South Wales, the settle-
cies that Masson claimed he added to ment soon moved from the marshes of Paper | $19.95
Kew included heathers, protea, gerani- Botany Bay a few miles north to Port
ums, the bird of paradise Strelitzia regi-
nae (named for Queen Charlotte), and
Jackson on Sydney Cove. But although
the British names rang with confident
Augmented Reality
the first specimen of Encephalartos possession, the plants and animals Mark Pesce
altensteinii, a cycad, repotted in 2009 died, and soon the settlers and con-
and, according to Goodman, “believed victs were facing starvation. When the “Thrilling, scary, hopeful, and required
to be the oldest living pot plant in the Second Fleet sailed urgently in Sep- reading”
world.” For the next two decades Mas- tember 1789, carrying vital supplies,
son collected in Madeira, the Azores, Banks arranged for one of the ships, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock:
the Canaries, and the West Indies. In the Guardian, to carry trees and plants, When Everything Happens Now
1797 Banks sent him to North America many from his own garden, in pots in a
Paper | $19.95
and Canada. He died in Montreal in special “coach” built on deck. Two Kew
1805, aged sixty-four, having collected gardeners, James Smith and George
for Kew for over thirty years.
Not all the expeditions in which
Austin, went with them. During the
voyage they were to protect the plants
The Meaning of Thought
Banks was involved were prompted by from wind and saltwater and from Markus Gabriel
botanical curiosity and acquisitiveness. shipboard animals and vermin, and to
In 1779, after the loss of the American water them carefully: “Plants on board “A tour de force”
colonies prevented the British govern- a Ship,” Banks wrote in his detailed Taylor Carman, Barnard College
ment from sending convicted felons instructions, “like cucumbers in Feb-
to work on tobacco plantations in Vir- ruary, require a constant attendance.” Cloth | $35.00
ginia and Maryland, a committee was When they landed the gardeners would
set up “to examine how far, Transpor- teach horticulture to the convicts and
tation might be practicable to other collect plants and seeds for Kew. A Brief Eternity
Parts of the World.” Banks was called All was in vain. In mid-ocean, some The Philosophy of Longevity
to make suggestions. Without hesita- 1,250 miles southeast of the Cape, the
tion, he answered, “Botany Bay.” He Guardian hit an iceberg. The ninety- Pascal Bruckner
had only spent a week in this marshy three pots of plants went down with the
inlet on the east coast of New Holland, ship. While two thirds of the men on “A stimulating travelogue for that journey
yet he declared that the climate was board miraculously survived and the we all hope to make.”
like that of Toulouse; the soil was good convicts among them were freed, Smith
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
for crops, cattle, and sheep; fishing was and Austin were among the forty who
good; timber was available; and the few died. Cloth | $19.95
inhabitants would be “willing to share Banks’s connection with New South
their land.” The idea was then dropped Wales was far from over. In 1800 he
for some years, but in 1783 Banks sent the independent-minded George
backed a proposal by the American Caley there to hunt for new plants.
loyalist James Matra for a settlement in Caley proved one of the most success- @politybooks facebook.com/politybooks
New South Wales, which matched the ful collectors, largely because he went
hope of Lord Sydney, the home secre- his own way—he was “Singular &

January 14, 2021 19

Whimsical,” Banks warned. He valued the return journey. A few special ones sustenance Bread fruit is procurd with natural history, including manuscript
indigenous knowledge and made close were saved, including “a beautiful no more trouble than that of climbing a drawings of plants. But this vast ter-
friends with local guides, explored the Pine” from southern Chile—the first tree and pulling it down.” ritory was out of reach to collectors.
Blue Mountains, and undertook a sep- monkey puzzle tree to arrive in Britain. In 1772 Valentine Morris, the lieu- Imperial decree confined European
arate expedition to Tasmania. During Another potentially profitable ven- tenant governor of St. Vincent and an merchants to the port of Canton, and
the same period, Banks also sup- ture was the quest in the late 1780s to Eton friend, wrote to Banks about the the only British allowed there were the
ported the young Lieutenant Matthew replace the Spanish monopoly on co- possibility of growing it on the island, men of the East India Company.
Flinders in his plans to circumnavigate chineal from Mexico with insects raised and around the same time the West Banks’s first chance to obtain Chi-
the continent in the Investigator expe- in Madras on special grass or imported India Committee, a band of powerful nese plants came through the company.
dition of 1801–1803, making sure that spineless Mexican cactus: the dye could merchants, agreed to underwrite the In 1782 John Duncan, a Scottish doctor,
the ship was fitted out with a special thus be produced and sold by the East project, seeing it as a cheap way to feed working as the company’s surgeon in
cabin to collect living plants. India Company. This idea—ultimately their slaves. But then the American Canton, began to send plants to Banks,
fruitless—was suggested to an excited War of Independence intervened, and many bought in local markets, and in
Banks by the East India Company sur- the scheme lay dormant until it won 1788 his brother Alexander took over.
F or each expedition, Goodman builds geon James Anderson. A more ambi- government support in 1787. Banks Alexander Duncan collected for Banks
up a picture based on meticulous re- tious Indian project, also proposed in took charge of the details and arranged for the next eight years, sending home
search in original sources, tracking 1787 and keenly supported by the Board for the First Fleet, returning from Bot- magnolias, water lilies, azaleas, camel-
the complex official and personal ne- of Trade, which was anxious to help any Bay, to collect the trees and take lias, chrysanthemums, and finally four
gotiations, the funding, planning, and Manchester cotton factories, was the in- them to the West Indies. much-sought-after tree peonies, only
appointments, as well as the details of troduction of a finer kind of cotton from But in a new plan, the Navy Board one of which survived the voyage home.
shipbuilding and plant care and the trials India to the West Indies. Banks sent bought a special ship, to be converted for In 1792 Banks had another try. While
of the voyages at sea and the col- helping to plan George Macart-

Editions Alecto Ltd/Trustees of the National History Museum, London

lectors on land. Plant- collecting ney’s mission to the Qianlong
and transplanting emerge as an Emperor, he enrolled Macart-
unconsidered facet of British im- ney’s friend and secretary George
perialism, undertaken with little Staunton as his botanical collec-
concern for native peoples, who tor and made sure the large en-
were judged bluntly as “hostile” tourage included two gardeners.2
or “friendly” and often regarded From a diplomatic standpoint
as a form of natural curiosity. the trip was a humiliating fail-
Banks was complicit in this, and ure, but Staunton’s haul for Kew,
Goodman illustrates vividly how including Rosa bracteata, the
adept he was, all through his ca- “Macartney Rose,” delighted
reer, at piggybacking on different Banks, who liked to imagine
government, diplomatic, and mer- that “our King at Kew & the
cantile ventures. Emperor of China” might “So-
His position as president of the lace themselves under the Shade
Royal Society gave him not only a of many of the Same Trees &
voice but a place on government admire the Elegance of many of
bodies, including the Board of the same flowers in their respec-
Longitude and the Royal Obser- tive gardens.”
vatory, and after 1793 the new Planting the World tracks
Board of Agriculture. Beyond Banks’s projects in detail and il-
this, he worked closely with the lustrates dramatically how diffi-
Privy Council Committee for cult it was to move plants around
Trade, chaired after 1786 by his the world before the invention in
friend Charles Jenkinson, Lord the 1830s of the closed, glazed
Hawkesbury, and exploited a wide Engravings of Clerodendrum paniculatum (left) and Leea rubra (right), two of the plants originally drawn Wardian case, in which conden-
network of allies such as Evan Ne- by Sydney Parkinson in Java during the Endeavour expedition, circa 1770; from Joseph Banks’ Florilegium: sation kept plants damp while
pean, a powerful administrator at Botanical Treasures from Cook’s First Voyage, with texts by Mel Gooding, commentaries by David protecting them from sea spray.
the Home Office, the Admiralty, Mabberley, and an afterword by Joe Studholme. It is published by Thames and Hudson. However often Banks designed
and eventually the Privy Council, new shelters for his plants and
and old Etonian allies like Phipps, now Anthony Pantaleon Hove (formerly the purpose: the Bounty, captained by gave instructions for their care, time
Baron Musgrave, a member of the Board Howe) to Gujarat with instructions to William Bligh. On board the trees would after time they were ravaged by saltwa-
of Trade and the Board of Control for find a successful cotton grower and spy be cared for by the gardener David Nel- ter, scorched by heat, pinched by cold,
India. Relentlessly, Banks cajoled and on him as closely as he could, making son, whom Banks had employed before. or lost in shipwreck.
pressured these and many other friends detailed notes on soil, manuring, rains, In Tahiti they collected over one thou- Yet although he was downcast at the
into supporting his plans. sowing, and harvesting. Hove was to sand breadfruit plants, placing them in losses and his efforts were sorely ham-
Banks’s collecting ambitions often send seeds to Soho Square, saying they pots in the cabin and tubs and boxes pered during the French wars, his op-
coincided with British mercantile in- were for Kew, and to write the informa- on the deck. All seemed set for a suc- timism and energy were unbounded.
terests. One early venture, arising from tion he gleaned in Polish, sending it to cessful voyage. Then, on April 28, 1789, When the wars ended, his driving goal
the 1783 plans of Banks and Matra, his brother in Poland. As a reward, he Fletcher Christian and his band of mu- was still to make Kew supreme among
aimed to promote commerce between was promised a plantation of his own. tineers took control of the ship, casting botanical gardens. In 1814 he managed
New South Wales and the Pacific coast To Banks’s dismay Hove overspent Bligh and eighteen others adrift. Nelson to persuade the prime minister—his old
of North America. Traders would buy wildly, and it seemed that he had been watched from the launch as the Bounty friend Lord Hawkesbury, now Lord Liv-
furs in Nootka Sound, in modern Van- sent to the wrong area besides. But sailed into the distance, breadfruit and erpool—that the garden’s expenses and
couver Island—a rich trade that Cook the collection he brought home was all. A few days later all the plants were the plant collectors’ salaries should be
had noted when he stopped there in impressive—not only 23 kinds of cot- thrown into the sea. Yet this was not paid from the public purse. His last proj-
the Resolution—and sell them, theo- ton, but 170 varieties of seeds and 80 the end. In 1791 Banks seized a second ects before his death in 1820 included
retically for vast profits, in China. Two varieties of living plants, among them chance, with Bligh as his captain again. the sponsorship of an expedition to the
expeditions set out, in 1785 and 1786. nutmeg and balm trees and a mango- This time all the plants arrived without Congo blighted by fever, the appoint-
On the second, Banks’s collector, steen. Banks, once appalled by Hove’s incident in St. Vincent and Jamaica, ment of a naturalist to accompany Lord
Archibald Menzies, sailed as the ship’s extravagance, now robustly defended before Bligh and his crew sailed hastily Amherst’s mission to China (another
surgeon, his brief including the collec- him, and all his debts were paid. home at the start of war with France. mix of diplomatic fiasco and botanical
tion of new plants in North America, Banks’s reach was global, although success), and the glorious plant-hunting
and wherever possible in China and some places gave a richer haul than of James Bowie and Allan Cunningham
Japan. The fur trading was not over- O ver the years, Banks’s voyage with others. India was especially lucrative, in Brazil. From Rio de Janeiro Cunning-
whelmingly successful, but Menzies Cook returned often to his mind, since Banks had many contacts in the ham told his brother, who was working
returned with over one hundred sig- prompting several substantial projects. East India Company and in govern- at Kew, that the gardens “will shine in
nificant new plants. A few years later Among them was the introduction ment, including Henry Dundas, head Melastoma, Malpighia, Banistera, Big-
Banks sent him on a second long trip, of breadfruit from Tahiti to the West of the Board of Control, and he was noniaceae, Gradeniae and many other
joining George Vancouver’s Pacific Indies. Breadfruit, which the Tahi- consulted both on the founding of a bo- new & interesting Genera.” Banks
expedition of 1790–1795. Over the tians roasted or fermented to a paste, tanical garden in Calcutta and on the could not have wished for more. Q
years, in harsh conditions, he searched seemed to epitomize their carefree introduction of tea to the subcontinent.
for plants on islands and coasts from life. “Scarcely can it be said that they But one country evaded him. His real 2
For more on Macartney’s mission, see
Hawaii to Alaska, from California to earn their bread with the sweat of their land of desire, from a botanical view- Larry Wolff, “What China Sounded
Chile. Seeds were sent home, but al- brow,” Banks had written in his En- point, was China: his library shelves Like,” The New York Review, Septem-
most all his living plants were lost on deavour journal, “when their chiefest groaned with material on Chinese ber 24, 2020.

20 The New York Review

 Revenge of the Has-Been
J. Hoberman
Mank source)—serves as the basis for Finch-
a film written by Jack Fincher er’s movie. It makes for a better story.*
and directed by David Fincher

The Brothers Mankiewicz: Mank has many impressive qualities,

Hope, Heartbreak, and first among them Gary Oldman, who
Hollywood Classics plays Mankiewicz with a steely twin-
by Sydney Ladensohn Stern. kle and a reedy quaver that suggests
University Press of Mississippi, an old radio broadcast—one of the
468 pp., $35.00 numerous period details in which the
movie excels, even as it fudges facts
Herman J. Mankiewicz, the Prohibition- and simplifies its subject’s contrarian
era newspaperman, Algonquin Round nature. Oldman has enjoyed a long and
Table bon vivant, Hollywood producer, colorful career, playing Lee Harvey
and subject of David Fincher’s movie Oswald for Oliver Stone and Dracula
Mank, is largely remembered for two for Francis Ford Coppola, capped with
pieces of writing—a 1926 telegram an Oscar for his impersonation of Win-
urging his drinking buddy Ben Hecht ston Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017).
to join him in Hollywood, where “mil- Still, his Mank rivals his early turn as
lions” were “to be grabbed” and “your a more dimwitted self- destroyer, the
only competition is idiots,” and the first Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, in Alex
draft of the screenplay that became Cox’s Sid and Nancy (1986).
Orson Welles’s first movie, Citizen Mank begins in the aftermath of
Kane (1941). Mankiewicz’s 1939 car accident. Fired
Kane, the prismatic biography of a from MGM and fleeing his creditors, he
press lord transparently based on Wil- embarked on a cross-country drive in the
liam Randolph Hearst, which has come company of a young screenwriter who
to be popularly regarded as the greatest totaled the car on the outskirts of Albu-
of Hollywood movies, is only one way querque. The crash is actually shown as
in which Mankiewicz helped to shape a flashback. The first scene has a small
American media. He was a Berlin cor- fleet of automobiles arrive at the desert
respondent for Women’s Wear Daily ranch where Mankiewicz has gone to re-
and, albeit briefly, The New Yorker’s cuperate, dry out, and, hired at $1,000 a
first drama critic. He worked as a press week, knock out a script for the twenty-
agent for the theatrical impresario Max Herman J. Mankiewicz; drawing by Tom Bachtell four-year- old Orson Welles. Welles’s
Reinhardt and the heavyweight boxer sometime producer John Houseman
Jack Dempsey; once in Hollywood, he was a Lon Chaney vehicle, The Road and good living kept him in a state of (Sam Troughton) opens the door for
produced two Marx Brothers movies, to Mandalay), Mankiewicz lived even perpetual peonage.” Granting his bril- Mank to hobble in, accompanied by a
Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, larger in Hollywood—“a promising liance (“a sort of Johnsonian figure in stoical German nurse (Monika Goss-
for Paramount and dashed off Holly- young writer, albeit a writer who drank the [film] industry”), Perelman in his mann), a prim British secretary (Lily
wood’s first anti-Nazi screenplay, The too much and gambled away funds memoir includes a vividly appalling Collins), and a cabinet filled with booze
Mad Dog of Europe, only months into his family needed to live,” as Sydney comic portrait: having consumed a gar- (which turns out to be bottled Seconal).
Hitler’s regime. (The film was never Ladensohn Stern describes him in her gantuan midday meal at a celebrated Mank can be difficult for the unini-
produced.) Working for Irving Thal- joint biography of Herman and Joseph, German restaurant, Mankiewicz lum- tiated to follow without a scorecard.
berg and David O. Selznick at MGM, The Brothers Mankiewicz. bers back to his office for a nap, only The film is interspersed with lengthy
he contributed to several notable mov- Still, he found time to collaborate to be interrupted by Perelman and an- flashbacks, not quite in the manner
ies—Dinner at Eight, San Francisco— with Anita Loos in adapting her best other neophyte writer seeking illumi- of Kane, that illuminate Mank’s Hol-
and even supplied the idea that The seller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for nation as to the psychology of the Marx lywood career, showcase his antics,
Wizard of Oz should begin in black and the screen (the 1928 Paramount silent Brothers’ characters in Monkey Busi- and establish his integrity in satirizing
white and burst into color with Doro- film—he was wooed away from MGM ness. Mankiewicz explains that “one of Hearst, particularly as, in 1940, vari-
thy’s arrival in Oz. shortly after arriving in Los Angeles) them is a guinea, another a mute who ous people—notably Herman’s brother
He mentored his younger brother, and to write intertitles for several of picks up spit, and the third an old Hebe Joe (Tom Pelfrey) and Davies (played
the writer- director-producer Joseph Joseph von Sternberg’s silent films as with a cigar,” and then dismisses his with comic radiance by Amanda Sey-
Mankiewicz, who over a long career well as the film version of the Broadway younger contemporaries with a “poi- fried)—appear at the ranch and, in the
wrote more than forty screenplays warhorse Abie’s Irish Rose. At least for sonous smile” and a curt “Beat it!” parlance of detective fiction, attempt to
and produced more than twenty films. a while, Mankiewicz was Paramount’s While still in his early thirties, sugar him off the case.
Herman and his wife, Shulamith Sara best-paid writer, even as a good deal Mankiewicz was a legend, a showboat, The first flashback has him stagger-
Aaronson, had three children: the of his energy was spent socializing. a nasty wit, and a habitual roisterer, as ing home drunk to his infinitely tol-
screenwriter Don Mankiewicz; the In those glory days, he played tennis shameless as he was outrageous. Perhaps erant, preternaturally wise wife (the
journalist Frank Mankiewicz, who with Greta Garbo and gambled with his most famous crack was delivered British actress Tuppence Middleton),
became the head of National Pub- his boss at Paramount, B. P. Schulberg. after vomiting up his meal at a swanky who unconvincingly advises him, “Go
lic Radio; and the novelist Johanna He and his wife threw costume parties dinner party: he assured his host, the to sleep, meshuggeneh.” Mankiewicz
Mankiewicz Davis. But unlike his for the Hollywood elite. And they were producer Arthur Hornblow, that “the met Sara, a middle- class Jewish girl
distinguished relatives (including his entertained by Hearst and his consort, white wine came up with the fish.” from Baltimore, in 1918, when he was
father, Franz Mankiewicz, a German- the actress Marion Davies, up the coast This bon mot and many others appear twenty. They married two years later
Jewish immigrant who attended Co- from Los Angeles at Hearst’s fabu- in Pauline Kael’s controversial essay and remained together for the rest of
lumbia University as an adult at the lously, if not insanely, excessive castle “Raising Kane,” originally published in his life, despite his alcoholism, com-
same time as teenaged Herman, and in San Simeon, California, the model 1971 in The New Yorker. Kael’s piece, pulsive gambling, and what Sara in
became a university professor), Her- for Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. instrumental in reviving Mankiewicz’s the movie calls his “silly platonic af-
man was also a self- destructive scamp, Not everyone was impressed. Groucho reputation, made the case that, having fairs.” A strong-willed woman, albeit
as notorious for his boozing and gam- Marx, who knew Mankiewicz from his proposed Citizen Kane’s subject and
bling as for the caustic wisecracks that Algonquin days—and who, along with multiple-viewpoint structure and writ-
would long outlive him. his brother Harpo, attended seders ten a massive first draft of the script, *Soon after “Raising Kane” was pub-
The critic Alexander Woollcott, an chez Mank—remembered him as “an Mankiewicz was its primary author. lished it became known that Kael
Algonquin crony, thought Mankiewicz irritating drunk” with little interest in Kael’s lively if somewhat specious ar- had herself taken undeserved credit
“the funniest man in New York.” movies. Herman regarded the Marx gument was largely debunked by Rob- for much of her research, which drew
Hecht, otherwise contemptuous of the Brothers as impossible to handle. The ert L. Carringer in his meticulously heavily on the work of Howard Suber,
an assistant professor in the motion
“Algonquin school of wags,” called him young S. J. Perelman, who arrived in researched book The Making of Cit-
picture department at UCLA who for
“the Voltaire of Central Park West”: Hollywood in 1930 to write for the izen Kane (1984), in which he calls it several years had been teaching a grad-
“Never have I known a man with so Marx Brothers under Mankiewicz’s “singularly one-sided.” Nevertheless, uate seminar on Kane. According to
quick an eye and ear—and tongue, for supervision, recalled him as “a large, “Raising Kane”—along with Richard her biographer Brian Kellow, Kael paid
the strut of fools.” Recruited by MGM Teutonic individual with an abrasive Meryman’s 1978 Mankiewicz biogra- Suber $375 for his research and prom-
in 1925 (the first film he worked on tongue [whose] fondness for cards phy (which acknowledges Kael as a ised him a credit, which was not given.

January 14, 2021 21

characterized by one of her grandsons his conflict with Welles over the screen- A few stars, among them Fredric bor Ira Gershwin’s wife, Lee. Incred-
as “a classic enabler,” she was the butt writing credit for Kane.) March and (briefly) James Cagney, ibly, the collision occurred in front of
of one of her husband’s most famous Most significantly, Herman was, and a larger number of writers, nota- Marion Davies’s bungalow; Hearst was
jokes (a running gag in the movie as for a brief time, Hollywood’s preemi- bly Mankiewicz’s Algonquin colleague inside hobnobbing with the publisher
it was in life). When an acquaintance nent premature antifascist. The major Dorothy Parker, supported Sinclair; of the New York Journal-American,
would inquire after Sara, Mankiewicz anomaly in Mankiewicz’s screenwriting in the movie, however, Mank stands which, along with the rest of the Hearst
would feign ignorance, forcing his career was The Mad Dog of Europe, a alone, favoring Sinclair because the press, gave the accident maximum cov-
interlocutor to clarify, “Sara—your convoluted family drama written hur- Hollywood establishment, Mayer, and erage. There were two trials. At one,
wife,” to which Mank would respond, riedly in the spring of 1933 to drama- Hearst so heartily loathe him. Finch- Welles testified as a character witness.
“Oh, you mean Poor Sara.” tize the Nazi persecution of assimilated er’s Mank seems to blame Hearst—the Mankiewicz was involved in sev-
Poor Sara largely recedes from the German Jews. “For the first time in subject of an extended, corrosive at- eral other ambitious projects, includ-
narrative, except as an intermittent re- years,” Stern writes, “Herman aban- tack in Sinclair’s 1919 tract on Ameri- ing one to be directed by the young
ality principle, as Mank is visited by the doned humor, irony, sophistication, can journalism, The Brass Check—for Nicholas Ray, arguably Hollywood’s
satanic Orson Welles (another British and his theatrical aspirations to write Mayer’s acrimony, although Mayer, a preeminent post-Wellesian director.
actor, Tom Burke) and begins dictating passionately and from the heart—in past chairman of the California Repub- (Houseman, who made the match,
his script, originally titled American. the medium he had been deriding for lican Party, needed no prodding. drove cross- country with the pair,
Mank’s uptight, judgmental secretary the last six years.” In one of Mank’s set pieces (a flash- whom he described as “two of the most
turns out to be secretly starstruck. “You Mankiewicz planned to produce the back to 1934 intercut with a 1940 scene violently self- destructive men I have
knew him?” she breathlessly asks when movie independently, along with his in which Charles Lederer suggests that ever known.”) Perhaps looking for an-
the name Hearst comes up, precipitat- friend the agent and producer Sam Marion Davies has been slandered in the other Kane, Mankiewicz developed a
ing a flashback to Paramount Pictures Jaffe. Jaffe even took out a full-page ad script for Citizen Kane), Mankiewicz is screenplay on the evangelist Aimee
circa 1930. In a scene that might have in the Hollywood Reporter announcing invited to Mayer’s election night party. Semple McPherson. His last completed
been cribbed from Fellini Satyricon, “the most valuable motion picture prop- With Sara helplessly looking on, he picture, however, was The Pride of St.
Mank flips coins for absurdly large bets erty I have ever possessed” and warning makes a fool of himself betting double Louis (1952), an innocuous biopic of
with Eddie Cantor, while a gaggle of rival filmmakers to “respect my priority or nothing on a Sinclair victory. Worse the Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean;
famous writers (identified as George rights.” He need not have worried. Will follows. The scene is a setup for the high he died the following year, age fifty-
S. Kaufman, Hecht, and Perelman) give Hays, the former postmaster general point of Oldman’s performance and five. Meanwhile, as detailed by Stern,
dictation to a sour secretary, topless entrusted with enforcing Hollywood’s the movie itself. This flashback is from his brother Joe, whose All About Eve
save for a set of pasties. There’s a mad moral standards, accused Jaffe and 1937, by which time Mankiewicz was (1950) was something of an instant
flurry of name- dropping—“Selznick!” Mankiewicz of besmirching the indus- close to persona non grata. He drunk- classic, ascended to the Hollywood
“Joe Sternberg?”—as a young Charles try with their exploitative fearmonger- enly crashes a costume banquet at San stratosphere. (His comeuppance came
Lederer (Joseph Cross) stares goggle- ing. Mankiewicz abandoned the project Simeon to pitch his idea for an updated with the disaster of Cleopatra in 1963.)
eyed at the waggish writers pitching a and had his name taken off the screen- version of Don Quixote, with Davies Mank is no documentary but a
ridiculous horror film to their clueless play (which did not stop the Nazis from playing Dulcinea and Mayer a ludicrous semifactual yarn—an opportunity
producer. Hallucinations ensue as the refusing to show any movie on which he Sancho Panza to Hearst’s corrupt Quix- to burnish the legend. The story of
ever-inebriated Mank wanders around had a credit). ote. Most of the guests have already run Mankiewicz and Welles is not simply
San Simeon, where a western is being Thereafter, as noted in Mank, for cover when Mank empties the room a conflict between two larger-than-life
shot. He meets and insults the studio Mankiewicz sponsored German-Jewish by throwing up (which provides an occa- individuals; it validates on a personal
boss Louis B. Mayer (the movie’s vil- refugees and contributed to various sion to use the line about the white wine level the struggle of Hollywood writers
lain, played by Arliss Howard) but is a anti-Nazi relief campaigns. On the other coming up with the fish). for credit on the screen.
flirtatious hit with Marion Davies, who hand, and unlike the prominent film- Meant to suggest an ur Citizen Kane,
is thrilled to meet him and to introduce makers associated with the Hollywood this imagined scenario positions the ac-
him to Hearst (Charles Dance). “Pops Anti-Nazi League, he loudly opposed tual Kane as Mank’s revenge on Hearst. With Mank, Fincher has directed a
likes you,” she later confides. American involvement in the European Perhaps it was; Mankiewicz had toyed movie written by his own father, the
situation. Indeed, according to Stern, with the idea of writing a play about late journalist Jack Fincher, sometime
“his public pronouncements [were] fre- Hearst as early as the mid-1920s, but in the 1990s, around the time his son
Non-Hollywood politics make their quently repugnant,” he supported the in any case, the scenario that became broke into production. The younger
appearance in a flashback to Mayer’s isolationists Charles Lindbergh and Kane took form during the meetings Fincher, now fifty- eight, is among the
birthday party, hosted by Hearst at Joseph Kennedy, both anti- Semites, with Welles that began in 1939. Welles most successful Hollywood filmmak-
San Simeon on July 4, 1933. The scene and “was so offensive on one occasion then edited Mankiewicz’s unwieldy ers and indeed a pure product of the
excoriates the refusal of Hollywood’s that Ernst Lubitsch ordered him out of screenplay into a manageable length system. Having apprenticed to George
heavily Jewish elite to grasp the danger his house.” When France was occupied, for shooting. According to The Broth- Lucas and established himself as a
posed by Germany’s new dictator; in- Mankiewicz went so far as to declare ers Mankiewicz, Mank was present on director-producer of music videos, he
stead they voice panicky concern about that Hitler was right—Jews did have the set (and even given a cameo amid took on a troubled, high-profile proj-
the muckraking novelist Upton Sin- too much power. Then, after Pearl Har- a crowd of newspapermen). Presum- ect, the third installment of the Alien
clair, soon to run as a socialist for gov- bor, he tried to enlist. ably he was pleased with the project, franchise, wrestled it into release, and
ernor of California. Meanwhile, back although he was reportedly startled moved on to a series of psychological
at the ranch in 1940, the German nurse by Welles’s unconventional technique, thrillers, notably Seven, Fight Club,
informs the disapproving British sec- Almost none of this figures in Mank. which was already being promoted as and his strongest movie, Zodiac, an
retary that the obnoxious Mank, who Rather, the movie advances a new a sensation. “Even before its release,” epic, obsessive procedural about the
has mocked the secretary’s husband, theory linking Mankiewicz’s politics, Stern writes, “Citizen Kane resurrected unsolved mystery of the Zodiac Killer.
an RAF pilot, is a secret hero, having namely his supposed identification Herman from the professional dead.” All studies in male pathology, they
sponsored her German-Jewish family with Upton Sinclair’s 1934 gubernato- Paradoxically, this publicity fu- were followed by The Social Network
and others for American visas: “Our rial campaign, to the origins of Citizen eled the battle over the writing credit, (2010), a box office as well as critical
entire village he brought here.” Kane. which preoccupies much of Mank’s success. In its unflattering portrayal
Mankiewicz’s actual politics, con- Waged under the slogan “End Pov- final scenes. The catalyst, occurring of the rise of Facebook founder Mark
trarian as they were, could perhaps erty in California,” Sinclair’s crusade while Citizen Kane was in produc- Zuckerberg, The Social Network was
be better treated in a documentary, a was opposed by official Hollywood, tion, was an item in Louella Parsons’s often compared to Citizen Kane, not
vehicle less likely to glide over nuance. which actively supported his Republi- gossip column quoting Welles to the least because Zuckerberg made his first
Like most German-Americans, Jew- can opponent, Governor Frank Mer- effect that he had written the movie billion around the same age as Welles
ish or Gentile, he was an opponent of riam. Greg Mitchell’s definitive history, alone, which prompted Mankiewicz made his precocious masterpiece.
World War I, although he enlisted. He Campaign of the Century (1991), lo- to take action—including a threat to Kane may or may not be the greatest
despised Republican presidents Cal- cates the origin of “media politics” have Welles’s credit taken away by movie ever made in Hollywood, but it
vin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover and in Hollywood’s mobilization against the Screen Writers Guild. Mank ends was surely the most audacious. Welles,
supported Franklin Roosevelt’s New Sinclair. The studios, including MGM, with Mankiewicz’s Cheshire Cat smile who arrived in Hollywood already a
Deal—until he didn’t. Having spent as shown in the movie, tithed their of triumph at the grudgingly shared celebrity, played—and drew attention
the year between high school and col- employees and, among other forms of Oscar for best screenplay (the only one to—the role of filmmaker. (Citizen
lege working in a Pennsylvania coal support for Merriam, produced fake the film would win). Kane, as the critic Andrew Sarris put
mine, he considered himself a strong newsreels to discredit Sinclair. The ep- Citizen Kane was the climax of it, “infected the American cinema with
supporter of labor unions; nonethe- isode is dramatized when Mankiewicz, Mankiewicz’s career. Afterward he the virus of artistic ambition.”)
less, he ridiculed the Screen Writers in a showdown with his boss, Irving found work and got solo credits, most Hollywood in 1940 was an insular
Guild—and then joined the rival com- Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), refuses notably for Christmas Holiday, a first- place. Welles was a feared outsider;
pany union, the Screen Playwrights. to donate to the Merriam campaign, rate noir with an unlikely title, directed Mankiewicz was an insider who had
(To get part of the movie’s subtext it instead sarcastically suggesting that by the German-Jewish refugee Robert been kicked out. Although it is evi-
is helpful to know that young Joe was Thalberg use the magic of the movies Siodmak. But even post-Kane, Mank dence of the desperation felt by both
among the founders and first officials to produce anti- Sinclair propaganda. remained Mank. In March 1943 he men, the battle over Kane’s credit is,
of the Screen Writers Guild, which, at He is subsequently distraught when he drunkenly plowed his car head-on into in the final analysis, a tempest in a
least in its rules, supported Herman in sees his idea come to fruition. a station wagon driven by his neigh- teapot. Welles was a self-aggrandizing

22 The New York Review

overreacher; Mankiewicz was a self- Mankiewicz knew how to write a screen- newsreel. Not the screenplay but the on their laptops. It’s an example of the
loathing underachiever who better than play. Welles did not, and, although he sight of the shaft of light as the news- mode the French called le cinéma rétro.
anyone knew the contempt with which learned, he would not have as strong reel runs out of the projector marked The preeminent American instance is
studios regarded writers. Citizen Kane a narrative scaffolding until he began the end of classic, invisible cinema. Im- Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974)—a
was a collaboration between a twenty- adapting Shakespeare for the screen. plicit in Citizen Kane is the idea that the film noir set in the late 1930s that im-
four-year- old upstart and a forty-three- Citizen Kane can be seen as a spir- camera lies, cinema fictionalizes, and possibly simulates (and improves on)
year- old has-been, each convinced of ited expression of youth revolt (mock- history is something manufactured ac- the noir’s period style. Chinatown is
his own genius, but it was not an equal ing arch-reactionary bugaboo Hearst) cording to the needs of the present. The the noir that should have been made in
collaboration. Welles took movies (as or a satire of Hollywood, reveling in movie’s signal achievement was its at- 1941 if only Hollywood had had the guts.
well as himself) far more seriously than the eponymous mogul’s megaloma- tempt to represent the communications Mank is a similar pastiche with kindred
Mankiewicz did, at least after The Mad niacal bad taste. Most significantly, it system of the mid-twentieth century. aspirations, only it isn’t a critique but a
Dog of Europe was crushed by the sys- embodies the way that motion pictures Mank, by contrast, is a nostalgic corrective: a sequel to Citizen Kane as it
tem. Mankiewicz long dreamed of some- can change the world. Its crucial device, celebration of Hollywood’s imagined might have been made in 1942, cleverly
thing like Citizen Kane. It took Welles attributable to either Mankiewicz or Golden Age—doubly so in that a size- constructed to have a happy, or at least
to make it possible. On the other hand, Welles, is the brilliantly contrived fake able part of the audience will watch it a Hollywood, ending. Q

Hitler in Antarctica
Geoffrey O’Brien

The Hitler Conspiracies aftermath of the French Revolution—a

Jörn Napp Bildbandarchiv

by Richard J. Evans. crucial juncture for the formation of
Oxford University Press, modern-style conspiracy theories cen-
276 pp., $27.95 tering around libertine philosophers,
Illuminati, Freemasons, and Jews—
Conspiracy theories can serve many the book moves inexorably toward our
functions. They may be tactical weap- present moment: “Nowhere has the
ons wielded against political adver- spread of conspiracy theories and ‘al-
saries, or licenses for every form of ternative facts’ become more obvious
revilement and victimization; they than in revisionist accounts of the his-
may be tools of induction into militant tory of the Third Reich.”
cadres or apocalyptic cults; they may
offer seemingly reasoned justifications
for already deeply held suspicions and R eading the book these past weeks
animosities; they may provide enter- has been like setting out to study with
tainment in which any true believer detached fascination the falsehoods
can become an investigator, infiltra- and fabrications of earlier eras, and
tor, counter- conspirator, or, if com- then finding by the final pages that in
mitted enough, perhaps world savior. the meantime the ground under one’s
In the age of the Internet they con- armchair has been undermined by an
tinue to evolve into a proliferating and army of diligent saboteurs who might
constantly mutating combination of at any moment break through the floor-
scripture and adventure story, readily boards. The impression is fortified by
monetized by hucksters and proselytiz- how closely what Evans writes dove-
ers, able to incorporate any arbitrary tails with daily newsbreaks, and how
detail—a reference to take- out pizza in often unfolding events have seemed di-
a purloined e-mail, say—and inflate it rect extensions of his text. As recently
into a building block of a global plot. as late August, for instance, the Repub-
Richard J. Evans’s The Hitler Con- lican National Convention scrubbed at
spiracies is a suite of investigations into the last minute a video presentation
conspiracy theories relating to Hitler on stricter immigration policies when
and the Third Reich—whether they the scheduled speaker, Mary Ann
paved the way for the Nazi regime and Mendoza, promoted on Twitter a long
its policies, served propaganda pur- thread asserting, among other claims,
poses either for or against the Nazis, that “‘The Protocols Of The Elders
or provided fodder in the postwar era of Zion’ Is Not A Fabrication. And, It
for what has become a deliriously un- Certainly Is Not Anti- Semetic [sic] To
fettered global traffic in “alternative Point Out This Fact.”
facts.” Having recounted the history of Evans’s first chapter meticulously
the Third Reich in a series of magiste- lays out the circuitous process by which
rial volumes and engaged closely and the Protocols was indeed fabricated
combatively with postwar revisionists from a “mishmash” of sources, and
(In Hitler’s Shadow) and Holocaust how it was first published in 1903 by a
The cover of ‘Armed Uprising: Revelations About the Attempted Communist Coup
deniers (Lying About Hitler), Evans Russian newspaper editor who “had re-
on the Eve of the National Revolution’ (1933) by Adolf Ehrt, which blamed the Reichstag
now confronts history that is not simply fire on a conspiracy to establish ‘Jewish Bolshevism.’ Marinus van der Lubbe,
cently organized a pogrom in Kishinev,
distorted or evaded but replaced alto- who was tried and executed for setting the fire, is pictured at right. in his native province of Bessarabia, in
gether by a fantastic parallel version. which forty-five Jews had been killed
The result, far from being a narrowly the question of who was responsible for mate of mystification and deliberately, and over a thousand Jewish homes
specialized study, could not be wider the burning of the Reichstag in Febru- sometimes sanctimoniously convoluted and shops destroyed.”1 He further de-
and more timely in its implications. ary 1933; the purpose of Nazi deputy misdirection, it takes all his gifts for scribes how it came to be published in
He has singled out—from a vast leader Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain rigorously compact exposition to keep Germany in 1920 by the founder of a
range of possibilities, since anything in May 1941; and, in the book’s longest the narrative lines clear. right-wing group called the Association
having to do with Hitler and the Nazis chapter, the multiple and ever- evolving In a domain full of digressive rab- Against the Presumption of the Jews,
by now has its attendant corpus of folk- scenarios in which Hitler, rather than bit holes and feverish flights of free and went through thirty-three editions
lore and fabrication—five focal points: dying in his bunker, somehow survived association, Evans fixes his attention up to 1933. All that would doubtless
the anti- Semitic tract The Protocols the war. Evans establishes with char- on the human circumstances out of do little to convince the author of the
of the Elders of Zion and its influence acteristic precision the background of which those flights arise: the freight of
on the Nazi regime; the “stab in the each one and then traces, in necessarily lives lived, actions committed, milieus 1
See Avishai Margalit’s review of Ste-
back” legend that Germany’s defeat in intricate detail, the processes by which inhabited. A tone of calm skepticism ven J. Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishinev
World War I was due to nefarious at- it was transformed and deformed. Since does not disguise his underlying theme and the Tilt of History in these pages,
titudes and actions on the home front; such processes tend to flourish in a cli- of proliferating peril. Beginning in the May 23, 2019.

January 14, 2021 23

aforementioned Twitter thread. Such garbled and contradictory pages whose pended civil liberties; a month later the Reichstag Fire is overwhelming”—the
clarifications, as Evans acknowledges, details reflected the political preoccu- Enabling Act gave Hitler total legisla- same conclusion reached by an ini-
are of limited if any use in blunting the pations of an earlier era. Hitler, Evans tive power. Evans writes, “The Third tial report of the Berlin police and re-
allure of conspiracy theories, since so suggests, more likely gleaned its con- Reich, therefore, was built on the foun- affirmed in what Evans considers highly
often the final resort of their adherents tents from the summary and extracts dations of a conspiracy theory.” The convincing detail by the German writer
is to assert that “it doesn’t matter in the included in the auto manufacturer case for a Communist plot was weak Fritz Tobias in his book The Reichstag
end whether their actual claims are true Henry Ford’s ghostwritten collection enough—and the judicial system still Fire: Legend and Reality (1962).
or false”; what is in question amounts to of articles The International Jew: The sufficiently independent—that when The Reichstag fire presents itself as
revealed wisdom, a more fundamental World’s Foremost Problem, published three Bulgarian Communists and the a very different sort of matter from the
truth beyond any need for evidence. in Germany in 1922. 3 In any event, for German Communist Party chairman Protocols. The latter conjured up an
In the case of the Protocols, the fake- Hitler and his colleagues the Proto- Ernst Torgler stood trial alongside van ancient conspiracy of global dimen-
ness of the document—cooked up from cols was only one item in the large and der Lubbe, all but the Dutchman (who sions and forecast the future crimes
an episode in a pseudonymous novel widely disseminated literature of anti- was promptly executed) were acquitted that would arise from it, on the basis of
by a Prussian police agent (Hermann Semitism that served merely “to con- for lack of evidence. no evidence other than the imaginary
Goedsche’s Biarritz, 1868), extracts firm what they already knew.” The idea of Communist responsi- testimony of imaginary witnesses. The
from a left-wing French tract of 1864 bility for the fire gained little traction fire did actually occur; an investigation
attacking Napoleon III, and further outside Germany. However, a counter- and a trial took place; material evi-
additions by a still-unidentified Rus- Evans distinguishes two major catego- narrative developed by the exiled Com- dence was produced. One might imag-
sian compiler, then passed off as secret ries: the systemic conspiracy theory— intern propagandist Willi Münzenberg ine that many decades later it would be
minutes from the First Zionist Congress the notion of what Richard Hofstadter and others, and widely disseminated possible to converge on a plausible ex-
in Basel in 1897—had been widely and described in his pioneering study of the in The Brown Book of the Hitler Ter- planation. After Tobias’s research was
persuasively established by the early “paranoid style” in politics as “a vast, ror and the Burning of the Reichstag published, as Evans recounts at length,
1920s. But for Hitler in Mein Kampf, the insidious, preternaturally effective in- (1933), had more enduring influence. quite the contrary occurred: denuncia-
newspaper accounts of the Protocols’ ternational conspiratorial network de- The Brown Book presented a detailed tions of Tobias and his claims; a series
fraudulence provided “the surest proof signed to perpetrate acts of the most and documented account of how a of articles, books, and committee re-
that they are genuine.” While Goebbels fiendish character”4 —and the event team of Nazi arsonists had started the ports presenting seemingly irrefutable
remarked in his diary that he consid- conspiracy theory, exposing the hidden fire and planted the allegedly mentally evidence for Nazi responsibility; the
ered the document a forgery—“I do not causes of singular occurrences, whether deficient van der Lubbe to take the fall. identification of much of that evidence
think the Jews are so completely stupid assassinations or plagues or lunar land- For many this remains the classic exam- as forged or misconstrued; elaborate
as not to keep such important protocols ings. He acknowledges that “the two ple of the “false flag” operation, pre- efforts to undermine the credibility of
secret”—he nevertheless accepted them types of conspiracy may, in the minds cipitating disorder to provide a pretext Tobias and anyone who supported his
as “the inner, but not the factual truth.” of some conspiracists, be linked . . . but to eliminate the opposition and seize conclusions. The claims and counter-
Time and again Evans comes up this is not necessarily the case.” absolute power. The narrative contin- claims continue, as a sampling of rele-
against the same wall: for the truly Not necessarily, perhaps—but to ues to be evoked as a cautionary model. vant websites makes clear. 6
committed, “ultimately facts did not speak anecdotally, they seem in con- Commentators in the months before the A hypothesis floated in good faith
matter.” He elucidates, for instance, temporary America almost invariably 2020 US elections repeatedly wondered may turn out to be incorrect, just as a
how the belief that at the end of World to be linked; few conspiratorial threads aloud if Trump’s apparent attempts to hypothesis floated in bad faith might in
War I the German army was “stabbed exist in isolation without linking up foment further chaos on the streets of fact explain what happened. At what
in the back”—by Social Democrats, eventually to a nearly infinite web of Portland and elsewhere might consti- point does it become a conspiracy the-
Communists, profiteers, and slackers machinations. It feels like we are liv- tute his “Reichstag moment.”5 ory? For Evans, the indications here
of all sorts—merged with the convic- ing through the baroque decadence include the reluctance to accept that
tion that German Jews had systemat- of the genre, in which each round of chance—including the chance inter-
ically evaded combat duty.2 When the complications must surpass what went Of course, one can have a Reichstag vention of an unaffiliated loner—can
War Ministry in 1916 ordered a census before, as, in Evans’s words (about moment without a Nazi conspiracy to play a determining part in major events;
to establish the truth of this, the re- speculation on the JFK assassination burn the Reichstag. The use made of reliance on the cui bono idea that to
sults showed that “80 per cent of Jew- and the events of September 11), “the the opportunity, even if the opportu- benefit from an event is evidence that
ish soldiers were serving at the front,” proponents of rival theories construct nity arose by chance, makes for a no one is responsible for it; the suggestion
but this information was withheld from evidential edifices of such staggering less horrific chain of events. But there that crucial witnesses have been delib-
the public, and anti- Semitic activists detail and complexity that they are fre- is no doubt that the element of prior erately silenced (participants in the fire
remained free to brandish their imagi- quently almost impossible for the lay- planning adds dramatic intensity, are said to have been liquidated, many
nary statistics on the subject. When the person to navigate.” In such cases there while attributing to the Nazis a strate- during the Night of the Long Knives
census became available after the war, can, however, be no telling how much gic cunning almost preternatural in its the following year); a willingness to
it made little difference. Evans cites the farther, or farther out, things may go. efficacy. In this case it is still the ver- engage in deliberate misrepresentation
argument of the right-wing ideologue The Reichstag fire serves ostensibly sion that people tend to remember; for or outright forgery in the interests of a
Hans Blüher in 1922: as a pure—and, by comparison with many it is the only one they have ever higher truth; and, as a last resort, the
later examples, relatively restrained— heard. I can recall that being told by a branding of researchers who question
It’s no use today for the Jewish instance of the event conspiracy. Hitler savvier classmate in elementary school the explanation as part of the conspir-
press to try and refute the “myth became Reich chancellor on January that the Nazis themselves had burned acy themselves (Tobias has been char-
of the stab-in-the-back.” You can 30, 1933. The fire broke out on the eve- the Reichstag was like the dawning of acterized as a Nazi sympathizer and
prove and refute anything. . . . In ning of February 27. A passerby saw a another way of looking at the world, a blackmailer).
this instance no “proofs” for and man with a torch shattering a window way that would forever involve doubt- Evans also notes the suggestion by
against are of any use, even if a to enter the building; flames spread ing appearances and questioning mo- one researcher in the 1990s—in an
hundred thousand Jews had fallen quickly; a twenty-four-year- old Dutch- tives: a moment of privileged initiation image straight out of an early Fritz
for the Fatherland. man, Marinus van der Lubbe, was into the secret order of those who really Lang film—that van der Lubbe may
arrested inside—sweating and half- know what goes on. have been hypnotized by a clairvoyant
In the case of the Protocols, Evans naked—and claimed to have started A quick scan of the Internet gives a to make him a pliable tool of the Nazis,
goes so far as to propose that relatively the fire alone, as an act of protest. more muted impression of current con- “an element of occultism and the para-
few of those inclined to cite it as a re- The Nazis immediately declared the sensus regarding responsibility, with a normal” foreshadowing a great deal
liable source—including Hitler—had fire to be the result of a Communist range of websites rendering such final more of the same.
read much or any of it. For most it was conspiracy. judgments as “almost impossible to
enough to believe that there existed co- Mass arrests followed within hours, know” (Smithsonian Magazine) and
pious documentary evidence of a con- and an emergency decree (never re- “a topic of debate and research” (Wiki- Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in
spiracy to create a worldwide Jewish scinded until the Reich’s fall) sus- pedia, whose entry does however allot May 1941—he was anxious, he said,
dictatorship, and to scan the lurid run- much space to arguments favoring Nazi to meet with the Duke of Hamilton, to
ning heads provided by helpful editors 3
guilt). Evans finds no such ambiguity, whom he attributed German sympa-
(“Reign of Terror . . .The Poison of Lib- Donald Trump made no explicit ref- declaring that “the argument for van thies—was a mysterious event in its
eralism . . .The Spreading of Epidem- erence to Ford’s proselytizing for der Lubbe’s sole culpability for the own time, but before reading Evans I
anti- Semitism when, on a visit to a
ics . . . Gentiles are Sheep”); it was not was not aware what a body of arcane
Ford factory in May 2020, he referred
necessary to wade through the many to “the company, founded by a man speculation it continues to generate.
5
Dana Milbank, “This Is Not a Drill. Hess, an early and intensely devoted
named Henry Ford. Good bloodlines,
The Reichstag Is Burning,” The Wash-
2 good bloodlines. If you believe in that
The claim of a stolen election put for- ington Post, September 25, 2020; Jef-
stuff, you got good blood.” 6
ward by Trump and his supporters has frey C. Isaac, “Has Trump’s Reichstag Evans is unpersuaded of the reliability
4
for a number of commentators evoked Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Moment Finally Arrived?,” Public of the most recent supposed bombshell,
ominous parallels to the “stab in the Style in American Politics,” in Anti- Seminar, June 2, 2020; John Buell, the recovery of a notarized statement
back” theory; see, among others, Jo- Intellectualism in American Life, The “Does Trump See COVID -19 and Pro- by a former SA member, Hans Martin
chen Bittner, “1918 Germany Has a Paranoid Style in American Politics, tests Against Police Brutality as His Lennings, testifying that he helped de-
Warning for America,” The New York Uncollected Essays 1956–1965 (Li- Reichstag Moment?,” Informed Com- liver van der Lubbe to the Reichstag
Times, November 30, 2020. brary of America, 2020), p. 512. ment, June 1, 2020. after the fire had already broken out.

24 The New York Review

Hitler loyalist, had been nudged aside wasn’t unusual for fifth graders to be As conspiratorial fantasizing spreads Then again, Hitler seems to have ended
within the Nazi leadership; a devotee swapping Hitler lore, no matter how more widely thanks to digital technol- up in Indonesia, where he converted to
of astrology and the occult who was de- far-fetched or off-base—and most of ogy, taking ever more extreme forms Islam. Or was he buried in Antarctica
scribed by his secretaries as “confused it was. Growing up after the war, we as it travels, even the most casual on- among the secret Nazi bases housing
and disoriented,” he told the British heard the fantasies and rumors before looker might feel that there is indeed a anti-gravity rockets? Meanwhile, Je-
that on his own authority he had un- we learned any history. The fantasies conspiracy underway, nothing less than rome Corsi (remembered for having
dertaken to negotiate a peace settle- and rumors, whether about Hitler or a worldwide conspiracy of conspiracy helped orchestrate the smear attack on
ment that would take Britain out of the flying saucers or fluoridated water, theorists, whether motivated by cul- John Kerry’s war record in 2004) has
war. Apparently under the impression continued to proliferate along the mar- tic rapture, Machiavellian scheming, recounted in Hunting Hitler (2014)
that there existed a powerful faction of gins—a midden heap amounting to a entrepreneurial zest, or the adrena- how Allen Dulles and the CIA helped
appeasers within the UK government parallel history—until in the late 1960s line of gaming. Perhaps it is a matter Hitler make it to Argentina; in later
eager to make such a peace, he offered came a full flowering of the outlandish. of surrendering, out of discontented writings he discerns Hitler’s ideologi-
completely unacceptable terms. Held It was amusing to sit with friends and boredom, to the pleasures of connect- cal legacy in free trade agreements and
prisoner until the end of the war, he parse the details of multiple assassi- ing dots, feasting on the “Easter eggs” the Affordable Care Act.
stood trial at Nuremberg and spent nation theories and convoluted espio- (hidden images or messages) planted as Evans gets as much humor as he can
the rest of his life confined to Spandau nage plots, all of which were somehow treats for diligent consumers of video from all this, with the implicit irritation
prison in Berlin. folded in with the mysteries of Atlantis, games and blockbuster movies and on of the historian forced to spend so much
Evans’s account suggests the confu- the cosmic pseudoscience of Immanuel the cryptic “breadcrumbs” laid out to time and energy demolishing theories
sion created by Hess’s defection. The Velikovsky, ancient astronauts, Soviet provide hints for devotees of QAnon. that required so little effort to construct
Duke of Hamilton—baffled by the paranormal research, and the subterra- Facts are confining and dispiriting; in the first place—knowing all the while
whole situation—was summoned to nean history of the Holy Grail. It was fantasy is unbounded and exhilarating the hardy persistence of the groundless
Churchill’s country house and briefed only when I got a job processing mail even when goaded on by dread. These and the certainty that his own scholar-
him on what the prime minister called orders for an occult bookstore that the are narratives of escape, even if they ship will be vilified as the inherently
“this funny story of yours,” but fur- charm began to pall. The stuff went off must culminate—as they so often do— compromised “official” cover-up. Hit-
ther discussion was suspended while in all directions, and wherever it went in a dream of annihilation. ler may have died in the bunker, but
Churchill proceeded with a planned it seemed remarkably often to be ab- narratives asserting that he did not
screening of a Marx Brothers film. sorbed into the most repulsive political will endure as long as there is anyone
Hitler, notified of Hess’s flight, reacted subcurrents. Early in The Hitler Conspiracies, on the planet who cares enough to per-
(according to Albert Speer) with “an By the early 1980s we were awash in Evans quotes the British historian petuate them. Such narratives exist in a
inarticulate, almost animal outcry,” recovered memories of satanic child John Gwyer commenting in the year of timeless zone outside history, ready to
and vowed that if he did make peace abuse that led to trials and convictions the Munich Conference on the appeal be recalled to life at any moment.
with Britain it would be on condition on the basis of what amounted to spec- of the Protocols: “One is reluctant to Evans speaks at the end of “a will-
that Hess be executed. British Commu- tral evidence, and by the 1990s heavily think that the average intelligence of ingness to change one’s mind” and “the
nists denounced the Duke of Hamilton armed militias were scanning the skies mankind is really so low that it cannot abandonment of one’s prejudices and
as a “Quisling.” Stalin, dining with for black helicopters heralding the New distinguish between plain truth and preconceptions in the face of evidence
Churchill at the Kremlin in 1944, pro- World Order. William Cooper’s best- fantastic falsehood.” Since 1938 it has that tells against them” as prerequisites
posed a toast to British Intelligence for selling Behold a Pale Horse (1991) not become any easier to think other- for the difficult job of “working out
successfully luring Hess to Britain. corralled the JFK assassination, the wise. More books on Hitler in Argen- what really happened in history.” His
The conviction that something much Trilateral Commission, the Knights of tina have been published in the first two own evidence in The Hitler Conspira-
more complicated underlay Hess’s Columbus, the purported laboratory decades of this century than in the pre- cies makes clear how much more diffi-
flight—something involving Hitler, or creation of AIDS, and the 1949 sui- vious fifty-five years. In Argentina, it is cult it is when the people you need to
a dissident faction in the Nazi Party, cide of former navy secretary James said, Eva gave birth to daughters, one reach may have migrated irrevocably to
or Churchill, or MI5, or a cabal of Forrestal into a metanarrative about of whom may well be Angela Merkel. other channels. Q
peace-minded English aristocrats, or a cosmic conspiracy of space aliens to
a cabal pretending to be peace-minded conquer Earth.
English aristocrats—has provided ma- In 1999 the science fiction movie The
terial for a cottage industry of inde- Matrix introduced the red pill/blue pill
pendent research and given rise to a metaphor beloved of conspiracy theo-
stream of books such as Peter Allen’s rists (who prefer the red pill that reveals
The Crown and the Swastika: Hitler, the horrifying hidden reality unseen
Hess, and the Duke of Windsor (1983), by others), and Alex Jones founded
Louis C. Kilzer’s Churchill’s Decep- InfoWars. (A proponent of Birther-
tion: The Dark Secret That Destroyed ism among countless other conspiracy
Nazi Germany (1994), and John Har- theories, Jones was given a hero’s wel-
ris and M. J. Trow’s Hess: The British come by armed protesters outside the
Conspiracy (1999). Maricopa County vote- counting cen-
The tales get progressively wilder, ter after the election, leading chants of
and often more deeply imbued with the “Arrest Bill Gates!” and “Arrest Joe
most dubious ideological tendencies: Biden!”) In Oklahoma City in 1995,
Hess was an emissary of Hitler who Timothy McVeigh took the lives of 168
sincerely sought peace. In rejecting people in a terrorist attack partly in-
Hitler’s offer, Churchill was ultimately spired by the political fantasy novel The
responsible for the Holocaust and the Turner Diaries (1978). A different sort
cold war and the collapse of the Brit- of counterculture was taking shape.
ish Empire—but then, Churchill and In Lying About Hitler, an account of
the Allies were responsible for the war the trial of David Irving, Evans wrote
in the first place. Hess was poisoned of a genre of popular pseudohistory
in prison to make him mad. His sui- about the Third Reich—tales of secret
cide—at the age of ninety-three, the doppelgängers and caches of Nazi gold
last prisoner in Spandau—was faked. and ancient secret societies working for
He had been murdered by British In- the Resistance—that offered “a per-
telligence to cover up his wartime verse kind of entertainment” in which
dealings with British politicians who “nothing was quite what it seemed, and
sought peace. He had been murdered terrible secrets had been suppressed by
to cover up what he knew about secret mainstream historical scholarship for Are you sitting comfortably?
Nazi bases under Antarctica. He had decades or even centuries. . . . On the
been replaced by a double, and it was whole it seemed fairly harmless.” He ... with what you’re buying; how and We charge you an honest price that
the double who crash-landed in Scot- contrasted such material with the truly where it is made; and the price you allows us to exist – and your furniture
land and who died in Spandau—just disturbing and dangerous disinforma- are being charged. to last generations. Comforting.
as, in a parallel narrative, Hitler would tion campaigns of Holocaust deniers
For 60 years we have only made 620 Chair Programme
be replaced by the double whose re- like Irving.7 The last two decades have
furniture that allows you to live Design Dieter Rams
mains were burned in Berlin, while the made it harder to discern the line be-
better, with less, that lasts longer. Now in linen
Führer and Eva Braun were whisked tween perverse entertainment and om-
off to South America in a submarine. inous intercepted messaging. We hand-make in England using the
very best locally-sourced materials. vitsoe.com/620
7
Evans, Lying About Hitler: History,
I heard that latter story on the play- Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
ground too. In the Eisenhower era it (Basic Books, 2002), pp. 108–109.

January 14, 2021 25

 Changing Psychiatry’s Mind
Gavin Francis
Mind Fixers: lists would lead to radical improve-

Instituto de Neurobiología Ramón y Cajal, Madrid

Psychiatry’s Troubled Search ments in the understanding of different
for the Biology of Mental Illness conditions and how to treat them.
by Anne Harrington. Ten years later, however, not a great
Norton, 366 pp., $27.95; $17.95 (paper) deal of progress had been made. Har-
rington describes a 1990 psychiatric
This Book Will Change Your conference held in Worcester, Massa-
Mind About Mental Health: chusetts, at which a speaker said he was
A Journey into the going to reveal, with his next slide, a list
Heartland of 
 

of established facts about one of the most
by Nathan Filer. life-changing diagnoses: schizophrenia.
London: Faber and Faber, “The screen then went blank,” writes
248 pp., £9.99 (paper) Harrington, “prompting wry laughter to
ripple through the auditorium.”
Twenty-five years ago, at the end of The DSM of 1952 recognized 106 di-
my two-month rotation in psychiatry, agnoses; 1968’s DSM - II had 182. The
Edinburgh Medical School delivered shift to checklists in 1980 swelled that
the results of our student assessments figure to 285, and with the DSM - IV,
by posting three lists of names on a published in 1994, it edged a little
departmental notice board. It was a higher, to 307. “Were all these new cat-
nerve-racking experience for all of us, egories really novel discoveries driven
who would learn of having passed or by rigorous scientific inquiry?” Har-
failed in full view of our peers. rington asks. “Were there really so
A crowd gathered around the board, many different ways to be mentally ill?”
and one by one my classmates found One of the champions of the new era of
their names on the pass list—or, even which DSM-III was emblematic was the
better, on the shorter list of those neuropsychiatrist Nancy Andreasen;
who passed “with distinction”—then by 2007 her enthusiasm for a strictly
cheered and went off to celebrate at the biological approach to psychiatry had
bar. But as I strained toward the lists cooled, and she was lamenting a decline
I felt a ball of tension in my gut; I was in “careful clinical evaluation” and the
a good student, had excelled in a few “death of phenomenology in the United
specialties so far, but couldn’t see my States”—an assessment echoed by Oli-
name. Then, there it was—unmistak- ver Sacks, who wrote of the DSM :
ably, on the dreaded third list of those
who had failed. I felt a tap on my shoul- Diagram of the cerebellum by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1894. Cajal’s drawings are collected Richness and detail and phenom-
der, someone pointed up at the distin- in The Beautiful Brain, edited by Eric A. Newman, Alfonso Araque, and Janet M. Dubinsky enological openness have dis-
guished students: there it was again. and published by Abrams in 2017. For more on Cajal, see Gavin Francis’s essay appeared, and one finds instead
The test had combined a written exam ‘In the Flower Garden of the Brain’ at nybooks.com/cajal. meager notes that give no real pic-
and an appraisal of clinical competence; ture of the patient or his world but
it seemed one of my assessing psychia- There are patients of mine who’ve had tive, so when the American Psychiatric reduce him and his disease to a list
trists had deemed me a star student, the four or five different diagnoses since Association published its first Diag- of “major” and “minor” diagnostic
other, a failure. I reported upstairs for their career in the care of psychiatric nostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in criteria.
what turned out to be an awkward in- services began, even though their core 1952, the more balanced, clinical lan-
terview, the outcome of which was that symptoms (and distress) have hardly guage constituted a step forward. The By attempting to rationalize diagno-
both assessments had been wrong: I changed. Most people who have lived DSM divided mental illness into condi- sis, Harrington explains, psychiatry in-
was an average student after all, neither a few decades with severe mental ill- tions arising as a consequence of brain advertently impoverished and sidelined
struggling nor distinguished. I was left ness have seen their own label evolve, damage (“impairment of brain tissue”) itself. By the launch of DSM -5 in 2013
wondering if I’d make a good psychia- simply because the way their symptoms and those considered “psychogenic” in (there was a conscious switch to Ara-
trist, an abysmal one, or both. are characterized by psychiatrists has nature. Freudian perspectives on men- bic numerals) the then director of the
That experience was unique in my evolved. This is true as much for “major” tal illness were then in ascendance, and National Institute of Mental Health,
medical training: in no other specialty psychiatric conditions, such as paranoid psychiatric symptoms (such as delusions, Thomas Insel, distanced himself from
was there such confusion over what sep- psychosis and psychotic depression, as it hallucinations, depressed or elevated the manual and realigned the agency’s
arates success from failure. If the psychi- is for conditions habitually thought of as mood) were not considered important research away from its categories. “Biol-
atrists couldn’t agree on the assessment existing along a spectrum that reaches as manifestations of a particular diag- ogy,” he told The New York Times that
of student performance, I wondered how normality (whatever that is), such as nosis. What was important were the un- spring, “never read that book.” More
much they’d agree on their assessments autism or attention- deficit disorder. conscious conflicts and psychodynamic than three decades after the attempt to
of patients. A thorny subject, perennially Psychiatrists save lives. For some of processes behind each person’s symp- put psychiatry on a firm biological foun-
controversial, because mental health di- my patients, diagnoses are received toms. The DSM - II, published in 1968, dation, Insel complained that its diag-
agnoses have such power—to save lives, with gratitude, either because they give elaborated on this view of mental illness nostic categories were still based solely
or ruin them. It’s a difficulty that Anne substance to a long-held sense of differ- without questioning its fundamentals, on “consensus about clusters of clinical
Harrington, a professor of the history of ence, or because they offer access to a adding a section on child and adolescent symptoms, not any objective laboratory
science at Harvard, tackles masterfully supportive community of others with conditions, and allowing for the possi- measure.” This was a crude, embarrass-
in Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled similar experiences. Sometimes they bility of a patient receiving more than ing approach, long outdated in the rest
Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, are welcomed as keys to unlock educa- one diagnosis (“co-morbidities”). of medicine, “equivalent to creating di-
which she divides into a history of how tional support. But for other patients, In 1980 the DSM - III was released. agnostic systems based on the nature of
psychiatry has approached, character- the labels are abhorred as stigmatizing, DSM - III aimed to tackle what many chest pain or the quality of fever.”
ized, treated, and maltreated mental symbolic of the medical profession’s doctors had come to see as the fuzzy
illness since the 1850s (“Doctors’ Sto- intolerance of human diversity. As a inutility of psychiatric diagnosis by
ries”); a section on depression, schizo- physician, my job is the relief of human introducing a checklist codification of With the first part of her book, “Doc-
phrenia, and manic depression as the suffering (patient means sufferer in mental symptoms. The authors of the tors’ Stories,” Harrington evaluates
three most illustrative disorders (“Dis- Latin); in psychiatry, that mandate manual were optimistic that the decade some of the many ways psychiatrists
ease Stories”); and finally suggestions rarely feels straightforward. ahead would transform psychiatry and sought, through the nineteenth and
for the future of psychiatry, with an ar- that, through the use of the diagnostic twentieth centuries, to portray them-
gument that a fundamental reappraisal grids, doctors would be able to discern selves as engaged in a biological sci-
is needed (“Unfinished Stories”). T he first attempt in the US to system- reliable biological markers of psychi- ence. The keepers of asylums too often
I work now as a primary care phy- atize categories of mental illness came atric disorder. The hope was that if found their patients more interesting
sician in Edinburgh; approximately a in 1918, with the Statistical Manual for patients could be grouped more easily dead than alive: only as cadavers could
third of my consultations concern men- the Use of Institutions for the Insane, into categories, like with like, then each their brains be removed for study.
tal health, and every day brings first- which was designed to help hospitals group could be studied for physical The German physician Emil Krae-
hand examples of just how variable the and asylums keep records and file cen- similarities. This became known as the pelin, who is often cited as a founder
manifestations of mental illness can be, suses for government statistics. The “biological revolution” in psychiatry. of modern psychiatry, wanted to get his
and how mutable its diagnostic labels. categories were crude and often pejora- Diagnostic reliability through check- nascent discipline away from prison-

26 The New York Review

asylums—where physicians were re- of “feebleminded” children. Dr. Fos- patients could be “shocked” with hy- came to dominate Western psychi-
signed to containing their patients, not ter Kennedy argued in favor, while Dr. poglycemic comas. (Harrington ex- atry, as Europe and North America
curing them—toward a more compas- Leo Kanner (later famous for debunk- plains that the care and attention these began to address the aftermath of war.
sionate, nuanced appreciation of each ing the myth of cold-hearted “refrig- patients received, not the coma, were Freud’s method prioritized the pa-
patient’s inner world. He identified two erator mothers” being responsible for what caused some of their conditions tient’s childhood experiences, uncon-
kinds of psychosis, defined broadly as inducing autism in their progeny) de- to improve.) In Hungary, Dr. Ladislav scious conflicts, and a tripartite schema
mental illness in which someone loses fended the social utility of a “mentally Meduna began inducing cataclysmic of the psyche (composed of id, ego,
touch with reality, often suffering delu- deficient” man who had collected gar- epileptic seizures with the drug me- and superego) over a psychiatry more
sions or hallucinations of phenomena bage in his district for many years and trazol, and his method spread: in 1942 concerned with the patient’s direct con-
that are demonstrably untrue: demen- who led a happy, productive life. “Shall a paper in the American Journal of temporary experience of mental symp-
tia praecox (“precocious mind-loss”) we psychiatrists take our cue from the Psychiatry reported that forty-six of toms. In 1943 William Menninger, a
and manic- depressive insanity (what Nazi Gestapo?” Kanner asked. Al- two hundred metrazol-treated patients psychoanalyst, was appointed director
we’d now call bipolar disorder). “In the though he defended the sterilization of had suffered spinal fractures as a re- of psychiatry for the US Army.
acute phase of both diseases, patients those “unfit to rear children,” euthana- sult of intense seizures. In Mussolini’s After the war, analysts like Anna
manifested states of agitated delirium sia was a step too far. Italy a neurologist named Ugo Cerletti Freud (Sigmund’s daughter) and Don-
that were sometimes virtually indis- Harrington shows just how close the switched to electricity after observing ald Winnicott, caring for evacuee
tinguishable from each other,” writes United States came to implementing how in an abattoir, the electrical stun- children and orphans, noticed the fre-
Harrington. “The most important dif- the euthanasia programs of fascist Ger- ning of pigs often induced convulsions. quency with which psychopathology
ference between the two disorders lay many: in an unsigned editorial in July After being initially lauded as was rooted in “maternal deprivation.”
in their different prognoses,” it being 1942 the journal editors came down a treatment for psychosis, electro- A group of female psychoanalysts in-
presumed that those with dementia on the side of promoting euthanasia in convulsive therapy (ECT) came to be cluding Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and
praecox would never get better while some cases, and implied that parents recommended mainly for depression— Marguerite Sechehaye advocated a rad-
those with manic depression might who expressed resistance to the idea the energy of the seizure was presumed ical re-mothering of their adult patients
improve. must be suffering from a morbid state to release some “vitalizing” substance to redress this presumed deprivation:
The prevailing ideas were chang- with origins in “obligation or guilt.” For in the body that would help lift the sitting with patients in their urine, ac-
ing: an emphasis on finding organic Harrington, these editors saw one of the spirits. Perhaps the most extreme man- cepting gifts of feces, even (in the case
lesions was already ceding to a more tasks of psychiatry as helping parents ifestation of the 1930s biological ap- of Sechehaye) offering food while hold-
psychological approach. In 1892 the “realize that they did not truly love their proach to psychiatry was lobotomy, an ing the patient closely, “like a mother
Association of Medical Superinten- severely disabled children after all.” incision through the prefrontal lobes of feeding her baby,” in Sechehaye’s words.
dents of American Institutions for the the brain, invented by António Egas By the 1950s, motherhood more gen-
Insane changed its name to the Amer- Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist, and erally was being blamed for mental
ican Medico-Psychological Associa- The 1920s and 1930s had brought the popularized across the United States illness—Harrington writes poignantly
tion; members began to call themselves inception of a series of “shock” treat- by Walter Freeman, a man with negli- of the many ways mothers were con-
not “superintendents” but “alienists.” ments, particularly for schizophrenia: gible surgical training who notoriously sidered culpable for their children’s
In 1921 the organization renamed itself patients were given malaria in the hope used ice-picks to lobotomize his pa- mental illnesses. If too “seductive and
the American Psychiatric Association. that recurrent, exhausting fevers would tients through their eye sockets. smothering,” they would render their
In Switzerland in 1874 a seventeen- wring madness from their minds, and Freud’s psychoanalytic approach sons homosexual (homosexuality was
year- old named Eugen Bleuler was the discovery of insulin meant that was still gaining adherents. Its insights a “psychopathic personality disorder”
disgusted by the dismissive attitude and then a “sexual deviance,” according
physicians took to his sister’s catatonic to successive iterations of the DSM); if
psychosis, and he decided to become a too cold and distant, they would cause
psychiatrist; in 1898 he was appointed autism. Yet another kind of mother,
the director of the Burghölzli hospital, if excessively permissive, induced de-
near Zurich. A senior colleague of Carl OVERWINTER linquency. Single African-American
Jung, Bleuler “adopted an unusually mothers were guilty of dominating
pastoral attitude toward his patients, their households in a way that emascu-
The day’s Scottish. Imperceptible
spending a great deal of time on the lated their sons so that they couldn’t, as
wards talking with them and becoming and far-seeing through coils of copra fog. Harrington summarizes, “develop the
familiar with their delusions and idio- Slow mastodons scurry to clear the road masculine confidence they needed to
syncrasies,” Harrington writes. Bleuler ahead, where brittle hazard lights dilute survive in a world where the odds were
was an admirer of Freud’s work, and paths I must go, or must not go, depends stacked against them.”
in 1911 he proposed the term “schizo- on the zero-hour radiation
phrenia,” meaning “split mind,” to whiteness. Its static rage behind closed doors
supersede Kraepelin’s “dementia crackles close in my ears with a tincture By the mid-1960s this era of mother-
praecox.” of aqua fortis. My fifteenth winter. blaming was passing. Lobotomy was
He didn’t mean split personality but First touched snow on a stratovolcano. going out of fashion too, in part be-
wanted to characterize the illness as a cause broadening recognition of Nazi
Then, to a city’s torch song, assembled
splitting of reliable associations among atrocities encouraged restraint, in
a wind-wall with ungloved hands, and winter
thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. part because new drugs did the same
The word caught on: by the 1920s de- after winter I pass shuttered houses, job with less finality or brutality. The
mentia praecox was considered ar- as lost as a sparrow in a mead hall, “major tranquilizer” chlorproma-
chaic. But an echo of the old orthodoxy flitting reconciled with lost, scarcely heard zine (Thorazine), once known as the
of mental illness arising from organic though the lost contrails of childhood shine back “chemical lobotomy,” was approved
pathology persisted, hastened by the the sea. The sea-absolving light even in 1954. It was derived from a class of
discovery that “general paralysis of the here I glimpse in gorges mute with ice floes antihistamines used in the dye indus-
insane” (GPI) had an organic cause: refracts the ambient blare of street plows, try (they’re bright blue in water), and
syphilis. In 1914 the Harvard patholo- now utterly gone. A furrowed mirage it was initially tested as a possible pre-
gist Elmer Southard wrote of the two solders in their wake Haudensaunees’ bones, ventative for surgical shock—patients
evolving camps within psychiatry: the given the drug before operations be-
buried long too deep for memorial.
“brain spot men” staring down their came sluggish and indifferent.
The road’s double bereavement remains blank.
microscopes versus the “mind twist It passed swiftly from the surgical
men” who saw mental illness as purely Could this be that dark and last outliving to the psychiatric wards. Psychoana-
experiential. night I’ve wondered at since the first snow lysts accepted the drug into their own
In 1924 a new law made it legal to flickered you have no place here and I stayed? schemas of mental illness by describ-
sterilize Americans deemed mentally My mind circles hellebores in a ring ing it as dampening “affective drive”
retarded, but courts still had the final of soil, given a chance, I’d scatter and leveling “psychic energy.” Equanil,
say; it wasn’t until 1927 that a Virginian at doorsteps. Haphazard violence, perhaps. Miltown, and Valium (the “minor”
woman named Carrie Buck became the Perhaps cure for madness. Commemorate tranquilizers) quickly followed, ag-
first of over 65,000 men and women na- the unavailing, unbodied stranger, gressively marketed first as drugs for
tionwide to be sterilized under the law. against whom grates the snow’s flaking iron, “overworked” businessmen, then for
In 1933 the German government would stressed, anxious housewives. “The
who nowhere can turn towards homecoming.
cite the US Supreme Court’s decision neurotic mother and wife who in the
in Buck v. Bell (1927) defending its 1950s had been blamed for causing
own Law for the Prevention of Hered- —Ishion Hutchinson mental illness in her children had, by
itarily Diseased Offspring. The Amer- the 1960s, herself become the patient,”
ican Journal of Psychiatry published Harrington observes.
two opinion pieces side by side in 1942, New drugs also made it eas-
arguing for and against the euthanasia ier to get patients out of long-stay

January 14, 2021 27

hospitals. Litigation accelerated dein- but stopped “abruptly” in the presence Harrington devotes a chapter each to injecting salts from the urine of manic
stitutionalization: patients and their of other staff. (“Staff are credible wit- biological psychiatry’s approach to the patients into guinea pigs: they died of
families became aware of their right to nesses,” Rosenhan wrote. “Patients are two principal categories of mood disor- convulsions. He was advised to com-
receive “adequate treatment,” which not.”) Rosenhan also concluded that fel- der, depression and manic- depression. bine patients’ uric acid with lithium, to
hospitals were blatantly incapable low patients were better judges of san- “Depression” today is arguably “mel- make it soluble. “The normally skittish
of providing. “Hospitals would have ity than clinicians. (“You’re not crazy,” ancholia” by another name; “melan- animals became lethargic and placid,”
to comply or face huge fines,” writes he quotes one fellow patient as saying. cholics” were once presumed to have Harrington writes. “When placed on
Harrington. “Unfortunately, virtually “You’re a journalist or a professor. an excess of black bile that depressed their backs, instead of frantically try-
all hospitals lacked sufficient funds to You’re checking up on the hospital.”) their spirits, but now genetics, neuro- ing to right themselves, they just lay
comply, so what they did instead was When Rosenhan’s findings became transmitters, and a constitutional in- there, apparently content.” This wasn’t
release more patients.” Against this public, one teaching hospital “doubted ability to meet life’s challenges are all all new: lithium was used as a tonic for
backdrop, the antipsychiatry move- that such an error could occur” and invoked—explanations theoretically nerves in the nineteenth century, as a
ment surged. In 1961 the sociologist asked Rosenhan to send at least one open to being proved or disproved em- constituent in Vichy and Perrier min-
Erving Goffman compared psychiatric pseudopatient for assessment at a time pirically, but which have been difficult eral waters, and as an additive in 7 Up
hospitals to concentration camps; at of his choosing over the following three to substantiate with hard evidence. The as late as 1950.
the same time rebel psychiatrists like months. During that period forty-one first mass-market antidepressant, am- In 1954 a drug trial in Denmark ran-
R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz insisted (of 193 total) admissions “were alleged, itriptyline (Elavil), was promoted by domly allocated to patients lithium or
that mental illness itself was a social with high confidence, to be pseudopa- Merck as a safe alternative to ECT; like a placebo and found strong evidence
construction with no empirical reality. tients by at least one member of the the formidably lucrative chlorprom- for its benefits. Lithium in overdose
For the psychoanalysts, diagnosis staff.” In fact Rosenhan sent no one at azine, it was derived from a group of can permanently damage kidney and
was less important than the psycho- all. antihistamines. Within twenty years, thyroid function, and its use requires
logical processes underpinning each “The view has grown,” Rosenhan the efficacy of its class of tricyclic anti- close monitoring: when the study fol-
patient’s unique set of symptoms. Har- wrote in the introduction to his paper, depressants was taken so much for lowed up with participants to check
rington reports studies from 1949 and granted that physicians could be sued for ill effects, a startling eight of the
1962 (by P. Ash and A. Beck, respec- that psychological categorization for not prescribing them. thirty- eight patients were discovered to
tively) that found only about 30 percent of mental illness is useless at best Tricyclics had side effects and were be sourcing their own lithium against
concordance between the diagnosis and downright harmful, mislead- dangerous in overdose. In the early medical advice. They said it helped not
reached by two psychiatrists assessing ing, and pejorative at worst. Psy- 1970s a new antidepressant that fo- just in the acute phase of manic psycho-
the same patient. That may not have chiatric diagnoses, in this view, are cused on boosting brain serotonin sis but prevented relapse into mania. A
mattered to the doctors, but about in the minds of observers and are levels called Zelmid was developed study in 1967 by the same Danish team
halfway through her book Harrington not valid summaries of character- in Sweden by Astra Pharmaceuticals. followed almost ninety Danish women
cites a study that should matter to every istics displayed by the observed. It was approved for use in Europe in with manic depression. Untreated, they
medical student and every practicing 1981. But recipients began to report averaged a relapse every eight months;
physician who has anything to do with His damning conclusion was that “it unpleasant, flu-like side effects, and in on lithium, relapses occurred “only
mental illness (i.e., all of them): David is clear that we cannot distinguish the 1983 it was withdrawn. once every 60–85 months and were of
Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane sane from the insane in psychiatric Between 1972 and 1975, Eli Lilly notably shorter duration.” As an ele-
Places,” published in Science in 1973. hospitals.” had also been developing one of these mental salt, lithium couldn’t, of course,
The paper has had its detractors, but drugs, later called “selective serotonin be patented; Harrington is withering in
in an experiment of stunning elegance reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs), and had her discussion of how slow the US mar-
Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist, It’s been thirty years since the confer- called it “fluoxetine.” It was only with ket was to take up such an unprofitable
exploded notions of the reliability and ence in Worcester at which a speaker the withdrawal of Zelmid that fluoxe- drug.
utility of psychiatric diagnosis, and showed a blank slide to reflect the es- tine was released for use, in 1987, under The DSM- IV divided recurrent
ignited a controversy that still burns tablished facts about schizophrenia, the name Prozac. One of Prozac’s ad- swings of mania and depression into
fiercely today. and the science of what schizophre- vantages over the older tricyclic drugs either Bipolar I or Bipolar II: the for-
Eight researchers, including Rosen- nia is—what a medic might call its was simply that patients seemed more mer manifesting itself as more florid
han, presented themselves at twelve pathophysiology—hasn’t budged an likely to lose weight than to gain it. psychoses, and the latter as milder ep-
psychiatric institutions, complain- inch. An elegant and valuable recent Sales soared. In 1993 Peter Kramer’s isodes of alternating depression and
ing that they were hearing indistinct contribution to this discussion is This Listening to Prozac spent three months elevated mood (“bipolar lite”). “But
voices, saying “empty,” “thud,” or Book Will Change Your Mind About on the best-seller list. Four years later, if bipolar disorder could have two sub-
“hollow”—terms chosen because they Mental Health by Nathan Filer, a for- direct advertising of prescription drugs types, then why not more—maybe even
had not previously been reported in mer psychiatric nurse in the southwest to patients encouraged the unsubstan- a lot more?” Harrington asks. Since
the literature. All said that they were of England. Filer writes about a se- tiated idea that low mood is simply a the 1970s Hagop Akiskal, a psychia-
undistressed by their “symptoms,” but ries of people and families touched by correctable chemical imbalance—a trist in Tennessee, has been insisting
all were admitted. “Immediately upon schizophrenia diagnoses. He uses their position not too different from the me- that bipolar disorder is not one condi-
admission to the psychiatric ward,” re- stories to explore the nature of delu- dieval idea of humors—and the age tion but many, across a broad spectrum
ported Rosenhan, “the pseudopatient sions and hallucinations, review the of “cosmetic psychopharmacology” of both severity and character.
ceased simulating any symptoms of latest research into their causes, and (Kramer’s coinage) arrived. This Book Will Change Your Mind
abnormality.” Eleven of the twelve describe how the diagnosis is reached. The checklist approach to diagnosis About Mental Health is explicit about
episodes of admission resulted in a di- Like Harrington, he recounts the hap- introduced by the DSM - III, and the in- how devastating severe psychotic ill-
agnosis of schizophrenia and just one, hazard manner in which treatments creasing use of questionnaires like the ness can be, and honest about how
having been admitted to an expensive have been discovered, perpetrated, and Hamilton Depression Scale, tended little is known of the condition’s neuro-
private hospital, was given what was discarded, but he explores more deeply to promote a diagnosis of depression; biology. Genetics are important, as is
then considered a more upmarket di- than Harrington the unfair stigma that since 1997 that tendency has only bal- fetal neurovulnerability, but adverse
agnosis—manic- depressive psychosis. people with such a diagnosis still expe- looned. Harrington offers a cogent childhood experiences and a lack of
All asked to be discharged as soon as rience. Along the way he questions the summary of the ways pharmaceuti- social support seem just as fundamen-
they arrived on the ward, professing assumptions made by the psychiatric cal companies publicize a diagnosis tal. I’ve seen in my own practice how
their symptoms gone, but their inpa- establishments of both the US and UK, first, then market an old drug as a new the social restrictions of the Covid-19
tient stays ranged from nine to fifty-two and asks whether “schizophrenia” as a cure, such as Eli Lilly’s magazine cam- pandemic seem to have set off, or re-
days (with nineteen days the average). concept needs an overhaul. paign to promote Prozac, “Welcome vealed, paranoid psychosis in people
When eventually discharged, the sup- Filer’s interest is in the fine details, Back,” or Pfizer’s TV campaign for who’ve never suffered mental illness
posedly “schizophrenic” patients the humanity and the specificity of each Zoloft, which characterized the brain before, and case reports confirming the
were told that their diagnoses were individual’s slide into a unique psy- as a kind of cake that needed the right same observation are beginning to be
confirmed but that they were now “in chosis. “We’ve seen that the most dis- balance of chemicals in order to be published in Spain and the US. Among
remission.” (Aware of how sticky, con- tressing personal experiences—those successful. her conclusions to Mind Fixers, Har-
sequential, and pejorative these labels that lead to the diagnosis of mental rington quotes the social science find-
can be, all had used pseudonyms.) disorders—are as likely to be shaped ing that many psychiatric patients have
Rosenhan’s pseudopatients took by our relationships and the pressures Kraepelin had wondered as early as a better response to being provided
notes throughout their hospital stays, of our environment as they are by any 1899 if swings from mania to melan- with “their own apartment and/or ac-
recording clinician and attendant be- abnormalities in our biology,” he con- choly—“circular insanity” or “insanity cess to supportive communities, than
havior, and clocking the time staff spent cludes. “Sometimes what needs ‘fixing’ of double form”—were manifestations being given a [prescription] for a new
with patients. No clinicians asked to see mightn’t reside within the individual at of a “single morbid process.” If so, it or stronger antipsychotic.”
these notes, or expressed any interest all.” was unusually resistant to treatment: Some might consider this finding
in them. Among the many scorching shock treatments and tranquilizers radical (contingent as it is on excellent
insights of the study was that the more made no difference either to the sever- insurance or a robust welfare state),
elevated a clinician was within the hos- S chizophrenia involves a pervasive, ity or frequency of the swings. In 1949 but in my own family practice I look
pital hierarchy, the less time he or she enduring disturbance in the reliability John Cade, a psychiatrist in Melbourne, after two such “sheltered housing”
spent with patients. Abuse of patients in of perceptions; any influence it has on wondered if mania might have a de- complexes for people with chronic
full view of other patients was routine, mood is usually considered secondary. tectable chemical signature. He tried mental illness. The arrangement works

28 The New York Review

beautifully: when given social support patients and what the staff at the sup- like this is challenging to a strictly bi- of crisis are times of opportunity.”
and primary health care, these patients portive housing complexes are saying, ological interpretation of severe men- As a medical student I was puzzled
rarely need the attention of psychi- and zero attention to DSM categories. tal illness—no one expects your liver by how my psychiatry tutors could
atrists at all. I see the patients more (Those categories don’t help in the alle- cancer or osteonecrosis to improve if struggle to distinguish a good student
or less regularly, depending on their viation of my patients’ mental distress; someone gives you a job or a house— from a failing one, but I see that am-
symptoms, and for those in a spiral of medication and supportive care do.) but mental disorders are different, cen- biguity now as magnanimous in its
worsening distress, a psychiatrist is al- Once you have a health care system tered on perceptual and social worlds. way, demonstrating a certain libera-
ways available by phone. that offers care based on distress and To treat them as purely physical is to tion from orthodoxy. In any discipline
Between the primary care physi- need rather than diagnostic category, misunderstand their nature. The final an admission of uncertainty sanctions
cian and the psychiatrist we prescribe and from which oppressive insurance pages of Harrington’s book summa- new ways of thinking. With creativity
the same old drugs—major and minor requirements have been removed, it’s rize the story so far: asylums gave way and humanity, the next generation of
tranquilizers, occasional antidepres- my experience that both patient and to neuroanatomy, which ceded to so- psychiatrists should be free to build
sants—to deal with agitation, hallu- physician benefit, and the therapeutic matic shock therapies, psychoanalysis, new models of mental distress in all its
cinations, paranoia, depression, and relationship flourishes. and the “biological revolution” in turn. manifestations, and new approaches to
mania. We pay close attention to the Harrington knows that an approach Psychiatry is again in crisis, but “times treatment. Q

The Poet and the Reader

Louise Glück

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 What happens to a poet of this type
Nobel Prize in Literature. This is her when the collective, instead of apparently
Nobel lecture, which she was unable exiling or ignoring him or her, applauds
to deliver in person because of the and elevates? I would say such a poet
Covid-19 pandemic. would feel threatened, outmaneuvered.
This is Dickinson’s subject. Not al-
When I was a small child of, I think, ways, but often.
about five or six, I staged a competi- I read Emily Dickinson most pas-
tion in my head, a contest to decide the sionately when I was in my teens. Usu-
greatest poem in the world. There were ally late at night, post-bedtime, on the
two finalists: Blake’s “The Little Black living room sofa.
Boy” and Stephen Foster’s “Swanee
River.” I paced up and down the second I’m nobody! Who are you?
bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Are you nobody, too?
Cedarhurst, a village on the south shore
of Long Island, reciting, in my head as And, in the version I read then and still
I preferred, not from my mouth, Blake’s prefer:
unforgettable poem, and singing, also in
my head, the haunting, desolate Foster Then there’s a pair of us—don’t
song. How I came to have read Blake is a tell!
mystery. I think there were a few poetry Illustration by William Blake from his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, circa 1825 They’d banish us, you know . . .
anthologies in my parents’ house among
the more common books on politics to speak, to whom, along with Shake- this is not a realistic hope, that it ig- Dickinson had chosen me, or recog-
and history and the many novels. But I speare, I was already speaking. nores the real, makes the poem heart- nized me, as I sat there on the sofa.
associate Blake with my grandmother’s Blake was the winner of the compe- breaking and also deeply political. The We were an elite, companions in invis-
house. My grandmother was not a book- tition. But I realized later how similar hurt and righteous anger the little black ibility, a fact known only to us, which
ish woman. But there was Blake, The these two lyrics were; I was drawn, then boy cannot allow himself to feel, that each corroborated for the other. In the
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as now, to the solitary human voice, his mother tries to shield him from, is world, we were nobody.
and also a tiny book of the songs from raised in lament or longing. And the felt by the reader or listener. Even when But what would constitute banish-
Shakespeare’s plays, many of which I poets I returned to as I grew older were that reader is a child. ment to people existing as we did, in
memorized. I particularly loved the song the poets in whose work I played, as the But public honor is another matter. our safe place under the log? Banish-
from Cymbeline, understanding proba- elected listener, a crucial role. Intimate, ment is when the log is moved.
bly not a word but hearing the tone, the seductive, often furtive or clandestine. I am not talking here about the per-
cadences, the ringing imperatives, thrill- Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to The poems to which I have, all my life, nicious influence of Emily Dickinson on
ing to a very timid, fearful child. “And themselves. been most ardently drawn are poems of teenaged girls. I am talking about a tem-
renownèd be thy grave.” I hoped so. I liked this pact, I liked the sense that the kind I have described, poems of in- perament that distrusts public life or sees
Competitions of this sort, for honor, what the poem spoke was essential and timate selection or collusion, poems to it as the realm in which generalization
for high reward, seemed natural to me; also private, the message received by which the listener or reader makes an obliterates precision, and partial truth
the myths that were my first reading the priest or the analyst. essential contribution, as recipient of a replaces candor and charged disclosure.
were filled with them. The greatest poem The prize ceremony in my grand- confidence or an outcry, sometimes as By way of illustration: suppose the voice
in the world seemed to me, even when I mother’s second bedroom seemed, by co-conspirator. “I’m nobody!” Dick- of the conspirator, Dickinson’s voice, is
was very young, the highest of high hon- virtue of its secrecy, an extension of the inson says. “Are you nobody, too?/ replaced by the voice of the tribunal.
ors. This was also the way my sister and intense relation the poem had created: Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!” “We’re nobody, who are you?” That
I were being raised, to save France (Joan an extension, not a violation. Or Eliot: “Let us go then, you and I, / message becomes suddenly sinister.
of Arc), to discover radium (Marie Blake was speaking to me through When the evening is spread out against It was a surprise to me on the morn-
Curie). Later I began to understand the the little black boy; he was the hidden the sky/Like a patient etherized upon ing of October 8 to feel the sort of panic
dangers and limitations of hierarchical origin of that voice. He could not be a table . . .” Eliot is not summoning the I have been describing. The light was
thinking, but in my childhood it seemed seen, just as the little black boy was boy scout troop. He is asking some- too bright. The scale too vast.
important to confer a prize. One person not seen, or was seen inaccurately, by thing of the reader. As opposed, say, to Those of us who write books pre-
would stand at the top of the mountain, the unperceptive and disdainful white Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to sumably wish to reach many. But some
visible from far away, the only thing of boy. But I knew that what he said was a summer’s day?”: Shakespeare is not poets do not see reaching many in spa-
interest on the mountain. The person a true, that his provisional mortal body comparing me to a summer’s day. I am tial terms, as in the filled auditorium.
little below was invisible. contained a soul of luminous purity; I being allowed to overhear dazzling vir- They see reaching many temporally,
Or, in this case, poem. I felt sure that knew this because what the black child tuosity, but the poem does not require sequentially, many over time, into the
Blake especially was somehow aware of says, his account of his feelings and my presence. future, but in some profound way these
this event, intent on its outcome. I un- his experience, contains no blame, no In art of the kind to which I was drawn, readers always come singly, one by one.
derstood he was dead, but I felt he was wish to revenge himself, only the belief the voice or judgment of the collective I believe that in awarding me this
still alive, since I could hear his voice that, in the perfect world he has been is dangerous. The precariousness of prize, the Swedish Academy is choos-
speaking to me, disguised, but his voice. promised after death, he will be recog- intimate speech adds to its power and ing to honor the intimate, private voice,
Speaking, I felt, only to me or especially nized for what he is, and in a surfeit of the power of the reader, through whose which public utterance can some-
to me. I felt singled out, privileged; I felt joy protect the more fragile white child agency the voice is encouraged in its ur- times augment or extend, but never
also that it was Blake to whom I aspired from the sudden surfeit of light. That gent plea or confidence. replace. Q
January 14, 2021 29
 Once Upon a Time There Was a Big Bubble
Cass R. Sunstein
Narrative Economics: a newfound fear of volatility and risk.
How Stories Go Viral and Drive Others will make expensive contin-
Major Economic Events gency plans, or hoard masks and clean-
by Robert J. Shiller. ing products. Many will live with a kind
Princeton University Press, of ambient anxiety, depression, or de-
377 pp., $27.95; $19.95 (paper) spair, which could make them turn to
drugs or self-harm. Some will engage
One of the most beloved episodes of more in protests, or study epidemiol-
Star Trek: The Next Generation is ogy, or employ private tutors, or bolster
called “Darmok.” On stardate 45047.2, their business-interruption insurance
the crew of the USS Enterprise, led by policies. Some will become EMTs;
Captain Jean-Luc Picard, encounters some who dreamed of being EMTs will
an advanced alien species called the no longer pursue that path. The same
Tamarians with whom it is unable to event has already given rise to myriad
communicate. Though the Tamari- narratives, which compete with one
ans’ words and syntax can be grasped, another and which can lead people to
what they’re saying seems to make no live in what seem to be different social
sense. “But are they truly incompre- universes.
hensible?” Picard wonders. “In my ex- Shiller hopes to develop “a new
perience, communication is a matter of theory of economic change,” one that
patience, imagination.” And yet a bar- emphasizes the importance of “pop-
rier remains. The frustrated Tamarian ular stories that spread through word
leader, Dathon, keeps repeating the of mouth, the news media, and social
same peculiar phrase: “Darmok and media.” He seeks to focus on “(1) the
Jalad at Tanagra.” word- of-mouth contagion of ideas in
The Tamarians, it turns out, speak the form of stories and (2) the efforts
only in narratives. They lack abstrac- that people make to generate new con-
tions. They rely on stories to express tagious stories or to make stories more
what they mean. “Darmok and Jalad contagious.” The latter point is import-
at Tanagra” is shorthand for the tale ant; influential narratives are often
of an improbable friendship between generated by people with explicit eco-
mutually suspicious, potentially hos- nomic or political goals (“the failure of
tile leaders of different cultures who Obamacare” or “the hapless neoliber-
ended up as allies, fighting side by side alism of Barack Obama” or “the safety
against a common enemy. By invok- of gold”). The narratives associated
ing that narrative, Dathon meant to with Me Too have provided the foun-
signal to Picard what he hoped would dation for challenges not only to sexual
happen between them. What makes violence and sexual harassment, but
this episode memorable is its depiction Robert J. Shiller; illustration by John Cuneo also to gender inequality of multiple
of a culture in which communication kinds. In Sexual Harassment of Work-
occurs only through stories, taken as paid no attention to those labels. If you Consider, for example, how memories ing Women (1979) the legal scholar
analogies or allegories. It is as if peo- are curious about whether increases in of the Great Depression marked so Catharine MacKinnon employed sear-
ple conveyed their every thought to the minimum wage will decrease em- many people who came of age in the ing narratives of male abuse of power.
one another by saying, “Hitler at Mu- ployment, you will not learn much if 1940s, giving them a pervasive fear of Narrative economics, as Shiller calls
nich,” “when Nixon resigned,” “the someone tells you that a tomato farmer the possibility of large-scale economic it, studies “the viral spread of popular
collapse of the Soviet Union,” “Hil- her cousin knew declined to hire more collapse. For some, that fear provided a narratives that affect economic behav-
lary Clinton’s e-mails,” “the election of tomato-pickers because of a rising long-term cloud over daily life; for oth- ior,” including decisions about whether
Barack Obama,” “the killing of George minimum wage. To be sure, behavioral ers, it led to a lot of saving and an un- to spend or save, where and how much
Floyd,” “your sister’s first marriage,” or economists draw on psychology to em- willingness to take economic risks. By to invest, whether to go to college, and
“coronavirus.” phasize our all-too-human departures emphasizing narratives, Shiller aims whether to take one or another job.
For narratives to communicate as from perfect rationality. We know, for to mount a fundamental challenge to When narratives spread, not only indi-
well as they did among the Tamarians, example, that people often suffer from standard economic thinking—and to viduals but also entire economies can
a society needs a clear understanding of “present bias,” which means that they open up new territory for analysis. move in surprising ways. Shiller wants
the stories that it shares; it needs stories emphasize the short term over the fu- “to improve people’s ability to antic-
that are universally known and a con- ture. We know that people tend to be ipate and deal with major economic
sensus about what they mean. In the overconfident about their plans, ex- Narrative Economics was published events,” and he thinks that if we incor-
absence of this sort of understanding, pecting that projects will take less time before the novel coronavirus struck, porate an understanding of economic
a story might divide people sharply; it than they actually do. We know that but in a sense the pandemic is an im- narratives, we will do exactly that.
might mean two or three things (“Don- people tend to be “loss-averse,” mean- portant point in his argument’s favor. It To explain what he has in mind,
ald Trump impeached”). ing that they dislike losses more than has already become a narrative—about Shiller draws attention to a recent nar-
The “Darmok” episode resonates they enjoy corresponding gains. These the volatility of the stock market, about rative involving the cryptocurrency
because humans have a lot in common and other findings are based on data, the negligence and failures of certain Bitcoin, whose value increased from $0
with the Tamarians. Narratives provide not on stories. public officials, about China, about to $300 billion in just a few years. With-
a kind of social glue. The Bible, for Robert Shiller is one of the founders the devastating effect of pandemics in out evaluating it or making predictions
instance, offers a collection of stories, of behavioral economics. He has spent general. Of course, the content of the about its future, Shiller emphasizes
usually taken to impart specific les- much of his career compiling and study- coronavirus narrative is not fixed and that “Bitcoin has no value unless peo-
sons; I might ask how your day was in ing large data sets on subjects including firm; we are in the midst of it, and peo- ple think it has value.” He suggests that
pandemic- era America, and you might real estate prices and movements in the ple sharply disagree about its meaning. the occasionally spectacular spikes in
reply by mentioning the Book of Job. stock market. He has used those data But there’s a story there all the same, Bitcoin’s price have been made possi-
In the United States, our national by- sets to explain “irrational exuberance,” and it’s affecting investors, employers, ble by a mysterious narrative featur-
words include people, policies, and for example unjustified optimism about employees, and voters. Because the ing a secretive creator named Satoshi
place names: Abraham Lincoln, Robert increases in stock prices. But in recent virus is disproportionately harming the Nakamoto, who, in Shiller’s words,
E. Lee, the New Deal, Stonewall, Anita years, Shiller has placed special em- poor and people of color, it is contribut- “has never been seen by anyone who
Hill, Harvey Weinstein. The meanings phasis on what he sees as the power ing to narratives about class and race as will testify to having seen him.” And
of these stories are constantly disputed of stories. His particular interest is in well—and to the sense of injustice over this narrative draws attention to an
and shift over time. That is testimony how specific narratives affect economic police violence that arose this summer imagined utopian future in which most
to their power. phenomena—recessions, depressions, after the killing of George Floyd. people buy and sell all sorts of things
Economists are interested in data, consumer choices, bubbles, the success For a long time to come, people will with Bitcoin and thus become “part of
not stories. If you want to know whether of new products, and rapid growth. be influenced, both politically and a broader cosmopolitan culture,” liber-
inclusion of calorie labels on condiment Shiller’s claim in his latest book, Nar- economically, by their understanding ated from the authority of nation-states
wrappers or soda cans helps to decrease rative Economics, is that economists of the pandemic, whatever narrative and their provincial treasuries.
obesity, you should not rely on an anec- and others have overlooked the impor- about it crystalizes for them. Some will Shiller uses the example of Bitcoin
dote about an overweight neighbor who tance of narratives in economic life. stay away from the stock market out of to illustrate the importance of social

30 The New York Review

 
AND  
A CU RRE NT L IS TI NG
Alexandre Gallery, 25 East 73rd Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10021 Yossi Milo Gallery, 245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001 Figureworks Gallery, 168 N. 6th St., Brooklyn, NY 11211
(212) 755-2828; www.alexandregallery.com (212) 414-0370; info@yossimilo.com; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM –6PM ZZZÀJXUHZRUNVFRP
Saturday & Sunday 1–6PM & by appointment
:HDUHSOHDVHGWRDQQRXQFHRXUQHZORFDWLRQRQWKH8SSHU(DVW6LGH Sarah Anne Johnson, Woodland
*DOOHU\DUWLVWVDQG$PHULFDQ0RGHUQLVWVRQYLHZE\DSSRLQWPHQW 2FWREHU²-DQXDU\ )LJXUHZRUNV *DOOHU\ ZDV RQH RI WKH HDUOLHVW JDOOHULHV WR RSHQ LQ WKH
LQTXLULHV#DOH[DQGUHJDOOHU\FRP -RKQVRQ·VGHEXWH[KLELWLRQSUHVHQWV WKULYLQJDUWVFHQHRI:LOOLDPVEXUJ%URRNO\QLQ)RURYHU\HDUV
QHZ ODQGVFDSH SKRWRJUDSKV ZLWK WKH JDOOHU\ KDV FRQVLVWHQWO\ SUHVHQWHG H[FHSWLRQDO ÀJXUHEDVHG ZRUN
ERWK ÀQH DUW DQG XQFRQYHQWLRQDO E\HVWDEOLVKHGFRQWHPSRUDU\DQGWKFHQWXU\DUWLVWV
PDWHULDOV DSSOLHG DFURVV WKHLU
VXUIDFHV VXFK DV SDLQW SKRWR
VSRWWLQJLQNDQGJROGRUEUDVVOHDI
-RKQVRQ·V DGGHG IRUPV UHSUHVHQW
what the eye and camera cannot
DSSUHKHQG ZKLOH H[SUHVVLQJ KHU
feelings of integration with the
QDWXUDO ZRUOG ´, GR WKLV WR FUHDWH D
PRUHKRQHVWLPDJHµVD\V-RKQVRQ
´7RVKRZQRWMXVWZKDW,VDZEXWKRZ
,IHHODERXWZKDW,VDZµ
Sarah Anne Johnson
Will Barnet (American, 1911–2012) (Canadian, b. 1976)
6WXG\IRUWKH.LWFKHQ, 1991, PMMP2, 2020, Michael Sorgatz, .LQJIRUD'D\, 2019, acrylic on board, 12" x 18"
watercolor, gouache, and charcoal on paper pigment print with acrylic paint
11" x 15 3/8" and holographic tape
20" x 13 3/8" (51 x 34 cm)

West Coast Print Fair Marlborough Gallery Blue Mountain Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
(617) 610-7173 545 West 25th Street bluemountaingallery.org; (646) 486-4730; Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM –6PM
www.westcoastprintfair.com New York, NY 10001
8AM EST–3PM EST (212) 541-4900 %OXH 0RXQWDLQ *DOOHU\ ZLOO FHOHEUDWH WKH RSHQLQJ RI LWV QHZ VSDFH LQ
January 22–February 9, 2021 www.marlboroughnewyork.com &KHOVHDZLWKDQH[KLELWRIJDOOHU\DUWLVWV%OXH0RXQWDLQLVRQHRI1HZ
Tuesday–Saturday, <RUN·VORQJHVWUXQQLQJFRRSHUDWLYHVLWVORQJHYLW\LQWKHHYHUFKDQJLQJ
3ULQW)DLUV86$ SUHVHQWV WKH :HVW 10AM–6PM ZRUOGRI1HZ<RUNJDOOHULHVDWWHVWVWRLWVYDOXHDQGUHVLOLHQFHDVDIRUXP
Coast Print Fair, a virtual show to be IRUFRQWHPSRUDU\SDLQWLQJ
held in lieu of the Portland (OR) Fine
3ULQW )DLU WKH %D\ $UHD )LQH 3ULQW Gina Sawin·VVHULHVRIELUGSDLQWLQJVUHIHUWRWKHWKHPHRIPLJUDWLRQDV
Brassaï
)DLU %HUNHOH\ &$ DQG WKH /RV DQLQHYLWDEOHDQGXQLYHUVDOPHDQVRIVXUYLYDO
$UPRLUHjJODFHGDQVXQK{WHOGH
$QJHOHV )LQH 3ULQW )DLU 3DVDGHQD SDVVHUXH4XLQFDPSRL[, 1932,
&$DOOFDQFHOHGWKLV\HDU gelatin silver print on
double weight paper
Image: 13" x 10 13/16"
 GHDOHUV IURP WKH 86 (XURSH Sheet: 16" x 12"
-DSDQDQG$XVWUDOLDZLOOH[KLELWDQG © ESTATE BRASSAÏ—
Kawase Hasui, =2-2-,6+,%$, 1925, RMN-Grand Palais.
VHOO ÀQH SULQWV DQG GUDZLQJV IURP woodblock print,
the time of the old masters through 14 1/4" X 9 1/2"
WR FRQWHPSRUDU\ ZRUNV UDQJLQJ
WKURXJK DOO VW\OHV DQG DUWLVWLF SHUL
RGV0RUHLQIRUPDWLRQIRUFROOHFWRUV
LQVWLWXWLRQVDQGWKHSXEOLFLVDWZZZ
ZHVWFRDVWSULQWIDLUFRP
Gina Sawin, Tern Flock: Gray Morning, 28" x 54"

LewAllen Galleries, Railyard Arts District, 1613 Paseo de Peralta, Cole Pratt Gallery, 3800 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70115
Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 988-3250; contact@lewallengalleries.com, www.coleprattgallery.com; (504) 891-6789; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM–5PM
www.lewallengalleries.com
Joan Griswold, Recent Work
Ynez Johnston & Leonard Edmondson December 31, 2020–February 13, 2021
December 11, 2020–January 23, 2021
7ZRLPSRUWDQW$PHULFDQPRGHUQLVWVDQGOLIHORQJIULHQGV

Paintings of the everyday: bookstores, bedside tables, a sink full of
GLVKHVFDXJKWLQDPRPHQW·VSOD\RIOLJKW
AND



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

If you would like to know more about

the listing, please contact
Johnston, 8QWLWOHG, 1954, collage on paper, 9 5/8” x 16 5/8”
gallery@nybooks.com
or (212) 293-1630

Joan Griswold, Deadline, 12" x 14", oil on linen

January 14, 2021 31

influences—our beliefs about what Shiller argues that such images take the “new automation,” including elec- economic sphere. Above all, Shiller
other people believe—on people’s hold of people’s imaginations and have tronic word processing and comput- is interested “in getting closer to the
economic choices, and to show the power for that reason. With respect to erized storage equipment, was held human reality behind major economic
centrality of emotionally evocative nar- the economy, there are “perennial nar- responsible for unemployment. Today events,” urging that the patterns of our
ratives to those influences. A new prod- ratives,” which it is easy to find newspaper or maga- thinking help explain why economies
uct—the Tesla, for example—might zine stories on the topic, with intense grow or stagnate, and “experience pe-
connect itself to an inspiring story of affect economic behavior by focus on the potentially harmful effects riods of rapid progress and periods of
public-spirited technological innova- changing the popular understand- of artificial intelligence and machine regression.” To be sure, many histo-
tion to combat climate change, and at- ing of the economy, by altering learning. rians do something like this already;
tract investors and consumers for that public perceptions of economic re- In Shiller’s view, there are many un- Shiller emphasizes the importance
reason. ality, by creating new ideas about answered questions here; we do not of orienting economists toward these
These influences extend to pub- what is meaningful and important know nearly enough to be able to “pre- narratives.
lic policy. Shiller points to the Laffer and moral, or by suggesting new dict the effects of labor-saving and in-
Curve, developed by the economist Ar- scripts for individual behavior. telligent machines on livelihoods and
thur Laffer (to whom Donald Trump work in the future.” But he emphasizes Here Shiller is onto something im-
awarded a Presidential Medal of Free- These include the view that real estate that the narratives about their adverse portant and often neglected. Many of
dom), which purports to show that cut- has some special value, that a return to consequences can have effects on both our most significant decisions are made
ting taxes (including on the rich) will the gold standard would stabilize the politics and investment, ultimately af- not by careful cost-benefit analysis but
actually increase government revenues. economy, and that either large corpo- fecting stock markets and the success by stories that come into our minds—
Unfortunately, the Laffer Curve is rations or labor unions are inherently or failure of companies large and small. including keen recollections of per-
wrong; tax cuts do not increase govern- evil. Shiller explores the nature and Many people are enthusiastic about in- sonal decisions that went well (moving
ment revenues. persistence of these narratives and also vesting in companies that specialize in to a new city, for example) or badly
As Shiller sees it, the Laffer Curve their various mutations. artificial intelligence, for example, even (dating a charismatic narcissist). Some-
is not a theory but a story, a pleasing Take the idea that machines are if there is no good reason to think that thing like this is true of public officials
tale of what might happen, and that’s going to replace workers. Shiller goes the investment will pay off. as well as ordinary people. The stories
what accounts for its power. It started back to classical Greece to show how For many years Shiller has devoted of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iraq
to spread in 1978, when the Wall Street potent that idea can be. Around 350 attention to booms and busts in real War have loomed large in the minds of
Journal reporter Jude Wanniski wrote BC , Aristotle raised the possibility estate, stressing his own finding (based high-level politicians.
a popular book, The Way the World that people might be replaced by me- on surveys) that in some periods, peo- In business, prominent narratives
Works, reporting that Laffer originally chanical instruments, describing a ple believe that real estate prices are can have a large influence—for in-
drew his famous curve on a napkin over situation in which “every instrument bound to go up, essentially forever. stance, a recent decision by an assort-
dinner with two White House officials, could accomplish its own work, obey- “Exuberant real estate narratives,” ment of companies to act in accordance
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. ing or anticipating the will of others.” as he calls them, can lead to a kind with moral values might be a response
Laffer himself denied the report, but, That fear has arisen periodically in of boom, with sharply rising housing to a narrative about such a decision, by
Shiller writes, the vivid tale of “a draw- the United States, with prophecies in prices. The reason is that such narra- one company, that also turned out to be
ing on a napkin helped make the story the 1950s about the baleful effects of tives tend to be contagious. If people highly profitable. Narratives of success
go viral,” which may well have made the an automated future. In fact, the word share a tale to the effect that real es- or failure often make all the differ-
theory more popular, even persuasive. “automation” was coined around 1955, tate is a fool-proof investment, they can ence, including to those who influence
Drawing on psychological research, when electronic data processing be- make it so, at least for a while. Belief large-scale movements in the economy.
he contends that “when authors want came pervasive and sparked fear of in the inevitable growth in real estate When people decide whether to buy or
their audience to remember a story, job losses. The fear arose again in the prices creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, rent a home, to enroll in a savings plan,
they should suggest striking visual 1980s, when the culture was obsessed in the form of a bubble. But bubbles to stay at home during a pandemic, or
images.” with robots (think Star Wars) and when pop, and this narrative can lead to di- to invest in equities or bonds, they often
saster, such as the Great Recession of rely on salient stories in their own lives,
2007. or those of others. Shiller is convincing
Stock market bubbles are best un- on these points, and in this he makes a
derstood in similar terms, produced major theoretical contribution.
as they are by narratives of inevita- Yet Shiller conflates the power of
ble growth and by people’s belief that social influences in general and the
other people are optimistic (and hence power of stories in particular. All of his
likely to invest). Shiller has claimed examples point to social influences on
that the lengthy bull market since 2009 people’s beliefs, but some of them do
in the United States is partly the re- not involve stories at all, at least not in
sult of a “story” that drove up markets any obvious sense. At times, he seems
during that period. Once people stop to stretch the very idea of “narrative.”
believing in that story, a sudden and To see how social influences work, it
steep downturn will occur. The mar- is useful to start with the idea of “in-
ket’s immediate collapse in response to formational cascades.” When people
the coronavirus pandemic can be seen don’t know about a given subject, they
to have vindicated Shiller’s argument, are often highly attentive to the infor-
though its recovery since raises numer- mation provided by the statements or
ous puzzles. actions of others. Suppose that Rick is
Shiller encourages economists to not sure whether it makes sense to in-
learn much more about how narra- vest in a new real estate property. He
tives work. He wants them to assemble may become enthusiastic about invest-
focus groups with people from differ- ing in an airy three-bedroom apart-
ent socioeconomic levels and to elicit ment in his neighborhood if his trusted
conversations about economic narra- friend Andrea says that real estate is a
tives. They can learn a lot, he believes, terrific investment. If both Andrea and
from listening to what people have to Rick believe that real estate is a terrific
say. Economists might work with his- investment, their friend Cynthia may
torical databases of personal letters end up thinking so too, at least if she
and diaries. They might interview lacks independent information to the
people, asking them to tell stories in contrary. If Andrea, Rick, and Cynthia
response to questions about economic believe that real estate is a terrific in-
decisions. vestment, their friend David will need
Intriguingly, he suggests that econ- a good deal of confidence to reject their
omists should investigate databases shared conclusion, and he may invest in
of religious sermons, because “they real estate as well.
touch on moral values” and because This is a highly simplified example,
“value judgments about what is right of course, but variations can be found
and wrong are undoubtedly relevant every day, online and off, as people
to changing economic decisions.” If, react to the signals given by the beliefs
for example, priests loudly denounced and actions of others. This conforming
the immorality and harmful effects of or assimilating process can produce
speculation, stock market investments, cascade effects, as large groups of peo-
gambling, and greed, economic histo- ple end up thinking and doing some-
rians might see a lot of caution in the thing different or new, often shockingly

32 The New York Review

quickly, simply because other people To be sure, it might go viral. (Actually,
are seen to think and do it too. To take it has.) But taken by itself, how much
a contemporary example, all over the does it have to do with narrative?
world the social response to the corona- Nonetheless, Shiller is right to sug-
virus has been a product not only of law gest that narratives can be uniquely
but also of an informational cascade, memorable and influential, because
often driven by two words: Stay home. they focus people’s attention and move
And yet in many places, there has been their emotions in ways that abstrac-
no such cascade. When social groups tions usually do not. Humans are not
are divided, it is often because different Tamarians, but with respect to human
social cascades develop, leading people behavior, a brief but riveting tale can
to radically different judgments about be worth a thousand pages of careful
what they ought to do. analysis. We know this from daily life,
In many cases, cascade effects will and there is suggestive research to that
occur, or not, depending on seemingly effect as well. If doctors want to en-
small factors, such as who speaks first courage a patient to have a risky oper-
in a meeting, the initial distribution of ation, they might do best not to refer to
beliefs, the level of trust, and people’s data but to tell a story about a similar
thresholds for abandoning their orig- patient who chose that operation and
inal beliefs in deference to the views is doing very well today. If you want to
announced by others. In hindsight, encourage a friend to get her son vac-
people are often tempted to think that cinated, it might be best to tell a story
a large-scale shift—the civil rights about a child who wasn’t vaccinated
movement, the Arab Spring, Brexit, and who got really sick with the flu, in-
the election of Donald Trump, the Me stead of quoting statistics. If politicians
Too movement—is inevitable or the want to encourage people to welcome
product of deep cultural forces. But it immigrants, it’s smart to describe the
might well be the result of something heroic feats and extraordinary inven-
more serendipitous, such as a promi- tions of particular immigrants who
nent news story at just the right time, or made spectacular contributions to so-
agreement between a movement leader ciety, rather than to give a summary of
and someone important who was for- the latest academic research.
merly undecided. At the same time, stories can be
manipulative, which means that using
them to influence people’s economic,
Many of Shiller’s examples do not in- political, or medical decisions can raise
volve stories as such. For instance, he ethical questions. A good storyteller
refers to a “narrative” that points out can be a trickster. Suppose, for exam-
“the folly of get-rich- quick schemes.” ple, that a company tries to sell a new
Is that really a story? It sounds more weight-loss product, regaling potential
like a cautionary note. Shiller also em- purchasers with a vivid (and true) story
phasizes a memorable quip by Ronald about a formerly obese teenager who
Reagan: “Government’s view of the used its product, lost fifty pounds, and
economy could be summed up in a is now able to run marathons in under
few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If three hours. This might make for a
it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it persuasive advertisement, but a single
stops moving, subsidize it.” In its time, story, appealing to people’s hopes and
that quip did catch on widely, but it emotions, doesn’t tell us a whole lot
does not sound much like a narrative about the actual effectiveness of the
either. product, or how likely it is to benefit
Or consider Shiller’s “perennial nar- most people.
ratives.” Suppose that you think real Societies need data, conveyed in a
estate prices will keep going up. If so, clear and comprehensible way. But if
you need not have any particular story our goal is to understand large-scale
in mind; you might instead be making movements in the economy and oth-
a prediction about what will happen. erwise, we could make a great deal of
Such exuberance is often driven not by progress by exploring the effects of sto-
stories but by propositions about the ries on people’s choices, and also the
future. The same is true about pessi- extent to which sharp differences in the
mism. The claim that machine learning perceived meaning of well-known sto-
and artificial intelligence will produce ries end up creating parallel universes,
unemployment is not a story at all; it is by splitting people along political, eco-
a prediction about a likely causal chain. nomic, religious, and cultural lines. Q

HELLO
hello to the unimaginative and dim ways of my kin, hello
to the bad lot we are, to the women mean and plucked, and to the men

on the broken steps who beat down the roses with their hosings,
to the nights that rose black as an inked plate, into which an acid bit stars—

puckered, tight, hard, pale as a surgeon’s scars,

hello to all that vast, unconditional bad luck, to the sensible, the stuffy,

the ugly couture of the thrifty, to the limp of bad goods, of old
furniture, the repeated wince of the creaky rocker, and to the grandmothers

dying in its clutch, and hello to rage which like an axis can move the world.

—Lynn Emanuel

January 14, 2021 33

 The People’s Novel
Adam Kirsch

Mehner/ullstein bild/Getty Images

The Aesthetics of Resistance, and analysis, mainly devoted to Marxist
Volume 1 interpretations of works of art and liter-
by Peter Weiss, translated from ature and to detailed recapitulations of
the German by Joachim Neugroschel, internal debates on the European left in
with a foreword by Fredric Jameson the early twentieth century.
and a glossary by Robert Cohen. Without a fairly advanced interest in
Duke University Press, these subjects, the most intrepid reader
325 pp., $27.95 (paper) will make little headway with The Aes-
thetics of Resistance. Even the way it’s
The Aesthetics of Resistance, laid out on the page is uncompromis-
Volume 2 ing: there are no paragraphs or quota-
by Peter Weiss, translated from tion marks, just one solid block of text
the German by Joel Scott, for hundreds of pages. As Weiss once
with an afterword by Jürgen Schutte. acknowledged to an interviewer, “I
Duke University Press, make it difficult for my readers.” So it’s
320 pp., $27.95 (paper) not surprising that the novel has been
slow to appear in English. A trans-
To the extent that the German writer lation of the first volume, by Joachim
Peter Weiss is known in the US, it is Neugroschel, was published by Duke
for his verse play The Persecution and University Press in 2005; fifteen years
Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as later, it is now joined by a translation of
Performed by the Inmates of the Asy- the second volume, by Joel Scott. (The
lum of Charenton Under the Direction third volume will presumably follow at
of the Marquis de Sade. Marat/Sade some point, hopefully before 2035.)
debuted in West Berlin in 1964 and Yet for the right reader, The Aes-
quickly became a hit on the West End thetics of Resistance offers unique
and Broadway, in a storied production rewards. The West’s literary mem-
by Peter Brook. With its fusion of rad- ory of twentieth- century communism
ical politics and sexual provocation, it was largely shaped by ex- and anti-
was a perfect theatrical starting gun for Communist writers like Arthur Koest-
the Sixties. ler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Czesław
Weiss took his cue from the histori- Miłosz, and George Orwell, who saw it
cal fact that the Marquis de Sade spent as inimical to spiritual and intellectual
the last years of his life in an insane life. Weiss makes a passionate case to
asylum, where he sometimes put on Peter Weiss at the International Vietnam Congress, Berlin, 1968 the contrary, arguing that for the poor
plays with his fellow patients as the and oppressed, communism offered a
cast. Marat/Sade imagines one such In Marat/Sade, Weiss is able to argue also pursued painting and experimen- key to spiritual and intellectual realms
performance in 1808, in which the pa- both sides of the question by splitting tal filmmaking. His first German work, from which they had been historically
tients act out the murder of the radical himself into two characters. In the end, the novella The Shadow of the Body excluded. But he is also acutely aware
Jacobin Marat, which had taken place however, Sade’s cynicism seems to tri- of the Coachman, didn’t appear until that the humanistic, emancipatory
fifteen years earlier at the height of the umph over Marat’s idealism. The fact 1960, four years before Marat/Sade communism of his dreams had a foe
French Revolution. But the real action that the entire play takes place in a made him internationally famous. in the actual Soviet Communist Party,
is intellectual, as Marat and Sade de- madhouse underscores the sense that with its demand for total submission
bate the nature of revolution. history itself is mad, that a rational and to an ever-changing ideological line.
Weiss’s Marat calls for the righteous just society can never be made by crea- The other work on which Weiss’s Balancing hope against reality, Weiss’s
destruction of the existing social order: tures like us. “Everything I wrote or reputation principally rests couldn’t novel tries to carry out the critique-
“The people used to suffer everything/ spoke / Was considered and true /Each be more different from Marat/Sade, from-within he outlined in his “Ten
now they take their revenge /You are argument was sound /And now/Doubt/ formally speaking. Yet The Aesthetics Working Points” essay.
watching that revenge /and you don’t Why does everything sound false,” of Resistance, an enormous historical How should the reader approach a
remember that you drove the people laments Marat. The curtain falls on the novel published in three volumes be- book whose very title declares its re-
to it,” he declares (in Geoffrey Skel- inmates of Charenton rioting, as nurses tween 1975 and 1981, has at its core sistance? One way to think about The
ton’s English translation). Sade was try to beat them into submission and the same problem as the play: Is it pos- Aesthetics of Resistance is as a bil-
no supporter of the ancien régime— Sade watches it all with a smile. sible to unite revolution and freedom, dungsroman, a story about the forma-
his notorious sexual crimes got him Yet in 1965, the year after Marat/ the common good and the individual tion of a young person’s character. But
imprisoned for ten years in the Bas- Sade premiered, Weiss published an imagination? The novel’s unnamed the classic bildungsroman was an arch-
tille, where he wrote The 120 Days of essay in which he implicitly came down narrator, a young Communist with ar- bourgeois genre whose protagonist
Sodom—but Weiss has him voice an on the side of Marat—which meant, tistic ambitions, struggles mightily to enjoys the education, resources, and
artist’s skepticism about the revolu- for him, on the side of communism. In serve both gods—to “match up,” in the freedom necessary to experiment with
tionary future: “Ten Working Points of an Author in words of one character, “the intensity styles of life. From Goethe’s Wilhelm
a Divided World,” Weiss announced, of revolutionary artistic and political Meister to Mann’s Hans Castorp, Bil-
Now I see where “For me, the guidelines of socialism actions . . . the irony of the one with the dung, or spiritual development, involves
this revolution is leading contain the valid truth.” He would not seriousness, the sense of responsibility breaking away from the middle- class
To the withering of the individual refrain from criticizing Communist of the other.” The book is a search for family and its conventional definition
man governments—and in later years he the ideal named in its title: an art that of success, but only temporarily. In the
and a slow merging into was sometimes persona non grata in equals the masterpieces of the past in end, after some adventurous years in
uniformity . . . the Eastern Bloc as a result—but those complexity and power, while standing an acting troupe or a mountaintop san-
in a state criticisms had to be made from within. up against the unjust order that created atorium, the hero is destined to rejoin
which has no contact with “Whatever mistakes have been made those masterpieces. the “real” world.
individuals and are still being made in the name The Aesthetics of Resistance has been What would a proletarian bildungs-
but which is impregnable. of socialism, they should be there for hailed by German critics as a modernist roman look like? Is such a thing even
learning and criticism based on the epic comparable in stature to Ulysses possible? That is the challenge Weiss
For Weiss’s 1960s audience, this basic principles of the socialist concep- and In Search of Lost Time. For all their sets himself in his novel, which also
prophecy had less to do with France tion,” he wrote. difficulty, however, those books are follows a young man through a crucial
than with the Soviet Union. Weiss was Weiss was living in Sweden rather much more inviting than Weiss’s. Joyce period of experience and growth. In
born in Germany in 1916, a year before than East Germany, which made his and Proust offer the reader sharply indi- this case, however, the narrator is an
the Russian Revolution, and over his position as a dissident Communist vidualized characters, complex human outcast—a worker and a political sub-
lifetime he had seen its promise of lib- much easier. In fact, while he wrote relationships, dramatic set-pieces, and versive; and rather than fostering his
eration give way to terror and oppres- his most important works in German, beautiful prose; Weiss eschews all education, the world does everything
sion, just like the French Revolution Weiss never lived in Germany after these things on principle. True to its possible to hinder it. In addition to the
before it. For leftist intellectuals of his he left the country in 1935. From 1939 title, which sounds more like an aca- “normal” obstacles of poverty and lack
generation, the critical question was until his death in 1982 he lived in Stock- demic treatise than a work of fiction, of education, he is living at a time of
whether the Soviet experience had dis- holm, and his first books were written The Aesthetics of Resistance proceeds historical crisis that makes the idea of
credited the faith in revolution. in Swedish; educated in art school, he by means of long passages of argument leisurely self-cultivation absurd.

34 The New York Review

W hen the first volume opens in Sep- bravura description of the Pergamon nally emerge. That’s what is supposed search an episode from Swedish history
tember 1937, the narrator is living in Altar, which has been on view in Ber- to have happened in Soviet Russia, for use in a play. Observing the great
Berlin, one of a small group of young lin since it was excavated by German which for the narrator is an ideological writer at work, the narrator once again
Communists who are trying to keep archaeologists in Asia Minor in the lodestar and a redoubt that must be de- recognizes the contradiction between
their faith and themselves alive in a 1880s. For eight pages, the narrator of- fended at all costs. Yet he is frequently Communist ideals of equality and the
completely Nazified country. He then fers a lavishly detailed account of its fa- reminded that the Soviet reality doesn’t reality of artistic genius, which is al-
makes his way to Spain, to take part in mous frieze, which depicts the battle of live up to this promise. Late in the first ways individual, and in Brecht’s case
the civil war as a member of the Inter- the Olympian gods against the Giants. volume, for instance, Weiss describes notably selfish and domineering. Yet
national Brigades. As this volume ends, In doing so, he displays a comprehen- a debate between two senior German the experience confirms the narrator’s
it’s clear that the republic is going down sive knowledge of classical history and Communists in Spain about purges in growing sense that his political and ar-
to defeat, and the narrator prepares to mythology, just as later in the novel he the party. According to Hodann, a doc- tistic vocations can be reconciled: “I
flee the country with his comrades. will prove to be an expert on ancient tor, the party has the right to eliminate began to make my language into a tool
The second volume picks up the story Carthage and modern France. dissenters: “A dissident opinion is a that I could wield. With Brecht I expe-
a few weeks later, with the narrator in criminal opinion.” rienced the first impulse to attempt to
Paris, where he has escaped at the last But Marcauer, a Jewish woman who give the current moment a historical
moment. It then follows him to Swe- But this failure of plausibility can declares, “I have been a member of charge.”
den, where he manages to find tempo- also be an assertion of the novel’s great the Communist Party since my teens,” As in Proust, the unnamed narrator
rary asylum and a menial job. Like the hope: that high culture can be wrested denies that the party had the right to of The Aesthetics of Resistance bears a
first volume, however, the second ends away from the ruling class and claimed kill Andres Nin, the leader of Spain’s strong resemblance to the author, and
on a note of defeat: in the closing pages, as the inheritance of the workers. Much independent leftist party POUM. “The it would be easy to take this as a de-
in April 1940, the narrator learns that of the book is devoted to demonstrat- acceptance of such an occurrence re- scription of Weiss’s own experience.
German troops are occupying Norway ing this kind of recuperation, reading vealed an attitude that made a mock- Also as in Proust, however, the differ-
and Denmark, leaving Sweden’s sur- canonical images and texts against ery of our goals, swindling all those ences between writer and character are
vival in doubt. the grain in a Marxist spirit. Thus the who had come to defend this country,” profound. Far from being a high school
The three years covered by Weiss’s Pergamon Altar becomes for Weiss an she protests. The justice of her stand is dropout, factory worker, and under-
first two volumes are packed with allegory of class warfare, with the os- proved when she is immediately disap- ground activist, Weiss was the son of a
world-historical events. (The third vol- tensibly heroic gods recast as prideful peared herself. But the narrator needs wealthy textile manufacturer; he grew
ume extends the story to 1945.) The oppressors and the villainous Giants the party too much to protest its deci- up in a household with servants and at-
great novels written at the time thrust turned into symbols of resistance. This sions: “We already knew that we would tended a Gymnasium. In an interview
the reader into the heart of those reinterpretation involves confronting repress any thought of this woman,” he about the novel, Weiss referred to it as
events: the Spanish Civil War in André the material conditions of the work’s says affectlessly. a Wunschautobiographie, the story of
Malraux’s L’Espoir (1937), the Mos- production, examining the relationship the life he wished he had, and there is
cow Trials in Koestler’s Darkness at between the kings who paid for the indeed a kind of Communist fantasy at
Noon (1940). Weiss, looking back from altar, the artists who designed it, and Marcauer seems to be Weiss’s inven- work in his self-reinvention as proletar-
a distance of four decades, has much the slaves who actually built it. Only tion, but most of the characters in The ian autodidact. This is a profound irony
to say about both, as well as about the in this way can the narrator meet the Aesthetics of Resistance are based on in a novel whose premise is that great
Munich Conference, the Nazi-Soviet objection of a friend’s mother, who actual people whom Weiss either knew and challenging art can be produced by
pact, and the outbreak of World War demands, “How can we . . . ever get personally or discovered in the course and for the working class.
II. But it is essential to the conception away from the fact that for our kind of his research. The book includes a The Aesthetics of Resistance departs
of The Aesthetics of Resistance that its all that construction involved nothing glossary identifying many of them, in- from Weiss’s experience in another sig-
narrator plays no significant part in any but drudgery and deprivation, plus a cluding Max Hodann, who mentored nificant way. In the novel, the narrator
of them. He only learns about them in pent-up rage toward the people who the young Weiss in Sweden. The narra- explains that his father fled Germany
the newspapers and on the radio, like took the credit.” tor visits the Pergamon Altar with his when the Nazis came to power because
everyone else. Even in Spain he works It’s not until the nineteenth century friends Heilmann and Coppi, young he was a well-known union leader and
as a hospital orderly, far from the front that the narrator begins to find art- Communists who were executed by the Social Democratic Party activist. The
lines, and struggles to form an accurate works that consciously embody social Gestapo in 1942 as part of the Red Or- narrator’s own opposition to Nazism is
picture of the conflict. protest. The second volume of The chestra resistance group. (Their death based strictly on class and ideological
In other words, his experience as Aesthetics of Resistance opens with is recounted in the third volume of the grounds. He shares the orthodox Com-
a historical subject reflects his expe- a long discussion of Théodore Géri- novel.) munist understanding of Nazism as an
rience as a proletarian: both involve cault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the An important figure in the second advanced stage of capitalism rather
being powerless in the face of malig- Medusa, which the narrator sees in volume is Rosalinde von Ossietzky, than a novel movement rooted in bio-
nant forces that shape his destiny. Only the Louvre. Like the Pergamon Altar, the daughter of the Nobel Peace Prize– logical racism.
communism, Weiss argues, offers a it is a depiction of gruesome suffering winning German pacifist Carl von Os- In reality, Weiss’s family fled Ger-
remedy for this political and cultural and struggle, but as Weiss delves into sietzky whom the narrator meets in many in 1935 because his father was
powerlessness. It’s not just that un- the circumstances of its composition, Sweden. Like Marcauer, she is a mon- Jewish, a fact he had concealed from
derground work gives the narrator a he shows that Géricault’s work doesn’t itory figure who reminds him of the Peter. The Weisses went first to Lon-
chance to strike a blow, however feeble, need to be read against the grain. It was moral shortcomings of the left. Her don, where they lived for almost two
against his oppressors. More import- a direct indictment of French colonial- father’s comrades promised to take years, and then to Czechoslovakia.
ant, the Marxist worldview allows him ism and the class system, inspired by care of her when he was imprisoned After Hitler’s annexation of the Sude-
to feel that he is a participant in his- an 1816 episode in which the officers by the Nazis, she says, but they soon tenland in late 1938, they drew on fam-
tory. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx of a ship bound for Africa first incom- lost patience: “Get a job as a maid, say ily connections to escape to Stockholm,
famously complained that “philoso- petently steered it onto the rocks, then my benefactors, learn stenography, where Weiss would spend the rest of his
phers have hitherto only interpreted heartlessly abandoned 151 passengers then you can find employment in an life. The story resembles that of many
the world in various ways; the point on a makeshift raft, where all but fif- office.” other Jewish- German refugees of the
is to change it”; but for Weiss’s narra- teen died of starvation, exposure, and Rosalinde is one of many characters period; Anne Frank’s family made a
tor, interpreting the world is the first violence. For Weiss, the dying cast- who function just like the spirits Dante similar flight, finding refuge in Am-
step toward changing it. “The upper aways of the Medusa deliver the same meets in the Divine Comedy, emerging sterdam. The fact that the Germans in-
classes essentially opposed our thirst message as the defeated Giants of Per- momentarily to offer their testimony or vaded the Netherlands and not Sweden
for knowledge,” he reflects in the first gamon: “Even in the most extreme de- reprimand, then slipping back into the explains the difference between Anne
volume. “Our most important goal was spair, as long as a breath could still be shadows. Though The Aesthetics of Re- Frank’s fate and Peter Weiss’s.
to conquer an education. . . . From the drawn, a will to live persisted.” sistance is a bildungsroman from one There is no obligation for Weiss’s
very outset, our studying was rebellion. This tragic definition of resistance point of view, from another it is Weiss’s narrator to be Jewish just because he
We gathered material to defend our- is the only one that makes sense to homage to the Divine Comedy, with its was—after all, Proust made the same
selves and prepare a conquest.” the narrator, living at a time when tripartite division and parade of histor- kind of change in his novel—but the
Weiss emphasizes the difficulty of Communist hopes were continually ical ghosts. Weiss was obsessed with erasure of this dimension of the story
this self-education for a worker who defeated. Weiss’s Marxism has more Dante; in 1964 he wrote a drama based tends to falsify the novel’s understand-
comes to a classroom or opens a book in common with the paradoxical mes- on the Inferno, which wasn’t published ing of Nazism and anti-Nazism. It is
at the end of his factory shift: “Our sianism of Walter Benjamin than with until long after his death. akin to the way postwar communism
numb minds often had to squeeze out the scientific determinism of Marx If the narrator is the Dante figure in thought about Nazi war crimes, prefer-
of a void and relearn nimbleness after himself. Indeed, Benjamin’s famous the novel, then in the second volume ring to speak of fascists and antifascists
monotony.” Yet a central, structural saying “There is no document of civi- Bertolt Brecht auditions for the role rather than Germans and Jews. And
improbability of the novel is that the lization which is not at the same time of Virgil. The second half of the book it’s a reminder, among many others in
narrator, who dropped out of high a document of barbarism” could serve is dominated by Brecht, who lived in The Aesthetics of Resistance, that com-
school to take a job as a shipping clerk as an epigraph for The Aesthetics of Stockholm for a year starting in April munism’s promise of historical X-ray
in a factory, somehow has access to the Resistance. 1939, when the young Weiss met him. vision, the ability to see through to the
enormous erudition of Peter Weiss. The promise of communism is that That brief encounter is transformed inner logic of events, depends on a will-
This discrepancy is front and center after the revolution, barbarism will be in the novel into an extended collabo- ingness to leave much of the truth in
from the start. The novel opens with a abolished and a true civilization will fi- ration, as the narrator helps Brecht re- darkness. Q
January 14, 2021 35
 The Dark History of School Choice
Diane Ravitch
The Power Worshippers: by a website called COVID Stimu- no basis in Scripture.” The needs of the destroy God, religion, and the fam-
Inside the Dangerous Rise lus Watch. Antelope Valley Learning poor, he writes, should be addressed ily. They found allies in the Austrian
of Religious Nationalism Academy, a charter school in Califor- not by government but by “the husband school of economics, which espoused
by Katherine Stewart. nia, received $7.8 million. The for-profit in a marriage . . . the family (if the hus- libertarian views, opposing the welfare
Bloomsbury, 342 pp., $28.00 Academia Corporation charter school band is absent) and . . . the church.” state, labor unions, public education,
chain won $28.6 million. Buckingham Initially, the animating issue behind and any other government efforts to
Overturning Brown: Browne & Nichols, an elite private this amalgam of radically conservative intervene in the free market. In 1979
The Segregationist Legacy school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, groups was not abortion, Stewart’s re- Jerry Falwell Sr. said he looked forward
of the Modern School which has a thousand students, high porting shows, but protection of the to a time when there wouldn’t be “any
Choice Movement school tuition of $52,300, and an en- tax- exempt status of segregated schools public schools—the churches will have
by Steve Suitts. dowment of $75 million, received be- and universities after the Supreme taken them over and Christians will be
NewSouth, 128 pp., $25.95 tween $5 million and $10 million. The Court’s Brown v. Board of Education running them.” Stewart cites this 1982
Paycheck Protection Program turned decision of 1954. Many of the “segrega- statement by Gary North, who is both
Schoolhouse Burning: out to be a multibillion- dollar bonanza tion academies” for whites that sprang an Austrian school economist and a
Public Education and leader in the Christian recon-

James Mollison
the Assault on American structionism movement:
Democracy
by Derek W. Black. Let us be blunt about it: we
PublicAffairs, 309 pp., $28.00 must use the doctrine of reli-
gious liberty to gain indepen-
During her tenure as secretary of dence for Christian schools
education, Betsy DeVos repeat- until we train up a generation
edly asked Congress to allocate of people who know that there
billions of dollars for vouchers is no religious neutrality, no
for religious and private schools. neutral law, no neutral educa-
She was repeatedly rebuffed. tion, and no neutral civil gov-
Even Republican members of ernment. Then they will get
Congress were unwilling to use busy in constructing a Bible-
the federal education budget to based social, political, and
pay for vouchers. After all, most religious order which finally
of their constituents’ children denies the religious liberty of
attend public schools. the enemies of God.
After the pandemic struck,
DeVos tried again. Late last A number of charter school
March, Congress passed a $2.2 chains, including Heritage
trillion relief bill called the Academy in Arizona and New-
Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and man International Academies
Economic Security (CARES) in Texas, were started in recent
Act, which allocated $13.2 bil- years by Christian national-
lion for K–12 education. Con- ists, who use their tax-funded
gress expected that the money schools to teach their religious
would be shared, as federal values. By allying themselves
education funds typically are, with secular education reform-
among the nation’s nearly St. Mary of the Assumption Elementary School, Brookline, Massachusetts; composite photograph ers, the Christian nationalists
100,000 public and 7,000 char- by James Mollison from his book Playground, published by Aperture in 2015 have been able to make “re-
ter schools, as well as private markable progress,” Stewart
schools based on the number of low- for nonpublic and religious schools, at up in response to Brown were affiliated writes, toward their goal of converting
income students they enroll. DeVos a time when most public schools lacked with conservative religious groups that “America’s public schools into conser-
instead directed states to share the the funding to pay for social distancing, believed that racial segregation was or- vative Christian academies.”
money allotted to public schools with health measures, and personal protec- dained by God. But their leaders knew
private and religious schools that en- tive equipment for students and staff. that they could not build a national
rolled middle-income and affluent stu- movement around the issue of protect- The project of turning America’s pub-
dents. The NAACP and several states ing the tax advantages of racist schools. lic schools into privately managed char-
responded with lawsuits, arguing that D eVos has spent the past three de- Not until 1979, six years after Roe v. ters with minimal regulation has been
her order was illegal. Three federal cades leading a campaign against pub- Wade, did the religious right settle on advanced with funding not only from
judges in different parts of the country lic schools and personally subsidizing abortion as its unifying cause. the DeVos and Koch families, but also
ruled against DeVos, and she backed political candidates who favor private Stewart traces the roots of the ha- from billionaire charter school sup-
down. alternatives. Trump’s decision to ap- tred of public schools to Robert Lewis porters like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings
But the Trump administration found point her as secretary of education was Dabney, a Presbyterian pastor. Born (a graduate of Buckingham Browne &
another way to enrich charter and pri- a reward to right-wing Christian groups in Virginia in 1820, Dabney was a de- Nichols), Eli Broad, the Walton fam-
vate schools. The Paycheck Protection that share her extremist views. In The fender of slavery and critic of the the- ily, Michael Bloomberg, and the Wall
Program (PPP), also part of the CARES Power Worshippers, Katherine Stewart ory of evolution. He complained about Street hedge fund managers who are
Act, was supposed to rescue small documents these groups’ long-standing “having to pay taxes to support a ‘pre- part of a privatization group called
businesses. Lobbyists for the charter crusade against public schools. They tended education to the brats of black Democrats for Education Reform.
industry, however, encouraged char- are “the New Right,” the Moral Ma- paupers.’” After the Civil War—during These individuals and groups con-
ter schools to apply as nonprofits, thus jority, Christian nationalists, and the which he served as a Confederate army tribute to state and local school board
double-dipping into both the public Christian Coalition: angry crusaders chaplain—Dabney tried to undermine candidates who favor school choice, as
school and PPP funds (public schools against secularism, liberalism, abor- Reconstruction by attacking “the Yan- well as directly funding school choice
were ineligible for PPP funding). Pri- tion, feminism, gay rights, and public kee theory of popular state education.” organizations.
vate and religious schools also qualified schools. They include groups like Capi- He proclaimed that public education Throughout much of the twentieth
for PPP funds as nonprofits. Therefore, tol Ministries, Focus on the Family, the was “pagan” and “connected by reg- century, US public schools typically
through a bill supposed to aid small busi- Family Research Council, Concerned ular, logical sequence with legalized enrolled 90 percent or more of the na-
nesses at risk of bankruptcy, thousands Women for America, the American prostitution and the dissolution of the tion’s students; since the introduction of
of charter, private, and religious schools Family Association, the Alliance De- conjugal tie.” charter schools in the early 1990s, that
received an average of about $855,000 fending Freedom, the Council for Na- In the twentieth century Dabney’s share has dropped to 85 percent. The
each, compared to about $134,500 per tional Policy, and the World Congress ideological descendants denounced charter sector has increased to seven
public school through CARES. Reli- of Families. At least eleven members of the New Deal and welfare programs thousand schools, which enroll 5 per-
gious schools of every denomination, the Trump cabinet met weekly for Bible as theft from the rich, which was con- cent of the country’s 56.4 million stu-
elite private schools, and more than study with Ralph Drollinger, the leader trary to God’s word. These right-wing dents, though its expansion has slowed
one thousand charter schools received of Capitol Ministries, who argues that theologians claimed that public schools over the past five years in part because
anywhere from $150,000 to $10 million God favors private property owners were anti- Christian, amoral, atheistic of the high rate of failure of charter
each according to a database compiled and that social welfare programs “have “government schools” determined to schools. (Approximately 10 percent of

36 The New York Review

students are enrolled in private schools, pate changes in the marketplace, such
although a precise snapshot of enroll- as the demand for fuel- efficient cars.
ment at any given time is hard to come With its strident rhetoric about public
by, since families move, schools close, school failure, A Nation at Risk set the
and a shifting percentage of school-age stage for school choice advocates. in memoriam
children may be homeschooled.)
The growth of both charters and
vouchers reflects thirty years of advo- The proponents of school choice
Alison Lurie
cacy for school choice. The first pub- over the past three decades claim that
licly funded voucher program began in choice will save poor children who are 1926–2020
1990 in Milwaukee and was expanded “trapped in failing public schools.” In
eight years later to include religious a 2017 address, Trump told Congress
schools. The first privately managed that “education is the civil rights issue
but publicly funded charter school of our time,” meaning that families
opened in Minnesota in 1992. Cur- should be “free to choose the public, “The women who could perform this magic were, in everyday life,
rently all but four states (Nebraska, private, charter, magnet, religious or everyday humans; but when they picked up their wands they became
North Dakota, South Dakota, and Ver- home school that is right for them.” practitioners of a secret art. The same thing happened in my books.”
mont) have laws authorizing charters, Families, of course, have long had that
largely in response to the Race to the freedom; his proposal was to publicly —Alison Lurie
Top program designed by President fund choices outside of public schools. The Mystery of Knitting, Words and Worlds
Obama’s secretary of education Arne This is high irony, as Steve Suitts
Duncan, which required states to have demonstrates in Overturning Brown:
charter schools in order to be eligible The Segregationist Legacy of the Mod- “So deft is the touch of her intricately playful fiction—so securely
to compete for $4.35 billion in federal ern School Choice Movement. Suitts, fixed are her characters at just the right distance between the pathetic
funds. Advocates for school choice the author of a biography of the liberal and the ridiculous—that we can both like them and laugh at them.”
claim that charter schools and voucher Supreme Court justice Hugo Black
schools outperform public schools, but and a longtime civil rights organizer in —The New York Times
most studies find that they typically get the South, details the history of school
the same results as public schools when choice, the central strategy of the south-
they enroll students from similar back- ern segregationists who fought Brown:
grounds, and those that get high test
scores choose their students carefully The political movement for “school
or push out low performers. These find- choice” is employing the icons and
ings, however, have not dimmed the en- language of civil rights and social The American Academy of Arts and Letters
thusiasm for school choice among its justice to advance private school
very wealthy funders. vouchers that fifty years ago were
and
How did “school choice” develop into primary tools for segregationists
a national movement that has brought to preserve unequal education for
public funding to privately managed African American and Hispanic Delphinium Books
and religious schools in most states? children. President Trump’s call
Catholics unsuccessfully sought public for a national program of “school
funding for their parochial schools in choice” echoes the language of
the 1840s, and then again in the 1960s, George Wallace and others who
when Congress passed the Elementary demanded the federal government
and Secondary Act, which included and US courts permit Alabama
benefits for low-income students in reli- and the South to administer “free-
gious schools. But there was never a na- dom of choice” for elementary and
tional “school choice movement” until secondary schools.
more recently. Ronald Reagan, who
had attended public schools in Illinois, In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
was persuaded by his friend the lib- seven states across the South—Ala- Nonconformity, Dissent, Opposition,
ertarian economist Milton Friedman bama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia,
to support vouchers. Friedman’s 1955 North Carolina, South Carolina, and and Resistance in Germany, 1933-1990
essay “The Role of Government in Ed- Georgia—enacted voucher and tuition
ucation” advocated for vouchers and tax credit plans to subsidize white fam- The Freedom to Conform
employed terminology such as “free- ilies fleeing integrating public schools.
dom of choice,” “government schools,” Suitts writes that white flight was so “This book brings fresh light to previously marginalized subject in
German history. It is an original approach, up-to-date written without
and “mixed schools.” His arguments great that by 1965, “there were nearly scholarly jargon, easily accessible to students, both at undergraduate
and rhetoric were quickly embraced by one million Southern private school and graduate. It is highly focused departing from the usual “histories” of
southern segregationists. students. Almost all were white.” Pro- a single country arguing for the “two German states”, and the three
Reagan was unable to persuade Con- moters of school choice prefer to trace political systems.”
gress to pass his proposals for vouch- their ideological lineage to Friedman — Prof. Dr. László Kürti, Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of
Miskolc, Hungary
ers and tuition tax credits for private instead of southern segregationists, but
schools. In 1981, his first year in office, their ideas overlap. Language used by
he created the National Commission various state legislatures sixty years ago This book contrasts three very different incarnations of Germany – the
totalitarian Third Reich, the communist German Democratic Republic,
on Excellence in Education, which is- seems to presage DeVos’s argument and the democratic Federal Republic of Germany up to 1990 – in terms
sued a report in 1983 called A Nation at that all students should have govern- of their experiences with and responses to nonconformity, dissent,
Risk. It decried the “rising tide of medi- ment funding to attend the school of opposition, and resistance and the role played by those factors in each 978-3-030-55412-5
ocrity” in American public schools and their choice; when Georgia enacted tui- case. Although even innocent nonconformity came with a price in all eBook: 76,99 €
blamed the public schools for the loss tion tax credits, the state’s attorney gen- three systems and in the post-war occupation zones, the price was the
Hardcover: 98,09 €
highest in Nazi Germany. It is worth stressing that what qualifies as
of American industries to Japan, South eral insisted “that any plan to ‘subsidize
nonconformity and dissent depends on the social and political context
Korea, and Germany. It cited low rank- the child rather than the school’ was and, thus, changes over time. Like those in active dissent, opposition, or resistance, nonconformists are
ings of American students on interna- lawful.” Suitts finds it remarkable that rebels (whether they are conscious of it or not) and have repeatedly played a role in pushing for change,
tional tests, without noting that they today’s school choice movement is “rep- whether through reform of legislation, transformation of the public’s attitudes, or even regime change.
had always scored poorly on such tests, licating so closely the primary strategies
and that these rankings did not pre- and tactics of Southern segregationists This unusual study compares the struggle over nonconformity across three political regimes, the Third
dict future national economic success. while claiming the righteous mantle of Reich, the GDR and the FRG. The analysis of dimensions like the role of religion, sexuality, politics and
It pointed to falling SAT scores, which the people and movement who fought culture exposes the dialectic between regime efforts to enforce conformity with its own ideology as
well as popular resistance against it. This unconventional approach sheds new light on the similarities
reflected the increased number of low- against those segregationists.”
and differences between different forms of German politics and society in the mid-twentieth century.
income students taking the test. Instead Most Americans remain stubbornly
— Konrad Jarausch, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
of bolstering support for vouchers and loyal to their local public schools. Even
school prayer, as Reagan had hoped, in states where Republicans have zeal-
the major accomplishment of the report ously promoted charters and vouchers,
was to create a false narrative about like Indiana, Florida, Ohio, and Mich- palgrave.com/in/book/9783030554118
“failing schools” that sidestepped child igan, most families still choose public
poverty, the correlation between test schools, as shown on the websites of
scores and family income, and the fail- state education departments. Indiana Learn more at palgrave.com
ure of American companies to antici- has one million students; about 36,000 A95732

January 14, 2021 37

 (3.6 percent) choose vouchers, and The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 de- sustained backlash in the South and
44,000 (4.4 percent) enroll in charters. clared that to ensure “good govern- in other parts of the nation, as Suitts’s
Florida has three million students; 11 ment and the happiness of mankind, book also shows. For more than a de-
Wealth, Energy, and percent are enrolled in charter schools schools and the means of education cade, the federal courts, Congress, and
H u m a n R i g h t s Va l u e s A n d S o c i a l J u s t i c e . c o m

Human Values: and 5.5 percent in voucher schools shall forever be encouraged.” the executive branch acted in concert
The Dynamics of (which are mostly religious). In Ohio, Black writes in detail about the to protect Brown and its order to de-
where Republicans have prioritized effects of the Civil War and Recon- segregate the nation’s public schools.
Decaying Civilizations from
school choice, about 2 percent of the struction on the progress of public ed- But after the election of Richard
Ancient Greece to America state’s 1.7 million students use vouch- ucation. Before the war, the South had Nixon in 1968, executive support for
ers and 6 percent are enrolled in char- rudimentary schools for white children desegregation withered, and his four
ter schools, most of which are rated D and none at all for black children. Sev- appointees to the Supreme Court—
or F by the state. Michigan, DeVos’s eral southern states forbade teaching Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun,
home state, has many charters (most enslaved people to read, for fear that Lewis Powell Jr., and William Rehn-
operated by for-profit corporations), they might be exposed to abolition- quist—backed off as well. Their most
America is but only 10 percent of families enroll ist literature. Near the end of the war, consequential education decision may
Self-Destructing: their children in them. Voters have Congress recognized the urgent need have been San Antonio Independent
Wealth, Greed, and Ideology overwhelmingly rejected vouchers in for education for freed blacks by cre- School District v. Rodriguez (1973),
Trump Social Justice and Utah, Michigan, California, Colorado, ating the Freedmen’s Bureau to supply an appeal for equitable school funding
Oregon, Florida, Oklahoma, and, most teachers, books, and schools to them. in Texas, which provided half as much
the Common Good
recently, Arizona. Yet the new conser- African-American leaders saw that money to poor and minority school dis-
vative majority on the Supreme Court their quest for freedom and equality tricts as to other districts. The Court
seems almost certain to sweep away depended on their access to education ruled that education is not a funda-
the provisions in state constitutions that and urged legislation to open public mental right, a ruling that has been
prohibit public funding of religious and schools to children of both races. used since then to deny federal lawsuits
private schools. When the former Confederate states for equal protection of students, and it
America’s Continuum applied for readmission to the Union, backed away from cases seeking rem-
of Racial Democracy Congress required that their state con- edies for segregated schools. As a re-
and Injustice: How did public schools retain this po- stitutions include a guarantee to provide sult, segregation in the nation’s schools
sition of public esteem despite nearly education to all their citizens. Black began to reverse course, reaching levels
From the Plantation to
four decades of bipartisan denuncia- notes that “almost all of [the new state not seen since the early 1960s.
the Urban Ghetto
tions? Derek W. Black’s Schoolhouse constitutions] used the phrase ‘system’ As the federal courts abandoned
Burning: Public Education and the of schools, making statewide and con- educational equity and desegregation,
Assault on American Democracy ex- sistent access to public education clear.” litigants looked to state courts, where
plores the privileged place that they Florida mandated “a uniform system they often found justices prepared to
hold in our country’s history. Black, of Common Schools” and made it “the agree that all children have a right to
a professor of law at the University of paramount duty of the State to make a sound, adequately funded education.
These three books by South Carolina and a civil rights law- ample provision” for these schools. Black asserts that education has a spe-
Thomas P. Wallace yer, makes clear that public education South Carolina asserted in its consti- cial place in what he calls our demo-
can be found at was central to the Founding Fathers’ tution that its public schools would be cratic ideology:
HumanRightsValuesAnd vision of a new kind of democracy that open to all “without distinction of race.”
SocialJustice.com rests on the consent of the governed. Louisiana’s constitution provided that Education is the means by which
They knew that consent required an ed- citizens preserve their other rights.
ucated citizenry. Thomas Jefferson and all children of this State between Education gives citizens the tools
John Adams were particularly outspo- the ages of six and twenty- one they need to hold their leaders ac-
ken in their belief that the state should shall be admitted to the public countable. Education allows chil-
/RQJDZDLWHGWKLUGERRN bear the expense of education, and that schools or other institutions of dren from all stations of life a fair
it should not be left to private or reli- learning sustained or established shot at the American dream. . . .
gious interests. Adams wrote the Mas- by the State in common without Democracy simply does not work
683(532:(56 sachusetts Constitution of 1780, which distinction of race, color or previ- well without educated citizens.
DQRYHOE\ contained this powerful endorsement ous condition. There shall be no
/$85(1 of public schools: separate schools or institutions of The question today, as Stewart,
learning established exclusively for Suitts, and Black agree, is whether pub-
)$,5%$1.6 Wisdom and knowledge . . . dif- any race by the State of Louisiana. lic education can survive the attacks by
fused generally among the body amply funded free-market ideologues,
of the people [are] necessary for And this was in 1868! religious zealots, and others who hate
the preservation of their rights and the very idea of it. Public schools have
liberties. . . . It shall be the duty of always had their critics and their flaws,
UHG¿HQGSXEFRP 5) 5('),(1'
38%/,6+,1* legislatures and magistrates, in all The contested presidential election of but—with the singular exception of the
future periods of this common- 1876 brought Reconstruction and the segregationist movement of the late
wealth, to cherish the . . . public days of idealism to an end. The Dem- 1950s and 1960s—never before has
schools. ocratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, there been a sustained effort to replace
won the popular vote, but the Repub- them with privately managed charter
Jefferson proposed a tax-supported lican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits,
school system for Virginia, though it and his allies brokered a deal to get the online learning, home schooling, and
was rejected by the state legislature due electoral votes of the southern states in for-profit schooling.
to its cost. exchange for a vow to withdraw Union Access to education does not belong
What Black considers the strongest troops and end Reconstruction. When in the marketplace. Like police and fire
endorsement of public schools pre- the military forces left, southern whites protection, public parks, public high-
ceded the Constitution; included in systematically withdrew the hard-won ways, and clean air and water, public
the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and rights of African-Americans to vot- schools are public goods, funded by and
1787 was language specifying how the ing and schooling. An important re- belonging to the public. Public schools
new territories should be organized in sidual benefit of Reconstruction was are democratic. That may be why the
order to join the nation as new states, that whites had gained access to public families of most children have ignored
THE LIBRARY 1000-PIECE PUZZLE rather than as expansions of existing schools and did not want to abandon the billionaires, hedge fund managers,
Children and animals spend a peaceful time states. According to the Northwest Or- it. But once they were back in control religious sectarians, and entrepreneurs
enjoying the library in this illustration by dinance of 1785, Black writes, in the South, they established a dual who have been wooing them for the
American artist Emily Winfield Martin. school system in which black education past three decades. The school choice
Martin’s work is inspired by fairy tales, film, every new town had to set aside was sparse and underfunded. And they movement hastens the resegregation of
music, myths, and the natural world; ele- one-ninth of its land and one- withdrew African-Americans’ access society along lines of race, class, and
ments of all of those influences are found in third of its natural resources for to the ballot box by introducing literacy religion at the same time that it diverts
this whimsical image. Made in USA. Ages the financial support of public ed- tests and other means of denying them funding from the public schools, mak-
7 and up. ucation. And every town had to the right to vote. ing it harder for them to meet the needs
#05-M2030 • 26 5/8"x 19 1/4" • $24.95 reserve one of its lots for the oper- Black describes the woeful state of of children, families, and communities.
Price above does not include shipping and handling. ation of a public school. schools provided to African-American As our society grows more diverse, and
Due to Covid-19, please allow extra time for shipping. students and the careful legal strategy as our democracy grows more strained
TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call Each town was to be divided into thirty- devised by lawyers for the NAACP that by divisiveness, the need for genuine
646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com. six squares of equal size; lot sixteen eventually led to Brown. That land- community-based public schools grows
was to be set aside for a public school. mark decision provoked a vigorous and stronger. Q
38 The New York Review
 Deadly Myths
Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

Ritta Trejo
Hurricane Season because we see her spying on them
by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the other side of the cane fields.
from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes. We know she doesn’t lack for money
New Directions, 210 pp., because she refuses payment on the
$22.95; $16.95 (paper) only occasion one of the villagers re-
quests a potion from her (from this, we
In Fernanda Melchor’s story “La Casa also know that she’s familiar with her
del Estero,” from her collection Aquí mother’s trade). Most perplexingly, we
no es Miami (2018), a group of friends are tantalized with the prospect that
spend the night in “la casa del diablo” she might be a man, because we hear
(the devil’s house), an abandoned locals whispering about her stature, her
property near their hometown in the voice, and her strong, claw-like hands.
state of Veracruz that the locals believe But the obscurity of the Witch’s gender
to be haunted. Toward the end of the is not the only plausible explanation
night, one of the women in the group for the ostracism; this is a society with
appears to succumb to a demonic pos- as much of a place for the concept of
session. Her eyes go blank, she hits her transgender women as for the concept
friends with astonishing strength, and of women who can live without a man.
she speaks in tongues. Her friends take Either way, we also learn that the
her to a healer for an exorcism, which Witch is not all that alone. Late at
doesn’t work. During the process, the night, when the women of the town are
spirit—clearly a male force—claims he sleeping, the men who disparage her
is entitled to the woman’s body because during the day attend the booze- and
she chose to enter the house herself: drug-filled parties she hosts in her base-
“She sought me, she went looking for ment. And we learn that one of them is
me!” it says through her transformed Luismi, her killer; the young man has
voice. “This bitch is mine!” a seemingly romantic relationship with
It would be easy to read the story the Witch but only allows himself to
as an allegory. Male violence against be seen with her at these clandestine
women is rampant in Mexico. There Fernanda Melchor, Mexico City, 2017 parties.
were 1,006 registered murders of The novel’s themes—poverty (and
women in 2019, a 137 percent increase Mexican writers have long been fas- universe; we are nothing. What we all that comes with it: dire working
since 2014. Veracruz, Melchor’s home cinated by this blend of dark myth and know is nothing compared to what conditions, educational deprivation),
state, on the eastern coast of Mexico, dark reality. An early and influential we do not know, to what we cannot repressed sexuality, political corrup-
has the highest number of femicides in example is the journalist and novel- control.” tion, and the opium of religion—all
the country. But to read the story in this ist Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s The Dead point to its main subject, which is vio-
way would be to ignore the presence of Girls (1977), a novel about killings at lence. But to list these as elements of a
magic in Mexican life. Veracruz is also a brothel written to resemble a police There is much that remains unknown Mexican story is to assert a platitude,
the center of Mexico’s witchcraft indus- report, and based on real events. (One in Melchor’s Hurricane Season. Pub- and Melchor’s novel is not a catalog
try, which peaked in the 1950s when a of the epigraphs to Melchor’s newly lished originally in Spanish in 2017, of the country’s troubles. Hurricane
local warlock, Gonzalo Aguirre Pech, translated novel, Hurricane Season, is the novel tells the story of a femicide Season is, first and foremost, a horror
became famous enough to add politi- from Dead Girls: “Some of the events that occurs in an inhospitably hot, story—its horror coming from rather
cians and film stars to his usual clien- described here are real. All of the char- God-forsaken town in a region that is than contrasting with the lyricism of
tele of farmers. acters are invented.”) unnamed but is revealed by the plan- Melchor’s prose. Instead of supplying
The brujo’s success was partly the re- Similar themes can be found in the tations of sugar cane, the presence of a welcome breeze in the heat, the local
sult of a shift in the trade itself. Though work of Roberto Bolaño, that writer an oil company, and the effects of in- river is where the children who find
most brujos until then were sought for who himself turned into a myth. His dustrial development to be a fictional- the Witch’s body “finally recognized
“white” services, mainly herbal heal- 2666 (2004) includes exhaustive ac- ized Veracruz. The victim is a social what was peeping out from the yellow
ing, Aguirre Pech claimed to have counts—crónicas—of the murders of outcast whom everybody calls “the foam on the water’s surface: the rotten
ascended Cerro Mono Blanco, a hill women and girls in the town of Santa Witch.” Her mother had been the local face of a corpse.” This face appears to
near Lake Catemaco, and bartered his Teresa on the Mexican-American bor- sorceress (“the Old Witch”) to whom the children as a “dark mask seething
soul with the devil for dark powers. der, a barely veiled fictionalization of people used to turn when they needed under a myriad of black snakes.” The
Ever since, the town by the lake—also Ciudad Juárez. The element of mysti- supernatural help. Most often, the cli- air itself is suddenly thick with “a ter-
named Catemaco—has been known for cism is less evident in Bolaño than in ents were women; most often, their rible smell that hit them harder than a
the black magic practiced by Aguirre Melchor, but one senses it in the mo- requests involved men: “Potions to pin fistful of sand in the face, a stench that
Pech’s apprentices. Although many pa- tives of a poet in Distant Star (1996) down the men, to really knock them off made them want to hawk it up before it
trons still request limpias, or cleansings who goes on a killing spree (including their feet, and indeed potions to ward reached their guts.”
of evil spirits, most have become more of former lovers), in the improbable the bastards off for good.” (Also, it is
interested in spells concerning sex and luck that guides a pair of writers to an revealed later, potions to get rid of the
love—or, rather, sex and hate. People encounter with their elusive literary creatures “growing inside” the women T he lush imagery gives way to the ka-
go for amarres (love spells) as much as hero in the desert, in The Savage De- as a result of the efficacy of the first leidoscope of stories that converge in
they go for vengeance. tectives (1998), and in the threatening potion.) the Witch’s murder. There is the story
Belief in the existence of evil spirits atmosphere pervading every event in After learning of the Witch’s murder, of the Old Witch, who was rumored
has long flourished in Mexico. As with 2666, from the inexplicable presence in we are told about her mother’s earlier to be sleeping with the devil. There is
many aspects of its culture, Mexican Mexico of a murderous German writer, death in a hurricane that devastated the story of a family whose matriarch,
spirituality is a combination of Cath- in the book’s opening pages, to the om- La Matosa, the village where the Old Doña Tina, enforces a system of racist
olic faith, pre-Columbian rituals, and, inous smile of a female politician to- Witch and her fatherless child lived. and sexist beliefs that benefit only her
on the eastern coast, the heritage of ward the end. After the village is rebuilt, presumably son, Maurilio, and her grandson, Lu-
African slaves. The invisible is as much The mysterious forces at play in many years later (how long exactly is ismi, at the expense of every woman in
a part of the Mexican world as the vis- Melchor’s stories are so palpable that not clear), only the child begins to ap- the family, including Doña Tina her-
ible, so to write about these matters one hardly questions their reality. In pear in the streets again, now grown: a self. There is the story of Chabela and
means to engage with fiction less than “La Casa del Estero,” Melchor asks her tall, thin spectral figure, always clothed Munra, a married couple supported
it might elsewhere. Melchor is a trained date, one of the men who had been at in black, as if in permanent mourning. by Chabela’s sex work. (Chabela jus-
journalist, and Aquí no es Miami was the devil’s house that night, “So you re- Most of the novel is recounted in tifies the burden by saying, ruefully,
advertised as a collection not of short ally believe in the devil?” flashback: the Witch inherits the Old that while no longer “a real handsome
stories—although that is, deliciously, Witch’s house on the outskirts of the fucker,” her husband can still “do things
how they read—but of literary jour- “I can’t tell you it doesn’t exist,” he village but not her place among the with his tongue you wouldn’t believe.”)
nalism. (The Spanish term to describe answered me. It had started to rain locals, who respected and feared her. Then there is Norma, a thirteen-
them, crónica, has a wider scope than again. “It would be selfish to say We only ever learn about the Witch year- old girl who runs away from an
the English “memoir” or “report,” both no: the universe is vast; there must through the eyes of the villagers; her abusive home and ends up in La Ma-
accepted translations; whatever the be incomprehensible, immeasur- own perspective is unknown to us, as it tosa by chance, interrupting her origi-
pieces in this book are, most of them able energies at work in it. We hu- is to them. We know that she lusts after nal plan to reach a coastal town farther
are narrated in Melchor’s own voice.) mans are microscopic shits in this the workers who are laying new roads south, where she hoped to find a cliff

January 14, 2021 39

 she remembered from a happy trip and class, urban minority. At the same time, her); rather, it is the unbearable fact
then jump off it. And there is Brando, memories came back to me of the way that Luismi’s own cousin betrayed him
a young man who struggles to come my grandmother would take an egg and and that, worse yet, Doña Tina herself
to terms with sexual desires that both pass it over me, then crack it in a glass of failed in her primary duty, as the fami-
scare and tempt him and which he water, to rid me of evils. (Once she sus- ly’s matriarch, to protect him.
ENVIRONMENTALLY
must keep secret from his fanatically pected a neighbor had given me the evil
FRIENDLY JOURNALS religious mother. Finally, traversing eye; another time, she considered the
them all is Luismi, an opaque character stomach bug I had to be mysteriously Latin America is not, of course, the
whose behavior swerves from repul- stubborn.) How much of La Matosa’s only place ruled by patriarchal law. But
sive, as when he remains impervious to “dark and dangerous” superstitions per- it’s noteworthy that the practice of ex-
the suffering of his own family, to sym- meate Melchor’s and my safer worlds? onerating men there is supported by a
pathetic, as when he takes in the wan- The belief (or perhaps it’s a hope) system of magical beliefs. These narra-
dering Norma, when he too struggles that goodness is worldly but evil is su- tives of exoneration can, at times, yield
with his sexuality, and when we read pernatural is presumably not unique gripping literature. Salvador Elizondo’s
about the impossibly beautiful voice to Mexico. It is only too human to Farabeuf (1965), another horror story
with which he sings at the Witch’s un- blame misfortunes on some distinct about murderous desires (in this case,
derground gatherings. agent other than ourselves. In a scene a man’s obsession with dissecting a liv-
Melchor never explicitly states that late in Hurricane Season, Brando, who ing woman), is told through the voice of
Luismi is the murderer, but it is obvious. helped Luismi with the murder, sits in the murderer; his aim is to remind his
A motive is suggested from the start: a cell listening to another inmate howl, victim that she had, in a past life, sworn
rumor has it that along with that mas- “Mamaaaaaaaa . . . mama, forgive me, she’d let him kill her. The man’s fate
sive house, the Witch received, as part mamita.” His cellmate explains: “This and the woman’s are said to have been
BAMBOO JOURNAL of her inheritance, a treasure of some junkie kills his own mother, smashes sealed by a secret ritual; vivisection is
The natural bamboo cover of this environ- kind that would ensure she would never her head in on some crackhead fuck- supposed to be the man’s ultimate act
mentally friendly journal is complemented have to work. Surely there is something ing rampage then says the devil did it! of love toward her. “You must concen-
by a cruelty-free leather binding. Each jour- of value in that room upstairs, the one I mean, Jesus fucking Christ!” Early trate,” he insists to her throughout the
nal is handmade and individually unique in that, whenever some drunk guest strays last year, a real crime in Mexico City re- novel; “you must concentrate so that
its appearance; the wood grain and color- from the debauchery of the basement, flected both this extraordinary violence you will never forget.” And he repeat-
tone of each will be slightly different. she madly rushes in to guard? and this denial of responsibility. A man edly asks her, “Do you remember? Do
The size of the notebook is 5.1" x 7.8". The Melchor’s kaleidoscope keeps cir- came home from a night out drinking you remember?”
bamboo cover (FSC certified) is 1.5mm in cling around the untold source of the and responded to his partner’s com- Bolaño’s Distant Star is the portrait of
thickness. The paper (200 pages) accom- horrors, and we, like the men tempted plaint by stabbing, disemboweling, and a troubled young poet. His first killing,
modates pencil, rollerball pen, and fountain by that room, are increasingly keen skinning her. A video that was leaked of twin sisters, occurs matter- of-factly,
pen without bleeding or ghosting. A tight to unveil it. This is an effect of the to the media—along with photographs as a natural, if extreme, consequence of
elastic closure keeps notes safe and pages structure of the novel as much as of of the victim’s body—shows him saying the aura of wickedness that surrounds
undamaged. More thoughtful details: a rib- its writing. Sophie Hughes’s transla- that he had been possessed by the devil. him. It is the same aura that attracted
bon page marker and a large pocket inside tion renders the expansive, punishing There is a danger in attributing male the sisters—and, presumably, the rest of
the back cover to store receipts, business spirit of Mexican slang so impressively violence to impaired states of mind: the his victims—in the first place, and which
cards, and the like. that one wonders whether the harsher fictional murderer was a “crackhead”; explains his uncanny literary talent. Fi-
For every journal purchase, the maker do- sounds of English, with its recurrent the real one was blind drunk. “A mur- nally he confesses his crimes to his clos-
nates to reforestation programs. The com- k’s and t’s and its shorter words, in fact derer of women is not a sick man,” est friends and family during a private
pany also believes in zero-waste product suit the novel better. (Then one peeks read several placards in the women-led literary performance. Just as femicide
packaging to reduce the disposable plastic at Melchor’s Spanish and is reminded protests that reached the Presidential was, for the murderer in Farabeuf, the
wrapping generated during the shipping of the original’s expressive force.) Sen- Palace following the murder in Mexico ultimate display of love, in Distant Star
process. Available with a brown or red tences are so long that one loses one’s City; rather, “he is a healthy product it is the poet’s ultimate artistic gesture.
spine, and lined or blank pages. breath reading them. of patriarchy.” This is a piece of pain- Mystical narratives are responsible
$36.00 each In the long section of 2666 called ful wisdom, and it casts the forgiving to some extent for the belief that the
Please specify spine color and paper style. “The Part About the Crimes,” Bolaño of men and the blaming of demons in lives killers are taking are not as valu-
warns us in the voice of a female jour- a new, political light. To see the truth able as their own. In The Labyrinth of
nalist: “No one pays attention to these about male violence one needs to look Solitude (1950), Octavio Paz described
killings, but the secret of the world is beyond individual crimes to the larger the unsettling way women are viewed
hidden in them.” The point of Bolaño’s system of oppression. in the Mexican imagination:
detailed homicide reports is to make us What may have first struck the reader
aware of some universality that tran- as inconsistencies in Hurricane Sea- The Mexican considers woman to
scends them. There is a hidden truth son—is this a book about misogyny? be a dark, secret and passive being.
in the Witch’s murder as well—we can Transphobia? Repressed sexuality?— He does not attribute evil instincts
sense it. What is this secret? are in fact manifestations of the same to her; he even pretends she does
thing: patriarchal violence. Women, not have any. . . . She is an incarna-
trans people, and gay men are all its tion of the life force, which is es-
Melchor has said that she was in- victims. The secret forces behind the sentially impersonal. . . .
spired to write Hurricane Season by a horrors in Melchor’s novel are not sick- Woman does not seek, she at-
story she saw in the newspaper: nesses of the mind or evil spirits, but the tracts, and the center of attraction
system of beliefs and concrete practices is her hidden, passive sexuality. It
I was surprised because the jour- that maintain the patriarchal order. is a secret and immobile sun.
nalist told the story in a way that In one of Hurricane Season’s most
made it sound normal to think heart-wrenching scenes, Doña Tina, If a woman’s life is closer to an animal’s
that a crime could be motivated having received the news that her or a plant’s, even to a cosmic body, then
VEGAN LEATHER NOTEBOOK
The cover of this notebook is made of vegan
by witchcraft. The murderer had grandson has been arrested on sus- her death is just nature purging itself
leather. Smooth and soft, it has a slightly killed the witch because she was picion of killing the Witch, cries her- of an outgrowth, and the man who
cloudy finish—neither glossy nor matte. doing witchcraft to make him fall self into a fatal fit but manages still, kills her is simply facilitating a natural
The 7" x 8.25" notebook (240 pages) is back in love with her. I was stunned in the midst of her spasms, to cast process.
available in Forest Green or Pale Smoke by this and I just wanted to write one final, hateful glance on her eldest It is considered bad taste to take
Blue, and with either blank or dotted pages. the story behind the crime. granddaughter, Yesenia, whom Doña Paz’s view of Mexico seriously these
(Dotted pages are an increasingly popular Tina knows to have “snitched” on her days. Surely the culture Paz was de-
format. Some writers feel dots provide more People have asked Melchor if the novel adored Luismi: scribing must be extinct, we tell
flexibility than lines, yet more structure reflects Mexican reality. She has an- ourselves; Mexico has modernized sub-
than a blank page.) Whether keeping a jour- swered, rightly, that “there are lots of In the faintest of voices Yesenia stantially in the past seventy years. Yet
nal, taking notes, keeping track of lists or different environments in Mexico’s begged for forgiveness and ex- murderers still blame demons for their
To Dos, this is a well-priced yet luxurious society” and that, among them, “it’s plained that it had all been for crimes; journalists still present those
notebook. true that there [exist] these really dark her, but it was too late: once again, crimes as stories about “possessed”
$40.00 each and really dangerous places.” But the Grandma hit Yesenia where it hurt men murdering “witches.” The writers
Please specify color and paper style. boundaries between those environ- most, dying right there, trembling with whom Melchor shares an interest
Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
ments are porous. Reading Hurricane with hate in the arms of her eldest in femicide—Ibargüengoitia, Bolaño,
Due to Covid-19, please allow extra time for shipping. Season, I saw the really dark and dan- granddaughter. Elizondo—may have been drawn in
gerous places I’ve grazed the surface of by the politics of the subject. Only
TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call during my travels across the country, The news that kills Doña Tina is not Melchor has exposed the “secret” be-
646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com. belonging myself, like Melchor, to a that Luismi might be a murderer (the hind these murders as the moral—that
safer sphere—the educated, middle- Witch’s life has, after all, no value to is, human—failure it is. Q
40 The New York Review
 What Happened at Masada?
James Romm

Lamnas/Alamy
A bas-relief depicting the sack of Jerusalem on the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, constructed in 82 CE

A History of the Jewish War, as told by Josephus, took on new mean- general appointed by the emperor Nero bear out that charge: it was much to
AD 66–74 ings during the Holocaust and subse- to crush the revolt. According to Jose- the advantage of Vespasian, the first
by Steve Mason. quent struggles for Israeli statehood. In phus’s account in The Jewish War, he Roman emperor to come from outside
Cambridge University Press, the mid-1960s the archaeologist Yigael prophesied to his countrymen that the the Julio- Claudian line, to appear fore-
689 pp., $163.99; $39.99 (paper) Yadin, the first large-scale excavator town would fall on the forty-seventh ordained or divinely favored, and the
of Masada (and former chief of staff of day, and it did, after Vespasian com- Middle East was at this time rife with
Masada: the Israel Defense Forces), publicized pleted a ramp that allowed his troops messianic murmurs about a world ruler
From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth what he considered to be vivid evidence to surmount its walls. arising there (some later claimed that
by Jodi Magness. proving Josephus’s account, though his What happened next is described these referred to Christ, whose gospel
Princeton University Press, claims have since been challenged. The in The Jewish War in surprisingly dis- was just beginning to spread). Did Jo-
265 pp., $29.95 controversy over what happened at Ma- passionate tones. With forty followers, sephus invent the tale of his prophecy
sada, and what various scenarios might Yosef took refuge in a cistern from to give Vespasian a gift of legitimacy,
The historian Steve Mason has called mean for modern Jews, has only grown which no escape was possible. In an ep- or perhaps even conspire with the Fla-
The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus since. isode that eerily prefigures his account vians to craft it? Or had he actually
“perhaps the most influential non- Beneath the mystery of Masada lies of Masada, he and his men decided to made one of history’s luckiest guesses,
biblical text of Western history.”* This the enigma of Josephus, a figure whose kill themselves rather than submit, and with his life and freedom on the line?
may seem a surprising choice. Written shifting identities make his authorial they drew lots to determine the order in After impressing the Romans with
in Greek around 75 AD, the war it de- motives hard to discern. Born into a which one would slay the next; the last his seeming prophetic powers at Io-
scribes—the Judaean revolt against Jewish family of priestly descent, Yosef would commit suicide. Yosef, “whether tapata, Josephus went on to become
Roman rule that began in 66 and largely ben Matityahu, as he was then known, by chance or the foresight of God,” a member of Titus’s staff during the
ended in 70 after huge losses, including spent his late teens in study and ascetic drew one of the last two lots. After subsequent siege of Jerusalem. As a
the destruction of much of Jerusalem practice, including (by his own report) watching thirty-nine men die by the go-between who could speak Hebrew,
and the tearing down of its Temple— three years at the side of Bannus, an sword, he abandoned his resolve and he sought, in a speech he records (or in-
hardly seems today to be “the greatest eremite Jew who lived by foraging and convinced his remaining comrade that vents) in The Jewish War, to persuade
not only of wars of our own times, but of dressed in palm fronds. How he went they both should surrender and live. the city’s defenders to end their rebel-
all those we have ever heard of,” as Jose- from this spare existence to become Brought before Vespasian, Yosef, in a lion. His mission failed. The siege came
phus claims in his opening words. Yet the Flavius Josephus—a wealthy Roman second prophetic moment, addressed to a brutal conclusion with the sack of
work continues to fascinate, especially citizen with land and income and a the commanding general as the future the city and the destruction—acci-
now that thorny questions have emerged name that marked him as a protégé of emperor of Rome. Vespasian was in- dental, according to Josephus—of its
concerning its account of the war’s coda the Flavian emperors—is a remarkable trigued and kept the young Jew in his Temple, tragedies remembered by Jews
in the year 74: the mass murder-suicide story of elevation at the hands of the retinue rather than shipping him off today with the fast of Tisha B’Av. Jose-
of nearly a thousand Jews who resided reigning superpower, recalling the rags- to Nero as planned. Within two years, phus accompanied the victorious Titus
on the fortified hill of Masada, just be- to-riches progress of his namesake, the after Nero’s ouster and a bloody fight back to Rome, where he ultimately
fore it was captured by the Romans. biblical Joseph, in pharaonic Egypt. among the generals seeking the throne, received land and income from his im-
Masada, which overlooks the Dead The transformation of Yosef into Jo- Vespasian was installed as emperor. By perial sponsors. Vespasian meanwhile
Sea, has, over the past century, be- sephus came in 67 AD, the second year that time Yosef was an adjutant to his used his son’s success in the Jewish War
come a symbol of Jewish self-assertion of the Jewish revolt. For years, corrupt son Titus, whom Vespasian had left in to prop up his own authority, staging an
and resistance to domination. Its well- Roman officials governing the region command of his troops, and was well on enormous triumphal procession in 71,
preserved ruins became a pilgrimage had treated the Jews and their Tem- his way to becoming the Judeo-Roman the first such spectacle Rome had seen
site for Zionist youth in the 1920s and ple with disdain; Jewish leaders had grandee Titus Flavius Josephus. in decades. Later, the Flavian amphi-
1930s, and Yitzhak Lamdan’s poem finally chosen to resist and in 66 had Josephus went on to write The Jew- theater, now known as the Colosseum,
“Masada” (1927) made a rallying cry of destroyed a Roman force sent to bring ish War, with its account of the Iotapata bore an inscription declaring that it
the words “Never again shall Masada them in line. Despite his doubts about episode, at the courts of Vespasian and was paid for out of war spoils, and the
fall!” The story of Masada’s last days, the wisdom of rebellion, Yosef, then a Titus (who succeeded his father in 79 Arch of Titus in the Forum presented
talented leader aged twenty-nine, ac- AD), and this calls his reliability into bas-relief scenes—still visible today—
*“Josephus’s Judean War,” the first cepted command of Galilee, the region question. The nineteenth- century Jew- of the sack of Jerusalem.
chapter of A Companion to Josephus, most directly in the path of Roman ish historian Heinrich Graetz labeled
edited by Honora Howell Chapman retribution. There, in the fortified Josephus a Römling, or “little Roman,”
and Zuleika Rodgers (Wiley Black- town of Iotapata (modern Yodfat), he a tool of imperial power. The tale of Josephus’s Jewish War, itself a monu-
well, 2016), p. 13. withstood a siege led by Vespasian, the the prophecy spoken at Iotapata helps ment to Flavian power, was composed

January 14, 2021 41

in the same years (the 70s) that the in which, after surrender, defenseless ager, in the years leading up to the es- to which I respond that this is not a
Colosseum was built. Steve Mason, peoples proclaim their conquerors tablishment of Israel as a Jewish state in question archaeology is equipped to
who has written about Josephus for deliverers: “It was an obvious strat- 1948, he fought the British occupation answer,” she writes. Those seeking to
two decades and is now editing an am- egy for Josephus to say to the grizzled as a member of the paramilitary Ha- unravel Masada’s mysteries will be dis-
bitious series of his complete works Vespasian: ‘You’re going to send me to ganah—an experience that, Magness appointed, but others will be reassured
in translation, considers the complex Nero? Why would you do that?. . . You asserts, informed his understanding of by Magness’s even tone and nondoctri-
links between the book and the re- are a real Caesar, Vespasian, you and Masada. He led the Israeli army in the nal approach. Addressing the twelve in-
gime under which it took shape in his this son of yours!’” A remark that was years after independence, before com- scribed ostraca, for example, she notes
lively and provocative A History of the merely sycophantic was later remem- mitting himself to archaeology in the an alternative interpretation, according
Jewish War, AD 66–74. He begins his bered as prophetic. early 1950s. That stage of his career led to which the potsherds are not lottery
inquiry with Josephus’s description Mason is not just an expert in the his- to startling discoveries, several of which tokens but name tags used in food dis-
of the Flavians’ triumphal procession tory of Judaea but also an adept reader had huge implications for Jewish self- tribution. She concludes the discussion
through the streets of Rome. It fea- of “story”—a valuable combination definition and Israeli national pride— by declaring them an “open question.”
tured potent demonstrations of dom- when it comes to the study of the Jew- including vivid remains from the Bar Magness cites Mason’s book in her
ination, including an enormous tower ish War and The Jewish War. The con- Kochba revolt against Rome in the 130s endnotes as a “radically revisionist
displaying painted scenes of Judaea’s flict was exceptionally complex, with AD, an uprising that forms a sequel reading of Josephus’s account,” but
destruction. But those scenes, Mason divided Jewish leadership—Jerusalem to the war that led to Masada. In the does not engage with it in her text.
notes, contradict the account of the war was at one point contested by three mid-1970s Yadin put down his spade That’s unfortunate, since some of his
Josephus himself has just given: they rival factions—and a four-way civil war to found a reformist political party, the arguments demand a response. He
portray Rome’s victory as a glorious in Rome that forced a pause in hostili- Democratic Movement for Change, and claims, for example, that the Roman
conquest of foreign land rather than ties until a new emperor could be cho- served under Menachem Begin as dep- siege ramp was never completed (it
in the darker tones of the suppression sen. Since Josephus is our only witness uty prime minister from 1977 to 1981. does not nearly reach Masada’s sum-
of a revolt. With the “resigned skepti- for events in Judaea, apart from a few Yadin took Josephus’s account of mit today, which has generally been
cism and gentle irony” of a seasoned glimpses afforded by Roman writers, Masada as a kind of handbook when he explained as the result of erosion), and
observer—a “statesman and practised a standard approach has been to treat led a pioneering excavation of the hill- therefore the attackers could not have
dissembler”—Josephus here signals to his text as a source and critique its ac- top ruins in the mid-1960s. His account taken the site in the way Josephus re-
his elite Roman readers that the Jewish curacy. Not so Mason. “There have not of the dig, published in Hebrew under a ports. Mason thinks it entirely possible,
War had indeed become Flavian pro- been many efforts—none of which I am nakedly nationalist title that includes the and in keeping with historical patterns
paganda, but not by his hand. aware—to interpret this as a narrative phrase “in those days, at that time” (an he finds elsewhere, that the Roman
Mason’s Josephus is neither a in terms of War’s character, plot, and evocation of the Chanukah story and yet commander at Masada offered terms of
Römling nor a Flavian lap dog but rhetoric,” he writes: another Jewish rebellion against pagan surrender to the Jews but then treach-
a “pragmatic statesman guided by rulers), indicates from the outset that erously slaughtered them after they
political-moral concerns.” In this he The still-prevailing tendency has he was reading The Jewish War closely opened their gates. The seven women
resembles Thucydides, whose Pelo- been to take it as a basic guide and looking to confirm its account in and children who escaped could not
ponnesian War Josephus imitates in his while challenging this or that the material remains. Later, one of Ya- gainsay the account of the lofty Jo-
opening sentence. Like its Athenian claim. Our procedure, instead, will din’s harshest critics, the Israeli sociolo- sephus—an account that can thus be
model, Jewish War pursues its largest be to accept the story for what it gist Nachman Ben-Yehuda, examined seen as one of history’s most successful
goals—questions of morality and the- is—a narrative by Josephus in mid- transcripts of the staff meetings at the cover-ups. The truth, Mason concedes,
odicy, including the troubling question 70s Rome—while posing our own site and pointed to evidence of tenden- is probably unrecoverable.
of why the God of the Jews allowed His historical questions. tiously pro-Josephan interpretation. Magness worked as a tour guide at
holiest site to be crushed—by import- Yadin’s defenders have since answered Masada in the late 1970s, some ten
ing into a historical narrative the tech- Splicing these two tasks together would those charges, but some have stuck. The years after Yadin’s excavations. She
niques of rhetoric and tragic drama. be daunting for many, but Mason shut- phrase “Masada myth” is now com- notes that by that time, the site had
Just as Thucydides did, Josephus rises tles easily between inquiries into the monly used in discussions of the site. already begun to lose symbolic im-
to emotional crescendos as he depicts war and Josephus’s account of it. He Yadin was particularly keen to find portance in the minds of Israelis, even
extremities of pain, in particular the is also a marvelous stylist, unafraid to support for the most sensational aspect while attracting growing numbers of
pain of the Jews during the siege and deploy sarcasm, humor, and other tools of Josephus’s Masada narrative: the non-Israeli visitors. Masada “still res-
fall of Jerusalem. (The story of Mary of not often used by scholars. mass murder-suicide of the site’s Jew- onates with Diaspora Jews who make
Bethezuba, a starving mother who can- ish occupants. According to The Jew- the pilgrimage to the top of the moun-
nibalizes her own infant, is recounted ish War, the leader of that community, tain, where their guides relate the story
at some length.) Rome is neither By contrast, the archaeologist Jodi Eleazer ben Yair, convinced his coun- of a small band of freedom fighters who
blamed for that cataclysm nor exoner- Magness, who in Masada also takes trymen, as the Roman siege ramp rose made a heroic last stand against Rome,”
ated. The Jews, tragic victims of a war on the dual challenge of recounting to a level that permitted penetration of she writes. This offhand comment, on
they foolishly brought on themselves, the Jewish War and interpreting The their walls, not to surrender. Instead, at the last page of her last chapter, may go
are ennobled by their suffering, but Jo- Jewish War, is more matter- of-fact, ben Yair’s instruction, each adult male farther than Magness realizes toward
sephus, in Mason’s view, does not be- but also persuasive in her command of put his family to the sword, then ten explaining the account by Josephus of
grudge the Flavians the political capital a vast array of evidence, including in men were selected by lot to kill the oth- Masada’s fall. Did he invent the Ma-
they gained from Judaea’s destruction. particular the physical remains of the ers, and those ten killed one another sada myth in answer to his own psy-
A former leader himself, Josephus ulti- Judeo-Roman clash. Magness is more in turn, until the last man set every- chological needs, as a former priestly
mately shows us that he “understands convinced than Mason of Josephus’s thing ablaze and killed himself. Seven Jerusalemite who had stood by during
political necessity.” pro-Flavian agenda. She claims that women and children escaped by hiding the destruction of his city and then had
Most salient of all passages in Thu- he “aimed at exonerating his Roman in an aqueduct. become a worldly Roman, far removed
cydides, in Mason’s understanding of patrons from responsibility for the out- When Yadin’s excavators uncovered from his nation’s travails?
The Jewish War, is the so- called Melian come of the revolt,” meaning primarily a set of twelve closely grouped ostraca, Readers have long puzzled over the
dialogue, in which Athens threatens a the destruction of Jerusalem and its or potsherds, inscribed with names by a parallels between Josephus’s (finally
small, friendless island with total de- Temple. The word “patrons” here re- single hand—including the name “ben aborted) murder-suicide pact at Io-
struction if it does not submit, and then fers to Vespasian and Titus; Magness Yair”—Yadin claimed to have found tapata and the more complete version
carries out the threat. In Mason’s view subscribes to the oft-repeated notion, the very lots cast in Josephus’s bleak he describes at Masada. He had no
Judaea, like Melos, was doomed from dismissed by Mason, that these emper- final sequence. (Various arguments conceivable source for the second ep-
the start, appealing in vain to God (just ors “commissioned” Josephus to write were proposed to explain the two isode other than the seven survivors
as Melos did to the pagan gods) for sal- The Jewish War. (No evidence for such extra lots.) A grouping of three skele- who’d escaped mass death. Josephus,
vation. The entrapment of Josephus a commission exists, though Josephus tons—the remains of a man, woman, too, had escaped mass death, first at
and his comrades in the cistern of Io- claims in his autobiographical Life, and child—inspired Yadin’s team with Iotapata and then in Judaea generally;
tapata is only the first of several dead- perhaps falsely, that he submitted the awe as they “relived the final and most he’d adopted the way of life embraced
end dramas recorded in The Jewish work to the Flavians for approval and tragic moments of the drama of Ma- by his people’s oppressors. As the sole
War; other leaders and groups become fact- checking.) This assumption might sada” (according to Yadin’s published Jew who’d been offered this remark-
cut off in tunnels, caves, or the Temple have caused her to question Josephus’s account). able redemption, he may well have felt
compound, and the work’s grim last reliability in the episode that chiefly a sense of survivor guilt, an emotion
act plays out on the besieged hilltop of concerns her, the siege of Masada, but in his case intertwined with questions
Masada. she declines to do so, preferring to leave Magness, a self-professed admirer of of identity and authenticity (much like
Mason offers much insight into the such matters to “Josephus specialists.” Yadin who later led her own excavations those faced by Diaspora Jews, or sec-
psychology of such situations (he ap- Disentangling Josephus from the site of the Roman army camps at the base ularized Israelis, ever since). Submis-
pears to have studied modern exam- of Masada, however, proves a difficult of Masada, treads cautiously in Masada, sion to Rome was, in his eyes, a more
ples, such as the entrapment by US task, thanks in large part to the work presenting both sides—for and against prudent path than defiance, but car-
troops of Japanese soldiers on Saipan of Magness’s teacher Yigael Yadin. the Josephus-Yadin scenario—with ried its own costs. Did Josephus, in the
Island in World War II). He sees Jo- Yadin was a unique figure in the annals care, and declining to choose between Masada episode, craft an image of the
sephus’s “prophecy” of Vespasian’s of archaeology, a military and political the two. “I am often asked if I believe total commitment he himself had been
rise as part of a well-attested pattern leader as well as a scholar. As a teen- there was a mass suicide at Masada, unwilling to make? Q
42 The New York Review
 A Month in the Life
Gillian White

Siglio
to shoot a roll of 35mm color film every
day in the month of July. At the time she
was living in SoHo with the filmmaker
Ed Bowes (with the Twin Towers not
yet finished and an era of financializa-
tion only just stirring, poets were still
living in SoHo) and traveling with him
back and forth between the city and the
Berkshires to work on “visual effects”
for Terrence McNally’s play Where Has
Tommy Flowers Gone, soon to appear
at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.
That month she also kept daily hand-
written notes. The intention was to
record as much “data” as possible—
whatever was happening to her—in
order to replicate her experience in text
and on film: “It was a month of my life.”
Mayer noted the day’s plans, places she
went, telephone numbers of people she
called, car colors, ads heard or seen,
feelings, the weather, things glimpsed
in magazines, seen on the television,
heard on the car radio, and a lot else.
She developed the film at night—a
complex, multistep process perhaps
difficult for today’s Instagrammer to
fathom.
Eventually she projected slides in se-
quence in her Grand Street loft as a vi-
sual aid by which to “revise and refine
her textual record” of the month. (One
A page from the July 26, 1971, entry of Memory by Bernadette Mayer
wonders if the “revision” largely in-
volved transforming journal notes into
prose poetry.) She then recorded her-
Memory the literary parents for whom she had a She wrote almost all of Midwinter Day self reading this text. For the installa-
by Bernadette Mayer. “mystical” affinity. (1982), her brilliant long poem about tion, Solomon paid to have 3-by-5-inch
Siglio, 335 pp., $45.00 Mayer, who grew up in the Ridge- a day in the life of a writing mother, prints of the slides developed and
wood neighborhood of Queens in New on December 22, 1978; asked in an mounted in sequence on boards with
Piece of Cake York City, lost her mother and father interview what she thinks of revision, handwritten cards indicating their
by Bernadette Mayer by the age of fourteen. Her father, a Mayer replied, “I disapprove.” The place in the sequence. The complete in-
and Lewis Warsh. former wallpaper designer who worked artist Adrian Piper has called May- stallation was fifty-two inches high and
Station Hill, 323 pp., as an electrician, died of an aneurysm er’s early prose-poetic experiments thirty-six feet long, while the six hours
$24.00 (paper) when she was twelve; as her mother, a “space-filling poetry” that, in aim- of Mayer reading her text played con-
secretary, was dying of breast cancer ing to capture the experience of con- tinuously in the installation space. The
Just after Frank O’Hara’s untimely two years later, she begged Mayer to sciousness, tends toward maximalist idea was to place the viewer-listener in
death in 1966, John Ashbery made a join a convent. Mayer’s legal guardian, abstraction. a position to be Mayer, to experience
case for the poet’s enduring signifi- an uncle, died when she was eighteen. something like her consciousness.
cance. In spite of only modest success She began her studies at a Catholic A few years later, Mayer reworked
during his lifetime, O’Hara was “the college instructed by nuns, but fled to Although Mayer’s early work did and printed the text of the installation
first modern poet” to pose a vital ques- Barnard as soon as her uncle died, fi- not find many readers—most of it was as a book, Memory (1975)—a rework-
tion: “Can art do this?” O’Hara’s and nally settling on the New School two self-published or published by small ing that suggests she did not disapprove
Ashbery’s different ways of answer- weeks later. After college she spent sev- presses, and many of her books are out of all forms of revision. When exactly
ing that question have changed what eral years in Lower Manhattan writing of print—it is now having a renaissance. she did the revising is a question the
counts as poetry in the US, which may and collaborating with conceptual art- Studying Hunger Journals, a 460-page text itself raises with references to his-
be why the New York School—the ists, including her then brother-in-law, book made up of prose journals Mayer torical events (the destruction of the
circle of poets and artists who the performance artist Vito Acconci, kept from 1972 to 1974 at her analyst’s Watergate tapes, for instance) that
worked and socialized in Manhat- with whom she edited 0 to 9, an influen- suggestion, was republished in its en- occurred well after July 1971. For fi-
tan in the 1950s and 1960s—remains tial mimeographed journal of experi- tirety in 2011 by Station Hill Press. It is nancial reasons, this textual version
a powerful category, in spite of the mental art and poetry. She has said that radically experimental in its aspiration included just a few images reprinted
varied styles and stances toward in spite of their differences, she agreed to find “a workable code, or shorthand, in black and white for the book’s front
poetry-making taken by the poets as- with Acconci “that you don’t see poems for the transcription of every event, and back covers; it is long out of print.
sociated with it. as this thing that’s surrounded by white every motion, every transition of . . . This latest iteration of Memory, pub-
Bernadette Mayer belongs to the space and is a precious object.” mind.” In 2019 Station Hill brought out lished in an appealing color edition, is
second generation of that school, those Across nearly thirty books—mostly the previously unpublished 1976 prose- another thing altogether: a modestly
who were writing in the late 1960s and poetry and what gets called literary poetry experiment Piece of Cake, oversized art book printed on matte,
1970s. Her poems’ unapologetic self- nonfiction—Mayer’s work takes on which Mayer had written with her coated stock, it pairs the 1975 text’s
centeredness and uninhibited liveliness the “anti-literary” idea that, as Ash- then partner, the poet and artist Lewis dated entries with new, small scans
recall Ashbery’s praise of O’Hara and bery put it, “here everything ‘belongs’: Warsh, who died in November. And (1 3/4 by 2 1/2 inches) of the almost
embody O’Hara’s faux-blithe claim that unrefined autobiographical frag- twice in the last few years her multi- 1,150 images, painstakingly color-
“you just go on your nerve.” (He once ments, names of movie stars and op- media installation “Memory,” which corrected from the original slides.
compared poetry to someone “chas- eras, obscene interjections, quotations was first exhibited in 1972 at Holly Sol- In its installation forms, Memory
ing you down the street with a knife.”) from letters.” From her earliest self- omon’s art space in New York City, has placed emphasis on the photographs
Mayer came of age around the time published volumes, Ceremony Latin been remounted: in 2016 at the Poetry (the text existed only as transient sound
O’Hara died, graduating from the New (1964) and Story (1968), to her most Foundation in Chicago and in 2017 at in the gallery). The 1975 book drew
School in 1967, where her teacher Bill recent, exhilarating book of poems, CANADA gallery in Manhattan. The attention almost entirely to Mayer’s
Berkson—O’Hara’s student, friend, Works and Days (2016), Mayer has project has now been reconceived— printed text. The new edition allows the
and collaborator—compared her early challenged the conventions of poetry brilliantly—as a book combining prose text and images to share space, work-
poems to the work of Gertrude Stein, by incorporating, even foregrounding, and photographs. ing in counterpoint to each other. Each
whom she’d never read. Stein later other written genres—letters, diary en- The publication by Siglio of this new day’s entry includes roughly thirty-six
came to mean a lot to Mayer; in an in- tries, psalms, detective stories—and by edition of Memory marks the third images, parceled out every few pages
terview from the late 1970s she identi- advocating for process (often limited major version of the project since it in rebus-like grids of nine shots (bring-
fies Stein and Nathaniel Hawthorne as by arbitrary constraints) over product. began in 1971, when Mayer undertook ing to mind Hilla and Bernd Becher’s

January 14, 2021 43

photographic grids): landscapes next to someone’s red roses purple ev- to start in a dream but arrives at Yeats it out. yes i do/what?/canal street/
to interiors, cityscapes, close-ups of ergreen & spaces a thin road with by way of Artaud: oh shit/right?/yeah ahhah/doesnt
objects, shots of people, self-portraits, no space for walking I saw the look anything like it though, i
and snapshots that, among other wild cat ed fixes dinner eat ham On Wednesday, I am saved from know, someplace outside nebraska
things, show time progressing from day corn strawberries & cream straw- hanging by running away: I work or something, that’s what it looks
to night. berries’ cream whipped once to at the museum, later I’m saved by like/that’s a dream a dream i had/
“I was never trying to take beautiful butter, cream & coffee & more b a petty bureaucrat who takes a is it? you took a picture in it?/yeah/
photographs,” Mayer has said. “I was dylan. . . . liking to me but also needs my ser- i took a nap the afternoon of july
trying to take as many as possible.” vices, dream, do you want to turn 4th. . . .
Many are visually pleasing, but thrown This sentence’s slippery syntax and me into antonin artaud, dream: on
in with merely mundane images, quick drift are typical; it is not uncom- the afternoon of october, four days On July 9, at the end of a similar tran-
beauty is not their point: the rafters of mon for a sentence to sprawl across after my marriage, my wife sur- scribed account of looking at her im-
a room, an off- center composition of a more than a dozen lines before reach- prised me by attempting automatic ages, she says, “I cant figure out . . .
hallway, of random things on a floor, ing a period. Commas, ampersands, writing. this must be inside the house but I
people whose meaning and identity and colons only somewhat slow the for- cant remember, this is like being a
are not clear, a single item—a cooking ward drive. Memory practices this move a lot: July detective. . . .”
pot or candle—taken several different Part of the pleasure of reading 3 slides into the script of Confidentially I felt like a detective reading Mem-
ways, many shots of Ed. The grid layout Memory is in feeling lost—immersed Connie, a 1950s film starring Janet ory, using a magnifying glass to see
mimics something of how the eye takes in a wash of language—and part is in Leigh (Google helps us understand); the photos in greater detail, and my
in many more images in a day than the thinking about where and how we re- memory of Memory will be in part

Lawrence Schwartzwald
brain can possibly make conscious use sist, enjoy, or manage the experience. the vision of myself peering into the
of. They linger and haunt. On the cover, Is it very easy or very hard? Is Mayer book, poring over it to connect images,
Mayer’s face, with dark open eyes and looking in or out? What are we to do words, history.
the camera visible (a self-portrait made with the text? One acclimates oneself
in a mirror), stares out at us like an im- to its logics, moods, and movements
passive ghost. as it goes along, recognizing repeated The perhaps more readable qualities
That inward/outward gaze is central names and places and themes; nar- of the work Mayer wrote after Mem-
to the project. Even as a fan of May- rative fragments begin to cohere and ory and Studying Hunger brought her a
er’s writing I felt self- conscious about throughlines of plot glimmer. larger audience and rankled her avant-
getting through the whole of Memo- And today Google gives us special garde supporters. In 1976 she wrote to
ry’s text; Mayer frequently calls it and access to Memory, allowing a profound the poet Jackson Mac Low:
Studying Hunger “unreadable,” a word change from the reader’s original rela-
that has a hold over Stein’s legacy as tionship to the text: whereas for the first I’m teaching myself how to write
well. It depends, of course, on what one decades of its life, Memory’s borrowed a direct sentence, simple commu-
wants reading (and writing) to do or to language might have been mistaken as nication. Sometimes it’s boring but
be—a question that Mayer, like many Mayer’s personal speech, some of its mostly to me it’s as much an exper-
avant-garde writers of her era, has details remaining resolutely obscure, iment as anything I’ve ever done. I
thought about as a function of the econ- now it can serve (for better and worse, wish for feedback about my books,
omies of time, labor, and leisure. The perhaps) as a hypertext by which to lo- money and fame. So what?
text doesn’t make it explicit, but Mayer cate Mayer’s lived experience, to pin it
and Ed are working hard through down. For a while as I read I tried to Mayer was at the time writing Piece
much of Memory, and the book takes locate Mayer and her crew on the map of Cake, a prose-poetry journal writ-
transcription to a kind of extreme, in- of the city and of history—Third Ave- ten with Warsh. It was published for
tentionally blurring the line between nue movie houses and their screenings the first time in 2019, and its stylistic
life and art. It riffs on what’s “worth” for early July 1971 (the Coronet: Ba- Bernadette Mayer, New York City, 2011 difference from Memory could not be
remembering and writing down, as well nanas, though the moviegoers end up sharper. It both does and doesn’t bring
as what’s worth reading and remember- at Carnal Knowledge), anti-police riots pop song titles and lyrics weave into us closer to Mayer, whose “So what?”
ing of a text that’s all about a person at the Jersey Shore, the Mod Squad on personal anecdotes; advertising copy suggests she knew she’d need to defend
who never quite speaks to us. the cover of that week’s TV Guide, the for a Manhattan dial-a-steak service her desire to find an audience. (A poem
history of the construction of the World pops up and takes over Mayer’s prose titled “James Schuyler’s Road Show” in
Trade Center. (that day’s entry ends, “Goodnight, her recent book Works and Days fea-
Aside from an opening twelve-page When I started reading reviews of a meat”). tures a party- dream- space including
section in long lines of verse that vex- book Mayer was reading—The Future Memory’s many shifts in tone and some of the poets who criticized her
ingly wind two different semantic of the Future—I feared I might never diction raise a couple of questions: work of this era. Let’s just say there are
threads around each other, Memory’s emerge. Possible plot lines seemed to When isn’t Mayer citing or collaging a lot of pens, phalluses, and revived
days and pages pass in lengthy, unpara- form: Ed and Bernadette record am- a received text, and what counts as corpses in it.)
graphed prose blocks, its information bient sounds in a city market; they and “real”? Long passages of transcribed Mayer and Warsh decided to write
presented without hierarchy or formal K. spend July 4 driving downtown and conversations (separated by slashes or Piece of Cake in July 1976, around the
coherence. watching fireworks at a pier (stunning not), driftings into letters written and time they signed a lease on an apart-
Each day offers loose but striking photographs show the Twin Towers received, incorporations of other peo- ment at 100 Main Street in Lenox,
sentences—a mixture of chronicle (ar- nearing completion); they drive up ple’s poems, twice including (as does where they settled in part because
rivals and departures, trips taken, work the Taconic Parkway to the country; Studying Hunger) altered lines from Hawthorne had lived there. Their first
done, weather observed) and dizzying, they take an affecting trip back to the Jerome Rothenberg’s “Portrait of a Jew child, Marie, was eight months old at
dense, and rhythmic blather. Here’s city to clean out Mayer’s childhood Old Country Style”: “I deny autobiog- the time. Over the month of August,
July 7: home in Ridgewood; they spend a day raphy or that the life of a man matters they wrote alternate chapters (Warsh
sailing at a boating club that won’t more or less. . . .” Like Rothenberg, took odd days of the month, Mayer
Between the thumb & forefinger allow Jews to join, in Lenox, Massa- Mayer is focused on the way language, even) and did not read each other’s en-
of my right hand, between those a chusetts, a village in the Berkshires; and memory, come at once from in- tries. They also agreed that, as Mayer
splinter zooms in quick & the taste there’s a bat in the house; Ed stays side and outside what we may want to puts it in the book’s introduction, when
waste of a room—I’m a schoolboy out all night; Mayer is in a terrible think of as the mind’s or self’s privacy. one of them “mentioned a name, like
in watercolors, look around, its mood, driving around to local radio Memory in this sense does “deny auto- Clark [Coolidge, Mayer’s friend and
mountains in merica zoom, what stations to find a recording of “That biography,” if by “autobiography” we collaborator], we would describe a bit
the fuck’s the moon we’re in an Old Black Magic” (for the McNally mean a story of the past anchored by a who that person is, a little about her
insulated room we take our time play at the Berkshire festival, Goo- sovereign self. Dreams and the writing or him”—in this decision, and in the
runnin round we zoom no moon, gle tells me). And so on. Finally July, of them are often her way of denying relatively conventional syntax and nar-
we make, monster, the greatest preparations for the play, and maybe the personal, and Memory, in all its it- rative cast of the book’s prose, it can
milk of all time, like this. . . . the relationship with Ed are coming erations, seems made to immerse the seem a counterpoint to Memory, an ex-
to an end—but how much of this have viewer and reader in a kind of dream, a periment in “clarity.”
Prose speeds up to keep pace with I invented? And do such speculations wash of “vagueness,” one of Ashbery’s I use scare quotes because it’s clear
thought or mood—as if writing were mar what Memory originally intended words for O’Hara. Mayer doesn’t think “simple commu-
squeezed in between errands—or to to do? Mayer seems to have experienced her nication” is more true or natural than
keep a rhythmic groove going. (Mayer Like O’Hara, Mayer is pushing contact sheets as we do—foreign, hard the “intransigent prose . . . communicat-
complains on July 13 that her “hand al- against the mainstream taste for first- to parse, and ripe for projection. In ing in great waves like an apparition”
ways hurts always hurts still does when person confessions, but she does so the entry for July 4 she writes, maybe that, she tells us in her August 4 entry,
I write in this book.”) July 6: precisely by writing her experience talking with someone else: she admires in Coolidge (and toward
with no interest in whether we under- which her writing strives, both before
Down the road roses to the fork at stand her feelings or even really what wow/you know what street that and after Piece of Cake). In the midst
the T, there’s money buried there happened. The entry for July 14 seems is? you wont believe it/i’ll figure of their narrating small details of daily

44 The New York Review

life and flashbacks to the past, Mayer ther authentic selfhood or in the main-
and Warsh play knowingly with rhetor- tenance of dominant social codes (as
“Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us
ical stances, narrative modes, and the some of her detractors have argued).
from the miserable reality of our days.”
possible kinds of self that seem to fol- She recounts her perhaps injurious re- —Luis Buñuel
low from them. lationship with Rubinfine in a passage
This is much of the fun of the book, that reads as a stagey performance of Painter, playwright, and novelist Leonora
and it adds a lot to its insightful, some- being at odds with herself and with pa- Carrington was a surrealist trickster par excel-
times surreal, often moving record triarchal codes: lence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, cel-
of a quiet life in which little happens, ebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body
where significant readerly and writerly But I am pretending to be very of work.
ambitions are inseparably braided into stupid for a moment, thinking it’s The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a
tender, funny evocations of time spent David who alone is reading this, as residential corner of a Mexican city and ends
with each other, Warsh’s parents, and every word of my writing was for a with a man-made apocalypse that promises to
Marie: “Every time I am trying to write time written only for him, and not usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are
about family living, I think so much of you, gentle readers, with whom for swept off to a most curious old-age home run
Gertrude Stein and of The Making of a minute I feel I have put myself in by a self-improvement cult and drawn several
Americans, but of course in her family a tight spot. But if you’ve ever seen centuries back in time with a cross-dressing
she never got up before noon,” writes a psychiatrist, I’m sure you know Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy
Mayer. Warsh wrestles with a macho exactly how I feel, no, I shouldn’t Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus.
romantic male role he worries he say that. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected her-
should and shouldn’t be playing now oines in twentieth-century literature, a nona-
that he’s a father: Mayer’s efforts at syntactic clarity are THE HEARING genarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby,

I feel like Oliver Wendell Holmes

not to be mistaken for narrative trans-
parency; this is one of many theatrical
TRUMPET who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword,
is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”
this morning. I want to throw open moments in the book, and direct ad- Leonora Carrington “The Hearing Trumpet . . . reads on its parodic
every window and bare my hairy dress to the reader plays a powerful Afterword by Olga Tokarczuk surface like an Agatha Christie domestic mystery,
chest to the multitudes below. In- part in the show. Paperback • $15.95 but one melted, dissolved by extreme heat into
stead, I light a cigarette and take One struggles to understand the Also available as an e-book something unthinkably other, and reconstructed
On sale January 5th
Marie on a tour of this office, try- criticism made by some in Mayer’s cir- as the casebook of an alchemist. . . . It asks
ing to overcome my feelings of cle that her more conventional “per- its readers to allow the dark, allow the wild and
“The Hearing Trumpet is so inspiring!
claustrophobia. sonal” writing makes a romance of Free-flowing, spiky imagination.
rethink how power works. It is a work of mas-
domestic life. Piece of Cake explores I love its freedom, its humour and
sive optimism . . . . One of the most original,
the powerful shifts in psyche and life- how it invents its own laws.” joyful, satisfying, and quietly visionary novels of
Mayer wrestles with internalized style that having children (especially —Björk, The Guardian the twentieth century.” —Ali Smith
archetypes, too—1950s mothers and the first) demands. Warsh and Mayer, “Briton Leonora Carrington is better known as a
nineteenth- century sentimental dia- then both thirty- one, living off food The Hearing Trumpet is the January Mexican surrealist painter, but here she creates
rists—and more explicitly than Warsh stamps and without jobs, manage anx- selection of the NYRB Classics Book
an extraordinary feminist fantasy, in which old age
she experiments with styles of writing iety and mortal dread with every baby- Club. If you join by January 13th,
becomes a riotous adventure.” —One of “1000
The Hearing Trumpet will be your first
that might reproduce or thwart those backpacked loop around the block. Novels Everyone Must Read,” The Guardian
selection. To join, visit www.nyrb.com
archetypes. On August 24, after a Mayer, who seems to do all the cooking or call 1-800-354-0050.
long section on Marie’s way of talking, and cleaning, spends the day with the
Mayer writes, “I must become more baby “phrasing things,” trying to write
avant-garde, it makes you seem less while playing peek-a-boo under the Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
foolish.” And on August 20, in the crib, and trying to read; as generations
midst of another long section about her of parent-writers know, it’s no piece of
own and others’ mothers: cake. And as women of Mayer’s gen-
“Celia Paul is a more gifted writer than she
eration know, women’s writing and
has any business being; it’s almost unfair . .. .
And sometimes, in writing a full drudge work share a long history. Au- Self-Portrait reads like a novel.” *
American paragraph as it speaks gust 24: “‘What are you saying about
and thinks itself, full of American me,’ Lewis just asked, glancing at this Written by one of Britain’s most important con-
thoughts which appear to be logi- page while I was rubbing a ‘pain’ in his temporary painters, Self-Portrait tells the artist’s
story in her own words, drawn from early journal
cal but aren’t, if you’ll forgive this back.” (Mayer had been trying to re-
entries as well as memory, of her childhood in
sudden American transition from call where she’d encountered the idea
India and her days as an art student at London’s
the thoughts that I think to be that late parenthood “fosters conser- Slade School of Fine Art; of her decades-long
your thoughts, dear reader, to the vatism and all its stately bourgeois relationship with Lucian Freud and the birth of
thoughts that I think might only ideals.”) their son; of the unresolvable conflict between
be mine as the writer, it seems like The contrapuntals of his and her en- caring for a child and remaining committed to
a big mishmash, Catch’s word for tries make a double-exposed portrait of art; of the familial connections Paul communi-
coddled eggs broken onto crumbs a two-writer family at its start, capturing cates through her paintings of her mother and
of toast or stale bread and mixed the strangeness of living with someone sisters; and finally, of the mystical presence in
together and eaten with a spoon, who is thinking their foreign thoughts her own solitary vision of the world around her.
with pepper added. Sometimes right next to you, in the same room. This SELF-PORTRAIT “Self-Portrait documents a woman learning to
a comforting meal, sometimes complicates Mayer’s career-long fantasy Celia Paul trust—not Freud, not other artists, but herself... .
nausea. of “finally telling everything” and cap- As a writer, [Paul is] possessed of a heightened
Hardcover • $29.95
Did Catch know she was speak- tures the weird rhythm of everyday life, over 70 illustrations sensibility, a particular vantage on to the world.”
ing Yiddish? Does my heart really in which other people call us out of our Also available as an e-book —Rumaan Alam, The New Republic *
beat in my legs? Is my clothing too heads and our heads lure us back inside “Captivating.. .Paul writes about her struggle to
constricting? Do we share love again. The intensity of such transcribed “She experiences art both as a woman love someone while dedicating herself to her paint-
enough to continue? Who am I cohabitation might tell us something and an artist. The two identities are ing.. .she hopes her book will ‘speak to young
speaking to? What a mishegas! about how to better appreciate our inextricable from one another, and the
women artists—and perhaps to all women.’”
tension between the two poles is
days at home during the pandemic: —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
electric. . . . Self-Portrait is a beautifully
“Catch” is Ed Bowes’s mother; part written bildungsroman, a “portrait of the “I loved the painter Celia Paul’s memoir Self-
of the allure of Piece of Cake comes A book like this is like a dream, artist” as a young woman. It is also, Portrait. It’s fascinating for its account of her
in Warsh’s and Mayer’s self- conscious or perhaps like one word: in a more uniquely, a powerful resource for
long-term lover Lucian Freud. ..but it’s also pain-
narratives of momentous episodes from month, or even, I am certain, in artists who face the dueling respon-
fully honest on what it means to be a woman
their pasts: Warsh’s time on the West one day, there are enough refer- sibilities of creation and caregiving.
You don’t have to be a woman or a who puts art first, no matter what.”
Coast and his activities in the writer ences, enough proposals, enough mother to feel this friction.” —Olivia Laing, New Statesman
communities of Bolinas, California; innuendo, simply there’s enough —Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times
his formation of Angel Hair Press with stuff—the usual weekly load—
his ex-wife, Anne Waldman; Mayer’s which, if put into language, en- “Paul is one of the most thoughtful and
My Sisters in Mourning,
father’s death; her sometimes pain- compasses, if not everything in the significant living women artists and 2015–2016
Self-Portrait helps suggest why. . . . (oil on canvas)
ful decade with Bowes; the writing of universe, which is what I believe, Her painting and writing are of a Self-Portrait,
Memory; and her complicated account at least everything in one’s own piece—closely observed, not seeking September–October
of her rather traumatic psychoanalysis life, everything “autobiographi- to flatter, and with people always as 2015 (oil on canvas)

with David Rubinfine. cal.” Fruits and vegetables do this her focus.” —Michael Prodger, The
In this passage late in the book (Au- to me. Sunday Times ’s ‘Books of the Year’
gust 26) one sees that its readability Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
really doesn’t imply Mayer’s faith in ei-  Q
January 14, 2021 45
 Please order books by using the contact information listed under each press’s name, or visit your local bookstore or online retailer.

THOMAS SCHULTZ M3 SCIENTIFIC MEDIA GEORGES KASSABGI

(315) 491-2863
PLAGUES AND WHAT GAVE YOU
PRINCES ROOTS & BRANCHES
A Family Saga Like No Other THAT IDEA?
The Great Mortality Rediscovering the Development of
by Thomas Schultz by Michael M. Meguid MD
How does a four-year-old boy up- Our Worldviews
Destiny-starred lives collide in this
rooted from a cozy Egyptian fam- by Georges Kassabgi
dark historical fiction novel set
ily endure parental cruelty, neglect, With this thought-provoking essay
in medieval England. A powerful
and abandonment in impoverished (2012), we are invited to examine
tale of death and betrayal boasting
postwar Germany? living systems’ fundamentals, as-
exquisite language, unforgettable
sumptions, and starting points used
characters, and a tangled knot of a 978-0-9992988-5-5 • Paper, $14.99
to firm up worldviews. Highlighted:
plot with thematic complexity. • 336 Pages • Literary Historical
No one (individual or group) knows
9781543930542 • eBook, $2.99 • Biography
everything, plus . . . each worldview
9781543930535 • Paper, $15.99 • Available on Amazon. has value—up to a point, plus . . . a
273 Pages • Historical Fiction/Medieval Author’s website: multidisciplinary study is outlined,
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, and through www.michaelmeguid.com plus. . . all frameworks of thought (philosophy, religious systems,
other booksellers. scientific method) are duly considered.
Author’s website: www.thomasfschultz.com In the follow-up, “Postscripts” (2018), the author expounds on his
insights with readers and includes his proposition on war and peace
HIGH PRIESTESS PUBLICATIONS (presented in academic setting and published in a military journal).
DELETREA www.highpriestesspublications.com; (608) 332-3399 His focus on deeper understanding ought to be useful when ad-
www.deletrea.net; (954) 562-7784 dressing other global challenges such as climate change, pollution
KING OF WANDS
control, human rights, systems thinking with honesty/humility,
THE SPELL Kings of the Tarot Series, Book 2
and more.
by C. V. Shaw by Anna Durbin
Sparks fly between Lady Julia Lacey, His two books are now published online by the International Soci-
“In C. V. Shaw’s endearing fantasy
local apostate, and Charles Rodman, ety for Philosophers: isfp.sdf.org/books.html
novel The Spell, a curse befalls a
the irksome vicar, when neither can Free downloads also at www.ResearchGate.net/search (using author’s
royal family and thrusts the en-
fight their fierce attraction despite full name).
tire kingdom into an adventure
their mutual antagonism. Author’s website: www.ugik.com
that spans generations. The Spell
is a captivating fantasy novel.” 978-0-9989229-5-9 • eBook, $0.99
—Foreword Clarion Reviews • 398 Pages • Historical Romance
“It’s a work that casts its own spe-
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
cial magic on the reader’s heart . . .” Z GIRLS PRESS
Noble, Kobo, and Google Books.
—Midwest Book Review callingcardbooks.com; (916) 878-1760
Author’s website:
“Fans of historical fantasy will
www.annadurbinauthor.com
find much to love in Shaw’s work.” WHAT GOES UNSEEN
—The BookLife Prize & Other Tales From Afar
9780997290486 • Paper, $19.99 • 240 Pages • Fantasy by Sean Minster
From everyday to ethereal, these
Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
ATMOSPHERE PRESS stories peer into the cracks of life,
Author’s website: www.cvshawbooks.com
www.atmospherepress.com; (740) 416-0443 asking what lurks in the liminal
spaces between the known and the
NEWER TESTAMENTS unknown.
RILEY PUBLISHING by Philip Brunetti
978-1-7328293-7-4 • Paper, $15.97
Encounter a mercurial narrator
• 224 Pages • Short Stories, Literary
THE LEAST YOU on a surreal, neo-noir journey in
Fiction
SHOULD KNOW Newer Testaments—“an innovative
ABOUT MEDITATION existential novel told through hal- Available at Barnes & Noble,
lucinatory poetics.” —Independent Amazon, IndieBound, and Ingram
A Brief and Practical Guide to
Book Review Spark.
Mindfulness Author’s website: minsterbooks.com
By Mac MacLean 978-1-64921-943-5 • Hardcover,
A straightforward guide for start- $25.99 • 204 Pages • Experimental/
ing your mindfulness practice. Literary Fiction
Clear and jargon-free instruc- Available on AtmospherePress.com,
tions, with illustrations, describe IndieBound, Amazon, and Ingram
appropriate postures, basic breath- Spark. GLOBAL ANIMAL PRESS
ing techniques, and what gear you will (and won’t) need. Author’s website: philipbrunetti.com www.globalanimal.org/snowflake; (310) 593-4830
978-06921622-2-4 • Paper, $16.95 • 114 Pages • Meditation SNOWFLAKE
Available on Amazon and IngramSpark. A Climate Thriller
Author’s website: meditation.theleast@gmail.com by Arthur Jeon
LARA MALMQVIST
A high school student decides he
TWELVE HORSES must kill the president as an act of
SYNTELL SMITH PUBLISHING FOR JULIA environmental protection.
The Story of a Southern “Ripped-from-the-headlines stunner.”
BOOK ENDINGS Alberta Pioneer —Editor’s Choice, Booklife
Loss, Pain, and Revelations— by Lara Malmqvist 978-1-7340935-0-6 • Paper, $14.99
A Call Numbers Novel “An enjoyable tale of Canadian • 978-1-7340935-1-3 • eBook,
by Syntell Smith pioneer life inspired by the author’s $4.99 • 403 Pages • Literary Fiction
In the dramatic sequel, Robin family history.” —Kirkus Reviews Available on Amazon and Barnes
Walker and the staff of the 58th 9781525545320 • Paper, $16.99 • & Noble.
Street Branch Library endure 216 Pages • Historical Fiction Author’s website:
shocking developments in life and www.globalanimal.org/snowflake/
Available on Amazon, Barnes and
death.
Noble, and Friesen Press.
9780692036983 • Paper, $16.95 Author’s website:
• 9781952506987• Hardcover, www.LaraMalmqvist.com
$25.99 • 422 Pages • Literary
Fiction
Available on IngramSpark, Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, and IndieBound.

To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.

46 The New York Review

LULU PUBLISHING EDWARD STREET BOOKS IPBOOKS
www.lulu.com IPBooks.net; (718) 728-7416
SANTA ABELLA
BALLASTED WINGS And Other Stories
CHIMERAS AND
Why That Day?
by Ken Wetherington
OTHER WRITINGS
by Susan Knox Kopta Fourteen introspective stories, often Selected Papers of Sheldon Bach
“Valuable asset for . . . caregivers and tinged with darkness, which probe by Sheldon Bach
advocates, those affected by bipolar.” the complexities of the human “I consider this one of the most
—BlueInk Review condition. innovative, creative, and thought-
“Vividly describing the gamut of ful books I have read for many
emotions.” —Kirkus Reviews 978-0578691428 • Paper, $12.99 •
years. Sheldon Bach is a great ana-
221 Pages • Fiction
978-1-4834-2952-6 • Paper, $8.92 • lyst, extremely close to the patients’
978-1-4834-2951-9 • eBook, $0.99 Available on Amazon. experience, in real contact with
• 131 Pages • Personal/Portrait, Author’s website: their deep processes and sense of
Memoir https://kenwetherington.com Self, and gifted with both immense
humanity and an admirable con-
Available on Amazon, Audible,
ceptual clarity and originality.”
iTunes, and GoodReads.
—Stefano Bolognini, M.D.
Author’s website: bipolarlinks.com/
978-0-9969996-4-9 • Paper, $35.00 • 306 Pages • Psychoanalysis
CYNTHIA KUMANCHIK Available on IPBooks.net and Amazon.
www.cynthiakumanchik.com
PHILLIP B. CHUTE, EA AUTOMATON NATION
www.phillipbchute.com FELA’S STORY
by Cynthia Kumanchik Memoir of a Displaced Family
THE SILVER THREAD Automaton Nation is perfect for
by Phyllis Beren
fans of Twilight and The Hunger
OF LIFE A childhood in a displaced persons
Games, where the stakes are high,
50 Original True Accounts of camp in Germany—a family’s story
love is unexpected, and characters
Divine Interventions and Life- of survival in Poland and Russia—a
survive in a dystopian world.
Changing Spiritual Events memoir of memory and identity con-
978-1728363264 • Paper, $13.99 • structed and lost over time. “In prose
by Phillip B. Chute, EA 242 Pages • Science Fiction
“Phillip B. Chute draws on dra- marked by wit, elegance, and search-
matic material from far different Available on Amazon. ing candor.” —Kirkus Reviews
aspects of his working life—spiritu- 978-1-949093-42-1 • Paper, $29.95
ality, karma, and the supernatural.” • 220 Pages • Memoir
—Self-Publishing Review Available on IPBooks.net and
978-1-7328855-2-3 • Paper, $14.99 Amazon.
• eBook, $4.99 • 183 Pages •
Spiritual
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, PAGE PUBLISHING, INC. NECESSARY VOICES
and Indiebound. www.pagepublishing.com; (866) 315-2708 A Collection of Short Fiction
Author’s website: www.phillipbchute.com by Merle Molofsky
A PASSION FOR TRUTH “These stories illustrate the para-
Reflections of a Scientist-Priest dox that fiction is an opening to
by John Huntington truth.” —Michael Eigen
“Each chapter is a unique gift. The “These are extraordinary stories.”
IUNIVERSE
dazzle of what you know and how —Lee Jenkins
www.iuniverse.com; (800) 288-4677
you have used your thirst for truth
978-949093-11-7 • Paper, $23.95 •
EVERY DAY IS and goodness, the extraordinary
102 Pages • Fiction
SATURDAY manner of your vocation, your love
and admiration for the people in Available on IPBooks.net and
Sleeping Late, Playing With the Amazon.
your life, the importance of your
Grandchildren, Surviving the
work, your radical obedience even
Quarantine, and Other Joys of in the face of horrid injustice: all
Retirement this and so much more is the abun- STREETS 1970
by Jerry Zezima dant gift you give us in this book.” A Novel
Every Day Is Saturday is a funny —by a Jesuit by Merle Molofsky
look at life after work, a cheerful “A provocative dose of Americana
978-1-64350-079-2 • Paper, $19.95 • 136 Pages • Philosophy,
guide to making it through a lock- that is equal parts poetic, visionary,
Religion, Science.
down, and—above all—an endur- gritty, mythical.” —Brent Potter
ing love story. “Zezima’s anecdotes Available on Amazon.
The “streets” are those of drug ad-
about life in retirement pack colos- dicts in NYC, 1970.
sal humor into bite-sized stories.” —
978-0-990661-32-0 • Paper, $24.95
BookLife Review
LUMINARY MEDIA • 178 Pages • Fiction
978-1-6632-0563-6 • Paper, $13.99 • 148 Pages • Humor luminarymedia.works; (913) 940-1133 Available on IPBooks.net and
Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Amazon.
Author’s website: www.jerryzezima.blogspot.com COMPLEX
by A.D. Enderly
“In this epic debut dystopian novel,
ELEMENTAL NATURES a teenager fights to rescue her ab- IN DEFENSE
selected lyrics, sequences, and ducted younger sister from the OF POLITICAL
artwork, with new poems and the ever-increasing perils of a futuristic CORRECTNESS
essay “The American Voice” megacity. . . . A thoroughly absorb- by Howard Kamler
by Lance Lee ing science fiction tale with a mot- Kamler’s defense of political cor-
“Stunning writing about the natu- ley cast.” —Kirkus Reviews rectness not only shows why being
ral world and bold descriptions of 978-0-578-75224-2 • Paper, $16.99 politically correct is the hallmark of
collective and fundamental expe- • 594 Pages • Science Fiction, being a good citizen, it also granu-
riences, vivid imagery, profound Dystopian larly details how those opposing
symbolism, and a homage to love.” Available on Amazon, Apple Books, the notion have rekindled the evil
—Booklife Google Play, and Barnes & Noble. flames of racism.
978-1-5320-9829-1 • Paper, $23.99 Author’s website: 978-1-949093-63-6 • Paper, $21.95
• 383 Pages • Poetry www.adenderly.com • 306 Pages • Nonfiction, Psycho-
Available on Amazon, Barnes & analysis
Noble, and iUniverse. Available on IPBooks.net and Amazon.
Author’s website: www.lanceleeauthor.com

To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.

January 14, 2021 47

 Democracy’s Demagogues
Ferdinand Mount
Men on Horseback: the masses and personifying the

Sarin Images/Granger
The Power of Charisma new nation, was intrinsic to the
in the Age of Revolution modern world.
by David A. Bell. In fact, one might argue, it is
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, only in our own time that we
335 pp., $30.00 can see most clearly how it all
works. The leader’s rallies, his
In 1917, when Europe seemed to broadcasts, his photo opportu-
lie in ruins, Max Weber wrote an nities, his tweets—these do not
influential essay with the mislead- simply decorate the serious busi-
ingly dull title “Parliament and ness of governing; they are part
Government in a Reconstructed and parcel of it. True, in the past
Germany.” In it he drew attention and perhaps in the present too,
to the outbreak of “Caesarism” charismatic leaders have often
in nineteenth-century Europe, threatened constitutional orders,
taking Otto von Bismarck as but they were crucial to the ini-
the prime example of a modern tial creation of those orders, not
Caesar for Germany (and indeed only by engineering the rupture
for the entire continent). How with the ancien régime but also
brilliantly, according to Weber, by bonding the public to this
the old Junker had reduced Par- strange new world. The char-
liament to a rubber stamp, what ismatic leader breaks the rules
devastating use he had made of not just because, he claims, the
emergency legislation and popu- rules are harmful to the people,
lar appeals, how ruthlessly he had but because breaking the rules
expanded the power of Germany shows that he has charisma; he
and consolidated his own. is beyond good and evil, and be-
You might think that Weber yond a lot of other boring stuff
goes on to tell us what a harmful too.
thing this modern Caesarism is As Weber writes elsewhere:
and how Parliament and the rule
of law must be strengthened as In order to do justice to their
bulwarks against its perils. And mission, the holders of cha-
he does, but then he starts off on risma, the master as well as
a new and more disquieting tack. his disciples and followers,
Isn’t it possible, he muses, that must stand outside the ties
demagoguery is actually inher- of this world, outside of rou-
ent in modern democratic suf- tine occupations, as well as
frage, just as it was in Periclean outside the routine obliga-
Athens? Apart from demagogos, tions of family life.
ancient Greek had a dozen other
words to describe “people- Charisma is both revolutionary
flattery” of one sort or another. and unstable: “It can only toler-
Surely mass democracy had a ate, with an attitude of complete
tendency to Caesarism: emotional indifference, irregular,
unsystematic, acquisitive acts.”
Every kind of direct popular Simon Bolívar Crossing the Andes, after a painting by Arayo Gómez, 1857; it is based on The charismatic can often be
election of the supreme ruler Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps identified by the absence of a cer-
and, beyond that, every kind tain normal human pulse. After a
of political power that rests on the Curiously then, Weber, this infinitely to witness Mussolini’s March on Rome, fractious meeting with Winston Chur-
confidence of the masses and not thoughtful and skeptical observer of he would have been uneasier still. chill in 1914, Henry James said to Vio-
of parliament . . . lies on the road human affairs, had come to agree with let Asquith that “it had brought home
to these “pure” forms of Caesarist the mountebank Napoleon III—who to me—very forcibly, very vividly—the
acclamation. In particular, this is named himself emperor of France in In Men on Horseback, David A. Bell, limitations by which men of genius ob-
true of the position of the President 1852—that “the nature of democracy a professor of history at Princeton, tain their ascendancy over mankind.”
of the United States, whose superi- is to personify itself in a man.” When takes Weber’s conjecture a stage fur-
ority over parliament derives from he was consulted about the writing of ther. Democracies, he points out, are
his (formally) democratic nomina- the Weimar Constitution in 1918–1919, particularly suspicious of charismatic To demonstrate his thesis, Bell takes
tion and election. he proposed the direct election of the leaders: five of the most memorable leaders from
German president. Charismatic lead- the revolutionary period: Pasquale
When traveling the United States in the ership by a single man, he maintained, Yet, paradoxically, the longing for Paoli of Corsica, George Washing-
election year of 1904, Weber had been was essential to cement the people’s such leaders acquired new impor- ton, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint
much impressed by Teddy Roosevelt’s loyalty and persuade them to accept tance, and a distinct new shape, Louverture—liberator of Haiti and
boisterous campaigning style. the dull impersonal weight of modern during the very same period that leader of the greatest slave revolt in his-
The miracle ingredient by which the bureaucracy, which was both universal witnessed the first stirrings of tory after Spartacus—and Simón Bolí-
demagogos acquires and retains power and inescapable. Yes, there must also modern democracy: the eighteenth var, who led the northern half of South
is what Weber calls “charisma.” It is be vigorous political parties and ac- and early nineteenth centuries. America to liberation from its Spanish
Weber who first borrowed from the countability to Parliament. But a dol- masters. Four fifths of the book is given
Epistles of Saint Paul the Greek word lop of charisma was indispensable. It was during that period of extraordi- over to beguiling portraits of this ex-
for “the gift of God’s grace” and gave This might be described as the nary intellectual ferment and then traordinary quintet, whose reputations
it a new, entirely secular twist. But even Weber Wobble, and an apparent excep- in the great revolutions that washed were to become entangled in a glittery
his use of the term retains a heaven- tion to the general thesis for which he across much of the Western world web of global hero worship: Louver-
sent aura. The man with charisma is is celebrated: that the modern world is between 1775 and 1820 that the pow- ture, for example, being known both
“meant to be.” He comes to fulfill the characterized by a turning away from erful forms of political charisma we as the Black Napoleon and the Wash-
destiny of the nation; he is the Man on magical ways of thinking, the once- are familiar with today emerged. The ington of the Antilles, Bolívar delight-
the White Horse in the Book of Rev- for-all Entzauberung, or disenchant- coming of democracy transformed the ing in being called the Washington of
elation. Hegel wrote, when he caught ment. He recognized the necessity of relationship between the people and South America. Bell constantly stresses
sight of Napoleon riding through Jena charisma, but he remained uneasy and their leaders, and the personal mag- that the cultural setting in which these
the day before the great battle against suspicious of it. He died a year later, netism of the leader electrified that heroes operated was distinctly modern.
the Prussian army in 1806, that he had in 1920, of the Spanish flu during the relationship. Far from representing a The panegyrists of old-style monarchs
just seen “this World- Soul riding out of great pandemic, aged only fifty-six. If backsliding toward older forms of gov- would never have portrayed them as in-
town.” That’s charisma. he had lived a couple of years longer, ernment, the new Caesar, adored by teracting with the public in the intimate

48 The New York Review

style in which James Boswell, in his Contract, on scant evidence, that Cor- might be gaining ground. Even in pre-
1760s travelogue, describes Paoli meet- sica was “the one country in Europe paring a revolutionary assault, PR was “A touching tribute to a beloved
ing ordinary Corsicans. which is fit to receive laws.” High praise never to be forgotten. Francisco de husband and a shared literary
I’m not sure this is wholly true. Mon- indeed, since Rousseau considered it Miranda, the hero of Bolívar’s youth, life.” —Kirkus Reviews
archs such as Henri IV of France and the greatest problem in politics “to find sailed from New York and landed on
Henry V of England have been de- a form of government that sets the law the coast of Venezuela in 1806, bringing
picted as sitting around the fire with above man.” Bell points out, however, with him not only guns and ammuni-
their soldiers, just as Napoleon was. that while Boswell was personally en- tion but also a printing press and linen
Bell also argues that charismatic au- chanted by Paoli and saw him as “the handkerchiefs printed with portraits of
thority could not be spread by per- father of a nation,” he was not too be- himself and George Washington—the
sonal contact alone: it depended on the dazzled to recognize the reality. In complete liberator’s campaign kit.
printing press and the rise of literacy as theory Corsica was “a complete and
well. In the eighteenth century a new well- ordered democracy,” but in prac-
novel-reading public emerged, all too tice, he observed, There is a danger—and Bell does not
liable to confuse the sentimental sto- altogether avoid it—of exaggerating
ries they read with real life. Denis Di- the power of Paoli knows no the importance of all this promotion
derot claimed that the French were like bounds. It is high treason so much and adulation and the interaction be-
children taken to the theater for the as to speak against, or calumni- tween the two. After all, these leaders
first time, unable to distinguish artifice ate him; a species of despotism were adored in the first place because
from reality. They were thus easy prey founded, contrary to the principles they were genuine military heroes.
for fake news peddled by public propa- of Montesquieu, on the affection Washington did cross the Delaware,
gandists. But was this all as new as Bell of love. Napoleon did cross the Alps, Bolívar
implies? From medieval hagiographers did cross the High Andes. These and
to the autobiography of the emperor Boswell followed Dr. Johnson’s ad- many other exploits were accomplished
Dorothy Gallagher’s husband, Ben Son-
Augustus, self-promotion and a certain vice to “give us as many anecdotes as with dash and daring, brilliant organi-
nenberg, died in 2010. He had suffered
indifference to truth have always been you can,” and his Journal became a best zational and tactical skills, and often
from multiple sclerosis for many years
the hallmarks of the charismatic’s PR seller. So much so that when France miserably ill- clad and ill-trained sol-
and was almost completely paralyzed
operation, with or without the printing moved to take over the island in 1768 diers. You might expect Toussaint’s
but his wonderful, playful mind remained
press. The full text of the Res Gestae and the radical Whigs pressed the Brit- slave army to have been a ragged and
undimmed.
Divi Augusti (Deeds of the Divine Au- ish government to intervene on Paoli’s starving lot, but the Army of Italy of
gustus) was carved in stone in cities all behalf, Lord Holland, paymaster gen- which Napoleon took command in In the book’s ten sections, Gallagher
over the Roman Empire. eral of the forces, declared, “Foolish 1796 at the age of twenty-six was also moves freely and intuitively between
Toward the end of Men on Horse- as we are, we cannot be so foolish as appallingly underequipped. Few of the the present and the past to evoke the
back, Bell tells us that, unlike Weber, to go to war because Mr. Boswell has men had boots, instead weaving their life they made together and her life
been in Corsica.” When Paoli began his footwear out of straw, and many had after his death. The stories Gallagher
I have little interest in charisma repeated exiles in London, from 1769 no jackets or trousers. Yet we cannot tells could not be more ordinary, and
as an abstract, timeless, universal until his death in 1807, Boswell and ignore the fact that in desperate situa- yet her glancing, wry approach to mem-
phenomenon. I have been con- the Johnson circle stuck by him, and tions, these inspirational commanders ory and life gives them a resonance
cerned about how it took on a par- Paoli makes frequent appearances in resorted to extreme brutality as well. that makes the reader feel both the
ticular form in a particular time The Life of Samuel Johnson, in which In Venezuela, Bolívar had eight hun- logic and the mystery of a couple’s com-
and place: the eighteenth- and Boswell develops the delicious mixture dred Spanish prisoners executed in mon existence. This slim book about
early nineteenth- century Atlantic of anecdote and observation that had cold blood. In Syria, at Jaffa, Napoleon irremediable loss and unending love
world. made his name with the Corsica book. had 1,500–2,000 prisoners led out to distills the essence of a lifetime.
Paoli was a fine-looking fellow. So the beach and then shot, bayoneted, or
“With the deliciously crisp lack of
Yet it would have been interesting to was George Washington, six foot three drowned.
sentimentality that has characterized
see him compare his charismatic lead- in his white stockings and not nearly as The liberator could shape any sort
both her style and her stance from
ers with earlier national liberators or stiff in private talk or correspondence of constitution he fancied, instruct his
the start, Dorothy Gallagher turns to
would-be liberators whose legends as he could appear in public. The same people how to sustain whatever political
a subject that would be perilous for
have endured: Joan of Arc in France, could not be said of Toussaint Louver- arrangements he preferred. What then
most writers but which here gives
William Wallace in Scotland, Owen ture. He was already in his late forties does he do? Here we come to a total
even greater scope for her striking
Glendower in Wales, or Cola di Rienzo when he came to prominence, frail, chasm between Washington and Bell’s
gifts: bereavement. These diamond-
in Rome, whose memory burned bright short, and toothless—he had acquired other four subjects. When the fighting
hard essays, each devoted to
enough five centuries later for Wag- the nickname “Sickly Stick.” And Na- was done, Washington publicly and de-
“things”—not lofty things, just things:
ner to compose his early opera Rienzi, poleon, as we all know, was tubby and liberately resigned his commission and
clothes, pigeons, typewriters, friend-
which so impressed the young Adolf short with an unpleasant Corsican ac- retired to private life. He was then cho-
ships found and lost, sofas, the medical
Hitler. Nor are these tenacious tales cent and, as a young man, flappy side- sen as president, served two terms, and
apparatus that inevitably became
simply epics of martial glory: Alfred locks that made him look like a sallow retired again (to be succeeded by short,
part of her and her late husband’s
the Great remains revered as a law- puppy. Bolívar was reputed to have balding John Adams, who had less cha-
life—evoke the writer’s grief, and
giver and founder of primary schools been handsome when young, but in his risma than a tree stump). Washington
hence her marriage, with remarkable
for children of all social classes except later years of power he was described resisted the call to proclaim himself
power.” —Daniel Mendelsohn
serfs. During the Covid pandemic, I as short and meager, with a highly un- monarch. He sought only to serve the
have found myself reading the infec- prepossessing countenance, a harsh more or less democratic political cul- “Dorothy Gallagher tells us beautifully
tion statistics from the Hywel Dda Uni- and disagreeable voice, and cold and ture in which he was reared, and which the things worth knowing. This book
versity Health Board—Hywel Dda, or forbidding manners. was taken for granted in all thirteen breaks my heart.” —Susan Minot
Howel the Good, being a tenth- century Still, PR could make up for a lot. colonies. But the other four? Let Bolí-
Welsh king famous for his liberal legal Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon var speak for them all: STORIES I FORGOT
code, which gave strong recognition to Crossing the Alps depicts the hand-
women’s rights. some young general in his bicorne, fully I am convinced deep in my bones,
TO TELL YOU
in command of his rearing horse as he that only a skillful despotism Dorothy Gallagher
points onward to victory. In fact, Napo- can rule America. . . . We are the Hardcover • $16.95
Bell’s five heroes did have some re- leon was said to roll around in the sad- abominable compound of those Also available as an e-book
markable Boswells, though, including, dle like a ship in high seas, and when tiger-like hunters who came to
as noted, Boswell himself. Few travel- crossing the Alps the pass was so steep America to shed blood and to Thursday, January 28, 2021,
ogues have exuded the easy charm of and icy that he had to stumble up it on crossbreed with their victims be- 7:30pm EST
the journal he wrote during his trip to a mule and slither down the other side fore sacrificing them, and then to Community Bookstore
Corsica in 1765 to meet the great Paoli. on his bottom. David’s picture was later mix the impure offspring of those Virtual Event
You come away as bewitched as Boswell carefully adapted to depict Bolívar in liaisons with the offspring of slaves Dorothy Gallagher talks about her
was by the confiding warmth of Paoli, the saddle crossing the High Andes. torn out of Africa. With such phys- new book with writer Susan Minot.
who at the age of thirty had succeeded Napoleon’s bulletins from the battle- ical mixtures, with such moral Register for this Zoom event at
his father Giacinto as “general” of the field were so notoriously exaggerated elements, how can we place laws communitybookstore.net.
dirt-poor island, with more or less un- that the expression “to lie like a bul- above heroes and principles above This program is part of the New York
limited executive powers. Pasquale had letin” entered the language.* Bolívar, men? Review Books and Community Bookstore
pacified the warring clans, founded a too, sent false reports of his victories to ongoing series of virtual events.
press and a university, and given the is- newspapers in London and elsewhere In one way or another, Paoli, Napoleon,
landers a spanking new constitution. It to counter any royalist sympathies that and Louverture expressed much the
was one of the first in Europe and was same attitude, though Toussaint put it
Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
written with input from Jean-Jacques *See my “An Ordinary Man,” The New to his followers more gently: “I have al-
Rousseau, who declared in The Social York Review, April 4, 2019. ways treated you as my children.” They

January 14, 2021 49

 all accepted that their people were sim- say, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira
NOW IN PAPERBACK AND WITH A NEW ESSAY ply too immature, too unruly, too quar- Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi—and “office
relsome to rule themselves. charisma” (Amtcharisma), by which
“As young Americans take to the streets to say
The Americans, and the British from even a totally unglamorous president
Black lives matter, they’re often told to vote.
While voting is important, it’s also important to
whom they had inherited their political like Adams—or François Hollande—
remember how black political representation has
culture, were different. “If I had been is bathed in the aura of the office. Bell
been chipped away by voter ID laws, gerrymander- in America,” Napoleon said, “I would doesn’t explore these possibilities,
ing and felon disenfranchisement. Blackballed have willingly been a Washington, and merely repeating that charisma has be-
addresses the struggle for voting rights and I would have deserved little praise for come an inescapable feature of modern
for racial equality more broadly, drawing on it, since I don’t see how it would have political life.
Pinckney’s own experiences and writings of civil been possible to do otherwise.” On In Revolutionary Constitutions
rights leaders to create a complicated picture St. Helena, he told his own Boswell, (2019), the Yale law professor Bruce
of black political identity.” —Isabella Rosario, Emmanuel de las Cases, that if he had Ackerman ventures into this other ter-
NPR’s Code Switch successfully invaded England, he would rain and brings back some fascinating
“Part memoir, part historical reflection, all polit-
have governed the country as a good results. He offers half a dozen mod-
ical: there’s something for everyone.” —Katherine
liberal. But you could do nothing with ern examples of post-revolutionary
Morgan, “15 Books About Race Everyone Should the French except give them orders. constitution-making for the long term:
Read,” Real Simple the India of Gandhi and Nehru, the
South Africa of Nelson Mandela and
“This brief but incisive reflection on the history of
voting among African-Americans takes the form
And what did these leaders leave Oliver Tambo, the revival of democ-
behind? During the French Revolu- racy in Italy after Mussolini, the Fourth
BLACKBALLED of a classic personal essay: light and conversa-
tion Paoli briefly returned to power, and Fifth Republics in France, Lech
THE BLACK VOTE tional, circling its subject in a deliberately mean-
supported by the British, but when the WałĊsa and Solidarity in Poland, then
dering style that ends up revealing more than a
AND US DEMOCRACY frontal attack might have.” —The New Yorker
British withdrew, the French returned. shorter pieces on Aung San Suu Kyi in
With a new essay Napoleon was not inclined to restore Myanmar, David Ben- Gurion in Israel,
“Blackballed is timely and essential. Recent police his erstwhile hero, whom he regarded and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
Darryl Pinckney killings of Black boys and men have once again as soft and too democratic in his ways, Each of these chapters is rich in detail,
Paperback • $14.95 pushed race to the forefront of public aware- and so Corsica remains to this day a leaving the reader deeply impressed by
Also available as an e-book ness, and Darryl Pinckney’s slender volume asks region of France. Haiti did eventually the patience and persistence of lead-
that we pause and look deeper—into the past, achieve independence, but only be- ers like Mandela and Nehru, who saw
“Recommended for political junkies and into the current state of our democracy and into
those seeking a quick study to gain a cause Napoleon’s troops died of yellow from the start that winning power was
‘what Black means now.’” —Patricia Sullivan,
basic understanding of the importance fever by the thousands. Napoleon re- not enough, and that they needed to lay
The Washington Post
of voting rights for African Americans.” stored slavery in France’s other remain- foundations that would endure beyond
—Library Journal, starred review “...offers a brisk history of black voting rights. ing possessions in the Caribbean—so their generation. Bolívar and Napo-
“A capacious and mind-opening It covers a lot of ground, surveying the trajectory much for the great liberator. There is leon would have regarded it as absurd
experience awaits within.” of the civil-rights movement, musing on the in- also the contention, still hotly debated, to expect any sort of stable democracy
—Publishers Weekly, starred review fluence of social media in the 2012 election that on his orders thousands of cap- to emerge in countries with such vast,
and describing the Supreme Court’s 2013 tured Haitians were gassed by sulfur diverse, and uneducated populations as
“[Pinckney’s] fusion of the personal and
the political makes him a peerless
decision overturning a key section of the Voting dioxide extracted from the island’s vol- India or South Africa. But it happened.
witness and participant, and lends his Rights Act.” —Ari Berman, The Nation canoes, apart from the thousands more Where Ackerman is critical rather
voice a weight and force that never who were killed by orthodox methods. than admiring, for example of WałĊ

comes at the expense of style or grace.”
At all events, the subsequent history of sa’s reluctance to push for full inde-
—Damian Van Denburgh, SFGate Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
Haiti, potentially the richest island in pendence and of Suu Kyi’s willingness
the West Indies, is a ghastly succession to come to terms with the generals, I
of massacres, coups, bankruptcies, and found myself wanting to defend their
invasions by every colonial power you caution. How hard it is for us at this
“An engrossing retelling of the Peach can think of. distance to calculate the risks of pro-
Blossom Paradise myth . . . . Rather than In Latin America, Bolívar’s vision of voking violent and overwhelming mil-
offering a well-trodden narrative of romance Gran Colombia broke up into no less itary interventions, of which they had
and revolution, Ge Fei shows that a than six squabbling, unstable states. As had such ghastly recent experience.
determined revolutionary isn’t necessarily a for France, it took more than a century As Ackerman says, “It is not for me,
shrewd one . . . A stirring, illuminating saga.”
of revolution and coups d’état before sitting in the comfort of my office at
—Publishers Weekly starred review
the country settled permanently into Yale, to undertake a pseudoscientific
In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded democracy. These regimes, which had ‘cost-benefit analysis’ that points con-
the young emperor that it was time to transform been established with such casual cru- clusively to the ‘correct’ decision.” One
his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern elty and indifference to loss of life, did can defend WałĊsa for reasons stretch-
state. The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed not manage to last. ing beyond Poland: by his conciliatory
was a moment of unprecedented change and Charisma was not enough. What was tactics he helped muffle the alarm bells
extraordinary hope—brought to an abrupt end lacking in all four cases outside the US in the Kremlin and made it easier for
by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations was any serious intention to deploy that “velvet revolutions” to spread across
would contribute to the revolutionary turn that charisma in the construction of a last- Central and Eastern Europe.
Chinese history would soon take, leading in time ing constitutional order. To start with, What Bell and Ackerman between
to the deaths of millions. there was no succession planning. Na- them show is that Caesarism is not a
Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the poleon abdicated twice in favor of his historical necessity but a conscious
PEACH BLOSSOM reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of infant son, but no one acknowledged choice. It is always possible to reclaim
a wealthy landowner and former government the poor little king of Rome. As Weber the system from the overblown preten-
PARADISE official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. remarks, “Everywhere the problem of sions of a demagogue by voting him
Ge Fei Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his succession has been the Achilles heel out, by shouting him down, by outlaw-
pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably of purely Caesarist rule.” ing his illegal acts, and, not least, by of-
A new translation from the Chinese
welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man Could it all have been different? fering better solutions to the grievances
by Canaan Morse
has a great vision of reforging China as an egal- Could the hard-won charisma have that brought him to power. In any case,
Paperback • $17.95
itarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to been crystallized into effective and our modern Caesars have not crossed
Also available as an e-book
make it real.
enduring institutions—a parliament the Rubicon or the Delaware—they
It is his own plans, however, which come to noth- that really did have power, genuinely have mostly been exempt from military
ing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up free elections, a constitutional court service for one reason or another. What
arms against a Confucian world in which women whose rulings were respected? Weber may have first looked like charisma is
are chattel. Her campaign for change and her also identifies “hereditary charisma” ultimately revealed as mere glitz. From
ALSO BY GE FEI struggle to seize control over her own body are (Erbcharisma), in which the radiance Clement Attlee to Angela Merkel, it is
continually threatened by the violent whims of of the revolution is transmitted down often the duller metal that turns out to
men who claim to be building paradise. the generations of a ruling family— be the purer gold. Q
“It is impossible to enter the deeper aspects of
contemporary Chinese literature without also en-
New York Review Books
tering the world of Ge Fei.” —Enrique Vila-Matas (including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Translated by Canaan Morse Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom,
Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Available from booksellers or nyrb.com Yongsun Bark, Distribution.

50 The New York Review

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity
Kwame Anthony Appiah

Minnesota Historical Society

Veblen: The Making of an monster it later became.) His work was
Economist Who Unmade Economics so impressive that when his adviser was
by Charles Camic. hired away by the University of Chi-
Harvard University Press, cago the following year, he brought
492 pp., $39.95 his brilliant protégé with him as a ju-
nior colleague. Veblen spent the next
We are all Veblenians now. Our un- decade and a half at Chicago, crafting
derstanding of the way people’s ac- the arguments for which he became
quisitions and activities advertise known.
their superiority—not least in an era
of Facebook show- offs and Insta-
grammable lives—has roots in work In Veblen, Camic has produced a sort
that the economist and social theorist of intellectual biography that largely
Thorstein Veblen published over a cen- dispenses with the personal life, while
tury ago. Behavioral economics finds directing intense and illuminating at-
a precursor in Veblen. So does evolu- tention to the scholarly milieu in which
tionary psychology. Our worries about Veblen emerged. In chapter after chap-
the “financialization” of capital, with ter, he establishes the continuities be-
its overgrowth of exotic instruments tween Veblen’s views and those of his
of debt and the institutions that create professors and peers. Veblen is consid-
and trade them? Veblen got there first. ered, for example, the progenitor of in-
Patriarchy as a system centered on war- stitutionalism in economics, which sees
fare, private property, and the control economic activity as shaped by evolv-
of women’s bodies: this feminist vision, ing institutions and customs, rather
too, was elaborated in his work. than simply arising from the aggrega-
Veblen even presaged the ascent of tion of rational, self-interested indi-
Trump. “A degree of arrested spiritual viduals. Yet Camic shows that many of
and mental development is, in practical Veblen’s instructors, at Hopkins, Yale,
effect, no bar against entrance into pub- and Cornell, were saying much the
lic office,” he once wrote. “Indeed, a de- same thing. Veblen’s evolutionary con-
gree of puerile exuberance coupled with victions—“Why Is Economics Not an
a certain truculent temper and boyish Evolutionary Science?” was the title of
cunning is likely to command something a 1898 paper—were similarly shared by
of popular admiration and affection.” his mentors and colleagues. Even the
Given that Veblen so shaped our combination of these interests wasn’t
view of the world, it’s striking that our distinctive; some of his most illustri-
view of him has long been so distorted. ous Chicago colleagues, Camic says,
For generations, he was seen as a “mar- viewed social institutions and evolution
ginal man”—someone raised in penury as “interlocked concepts.”
within an insular immigrant commu- Thorstein Veblen in 1880, the year he graduated from Carleton College And while we may be impressed by
nity, who spoke no English until well Veblen’s regular recourse to the eth-
into his teens, whose eccentric manner consin to Minnesota, having acquired Ruskinian socialist, with literary ambi- nography of distant tribes, Camic notes
branded him as a social outcast and an 290 acres there. By 1870 they were tions. (“I want most of all to be a poet that Clark, when Veblen was his stu-
academic outsider (save when it came the richest farming household in the of the new time,” she wrote.) dent, was calling for political economy
to the bedrooms of faculty wives), and township. Thomas, a freethinker with A decade elapsed before they were to be “built on a permanent foundation
who saw through the complacencies of literary interests, was an accomplished married, in part because she was hesi- of anthropological fact.” As for Ve-
his scholarly age precisely because he carpenter as well, and the house he tant to marry anyone at all, and in part blen’s iconoclastic pose and prose? “In
never fit into it. built, now a National Historic Land- because Veblen was away in graduate the Age of Iconoclasm, mainstream
This depiction was put forth in a mark, featured precise wainscoting and school—at Johns Hopkins, where he academics were iconoclasts,” Camic
much-lauded biography that the Co- faux-graining, a double- deck porch, studied philosophy and political econ- writes, pointing out that his main in-
lumbia economist Joseph Dorfman and walk-in closets. omy, and at Yale, where he received a structors in graduate school all de-
published in 1934, five years after his Veblen had English-speaking play- doctorate in philosophy in 1884. He scribed themselves as rebels. Veblen
subject’s death. It set the tone for later mates and classmates, and grew up in then fell ill with what seems to have wasn’t out of the swim of things; he
writing on Veblen by such eminences a household that could afford to hire been malaria and went home for a was simply swimming faster and more
as David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, tutors—and to pay in full when he en- years-long convalescence. He may have forcefully than his peers.
and Daniel Bell. Only in the 1990s did rolled in nearby Carleton College. It been recovering, too, from having been To a remarkable degree, the core te-
revisionist scholarship reveal this por- was Veblen’s great good fortune that dosed with calomel, a mercury com- nets of Veblen’s thought can be found in
trait to be tendentious almost to the its faculty included the thirtyish John pound widely used for such conditions, his first and most famous book, A The-
point of fraudulence. Charles Camic, Bates Clark, who later became the as Elizabeth and Henry Jorgensen con- ory of the Leisure Class: An Economic
a sociologist at Northwestern, pushes country’s preeminent economic the- jecture in Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Study of Institutions (1899). The work,
the argument further in Veblen: The orist. Clark, in those days, inveighed Firebrand (1998), a ragged but spir- for most readers, was the great indict-
Making of an Economist Who Un- against the “love of display” of the ited biography that eschews the “mar- ment of the Gilded Age; that’s how Wil-
made Economics, his book about the vulgar rich who ordered their libraries ginal man” trope. When Thorstein and liam Dean Howells approached it when
intellectual background of Veblen’s by the linear foot and “shrewd trading Ellen married in 1888, neither was in he published the review that lofted it to
thought. Evidently he was not only far men” whose dealings benefited “no one the pink of health; Ellen had long suf- fame. “Conspicuous consumption”—
from a marginal man in his personal but themselves.” Veblen took half a fered from thyroid dysfunction (she hid which could be “vicarious conspicuous
life; he was, in his professional life, the dozen courses with him; he recognized a goiter behind high collars) and was consumption,” as when men required
“consummate academic insider.” a first-rate mind when he saw one. So recovering from a breakdown. Still, their wives to become women of lei-
did Clark, who became a lifelong sup- the newlyweds also shared cultural sure—put a crisply alliterative label on
porter of Veblen’s, even when the two and political enthusiasms, and were the habit of competitive display, group-
Some of the biographical confusions found themselves on opposite sides of a jointly captivated by Edward Bellamy’s ing together fashion, finery, sports, and
are understandable. Veblen’s parents, fierce and consequential battle. just-published Looking Backward, a much more. Skirts appealed precisely
Thomas and Kari, were immigrants An equally fateful encounter was million-selling, socialist-utopian novel because they were “cumbrous” and ad-
from Norway who arrived in the US in with a younger Carleton student named with powers of political conversion vertised that the wearer could afford a
1847 with little money and less English, Ellen Rolfe. She was a niece of both unequaled until The Fountainhead ar- garment that “incapacitates her for all
and joined other Scandinavians who the president of the college and the rived to pull impressionable youth in useful exertion.” Almost everything
were turning the northern prairies into president of a major midwestern rail- the opposite direction. people did semaphored what Veblen
croplands. But the industrious Veb- road company, and she was described The professional course of Veblen’s called “invidious comparison.”
lens—with the help of the odd bank by another student as “easily the most life was finally set when, in 1891, he Our very aesthetic sense, he argued,
loan—soon established themselves. intellectual member” of her class. Hav- went to Cornell and swiftly secured a was deeply and unconsciously shaped
Thorstein was born in 1857; when he ing grown up close to great wealth but second doctorate, in economics. (The by status concerns: we admired the
was eight, the family moved from Wis- not quite in possession of it, she was a typical Ph.D. thesis wasn’t the baggy high gloss on a gentleman’s fancy hat

January 14, 2021 51

but deplored the shine on a threadbare though, and Ellen responded by throw- Veblen was too prominent to be fired we all need water and nobody needs
sleeve. We persuaded ourselves that ing herself into real estate, buying and without a high-minded reason. One diamonds? For such marginalists, the
the handwrought silver spoon was pret- selling properties, erecting shacks, and soon materialized. When Ellen heard crucial distinction was between total
tier than the machine-made and per- settling for a while on a remote farm in rumors that he had an inappropriate re- utility and marginal utility—the value
fectly shaped aluminum one, though Idaho. lationship with a colleague’s estranged to you of another bucket of water, in
they were equivalent in their “service- After Hardy was lost to another man wife, she sent off a letter to Harper, a world where water is abundant, ver-
ability”—a crucial Veblenian term of in another city, Veblen decided to con- depicting her husband as sexually dis- sus the value to you of another carat of
value. The canons of taste arose from fess to his wife his futile love for the solute. (Scholars now tend to accept diamond, in a world where diamonds
perceptions of price. young woman (“I can see now that I Veblen’s insistence that the rumors aren’t. And while the classical econom-
As was then common, Veblen di- have been deceiving both myself and were unfounded.) Before long, Veblen ics associated with Smith and David
vided the history of mankind into the you about it”) and ask for a divorce. was informed that his time at Chicago Ricardo supposed that the value of a
stages of savagery, barbarism, and civ- He declared that “the relation of hus- was coming to an end. This is more or good reflected, objectively, the paid
ilization, although he was inclined to band has become untenable,” and ven- less when Camic’s book ends, too, and labor that went into making it, the mar-
depict this not so much as progression tured that it might have “always been not unreasonably. The book’s subtitle ginalists thought its worth was, subjec-
as decadence. In “peaceable savagery,” a false one.” Why false? Camic and refers to “the making of an economist,” tively, whatever people would fork out
we engaged in honest toil to create others, taking note of a pathologist’s and by this point Veblen the economist for another one.
serviceable goods—responsive to real report, tell us that Ellen had anatomi- was thoroughly made. John Bates Clark, for all his youthful
needs, not wasteful consumer prefer- cal anomalies that may have leanings toward Christian

Peter Wilson/Bridgeman Images

ences. Only in the barbarian stage did made coitus impossible. In Socialism, became a stal-
the “predatory habits and aptitudes” of the event, she refused to ini- wart of the new approach. In
forcible acquisition evolve. The essen- tiate a divorce, and Veblen the “marginal productivity
tial thing to acquire was the labor of wouldn’t pursue one against theory of distribution” he
others, and Veblen thought women were her wishes. advocated, an employee will
the most productive of laborers. Hence Curiously, Ellen estab- be paid according to what his
his argument that the “institution of lished warmly cordial rela- labor brings in, its “marginal
ownership has begun with the owner- tions with the University of product.” Clark conceded
ship of persons, primarily women.” Chicago’s president, William that the rule was subject to
In our civilized era, these predatory Harper—he read the man- various idealizing counter-
ways became only more pervasive and uscript of a charming chil- factuals. (It assumed, for ex-
proficiently exercised under “the pe- dren’s book she’d written, ample, perfect competition
cuniary employments”—anything di- The Goosenbury Pilgrims, and substitutability: a firm
rected at moneymaking rather than and it was published with was choosing among equiv-
manufacture. Ownership had all the his encouragement—even as alent workers, the worker
prestige, while the work of making use- Veblen’s relations with him among equivalent jobs.)
ful things, “industrial employment,” were cooling. The Theory of Still, he considered it a “nat-
was denigrated. For economists, the Business Enterprise, which ural law” that, “if it worked
chief provocation was in the thesis (still appeared in 1904, did not without friction, would give
in fledgling form here) that pecuniary please Harper, who sought to every agent of production
pursuits were nonproductive, that the the patronage of exactly the the amount of wealth which
profit motive tended to be at odds with, sort of people it indicted. that agent creates.” Workers,
rather than aligned with, what Veblen The so- called captains he was inclined to say, got
thought mattered most: the efficient of industry, Veblen’s book what they deserved.
use of industrial capacity. The prob- argued, were really preda- Veblen blasted away.
lem with industry was that it was in the tors whose money-minded How could we ever know
hands of businessmen. manipulations came at the that your remuneration
Both readers who approached A expense of “economies of coincided with the utility
Theory of the Leisure Class as cultural production and heightened of your labor? In Veblen’s
critique and those who approached serviceability.” When busi- terms, “vendibility” (what
it as economic theory were struck by nesses competed with one the market rewarded) sel-
its caustic, coruscating prose. Camic another—Veblen always Peter Wilson: Egg Management, 1980 dom squared with service-
says the style was “a standard piece of viewed competition with ability (what the community
equipment in the intellectual toolbox disfavor—they gave up the efficiencies What about the subtitle’s claim that at large required). Otherwise why did
handed down to him.” In fact, that style to be gained by coordination and scale. Veblen “unmade economics”? Camic, we have poverty and unemployment
was doing a great deal of work. Veblen, And when rational consolidation had who says we must recognize what amid plentiful resources and unmet
as a social scientist, maintained a pre- taken place, businesses were inclined wasn’t original in Veblen in order to wants? Business folk, those inveterate
tense that he was making no judgments to underproduce in order to buoy see what was, situates him amid the “higglers,” could enrich themselves by
even as his adjectives constantly ren- prices. He was scathing, too, about the great methodological struggle repre- buying cheap and selling dear, by ma-
dered their verdicts. “Opinion seems to pecuniary prevarication represented by sented by the “marginal revolution” in nipulating prices through letting their
be divided as to whether I am a knave salesmanship, advertising, corporate economics. Not a few of his colleagues factories idle, by puffing up the prices
or a fool, though there are some who communications, branding—all the were awoken from their dogmatic of their goods through deceitful adver-
make out that the book is a work of intangible elements of what accoun- slumber—or, as Veblen thought, nar- tising, or through a host of other strata-
genius,” Veblen humble-bragged to his tants called “goodwill.” The activities cotized into one—by the work of the gems, most of which negatively affected
older brother Andrew. Inevitably, the of both bankers and businessmen, he Austrian scholars Carl Menger and, social benefit. The best-rewarded peo-
book participated in the economy of maintained, “begin and end with what starting in the late 1880s, his disciples ple were generally the least productive
prestige it limned. Those who consid- may broadly be called ‘the higgling of Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von people. “Friction” wasn’t a sideline
ered themselves sophisticates did well the market.’” Böhm-Bawerk.* (In America, Camic issue in the workings of capitalism; it
to have a copy in the drawing room, The book’s account of finance cap- finds, the influence of other marginalist was the whole game.
readily visible to their guests. italism certainly seems prescient. As schools came later.) Today this work is Veblen’s chief professional contri-
Veblen saw it, debentures and other seen as a forerunner of the neoclassical bution, in Camic’s view, was precisely
instruments of debt were placing tradi- economics that dominated the century this “novel nonproductivity theory of
The professional triumphs were ac- tional capital (a factory, say) on a credit to come. the distribution of economic rewards.”
companied by personal turmoil. In A basis, and were reorganizing industrial The so- called Austrian school solved Classical theorists like Smith and
Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen concerns in a way that blurred the line an old problem right away. Why, Adam J. S. Mill had discussed unproductive
approvingly invoked the “New-Woman between capital and credit. “Capital” Smith had wondered, were diamonds labor—labor that didn’t produce ma-
movement” and its “double watch- now meant “capitalized presumptive more valuable than water, given that terial, serviceable goods—but Veblen’s
word, ‘Emancipation’ and ‘Work.’” He earning capacity.” If the captains of account of the modern economy put it
seemed the perfect feminist, his wife industry were ultimately parasites, the front and center. In so doing, Camic
the perfect New Woman. captains of finance, who simply issued *In a lucid and learned overview, Bruce claims, he was able to undermine the
But the two made each other mis- and traded paper, were parasites on Caldwell shows that Menger himself foundations of the Austrian school—
erable. It didn’t help that Veblen had parasites. Yet Harper may have been considered his theory of marginalism along with, by implication, its neoclas-
fallen in love with Sarah Hardy, a bril- more offended by a section that had to be of, well, marginal importance; sical successors—and point toward a
liant graduate student. This was clearly been removed from the book. Veb- the concept was signal-boosted by his sounder alternative.
Austrian exponents. William Stanley
what we’d now call an “emotional af- len sent it around for publication as a
Jevons and Léon Walras, meanwhile,
fair,” not a sexual one. (Modern schol- standalone essay, and a copy evidently arrived at marginalism through some-
ars see no evidence that he was ever reached Harper’s desk. The subject thing like convergent evolution. See T hat it was Veblen who coined the
physically intimate with more than two was higher learning in America—and Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge (Univer- term “neoclassical economics” pro-
women, his first and second wives.) the involvement of businessmen as a sity of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 17–38, vides yet another instance of move-
The marital froideur was a torment, bane to it. 64–82. ments baptized by their enemies. Yet

52 The New York Review

it’s hard to turn his critique into a pro- founding president, David Starr Jor- legal wife, eventually joined him in
gram. For marginalists, concerned not dan. Although the terms were mingy, Columbia with her two daughters. By

E!
2021

LA W
BL
with the servicing of needs but with Veblen improved them through hard then, however, her health was in de-

AI NO
the satisfying of wants, a distinction
between productive and nonproduc-
bargaining. “I cannot afford to accept
any academic rank lower than the
cline. Veblen was a bit creaky himself,
probably the lingering effects of the New York

AV
tive labor was hardly tenable. Any
activity that produced something peo-
highest assigned to any member of the
Department, or any salary less than
calomel he had been given for a case of
pneumonia.
Review
ple were willing to pay for (a shovel, a
tidy house, a night at the theater, a silk
the highest paid to any member of the
Department,” he wrote Jordan. “My
Still, he resumed an interrupted ca-
reer; The Instinct of Workmanship and
Calendar
cravat) created wealth. Was Veblen’s acceptance of an inferior grade would the State of the Industrial Arts, planned
nonproductivity theory a useful re- be looked on by my friends in science long before, appeared in 1914. In our
placement? Certainly the task of trying as something in the nature of a reduc- evolutionary past, he conjectured, a
to say what is and isn’t “serviceable” tion to the ranks” and “contribute to tropism toward workmanship—what
is not an enviable one. That heirloom my discomfort.” It would, in short, be a he variously called “a proclivity for
tomato on your plate is nutritious, de- blow to his status. taking pains” and as “a disposition to
licious, and status-signaling: you would Thorstein and Ellen arrived together do the next thing and do it as well as
have to have a very sharp knife to sepa- in Palo Alto—he picked her up from a may be”—enabled our ancestors to
rate out those parts. remote timber claim in Oregon—and survive. Alas, this salubrious instinct
Then there’s the question of whether she had hopes that she would finally was readily overridden or distorted,
the model of marginal utility, whatever share in the ineffable delights of ac- especially by “the proprieties of the pe-
2021 David Levine Calendar:
its uses and abuses, was necessarily ademic social life in a college town. cuniary culture.”
blind to distributive malignities: Once again, however, it became plain It’s telling that Veblen, always best Storms, Whirlwinds, Earthquakes
that Veblen’s heart belonged to an- known for his theory of the “leisure This handsomely printed calendar in-
The greater the differences in other: this time to Mrs. Ann Bradley class,” seldom used that term in his cludes 13 David Levine caricatures
wealth, the more striking will be Bevans, known as “Babe,” a Eugene later writing. In part, it’s because he drawn exclusively for the Review. The
the anomalies of production. It Debs–adoring socialist and suffragist. had shifted his focus from consumption 11" x 11" wall format with large date
will furnish luxuries for the wan- Once again, Ellen threw herself into to production. He had come to notice, blocks makes it ideal for recording notes
ton and the glutton, while it is construction, putting up a two-story too, that “leisure” was something of a
and appointments. $12.95
deaf to the wants of the misera- house on Sand Hill Road, parts of red herring. “No class of men have ever
ble and the poor. It is therefore which she built with her own hands. bent more unremittingly to their work “For it is not light that is needed,
the distribution of wealth which Meanwhile, Babe, recently divorced, than the modern business community,” but fire; it is not the gentle shower,
decides how production is set to wrote repeatedly to Ellen, asking her to he wrote in The Instinct of Workman- but thunder. We need the storm,
work, and induces consumption of set her husband free. The attempt mis- ship. “Within the business community the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
the most uneconomic kind: a con- fired. In the spring of 1909 Ellen wrote there is properly speaking no leisure
The feeling of the nation must be
sumption which wastes upon un- to Jordan of her concerns, and he asked class, or at least no idle class”—its
necessary and culpable enjoyment for more information. Ellen evidently besuited members took pride in their quickened; the conscience of the nation
what might have served to heal the forwarded letters from her husband, strenuous labors, displaying the in- must be roused; the propriety of the
wounds of poverty. and probably some from Bevans. In stinct for workmanship in a perverted nation must be startled; the hypocrisy
October Jordan wrote his counterpart form. Being a successful parasite, it ap- of the nation must be exposed; and
The sentiment could be Veblen’s; the at the University of Chicago: peared, was no job for loafers. its crimes against God and
words, published a decade before A Camic notes that Veblen, ousted man must be denounced.”
Theory of the Leisure Class appeared, I have been able, with the help of from “the research hothouses of Chi-
—Frederick Douglass, Speech
are from Wieser, the very person who Mrs. Veblen, to find out the truth cago and Stanford,” largely ceased aim-
introduced the term “marginal utility” in detail as to Professor Veblen’s ing his work at his professional peers. July 4, 1852 delivered in Rochester, NY
(as his coinage Grenznutzen was trans- relations. He seems unable to re- By 1918 he had moved to New York and Shipping is FREE within the US!
lated), along with the concept of oppor- sist the femme mécomprise. . . . joined the staff of The Dial, then a bi- Why not order one for yourself
tunity costs. The university cannot condone weekly in a political phase. If the irony and several for your friends?
In taking on the marginalists, Veb- these matters. of his earlier work arose from an artful
Go to: shop.nybooks.com
len had skewered the model of Homo tension between implicit polemic and
economicus—an atomistic, ahistorical A few days later, Jordan assured Ellen professed dispassion, he was now more
concept of man as a “lightning calcula- that “we have accepted Dr. Veblen’s apt to call a spade a spade, and to re-
tor of pleasures and pains.” Yet Wieser resignation.” vile the schemers who didn’t know how Name

was perfectly aware that, as he wrote, Camic writes of “a stigma of shame to use one. The wit grew sparser, small
“the appraisal of even the purely in- that Ellen Veblen kept fresh by her re- gemstones that were set in large cinder- Address

dividual need” is in fact “influenced lentless efforts to incriminate Veblen in blocks but could still catch the light.
by society,” such that someone “may academic circles,” efforts that perma- Writing, at one point, about the “very
plunge into excessive disbursements nently scotched his prospects for a ca- reputable fortunes” made in the slave
to maintain outer show . . . for fear of reer at a major research university. The trade, Veblen suggests that it was City/State/Zip

losing caste and of being relegated to a Jorgensens, more colorfully, ascribe to

lower social level.” her “a vengeance worthy of Moriarty’s in this moral penumbra that Amer- Country

Mr. Marginal Utility, then, had no pursuit of Holmes.” But we can regret ican business enterprise learned J Check enclosed*
problem reconciling his models with the damage done to Mr. Veblen with- how not to let its right hand know Charge my: J AMEX J Visa J MasterCard
talk of processes, social forces, insti- out losing sympathy for Mrs. Veblen. what its left hand is doing; and
tutions, wasteful display. And gov- She might have had a very different there is always something to be
Credit Card Number
ernment interventions: Wieser was life had medicine been more advanced, done that is best done with the left
especially proud of having supplied since she suffered from something hand.
Expiration Date
theoretical support for progressive like Graves’ disease (and probably
taxation. (Friedrich Hayek later com- from misguided attempts to treat it).
plained that he was “slightly tainted Her life certainly would have been dif- Among members of the educated Signature

with Fabian socialist sympathies.”) ferent had gender equality been more public, Veblen remained a name to Item Qty Price Total
You didn’t need to think that indus- advanced, since she suffered, finally, conjure with. H. L. Mencken, writ- 2021 Calendar X $12.95 = $
trial work is the only productive kind from being in a world less than eager ing in 1919, claimed that he had lately PLUS POSTAGE & HANDLING
in order to see fault in the distribution to develop a woman’s intellect and “dominated the American scene”— within US per item FREE!
X $4.00 = $ 0.00

of rewards. All theories idealize: all talent. that “there were Veblenists, Veblen OR Canada per item X $10.00 = $
stipulate counterfactual conditions or Veblen, who had so recently insisted clubs, Veblen remedies for all the sor- OR Rest of World per item X $14.00 = $
invoke ideal types (as with Veblen’s on the perquisites of his rank, now knew rows of the world.” Hostile hyperbole Orders to New York– add local Sales Tax =$
sharp contrast between the productive he’d be lucky to find any academic post was Mencken’s specialty, of course, but
and the nonproductive). Precisely be- at all. He took one—poorly paid, and when the New School was established GRAND TOTAL $
cause we live in a world of highly im- on an annual contract—at the business that year—as a scantily funded assem- * Check or US money order must be made payable to The
perfect information, we need an array school at the University of Missouri, blage of illustrious leftists, including New York Review of Books in US dollars, drawn on a US bank
of models; we also need to know when which was then a far cry from the re- Charles Beard and John Dewey—it account. We cannot accept international money orders.

to remodel them. search institutions he had been accus- happily welcomed Veblen to its ranks. Please allow 1–2 weeks for delivery within the US and
2–3 weeks for delivery outside the US.
tomed to, and put down stakes in what The offer was well timed because
he called “a woodpecker hole of a town he was being discarded by The Dial, Return this coupon to: Order Department,
Veblen, shown the door at Chicago, in a rotten stump called Missouri.” He now under new, more literary-minded
435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014,
soon found himself engaged in no lit- would make do. Ellen, perhaps molli- management.
or for credit card orders only, call (646) 215-2500 or
tle higgling himself. In 1906 he secured fied by his reversal of fortunes, finally While all this was going on, it was visit shop.nybooks.com
a job offer from Stanford’s ambitious granted him a divorce; Babe, as his weighing on his mind that his wife was

January 14, 2021 53

 The Classifieds
losing hers. Babe had spiraled into dled by ignorant business men with These days, “costly” and therefore
paranoid fantasies—for example, that an eye single to maximum profits; credible signaling is as likely to be
Kaiser Wilhelm’s son was planning to the resulting output of goods and discussed in journals of biology as of
assassinate her husband—and ended services would doubtless exceed economics. It is the stotting gazelle, The Classifieds
up in McLean, the renowned psychiat- the current output by several hun- leaping into the air to display its robust To place an ad or for other inquiries:
ric hospital in Massachusetts. It all went dred per cent. health and agility (discouraging pred- email: classified@nybooks.com
terribly wrong. A hunger strike, a feed- ators and encouraging mates); it is the tel: (212) 293-1630.
ing tube, a lung infection: by October This was his way of dispensing with Super Bowl commercial that suggests, You may also place an ad through our
1920 she was dead. In his remaining de- simply by its expense, a firm’s confi- website at www.nybooks.com/classifieds/
friction. And yet we are left with a quan-
cade, Veblen took on the responsibility dary. Veblen scorned Homo economicus dence in the product being marketed. Classified Department
of looking after his stepdaughters, the as a uselessly unreal model, but if we’re The Prius in your driveway, the fair- The New York Review of Books
elder of whom increasingly took on the taking human beings as they are, how trade stamp on your bag of coffee, the 435 Hudson St., Suite 300
responsibility of looking after him. far will we get by wishing away the profit college degree on your resume: signal- New York, NY 10014-3994
As the 1920s got underway and the motive, the pecuniary urges, the appetite ing theory, in deeply Veblenian ways,
All contents subject to Publisher’s approval.
financial sector that he warned of in for acquisition, even the inclination to has something to say about all these Publisher reserves the right to reject or
his younger years spread like an algal compete? His selfless technicians—like things and more. His gimlet-eyed per- cancel, at its sole discretion, any advertising
bloom, he had only the chilly satis- his peaceable-savage workmen—are lit- spective has, perhaps to a fault, become at any time in The New York Review of Books
faction of seeing his pessimism vindi- tle more plausible than those lightning an intellectual reflex. or on our website. The advertiser and/
cated. In truth, that pessimism made calculators of utility. One can wonder, If this perspective could seem phi- or advertising agency, if any, agree to
indemnify the Publisher against any liability
him an odd fit for the “Progressive” too, why Veblen, for all his evolutionary listine, not to say inhumane—Theodor or expense resulting from claims or suits
label sometimes affixed to him. Veblen enthusiasms, not to mention his preoc- Adorno insisted, half in praise, that based on the contents or subject matter of the
considered labor unions, for instance, cupation with industrial efficiency, took culture “was never anything for Veb- advertisement, including, without limitation,
to be just another impediment to his so little interest in innovation. “Just now len but advertising, a display of power, claims or suits for libel, violation of rights of
privacy, plagiarism, copyright or trademark
principal concern: maximizing produc- communism offers the best course that I loot, and profit”—the philistinism was infringement, or unauthorized use of the
tivity. (“The A.F. of L. is itself one of can see,” he wrote a friend some months theoretical, not personal. In his fading name, likeness, statement, or work of any
the Vested Interests, as ready as any before his death. years, he busied himself with a trans- person.
other to do battle for its own margin of lation of an Old Norse saga. His an-
privilege and profit.”) His research, as tipathy for pecuniary pursuits was, on
the radical economist Douglas Dowd P erhaps we’d do better to attend less to the other hand, matched by a certain
For NYR Boxes only,
observed, had shown him “a working what he saw than to his ways of seeing. incompetence at them. He bought oil
class that, far from wishing to abolish Veblen can be credited with establish-
send replies to:
stocks and invested his nest egg in a
the economic system under which it ing a habit of rational analysis that— Fresno raisin farm—never a good
worked, sought largely to occupy a more in a way now commonplace—tightly idea—only to see the raisin industry 55¢
NYR Box Number
rewarding and honorific role within it.” enmeshed evolutionary and economic go bust. Despite various baleful re- The New York Review of Books
Veblen prided himself on being a di- thinking. Over the past half- century, marks about real estate, he acquired 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300
agnostician; he was chary about offer- the deliverances of a technical appara- the house on Sand Hill Road from his New York, NY 10014-3994

ing remedies, aptly enough for someone tus (most notably, game theory) created first wife, at a considerable markup.
debilitated less by the diseases he con- an intellectual Schengen Zone between The place lacked the fine craftsman- PERSONALS
tracted than by the medications he was these realms, eased by a shared formal ship of the house where he grew up
HOPING TO BRIGHTEN 2021 by getting to know a kind,
given for them. Yet he was drawn to a language. Veblen’s notion of “conspic- but had its ramshackle charms. It was smart, active Jewish man, 70–80 years old with a sense of
technocratic vision in which entrepre- uous consumption” found a powerful amid Ellen’s handiwork that he died, humor and healthy lifestyle. I am a family-oriented, semi-
retired female MD. I have broad cultural interests, love
neurs were replaced by engineers. In his heritor in the handicap principle, which of a heart attack, on August 3, 1929, nature and travel, and have a zest for life. nyoptimist2021@
next-to-last book, The Engineers and emerged in evolutionary theory in the weeks before a crash that made his gmail.com.
the Price System (1921), he sketched 1970s and applied his explanation for holdings worthless and his writings
GREAT WARMTH, OPTIMISM, AND DELICIOUS WIT
out a long- odds solution to what ailed the appeal of “cumbrous” apparel to invaluable. from a guy (68–83) would be cherished by a slender, spir-
us, and proposed having industry run the biological world. According to this In 2004 a grandson of the second ited gal with a passion for classical music, kids, and rich
companionship. Tri-state area. a.raphael222@gmail.com.
by “a soviet of technicians,” set up as a hypothesis, the deer’s uselessly massive Mrs. Veblen put the house on the
“self- directing General Staff.” (Those antlers or the peacock’s extravagant market as a teardown. The property, DATE SMART. Join the introduction network for single
who grew up in the planned economies tail, precisely because they are wasteful across the street from the Stanford golf graduates and faculty of the Ivies, Stanford, and other ex-
cellent schools. www.rightstuffdating.com.
of the mid-twentieth century may see and costly, signal that the creature has course, brought in a seven-figure offer.
some misplaced confidence here.) If fitness to burn. “Signaling” theory— “Build Your Own Dream Home!” was
our productive industries were orga- concerned with the ways economic ac- the realtor’s pitch, and someone did. A Individual fueled by intellectual curiosity,
cultural hedonist, Grecian Urn enthusiast,
nized into a whole and then tors seek to convey information about former communications exec at Visa allergic to online dating and no stranger to
themselves—arrived in economics lives there now. Veblen would have conversation, candlelight, or tight elections—
managed by competent technicians around the same time, and the ultimate taken a mordant satisfaction in this. He If the above describes you or the person you hope to
with an eye single to maximum result was an interdisciplinary wedding took a dim view of both credit and cor- meet, then place a personal ad in
The New York Review of Books’s February 25, 2021,
production of goods and services; at which Veblen was brought back to porate communications, but he always Valentine’s Day issue.
instead of, as now, being manhan- officiate. relished irony. Q Submit by January 15, 2021. We will run the most
inventive personal ad free of charge, and runners-up
will be offered 50% off regular rates.

Email submissions to: classified@nybooks.com,

15-word minimum, 35-word maximum.
Brevity, after all, is the soul of wit!

ACTIVE WOMAN (MID-70s), retired physician, near Twin

LETTERS Besides leading us to wonder how discus-
sions of administrative law over Thanksgiv-
about Rod Serling, but neglected to include
Gordon F. Sander’s Serling: The Rise and
Cities. Aspires to share healthy lifestyle, love of nature,
ERRNVDQGWUDYHOZLWKNLQGVHFXUHPDQRIVLPLODUDJHZKR·V
ing dinner went in the Gorsuch household, Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man intellectually curious, altruistic, optimistic, emotionally re-
THE GORSUCH DEFERENCE? this history is a reminder that, like much (1992), which came to my attention after I ÁHFWLYH DQG ZKR NQRZV GHHS MR\ DQG YDOXHV TXLHW WLPHV
okate0504@gmail.com.
else Feldman identified, agency deference wrote the piece. I regret the omission.
To the Editors: is not exclusively a liberal position. Def- STUNNING, EASYGOING, UPBEAT, WOMAN IN HER 30s
erence undoubtedly looked good to con- Andrew Delbanco who is fun to be with and well-rounded, seeks also accom-
Readers of Noah Feldman’s insightful ar- servatives in the 1980s when comparing New York City plished gentleman late 20s–40s for lasting, loving, romantic
UHODWLRQVKLS5HSO\ZLWKELRSKRWRLQFRQÀGHQFHPhoebe@
ticle on the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s Reagan-era policies to a then more liberal seiclub.com.
influence on the current Supreme Court activist judiciary. One hopes that in recon-
[“The Battle Over Scalia’s Legacy,” NYR, sidering Chevron, the justices base their de- HITCH MY WAGON TO A STAR—Looking for a bright so-
December 17, 2020] might appreciate a cisions on the kinds of jurisprudential con- phisticated senior stargazer! CStein3981@aol.com.
siderations that Feldman describes, rather Letters to the Editor: letters@nybooks.com. All other
factoid regarding Justice Neil Gorsuch’s correspondence: The New York Review of Books, 435 BRILLIANT, FUN, RETIRED PROFESSIONAL! I love
opposition to the Chevron deference grant- than policy preferences regarding agency Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994; dancing and NYC. Seeking like-minded gentleman.
ing significant deference to agency inter- regulations. mail@nybooks.com. Please include a mailing address rose2020violet@gmail.com.
with all correspondence. We accept no responsibility
pretation of statutory authority. Chevron for unsolicited manuscripts. DATING FOR BOOK LOVERS. Find a date that loves
v. National Resources Defense Council Tim Brennan Subscription Services: nybooks.com/customer-service books. Join free. www.booklovers.dating.
(1984) protected a Reagan administration Silver Spring, Maryland or The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big
Environmental Protection Agency inter- Sandy,TX, 75755-9310, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info. INTERNATIONAL BEAUTY IN HER FIT, energetic, youth-
In the US, call toll-free 800-354-0050. Outside the US, ful 50s, easy-to-smile, honest, with an infectious laugh
pretation of the Clean Air Act granting call 903-636-1101. Subscription rates: US, one year seeks gentleman 50–60s for love, laughter, and romance.
polluters greater flexibility regarding com- EVEN MORE ROD SERLING $89.95; in Canada, $95; elsewhere, $115. 5HSO\ZLWKELRSKRWRLQFRQÀGHQFHPhoebe@seiclub.com.
pliance. The EPA administrator issuing that Advertising: To inquire please call 212-757-8070, or
regulation was Anne Gorsuch, Justice Gor- To the Editors: fax 212-333-5374. WIDOWER, 88 (BUT LOOKS MUCH YOUNGER), 6'3", 190
such’s mother. But for other circumstances, Copyright © 2021, NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. lbs., retired tax lawyer, seeks tall, thin, elegant lady for ro-
Nothing in this publication may be reproduced with- mance. taggart9john@gmail.com. Send me an email and I
it could have been called the Gorsuch In “Night Terrors” [NYR, November 19, out the permission of the publisher. The cover date of will send you a picture.
deference. 2020], I noted several biographical works the next issue will be February 11, 2021.

54 The New York Review

 The Classifieds ,QTXLULHVRUFODVVLÀHG#Q\ERRNVFRP

MWM ERROR THEORIST still looking for compatible COMPOSITION MISCELLANEOUS AWARDS
) WR KHOS ÀJXUH RXW ZKDW·V LPSRUWDQW &DPEULGJH DUHD
tlph644@gmail.com. A CHARISMATIC, AGING FRENCH ROCK STAR will PHILANTHROPIC FUNDING SOUGHT, for pursuing ideas
compose and record an original song for you, your mom, and strategies, that I believe, in aggregate, represent our
NEW YORK CITY ATTORNEY, well read and well traveled, \RXUORYHURU\RXUSHWLQ)UHQFK(QJOLVKRU)UDQJODLVUHF best hope for saving the planet. www.ecoideaman.com. 
" "
'
#"

vigorous, eclectic, good listener. But life is more. Seeks ommended). US$200. Contact: lodbrogsagent@gmail.com; (
%!(
)$
##$*#
)
,##'(

woman to share the adventure. Femmes francophones ap-
préciées. NYR Box 68070.
www.imrelodbrog.com.
THERAPEUTIC SERVICES
$
)(
.'4(
'/(
#
)
(*)
'(
$'
#-)
.'

SINGLE GENTLEMAN, 71, good-looking and active, seeks

POSITIONS AVAILABLE POSTURE-RELATED PAIN? Is it worse since you began
ZRUNLQJ IURP KRPH" $OH[DQGHU 7HFKQLTXH OHVVRQV FDQ
liaison with attractive, unattached lady under 50. NYR Box
68395.  

  

help. Try a free introductory lesson. www.betterATbeing
.com.  
!+8!-
1)8%2
This is a live-out position, work from Tuesday to $'
!
% !
%


TATTOOED, PIERCED, XQGHUFXWKDYLQJ OHDWKHU MDFNHW²
FODGSDQVH[XDO(DVW$VLDQIHPPHVHHNVZKLVNH\GULQNLQJ
Friday. $750 weekly. Childcare and light house- :5,7(56·6(59,&(6 42!-
14,".1%
%1,!-7 
keeping. Must be able to interact with children,
DUWLÀFHWRXWLQJ DQWLDXWKRULWDULDQ DHVWKHWH WR ZKLOH WKH START, EDIT, OR COMPLETE YOUR NOVEL or story
KRXUV DZD\ ZLWK $FFHSWLQJ DSSOLFDWLRQV IRU ERWK YLUWXH 
speak English, and nonsmoker. collection with help from prize-nominated author of
$'
#!
 


sin. ZXOÀVK#JPDLOFRP. 





  “bewitching” (NYTimes), “electrifying” (Believer), “gripping” !


$
%

If interested you can reach Keith at (FT ÀFWLRQwww.tadziokoelb.com. %!-!1)%
!1!2#.-
1!-#%
WIDOWED MARGRAVINE SEEKS RESPITE from Candshop606@gmail.com
FRWHULH RI V\FRSKDQWV (QFORVH \RXU PRVW SUXULHQW SRHP PARIS PRESS FORMER DIRECTOR provides manu- $'
#!
 


lasciviousmargravine@gmail.com. script consultations and coaching. “Writing through Na-   

!



!

YOUTHFUL, MOSTLY ASIAN GRANDMOTHER, HQMR\

MARKETPLACE WXUH DQG $UW 3RHWU\ :RUNVKRSV DQG 5HWUHDWVµ ZHOFRPH
new and experienced poets/writers. www.janfreeman.net,
"!

.!-
!13:-%8
+)%1
/!)-
ing second career, seeks kind, self-supporting, single man, janfreemaneditorial@gmail.com.
60–70, in NYC area to share life interests and deep con- $'
"
!


nections beyond corona. ritodlomajonma108@gmail.com. NEED A GHOST?,·PDZHOOSXEOLVKHGELRJUDSKHU DXWKRU -3;-).
4'423.
!-9!$.
1)-$!$%

ZKR·VVXFFHVVIXOO\JKRVWZULWWHQPHPRLUV RWKHUQRQÀFWLRQ
1!8)+
PERSONAL SERVICES INCREASE AFFECTION books. Would love to help with yours! chrysanthemuse@
gmail.com.
EXCELLENT MASSAGE BY EVA. . .  ,QFDOO  2XWFDOO (%
,.4-3
.&
3(%
1)8%
!-$


Foreveryounghappy85@gmail.com. Created by %2%!1#(
1.*%#32
Winnifred Cutler, 
"$*#)
$


!/#
'/
(


Ph.D. in biology from ,((
'#(
!
$
,
"*()

()
(

U. of Penn, post-doc .
)
'/,##'
$'
'('
%'$)(

Stanford. Co- %''!.
#+$!+#
.$*#
'(''(
discovered human
Sell your pheromones in 1986
property 
 
 

Effective for 74% in
in the two 8-week studies 

 



 
NYRB and for 68% in a 3rd
8-week study. ENCUUKƂGF"P[DQQMUEQO  

!+8!-
1)8%2
PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 ,$')

,((
'#(



DQGZLOOEHDZDUGHGLQWKHÀHOGVRI
DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES
#!"



"#!
ATHENA PHEROMONEStm
INTERNATIONAL RENTALS increase your attractiveness.  "

 &

"


PARIS (SQUARE BERLIOZ—9th arr.), Fiber+, 3BR/2Bth, Unscented Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 "

!"
EHDXWLIXOIXOOÁRRUFRQGRWKÁHOHYDWRUZZZSDULVÁDWXFRP Fragrance 10:13 tm For Women $98.50 HIGHLY QUALIFIED EDITOR/COPYEDITOR of academic
Tel: (415) 922-8888. Additives Cosmetics Free U.S. Shipping DQG QRQÀFWLRQ PDQXVFULSWV 3K' LQ (QJOLVK H[SHULHQFH  

"

!!
working with university presses and shepherding manu-
♥ Wendy (VT) “Your 10:13 works! Not only do I re-
$""
&!



VACATION RENTAL ceive romantic attention from my husband, but
scripts to publication. annalisazoxweaver@gmail.com.
!" &!
!"!
gentlemen everywhere start conversations out of
YELLOWSTONE IN WINTER: 3BR, 2-1/2 BA w/full kitchen,
the blue! My husband asks: ‘Do you know this
I EDIT FICTION, NONFICTION, memoir, and poetry man- $"#)$#(1.
*#+'()(
$'
!'#

79 :L)L DQG VSD 1HDU 1( HQWUDQFH (QMR\ WKH ZLQWHU uscripts. Sixty books I edited have been published in the ($)(1"*()

(*"))
)$
)
#'!

guy?!’ It makes me feel womanly!”
wildlife! Contact jtsupkeepservices@gmail.com. last eight years. Free consultation. www.wyncooper.com; '/
$""))
$
)
#)'#)$#!

!/#

♥ Bob (FL) 10X Reorder “Your scientific ‘magic wyncooper@gmail.com. $*#)$#
.


!1#(
 

ADVICE SERVICE trick’ does seem to work, and I give it credit as
RESPECTFUL, AFFORDABLE FEEDBACK in any genre.
one of the things I did that helped save my 4//.13)-'
$.#4,%-3!3).-
1%04)1%$
LOOKING FOR THE UNFILTERED TRUTH? Send Mai (GLWV WR UHYLVLRQV EUDLQVWRUP WR ÀQDO GUDIW ,·P KHUH IRU 0
-XVWLÀFDWLRQIRUWKHFDQGLGDWH·VQRPLQDWLRQ
marriage. I’m in sales and going to give it another
\RXU TXHVWLRQV DERXW \RXU UHODWLRQVKLSV DW KRPH VFKRRO ZKDW \RX QHHG 0)$ 3K'  \HDUV H[SHULHQFH #!*#

!()
$
('
"$()
"%$')#)

go to see if it helps in my professional life.”
work, and more at PDLWKHXQÀOWHUHGWUXWK#JPDLOFRP. www.adamprinceauthor.com. %*!)$#(
Not in stores tm
610-827-2200 0

$"%!)
$'%.
,)
)
#
%!
$

FURNITURE WANTED Athenainstitute.com
TIME TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIR? Ghostwriting by New
York Times best-selling author/biographer. (917) 673-6341.
')
#)$#!).
'(((
'#)
%$)$

%'(#)
%$()$#*#)$#
"#
"

Athena Institute, Braefield Rd, Chester Spgs, PA 19425 NYB www.jackieaseditor.com. )+)(
BUYING MID CENTURY DESIGN FURNITURE
1950s-1970s Danish, French, Italian Modern, !#$"#)$#(
'
#$)
%)
Herman Miller, Knoll, Memphis. Noted
&RQWDFWDGGUHVV
designers sought: Eames, Wegner, Juhl,
(!)1,!-
.&
3(%
%-%1!+
1)8%
.,,)33%%
Nakashima, Ponti, Bertoia, Noguchi, Prouvé,
Perriand, Chapo, Royère.
Open Air Modern (718) 383-6465
info@openairmodern.com
World’s Finest Eye Cream 1.&%22.1
4#)!-.
!)!-)
-3%1-!3).-!+
!+8!-
.4-$!3).-
=1)8%>
)!88%33!
,"%13.
).1$!-.





)+!-.
3!+7
a “selections” product in Oprah magazine

AIRBRUSH
%+
  

!6
   
GIFTS %,!)+
''"

),2
!-$
#3)5)3)%2
.&
3(%
!+8!-
.4-$!3).-


!/#
$*#)$#
,
(
#)'#)$#!

#
')'
#
($%
)(
$#)!.
)'$*
),$

)RXQGDWLRQVRQHXQGHU,WDOLDQMXULVGLFWLRQDQGWKH
Eye Refining Treatment $)'
*#'
,((
*'()$#

!!

&
&
"!
'&(

Airbrush Eye Cream reduces ZLWK D UHJLVWHUHG R΀FH LQ 0LODQ KDV WKH DLP WR
%'$"$)
)'$*$*)
)
,$'!
*!)*'
(#

puffiness right away, especially when #
)
"$()
"')$'$*(
#))+(
#
)
*(

$
*"#).
%
#
')'#).
"$#
%$%!(

cold. Promotes new collagen which ''!((
$
#)$#!).
'
$'
'
(
"

(
))#
)'$*
)
##*!
,'#
$
%'/(

reduces fine lines and wrinkles. Reduces #
)
(#(
*"#)(
#
($!
(#(

$"#)$#(
$'
)(
%'/(
'
'+
)
)

dark circles, is soothing, hydrating and $*#)$#4(
'&*()
'$"
)
,$'!4(
!#

!'#
($)(
#)(
'
(!)
.
)

promotes a youthful healthy glow!

&
!!
$"%$(
$
"##)

Reg $68 Hypo-allergenic and natural containing
*'$%#
($!'(
#
(#)()(
)
#)'+!(
$

#$)
!((
)#
)'
.'(
)

!/#
$*#)$#

Now only $54.40 emu oil serum, green tea extract, aloe vera,
!($
,'(

2'/
$'
*"#).

#

')'#).
"$#
$%!(3

Compare to: collagen and elastin. 
!!

&
&
"!
' "(

ZLWKDUHJLVWHUHGR΀FHLQ=XULFKPDQDJHV(XJHQLR
La Mer Eye Balm @ $200
!/#4(
())

Shiseido Solution LX @ $130 Use am & pm for best results and the jar will #! 
$)'
#)'#)$#!
%'/(
)

!/#

La Prairie Swiss @ $240 last about 3 months! 3UL]HVDUHDZDUGHGLQGLͿHUHQWVXEMHFWDUHDVHYHU\
\HDU 7KXV VXSSRUW LV JLYHQ WR HPHUJLQJ ÀHOGV RI
"
'('
(
,!!
(
)$
$)'
"%$')#)

Use 20% discount code: BRM at ÀHOGV RI VWXG\ WKDW DUH RIWHQ RYHUORRNHG E\ RWKHU
www.dremu.com '#$,#
%'/(
.1
&413(%1
)-&.1,!3).-
or call 800-542-0026 and get free shipping. HPDLO''"
Open 7 Days %%%' 

January 14, 2021 55