Charles Glass: Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Andrew O’Hagan: Sarah Schulman:

War, Hunger, and The World Watching Ourselves Promiscuous

Quakes in Syria of Frans Hals on HBO Policing

Volume LXX, Number 5 March 23, 2023

Colin Grant:
Jonathan Escoffery’s Jamaican Migrations
Anjum Hasan:
Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi Epic
Francisco Cantú:
Revolution and the Borderlands
Meghan O’Gieblyn:
Martin Riker’s Interior Realism
Verlyn Klinkenborg:
The Truth About Very Old Trees
SUBLIME IDEAS
DRAWINGS BY GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI
MARCH 10 THROUGH JUNE 4, 2023
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Contents March 23, 2023

DIVISION
6 ............................................ Jenny Uglow Fascism’s Poster Girl
Mussolini’s Daughter: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
by Caroline Moorehead
OF LABOR
10 ................................ Andrew O’Hagan Bigger, Deeper, and More ‘Fucked Up’
It’s Not TV : The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Tinderbox: HBO ’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller
14 ........................................ Charles Glass Disenchantment and Devastation in Syria
16 .............................. Meghan O’Gieblyn The Life of the Mind
The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker
19 ....................... Ruth Bernard Yeazell Laughs and Smiles
The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World by Steven Nadler
22 ........................................... Colin Grant Far from Jamaica
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
23 ................................. Lauren K. Watel Poem
27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francisco Cantú An American Story
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands
by Kelly Lytle Hernández J A C Q U E L IN E J O N E S
29 ....................................... Anjum Hasan Endless Trances
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi
by Daisy Rockwell
NO RIGHT TO AN
33 ................................. Sarah Schulman Red Lights, Blue Lines
The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation
HONEST LIVING
to Gentrification by Anne Gray Fischer The Struggles of Boston’s Black
Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life
Before Stonewall by Anna Lvovsky
Workers in the Civil War Era
We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
by Mariame Kaba, edited by Tamara K. Nopper and with a foreword
by Naomi Murakawa “Essential. . . . With graceful
35 ............................................ Will Harris Poem writing and sharp analysis,
36 .......................... Verlyn Klinkenborg Trees in Themselves Jones brings us a fuller
Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer
story of the transition from
40 ......................................... Magda Teter Reckoning with a Troubled Past
The Invention of the Culprit: The Case of Little Simon of Trento from Emancipation to
Propaganda to History an exhibition at the Tridentine Diocesan Museum,
Trent, Italy
Reconstruction to Jim Crow.”
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Domenica Primerano and others — M A R C I A C H AT E L A I N ,
The Absent: The History of the Jewish Community in Sandomierz
an exhibition at the Regional Museum in Sandomierz, Poland
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Franchise
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Karolina Gara and Tomisław Giergiel
43 ........................ Geoffrey Wheatcroft Bloody Panico
Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over by Samuel Earle “The streets of Black Boston
Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10 come alive in No Right to an
by Andrew Gimson
Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid Honest Living, a sensitive,
by Matt Hancock with Isabel Oakeshott immersive, and exhaustive
The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story by Sebastian Payne
Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall study of African American
of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and James Heale
The Reign: Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Part 1: The Way It Was, 1952–79 workers, their dreams,
by Matthew Engel and their disappointments.”
The Worm in the Apple: A History of the Conservative Party and Europe
from Churchill to Cameron by Christopher Tugendhat —T I YA M I L E S ,
46 ......................................... Letters from Mark Hussey, James Heffernan, and Edward Mendelson National Book Award–winning
author of All That She Carried

“A profound reflection on the

enduring tensions between
America’s high-minded rhetoric
of liberty and equality and
the persistence of racial injustice.”
nybooks.com Kaya Genç: After the Quakes, the Cowardice of the Turkish Press
Willa Glickman: What Striking New York Nurses Won —T H O M A S J . S U G R U E ,
Susan Barba: The Slow-Moving Atrocity in Nagorno-Karabakh author of Sweet Land of Liberty
Ted Reichman: Charles Stepney’s Basement Tapes
Carey Baraka: The Political Education of Kenya’s William Ruto basicbooks.com
Regina Marler: Joan Brown at SFMOMA

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3
4 The New York Review
Contributors
Francisco Cantú is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from Editor
Emily Greenhouse
the Border.
Deputy Editor
Charles Glass is a former Chief Middle East Correspondent for ABC News Michael Shae
and the author of They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, Executive Editor
British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France. His new book, Soldiers Don’t Jana Prikryl
Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First Senior Editors
World War, will be published in June. Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein,
Hasan Altaf
Colin Grant’s latest book is I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. He is the
Contributing Editors
Director of WritersMosaic, an online magazine for new writing and a division Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
of the Royal Literary Fund.
Art Editor
Will Harris’s second book of poems is Brother Poem. Leanne Shapton
Managing Editor
Anjum Hasan’s new novel, History’s Angel, will be published in July. She is Lauren Kane
the author of five previous works of fiction.
Online Editors
Verlyn Klinkenborg’s books include Several Short Sentences About Writing, Lucy Jakub, Max Nelson
The Rural Life, and Timothy; or Notes of an Abject Reptile. Associate Editor
Daniel Drake
Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of God Human Animal Machine: Technology,
Assistant Editors
Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning and the essay collection Interior States. Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman
Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel, Mayflies, won the Christopher Copyeditors
Isherwood Prize from the Los Angeles Times and became a series on BBC Sam Needleman, Will Palmer
television. He is the Editor-at-Large of the London Review of Books. Editorial Interns
Jordi Anaya, Yadira Gonzalez
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and AIDS historian.
Editor-at-Large
Her latest book is Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New Daniel Mendelsohn
York, 1987–1993.
Magda Teter is a Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic
Publisher
Studies at Fordham. She is the author, most recently, of Christian Rea S. Hederman
Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism.
Associate Publisher, Business Operations
Jenny Uglow is a biographer and cultural historian. Her latest book, Sybil Michael King
and Cyril: Cutting Through Time, was published in the US in December. Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning
Janice Fellegara
Lauren K. Watel’s poems, stories, essays, and translations have appeared in
Advertising Director
The Paris Review, The Nation, and Ploughshares, among other publications. Lara Frohlich Andersen
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion, The Strange Contracts Director
Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! His most recent book is Churchill’s Jean Marie Pierson
Shadow. Rights
Patrick Hederman
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. Her books
Type Production
include Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names Will Simpson
and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. She is writing
Production
a book about the modern reception of Vermeer. Kazue Jensen
Web Production Coordinator
Maryanne Chaney
Advertising Manager
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Special Projects
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Founding Editors
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Cover art Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
Anne-Sophie Tschiegg: sans titre, 2022
(Galerie Albert Baumgarten, Freiburg)
Series art
Jason Fulford: Drawings, 2023

rachelcomey.com

March 23, 2023 5

 Fascism’s Poster Girl
Mussolini’s Daughter:
The Most Dangerous
Woman in Europe
by Caroline Moorehead.
Harper, 405 pp., $32.50
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni,
came to power in the parliamentary
elections of September 2022 through
the coalition of her right-wing party,
the Brothers of Italy, with Matteo Sal-
vini’s far-right Lega and Silvio Ber-
lusconi’s center-right Forza Italia.
Although the Italian far right has al-
ways disavowed its links to Fascism,
Meloni began her career in the openly
neo-Fascist Italian Socialist Movement
(MSI ), formed in 1946 by erstwhile sup-
porters of Benito Mussolini. Her party
retains the MSI logo and is happy to
proclaim a slogan heard everywhere
in the Mussolini era: Difenderemo Dio,
patria, e famiglia (We will defend God,
country, and family).
In Mussolini’s Daughter: The Most
Dangerous Woman in Europe, her
timely biography of Mussolini’s “ec-
centric, clever and mercurial” eldest
daughter, Edda, Caroline Moorehead
shows how deeply ingrained that her-
itage is. The book opens with a de-
scription of the Mussolini family home
outside Forlì, still a place of pilgrim-
age, where the gift shop sells
mugs, plates, aprons, knives and
even teapots engraved with Fas-
cist insignia; busts of the Duce in
a hundred different heroic poses;
replicas of the caps and hats worn
by him; books and framed pictures;
knives.
The knives were out a century ago,
after a summer of chaos in the Italian
parliament and violence in the streets.
On October 24, 1922, Mussolini roused
a Fascist rally in Naples by declaring,
“Either the government will be given
to us or we shall seize it by marching
on Rome.” In the following days the
government collapsed, and the Fas-
cists descended on the capital. Edda
was twelve. At home in Milan on Oc-
tober 27, Mussolini took her to the
theater with her mother, Rachele. As
they watched from their box, Mussolini
kept slipping out; he was waiting for a
phone call from King Victor Emman-
uel III, asking him to form a govern-
ment. Finally he whispered, “It’s time,”
and rushed them home. Then he took
the night train to Rome, arriving an
hour and forty minutes late, stepped
onto the platform, and announced that
from then on he would make the trains
run on time.
Edda never forgot that night. The
father she “loved and admired,” Moore-
head writes, “had gone from black-
smith’s son and political brawler to
becoming, at the age of thirty-nine, the
twenty-seventh and youngest prime
minister in Italian history.”
A biography of Edda Mussolini is
also by necessity a life of her father
and an analysis of the rise and fall
of Italian Fascism. This is an unex-
pected sidestep for Moorehead, who
has built up a distinguished and
moving body of work chronicling the
fight against Fascism in France and
6 The New York Review
Jenny Uglow
Edda Ciano, Rome, circa 1930
Italy.* Here, by contrast, she focuses
not on resistance but on the inner
mechanics of power. Inevitably Mus-
solini often dominates the book, but
this is also an engrossing portrait of a
young woman forced to become a pub-
lic figure. “All through the 1930s and
into the war,” Moorehead writes, Edda
“took her reluctant mother’s place as
the image of what a true Fascist girl
and woman ought to be. It was, as it
turns out, a deceptive one.” The emo-
tional tug comes from those layers of
deception and from Edda’s struggles
to find her own way and avoid being
crushed by the father she adored—and
ultimately hated.
M oorehead has a spirited turn of
phrase, a keen eye for the telling
detail and pungent quote, and a gift for
marshaling complex material. Briskly
she tracks Benito Mussolini’s progress
from his childhood in the northern ag-
ricultural region of Emilia-Romagna,
through his years as a fiery, committed
*A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story
of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in
Occupied France (Harper, 2011); Village of
Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France
(Harper Perennial , 2014); A Bold and Dan-
gerous Family: The Remarkable Story of an
Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight
Against Fascism (Harper Perennial, 2018);
A House in the Mountains: The Women Who
Liberated Italy from Fascism (Harper, 2019).
Socialist in Italy and Switzerland, to
his return to Forlì, near his home vil-
lage of Predappio. As secretary of the
local Socialist Party and editor of its
paper, La Lotta di Classe, he swept up
his pregnant girlfriend, Rachele, de-
spite her family’s opposition: Edda was
born on September 1, 1910. When she
was two, they moved to Milan, where
Mussolini edited the national Socialist
Party’s journal Avanti.
A dramatic shift came in 1914, when
he swerved from supporting the So-
cialists’ advocacy of neutrality during
World War I to demanding “war and
social revolution,” views he expressed
in his own paper, Il Popolo d’Italia.
By 1919, convinced that socialism
was dead, he was arguing for rule by
an elite, a band of warriors under a
ruthless leader bold enough to revive
the nation. In March of that year he
launched the Fasci Italiani di Com-
battimento before a band of follow-
ers, “many of them Arditi, the veteran
shock troops [of the Italian army], car-
rying daggers and staves and wear-
ing black shirts under their military
jackets.” In 1921, reconstituted as the
National Fascist Party, it won thirty-
five seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
Mussolini’s election as a deputy
made him “ever more heroic and ad-
venturous” to Edda. Impulsive, obsti-
nate, and prone to sudden rages, she
was already known as “‘la cavallina
matta,’ the mad little horse.” “I was
barefoot, wild and hungry,” she remem-
bered, “a miserable child.” As a skinny
nine-year-old, she buried herself in
reading, cut her hair like a boy’s, and
tried—not for the last time—to run
away. Mussolini, proud of her willful
independence, took her with him to his
office, the theater, and cafés, but once
he moved to Rome she rebelled still
more. After the death of her grand-
mother Anna—a mediator in her fights
with Rachele—she demanded to be
sent to boarding school. Unsurpris-
ingly, she hated the snobbish Cath-
olic school her father chose, feeling
stifled by the formality and scalded
by the sneers of other girls: soon he
was asked to take her away.
Throughout her childhood and ad-
olescence, she also endured the vio-
lent domestic rows over Mussolini’s
string of mistresses. Chief among
these were the Socialist Angelica
Balabanoff, the cultured Margherita
Sarfatti (whose best-selling book Dux,
in 1925, described him as “embody-
ing both modernity and the grandeur
of the ancient Romans”), and the de-
manding Ida Irene Dalser. The birth
of Dalser’s son Benito and her claim
to be Mussolini’s wife led Rachele fi-
nally to insist on marriage in 1915. Yet
there were always other mistresses,
other babies, other girls whisked into
his office for “a quick coupling” on the
carpet. “My sexual appetite does not
allow for monogamy,” he said noncha-
lantly, but the impact on Edda can be
judged by her own uneasy, hectic ap-
proach to sex.
R oman high society found Mus-
solini charming, unpredictable,
untidy, with a seductive hint of dan-
ger. From the mid-1920s his reputation
grew. Pope Pius XI said he was sent
by Providence; Churchill admired his
“victorious battle against the bestial
appetites and passions of Leninism”;
Adolf Hitler kept a bust of him in his
Munich study.
In 1925, when he overcame the cri-
sis following the murder of his oppo-
nent the Socialist deputy Giacomo
Matteotti the year before, which had
caused “a huge groundswell of revul-
sion” against the Fascists, Moorehead
notes:
Fascism was back in control and
Mussolini, with his springy, cat-
like step and the mannerisms—
the jutting jaw, the scowl, the large
bald head thrown back, the staring
eyes—that would define his long
tenure, was not about to cede any
corner of it. Discipline was to be just
another word for dictatorship. The
“fascistisation” of Italy had begun.
A tall, rangy teenager, Edda shared
her father’s disconcerting stare.
Praised by the press for her “grace and
charm,” in reality, Moorehead tells us,
she was “awkward, prickly and com-
bative,” hiding her intelligence and
skills. Mussolini let her cycle, swim,
and wear trousers, but not smoke or
go to dances. In 1929, when police re-
ports arrived of the “fortune hunters,
spendthrifts and drug addicts” who
pursued her during family summers
 “A fascinating history . . . [it]
reminds us just how much war
shaped modern Europe.”
—William Anthony Hay,
Wall Street Journal
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Now in Paperback
“A powerful new vision of the
long arc of protest against
racial segregation in America.”
—Annette Gordon-Reed,
author of The Hemingses
of Monticello
March 23, 2023
“A gripping panoramic history
that pairs ingenious excavation
with enlightening explanation
to relight the fire of feminist
political identity at the very
moment when we need it most.”
—Tiya Miles, author of
All That She Carried
Tenth Anniversary Edition
Now in Paperback
“A perfectly grounded account
of what it is like to live an
indigenous life in communion
with one’s personal spirits.”
—Louise Erdrich,
New York Times Book Review
hup.harvard.edu
“Well written and full of dis-
turbing detail—a new and
much-needed perspective
on an iconic museum object.”
—Bénédicte Savoy, author of
Africa’s Struggle for Its Art
—Jennifer Szalai,
Now in Paperback
“A tremendous offering and one
that would make Woodson, the
ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”
—Randal Maurice Jelks,
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Bradatan, a philosopher, writes
with elegance and wit, his every
thought and sentence slipping
smoothly into the next . . .
I was absorbed by Bradatan’s
book even—or especially—
when I felt uncomfortable with
its implications.”
New York Times
Now in Paperback
“A wide-ranging study of Black
female artists, from elders like
Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters
to Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe
. . . Connecting the sonic worlds
of Black female mythmakers and
truth-tellers.”
—Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
7
at Riccione on the Adriatic and of her
own “apparent allergy . . . to suitable
young men,” he packed her off on a
long cruise to India to “tame” her.
Later that year he moved the family
to Rome, and Edda settled into the
vast Villa Torlonia with her four sib-
lings—Vittorio, Bruno, Romano, and
the baby Anna Maria—and her mother,
who promptly turned the landscaped
gardens over to vegetables, chickens,
and pigs. In Rome, to dodge her fa-
ther’s oppressive surveillance, she
abruptly decided to find a husband and,
after dispatching some hopefuls, set-
tled on Count Galeazzo Ciano, whose
father was a rich shipping-company
owner, naval hero, and Fascist. A career
diplomat who had served in Argentina,
Brazil, and Beijing, Ciano was hand-
some and easygoing, with “a useful tal-
ent for saying nothing, while giving
the appearance of saying everything.”
The decision was quick and prag-
matic—“There was no mention of
love”—and their wedding in 1930 was
a full-scale Fascist spectacle. (News-
reels available on YouTube show lines
of children marching past, with small
boys saluting and girls waving flow-
ers.) At the start of their honeymoon
in Capri, Edda panicked, locked her-
self in the bathroom, and told Ciano
that if he touched her, she would throw
herself over a cliff: “‘Nothing in you
surprises me,’ Ciano replied, ‘but I
would like to know how you plan to get
there.’ They laughed.” Much later Edda
wrote, “And so began . . . our first mar-
ried night, which, to be honest, was not
much fun. I hated it all. Later, things
improved, but it took time.”
Soon Ciano was sent to Shanghai, a
posting that gave Edda, she said, the
happiest time of her life. Moorehead
brilliantly evokes Shanghai in the 1920s,
with its crowded waterfronts, cafés, and
clubs, where blocks of ice cooled the
sweltering dancers whirling to “Rag-
time, Dixieland Swing, the Turkey Trot
and the Grizzly Bear.” Edda acquired a
taste for gin and high-stakes gambling,
while Ciano indulged in quick affairs
(including, allegedly, with Wallis Simp-
son). In response, Edda vowed never to
be jealous like her mother but simply
to regard him as a friend, and she de-
veloped a close friendship of her own
with a Chinese warlord, Hsueh-liang.
After a difficult labor, Edda and Ciano’s
son Fabrizio was born in Shanghai on
October 1, 1931, and greeted with the
cry “‘Mamma mia! Quanto è brutto,’
how hideous he is.” To her fury, when
she became pregnant again Mussolini
summoned them home, insisting that
she needed rest.
In Moorehead’s account, the public
and the private intersect. The Cianos’
rocky marriage is set against the way
Mussolini persuades the public “with
considerable guile and stealth” to ac-
cept and even be proud of his “pro-
foundly illiberal” regime. His program
of agricultural reform and public works
helped Italy weather the Great Depres-
sion, and the cult of the leader grew:
“As the popular slogan put it ‘Mus-
solini ha sempre ragione,’ Mussolini is
always right.” Unions were dismantled,
press freedom curtailed, and dissent
monitored by “a spider’s web of spies,
informers and agents provocateurs.”
Schools became indoctrination hubs,
and universities were purged. In do-
mestic life adultery was made a crime
(“but only for women”), and childbear-
ing was lauded.
8 The New York Review
Edda realized that she was to be
a poster girl for these policies: “She
and Ciano were to be the golden young
couple of the new Fascist aristocracy,
models of the ‘stile Fascista,’ dutiful,
efficient, moral and fecund.” Moore-
head points out that in many ways,
however, they were the very opposite
of the Fascist ideal of the martial,
strong Italian male and his thrifty,
fecund wife. “Edda was unmaternal,
thin, opinionated, a heavy drinker and
a terrible housewife,” while Ciano, far
from being ruthless and sporty, “was
soft, vain and uncertain, with expen-
sive tastes.” And though Edda en-
joyed being fussed over by rich Roman
hostesses with “a shameless display
of toadying,” in the words of the Du-
chessa di Sermoneta, her reserve put
people off. Rumors swirled around
her. One report described her as a
nymphomaniac living a life of squa-
lor in an alcoholic haze. Her mask, said
her friend the slick, worldly journal-
ist Curzio Malaparte, seemed “some-
times that of an assassin, at others
that of a potential suicide.” Even at the
apex of the Fascist regime she had a
sense of dread: “‘We must deprive our-
selves of nothing,’ she told a friend,
‘because we know that the guillotine
awaits us.’”
On their return from China, Ciano
had been made head of the Presidential
Press Office, forming a virtual court
around himself in Rome. In June 1934
he organized the first meeting between
his father-in-law and Hitler, while in
the same month Edda was dispatched
to learn the British response to Mus-
solini’s intention to invade Ethiopia.
In London she was received at court,
stayed with the Astors at Cliveden, and
reported back faithfully: the newspa-
per baron Lord Rothermere approved
of Mussolini taking on “those wretched
blacks,” while Prime Minister Ramsay
MacDonald was cool but said Britain
would not declare war on Italy. A sec-
ond trip to London with Ciano followed
in May 1935 to test British feelings
again. If Edda, in her early twenties,
regarded international politics merely
as a poker game—“to win you needed
cunning, quickness and pleasant man-
ners”—the stage was now set for the
brutal and horrifying Ethiopian war.
Ciano and Edda’s brothers Vittorio and
Bruno took part as bomber pilots, com-
ing back with a clutch of medals.
I nitially Mussolini had written off
Hitler as a “silly little clown,” pro-
claiming that “now he’ll follow me
wherever I want.” By 1936 he knew
better. Irked by sanctions imposed
by the League of Nations after the
Ethiopian campaign, he turned to
the Reich for support. In June he sent
Edda to Germany, where news of Cia-
no’s appointment as foreign minister
sent Nazi grandees scurrying to pay
court. She lapped up the flattery, be-
coming friends with Magda Goebbels,
finding Goering “extremely likeable”
and Hitler “a veritable hero.” Ciano,
who visited Germany soon afterward,
thought the opposite. In November
1936 in Milan, Mussolini for the first
time depicted Rome and Berlin as
an “axis” around which peace-loving
states could revolve.
The following September, as the
culmination to a lavish state visit, he
and Hitler addressed a million-strong
crowd in Munich’s Olympia Stadium.
(With nice timing Mussolini’s claim
that the two countries were “the great-
est and most genuine democracies”
was drowned by torrential rain and
loud thunder.) Faced with the huge
cost of the Ethiopian war and of sup-
porting Franco in the Spanish Civil
War, he still wavered between close-
ness to Germany and rapprochement
with Britain and France, but the
strength of Nazi influence showed
in the shift from his early contempt
for anti-Semitism to his adoption of
a Manifesto on Race and laws exclud-
ing Jews from public life, a policy that
both Ciano and Edda opposed.
Throughout these years, since Ra-
chele shunned society gatherings, Edda
acted as first lady. Yet from Moore-
head’s account, she didn’t much enjoy
it. Bored, she slept late, shopped, drank,
gambled, and crumbled into depres-
sion. Travel helped: escapes to Venice
and long stays in Capri, where she built
a startling modern house and enter-
tained smart Italian Fascists and vis-
iting Nazi leaders. The island bristled
with spies. Between retreats to Capri,
she accompanied Ciano to Hungary,
Yugoslavia, and Poland, and by 1939 the
couple were international celebrities:
he was on Newsweek’s cover in March,
styled as a “Fascist missionary,” and
she was on Time’s in July; the accom-
panying story called her “one of Eu-
rope’s most successful intriguers and
string pullers” who wore the “diplo-
matic trousers.” These were far from
glowing profiles—by 1939 any early
admiration in the US for Mussolini’s
reforms had dissipated—but the writ-
ers were impressed by Ciano’s mix of
glamour and power and Edda’s sleek,
fashionable style. A few years earlier
a journalist had claimed, “Everyone
knows that her father rules Italy and
that Edda rules her father.” In 1940 the
Egyptian magazine Images called her
“the most dangerous woman in Europe.”
Moorehead takes this for her sub-
title, but it’s hard, at any point in her
book, to see that Edda had many in-
telligent ideas on politics, let alone
to assess how “dangerous” she was.
Moorehead herself seems baffled, ask-
ing, “Influence certainly, but actual
power?” Edda and her father “spoke
constantly, but just what she said, what
she advised, was never written down.”
Their relations were strained, however,
by arguments over Mussolini’s latest
mistress, Claretta Petacci, who was a
year younger than Edda. As the story
unfolds, Edda comes to seem more
victim than perpetrator.
C iano concluded the Pact of Steel
between Germany and Italy in
May 1939 but spent the subsequent
months of “non-belligerency” trying
desperately to keep his country out of
the conflict, describing Hitler and Ger-
man foreign minister Joachim von Rib-
bentrop as “two madmen” and telling a
friend that Mussolini “wants war like a
child wants the moon.” When Italy fi-
nally entered the war on June 10, 1940,
he wrote, “I am sad, very sad. The ad-
venture begins. May God help Italy.”
Edda, by contrast, was delighted, having
pushed her father strongly toward war
and admitting later that she was “ex-
tremely bellicose and Germanophile.”
She went on to work with the Italian
Red Cross, nearly drowned when her
ship was torpedoed, and served in hos-
pitals on the eastern front and in Sicily.
After invading Greece, a costly deba-
cle for which Ciano was widely blamed,
Italy suffered catastrophic losses first
in North Africa and then during the
Russian campaign. At home, amid con-
stant bombing and increasing hunger,
the cult of the Duce foundered. The
despairing Ciano, failing to pressure
Mussolini to sue for peace, was now
openly anti-German, and in a cabinet
shuffle in February 1943, bowing to
German demands, Mussolini removed
him from the Foreign Office. Ciano
snapped up the post of ambassador
to the Vatican, which ironically gave
him greater freedom to maneuver.
From this point, the political be-
comes grimly personal and Moore-
head’s dense final chapters have an
aura of Greek tragedy: toxic, incestu-
ous, reeking of betrayal, fear, and pain.
After the Allied landings in Sicily in
early July 1943, against a background
of military disaster and resistance at
home, plots against Mussolini mush-
roomed. Ciano’s office at the Vatican
became a center of intrigue as crit-
ics—who included the royal family and
Pope Pius XII—agreed that Mussolini
must go and that the country should
seek an exit from the war. Finally, at a
meeting of the Grand Council on July
24, Ciano joined those demanding that
he hand over his military power to the
king. Mussolini, who had been formally
informed before the meeting, remained
defiant, but the motion against him
was finally passed at two in the morn-
ing. Technically the council was a con-
sultative body and its vote was entirely
legal, but it was a coup nonetheless.
That afternoon the king demanded
Mussolini’s resignation, amid a flurry
of apologies, while pointing out that
he was “the most hated man in Italy.”
As soon as he left, he was arrested.
Attacks on prominent Fascists fol-
lowed. In the atmosphere of fear, freed
“from the long ambiguity of her posi-
tion,” Edda was at last able to express
her own feelings, show her strength, and
act decisively—but not effectively. She
organized her escape with Ciano and
their children, only to find that their
plane was flying not to Spain, as she
thought, but to Germany, where they
would be “guests” of the Führer.
After the armistice between Italy
and the Allies in September 1943, Ger-
man commandos rescued Mussolini, by
then a haggard figure sick with stom-
ach ulcers, and Hitler set him up in
northeastern Italy as head of the pup-
pet Repubblica Sociale Italiano, known
as the “Republic of Salò” after a nearby
town. At this point, Edda dashed back
from Germany to Rome to find Ciano’s
diaries, which compromised several
German leaders, hoping she could bar-
ter them for his safety. But while she
was away he was arrested and handed
over to the Salò regime. Between Jan-
uary 8 and 10, 1944, after desperate
attempts to rescue him, he was tried
with five others in Verona, “a fortress
town for the Nazis and the Fascists”;
all were found guilty of treason. The
next morning, January 11, they were
tied to chairs and shot in the back
by a firing squad: a German diplomat
who was present said, “It was like the
slaughtering of pigs.” Mussolini made
no attempt to intervene.
O n April 27, 1945, while trying to flee
their base on Lake Como, Mus-
solini and Petacci were captured, and
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International Women’s Day 2023

March 23, 2023 9

the next day they were shot by parti-
sans. Their corpses and those of fif-
teen of their followers were taken to
Milan and dumped in Piazzale Loreto.
Mussolini’s and Petacci’s were urinated
and spat on before being hung upside
down from the roof of a garage. That
day, April 29, the German surrender
in Italy was signed.
From her refuge in a Swiss convent,
Edda was handed over to the Italians
and banished to the island of Lipari.
Here she had a tender, escapist af-
fair with a local man, Leonida Buon-
giorno. Often in Moorehead’s book
Edda seems like a ghost in her own
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Viking, 402 pp., $28.00
Tinderbox:
HBO ’s Ruthless Pursuit
of New Frontiers
by James Andrew Miller.
Henry Holt, 995 pp., $50.00
The Wire was between its fourth and
fifth seasons. Mad Men had just pre-
miered. The Sopranos was approaching
its finale. Rome had just ended after
twenty-two episodes. Viewers were
still mourning Six Feet Under and
the western series Deadwood. If you
attended a dinner party sometime in
2007, you might find yourself involved
in a discussion about how Baltimore
schoolkids can be turned into drug
dealers, or how a New York adman’s
success could be a measure of how
well he had escaped his past. Conver-
sation might proceed to the question
of whether “the family” surrounding
Tony Soprano could be viewed as a se-
rial Freudian nightmare, or whether
the Fisher family’s funeral home in
Six Feet Under hadn’t in fact been the
locus for a treatise on the meaning of
happiness. In the following decade the
idea that TV drama could catch the
spirit of the age became routine. It
wasn’t, after all, a major novel or a hit
play that distilled the paranoid nullity
of Trumpian ethics, but the show Suc-
cession, an encapsulation of dynastic
corruption that began airing less than
two years into his presidency. All these
dramas were produced by HBO except
one, Mad Men, which was created by
Matthew Weiner, who had just left the
company for AMC .
Arguably, television has always been
good at describing America to itself.
In 1958, the year NASA was founded,
seven out of the ten top-rated shows
in America were westerns obsessed
with the problems of pioneers; by the
mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan was
riding high, four of the top ten, led by
Dallas and Dynasty, were about feud-
ing wealthy families in shoulder pads.
Television was not yet the national
theater of America. Many of those
shows remained indebted to radio, to
two-dimensional melodrama, to clichés
and cliff-hangers, with characters who
10
story, but at this point, perhaps be-
cause we have extracts from her letters
of the time and can hear her sponta-
neous voice, she springs to life. The
romance could not last. In the winter
of 1946, aged thirty-six, she finally re-
turned to Rome. She sold Ciano’s dia-
ries to the Americans, and they were
published in the Chicago Daily News.
She never married again but lived a
lonely, somber life in Rome until her
death in 1995, refusing to the end to
see Ciano as a traitor and asserting
that “her father’s greatest mistake had
been to allow himself to fall for the
adulation of the Italian people.”
Andrew O’Hagan
Illustration by Michael Schmelling
resembled nobody who existed in real
life. (Even as recently as Friends: no
group of young people ever lived in
a New York City apartment like that,
and none ever had such hair in the
morning.)
In the first season of The Sopra-
nos, on the other hand—in episode
5, to be precise—a new kind of dra-
matic nuance on television was born,
as well as a new kind of realism. Tony
Soprano (James Gandolfini), a leading
modern mafia figure who is suffering
panic attacks and seeing a therapist,
takes his daughter to look at colleges
in Maine. He is funny, likable, specific,
but oddly typical. He spots a guy in a
gas station, a rat from his New Jersey
neighborhood now living under wit-
ness protection. Before the end of
the episode, Soprano strangles him to
death. Our hero isn’t Raskolnikov and
he certainly isn’t Atticus Finch—he’s a
manspreading, bottom-pinching, sexist
and racist pig—yet he’s energetic and
searching, companionable and surpris-
ing. That’s character in literature: not
a stooge in your reverie of fair play
and sound politics, but a creature of
his time.
That adulation never entirely died,
and two of Mussolini’s granddaugh-
ters have entered politics: Alessandra
is a former member of both the Ital-
ian parliament and the European Par-
liament for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia,
and Rachele is currently a councillor
in Rome for Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
His great-grandson Caio Giulio Cesare
is also a Brothers of Italy supporter,
standing unsuccessfully for the party
in elections for the European Parlia-
ment in 2019. In an interview he said,
“I will never be ashamed of my family.”
In 1957 Edda had overseen the re-
turn of Mussolini’s body to the family
W e may have reached the point
where a great political speech
is not something we necessarily ex-
pect from a politician. We expect it
from a showrunner. Take the best mo-
ment in Aaron Sorkin’s imperfect show
for HBO , The Newsroom, when the fic-
tional news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff
Daniels) is attending a symposium.
A sophomore asks a question about
why America is the greatest country
in the world. “There is absolutely no
evidence to support the statement,”
McAvoy replies, to consternation.
We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-
seventh in math, twenty-second in
science, forty-ninth in life expec-
tancy, one-hundred-and-seventy-
eighth in infant mortality, third in
median household income, number
four in labor force, and number four
in exports. We lead the world in
only three categories: number of
incarcerated citizens per capita,
number of adults who believe an-
gels are real, and defense spending,
where we spend more than the next
twenty-six countries combined,
twenty-five of whom are allies.
tomb at Predappio. “Today,” Moore-
head writes,
the crypt is open only on the anni-
versaries of Mussolini’s birth and
death, and on 28 October every
year, when the faithful, those who
yearn for the days when Fascism
ran their lives, gather in Predap-
pio to remember the March on
Rome.
.
Edda Mussolini may not have been
dangerous herself, but her father’s
fearsome ideology, which governed her
life, refuses to be buried for good.
Beginning in the 1990s, producers
at HBO didn’t think like ordinary TV
people. When they spoke about their
work, they often came off like novelists
being interviewed for The Paris Review
about the verities of their style. Felix
Gillette and John Koblin’s It’s Not TV
proves to be a lively companion to all
these shows. The authors quote David
Simon, the creator of The Wire:
I never looked at The Wire as being
a story about Baltimore. . . . We ob-
viously wrote the specifics of Bal-
timore into the piece because we
knew them. But we could have done
that with Pittsburgh, or Cleveland,
or St. Louis. I looked at it as a story
about postindustrial urbanity—
the postmodern problems of city
living and self-governance.
(Theodore Dreiser, eat your heart out.)
The Wire subverted the cop show
just as The Sopranos subverted the
mob drama, but arguably these shows
also interrogated character, inflected
political anxiety, and promoted a taste
for ambivalence in ways that were once
chiefly expected of novelists in fine
feather. There was a time, not a hun-
dred years ago, when every other per-
son on the train was reading Norman
Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead; in
2010 they might have been watching
Tom Hanks’s miniseries The Pacific,
for which HBO budgeted $200 million.
Ted Sarandos, now CEO of Netflix, but
back then the executive at the com-
pany responsible for licensing con-
tent (including HBO content) for its
relatively new streaming service, was
astounded that HBO thought it could
spend so much on one show, and he
confronted HBO ’s Chris Albrecht, the
executive and future CEO responsi-
ble for some of these shows, about it.
“Sarandos found a moment one day
over lunch in Beverly Hills to ask [him]
point-blank why on earth he would do
such a deal,” write Gillette and Koblin.
“‘Because we can,’ Albrecht replied
nonchalantly, introducing Sarandos
for the first time to the HBO shrug.”
Such confidence altered the industry.
“We had the entire Pacific war in the
bones of our two characters,” Hanks
says in James Andrew Miller’s Tinder-
box. It was as if HBO was by that point
directing people’s sense of historical
character and national story. “We had
The New York Review
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a screening of the first episode in the
White House,” the executive Eric Kess-
ler says. “Right in front of me was
Obama, Spielberg, and Hanks and be-
hind was the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I
had a feeling of pride and awe.”
Miller tells a tale of “power strug-
gles, creative battles, flagrant jealousy,
toxic personalities, cutthroat rivalries,
and sheer ambition.” He used the same
method a few years ago in a hilarious
book about Creative Artists Agency.*
This time around the backstabbing
players are even more relentless and
even less sorry. They undermine one
another and shout in one another’s
faces and steal one another’s jobs,
all in the name of quality or personal
gain, in a company where the two had
become indistinguishable. HBO exec-
utives know how to exterminate a for-
mer colleague with as much relish as
Darryl Zanuck once smoked a cigar.
“He was a chronic bullshitter,” HBO ’s
leading light Michael Fuchs says of
his moderately Machiavellian usurper,
Jerry Levin, chairman of Time Warner.
“He had no balls. . . . I finally realized
Jerry was good at something, and it
was inside fucking manipulation bull-
shit, like Stalin.”
A s a cable start-up in the south-
ern half of Manhattan in the mid-
1960s, Home Box Office was initially
known for showing old movies and
sports. It broadcast Knicks games
and began, early on, to encroach on
the better boxing matches, but in 1973
it was still showing, for example, the
Pennsylvania Polka Festival. It sur-
vived by a combination of fake num-
bers and free turkeys. (Improve your
Thanksgiving with access to HBO and
a gratis bird.) Subscriptions started to
grow. The company scored big with The
Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla
in Manila, marquee boxing events that
sold subscriptions, as did music spe-
cials (Diana Ross at Caesar’s Palace).
HBO had comedy specials and no com-
mercials, and it began to make movies
at the time when cable movies were
not eligible for Emmys. It gained a rep-
utation as a platform that was hospi-
table to fairly adult content, unafraid
of realistic depictions of violence and
sex. “Sex was still a secret in America,”
says Sheila Nevins, HBO ’s legendary
documentaries guru.
To tell the truth, to take risks with
story, to speak out: these were the ur-
gencies at the company, all of whose
young executives, by the mid-1980s,
had both decent budgets and healthy
Copernicus complexes. There was fun
to be had and they were having it, ac-
cording to It’s Not TV :
“If you were a young dude in your
twenties or thirties, you’d have
thought you had died and gone
to heaven,” says Dave Baldwin, a
boisterous, bearded ex–school li-
brarian who for years ran HBO ’s
scheduling department. “People
back then were either single or
about to become single again.”
Decades before tech companies
in Silicon Valley adopted the tech-
nique of throwing over-the-top,
celebrity-infused company parties
to brand themselves, HBO used its
*Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Holly-
wood’s Creative Artists Agency (Custom
House, 2016).
12
fun-loving reputation to gain a
competitive edge.
Yet the big obsession for them all at
that time was how to move into orig-
inal programming in a way no cable
operator had managed before. Could
they do it? They passed on Roseanne,
which was picked up by ABC . “I always
wanted to work with Chris [Albrecht]
at HBO ,” says Roseanne Barr in Tin-
derbox. “I would’ve gone much deeper
with my show. Way more working-class
subject matter, and way more about my
real life and real-life controversies.”
“We weren’t ready for it,” says Fuchs.
They hadn’t yet hit their crazy streak or
found their novelist’s bent, their taste
for reality. And when it came, an actor
such as James Gandolfini would be paid
over $1 million per episode.
B y the second season of The So-
pranos, HBO had taken to adver-
tising every episode as if it were a
stand-alone movie. “It’s Not TV . It’s
HBO ” was the famous tagline, which
itself got press coverage. The surge
in quality had begun with Sex and the
City, a new kind of romantic comedy
in which HBO ’s executives displayed
a fresh ethos: they didn’t care about
the other networks’ ways of judging
success. “At a premiere,” remembers
Jeff Bewkes, later the chair of Time
Warner (which owned HBO ),
Darren [Star, the creator of Sex
and the City] did that Hollywood
thing, “Hey, how do you like it? The
ratings are up.” I said to him, “If
you don’t take the ratings down
by a third, I’m going to cancel this
fucking show. I don’t want ratings.
I want a better show . . . stop ex-
plaining jokes.”
Showrunners were encouraged to
have their particular vision; in the
golden age, they were never drowning
in “notes” from the executives. They
had no advertisers to complain about
racy content, they could run the dra-
mas over many hours and many sea-
sons, and they didn’t have to build in
ad-break cliff-hangers, so the entire
nature of TV drama changed. Albrecht
is said to have given only one note to
the creators of Six Feet Under: “Just
make it more fucked up.” “You don’t
hear that at every network all around
town,” says the show’s executive pro-
ducer, David Janollari.
In a sense, these executives were
selling a new ideal of human interest.
They were being encouraged by their
bosses to make things darker, more
libidinal, more surreal. Alan Ball, the
creator of Six Feet Under, had previ-
ously worked on ABC ’s Grace Under
Fire and CBS ’s Cybill, and he was sick
of the usual network routines and the
scripts, which were “always the same
thing,” according to It’s Not TV :
Make everybody nicer and spell out
the subtext. “It was kind of soul
deadening,” Ball said. . . . “I had to
sort of unlearn a lot of habits. . . .
You do year after year of network
TV and you learn to anticipate the
notes.”
Likewise, Terence Winter, who became
the showrunner and chief writer on
HBO ’s Boardwalk Empire, reflects on
the absurd experience of having been
a writer on syndicated, non-HBO shows
such as Flipper: The New Adventures,
which was, write Gillette and Koblin,
a 1995 revival of a classic dolphin-
centric series, and it proved to be a
real challenge. “I don’t think most
people realize that there are, or-
ganically, only ten stories in the
world that involve a dolphin,” Win-
ter said. “When you figure out
what those ten stories are and
then you’ve still got twelve more
episodes . . . Flipper . . . has to be in-
volved in a murder?”
So HBO went bigger, deeper, and
more “fucked up,” such that plotlines
that were expected could seem like
a corruption. The end of Sex and the
City—Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big get
together and move back to New York
City—felt like a deflation into tradi-
tional romantic clichés and empty val-
ues. There were obvious tensions on
that show—personality clashes, gossip,
and toxicity—and it struggled to marry
its courage to its convictions. “I think
the show ultimately betrayed what it
was about, which was that women don’t
ultimately find happiness from mar-
riage,” Star said later. “Not that they
can’t. But the show initially was going
off script from the romantic comedies
that had come before it.” And that was
always going to be the problem for HBO ,
especially when Me Too happened. The
company made its name on boxing and
on sexual content, but by the mid-2000s
the people who made its big shows were
like auteurs stewing in their own juices.
“Like nineteenth-century British nov-
elists or 1970s New Hollywood direc-
tors,” write Gillette and Koblin,
the cable TV auteur became in the
2000s a revered figure in popular
culture, lionized by the press, piled
into syllabi by academia, and read-
ily identifiable by certain distin-
guishing traits. He was brilliant,
garrulous, irascible, literary, foul-
mouthed, impassioned, lyrical, ex-
cessive, vengeful, self-righteous,
and brimming with arcana. He was
not just exquisitely good at mak-
ing TV , but also at talking about it.
And, though it was never explicitly
stated, he was always a he.
The sense of mission has survived
into the current market. “HBO is a
bunch of determined individuals,”
Miller recently told The Hollywood
Reporter,
who are waking up every morning,
going to the office and trying to do
the best they can to survive in a
world that has not been particu-
larly kind to their business model
for the past several years. They’re
trying to climb Everest on a cold
day in their shorts. They’re trying
to make sure they’re still relevant
despite all the advantages Netflix
has in terms of its subscribers,
that Apple may have in terms of
its money, that Amazon may have
in terms of its determination and
focus to be a powerful presence. . . .
So I think HBO is an entity that’s
fighting for survival.
Y et for all the fun of the corporate
tittle-tattle in these books, what
really matters about HBO has to do
with American storytelling itself. The
company has absorbed, if you like, the
lessons not only of its successes but
of its failures. It might have missed
out on Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and
House of Cards—it passed on each of
these sagas of men behaving badly—
yet it responded with a kind of pa-
nache to some of the debates it had
itself engendered, going on to pro-
duce Girls, Big Little Lies, Mare of
Easttown, and My Brilliant Friend.
An Oscar-nominated film director told
me recently that you should wait ten
years to make a drama about a polit-
ical situation, but here is HBO doing
it in real time. We watch it to see fic-
tion putting its finger on pulses where
the facts seem faint. In defying ideas
of “fake news,” HBO seems to say, we
might also detect our commitment to
“true fiction.”
Lena Dunham’s Girls was a deep
comedy in conversation with its times.
“For a network to let me basically have
Adam [Driver] sexually assault some-
body and then continue to be a roman-
tic lead who we care about,” Dunham
tells Miller in Tinderbox,
was so important to me. Obviously
in life, my values, which I feel [are]
really important to assert, are, “Be-
lieve women a lot. It’s just black
and white.” But I think in film we
have to be free to have nuance. I
wanted to be able to write people
who did things that contradicted
other things they did.
There are those, naturally, who won’t
root for HBO -style dualities, and who
equally hate novels that say contra-
dictory things. “We live in a society,”
Dunham continues,
where a woman is not allowed to
yell “I’m smart” without terrible
consequences. . . . And how is it
possible that Tony Soprano and
Walter White are murderers but
people hated Hannah and Marnie
[from Girls] way more and thought
they were worse people? How is it
possible that you root for a mafia
hitman but you can’t root for a girl
who cheated on her boyfriend?
That’s the world we live in.
Fiction can be divisive, of course, every
narrative subject to correction and
renegotiation, in a world in which no
truth is a truth for everyone.
The HBO universe is still changing,
but as a production force it has come
a long way from Pennsylvania Polka.
The real challenge for TV is compe-
tition with social media. Producing
genuine stories—to say nothing of
making art—is an expensive strug-
gle, especially when so much of the
young audience, raised on TikTok, has
an unquenchable desire for free con-
tent featuring dancing cats and vid-
eos of their schoolmates being kicked
in the nuts. “Great television came
only from one place,” write Gillette
and Koblin. “From listening to art-
ists and supporting their instincts and
visions zealously.” Who knew, except
television itself perhaps, that the fu-
ture might be a place where reality
could seem less real than its repre-
sentation? “I gotta watch TV to figure
.
out the world?” asked Paulie Gualtieri
of The Sopranos, while trying to ex-
plain to his friends how germs are
passed.
The New York Review
 Feb 18–June 12
Get Tickets
Major support for Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears is provided by
The Donnelly Family Foundation and Natasha Henner and Bala Ragothaman.
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Salvador Dalí. A Chemist Lifting with Extreme Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano (detail), 1936.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph R. Shapiro.
© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2022.

March 23, 2023 13

 Disenchantment and Devastation in Syria
A market in Damascus, Syria, January 2023
For the first time in sixteen years Da-
mascus has inaugurated a new five-
star luxury hotel. The Golden Mazzeh
is a ten-story reminder that some Syr-
ians are surviving America’s economic
sanctions better than others. Its 111
suites and rooms, ten restaurants and
bars, two outdoor swimming pools,
ballroom, meeting rooms, theater, gym,
and conference center make it a for-
midable competitor to the older Sher-
aton and Four Seasons. Guests can sip
martinis in its two rooftop bars while
contemplating a 360-degree panorama
of the sprawling Syrian capital: subur-
ban apartment complexes and parks to
the west, Mount Qasioun to the north,
and to the east the ancient walled city
where Saint Paul eluded his perse-
cutors and which tradition says the
Prophet Muhammad bypassed in the
belief that man could enter paradise
only once. An Italian architect, Mas-
simo Rodighiero, designed the hotel,
whose manager, Patrick Prudhomme,
is French. In the eucalyptus-shaded
public garden across from the en-
trance, mothers watch their children
as traffic rumbles along the nearby
Mazzeh Highway toward Beirut.
This is the road that first delivered
me to Damascus at Easter 1973, before
high-rise government offices, embas-
sies, and apartments for a new class
of military officers, civil servants, and
merchants absorbed semirural, sub-
urban Mazzeh into the metropolis. I
was a tourist then, an ignorant Amer-
ican graduate student on his way by
land from Lebanon to Aqaba in Jordan,
pausing long enough for lunch and a
little sightseeing. When I returned
the following October to cover the
war with Israel, it was as a journalist
14
Charles Glass
on a visa approved by the Ministry of
Information’s obstructive, sluggish bu-
reaucracy. Since then I’ve had to apply
to the ministry whenever I sought to
return.
When I submitted my latest request
on October 16, the Syrian consulate in
Beirut informed me, “The visa process
takes twenty to thirty days to get a re-
sponse from Syria.” Three months later
the ministry had yet to respond. Syrian
and Lebanese friends with wasta—in-
fluence—in Damascus offered to ob-
tain a visa for me through the more
powerful Ministry of Interior. To my
surprise, they succeeded. I took a taxi
from Beirut to the Syrian border post
at Jdaideh, where an officer behind the
counter examined the visa and checked
his computer. When my journalist sta-
tus flashed up, he declared that I could
not enter without the imprimatur of
the Ministry of Information. My driver
remonstrated with him, until a man
in civilian clothes behind us offered
help. He told the officer to admit me
if I wrote a letter affirming that I had
retired from journalism and would not
be reporting from Syria. I did so, the
official relented, and I paid $140 for
the visa stamp. When I turned to thank
my savior, he had disappeared.
Relieved of my journalist status,
I skipped interviews with officials
in favor of meeting friends, visiting
monuments and museums, lingering
in coffeehouses, gossiping with shop-
keepers, and hearing again and again
that life is unbearable. Electricity is
supplied one hour in every six. Gas-
oline and diesel to run cars, heaters,
and kitchen stoves are in short supply
and, when available, too expensive for
the average worker. Iran has increased
the price it charges Syria for seaborne
deliveries of refined oil, only one of the
reasons Syrians pay about ten times
what the next-door Lebanese pay for
a liter of gasoline. Oil traders point to
the government’s hoarding of gasoline
and diesel in storage tanks near Bani-
yas harbor, which delays distribution
and keeps prices—and profits—high.
The value of the Syrian pound has
dropped steadily, from 3,000 to the
US dollar last year to 6,500 when I ar-
rived, and it continued to fall while I
was there. With the largest denomi-
nation note only 5,000 pounds, men
carry thick bricks of cash in handbags.
Bread costs 40,000 pounds a kilo. A
year ago, it was a mere 500. Meat, veg-
etables, olive oil, and other basics are
beyond the means of most Syrians. The
World Food Program (WFP ) estimates
that 12 million out of Syria’s remain-
ing 18 to 21 million inhabitants—6.6
million have fled the country since the
civil war began in 2011—do not have
enough to eat. More than a quarter
of a million qualify for assistance to
ameliorate what the WFP calls “acute
malnutrition.” The World Health Or-
ganization had recorded more than
50,000 cases of cholera across Syria
by the end of last year and warns of
other epidemics due to the shortage
of imported medicines.
D amascus reminded me of Bagh-
dad on my many trips there be-
tween the war over Kuwait in 1991
and the American invasion in 2003.
In those years the US, the EU, and
the UN were enforcing similar restric-
tions based on their conviction that
economic hardship would destabilize
Saddam Hussein’s regime or compel a
hungry populace to depose him. In Iraq
then, as in Syria now, the regime flour-
ished and people starved. I recall Iraqi
teachers begging in the streets and
middle-class married women turning
to prostitution to feed their children.
The reported deaths of half a million
Iraqi children from malnutrition were,
in the words of then US ambassador
to the UN Madeleine Albright, “worth
it.” The failure of sanctions on Iraq to
bring about regime change, as in Cuba
over a longer period, has not persuaded
Washington to conceive of an alterna-
tive for Syria.
Perfunctory US sanctions on Syria
had been in place since 1979, but the
all-out economic blockade went into
effect 180 days after December 20,
2019, when Congress passed the Caesar
Syria Civilian Protection Act—named
for the photographer who documented
murder and torture in government
prisons. President Bashar al-Assad,
assisted by Russia and Iran, had just
secured his regime with the expulsion
of his rebel enemies to a periphery
in northwest Syria, near the Turkish
border. The Orwellian preamble to
the State Department’s fact sheet on
the legislation states, “Our sanctions
under the Caesar Act and Executive
Order 13894 are not intended to harm
the Syrian people.” My daily prome-
nades through Damascus’s old and new
sections suggested that the intention
is belied by reality. The run-down flats
and houses of the poor, who complain
of the struggle to afford food and heat,
coexist with the prosperous Abu Rum-
maneh and Malki quarters’ neon-lit
restaurants, cafés, and nightclubs.
Compounding the misfortune is
the transformation of Syria into what
The Economist calls a “narco-state”
that produces and exports billions
of dollars’ worth of illegal, addictive,
amphetamine-like Captagon pills in
cooperation with Lebanese, Jordanian,
and Saudi smugglers. Many a Ferrari
and Maserati parked outside expen-
sive restaurants was purchased with
drug money. Scions of old but recently
impoverished trading families speak
with derision of the nouveaux riches
who made their fortunes from the war
and are increasing them by evading
sanctions.
“The regime is still here, and the
people are suffering,” a diplomat told
me. “Reconstruction” is a forbidden
word, as international agencies are
permitted to provide the drip-drip of
humanitarian aid but not the means
to rebuild. The Caesar Act threatens
to penalize anyone from any nation
AMMAR SA FAR JA LANI/XI NHUA/ALAMY LI VE NEWS
who assists in reconstructing Syria’s
infrastructure, which has been dev-
astated by years of war. Such is the
logic of sanctions.
While the government and many cit-
izens blame sanctions for the country’s
plight, the victorious president does
not escape blame. “I don’t dare say it,
but I like him,” an old friend confided.
“Before the war, no one dared say he
didn’t like him. Now, it’s the opposite.”
Over the following days more people,
including those who supported him
on my previous visits, criticized his
performance, the blatant corruption,
The New York Review
and the ostentatious wealth enjoyed
by his inner circle.
Another friend, who posted pro-
Assad propaganda on social media
during the war, is fed up. “He betrayed
us,” he said, sotto voce. Assad’s critics
do not pronounce his name. It is always
“he” or “him.” They never know who
is listening. Their grievances are now
more economic than political, as they
were ten years ago. Disenchantment,
however, does not imply another re-
bellion. Instead, there is resignation.
I met the novelist Khaled Khalifa, a
longtime friend, in an old-city coffee
shop deserted except for two waiters
and us. Slivers of sun filtered through
the dingy windows, exaggerating the
exhaustion in Khaled’s bearded, once-
vivid face. His latest novel, No One
Prayed Over Their Graves, like his pre-
vious works, is banned in Syria.1 He
spent ten years writing it, conceiving
the story after seeing a church in the
region of Qamishli, near the Turkish
border in the northeast of the coun-
try, that the Ottomans had desecrated
in their genocide of the Armenians
during World War I. “It explains ev-
erything now,” he said over a tiny cup
of sugarless Turkish coffee. He added,
“All my friends have left Syria.” We
walked along a narrow, cobbled street
toward his car. “Syria is finished,” he
told me. “Who knows what will hap-
pen to Syria now? No one.” I remem-
ber when he had hope and could laugh
about police breaking his arm during
an early antiregime demonstration.
Now the laughter was gone. He left
the next morning for Zurich on a writ-
ing fellowship to work on a new book.
I wandered alone through the
old city and the jammed Souk al-
Hamadieh, finding my way through
the ancient walls to the disused Hejaz
railway station. From there I went to
the Fardoss Tower Hotel’s ground-floor
café. I remembered the enthusiastic
youngsters who gathered there in 2012
and 2013 to organize peaceful protests
demanding reform. Most of them are
gone, some arrested, others in exile.
A few students were there, but I saw
from their laptops that all they were
doing was homework. A university de-
gree will make it easier for them to
do what most young Syrians want to
do: emigrate.
“If a country like Canada agreed to
admit any Syrian, the country would
be empty,” said another friend. Even
without a visa, young men who can are
fleeing in search of work and perhaps
a semblance of normal life. Most of
the Syrian capital’s inhabitants must
have forgotten the savage artillery and
aerial bombardments that terrorized
them for years. Otherwise they would
not say, as they do, that life is worse
now than it was during the war. “We
miss the rocket times,” a friend whose
retail business has failed told me. “If
we died, we died. It was war. Now we
don’t know.” What he didn’t know was
how he would feed his children.
The war may be over in Damas-
cus, but it still rages in outlying re-
gions so far away that they seem to
be on another continent. Syria, like
Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three
parts: the government-held center
1
The English translation by Leri Price will
be published in the US by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux in July.
March 23, 2023
with about 60 percent of the land
and nearly 80 percent of the popu-
lation; the Turkish-occupied north-
west, where unreconstructed jihadists
and other rebels launch desultory at-
tacks on government outposts; and
the Kurdish-governed northeast under
the protection of nine hundred Amer-
ican soldiers and American air power.
There is also a twenty-one-square-mile
“red zone” of oil-rich desert that the
Americans control in the south along
the Jordanian border.
Syria today is a multi-ring circus
where armed forces from Turkey,
the US, Russia, and Iran engage in
a clandestine conflict with no obvi-
ous objectives. US troops are never
far from their Russian counterparts
in the government zone. The Turkish
army attacks the Kurds despite the
American presence. Iranian troops,
augmented by Iraqi Shiite militiamen
and Lebanese Hezbollah irregulars,
harass the Kurds, the Americans, and
Turkish-supported Sunni fundamen-
talist militias. The Israelis regularly
bombard the Iranians, Iraqis, and Hez-
bollah from the air.
“Syria is the stadium,” a business-
man whom I have known for years told
me. “We are the grass. All the players
play on us: Russia, the US, Iran, and
Turkey.” While outside powers keep the
conflict simmering, they are attempt-
ing to win through negotiations what
they cannot achieve by force. Moscow
sponsors talks between Turkey and
Syria aimed at getting Turkey to with-
draw from the northwest and disarm-
ing the Kurds so Damascus can police
the border for Turkey, while forcing
the Americans to leave. The US seeks
a compromise between Turkey and the
Kurds to prolong the Kurds’ autonomy
and keep Damascus from threaten-
ing them. Neither diplomatic push has
succeeded, but the Russians’ efforts
are making more headway.
Meanwhile the US feels betrayed as
its Arab allies welcome Assad back into
the fold, just as they did Egypt’s Anwar
Sadat after his “treachery” of mak-
ing peace with Israel in 1979. Jordan,
the UAE, and to a lesser extent Saudi
Arabia have reopened relations with
Assad in the hope of reducing Iranian
influence. Most of their diplomats are
back, their intelligence services have
resumed cooperation, and trade del-
egations are booking Damascus’s ho-
tels. The Golden Mazzeh should have
room for them all.
O n February 6, soon after my re-
turn to Beirut, the violent shaking
of my bed woke me around 3:15 AM .
I got up and stood in a doorway, as
I was advised to do during my youth
in earthquake-prone California. My
eleventh-floor flat swayed for a few
minutes and stopped, then the swaying
resumed with less force for another
minute and stopped for good. Later
that morning I read that the quake
had devastated southern Turkey and
northern Syria. To war and hunger can
be added the blind cruelty of nature.
At last count, although the figure
continues to rise, the toll from the
magnitude 7.8 earthquake, and the
smaller one that followed on Febru-
ary 20, was 48,000 people killed, more
than 6,000 of them in Syria. Turkey,
where the epicenters of the quakes
were located, suffered the most casual-
ties and buildings destroyed. In Syria,
the ancient city of Aleppo, the country’s
commercial capital, was the worst hit.
Much of it had yet to be rebuilt follow-
ing the government’s December 2016
conquest of rebel strongholds in the
eastern half. I described in these pages
what I saw there in the spring of 2017:
Bombs have transformed Aleppo
into an Escher-like vision of six-
foot-thick concrete slabs twisted
into braids; five-story apart-
ment buildings compressed into
piles ten feet high; and collapsed
façades of entire streets expos-
ing rooms with ceiling fans eerily
intact and revolving in the wind.2
Many residents moved back rather
than become refugees or lose title to
their properties. Their homes remained
so precarious that the earthquake
knocked them down for good. A woman
I know in Aleppo sent me pictures of
her apartment. It had scars in the walls
so wide you could walk through them,
and ceilings had collapsed into rooms
below. Men, women, and children shiv-
ering outdoors needed not only blan-
kets but food. Aid was slow to arrive
in both Aleppo and the Turkish rebel
territory north of it.
The regime and its jihadist oppo-
nents blame each another for block-
ing deliveries of desperately needed
earthmovers, food, blankets, tents,
and medicines. The UN accused the
largest jihadist coalition, Hayat Tahrir
al-Sham, of delaying supplies over “ap-
proval issues.” Although one of Hayat
2
“In the Horrorscape of Aleppo,” The New
York Review, May 25, 2017.
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Tahrir al-Sham’s predecessors, the
al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front,
used to kidnap and torture foreign
journalists, its leader, Abu Mohammad
al-Jolani, granted an interview to The
Guardian in which he claimed that the
regime could not be trusted and that it
had turned the region “into an ongo-
ing earthquake the past 12 years.” He
eventually withdrew his objections to
receiving aid, no doubt under pressure
from his Turkish protectors and the
thousands of civilians among whom
he and his fighters live.
President Assad, who had insisted
for years that Syrian sovereignty re-
quired the UN to provide assistance
only through Damascus, belatedly
agreed after the earthquake to per-
mit the UN to send aid to rebel areas
from Turkey through two border cross-
ings. The US too softened its hard-line
stance on February 9 and lifted some
of its sanctions for 180 days to allow
agencies to send earthquake relief,
but it has not responded to appeals
from Pope Francis, the World Council
of Churches, the Norwegian Refugee
Council, and Syria’s Christian bish-
ops for further easing of the embargo.
While the US remains firm, some EU
countries—notably Italy, which sent
ambulances and the navy ship San
Marco to Beirut with equipment for
Syria, and the Czech Republic—are
breaking ranks and demanding that
more be done to allow Syrians some
measure of dignity and self-reliance.
.
I applied for a visa immediately after
the earthquake to see its effects for
myself. As of this writing, I am still
waiting.
—February 23, 2023
E
EG
L
OL
15
 The Life of the Mind
The Guest Lecture
by Martin Riker.
Black Cat, 241 pp., $17.00 (paper)
Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture be-
gins with a paragraph of stage direc-
tion, establishing the scene that will
make up the entirety of the novel.
The story takes place in a hotel room
“somewhere in middle America.” The
room is dark, and its king-size bed
holds three bodies:
On the left lies a man, in the mid-
dle a girl, both on their sides and
sleeping. On the right: a woman on
her back, awake. Her eyes are either
open and staring at the ceiling, or
else closed; at any given moment,
it’s one or the other. She lies per-
fectly still, not making a sound, but
inside her head, things are busy. A
lecture is about to begin.
There’s something slyly prankish in
that last line, as though a rug were
being pulled out from under one’s
feet. The drama we have been prom-
ised collapses into disquisition. The
anticipated stage set, with its props
and colorful backdrop, has been re-
placed with the podium—or perhaps
the pulpit. But the speech that is about
to begin is not easily classified as an
existing form of rhetoric.
Abby—she who lies awake in bed—
is an economist who is to speak the fol-
lowing day on John Maynard Keynes’s
1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for
Our Grandchildren.” It’s an odd choice
of subject: writing on the cusp of the
Great Depression, Keynes argues that
the downturn is merely “a temporary
phase of maladjustment” on the over-
arching road to global prosperity and
offers utopian predictions for the next
century (a fifteen-hour workweek, end-
less leisure time) that have obviously
not been borne out.
Abby, too, has failed to predict—
and prepare for—the future. Instead
of writing her lecture she decided, on
the advice of her husband, Ed (one
of the two sleeping bodies next to
her—the other belongs to their daugh-
ter, Ali), to improvise. “It always im-
presses people when you wing it,” she
recalls him saying months earlier, back
when the engagement was still far off
enough to inspire endless optimism.
Ed, who had been reading Cicero,
suggested that she try the “loci
method,” an ancient technique that
designates the features of a familiar
location—usually the speaker’s own
house—as mnemonics for remem-
bering any long speech or narrative.
Resolving to make productive use of
her insomnia, Abby tries to visualize
the lecture that she has only hazily
sketched out. In the living room she
will introduce Keynes and his essay.
In the dining room she will give two
reasons why his predictions were
wrong. In the kitchen she will defend
his essay, arguing that it has a narra-
tive purpose beyond literal forecasting.
That’s the plan, anyway. But the
insomniac mind, much like econom-
ics, favors circular trajectories over
linear arcs. Her mental rehearsal is
frequently stymied by second-guessing
16
Meghan O’Gieblyn
Martin Riker; illustration by Hope Gangloff
(“I could crib some lines from Muñoz?
Or pretty much any Frankfurt-type
philosopher. Stuart Hall’s ‘narrative
construction of reality’?”), and the
whimsical task of mentally recreating
her house proves a pleasant distrac-
tion. “A tall room with good windows,”
she says, invoking her dining room.
Giant funereal sideboard inherited
from Ed’s family—not a treasured
heirloom, his mom bought it at a
flea market—that in any other
room would look like a set prop
for The Addams Family but in this
room really works, somehow. . . . A
Persian rug. When did we get that?
Threadbare, needs replacing, but
I like it anyway.
Mnemonic comes from the Greek
mnēmē, or “remembrance,” and while
these objects are supposed to serve as
lecture prompts for Abby, their func-
tion is more often Proustian, sparking
expansive recollections of family life
(reading The Wind in the Willows to
Ali, fleeing a basement flood shortly
after Trump’s election), as well as
some more painful memories of her
academic career. At times, Abby be-
comes both author and audience of
her own lecture—an ancient rhetorical
device otherwise known as “negative
self-talk.” She chides herself for hav-
ing agreed to give
a talk about optimism at a time
when I am personally feeling
anything but. When I have been
stripped of my own optimism by
recent life events that I am not
going to think about now. No, I
am not. No, I am not. Except per-
haps just to acknowledge the irony,
that here I am serving myself up
as some sort of expert on how to
proceed through the world with
intention and purpose when in
fact I am utterly lost. When ev-
erything I have ever worked for
is STOP . Just stop.
Abby, it turns out, is in a unique po-
sition to contemplate Keynes’s failure
to imagine the persistence of economic
precarity. She has recently been denied
tenure by her university and faces the
rather bleak prospect of returning to
adjunct work. The loci method, there-
fore, entails a painful irony: the house
she mentally traverses, the house in
which she believed she and Ed would
grow old, will have to be sold.
It’s a minor tragedy in an era of ex-
pansive crises, and Abby is acutely con-
scious of its proportion. “Are you really
going to mourn your kitchen?” she be-
rates herself at one point. “That’s what
you’re going to mourn?” This thought
is quickly followed by another: “It’s not
just a kitchen, though. The kitchen is
metonymic.” The kitchen, like all the
rooms of her mental house, is both
metonymic and mnemonic—both a
symbol of the life she’s lost and the
imaginative ground on which the novel
unfolds. “My house,” she says, again
and again, her fondness growing pos-
sessive and desperate.
T he birthplace of the novel, Walter
Benjamin argued in 1936, is “the
individual in his isolation, the indi-
vidual who can no longer speak of his
concerns in exemplary fashion, who
himself lacks counsel and can give
none.” The person who is alone with
their own thoughts has been the fun-
damental dramatic situation since the
seventeenth century and is, according
to Benjamin, what distinguishes the
novel from the epic. Still, it’s hard to
think of a recent novel that’s gone as
doggedly as Riker’s does into the tunnel
of pure interiority. Even the narrator
of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bath-
room (1985), sequestered in his tub, has
a radio for companionship. Even Dos-
toevsky’s Underground Man has pen
and paper. While Abby is presumably
within arm’s length of a smartphone
and a television remote, she refuses
to stir for fear of waking Ed and es-
pecially Ali, who is a light sleeper.
It is this act of selflessness—the
courage to inhabit her own mind—that
endows her story with the gravity of
a mythological quest. She envisions
herself as “unsung hero to her loved
ones, a sweet husband-daughter duo
who will never know the epic battles
she fought, through the darkest hours,
so that they could get some sleep.”
As for giving counsel, that is not yet
beyond her reach. Anticipating that the
descent into the psychic underworld
will be perilous and lonely, Abby con-
jures Keynes as a kind of Virgil—if Vir-
gil were not only a spiritual guide but
also an oratorical coach. She pictures
him beside her in every room of her
imagined house, lounging on her living
room sofa with his “horsey features”
and “white push-broom mustache,”
shuffling a deck of cards at her dining
room table. He addresses her as “Abi-
gail” and offers grandfatherly remind-
ers to stay on track. “You were born
into an era of overload,” he interjects
during her digressive narration of his
biography. “Leaving things out is the
great unmastered art form of your age.”
Economists deal in projection, fore-
casting the future, but Riker is also
playing on the word’s psychoanalytic
connotation. “As you know perfectly
well, I am just your imagination,”
Keynes reminds her. “Anything I ask,
you are asking yourself.” At times, his
voice loses its contours and becomes
indistinguishable from her own. She
has created him, she observes, “be-
cause I always work better with
feedback, but Ed is asleep,” to which
Keynes replies, echoingly:
“You rely on him for feedback.”
It helps.
“Except that I, being you, am not
‘feedback.’ I’m a sounding board.”
So?
“So, if I am standing in for Ed,
that suggests that what you rely
on him for is not really to give
feedback, but only to be a sound-
ing board.”
I think he understands that.
“What he perhaps does not
understand is that you do not
really even need him as a sound-
ing board. Evidently, you can do
‘sounding board’ all by yourself.”
He’s a very good sounding board.
Things sound better bounced off
of him than off of other surfaces.
“Acoustical Ed.”
Also loving.
“Acoustical, also loving, Ed.”
Men have done worse.
“Much worse.”
The New York Review
 It’s true that Abby can do “sounding
board” all by herself. The lecture hall
of her mind houses a rotating roster
of guest speakers: loved ones eager to
indict her for personal deficiencies;
thinkers, dead and living, who have
influenced her work. Her insomniac
lecture prep frequently drifts into an-
cillary ideological quibbles that display
an eidetic (and sometimes incredible)
recall of the texts she’s read. Quotes
rise up, unbidden, from the landfill of
memory: The barrier between oneself
and one’s knowledge of oneself is high
indeed (James Baldwin); The misery of
being exploited by capitalists is noth-
ing compared to the misery of not being
exploited at all (Joan Robinson). Her
spiraling self-pity is continually in di-
alogue with an ambient guilt—or per-
haps the anticipated roar of a Twitter
mob. In the midst of lamenting that
she and her family have been sent
“into the proverbial street,” a censo-
rious voice counters:
Not, of course, in the way that
people less fortunate than you
get sent into the actual street,
which is a lot of people, around
the world and in your own commu-
nity, so many people in situations
so much worse than yours.
A bby suspects that misogyny lurked
behind her tenure denial—the all-
male committee concluded that her
book was “derivative”—and at one
point her house is transformed into
a Lewis Carroll–esque courtroom, with
Keynes serving as her attorney. The
charge of unoriginality was, Keynes ar-
gues, “a tawdry effort by the plaintiff’s
embittered colleagues to dress up their
prejudice as rational assessment.”
Just as clarity appears within reach,
however, Keynes dons a black robe and
white barrister wig. He has resigned
his role as lawyer and serves now as
judge, reading a scathing caricature of
her own paltry complaint. “Your posi-
tion, if I may restate it for the record,
is that you are entirely the victim in
this situation?” he bellows. “That you
are personally not bound by your insti-
tution’s metrics and expectations for
tenure, for example, simply because
you find them archaic?”
This accusation escalates into a
wider indictment (again, Keynes’s
voice becomes Abby’s own), conclud-
ing that there is something fundamen-
tally wrong with the plaintiff, that she
was unprepared for life from the jump,
that all her problems have stemmed
from her inability to find a convincing
social persona that can express the
multitudes within her:
Because at the end of the day, you
are uniquely ill-equipped to convey
to the world what you care about
or what you want to say. . . . You
are capable of being many selves
but the moment you commit to
one, it becomes an imposter, a
dummy to dress up and roll out
into the world in your place. And
you hate the dummy, hate every-
thing it says, even though it only
says what you give it to say, and
even though the words you give it
to say are the best you can come
up with.
Her anxiety about the impending
lecture seems to have sparked a larger
March 23, 2023
crisis about what Erving Goffman
called “the presentation of self in ev-
eryday life.” Even the writerly voice
she adopted in her book—“a ‘self’ in
language”—was, Keynes concludes,
a false manifestation. Like many in-
troverts, Abby is entirely herself only
in her own mind, where she is free to
rehearse and revise potential scripts
without an external audience. Her
stream of consciousness is dialogic,
“a discussion with oneself,” as Bakh-
tin once described the soliloquy, and
it’s precisely the closed circuit—the
fact that we readers are not its in-
tended audience but its accidental
auditors—that allows for this raw
(and recognizable) intimacy. Isn’t
this what we all do within the humid,
rackety chambers of our most private
moments? We argue with ourselves
and our projections. We serve as both
the prosecution and the defense. We
lecture ourselves in digressive tirades
that slip, instinctively, into the second
person, dispelling the fragile illusion
of the indivisible “I.”
The mind is, of course, the house in
which each person is fated to live (“the
four walls of your skull,” as Keynes
puts it). But such structures are al-
ways porous. At one point, standing
with Keynes in her imaginary kitchen,
Abby recalls how she and Ed discov-
ered, during a recent renovation, layers
lurking beneath the surface—old wall-
paper, ancient circuit boxes, evidence
of all the people who had lived there
before. The house of the mind is sim-
ilarly composed of so much inherited
hardware: half-remembered quotes,
values absorbed in childhood, political
ideologies that intrude on private rec-
ollections—not to mention the vast,
unmarked territory of the unconscious.
The mind may be the only true uto-
pia, but it is not, in any sense of the
term, private property. Even when we
are lost in our thoughts, we’re never
really alone.
R iker is fairly new to the writing of
novels but he’s a longtime student
of the form. He has worked as associ-
ate director at Dalkey Archive Press
and cofounded Dorothy, a feminist
press, with his wife, the writer Dan-
ielle Dutton.1 His first book, Samuel
Johnson’s Eternal Return (2018), was a
picaresque road novel about metem-
psychosis, chronicling the tales of a
dead man who is reincarnated in a va-
riety of different bodies—young and
old, male and female, Black and white.
(It was a modern retelling of the 1836
social satire Sheppard Lee, Written by
Himself by Robert Montgomery Bird.2)
More than one critic called the novel
Whitmanesque, sensing in its premise
a formal allegory about the novelist’s
ability to get inside the heads of char-
acters who differ from himself, though
in practice the device was more theo-
retical than illustrative. Unlike Bird’s
narrator, who experiences the perspec-
tive of the person he possesses, Riker’s
hero retains his own consciousness
throughout each transmigration and
has no access to his hosts’ thoughts.
1 intellectual hero, owes less to his eco-
Since last year Dorothy has been in a dis-
tribution partnership with New York Re-
view Books.
2
Reissued by New York Review Books in
2008, with an introduction by Christopher
Looby.
In interviews, Riker confessed
some uneasiness about the logistics
of inhabiting other minds and denied
that his novel was an attempt to “sing
America.” (“America,” he said, “is a
fairly complicated place.”) The Guest
Lecture, his second novel, also involves
an imaginative leap—across gender
and profession—in its chosen protag-
onist, though it’s a credit to Riker’s
virtuosity that I forgot this almost
immediately. Abby is among the most
convincing female narrators written
by a man, largely because of how ca-
pacious she is, and how many voices
she harbors within herself. In a sense,
the novel perfectly inverts the prem-
ise of Riker’s first book: while Samuel
Johnson’s Eternal Return followed a
first-person narrator who speaks in
one voice throughout his promiscu-
ous body-snatching, The Guest Lecture
evokes a choir within a single, immo-
bile person.
Dialoguing with oneself is an at-
tempt to achieve objectivity, and it’s
clear that Abby is seeking in Keynes’s
ideas more expansive insights into the
questions that have haunted her life:
When do risks pay off and when are
they foolish? What does it mean to
plan for the future? Is it possible, in
this political and ecological climate,
to sustain any kind of hope?
As the night unfolds, these ques-
tions take her deeper and deeper
into the past. For dozens of pages at
a time, Keynes disappears, the mne-
monic house dissolves, and the story
becomes immersed in the panorama
of memory. She revisits conversations
with her mentor, Maggie, a college pro-
fessor who got her hooked on feminist
economics—or perhaps the subject
was merely a gateway to the person.
(“That class was about Maggie,” she re-
alizes. “It was Maggie 101.”) She spends
a long time recalling her college friend-
ship with Evelyn, a drummer who in-
troduced her to experimental music
and whom she admired for her free-
spirited capacity to improvise. There’s
a moment in Mrs. Dalloway when Cla-
rissa berates herself for confusing
Miss Kilman with “the idea of her,”
but Abby’s experience suggests that
there’s no escape from such errors. All
of her beliefs and intellectual preoc-
cupations, she realizes, were inspired
by various people—“people with pur-
pose, or with what looked to me like
purpose, providing models of how to
meaningfully exist in this world.”
Even her attraction to Keynes, her
nomic theories than to his personal
qualities. Abby is the kind of econ-
omist fond of pointing out that the
discipline was once a branch of moral
philosophy, and her lecture’s potted
biography of Keynes makes ample use
of his Bloomsbury connections—his
friendships with Virginia Woolf and
Bertrand Russell. The underlying point
of her talk is that economics is not a
science but a form of rhetoric. Rheto-
ric gets a bad name, she acknowledges,
thanks to Plato, who called it “the art
of clever speeches.” But its value is
that it acknowledges that truth itself
is dialogic, “specific to each situation
and determined through language and
argument rather than inherited from
the gods.” Keynes’s essay about the
future was not delivering truths from
on high. It was “a form of utopian sto-
rytelling,” a thought experiment that
conjured, through the enchantment of
narrative, a counterargument to the
dreary realities of his time.
Utopia, Abby recalls, literally means
“no-place.” The usefulness of utopian
ideas lies not in their accuracy—
their fidelity to reality—but in their
capacity to provide imaginative
alternatives:
Its real value—the real value of
any utopia—is that it doesn’t
exist. It’s not a model of how ev-
erything should be; it’s an alter-
native to whatever reality you
currently inhabit. The purpose
of a utopia is to open your eyes
to possibility, to allow yourself to
see more clearly, by way of con-
trast, the society in which you live,
the customs you’ve grown so ac-
customed to that they’ve come to
seem inevitable. It’s not a prop-
osition, even less a plan, but a
viable reminder that everything
you take to be “the world” could
be, if we wanted it to be, very
different.
It’s a passage, like many in this novel,
that is dense with double meaning.
Projection, after all, is also what nov-
elists do, building stage sets to drama-
tize intellectual tensions, splintering
their psyche into different characters,
dreaming up landscapes that exist only
in the nowhere-space of the imagina-
tion. At one point Abby considers in-
corporating into her speech a quote
from Paul Ricoeur: “Part of the lit-
erary strategy of utopia is to aim at
persuading the reader by the rhetorical
means of fiction.”
I ’m reluctant to use the phrase
“novel of ideas,” aware of a not-so-
distant time when the term was, to
paraphrase Mary McCarthy, a tautol-
ogy. But Riker’s novel undoubtedly
falls into this category, and it’s in-
teresting to consider how it both en-
gages and subverts many of its alleged
problems. More than once while read-
ing The Guest Lecture, I thought of
J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Pub-
lished in 2003, shortly before Coetzee
won the Nobel Prize, the novel is largely
composed of academic lectures given by
the fictional titular novelist. It was not
particularly well received: critics dispar-
aged it as “a string of metaphysical pit
stops” and suspected Coetzee of using
his female protagonist to ventriloquize
his own arguments “without taking full
intellectual responsibility for it.”3 (It
3
Janet Maslin, “The Mockery Can Still Sting
with a Target in the Mirror,” The New York
Times, October 21, 2003; and David Lodge,
“Disturbing the Peace,” The New York Re-
view, November 20, 2003.
17
 didn’t help that the topics of Elizabeth’s
lectures—animal consciousness, the
problem of evil—were those Coetzee
had expounded on in his own public
talks.)
Few critics seemed to realize that
the novel was in fact satirizing the
limitations of this kind of fiction—
namely, its tendency to devolve into
lecture. “Realism has never been com-
fortable with ideas,” the unnamed
narrator declares in one of several
metafictional intrusions that call at-
APRIL 28-30, 2023 tention to the novel’s constructedness.
During a sex scene, when a woman’s
FAIRMONT SONOMA MISSION INN & SPA knee slips under the man’s arm and
folds into his armpit, the narrator in-
The Main Tent Walter Isaacson - 2021 terrupts again to question the pur-
pose of this detail: “Does the mind
by nature prefer sensations to ideas,
the tangible to the abstract? Or is the
folding of the woman’s knee just a
mnemonic, from which will unfold the
rest of the night?”
It’s an interesting word choice,
“mnemonic.” Writers with philosoph-
ical or political interests, it suggests,
Jeff rey Brown and Erik Larson - 2022 are always in danger of reducing the
rich texture of experience to so much
cheap staging, turning characters into
mouthpieces and details into mne-
monics—semiotic keys designed to
unlock the novel’s embedded concepts.
This is presumably why the most in-
tellectually engaged novelists today
have receded into monophonic auto-
SONOMA MISSION INN & SPA
biography, collapsing their casts down
to a single first-person narrator who
is essentially identical to their author,
A Wine Country Weekend Like No Other thereby avoiding the risk of creating
characters who function like ideologi-
Discover a 3-day weekend lecture series that features over 20 cal puppets. (Some two decades later,
authors from a variety of literary genres as well as talks by one wonders whether Coetzee might
have preempted his detractors by giv-
leaders in science, technology, and medicine. Curated to ing his protagonist his own gender
stimulate the minds and nurture the souls of readers and and name.)
those who love to learn, the Festival is held at the Fairmont At times, this impatience with the
Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, a beautiful, welcoming sanctuary contrivances of fiction rises to a kind
of eschatological idealism, a longing
that treats guests with warmth and genuine hospitality at the for the day when the novel will become
healing site of geothermal mineral springs. synonymous with pure consciousness,
leaving behind the body and those
C O N F I R M E D S P E A K E R S worldly possessions in which read-
(as of February 16th. Stay tuned for more exciting speakers to be announced) ers can no longer put their faith. Ra-
chel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2015–2018)
was praised for promising “a future for
the novel in which we might no lon-
ger need characters and, by extension,
all of their crap.”4 In Joshua Cohen’s
Book of Numbers (2015), the narrator,
holed up in a hotel room, promises
Isabel Allende Abraham Verghese Dave Barry Danielle Feinberg that he won’t be subjecting us to the
tedium of set design. “There’s nothing
worse than description: hotel room
prose. No, characterization is worse.
No, dialogue is.”
Riker (thankfully) spares us hotel
room prose, but he also discovers
Ada Limón John Hering Stacy Schiff Jeffrey Brown
an imaginative means of reconciling
realism to ideas. Instead of scrubbing
his novel of characters, dialogue, and
detail—or calling attention to their
artifice through metafictional bul-
letins—he outsources the world-
building to his protagonist. It is Abby,
after all, who constructs the mne-
Erich Schwartzel Hugo Vickers Philip Taubman Silvia Vasquez-Lavado monic house, piece by piece, with the
poetic verve of a novelist. It is she
who fractures her voice into multi-
ple characters and sets them in dia-
logue with one another. The reader’s
fear that these scenes conceal a rhe-
torical function, that they are mere
morality plays, is defused by the fact
Bill Millikan Soyoung Lee Stephen Kotkin that they plainly are—but the person
For m ore information visit: svauth orsfest .org
4
Sonoma Valley Authors Festival is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization Tax ID #84-4846165
Heidi Julavits, “Choose Your Own Rachel
Cusk,” New York, March 6, 2017.
18
giving and seeking counsel is Abby
herself.
She is the one standing outside her
life, trawling its scenes for themes,
using people as models of ideologies,
searching for sermons under every dec-
orative stone. The extent to which her
indiscriminate free association of ideas,
people, and things feels more or less
recognizable would seem to suggest
that everything contemporary read-
ers find suspicious in novels is actu-
ally happening all the time—in the
intrinsically didactic life of the mind.
The inner novelist in each of us has no
trouble synthesizing the tangible and
the abstract into vibrant intellectual
dramas. This is practically all that the
mind of a thinking person does.
Riker shows his hand only once, in
that italicized opening paragraph of
stage direction, breaking the fourth
wall before the fourth wall (or any wall,
for that matter) has been constructed.
But it’s nevertheless this other mind
lurking behind the scenes—one that
is different enough from its narrator
to suggest dramatic irony—that cau-
tions the reader against taking Abby’s
conclusions at face value. She believes
that this long, dark night of the soul
is a “final accounting,” and antici-
pates that it will be a turning point in
her life:
I will worry less about my own sta-
bility and security, worry less about
Ali, who is amazing and competent.
I will treat myself better, and by
extension will treat others better. I
will have a brave mind. Keynes was
never a parent. He looked for cour-
age in other places, found generos-
ity in thinking. It’s what he came
to thinking for. To solve problems
but also to live in the generosity
of the mind and the imagination.
That is not economics or scholar-
ship, that is just being a thinking
person in the world.
Anyone who has tried to house their
entire life within the confines of a
form—an idea, a theory—knows all
too well the futility of the task. Just
as economic theories break down
in the dynamics of the real market,
and the mind’s polyphonic potential
narrows to a single spoken voice, so the
purity of any abstract concept becomes
brittle and untenable when imposed
upon the complexity of waking life.
This is, in the end, the fundamental
paradox of being “a thinking person
in the world.” If The Guest Lecture is
trying to persuade us of anything, it is
.
not any particular idea but rather the
value of the interior drama itself—and
the heroic efforts required of those
who are willing to attend to it.
The New York Review
 Laughs and Smiles
The Portraitist:
Frans Hals and His World
by Steven Nadler.
University of Chicago Press,
365 pp., $35.00
Frans Hals clearly had an eye for faces,
but he doesn’t seem to have been very
interested in turning it on himself.
Unlike his great contemporary Rem-
brandt van Rijn, whose some eighty
self-portraits comprise a richly in-
ventive visual memoir extending from
his young manhood to the year of his
death, Hals is generally credited with
just two, one of which survives only
in copies. The lost original, probably
painted in the 1640s when he was in
his mid-sixties, appears to be the sin-
gle occasion on which he devoted a
canvas solely to his own features. The
other self-portrait is a small image in
a work with ostensibly more ambitious
aims in view: Officers and Sergeants of
the St. George Civic Guard (1639), the
last of the grand civic guard paintings
with which Hals had first established
his reputation more than two decades
earlier. Peering over the shoulder of an
ensign in the upper-left-hand corner
of the canvas, this Hals is simply one
member of the company, his marginal
placement and muted coloring affirm-
ing his subordination to the whole (see
illustration on page 21).
If this small head and torso in fact
represent the artist—and like virtually
everything else in his personal history,
even this sighting remains a matter
of conjecture—then it’s a fitting em-
blem of the dilemma that confronts his
would-be biographer. Hals may have
become famous for his lifelike por-
traits, but the only way to depict his
own life, Steven Nadler suggests in The
Portraitist, is to paint a picture of the
social world in which he was embed-
ded. As Nadler acknowledges, this is
a book whose subject “all too often . . .
disappear[s] from view.”
Whether Hals’s reluctance to serve
as his own model was a matter of tem-
perament or his financial situation is
impossible to say: self-portraits, after
all, don’t pay for themselves. The writ-
ten record does little to remedy the
problem, especially when it comes to
conveying a sense of what he was like.
“Other than the paintings,” Nadler ob-
serves, “we have nothing by Hals’s own
hand: no diary, no letters, no written
documents whatsoever,” and the few
anecdotes that have come down to us
are of dubious provenance. In this re-
spect Hals’s story—or more precisely,
his lack of one—most closely resembles
that of another elusive Dutch painter,
Johannes Vermeer, a similarity Nadler
registers when he cites John Michael
Montias’s “masterful study” of the Delft
artist, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of
Social History (1989), as a model for his
METROPOLI TAN MUSE UM OF ART
own work. As with Vermeer, the biogra-
pher of Hals is compelled to reconstruct
his life from documents primarily tes-
tifying to the activity of others.
Like Vermeer, too, Hals owes the
beginning of his present reputation
to the pioneering work of the radical
nineteenth-century French journal-
ist and art critic Étienne-Joseph-
Théophile Thoré, better known as
March 23, 2023
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Frans Hals: Merrymakers at Shrovetide, circa 1616–1617
Thoré-Bürger, whose enthusiastic
promotion of both painters helped to
spark their modern revival. But un-
like “the Sphinx of Delft,” as Thoré-
Bürger famously dubbed Vermeer, Hals
needed to be rescued less from the
neglect of the intervening centuries
than from their faint contempt.
Arnold Houbraken’s influential com-
pendium of artists’ biographies, The
Great Theater of Dutch Painters (1718–
1721), merely named Vermeer in passing,
and subsequent commentaries failed
to do even that. When it came to Hals,
however, Houbraken spun an entertain-
ing tale of how the drunken artist was
plucked from the tavern to dash off a
portrait for an unknown visitor, only
to be outclassed when the stranger
proceeded to paint him in turn. The
tale, which culminates in Hals’s dis-
covery that he has been engaged in a
pictorial contest with the masterful
Anthony van Dyck, is almost certainly
apocryphal. So too, for all we know,
is Houbraken’s claim that Hals was
often “deep in his cups”—a claim that
may owe more to the number of ves-
sels being drained in his paintings
than to the amount of alcohol he con-
sumed. Still, the idea that the artist’s
personal habits were as loose as his
brushwork proved irresistible, espe-
cially when such brushwork fell out
of fashion in the eighteenth century.
According to Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Hals might have surpassed Van Dyck,
had he only possessed “a patience
in finishing.”
M eanwhile, some basic facts were
lost to history, if they were ever
recorded in the first place. We still
don’t know, for instance, whether the
future portraitist was born in 1582 or
1583, let alone whether his parents,
who apparently emigrated from Ant-
werp to Haarlem sometime in 1586,
were Catholic or Protestant, despite
the interminable religious conflicts
that were roiling Northern Europe
at the time. Like many others who
fled north in those years, the family
may well have left Antwerp because
they could no longer worship as they
pleased after the city fell to the Span-
ish in 1585. But the evidence is incon-
clusive, and though Nadler devotes
considerable attention to the shifting
political and confessional allegiances
of both Antwerp and Haarlem during
Hals’s lifetime, the artist’s own faith
remains as obscure as his parents’.
There is no record of his baptism,
nor were any banns recorded for his
marriage to Anneke Harmensdoch-
ter in 1610—the same year, as it hap-
pens, in which he first figured on the
rolls of the Haarlem guild as a mas-
ter painter. Like Anneke, who died in
1615, the painter’s second wife, Lys-
beth Reyniersdochter, apparently came
from a Dutch Reformed family, but
the banns for that marriage in 1617
merely identify the groom as “from
Antwerp.” What we do know, at least by
inference, is that the couple were quite
well acquainted by the time of the wed-
ding, since Lysbeth gave birth to their
first child, a daughter named Sara, nine
days later. Eleven more children fol-
lowed in rapid succession, beginning
with a boy named after his father born
approximately a year after Sara.
Indeed, among the more documented
facts about Hals—as well as the more
salient—is the size of his family. Of
the fifteen children from his two mar-
riages, ten were still living in 1650, in-
cluding five sons who likewise took up
the profession of painter. But while it’s
widely assumed that they trained with
their father, the identity of Hals’s own
master is at best a matter of informed
speculation. Nadler opts for another
Flemish emigrant, Karel van Mander,
whose present reputation primarily
rests on his authorship of the Schilder-
Boeck (1604), a survey of painters from
antiquity through the sixteenth cen-
tury that did for the art of Germany
and the Netherlands what Vasari had
done for that of Italy.
Though the first edition of the book
makes no mention of Hals, a biograph-
ical sketch of Van Mander appended
to a posthumous edition of 1618 lists
“Frans Hals, portrait painter of Haar-
lem,” among the late author’s pupils,
and at least two contemporaries ap-
pear to have endorsed the claim. To a
modern eye, Hals’s vibrant portraits
would seem to have little in common
with the mannerist history paintings
turned out by Van Mander, but the lat-
ter’s praise of “the great Titian” offers
a possible lineage for the future por-
traitist’s brushwork, especially since
Van Mander also singled out the Ve-
netian master as the best exemplar
of the so-called rough (rouw) style for
which Hals was later celebrated.
If Hals did learn his trade from
Van Mander, however, it seems clear
that the older man would only have
lamented how the younger one chose—
or was compelled—to practice it. Like
most theorists of the era, Van Mander
ranked portraiture among the lower
genres of painting, regarding it a poor
substitute for the classical and biblical
subjects that had traditionally consti-
tuted the pinnacle of the art. The trou-
ble, as he reluctantly acknowledged,
was that the Netherlands afforded
“little work” of the kind required to
train aspiring painters in the higher
aspects of their calling. Lacking both
aristocratic and church patronage, in
other words, but with a burgeoning
middle class eager to see themselves
memorialized, those who hoped to earn
their living by the brush all too often
ended up by taking what he termed
“this side-road of art (that is: portrait
painting from life).”
What Van Mander didn’t say, but
what the evidence gathered here
suggests, is that making a comfort-
able income by such means was far
from guaranteed, even for a supremely
gifted artist like Hals. Nadler’s own
assessment of the situation is care-
fully hedged:
A relatively successful professional
portrait painter in the middle of
the seventeenth century who was
able to keep a steady flow of busi-
ness could count on earning up to
several thousand guilders per year,
19
 making him (or her) fairly well-off
by contemporary standards.
Elsewhere, Nadler further compli-
cates that judgment by making clear
that the price an individual portrait
might fetch could vary widely, depend-
ing as much on the means of the buyer
and local economic conditions as on
the skill of the painter. Portraiture
might represent a “side-road,” but
the route was crowded: packed not
only with all those Dutch citizens
who hoped to have their likenesses
recorded but with the many trained
artists prepared to satisfy them.
N adler partly makes up for his elu-
sive subject by filling his pages
with brief sketches of these competi-
tors, as well as of contemporaries who
specialized in other genres, like land-
scape or genre painting. But the econ-
omy of the Netherlands and especially
of Haarlem in the period occupies him
almost as much as artistic develop-
ments, and for very good reason: if
there is one fact about Hals for which
we have abundant evidence—apart,
of course, from the artistry visible in
the paintings themselves—it is the
lifelong precariousness of his finances.
No archival documents figure more
routinely in The Portraitist than the
records of the painter’s indebtedness.
A suit filed in the summer of 1616 de-
manding payment for two paintings
he had presumably acquired for resale
was suspended when the court learned
that Hals had departed for Antwerp.
But beginning with another suit for
overdue pay and expenses from the
nursemaid with whom the recently
widowed artist had left his two sur-
viving children during that sojourn, the
bills mount steadily, as if determined
to outpace even the remarkable growth
of his second family.
Among the items for which he was
taken to court for nonpayment between
1624 and 1630 were a fur jacket (three
guilders and six stuivers), butter and
cheese (seven guilders), bread (five guil-
ders and seventeen stuivers), and shoes
(five guilders and five stuivers)—not
to mention the twenty guilders in un-
specified wages and expenses for which
his wife was sued in 1626, the four guil-
ders for “delivered goods” in 1629, or the
eleven guilders and seventeen stuivers
he apparently owed a workman of some
sort that same year. (A skilled laborer
in the first half of the seventeenth cen-
tury typically earned about one guilder
a day, the approximate equivalent, Na-
dler reports, of $60 now.)
The ledger for the 1630s is little bet-
ter: twenty-three guilders and seven-
teen stuivers for bread, ninety guilders
jointly owed with his brother for an ox,
even a paltry four stuivers (less than
a quarter of a guilder) in unpaid dues
to the Guild of Saint Luke. There were
further bills for linen, shoes, and un-
paid rent in the 1640s—unlike many
painters at the time, the Halses never
owned their own home—and from
the baker and butcher again, as well
as from a local tavern keeper, in the
1650s. (Nadler observes that the latter
kind of debt is surprisingly rare for
someone supposedly addicted to alco-
hol.) On a number of these occasions,
Hals appears to have compounded
his problems by failing to show up in
court, but he did settle an overdue bill
for which a baker was demanding pay-
20
ment in 1654—a whopping two hun-
dred guilders—with a consignment of
furniture and paintings that included
one by his own hand, as well as two
by his sons.
Though that transaction bears an
eerie resemblance to a better-known
exchange that took place in Delft some
two decades later, the resemblance
is misleading—and not because the
baker’s bill for which Vermeer’s widow
surrendered two of her late husband’s
paintings was even more staggering
than the Halses’. (At over seven hun-
dred guilders, Montias reported, it
amounted to the largest such debt he
had ever seen in a Delft inventory.)
Frans Hals: Pieter Cornelisz van der Morsch, circa 1616
Married into a prosperous family and
with the apparent support of a wealthy
patron, Vermeer seems to have been
relatively immune from financial wor-
ries until the last years of his life, when
war with France triggered a sudden
collapse in the Dutch economy.
Hals had no such luck—though he
also began with an upwardly mobile
marriage, his first wife’s relatives made
little effort to help, even while she was
alive—and the repeated economic
downturns sparked by the Anglo-Dutch
Wars seem not so much to have occa-
sioned his difficulties as intensified
them. The formidable size of his fam-
ily, several of whom ran up debts of
their own, obviously didn’t help. It fits
the story the surviving documents ap-
pear to tell that The Portraitist’s index
has a separate entry under its subject’s
name—the only one of its kind—for
“Hals, Frans, financial problems of.”
A nd then, of course, there are the
paintings. If it’s really true, as the
old maxim has it, that every painter
paints himself, then Hals’s portraits
and occasional genre paintings betray
remarkably little of the anxiety and
gloom that the archival record might
lead one to expect. On the contrary:
among the characteristics for which
his work has been justly celebrated
is its cheerful animation—a charac-
teristic perhaps best epitomized by
the picture popularly known as The
Laughing Cavalier (1624) but clearly
visible in many others as well. Nadler’s
claim that “Hals’s oeuvre . . . may con-
tain more laughs and smiles than that
of any other painter in history” is prob-
ably impossible to verify, but it cer-
tainly feels true to the accumulated
impression that oeuvre produces on
the viewer. Though a number of the
paintings show figures deliberately
engaged in comic performances, the
buoyant energy they communicate de-
rives as much from the artist’s style as
from the occupation of his models. As
one of his early subjects, the humanist
scholar Theodorus Schrevelius, later
wrote, “There is in his art of painting
such a force and life” that “all of his
portraits . . . seem to breathe and live.”
Something of that stylistic energy
is already evident in the first of Hals’s
militia pieces, despite the formal con-
straints of the genre. The men who
gather around the well-stocked table in
Officers and Sergeants of the St. George
Civic Guard (1616) may display only the
faintest of smiles, but their individu-
alized features and the dynamism of
their poses, as one prepares to carve
the roast while another turns as if to
address his neighbor and a third twists
in his chair to face the viewer, pro-
vide intimations of still livelier images
to come. These were Hals’s own offi-
cers—he had joined Haarlem’s Saint
George Civic Guard in 1612—and his
spirited handling of the assignment
evidently met with favor, prompting
four more such commissions from
Haarlem and one from Amsterdam in
the decades to follow. (It’s his third
depiction of the Saint George Guard
that includes the small self-portrait.)
For reasons that remain typically ob-
scure, the arrangement with Amster-
dam, begun in 1633, dissolved several
years later in acrimony and lawsuits,
when Hals insisted on returning to
Haarlem before the painting was fin-
ished. But the fact that the company
had taken the unusual step of look-
ing outside the city’s limits when they
wished to memorialize themselves tes-
tifies to the artist’s growing reputa-
tion. If you wanted something bold and
up to date in civic guard portraiture,
these men seem to have known, you
sent for Frans Hals.
To a modern eye, however, the por-
traitist’s signature style may be even
easier to discern in other early works,
like the large genre painting that the
Metropolitan Museum in New York
calls Merrymakers at Shrovetide (circa
1616–1617; see illustration on page 19)
or the portrait of Pieter Cornelisz van
der Morsch (1616) that now hangs in
the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pitts-
burgh. Though only the subjects of the
former are anonymous, both works
depict people jokily pretending to be
someone else. Van der Morsch, who
belonged to a Leiden branch of the
literary and dramatic societies known
as rederijckerkamers, or Chambers
of Rhetoricians, poses as the witty
fool Piero, while the Shrovetide pic-
ture includes two stock figures from
the comic stage: Hans Worst, whose
eponymous sausage dangles from his
cap, and a red-faced Peeckelhaering
(pickle-herring) suitably attired with a
garland of salted fish, eggs, and a pig’s
foot, among other suggestive items.
The two men form an amorous triangle
with a rosy-cheeked and richly dressed
blonde—probably a boy in drag, ac-
cording to the museum’s website—as
other energetic revelers crowd onto
the surface of the canvas around them.
A herring also figures prominently
in the Van der Morsch portrait, whose
subject looks wryly at the viewer while
gesturing with a large specimen: the
very embodiment of the Dutch expres-
sion iemand een bokking geven—to
give someone a herring, or ridicule
them. Nadler reports that the artist
had registered as a “friend” of the
Haarlem rederijckerkamer, and if the
Metropolitan Museum is right to sug-
gest that the Shrovetide merrymakers
were probably members of the local
painters’ guild, who traditionally en-
gaged in such theatrics during Mardi
Gras, then Hals may have been directly
implicated in their comic performance
too. But whatever the biographical
CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART, PITTSBURGH/ALAMY
facts, the vivid colors and fluid brush-
strokes by which these figures appear
to have been brought swiftly to life
make their own claims to carniva-
lesque exuberance.
S cholars have speculated that Hals
may owe this loose handling of
paint to the example of Flemish art-
ists like Jacob Jordaens and even the
young Van Dyck, whose work he would
have seen on his visit to Antwerp in
the summer of 1616—his only doc-
umented journey outside the Dutch
The New York Review
 Republic. Rubens’s studio, with which
both Jordaens and Van Dyck were con-
nected, would have been an obvious
stop while he was there. Of even more
interest, perhaps, than the finished
canvases produced by Rubens’s work-
shop were the small studies known as
tronies: anonymous heads, typically
based on live models, whose sketch-
like character may have helped inspire
the “rough” style for which Hals later
became famous.
Though Nadler concludes that the
portraitist “must have returned from
Antwerp a changed man artistically,”
that aesthetic education necessarily
remains, like so much of his story, hy-
pothetical, with some scholars arguing
that Hals developed his characteristic
brushstrokes before he headed south.
What does seem clear, however, is that
he was likelier to give his brush freer
rein, at least at first, in genre paintings
such as Merrymakers at Shrovetide, or
the still more loosely handled images
of anonymous persons he turned out
in the 1620s and 1630s: Young Man
and Woman in an Inn (1623) and The
Smoker (circa 1623–1625), for instance,
both also at the Met, or the small tronie
of a tousle-haired and rosy-cheeked
child, his lips parted in a charming
smile, that tradition has dubbed the
Laughing Boy (circa 1625). (The Mau-
ritshuis in The Hague, which acquired
the latter picture in 1968, character-
izes it as “the most engaging laugh in
seventeenth-century Dutch painting.”)
Presumably produced on spec, such
pictures typically sold for lesser sums
than commissioned portraits, but
they also allowed the artist to exper-
iment—and show off—without fear of
offending a difficult client. It’s often
assumed that the very looseness of
such pictures had the added virtue of
making them faster to paint, though
the art historian Walter Liedtke irri-
tably dismissed this as a “Romantic
notion” that confused the impression
of spontaneity with the evidence to be
gleaned from the layers of pigment by
which Hals patiently built up an image.
To illustrate his point, Liedtke jux-
taposed another famous Hals paint-
ing from the 1630s known as Malle
Babbe with a clumsier version by a
seventeenth-century imitator, whose
attempt at Hals’s brushwork clearly
lacks the nervous energy of the orig-
inal.1 Malle Babbe is the name of a
type, like Mad Meg, and Nadler reports
that the picture, whose subject bares
her teeth in something closer to a gri-
mace than a smile, is thought to be
the last of Hals’s genre paintings: a
classification presumably supported,
though Nadler does not say so, by the
fact that the owl perched on the wom-
an’s shoulder was a common emblem
of folly. At the same time, the discov-
ery that there actually was an inmate
FR ANS HALS MUSEU M, HAAR LEM, THE NE THE RLANDS
called Malle Babbe—nicknamed “the
Witch of Haarlem”—in the local work-
house raises the intriguing possibility
that the picture is also in some sense a
portrait, though probably not one com-
missioned—or paid for—by its model.
And it’s hardly the only Hals paint-
ing that hovers ambiguously on that
border. If we couldn’t identify Van der
Morsch, for instance, we might well view
his portrait as an image of a generic
Piero, while Young Man and Woman
1
Walter Liedtke, Frans Hals: Style and Sub-
stance (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011),
pp. 27–28.
March 23, 2023
in an Inn, now officially classified as a
genre painting, was once called Joncker
Ramp and His Sweetheart, because ob-
servers thought they recognized a man
named Pieter Ramp from another of
Hals’s civic guard portraits. Though
art historians sometimes imply that
you can distinguish the portrait of an
unknown person from a genre paint-
ing by the degree to which its subject
is individualized, the principal differ-
ence for Hals was whether his sitter
was footing the bill.
H als’s paying customers represented
a range of occupations, from busi-
ness owners and civic leaders to intel-
lectuals and fellow artists, and no one,
including the portraitist, seems to have
worried whether they were Catholic or
Protestant, or which sect of Protestant-
ism among the varieties on offer had
attracted their sympathies. (Unlike
Rembrandt, however, Hals does not ap-
Frans Hals: Officers and Sergeants of
the St. George Civic Guard, 1639 (detail);
the center figure is believed to be a
self-portrait of Hals
pear to have painted any Jews, though
Nadler, who has previously written on
Rembrandt’s Jewish connections, re-
fuses to rule out the possibility.2) But
in one respect at least, the political
and sectarian conflicts of the period
may have been good for Hals’s balance
sheet. Though Haarlem had long been
renowned for its breweries, the crack-
down on religious toleration that fol-
lowed the triumph of the Orangist party
in 1619 meant that the Catholics who
had previously dominated the industry
were forced to relinquish their place
among the city’s elite to a new set of
Calvinist brewers, who chose to mark
their arrival by having their pictures
painted. As John Singer Sargent dis-
covered almost three centuries later,
members of a newly ascendant class
are among a portraitist’s best clientele.
In Hals’s case, as in Sargent’s, the re-
sult could be multiple orders from the
same family, particularly if the head
of the household, who often went first,
was pleased with his likeness. Hals’s
single biggest source of commissions
was the wealthy Olycan family, which
came into civic prominence in Haar-
lem after 1619, and whose patriarch,
Pieter Jacobsz, had made his fortune
as a grain merchant before acquiring
several breweries. Like Sargent, who
undertook a pair of portraits commem-
orating the silver wedding anniversary
of the Jewish art dealer Asher Wert-
heimer and his wife before going on
to paint ten more pictures of the clan,
2
Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2003); reviewed in
these pages by Benjamin Moser, August
14, 2008.
Hals began his immensely productive
association with the Olycans—Nadler
counts a total of eighteen portraits,
either of individuals or a group—with
pendants of a wedded couple: not the
paterfamilias in this case, but his re-
cently married son Jacob and his wife.
When the young Olycan and his
bride posed for these formal images
in 1625, Hals still tended to execute his
portraits with an attention to detail
notably absent from contemporane-
ous genre paintings like The Smoker,
and apart from a few passages in the
couple’s elegant costumes, there is rel-
atively little evidence of the animated
brushwork we have learned to identify
with the Hals style. By the time Jacob’s
Small-group
parents sat for their own portraits at
the end of the decade, however, that cultural tours
had clearly begun to change. The can-
vas on which Hals recorded his first
for people passionate
image of the patriarch—the couple about literature and
ordered a second set ten years later—
has since been cut down, but even the the arts.
truncated version makes a powerful
impression: one that manages to con-
vey both the imposing presence of this Thinking Space, Drinking Space:
solidly built man and the sheer vitality Paris Café Culture
he shares with the artist. May 2023
Pieter Jacobsz’s slightly parted lips
are something of a Hals trademark, giv-
ing his faces a potential mobility that Quiet Revolutions:
more conventional portraits lack—a Literature in Quebec
mobility they obviously share with the June 2023
brush of the painter. Unlike some of
the artist’s other memorable subjects,
however, the wealthy beer magnate is
Toronto Pursuits Seminars
clearly not about to smile: he looks University of Toronto
far more likely to issue an order than July 2023
to break out in laughter. Nor is there
any of that self-conscious delight in Into the Wild in
the act of posing that seems to char-
Newfoundland
acterize The Laughing Cavalier, for
instance—a work that despite its September 2023
traditional title was probably meant
as a portrait of the textile merchant Of Sagas and Storytelling:
Tieleman Roosterman—or the delib- Literary Iceland
erate swagger with which another tex- October 2023
tile merchant, Willem van Heythuysen,
appears to entertain both himself and
the artist in the first of two portraits Everyday Beauty:
Hals painted of him. Arts of Japan
We can’t really know, of course, November 2023
whether the faintly ironic effect of
the first portrait (circa 1625) is inten- Coming up in 2024:
tional, let alone whether the sitter was
in on the joke. But the impression of Amsterdam and Brussels, Paris,
a shared understanding is difficult to Morocco, Santa Fe and more
shake, as it is in the second picture for
which Van Heythuysen posed (circa
1638), this time tilting back at a rakish
angle in his chair, legs casually crossed
and a riding whip in his hands.
As Nadler remarks at the outset,
“Hals’s people . . . are fully present,”
and this remains the case whether
they engage us with the solemnity of
a Pieter Olycan or the broad smiles Learn more about our tours
of the evidently inebriated couple and get detailed itineraries at
in Young Man and Woman in an Inn.
Neither introspective and soulful like
ClassicalPursuits.com
many of Rembrandt’s figures nor ab-
sorbed in their tasks like Vermeer’s, info@classicalpursuits.com
they are instead eminently social crea- 1-844-378-2869
tures, who call forth a corresponding
responsiveness in the viewer. We may
not know much about the man who
painted them, but by eliciting what
Ernst Gombrich famously termed the
“beholder’s share”—by compelling us,
that is, to step back and reconstruct
his people out of the broad strokes
and dabs on the canvas before us, as
.
if we were participating in the act of
creation—the very style that brings
Hals’s people to life allows us to feel
something of his presence too.
21

If I Survive You
by Jonathan Escoffery.
MCD /Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
260 pp., $27.00
On July 16, 1975, Jamaica’s conserva-
tive newspaper, The Daily Gleaner,
published an ominous headline para-
phrasing Prime Minister Michael
Manley, the leader of the leftist Peo-
ple’s National Party: “No One Can Be-
come a Millionaire Here—PM .” In an
ill-tempered story, the paper fizzed
with fury at the heresy of the prime
minister’s anti-individualistic and an-
ticapitalist vision for the country, re-
porting that his advice to “anyone who
wants to become a millionaire in Ja-
maica” was to “remember that planes
depart five times daily to Miami.” Man-
ley, The Daily Gleaner concluded some
months later, was “the most messianic
figure in Jamaica’s political history”;
he had courted Fidel Castro and bra-
zenly aligned Jamaica with Commu-
nist Cuba.
A few days after the “breaking
news” about millionaires, Manley felt
the need to clarify that his criticism
had been specifically directed at those
whining upper- and middle-class com-
patriots who were “motivated only by
the selfish desire to become a mil-
lionaire overnight” and who “refused
to regard themselves as part of the
Jamaican society and owing an obli-
gation of service like the rest of us.”
His qualifications came too late; many
middle- class families had already
packed their bags. Those leaving the
Caribbean island joined thousands who
had previously made the roughly six-
hundred-mile journey, just two hours
by plane. Indeed, so many Jamai-
cans decamped to South Florida and
to Miami in particular that the city
quickly earned the sobriquet “Kings-
ton 21,” making it an honorary district
of Jamaica’s capital.
In If I Survive You, Jonathan Escof-
fery’s stunning debut work of fiction,
the parents of Delano and Trelawny
are among those well-heeled refugees
who have turned their backs on Ja-
maica. As a young man the boys’ father,
Topper, luxuriated in the kind of com-
fort befitting the only son of uptown
Kingston parents. Such an individual,
Topper informs us, has options: “You
can take Daddy’s Datsun or Mummy’s
new ’68 VW and fly past street urchins
who sell bag juice and ackee at red
lights down Hope Road.” Even though
those options may have been limited
by Manley’s focus on the island’s poor
“sufferahs” and his determination to
establish a more equitable society,
Topper and his wife, Sanya, were still
privileged enough to embark on one
of those five daily flights.
But they didn’t flee the country out
of antipathy to the hard-line Commu-
nist state they believed to be on its
way; they rushed to get out because
they feared for their safety. By the
mid-1970s Jamaica had become an
extraordinarily violent society. Even
the exponent of “One Love,” Bob Mar-
ley, was forced into exile in 1976 after
would-be assassins broke into his com-
pound with guns blazing. The wounded
reggae star was fortunate to escape
22
Far from Jamaica
Colin Grant
Jonathan Escoffery; illustration by Vivienne Flesher
with a bullet lodged in his arm, but
many others perished as the island
descended into anarchy and virtual
civil war, with politically motivated
gunmen responsible for hundreds of
murders.
Though in Escoffery’s fiction the
word on the street is that “mostly it
man who live in zinc house and home-
less who live in the gullies that dead,”
the threat is increasingly worrisome
to middle-class Jamaicans. From Man-
deville, a sleepy town in the center of
the country, Topper calls his parents
back in Kingston and learns:
Gunman lick down them door and
tie up you mummy and daddy, and
thief off them money and jew-
elry and everything. Daddy them
pistol-whip and you mummy . . .
God knows how them feel her up
so, even when she old to rass. But
him tell you say it could have gone
worse.
Topper is not so sanguine; he’s galva-
nized to seek a coveted visa to the US.
The escalating violence marks a grim
turn of events, but there’s an ease, ex-
uberance, and energy about Escoffery’s
writing, and despite its darkness it
is thrilling to read. If I Survive You is
a collection of eight interconnected
short stories, one of which, “Under
the Ackee Tree,” won The Paris Re-
view’s 2020 Plimpton Fiction Prize.
Escoffery’s prose, by turns muscular
and delicate, is vivid and expressively
true to the Jamaican voice, especially
to the bilingual ability of the middle
classes (Topper is an exception) who,
when off the island in Miami, savor
their accents and code switch, when
it suits them, from standard English
to patois.
The chapters can be read as stand-
alone stories. The book, though, feels
like a novel, partly because the central
characters, Topper and his sons, appear
throughout; Sanya is vividly depicted
but has only a supporting part. Each
story is told from a particular charac-
ter’s perspective, so the reader gains a
sense of their progression over more
than twenty years. The overarching
narrative, then, is not chronological;
it’s episodic, zipping back and forth in
time and occasionally repeating infor-
mation that has appeared elsewhere.
A s suggested by the title, this is a
tale of survival. These children of
immigrants are their parents’ experi-
ment in surviving in a foreign land and
culture. Like many immigrant parents,
Topper is almost exclusively concerned
with financial security; he doesn’t at-
tend to his sons’ emotional health. In
his shamelessly Darwinian approach
to survival, there’s no room for soft-
ness or empathy for others, though
he is given to bouts of sentimentality.
The overriding theme of If I Survive
You—migrants struggling to improve
their circumstances and wrestling with
new identities, minimum-wage poverty,
and the threat of natural disasters—is
echoed in a number of recent collec-
tions of short stories, perhaps most
notably Bryan Washington’s Lot (2019),
set in different districts of Houston in
the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
But in its tone and ability to freshly
conjure an underexplored world, If I
Survive You has more in common with
Drown (1996), Junot Díaz’s collection of
stories that range from the barrios of
the Dominican Republic to the bruis-
ing streets of New Jersey.
Escoffery grew up in a Jamaican
household in Miami, and in his book
he evokes the tug of nostalgia felt by
migrants. The younger son, Trelawny,
is born in the US and named after a
parish in Jamaica to remind his father
of home. Like many people around the
world, Jamaicans regularly undertake
internal migrations, moving from the
countryside to the capital and bring-
ing their country ways with them. But
the transfer to the US is of another
magnitude and presents unexpected
challenges. At one point, recounting
his experiences, Topper laments how
the Caribbean newcomers find that the
host culture is not so accommodating:
You miss walk down a road [in Ja-
maica] and pick Julie mango off
street-side. When you try pick
Miami street-side mango, lady
come out she house with rifle
and shoot your belly and backside
with BB . In the back of your Cutler
Ridge town house, you start try
grow mango tree and ackee tree
with any seeds you come by, but
no amount of water or fertilizer
will get them to sprout.
How to ensure against rejection
or at least to mitigate its effects is
a theme that pervades the book. One
solution might be to recreate home
when abroad. Ackee, Jamaica’s national
fruit and an essential ingredient of
the dish ackee and saltfish, serves as
a powerful metaphor for identity and
belonging. One morning Topper sits
his sons down to breakfast to
try teach them them culture to
make sure it survive. The tropi-
cal market on Colonial start carry
canned ackee . . . so you cook the
boys ackee and saltfish. . . . You see
this here, you say. The ackee grow
in a pod and it must open on it own
or else the ackee poison you. You
point to the picture on the can . . .
and it remind you that you never
eat ackee out of no can before.
Later in the story the older son, Del-
ano, seizes on ackee as a way to secure
a victory over Trelawny in their rivalry
for their father’s affection. Trelawny
may be more academically gifted, but
Delano’s emotional intelligence is
keener. He cements his status as favor-
ite when, as a young adult, he arranges,
much to his father’s delight (his “eye
start water”), for an ackee tree to be
transplanted to the family’s backyard.
The New York Review
 Trelawny, whose story is central to
the book, is bemused by the idea of
recreating Jamaica. Escoffery reflects
this in the choice of language used
by his characters: Topper speaks in a
heavy patois; Delano, his Jamaican-
born first son, is bilingual, flicking be-
tween American English and Jamaican
patois. But Topper notes disappoint-
edly that when Trelawny “start talk,
you can’ believe it: is a Yankee voice
come out.” Trelawny is keen to blend
in and dial down the difference be-
tween him and his classmates, chil-
dren of the host nation. In the aptly
titled opening story, “In Flux,” this
difference is brutally laid bare when,
on a career day at Trelawny’s school,
Topper (who has struggled to eke out
a living as a used car salesman and is
now a general contractor) attempts to
explain his job to the class. “When man
need dem bat’ room fix, is me get all
di plaster an’ PVC an’ t’ing,” he says in
broad, barely comprehensible patois.
It’s all too dizzyingly unsettling
for Trelawny, and the confusion over
identity doesn’t let up: it follows him
to college in the Midwest. There the
locals do not have a nuanced under-
standing of race; he is simply con-
sidered black, but he is not alone in
being racially reduced. He gravitates
toward undergraduates who reassure
themselves that though they might
originate from Mexico, China, or Ar-
gentina, they should be considered
white:
“Just because my mother is Jewish,
all of a sudden I’m treated like I’m
not White here.”
“Oh, you’re White.” The Mexican
places a sympathetic hand on the
brown-haired woman’s arm. “Don’t
worry.”
“Aw, you’re White, too,” she says,
returning the arm pat.
It’s at such moments that Escoffery’s
sly humor and finely calibrated dia-
logue come to the fore. The cultural
T opper and Sanya are relieved to
have escaped the financial uncer-
tainty and violence of Jamaica. But it’s
impossible to deny and difficult to re-
sist the call of home, even if it turns
out to be a siren song. On a trip to Ja-
maica for his parents’ funeral (they are
said to have died in a road accident,
but everyone knows the truth: gunmen
murdered them), Topper finds solace
in an act of fleeting sexual congress
with a local woman. A year later, fol-
lowing an unexpected pregnancy and
the birth of a child—though he ques-
tions whether he is really the father—
he feels compelled to return once more
to Jamaica and at least to assuage his
guilt with a bundle of cash. He arrives
at an inhospitable place with “shacks
made of lean-to zinc,” a shantytown
where “you can see don’ nobody here
have phone.” With an economy of writ-
ing that as the book progresses seems
increasingly to be a signature strength,
Escoffery paints a poignant picture
of pitiless poverty, crowned by the
child’s presentation to his father, as
notes, “Mom blamed the white rum,
the nights Dad disappeared, then re-
appeared reeking of debauchery. Dad
claimed she’d become too American-
ized in her expectations of marriage.”
The endpoint of separation and
divorce is soon reached and with it
comes the arrangement that the par-
ents should each take one of the boys.
Trelawny is then in the sixth grade; his
brother is four years older. Unsurpris-
ingly, their father chooses Delano. That
decision sows a seed of resentment
that will lead a decade later (after Tre-
lawny has graduated from college) to an
altercation between father and son and
an act of violence that prompts Top-
per to kick Trelawny out of his house.
The story “Odd Jobs” follows on
from this family cataclysm. By now
Sanya numbers among the returnees
who have gone back to Jamaica per-
manently. The unemployed Trelawny is
out of luck and out of sorts; he has no
choice but to live in his car, changing
parking spaces at the local shopping
center every few hours. He believes,

T here’s further discomfort and con-

fusion for the family over Amer-
ica’s racial hierarchy, which does not
fit the familiar Jamaican model. Not-
withstanding the fact that the vast
majority of Jamaica’s population is
black, few among the aspiring mid-
dle class would accept that descrip-
tion of themselves. Sanya, the boys’
snobbish mother (when she sucks her
teeth in displeasure, she produces a
sound “akin to industrial-strength
Velcro ripping apart”), claims to have
Jewish and Irish ancestors.
The belief that your social status de-
grades with too close an association
with Africa results in the kind of ge-
nealogical pretension that Zora Neale
Hurston skewered in “How It Feels to
Be Colored Me”: “I am the only Negro
in the United States whose grandfa-
ther on the mother’s side was not an
Indian chief.” When, in his final se-
mester as an undergraduate, Trelawny
questions his mother about their iden-
tity (“Are we Black?”), Sanya answers
with undisguised pride that “our last
name comes from Italy,” and what’s
more that their pedigree is even fur-
ther enhanced: “‘Your grandmother’s
father,’ and she lowers her voice to a
whisper when she says this, ‘may have
been an Arab.’”
Trelawny shifts through various
identities, trying each one on before
discarding it, as none seems to fit.
His features and cinnamon complex-
ion make it possible for him to have
a chameleonlike existence before he
is outed. At one school he hangs out
with the Puerto Rican boys, until their
suspicions are aroused by the fact that
he can’t speak Spanish. When he con-
fesses that his parents are from Ja-
maica, his Latino friend shoots back,
“Wait. You’re Black?” Later, Tre-
lawny is attacked by African Amer-
ican boys after being mistaken for
Puerto Rican; and later still, a white
colleague draws his attention to the
distinction between African American
and Caribbean:
At the warehouse where you work,
a White coworker asks you to help
him “nigger-rig a pallet.”
“Is that really the kind of thing
you want to say to me?” you ask
him.
“What do you care? You’re not
Black. You’re Jamaican,” he says.
complexities of race are further
demonstrated back in Jamaica when
Trelawny’s father, on a visit to the is-
he kneels in a rusted hovel on a blan-
ket of dirt and immediately sees two
things: “Him have your eyes, fi true,
land, drives to a mountainside ghetto so him must be yours. And that the
and is asked by a man guarding its en- baby dead from time.”
trance, “White man, you ’ave business The matrimonial deceit blankets
’ere?” Topper nearly laughs and ques- Topper’s marriage in an emotional
tions why he, a man of color, would be frost that threatens never to thaw.
described as white: “And him say, You Indeed, Sanya’s antipathy toward
the whitest man me ever see, and him her husband hardens with his un-
no say it with humor.” checked, feckless behavior. Trelawny
The Island
I swam without ceasing around the rocks
guarding the island, the looming black rocks
slick with surf. In sunlight they shone like
onyx, as if polished. In a storm they were flat
and dull as slate. I used to search for an opening
in the rocks, some small gap through which to
slip my body, in the hopes of finding calmer wa-
ters, because the seas were so choppy then, the
waves churning as if in anger, the foam roiling
up to the rock tips, but the rocks made a wall
around the island, a wall that seemed impene-
trable. I swam around the rocks with my
thrashing crawl—I was never a good swim-
mer—always wondering where my strokes
would take me, the sun like a deity watching my
slow progress, scratching its head and mutter-
ing, Why her, why here, swimming in circles? I
could never find a space in the rocks through
which the island was visible. I could only imag-
ine a place, wild with raw beauty, running with
springs and vines, where the flowers grew as
high as trees, the trees high as skyscrapers,
where horses galloped on the sand, horses ma-
jestic as clouds, leaving sand upturned behind
them like trails of sugar, which the waves would
wash over, wash away, where blue butterflies
and tropical birds dotted the flowers and trees
like confetti, and all the fruit I could bear to eat.
What a vision, this island. I swam around it for
years. If only I’d thought to swim away.
—Lauren K. Watel
though, that his fortunes will change
when he happens across a Craigslist
posting: “I’ VE NEVER HAD A BLACK
EYE . . .” In it an entitled college girl
named Chastity explains that she both
needs the bruise for a photo project
and wants to experience what it feels
like to be punched. The ad ends with
“sorry, no black guys.” But Trelawny
responds anyway because, he admits,
“I’d reached the point in my starvation
where personal ethics and phenotypic
traits couldn’t deter me.”
Off-the-scale stupidity, surely. The
warning bells should have rung at
every stage, but it’s a mark of Escof-
fery’s creative power that Trelawny’s
unlikely signing on for the gig feels
convincing, as it reveals his despera-
tion and lack of insight. This won’t end
well. After some hesitation at Chasti-
ty’s upscale apartment, he agrees to
her final plea: “You don’t even have to
use closed fists. Just slap me a little.”
On his second attempt, Chastity top-
ples over. Still, she wants it harder,
so he straddles her, tugs on her pony-
tail, and hits her “with certitude” until
“tears streaked her taut cheeks.” Tre-
lawny begins to worry that he’s gone
too far but then surprises himself with
what comes out of his mouth: “Do me
now.” Before Chasity can comply, her
parents walk through the door and
their violent response to what they
see is all too expected.
E scoffery’s exploration of the lure
and commodification of danger
among middle-class Americans stulti-
fied by their wealth is darkly funny and
unsettling. Growing up as the child of
Jamaican migrants to the UK, I recall
how those “blessed” relatives who went
to the US were often spoken of with
awe. America’s meritocratic culture
allowed them to fulfill their potential
and succeed, we were told, whereas the
UK’s environment stymied ambition.
General Colin Powell, whose parents
were Jamaican migrants to New York,
was celebrated as the personification
of that notion and embodiment of the
American dream. On September 26,
1995, The Times of London carried a
story that contrasted the general’s for-
tunes with those of his British cousins:
Mentally reclothe Colin Powell.
Remove that immaculate and

March 23, 2023 23

 On THE STEINWAY QUINTET
“A novella of genius.”
Geoffrey Wolff, Esquire
“Epstein’s vision of colliding worlds is disturbing,
moving, probing.”
Publishers Weekly
“A victorious tarantella to life. This expert writer’s greatest
talent is the ability to convey the peculiar anguish of being
Jewish, or black, or in any way repressed or oppressed,
without imposing on the reader his own first-person
experience, from which that ability derives. Epstein’s
transcendent eye looks with compassion on humanity as
a whole.”
The Washington Star
“A stunning piece of work. Epstein succeeds brilliantly in
illuminating the human predicament.”
The Florida Times-Union/Jacksonville Journal
“Pure hilarity, strong and wondrous, breathtaking and
heartbreaking … Epstein converts language into a sort of
music, the kind of lyricism one looks for and seldom finds
in literature.”
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
“Deft, original, and very funny … illuminates the mystery
of our common humanity and mortality, our means of
embracing neither the arid intellect nor the anarchic id, but
music—the imagination of the heart.”
Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review
On GOLDKORN TALES
“As his earlier fiction has demonstrated, Mr. Epstein is
an exuberant writer, whose ambitions to address the large
matters of history, and our moral and intellectual choices, is
matched by a commodious talent—an ease in story-telling
and a screwball feeling for comedy that counterpoints the
high seriousness of his subjects and invests them, at once,
with humanity and a sense of emergency…. Reason and
passion, death and life, the mundane and the momentous
come crashing brightly together. And by the end, as
Leib Goldkorn re-embraces music as a symbol of nature
and harmony, the reader, too, is moved to celebrate the
redemptive powers of the imagination—and to applaud
Mr. Epstein’s artistry and ambition.”
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Goldkorn Tales is timely and necessary because of
Epstein’s endlessly inventive, often astonishing reworking
of his major intertwined themes: the threat to the survival
of humanist culture and the supremacy—the eternal
supremacy and triumph—of the imagination.”
Boston Herald
“In one of contemporary literature’s most life-affirming works,
Leslie Epstein turns a musician’s story into music itself.”
Frederick Busch, The Georgia Review
“Epstein manages just the right balance of heart and
heartlessness that Rouault found for his terrifying pictures
of clowns. With Goldkorn we laugh out loud—or I did
anyway, but the laughter only underscores the pain from
the excruciating stitch in the world’s side…. There is a
deftness, a zest and a literary dexterity at work here, of the
highest order.… Marvelous, not only for him, but for us,
too, his grateful and admiring readers.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“This is the most luminous of Leslie Epstein’s fictions.
From its trio of interwoven novellas, a world emerges,
grave yet sportive and redeemed by the humane powers of
music. Goldkorn Tales evokes the spirit of the comic operas
of Mozart, antic collisions of farce harmonizing with a
rueful awareness of the brevity of human love.”
The Boston Globe
“A ghastly/comic parade of provocative juxtapositions,
haunting images, and hilarious moments.”
Kirkus Reviews
24
“Leslie Epstein has created an imaginative fiction that
satisfies a reader’s hunger for writing laced with adventure
and wit, moral fervor and surprise…. Goldkorn Tales is
a superb work. With its fascinating characters, rich story
line and dazzling writing, it possesses the most enchanting
elements of engaging fiction.”
San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
“Leslie Epstein, too, has his own transforming wand. He
is a man of high seriousness with a light, comic touch, a
literary Chaplin. Like Chaplin he roller-skates elegantly
along the edge of vast drops. His style is magical, his world
animate, a heroic struggle of petty Jobs against cosmic
assaults. His characters are full of wonder, determined
to transcend terror, public and private. His is a fiction of
complex dissonances and resolutions: artful harmonies,
mindful pleasures. What Goldkorn says of his recovered
flute might well be said of Leslie Epstein’s fiction: ‘I am still
filled with amazement that merely by blowing upon such
an instrument, and moving one’s fingers, a trained person
may produce such melodious, such lyrical sounds.’”
The Boston Observer
On ICE FIRE WATER
“[Leslie Epstein] has never been funnier, never more confident
about the possibilities of postmodernism, as he continues to
explore the horrific darkness just beneath Goldkorn’s individual
tsoris. The result is a ‘Goldkorn cocktail’ that successfully mixes
real characters with imagined ones, the beautiful with the ugly
and aspects of goodness with unspeakable evil…. In old age
Goldkorn retains his essential trademarks, but his insights
strike me as both wiser and more earned. The result is such a
delightful romp through Goldkorn’s century that I suspect
even those who have not followed his comic exploits will now
find themselves singing his tune; as for those who have loved
Goldkorn for decades, they will have additional reasons to crow
about having been right all along.… [With a] voice, seasoned by
sorrow, that turns quotidian woe into bursts of language and
dashes of poetry … playfulness of a high and delightful order…
Mr. Epstein gives Hollywood melodrama the comic send-up
it deserves and in the process turns the altogether predictable
into art.”
The Forward
“A fantastical, wickedly funny new novel.”
Elle
“A wise, heroically funny novel …[a] masterful linguistic
and critical performance. Earthy, resourceful and wistful at
once, in this novel Epstein once again skewers folly to the post.”
Publishers Weekly
“A masterly blend of the plangent and the preposterous…
Goldkorn transforms the visible into the risible … Ice Fire
Water abounds with inspired confusions and illusions…
irreverent as it is inventive, Ice Fire Water is a manic
screwball comedy and, if it ever made it onto a screen,
even the mosquitoes would guffaw.”
Los Angeles Times
“This trio of stories emphasizes funny over poignant—
and succeeds.”
Library Journal
“Endearing … hilarious…. Like the best fiction Ice Fire
Water works equally well on various levels. Readers will
either delight in Epstein’s games, and want to play along,
or they’ll read right through the allusions—literary and
otherwise—and be thrilled to have laughed out loud….
What distinguishes Ice Fire Water is its humor, and its
humanity. Epstein’s richness is unsurpassed.”
Chicago Tribune
“In this telling, [Leib Goldkorn] emerges as perhaps the most
indomitable Jew to walk through a lion’s den since Daniel.…
Epstein’s imagination is as fluid as quicksilver and as volatile
as magnesium.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Goldkorn is a man of unflagging ardor and thwarted dreams,
and his creator is a gutsy and gifted writer who reminds us that
comedy is just the flip side of tragedy … a master satirist.”
Booklist
“An expertly balanced mixture of hilarity and pain.... Like
a German-accented Salman Rushdie, Epstein is at play
among several vernaculars, gleefully scrambling cliches
and strewing glittering bits of wry humor with abandon …
[Goldkorn] is surely one of the liveliest nonagenarians in
fiction, detailing the decay of impoverished old age with a
kind of ridiculous dignity.”
San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
“Goldkorn, with all his dark fantasy and obsession, still has
comedy, as well as music, in his heart. Although a soul in
torment reaching the end of his years, Leib remains bowed
but unbroken.”
Agni Review
“Leslie Epstein’s new novel is a triumph…. Leib has never
appeared in better fettle than in this novel, where tragedy, farce,
history, culture, and the imagination overlap. The comic scenes
refute reality, celebrate the life force [and] the shining wonder of
Leib Goldkorn’s imagination.”
Bostonia
“Like Saul Bellow and Stanley Elkin before him, Epstein writes
an energetic, full-throated prose that finds maniacal vaudevillian
comedy in both everyday absurdity and historical catastrophe….
[Leib Goldkorn] is a delightfully outrageous creature, part
urbane New York sophisticate and part clownish schlemiel.”
Newsday
“Ice Fire Water is funny, sad, juvenile, wise, coarse, and
erudite. And it would fall flat—as flat as Leib’s flute-
playing—were it not for the voice of Leib Goldkorn, which
somehow combines a carnival barker’s campy energy
with genuine moral urgency and a poignant evocation of
human longing. It’s a voice that takes Leib Goldkorn’s 94
years’ worth of unconsummated desire and transforms it
into a remarkable triptych about eros and thanatos…. One
of the most exuberant and under-appreciated voices of
American fiction is back. It belongs to Leib Goldkorn….
Epstein is a master at creating characters intoxicated by
the idea that they can invent themselves and their world.”
Paul Gediman, Boston Review
“Meticulously crafted, Ice Fire Water is an uncompromising
philosophical meditation that conjoins a universal human
catastrophe with individual misfortune in order to
comprehend the unthinkable and demoralizing horrors
of history. The result is disarming and moving, an
always hilarious ‘cocktail’ of three novellas that manages
to adroitly fuse the past with the present as well as the
beautiful with the profane.”
Houston Chronicle
“Leib Goldkorn’s is a wonderful voice, which resonates
with rare sensitivity and remarkable insight. Ice Fire
Water is playful, hilarious and somber, all at the same
time. A great book.”
Aharon Appelfeld
“Ice Fire Water, in its ribald episodes and philosophical
agitations, fits on that very small shelf with Gogol’s tales.
Leslie Epstein conducts the tragic and the comic with
epic grandeur.”
Howard Norman
“Ice Fire Water is extremely funny and touching. A most
unusual and outstanding book.”
John Bayley
On LIEBESTOD
“The wily and seductive Epstein continues his impish
mixing of fact and fantasy as he picks up the story
of musician, rascal, and Holocaust survivor Leib
Goldkorn.... As his hero capers about like an escapee from
a Chagall painting, stumbling from crisis to crisis in this
deliriously ribald, shrewdly orchestrated, and covertly
hard-punching comic farce, Epstein blasts hypocrisy
and extremism, embraces life’s glory and absurdity, and
mourns humanity’s unending legacy of sorrows.”
Donna Seaman, Booklist
“An outrageous and poignant swan song.”
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Review
 Un-Gyve Press
www.un-gyvepress.com

March 23, 2023 25


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26
bemedalled military uniform. . . .
Dress him instead in a London
bus conductor’s drab grey garb and
imagine the man . . . punching the
bell above his head, and bawling
“Fare please!”. . . Had the chips
fallen slightly differently this,
not America’s adulation, could
well have been General Powell’s
fate. After all, this is more or
less how two of his first cousins
ended up.
Escoffery’s book challenges that
received truth. Despite all the ad-
vantages of life in North America,
his fictional Jamaican family seems
destined for skid row. Social mobil-
ity is possible, but the trajectory is
downward. The sense of an imminent
but avoidable emotional car crash and
our voyeuristic interest in it partic-
ularly informs the story “If He Sus-
pected He’d Get Someone Killed This
Morning, Delano Would Never Leave
His Couch.” The story centers on the
elder brother, who earlier in the book
starts a tree-surgery business and has
a family living in the suburbs. Delano
is undoubtedly a poster boy for the
possibility of successful transition
from immigrant to respected citizen.
But he, too, is down on his luck; his
business has been hit badly by the ca-
lamitous 2008 recession. With a natu-
ral disaster predicted, though, he spies
an opportunity.
The story, weighted with dread from
the start, opens with the news that
Key West residents are expected to
begin evacuating in advance of Hurri-
cane Irene. If Delano can get his con-
fiscated truck back from Rusty, the
garage owner, and a contract from
the manager of a housing complex to
fell its trees before the storm knocks
them onto cars and houses, then he’ll
be back in business.
The odds are against him. The com-
plex’s manager, Tina, has yet to for-
give Delano for spurning her previous
sexual advances. He must now seduce
her to get the contract, but after his
business pitch, Tina’s expression is
“that of someone watching a grown
man vomit on himself.” Worse still,
hell would freeze over before Rusty
would release the truck. Delano’s tree-
surgery crew also presents formida-
ble challenges, especially his deputy,
Nordic, who when it comes to violence
“doesn’t speak in metaphor.” His most
vexing problem is the fading possibil-
ity of rapprochement with his wife,
who reminds him, “You’re not a pro-
vider, Delano. You’re a liability.”
Delano’s life, so promising when
he was entering adulthood, has been
stunted by the fluctuating fortunes
of his business. He is disheartened
to recognize that he is at best a com-
promised, degraded soul who “dete-
riorated in the ways one can while
still waking up on the right side of
the dirt.” None of his difficulties seems
surmountable, yet “still an idea slips
through, despite his efforts to con-
tain it. An idea that he controls his
destiny.” Delano is obviously deluded.
He steals back the truck. But it turns
out to be dangerously faulty, resulting
in an accident with Mikey, one of his
spliffed-out workers: “He calls Mikey’s
name, but the truck’s arm is already
catapulting the bucket to its apex,
windmilling Mikey and his scream-
ing chain saw into a hemorrhaging
street.”
No, it doesn’t end well. And finally,
in the last story (which gives the book
its title), we’re back to moral corro-
sion with Trelawny scrolling through
Craigslist ads. There’s a feeling of déjà
vu, as he yet again defaults to an un-
wise choice in helping a couple of “at-
tractive young professionals,” Tim and
Morgan, both white, spice up their sex
life:
WATCH MY BOYFRIEND AND I . . .
We are looking for someone to
watch us in bed. Preferably 6'2"
or taller. . . . PREFERABLY BLACK .
Trelawny at least registers the jeop-
ardy this time: “You consider that
Morgan prefers Black guys because
when one goes missing no one both-
ers to look for him.” A black, second-
generation immigrant may have more
social stock than an economically chal-
lenged African American, but Trelawny
is not likely to fare any better in his
precarious position. And no, this also
doesn’t end well.
R eaders might shake their heads
and remind themselves that
Delano and Trelawny are the sons of
immigrants who, had they stayed in
Jamaica, were destined for comfort-
able, privileged lives. This unraveling
of fortunes is not supposed to happen
to people like them. But is it kismet,
or are their parents to blame?
Invariably among migrants there’s
a tension between nostalgic roman-
tics who dream of returning to their
homeland and hard-nosed pragmatists
determined to stay. A central question
posed by If I Survive You concerns the
emotional cost of displacement: Do fi-
nancial betterment and the prospect
of living the American dream outweigh
the long-term erosion of a sense of
one’s former self? Finally, can the deci-
sion by Topper and his sons to remain
in the US be considered a success?
Judgment comes at the end of
“Under the Ackee Tree.” In celebration
of his retirement, Topper summons
those members of his family who are
still on reasonable terms with him to
a poolside party at his Miami house.
The family’s tenacity and ability, albeit
compromised, to thrive on foreign soil
is symbolized by the fact that Topper’s
ackee tree has started to bear fruit.
On the night of the party, there’s a
hum of contentment reflected in the
seductive lights draped from the roof
of the pool deck and the old-time reg-
gae music playing in the background
as celebrants slam dominoes down on
the table. But the festive mood dark-
ens as “man start in on the white rum”
and Topper’s tongue loosens. In the
increasingly vexed discussion about
the state of Jamaica (“Boy, is Manley
mash up the country”), and the wisdom
of leaving the island (“Soft boy like
you [Trelawny] would’ve dead long-
time”), Topper offers a stinging assess-
ment of his “defective” younger son.
Trelawny walks out of the argument
burning with humiliation; he is soon
seen in silhouette under the ackee tree
with an ax in his hand, repeating to
himself:
I’ll chop down your tree.
I’ll chop down your tree.
I’ll chop down your fucking tree.
Trelawny wields the ax, but the vio-
lence is emblematic of the years of
frustration that not only he but also
his brother and father have felt; in
subsequent stories, the half-destroyed
ackee tree appears as a recurring motif
of the migrant family’s failure to thrive
in the US.
The bleakness of “Under the Ackee
Tree” runs right through to “If I Sur-
vive You.” Now, a few years after the
ax incident, the adult brothers are liv-
ing together, sharing once more the
house where they grew up. But both
are struggling: a dreadlocked Delano
dreams of making it big as a reggae
musician, although he doesn’t actually
have a band; Trelawny is a poorly paid
high school teacher who aspires, and
threatens, to buy out his brother from
the house, even though it is sinking.
They are rivals in desperation: Who
will sink and who will swim? Delano
strikes first when Trelawny is at work:
calculating that he needs his broth-
er’s room as a rehearsal space for his
future band, he clears out Trelawny’s
possessions, dumps them on the front
lawn, and changes the lock on the front
door. The pathos is rendered, as in
much of the book, with humor; the
backwash of pity at the naiveté of each
brother’s scheme for self-improvement
is tempered by the brio of Escoffery’s
writing. In this story, as in all the oth-
ers, there are echoes of how émigrés’
social capital disappears in their ad-
opted homelands, and how they and
their descendants are reduced to lives
of permanent jeopardy, of uprooted
temporariness.
As Trelawny’s options narrow for
evading homelessness and penury so,
too, his luck runs out and his judg-
ment falters. The paid nonparticipat-
ing observer of white middle-class
sexual coupling contemplates partici-
pation when lured back by Morgan to
the luxury apartment when her part-
ner is out of town. As he knocks back
cocktail after cocktail, the tequila
courses through Trelawny’s body, and
he drifts through time, feeling simul-
taneously that he’s on Morgan’s couch
and “diffused across the universe, on
an infinite trajectory.”
In this mental state, freed from his
troubles, he has a premonition of a
better future. He imagines escaping
both the prison that his life has be-
come in Miami and the path to self-
destruction he has forged for himself.
But it doesn’t last long. Trelawny soon
succumbs to the notion that escape is
.
a fantasy: “It occurs to you that people
like you—people who burn themselves
up in pursuit of survival—rarely sur-
vive anyone or anything.”
The New York Review
 An American Story
Bad Mexicans:
Race, Empire, and Revolution
in the Borderlands
by Kelly Lytle Hernández.
Norton, 372 pp., $30.00
In his 2005 book Ringside Seat to a
Revolution, the historian David Dorado
Romo chronicles the often garish man-
ner in which the Mexican Revolution—
one of the first mass uprisings of the
twentieth century—was consumed and
commodified by American spectators.
His account centers on his hometown
of El Paso, which, when large-scale hos-
tilities broke out in 1911, became awash
with journalists, photographers, and
filmmakers as well as thrill seekers and
tourists who posed for photographs
with Mexican insurgents across the
river, sitting atop their horses with bor-
rowed rifles and bandoliers. During
the Battle of Ciudad Juárez, real estate
owners in downtown El Paso charged
up to a dollar for a place on one of the
various rooftops that overlooked the
fighting, and when the dust finally set-
tled, sightseeing cars advertised trips
across the river to view the ruined city.
In his prologue, Romo describes the
long cross-border wanderings he once
made in search of the ghost of revo-
lutionary leader Pancho Villa, visiting
the hotels where he stayed in exile, the
homes where he visited his multiple
wives, and the confectionery shops
where he sat eating ice cream and
peanut brittle—locations long since
torn down or replaced by Burger Kings
and dollar stores, none with so much
as a tiny placard to honor their histor-
ical significance. The stories of this
binational community, Romo realized,
LOS ANGELES TIMES PHOTOGRA PHIC ARC HIVE/LI BRA RY SPECI AL COLLECTIONS , C H AR LE S E. YOUNG RE S EA RC H L IBRA RY, UC LA
constitute a long-marginalized history.
Why has the border always been pre-
sented as an obscurity, he asks, de-
spite being the site of century-defining
uprisings and social movements?
“Maybe,” Romo suggests, “because the
history of the border has never been
considered a truly American history.”
When I was growing up in Arizona’s
public school system, my encounters
with “border history”—which is to
say, the history of the region in which
I lived—were almost nonexistent. In-
stead, my classmates and I learned
in detail about events that unfolded
in places most of us had never been,
studying European wars and trans-
atlantic trade, the outbreak of revolu-
tion and civil war along our country’s
East Coast. Stories closer to home
all seemed to hinge upon timeworn
mythologies of pioneers and settlers
who “tamed the West,” winning terrain
from “hostile natives” and bestowing
it with familiar names. In high school,
there were short units on the Mexican–
American War and Texan independence,
with the Mexican Revolution even more
briefly sketched—a mere page or two
in our hulking textbooks.
The most recent book from the
MacArthur award–winning historian
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Bad Mexi-
cans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in
the Borderlands, takes a very different
approach, casting the border as ground
zero for continental change. Hernández
does this by following the exploits of
a little-known revolutionary, Ricardo
March 23, 2023
Francisco Cantú
Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón at the Los Angeles County Jail, circa 1916
Flores Magón, and his motley crew
of magonistas—dogged journalists,
downtrodden workers, and all manner
of political dissidents drawn together
by international networks of solidarity.
What is profound about Hernández’s
portrayal is the way it reverberates out-
ward from Mexico, through the border-
lands, and deep into the interior of the
United States and even Canada, casu-
ally brushing aside the notion that this
era of upheaval was in any way confined
by our frontier and framing it instead
as part of a truly American story. “The
1910 Mexican Revolution,” Hernández
writes, “is a seminal event in US his-
tory: it changed who we are as a people.”
The borderlands are familiar terrain
for Hernández. Her first book, Migra!: A
History of the US Border Patrol (2010),
traced the growth of the agency from
a tiny outfit of “Chinese inspectors”
and rough-and-ready cowboy lawmen
to an enormous agriculture-allied po-
lice force that managed the flow of
Mexican farm labor while serving as
a “sanctuary of violence” that helped
instill racialized notions of Mexican
“illegality” in the United States. Her
next book, City of Inmates: Conquest,
Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Cag-
ing in Los Angeles (2017), followed the
rise of incarceration and forced labor
in the American West, describing how
the internment of immigrants and rad-
icals led the City of Angels to become
“the carceral capital of the world.”
Much of Hernández’s work also ex-
tends beyond the realm of conven-
tional academic research, which has
earned her a reputation as a “rebel
historian,” a label she has embraced.
City of Inmates, for example, includes a
chapter that collects testimonies from
community members, activists, and
formerly incarcerated persons, and she
is the cofounder of the Million Dol-
lar Hoods project, which uses arrest
and jail data as well as oral history
to document the unequal social, geo-
graphic, and fiscal impact of mass in-
carceration in Los Angeles. Alongside
Monica Muñoz Martinez, whose multi-
disciplinary approach to history has
raised awareness of the mass lynching
of ethnic Mexicans in the early twen-
tieth century, Hernández is part of a
new generation of tenacious histori-
ans who are exploring how injustice
is lived, remembered, and forgotten
in the borderlands and beyond.
Bad Mexicans is undoubtedly Hernán-
dez’s biggest and most ambitious book
to date. It is also, in the best possi-
ble sense, a decidedly more “popular”
than “scholarly” history, brimming with
vivid characters, narrative detail, and
modern-day resonance. In an interview
with Publishers Weekly, Hernández dis-
cussed her decision to write about the
subject as accessibly as possible: “For
me, it was when Donald Trump used
the phrase ‘bad hombres,’ that I knew
that this story needed to be told for
a broader audience, because he was
stirring up a really dangerous history.”
Authorities on both sides of the bor-
der have long referred to nonconform-
ing Mexicans as malos or “bad,” with
revolutionary-era magonistas foremost
among them. “It’s important for what
is emerging as one of our largest pop-
ulations here in the United States,”
Hernández said, “to see themselves as
protagonists in the American story.”
R icardo Flores Magón was “bril-
liant and ill-tempered,” Hernández
writes, and “looked more like a girthy
professor than a gutsy revolutionary.”
From the beginning, dissent seemed
part of the Flores Magón family DNA :
in 1892, when Ricardo was just sev-
enteen, he was arrested at a student
march alongside his older brother
Jesús, “a full-time lawyer and a part-
time activist.” Not long after, Jesús
launched a legal journal that docu-
mented indigenous uprisings in Mex-
ico’s north, which eventually landed
him in jail for criticizing military of-
ficials. For a time, Ricardo followed in
his brother’s footsteps, studying law
and working as a printer’s assistant
before dropping out to travel through
southern Mexico, where he witnessed
firsthand the subjugation of the rural
working class. Upon his return to Mex-
ico City, Ricardo was invited by Jesús,
newly released from jail, to help launch
a weekly newspaper “to point out and
denounce all of the misdeeds of pub-
lic officers who do not follow the pre-
cepts of law.” Stirred by his travels and
his reading of anarcho-communist in-
tellectuals like Peter Kropotkin, Ri-
cardo accepted the invitation. Soon
their youngest brother, Enrique, would
join them as the newspaper’s editor.
The Flores Magón brothers called
their paper Regeneración, and their
principal target was Mexico’s long-
serving autocratic president, Porfirio
Díaz, whose rule began in 1876. Díaz
was widely credited with having mod-
ernized Mexico by overseeing robust
economic growth, a dramatic expan-
sion in infrastructure, and a popula-
tion boom. But for the working class
these economic advancements—most
of which were financed by US and Eu-
ropean interests—had merely served
to replace the colonial feudalism of the
encomienda system (in which indige-
nous people were enslaved by Span-
ish settlers) with the debt peonage of
industrial capitalism. Díaz’s vision of
“order and progress” was also paired
with intensely centralized political
power and a robust police state that
monitored dissent in the streets, in
the fields, and in the press.
Opposition to the Díaz regime had
long been a dangerous proposition. The
president’s national police forces, the
widely feared rurales, were deployed
far and wide to crack down on un-
rest, ensuring that Mexico remained
a “safe” and attractive place for for-
eign investors. For many years, resis-
tance remained diffuse and isolated,
but industry and infrastructure soon
created greater mobility for the work-
ing class. “Dispossessed in Mexico,”
Hernández writes, “millions of Mexi-
cans first migrated within Mexico, to
towns and cities, factories, haciendas,
and mines in search of work. Then they
began crossing the border, following
the railway lines funded by investors
to extract and export Mexico’s natural
resources.” In short order, Mexicans
became the primary low-wage work-
force in the American West, and as the
flow of people, money, and goods and
services swelled between north and
south, so did the exchange of revolu-
tionary ideas.
Regeneración, launched in 1900, soon
evolved into a mouthpiece for the dis-
content of millions. The Flores Magón
brothers situated their paper at the
vanguard of Mexican radicalism, boldly
challenging not just Porfirio Díaz him-
self, but the entire Porfirian order,
which had for decades seemed unas-
sailable. One issue in particular served
as a turning point: published on March
7, 1901, twenty-five years into Díaz’s
rule, it named the president eleven
times on its front page, disparaging
him in terms rarely used in the main-
stream press—as a “despot” and an
“autocrat” who had constructed a mon-
archy masquerading as a democratic
republic. Hernández vividly imagines
how copies of this incendiary issue
27
would have journeyed across Mexico
and into the United States:
Inked on the pages of Regene-
ración, this inflammatory assault
on the regime radiated outward
from the Zócalo, passing from
hand to hand on tramcars and
buses and on the shoulders of
paperboys hustling for the day’s
meal. By noon, people throughout
Mexico City would have read the
breach. By day’s end, the editors’
criminalized words would have
reached Puebla and the towns sur-
rounding Mexico City. The next
morning, the paper would be de-
livered to readers as far away as
San Luis Potosí, Oaxaca, and then
across the border to towns like
Laredo and El Paso, Texas, where
displaced Mexicans clustered in
search of work. Everywhere they
went, from the mines in Arizona to
lumber mills in Colorado to citrus
farms in California, workers car-
ried Regeneración. As one observer
would later report, copies of Re-
generación were passed “from one
town to another until they fell to
pieces from use.” Few Mexicans—
no more than 28 percent by 1910—
were literate, but the strong oral
tradition of sharing news by camp-
fire and on soapboxes, in cantinas,
and in song helped spread Rege-
neración’s message.
In the ensuing years, Porfirio Díaz’s
forces raided the offices of Regene-
ración time and again, seizing and
destroying multiple printing presses
and unleashing a string of arrests tar-
geting anyone involved in the paper’s
publication. By 1905 the Flores Magón
brothers and a handful of their most
influential allies had fled to the United
States, where they continued publish-
ing Regeneración and began organiz-
ing a new political party, the Partido
Liberal Mexicano (PLM ), to challenge
Díaz. The party’s organizing commit-
tee, called La Junta, also took steps
to establish a network of locally orga-
nized brigades known as focos to pre-
pare for a series of planned raids in
northern Mexico.
I n one of Hernández’s most mem-
orable chapters, she describes La
Junta’s involvement in the landmark
1906 strike at the US-owned mining
encampment in Cananea, Sonora. In
the lead-up to the action, PLM mem-
bers enlisted strikers alongside repre-
sentatives from the US-based Western
Federation of Miners, highlighting a
growing potency in cross-border or-
ganizing. The revolt was violent and
short-lived, coming to an end in less
than a day, when Díaz’s rurales ar-
rived alongside a brigade of Arizona
Rangers who had ridden south from
the border to protect American busi-
ness interests. News of the American
incursion traveled quickly: the next
day, headlines in Mexico City decried
a Díaz-sponsored “Invasion of Mexican
Territory by North American Troops,”
delivering an unexpected blow to the
president’s perceived infallibility.
“The strike at Cananea,” Hernán-
dez writes, “shredded Mexican citi-
zens’ belief in the regime’s ability to
protect them” and provided the per-
fect opportunity to launch a new PLM
manifesto. A month later the PLM dis-
28
tributed 750,000 copies of its new fifty-
two-point platform on both sides of
the border, emphasizing presidential
term limits, voting rights, labor reform,
an end to debt servitude, limits to for-
eign ownership, and above all the re-
distribution of land. Ricardo Flores
Magón lamented the extent to which
the compromised platform strayed
from the principles of anarchism, but
its tenets went on to exert a profound
influence on Mexico’s nascent revo-
lutionary movement, reaching future
leaders like Emiliano Zapata, who, in-
spired by Regeneración, adopted “Land
and Liberty” as his battle cry.
With the exiled magonistas growing
more and more influential, Díaz im-
plored the United States to help bring
them down. The American government,
it turned out, was eager to oblige—the
strike in Cananea had threatened cor-
porate stability at home and abroad,
and all across the Southwest local au-
thorities and big businesses had begun
to note the presence of revolutionary
propaganda and rising tensions across
mining camps and farmlands. At the
same time, the Flores Magón broth-
ers and their associates were rubbing
elbows with some of the most conse-
quential figures on the American left,
cultivating support from influential
labor organizers like Mother Jones and
Eugene Debs, the anarchist activist
Emma Goldman, and the socialist jour-
nalist John Kenneth Turner.
After receiving Porfirio Díaz’s re-
quest, President Theodore Roosevelt
himself placed multiple agencies
on high alert, ordering them to “go
to the utmost limit in proceeding
against these so-called revolution-
ists.” Hernández writes:
The US Departments of State, War,
Justice, and Commerce and Labor
committed dozens of agents, of-
ficers, soldiers, and officials, and
enormous resources, to under-
mining the magonista revolt in
the United States. The US Mar-
shals, the Bureau of Investigation
(later the FBI ), the US Immigration
Service, and the Arizona Rangers
participated, too, as did police and
sheriff departments across the
country. The US Postal Service
played a particularly important
role, providing Mexican authorities
and agents with access to mago-
nista mail, which allowed the coun-
terinsurgency units to hunt down
revolutionaries on both sides of the
border. The Mexican government
also hired a bevy of US-based in-
formants and spies, and likely paid
off at least one US attorney with a
diamond ring. In sum, US agents
were responsible for monitoring,
tracking, arresting, imprisoning,
detaining, deporting, and even kid-
napping scores of Mexican revo-
lutionaries in the United States.
Thus, even as radicalism and solidar-
ity were flourishing across borders,
new cross-border enforcement regimes
were being tested and assembled to
meet them.
M uch of the pleasure of reading
Bad Mexicans comes from the
way its historical and academic rigor
is infused with propulsive storytell-
ing. Nowhere is this on display more
than in the book’s middle section,
chronicling the continent-spanning
cat-and-mouse chase that took the
Flores Magón brothers and their as-
sociates from Mexico City to Laredo,
St. Louis to Toronto, Montreal to Los
Angeles, and many more places in be-
tween. At times their escapades almost
seem ripped from a spy thriller—they
send letters written in code and ci-
pher, they cross-dress and don other
elaborate disguises, they smuggle mes-
sages and military orders out of jail in
dirty laundry. But even in her book’s
most rollicking moments, Hernández
never resorts to trope or cliché, and
she never lets us forget the real-life
stakes of her borderland caper. For a
region saddled with so many grimly
narrated histories, Bad Mexicans is
great fun, full of the joyful resilience
and tenacity that make the border-
lands and its people so distinct.
Hernández also takes the time to
render the full ensemble of the ma-
gonista world. On one side are those
who wished to quash them: private
detectives and secret service agents
by turns savvy and bumbling; rule-
bending postmasters, prosecutors, and
diplomats; and a slew of politicians,
military leaders, and law enforcement
agents obsessively chasing every bread
crumb left by the radicals. On the
other are rebels of every conceivable
kind: the quiet schoolteacher who co-
published Regeneración, the reformed
militiaman who renounced his family’s
wealth to become a migrant worker and
union organizer, and the fifteen-year-
old poet who drowned suspiciously in
the Rio Grande after being trailed by
informants. Then there are the Sara-
bias—Manuel, who was kidnapped and
surreptitiously extradited to Mexico
after helping organize the strike at
Cananea; his brother Tomás, who be-
came the PLM ’s mail and communi-
cations guru; and their cousin Juan,
a telegraph worker and circus-loving
poet who turned into a barnstorming
orator. We are also introduced to nu-
merous indomitable women, including
Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, the
editor of an anarcho-feminist maga-
zine who was routinely jailed for sedi-
tion and rebellion, and María Brousse,
the dynamite-smuggling “gladiator”
who became Ricardo Flores Magón’s
lifelong love.
As Bad Mexicans nears its conclu-
sion, the formal outbreak of the Mexi-
can Revolution is sketched only briefly.
By 1910 nearly all the magonistas had
been sidelined in one way or another—
killed or jailed in the US or Mexico,
forced overseas in exile, or effectively
banished from the movement because
of infighting. The remaining magonis-
tas were narrowly committed to anar-
chism, which distanced them from the
more organized, less ideological lead-
ers who ushered the revolution into its
bloody phase, their names becoming
well known to history: Madero, Orozco,
Zapata, Villa, Carranza. As mass rev-
olution swept Mexico and Díaz was
finally ousted in May 1911, the mago-
nistas became, for the most part, spec-
tators to the upheaval they had primed
the country for, watching the bloodi-
est war in the history of the Americas
unfold from afar.
Hernández is careful to remind us
that the PLM ’s leadership was almost
entirely made up of journalists with
no political or military expertise. In
attempting to build their army, they
leaned on words to do their work, and
since they were always on the run, they
lacked an epicenter from which to or-
ganize or launch campaigns. Ricardo
Flores Magón insistently viewed this
as a strength, arguing that dispersal
made their movement more difficult to
subdue, convinced that a few smartly
timed raids would spark the Mexican
public to rise up in arms and sponta-
neously carry out the revolution. But
while the magonistas were extraor-
dinarily adept at the intellectual and
linguistic task of building a social ca-
pacity for revolution, they remained
entirely unequipped for, and largely
uninterested in, the concrete work of
military confrontation necessary to
depose political leaders and disman-
tle corrupt institutions. “In the end,”
Hernández writes, Flores Magón “was
an agitator, not a revolutionary.”
Left behind by the revolution, Flores
Magón stayed in the United States,
lashing out at perceived personal and
ideological betrayals. He gradually fell
out of grace with his fellow leftists in
the US—even Mother Jones dismissed
him and the remaining magonistas as
“unreasonable fanatics” after they re-
jected calls to return to Mexico to help
shape the new government’s agenda.
Sequestered in a ramshackle commune
in East Los Angeles, Flores Magón
tended to chickens and published in-
termittent issues of Regeneración to
a tiny list of subscribers, which, in
1918, landed him back in prison for
calling “for the overthrow of the fed-
eral government,” a violation of the
newly passed Espionage Act. Chron-
ically ill and nearly blind, he foresaw
his impending death in a letter to a
friend. “One fine day,” he wrote, “my
weapon—my pen—the only weapon
I have ever wielded; the weapon that
landed me here; the weapon that ac-
companied me through the infernos
of a thirty years’ struggle for what is
beautiful, will be then as useless as a
broken sword.” Flores Magón died, as
he predicted, at Leavenworth Peni-
tentiary in November 1922.
W hat remains astonishing about
the magonista saga is not just
how they primed a country for revo-
lution, but the extreme lengths the
Mexican and US governments went
to in order to sideline a ragtag group
of rebels with little economic or mil-
itary means. This is where Bad Mexi-
cans grimly connects with Hernández’s
previous work on border enforcement
and mass incarceration—in pursuing
the magonistas, both governments
began to perceive new threats at the
border, posed not by the formal armies
of neighboring nations but by unwieldy
constellations of poor people, work-
ers, and migrants. This is the era in
which modern notions of border po-
The New York Review
licing were gradually defined, with the
US pioneering mass deportation and
immigrant incarceration, as well as
extralegal abduction and surveillance,
and white supremacist legislation and
jurisprudence that redefined the race,
citizenship, and criminality of Mexican
immigrants. By the time the Mexican
Revolution drew to a close at the be-
ginning of the 1920s, the stage had
been set for the creation of the US
Border Patrol, the formalization of
border inspections, and the enduring
militarization of the borderlands.
Works of history are often read with
an implicit sense of resignation, as
if we are encountering destiny laid
out upon the page. In many tellings,
the apparent dystopia of the border-
Tomb of Sand
by Geetanjali Shree, translated
from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
HarperVia, 603 pp., $29.99
In Tomb of Sand, the first Indian-
language novel to win the Interna-
tional Booker Prize, the Hindi writer
Geetanjali Shree combines linguistic
energy with unflagging wit to uncover
the secrets and lies of Indian family
life. To this are added frequent inter-
polations on the out-of-joint times,
marked as they are by “the jacking
and hijacking of roles; the back-to-
front of related relationships. How
does mankind soldier on,” she won-
ders, “or animalkind, or lock, stock,
and barrelkind?”
The book, Shree’s fifth novel, be-
gins as a comedy of manners set in
an upper-class family that would likely
consider itself middle- class. They
come from old money—they even, in
the case of the man of the house, a
senior government official, cultivate
a distinctly feudal haughtiness and
sense of noblesse oblige—but their
concerns are humdrum: social status,
money, homes, food, clothes, and most
of all the tightrope of family relations.
The main characters remain largely
unnamed: they are Bade (elder son),
Beti (daughter), Bahu (daughter-in-law).
Then two grandsons and, at the center,
the aged mother—Ma, Mata ji, Amma.
Ma starts out the novel a new widow
in a funk, in bed in her son’s home in
New Delhi. “When footsteps neared
the room,” Shree writes, “she’d turn
her back, she’d stick to the wall. She’d
play dead, eyes and nose closed, ears
shut, mouth sewn, mind numb, desires
extinct; her bird had flown.” Ma dis-
rupts the family’s daily grind with what
James Joyce called “silence, exile, and
cunning.” She is a classic maternal fig-
ure—doling out tough love and excel-
lent humor—but she is also, through
some trick of long years, an increas-
ingly unknowable quantity, harboring
a well-concealed past.
Shree sets out to explore how Ma’s
muteness brings out the best and
worst in her kin, among whom there
are constant exchanges at cross-
purposes but few scenes of direct,
meaningful conversation. The fam-
March 23, 2023
lands, with its onslaught of “crises”
perpetuated by draconian policy and
violent enforcement, seems almost
preordained. In his 2011 book An In-
finity of Nations, the Anishinaabe
historian Michael Witgen challenges
the assumption of inevitability that
so often underlies American history.
“Until the middle of the nineteenth
century,” he writes, “autonomous Na-
tive peoples occupied the vast major-
ity of North America.” The fate of the
United States as a nation, he argues,
the possession of its terrain, its entire
ethnic and political makeup—none
of it was ever as certain as we imag-
ine. Writing about early encounters
between natives and white explorers
on what would become the US–Canada
Endless Trances
Anjum Hasan
Geetanjali Shree; illustration by Ruth Gwily
ily is driven by genuine, sometimes
hysterical mother-love, but it’s also
one in which the brother and sister,
Bade and Beti, are estranged; he is
dismissive of her “misspent youth”
carving out an independent life as a
writer and in romantic relationships
of her own choosing, while she balks
at Bade’s paternalism (but does not
ever confront it). As for Bade and
Bahu, they only ever address each
other in order to gripe. At one point,
Bahu is overwhelmed by a family
crisis:
For a moment she wanted to go
back to Bade’s side, lie against
frontier, Witgen describes “a dynamic
and evolving world with a very long
history—a history that has been ren-
dered largely invisible because of the
mythology of discovery and conquest.”
The same is true, of course, on our
southern border, where frontier nar-
ratives have long sought to project a
sense of inexorable dominance over
a place defined by fluidity and flux.
The million refugees who fled the vi-
olence of Mexico’s revolution, Hernán-
dez reminds us, transformed the
demographic trajectory of the Amer-
ican West, setting Latinos on course
to become the largest minority in the
US. My grandfather, born in Mexico at
the dawn of the revolution, was one
of those who fled. In our family, as
his back and close her eyes. But
they’d spent so many years fret-
ting and fuming at one another:
that was now the most comfortable
way to interact; if she did some-
thing affectionate they’d both be
embarrassed.
Bahu’s stream-of-consciousness stew
of concern and injury is one of the
most potently funny aspects of the
novel: she is always calling her favor-
ite child, Overseas Son, to vent. He
fathers his mother—“To what has
already occurred the son adds imag-
ined oppressions and exhorts her to
put on her Reeboks and stamp out of
in so many others, stories from the
other side of the border were seem-
ingly assimilated away, and I grew
up with little understanding of how
the revolution touched me or my an-
cestors, and even less of how it per-
vaded the history of the places I lived
and moved through. As David Dorado
Romo observed in his El Paso wan-
derings, there are few markers of our
revolutionary past in the borderlands.
A spirit of resistance and solidarity,
however, is alive and well, and as the
legacies of the magonistas and others
are exhumed and reclaimed, one can
.
only hope that the history of our re-
gion—and its truly American nature—
will finally receive the recognition it
has long been denied.
the door”—and thoughtfully sends
figs for his grandmother’s chronic
constipation.
Our social scientists have been
barking up the wrong tree, announces
Shree, in declaring the great Indian
joint family obsolete. People don’t need
to live together, bound by physical
walls, to be a family; family’s a state of
mind. In this case no one’s grouses are
the basis for a psychological render-
ing of family life’s toxic side—as they
would be in, say, Jonathan Franzen’s
novels. The crabbed words in Tomb of
Sand provide fodder instead for philos-
ophizing on personal relations. (The
poet, translator, and folklorist A.K. Ra-
manujan once noted that in the Indian
tradition the study of psychology has
by and large been philosophical, aim-
ing at salvation and ecstasy—instead
of, presumably, the unpacking of inner
life. We have no equivalents, he said, to
Rousseau’s Confessions, Rembrandt’s
self-portraits, or Richardson’s novels.)
Shree’s characters are all role-playing,
but seriously, even sincerely—eager-
to-please yet resentful Bahu, solicitous
and patronizing Bade, free-spirited
Beti, the two chalk-and-cheese yet
equally devoted grandsons.
Beti, who also lives in the city, is
torn whenever she visits the fam-
ily. She raises a foot to step over her
brother’s threshold but can’t decide
whether to go in or leave, and as she
“pauses in this pose at his door, the
thought flashes through her mind—
have I been acting until now, or am I
just about to start?” This hyperaware
performing can drive the players to
despair, but they never take it lightly
or drop the act:
The ability to show compassion
is the primary goal of all family
members; it is the means to fra-
ternity love peace happiness. If
you can bestow a poor thing look
on someone else, you become their
Sorrow Destroyer: godlike! and
begin to relish the sight of your
own reflection.
O ne day Ma—with the help of a
nifty folding cane Overseas Son
brings her from Australia, both walking
29
aid and magic scepter—starts to rise.
A madcap journey follows in which she
swerves away from her persona as just
the nurturer of her children, now anx-
iously nurtured by them, to claim an
older past—a childhood in a Punjab
on the Pakistan side of the border. Re-
turning there will eventually endow her
with both name and narrative.
But first she goes missing, losing her
way when she walks out of the house
to entrust a family heirloom to an old
friend, the confident, bustling Rosie,
her would-be Sancho Panza. Rosie rep-
resents everything the family finds
mildly horrific—proletarian wiles, love
that seeks no recompense, and, despite
her bravado, a vulnerability to the vio-
lence inherent in this class-fractured
society. In sociological terms she is
from a third-gender community known
as hijra, whose members usually make
a living from impromptu singing and
dancing; in Shree’s poetic vision she
becomes a river flowing both ways, at
times appearing in the persona of the
tailor Raza Master and then segueing
neatly to the always flamboyantly and
femininely dressed Rosie.
Ma is eventually found after thirteen
hours—though it may well be thirteen
days or thirteen weeks; why bother
with precision, Shree asks—and she
decides on a whim to make her home
now in Beti’s apartment. The bedbound
grieving widow slowly transforms into
a voluble, neighborly figure, aided by
the irrepressible Rosie:
Rosie of course cheerfully visited
all the time, and what did it mat-
ter to Beti whether she’s this or
she’s that. Yes, perhaps she found
it a bit unsettling when she found
her cutting Ma’s toenails—just a
tiny bit—but only because, oh, hey,
she could have asked me. These
two were having a wonderful time
while Beti was off busy with some-
thing. She was also in a bit of a
quandary as to whether Ma should
be so free just because she’s found
a free helper? But.
Beti’s quiet home life becomes a so-
cial whirl, giving her much joy but also
sleepless nights and existential panic.
She can’t focus on her writing, feels
her face blurring into a housewife’s or
even metamorphosing into Ma’s, all the
while mothering her mother through
illness and accidents. The dutifulness
strains to a sullen cracking point in
Beti’s internal monologue:
If this is what was to become my
lot then I too should have done
what others do, they who have the
advantages that come with not
living alone, here I have to deal
with the disadvantages of being
alone, but also the disadvantages
of being with everyone by force of
circumstance.
But Ma’s highly corporeal presence
in Beti’s life turns out to be spectral
in another sense, for Ma is still really
under Bade’s care; the elder son, by
tradition, has eternal charge of his
mother. His “son-ego was shattered”
whenever Beti seemed to have done
more than he had for their mother, so
in his opinion Ma is only away visiting.
Shree’s marvelous ear for the carp-
ing and affection that make up family
life is not just put in the service of sat-
ire: families are her canvas. She says
30
of them what has been said about the
Mahabharata: “They contain all that
exists in the world, and whatever
they don’t contain doesn’t exist.” She
is alert to the more trying aspects of
Indian domesticity, particularly to do
with cooking, such as the need to pluck
greens leaf by single leaf, or the im-
possibility of eating simply. The dal
calls for roti and sabzi, which in turn
beg for the accompaniments—“ghee,
chutney, salad, raita, and a little rice.
All of them come together and call out
for sweets. . . . Even food has a joint
family!”
Shree’s scrutiny of family relations
across her fiction is reinforced by her
often referring to characters, as in
Tomb of Sand, only by kinship terms.
Her third novel, Tirohit (The Roof Be-
neath Their Feet, 2013), is animated by
the play between the womanly “inside”
and the worldly “outside,” public pre-
sumptions and private truths. It cen-
ters on the unlikely friendship between
two women: the rich, married, unhappy
Chachcho (colloquial for paternal un-
cle’s wife) and the penurious, single,
socially invisible Lalna (meaning “Lal-
lan’s”—her relation to this man re-
mains vague). Lalna and Chachcho
create an island of girlish fantasy on
their shared rooftop—dressing up,
eating, singing and dancing—an open
yet clandestine space that complicates
the inner/outer divide.
The afflicted love between sons and
mothers is an abiding subject. In Mai
(2004), Shree’s brilliantly observed first
novel, an imperious grandmother is
roundly ignored by her husband and
worships her son, always pressing
food on him and occasionally thrash-
ing about in mysterious pains, calling
on her boy—middle-aged like Bade—
to massage her, crying out, when he
does her legs, “More . . . harder . . . oh
god . . . a little higher.” In Khali Jagah
(The Empty Space, 2011), a couple tries
to go on living after losing their teen-
age son in a bombing. The story is told
by the abandoned child they adopt to
fill in that blank, which he sometimes
tries to do but often resists. The fa-
ther finds that his only remaining
purpose is to go on repeating about
the dead boy, “I am so lucky that I
came into the world to be his father.”
The mother, frozen in the aftermath,
unable to cry for fifteen years, keeps
trying to track similarities between
lost son and replacement; when the
adopted boy turns eighteen, he notices
that “Ma looks overwhelmed with grat-
itude that I have resurrected him so!
She sees us both, eighteen years old,
lying one inside the other.”
In Mai and Tomb of Sand, mother–
son relations are complicated by the
more thoughtful bond between moth-
ers and daughters—in both novels the
younger woman struggles to circum-
vent everything the elder’s strait-
laced life represents, only to acquire
belatedly some subtle lessons about
freedom within the family rather than
in flight from it. In Tomb of Sand these
close-to-home themes acquire larger
resonance with Ma’s decision to visit
Pakistan, with Beti in tow: “You, Ma
lifted her cane and pointed it toward
Beti, You will be the one to go with
me. It was an order.”
W ith this turn in the plot, the
family drama becomes a travel
story with mythic overtones—a jour-
ney across modern India’s most con-
tentious border, whose creation was
not just historical blunder turned
geographic fact but also the fount of
seventy-five years of mixed emotions,
grappled with repeatedly in the sub-
continent’s literature, cinema, and
painting. Shree rejects the idea of
Partition—dividing a country along
religious lines—with humanist lyri-
cizing rather than political argument,
as when Ma delivers an extended so-
liloquy on borders: “Asses! A border
stops nothing. It is a bridge between
two connected parts. Between night
and day. Life and death. . . . A border
is a horizon. Where two worlds meet.
And embrace.” Shree also threads in
elements of the fantastic—such as
talking crows greatly concerned with
human affairs—perhaps as an argu-
ment about the impossibility of cold
realism capturing this history of di-
vided but joined-at-the-hip families:
the fictional one of people and the
imagined one of nations.
When Ma and Beti reach the border,
Shree turns out a parade of well-known
Hindi and Urdu writers, all of them
gathered at a crossing where armed
soldiers from India and Pakistan strut
daily in a showy drill of competitive
jingoism. The writers declaim lines
from their novels—among them some
of the classics of Partition literature,
such as Intizar Husain’s Basti (1995),
Krishna Sobti’s Zindaginama (2016),
and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1981)—
to illustrate the illusoriness of na-
tional borders and the bewilderment
of those subject to their apparent fix-
ity. She also calls up the best-known
metaphor Partition has produced, the
character Bishan Singh from Saadat
Hasan Manto’s timeless story “Toba
Tek Singh,” who clings to the no-man’s-
land between the two countries when
he and other inmates of a lunatic asy-
lum are being transferred from one
to the other. Here, reincarnated as a
ghost, he runs amok among the “wise,
lost” writers and border patrols: “His
invisible fist gave it to the demons on
both sides. . . . He who had gone mad
from the years of lunacy between the
two countries was not in the mood for
leniency today.”
Since the family talks a great deal
but reveals little, Beti previously had
no idea about her mother’s background
in Lahore, the city she fled as a young
woman in the tumult of Partition. As
Beti starts to glean this past, she sees
that Ma is after more than just a nos-
talgic visit to a childhood home: she
wants a reckoning of the costs of vio-
lent rupture and a reconciliation with
estranged relatives, even if this means
endangering her life and driving her
daughter nuts from incomprehension
and fear.
Very quickly mother and daughter
run afoul of the Pakistani authorities.
Still, Ma is adamant that she cannot
return home till she has fulfilled her
mission, thereby anticipating, it would
appear, a tragic end. But Shree does
not want us to expect a straightfor-
ward story, all its elements converging
on denouement. She warns the reader
late in the book:
So which will it be? The path of
shadows or of sharply delineated
dark shapes? If you’re game for the
first, come along, fellow traveler.
Prefer the second? Then stop right
where you are.
This is a credo she affirms repeatedly
in the novel—that stories are not to
be read as poor versions of life: “They
don’t have to be contemporary or com-
plementary or congruent or connubial
with the real world. Literature has a
scent, a soupçon, a je ne sais quoi, all
its own.”
Such commentary runs throughout
Tomb of Sand, accompanying the ac-
tion, sometimes dogging it. For Shree,
to tell a story is to reflect on the na-
ture of storytelling, and in this and her
other novels she often sounds a clear
contra-Flaubertian note. “Surely not
every storyteller has to be like God,
omnipresent, omniscient, the Cre-
ator?” says the unnamed child nar-
rator in The Empty Space. And later,
“It’s a disease, this habit of those who
build chronologies, to fix everything,
stabilize everything, in one straight
sequence.” In any case, how to be God
when, as she says in The Roof Beneath
Their Feet, “things don’t really happen
when they’re happening. They happen
later. When a storm within links them
up to the larger picture.” In Tomb of
Sand, she emphasizes that a story is
a living being. It could turn nomadic,
or refuse to budge and become a tree,
end up preserved in tombstones, sa-
madhis. (The word in the novel’s Hindi
title, Ret Samadhi, gestures at its dual
meaning—both memorials to death
and endless trances, states of death-
like meditation.)
Shree is repeatedly drawing our at-
tention to the fluidity and intercon-
nectedness of things. If stories can
take pretty much any form, other con-
cepts such as love or time are simi-
larly elastic:
One can speak of love at any time
because love is lovely. It is natural.
Also tempestuous. When love is
boundless it breaks out into the
cosmos. Its essence reaches a pin-
nacle and the drive to overpower
one another flames out.
And time is a trickster, the days,
weeks, and months ribbons that he
“flings about as he watches for his own
amusement, to see if anyone can mea-
sure them, but no one can, and who-
ever knows this ahead of time throws
in the towel.”
Such transmogrifying can some-
times verge on twee. It doesn’t always
convince but it does hint at the sources
of Shree’s imagination. If her family
story is a Mahabharata, her cogita-
tions could be said to sound a Hindu
philosophic note, more specifically the
The New York Review
 



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March 23, 2023 31


Beppe Fenoglio’s masterpiece
Milton is a member of a partisan
band battling Italian Fascists and
German forces in the chaotic last
years of World War II. Before the war
he was a student of English litera-
ture and a lover of poetry. He was in
love with Fulvia, and she’d invite him
over to her rich family’s house and
have him read to her.
Now, in the thick of war, he dis-
covers that Giorgio, his friend and
fellow partisan, was sleeping with
Fulvia at the time. Furious with jeal-
ousy, Milton hastens to have it out
with Giorgio, but Giorgio has been
captured by the Germans. A Private
Affair tells the story of Milton’s mad
quest—through mud and fog, rain
and terror, while barely evading en-
emy patrols—to rescue his friend,
the better to settle a grudge from a
lost world of peace.
“A Private Affair has the geometric
tension of a romance of mad
lovers and chivalric pursuits like
Orlando Furioso, and at the same
time it presents the Resistance
exactly as it was, inside and out,
as truly as it has ever been
written. . . with all the moral values
and emotions (the more powerful,
the more implicit) and fury.”
—Italo Calvino
“No other modern Italian
author has managed to produce
such tellingly unstable fiction,
while sustaining such a
powerful narrative drive.”
—Peter Hainsworth, TLS
A PRIVATE AFFAIR
Beppe Fenoglio
Translated from the Italian by
Howard Curtis
Paperback • $16.95
On sale March 28h
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
32
idea, to quote Ramanujan again, that
there is continuous traffic between the
concrete and the abstract in Indian
thought systems:
Contrary to the notion that Indi-
ans are “spiritual,” they are really
“material minded.” They are ma-
terialists, believers in substance:
there is a continuity, a constant
flow . . . of substance from context
to object, from non-self to self.
S hree has no doubt drawn on the
many writers she invokes directly
in Tomb of Sand, but the novel I was
most reminded of is an English-
language one: Salman Rushdie’s Mid-
night’s Children (1981), which is as
taken with the strange birth of nations,
as drunk on wordplay. In his introduc-
tion to the anthology of Indian liter-
ature he edited with Elizabeth West
to mark the fiftieth anniversary of in-
dependence (and Partition) in 1997,
Rushdie recalls a university student
interrogating him about his novel:
“Fundamentally, what’s your point?”
He had no answer except that the
whole thing from beginning to end is
the only point.
Rushdie offered the same defense
for the anthology, while also arguing
that the best Indian writing in the past
half-century was originally produced
in English—something of a dare that
drew much shock and horror then but
now feels quaint, not least because
translations into English, which he
lamented the poorness and paucity
of, have since considerably accelerated
and improved.
Daisy Rockwell’s translation of Tomb
of Sand—originally published in the
UK by Tilted Axis Press, a nonprofit
publishing house focused on contem-
porary Asian writers—is a glittering
example. Perhaps her greatest achieve-
ment is the recreation of Shree’s an-
imated, conversational, on occasion
rambling style. She combines a literary
English (translating, for instance, what
is simply “So why then shouldn’t folk
go on about mangoes?” as the Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning–inspired “Oh,
mangoes, how we love thee. Shall we
count the ways?”) with an ear for
how Hindi’s onomatopoeia, allitera-
tion, and puns might echo in English
(“Ye hasi nahi, hai hahakar” becomes
“This isn’t just hee hee ha ha it’s hoo
ha, it’s brouhaha”; “Ram hame rama
rehta hai” is rendered as “Lord Ram
ram-bles into our hearts—that’s why
we call him Ram”).
A book and its translation inevita-
bly speak to different things in their
separate literatures. In English, the
question asked of Rushdie about the
fundamental point arises with Tomb
of Sand, as it does with all loose baggy
monsters of novels. One answer could
be: a need to account for the turbu-
lence, both moral and climatic, of the
age and thus the breakdown of funda-
mentals. Things were in their place
once: the elder had only to raise his
eyes for the youth to fall in line, and at
the first drop of rain the tree knew it
was time to bear fruit. Now “all of na-
ture is plagued with confusion” and ev-
erything is a “topsy-turvy mishmash.”
This anarchy seems to play out in
two directions. Shree celebrates the
creative disruptions of truth that lit-
erature allows, and often calls out
the hubris of the well-informed and
the silliness of soulless rationalists.
“Understanding has become a much
eroded, much abused word,” she writes
in Tomb of Sand, “to the point that
its sense has come to mean to estab-
lish meaning, when its real sense is to
displace meaning. To give you such a
shock you see lightning.” At the same
time, this chaos has had deleterious
effects on Indian culture. One charac-
ter observes how
any random guy you address, in
whatever Indian language, answers
in English, and in bad English at
that, even the Hindi spelling on
the signboards is wrong, and as
for spellings of English words, the
less said the better.
It is not a purer existence Shree is
after, but a more harmonious one. She
dispenses with facticity and realism
in favour of dhwani, a word that im-
plies both tone and resonance. When
Beti cannot work in her own home,
it is because the dhwani has been
scrambled with her mother’s entry—
things are out of key. All the same Ma
is creating, for herself, a new tune, re-
discovering her body and talking to
herself, communing with sunlight
and houseplants: “Melody is import-
ant. Whether love affection friendship
are madness or no, there should always
be a melody in one’s heart that plays
throughout life.”
Toward the end of Tomb of Sand,
as Ma momentarily finds a lost love,
boundaries crumble to the strain of
an old raga: “Something of great value
slowly returned to them both. A fine,
melancholic echo of whatever had
happened that shouldn’t have, and
whatever had happened that turned
out well despite the bad times.” One
could say all of Shree’s work is a tun-
ing undertaken to pick up that fine,
melancholic echo.
I f in English Tomb of Sand raises the
question of pertinence, in Hindi it
demonstrates what the language can
be stretched to do. My mother is also
a child of Partition: about the same
age as the Ma of the novel, born in
that forbidding northwest mountain
frontier where Ma and Beti end up,
she grew up a refugee in Delhi, where
most of Tomb of Sand is set. She hap-
pened to be reading the novel in Hindi
while I read the translation, and she
was taken with completely different
discoveries, being brought up short by
the Urdu—“difficult”—and delighting
in the Punjabi. (These two are among
the cousins to Hindi that Shree draws
on to capture an everyday linguistic
mix that is uniquely North Indian.
As Rockwell points out in her trans-
lator’s note, a “household of the kind
around which the narrative revolves
is a polyphonous ecosystem in which
no language is likely spoken in an ‘un-
adulterated’ form.”) My mother also
assured me, referring to Shree’s love
of wordplay and neologisms, that the
novel features vocabulary “you will not
find in any dictionary.”
Born in the Hindi-speaking state
of Uttar Pradesh in 1957, Shree grew
up speaking that language but was
educated in English. She could have
chosen to write in English, but on
the other hand many Hindi writers of
her generation and the preceding one
are and have been perfectly bilingual.
She has often remarked on her stra-
tegic choice of Hindi as a language of
writing and how she remade it to suit
her creative purposes. She writes in
a 2011 essay for The Caravan maga-
zine about resisting the hold of stan-
dardized Hindi, based on the variant
called Khari Boli, instead drawing on
the “full-throated expletives” of street
talk as much as on the “sage-like, quiet
tones” of formal speech.
My own Hindi is not sturdy enough
to keep up with Tomb of Sand’s wordy
and inventive style, but reading Shree’s
Pratinidhi Kahaniyan (Representative
Stories, 2010), which includes works
from four previous collections of her
short fiction, one sees how language
rather than plot takes the lead. In an
account of the truculent friendship be-
tween two women, Shree keeps coming
up with terms—main jal-bhun rahi
thi (I was burning up), hujjat karna
(to bicker), makhaul udana (to make
fun of), taane bhari avaaz (taunting
tone), and so on—to characterize their
wrangling till this synonymizing even-
tually starts to feel like the point of
the tale. At the start of another story
a character waking up asks sleepily,
“Main jeeti hoon?” which could mean
both “Do I live?” and “Have I won?”;
what follows then seems to question
whether one can, as a restless, stay-
at-home wife, manage both.
When Tomb of Sand won the Inter-
national Booker last year, Shree said
it was a recognition for all of Hindi
literature. In its modern avatar, this
literature was born about the same
time as Indian nationalism, and the
preoccupations of the latter, especially
freedom from colonial rule, were often
its subject. (The same is true of fic-
tion and poetry in most of the coun-
try’s other languages.) Some writers
created from the trauma of Partition
the basis of a literary renaissance—
those in Shree’s border pageant as well
as others such as Yashpal, whose epic
novel Jhootha Sach, translated as This
Is Not That Dawn (2010), is considered
the high point of the genre. But not
all these figures are widely known,
and most have been only selectively
translated.
This disregard is partly the fault of
English—both its global dominance
and its increasing hold on the Indian
imagination. We are doubly illiterate,
as Shree points out: we don’t speak
the imported language well, and in the
process of trying also lose our native
tongues.
At the same time, there are clum-
sily forceful official attempts to make
Hindi the predominant language of
education and administration in a
highly multilingual country, leading
to, as the well-known Hindi journalist
Mrinal Pande recently said, its foot-
print growing and its soul shrink-
ing. So as critical as the question of
the relative value of each language is
this: Can Hindi literature capture the
grossly uneven, even misshapen, re-
sults of independent India’s progress?
Forged during that visionary and vi-
olent mid-twentieth-century era, in
constant conversation with the ideals
of nationalism, and then turned into
a more artful instrument in the mod-
ernist fiction of the 1950s and 1960s,
can Hindi reinvent itself again in this
.
messed-up, “topsy-turvy mishmash” of
an era without coming across as ingen-
uous or self-involved? Shree’s fiction
offers a rousing yes.
The New York Review
 Red Lights, Blue Lines
The Streets Belong to Us:
Sex, Race, and Police Power
from Segregation to Gentrification
by Anne Gray Fischer.
University of North Carolina Press,
298 pp., $29.95
Vice Patrol:
Cops, Courts, and the
Struggle over Urban
Gay Life Before Stonewall
by Anna Lvovsky.
University of Chicago Press,
337 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper)
We Do This ’Til We Free Us:
Abolitionist Organizing and
Transforming Justice
by Mariame Kaba, edited by
Tamara K. Nopper and with a
foreword by Naomi Murakawa.
Haymarket, 206 pp.,
$45.00; $16.95 (paper)
At the City University of New York’s
College of Staten Island, where I taught
for twenty-three years, I consistently
had police officers, their partners, and
their children as my students. Most were
Italian American or Irish American,
but in recent years I saw more Latino,
Asian, and Black police officers and
their family members. When Eric Gar-
ner was murdered by a New York City
police officer on Staten Island in 2014,
held in an illegal chokehold for selling
loose cigarettes, I felt it necessary to
halt my lessons in fiction writing to
discuss his death, so close by. To my
surprise, not only the white but also the
Latino and Asian students connected
to the police were unanimous in their
defense of the cops. “If Eric Garner had
done what he was told,” they all agreed,
“he would be alive today.” Judgment,
proportion, negotiation, and fairness,
they seemed to assume, were not the
police’s responsibility.
The proliferation of camera phones
has allowed civilians to document po-
lice violence against people of color
and widely disseminate the evidence,
elevating longstanding public debates
about transforming and even eliminat-
ing the police. Mainstream responses
to police violence in the second half
of the twentieth century—like New
York’s Civilian Complaint Review
Board, founded in the 1950s, which
attempted to create citizen over-
sight; the Knapp Commission of the
1970s, which was established to con-
front the city’s police corruption; and
Supreme Court decisions under Chief
Justice Earl Warren that attempted to
strengthen the requirement for war-
rants and the right to counsel—all
rested on the assumption that exist-
ing laws and structures just needed
to be enforced correctly. The modern
prison abolition movement proposes
another way to organize our social
relationships altogether. The current
system, it argues, can only generate
endless cycles of government-imposed
punishment, separation, and cruelty.
Two recent books, The Streets Belong
RUSS MARSHALL
to Us by Anne Gray Fischer and Vice
Patrol by Anna Lvovsky, offer histor-
ical genealogies for the violations of
contemporary policing. A foundational
influence for those violations, they both
March 23, 2023
Sarah Schulman
A sex worker on Cass Avenue, Detroit, 1965; photograph by Russ Marshall
argue, was the repression of “vice”—the
control of both sexual behavior and the
public movement of women and queers.
“Sexual policing,” as Fischer puts it,
“was a laboratory for law enforcement
authorities and politicians to test novel
methods of state power.”
F ischer, an assistant professor of
gender history at the University of
Texas at Dallas, shows in stunning de-
tail how American policing has shifted
its justifications over time to main-
tain control of Black people, especially
Black women. Her account begins at
the turn of the twentieth century,
when the white press started to apply
the word “slavery” to white women in
a floridly sexual sense. Young white
women who moved to cities seeking
economic autonomy or merely sur-
vival were depicted in print and on
screen and stage as pure innocents
supposedly captured and forced into
“white slavery” by sinister Jewish,
Black, and Chinese men. In 1910 the
White-Slave Traffic Act, known popu-
larly as the Mann Act, made it a felony
for women to be moved across state
lines for “prostitution or debauchery,
or any other immoral purpose.” The act
made independent women vulnerable
to legal prosecution for prostitution or
for defying traditional mores of home
and hearth. It was also used to punish
interracial and extramarital sex. Most
dramatically, Fisher writes, the “white
slavery” myth “shunted into obscurity”
the real consequences of chattel slav-
ery for Black women.
Around this time, municipalities
were designating certain urban neigh-
borhoods—like New York’s Tender-
loin, New Orleans’s Storyville, and
San Francisco’s Barbary Coast—as
red-light districts that hosted broth-
els, gambling parlors, and bars. They
often bordered downtown centers like
city halls and financial districts—mak-
ing them convenient to the white men
who controlled government and com-
merce—and Black, Chinese, or other
immigrant neighborhoods, which pro-
vided sex workers of all races. Many
individual brothels were racially seg-
regated, but some of the poorest may
have been racially mixed, as were some
of the most elite.
Fischer argues that the police, who
were mostly white men, had a finan-
cial investment in working these con-
centrated areas because policing vice
created opportunities for substantial
bribes and protection money. This prof-
iteering let officers give kickbacks to
political leaders, which in turn funded
campaigns and built machines of power
such as Tammany Hall. Popular exposés
of the era, like Lincoln Steffens’s jour-
nalistic broadsides of 1903 and 1904,
showed that police kickbacks from
prostitution and gambling were going
into the pockets of political leaders in
Minneapolis, New York, and Philadel-
phia. Prostitution policy, Fischer writes,
was “the connective tissue of early
twentieth century urban government.”
In the late nineteenth century,
Gilded Age reformers often justified
the existence of red-light districts
because they supposedly protected
white Christian womanhood by con-
taining vice, while offering white men
an outlet for desires deemed unsuit-
able for their wives. The New York po-
lice commissioner William McAdoo, as
the historian Mara Keire wrote in For
Business and Pleasure (2010), her study
of red-light districts, “believed that re-
stricting vice to certain neighborhoods
reduced crime throughout the city.” The
railroad magnate William Baldwin said
that he “would rather see a little hell
than a big hell.” But the wish to protect
white women was strictly class-based.
Plenty of poor white women worked in
the red-light districts.
The dominant attitude among white
reformers changed after the turn of
the century, with the rise of social
work and the expansion of professions
open to women that involved direct
services to the poor. Progressive-era
reformers grew more interested in
finding solutions to the fundamental
causes of social problems, and some
now wanted to end vice-related em-
ployment entirely—to end prostitu-
tion rather than contain it.
Their rationales ranged from Chris-
tian values to radical visions of eco-
nomic equality. The Chicago social
worker Jane Addams felt that pros-
titution would end if the conditions
that led women to sex work, especially
unequal wages, were eliminated. Other
reformers, such as Frances Willard and
the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union, favored the programs of social
control that eventually led to Prohibi-
tion. These diverse coalitions won over
the public. “The first Red Light Abate-
ment Law passed in Iowa in 1909,” the
journalist Sarah Laskow has written,
“and by 1914 the American Social Hy-
giene Association was working to pass
similar laws state by state.” Between
1912 and 1920 US city governments
closed two hundred red-light districts.
Police and politicians, however,
had too significant a financial stake
in brothels, gambling, and drinking
to eradicate vice districts altogether.
They therefore “met reformers half-
way,” Fischer writes: “instead of abol-
ishing vice districts, they routed them
to Black neighborhoods.” Building on
the work of scholars including Kevin
Mumford, Chad Heap, Cynthia Blair,
and Saidiya Hartman, Fischer ar-
gues that during the 1910s and the
1920s police deliberately enforced
new borders of tolerated vice. They
managed
an urban faucet, permitting the in-
undation of white men into Black
33
 neighborhoods, aggressively polic-
ing white women’s interracial so-
ciability, and erratically targeting
Black women for morals offenses.
The geographic containment of
vice, Fischer suggests, was itself a
law enforcement strategy. Once vice
had been relegated to Black neighbor-
hoods, those neighborhoods became
ever more associated in the white pub-
lic imagination with “sexual deviance
and lawlessness,” which helped jus-
tify the criminalization of their resi-
dents. When periodic flareups of white
moral outrage exposed police corrup-
tion, white reformers called for—and
were appeased by—crackdowns on
public displays of sexuality and sex-
ual commerce. “Black neighborhoods
had become the go-to sites for mor-
als arrests,” Fischer writes, “but those
arrests were not designed to repress
vice.” As one Black vice-syndicate
member in Los Angeles said in 1924:
It has always been the custom
here . . . when the town gets too
bad . . . to go over to Central avenue
and clean up the negroes. That al-
ways satisfied the longhairs [white
moral reformers]. . . . And the blow
has fallen where there is least re-
sistance—on those who have the
smallest chance of a comeback.
T he failure of Prohibition, Fischer
writes, left “police publicly discred-
ited and widely reviled.” So they re-
branded themselves as “crime fighters”
charged with confronting not wayward
girls but manly gangs, even though
this didn’t reflect reality. By 1930, as
“law men trumpeted ‘scientific’ data
gathering and cutting-edge weapons
and surveillance technologies,” in Fi-
scher’s words, arrest rates were being
collected and publicly circulated. The
police made more and more arrests—
although not because of a touted crime
wave. What actually increased were
rates of arrests on morals charges.
“Between 1932 and 1937,” Fischer
writes, “the FBI reported that the num-
ber of arrests of women increased by
75 percent,” while the arrests of men
rose by only 40 percent. A third of these
women were arrested either specifi-
cally for prostitution—a charge women
faced overwhelmingly more often than
men—or for the vaguely defined crimes
of disorderly conduct and vagrancy.
The FBI started breaking down crime
by gender in 1932 but did not account
for race within those statistics. Simply
drinking, going out at night in public
spaces defined by vice, or being sexu-
ally available could qualify as disorderly
conduct or the even vaguer “suspicion
of promiscuity.” Fischer writes that by
1930 “prostitution and promiscuity
blurred into a single legal category.”
This trend was lethally combined
with what Fischer calls the “new in-
vasion” of Black areas by white vice
consumers and workers, from male
customers and female companions
game for transgressing social bound-
aries to underclass and marginalized
women—presumably including queer
women, though Fischer does not ade-
quately address them. The best doc-
umentation of how Black residents
experienced white people arriving to
party on their streets comes from the
Black press. Local newspapers, Fischer
writes, “brimmed with accounts of po-
34
lice collusion and political corruption
as Black neighborhoods’ dignity and
safety were traded for white men’s
pleasure and profit.”
“Black women were more vulnerable
to arbitrary raids and frame-ups” than
white women, Fischer writes, in part
because white police expected suc-
cess in court with Black defendants.
“The racial inequality of morals law
enforcement deepened” still further as
it became more acceptable for white
women to occupy public space without
police attention in the 1950s and 1960s.
Between 1961 and 1962 in Los Ange-
les, the arrest rate for white women
declined by 12 percent, but for Black
women it rose by 18 percent.
Fischer attends to the huge popula-
tion shifts that transformed American
cities in the period she discusses, es-
A policeman in disguise on a Hollywood street waiting to be solicited by passing drivers,
Los Angeles, 1964; photograph by Bill Eppridge
pecially the Great Migration of south-
ern Black people to the north and the
subsequent wave of white flight from
northern cities. Her book offers a pre-
amble to the mass political movements
of the 1960s and 1970s, including gay
liberation, women’s liberation, and
movements for both Black civil rights
and Black power. It took urbanization,
the irrepressible recognition of differ-
ence, the mix of ideas and experience,
and the potential of uncontrolled pub-
lic space—in part created by neglect—
to produce these revolutionary ideas
and relationships.
When the children of white flight re-
turned to the cities in the early 1980s,
they had their way paved by renovation
and new construction, the redistribu-
tion of existing housing stock, and the
imposition of gated-community aes-
thetics onto urban space. The result
was that they replaced existing urban
populations en masse. Sexual policing
was a gateway for this gentrification,
Fischer writes. Real estate developers,
in neighborhoods like Boston’s Com-
bat Zone or Atlanta’s Peachtree Street,
depended heavily on mass arrests of
sex workers and the elimination of sex
businesses like theaters and dance and
massage parlors. In New York City the
redevelopment of Times Square, started
in the 1980s, directly targeted sex busi-
nesses including massage parlors, por-
nographic and live-act theaters, sex
hotels, and street prostitution, clear-
ing areas for high-end redevelopment.
This initiative was part of a citywide
trend: the city and federal governments
disinvested from low-income housing
programs, and tax breaks were given to
luxury developers, leading to a cultural
attitude that allowed young whites to
feel comfortable establishing their sub-
urban tastes in communities of color.
We have seen, in the decades since, the
extended seizure of Black residential
neighborhoods like Bushwick, Crown
Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
F ischer leaves the policing of queer
people almost entirely out of her
discussion. Lvovsky, a professor of law
and history at Harvard, brings it to the
center, with more success in analyz-
ing gay men’s interactions with op-
pressive authorities than those of gay
women. “The law’s confrontations with
gay life in the twentieth century are a
core part of any history of sexuality in
the United States,” she writes. In Vice
Patrol, she examines the range of atti-
tudes within law enforcement as it set
about repressing and punishing homo-
sexuality in the public sphere. State
strategies for antigay policing often
mirrored the tactics that Fischer shows
were designed to control and punish
women, especially Black women. Sod-
omy statutes were deployed against gay
defendants in court much as antisolic-
itation laws were against women; regu-
lations targeted gay-friendly bars much
as they had bars where unaccompanied
women could be sexually available. In-
deed, Lvovsky shows, “the project of
policing gay life at midcentury” became
“the site of an institutional struggle
over the boundaries of the criminal
justice system itself.”
Lvovsky makes three related claims:
first, that the different arms of the
criminal justice system agreed neither
about the importance of repressing
queer life nor about how to do it; sec-
ond, that court battles were “a pow-
erful arena for shaping” knowledge
and understanding of queer life; and
finally, that the police’s antigay cam-
paigns benefited from the system’s
deep internal disagreements about
“the nature of homosexuality itself.”
She bears out those claims by examin-
ing the tactics of repression likeliest
during this period to bring “the police,
and gay men themselves, into court”:
“liquor board proceedings against gay-
friendly bars, plainclothes campaigns
to entice sexual overtures, and the use
of clandestine surveillance to uncover
sexual acts in public bathrooms.”
Fischer points out that white men
were not persecuted for prostitution,
but Lvovsky shows how being homo-
sexual stripped some white men’s layer
of protection away. And yet her empha-
sis is on the enforcers, not the defen-
dants. Most policemen in the years
after World War II “came to the force
with little knowledge about gay life,”
Lvovsky writes. But “as gay men in the
1950s cohered into increasingly robust
communities, vice officers developed an
unusual intimacy with the gay world’s
social and sexual practices.” Their “flu-
ency in cruising culture,” for example,
makes them central, for Lvovsky, “to any
history of public knowledge about sex-
ual difference.” In the 1960s, she argues,
it was the police, more often than activ-
ists or academics, who became sources
for the media’s information—and its
misconceptions—about homosexuality.
Like Fischer, Lvovsky points to the
failure of Prohibition as a turning point
for policing in the US. Establishments
serving liquor illegally were subject to
illegal payoffs, but once alcohol was legal
again, “legislatures across the nation
passed regulations policing the sale of
liquor in both retail and service estab-
lishments,” including, even in New York
City, restrictions on knowingly selling
drinks to homosexuals. Those restric-
tions stayed in place until activists
overturned the laws, starting in Cali-
fornia in 1951. Technically the right to
deny public accommodation—service
in a restaurant or a hotel—continued
into my day, until New York City finally
passed a nondiscrimination bill in 1986.
No such legislation has yet come to be
applied federally: even now, aside from
the right to get married, queer people’s
rights to access and expression are de-
termined on the state and local levels.
Because the laws “prohibiting own-
ers from ‘permitting’ homosexual
customers or harboring known fe-
male impersonators . . . generally re-
quired some evidence that the bar’s
employees knew that they were serv-
ing a queer clientele,” Lvovsky notes,
officials tasked with enforcing them
insisted that homosexuals were swish,
limp-wristed, and therefore easily
identifiable. For a man to wear loaf-
ers or order cocktails instead of beer
and shots could become automatically
indicting. The result was to stigmatize
a range of ways that people presented
themselves. This meant overt regula-
tions against female impersonators,
the effeminate, and the femme.
Bar owners had the full range of re-
sponses to these laws. Some tried to
kick out queer clients, going so far as to
drop salt in their drinks to chase them
away. Others catered to queers and
didn’t want straight customers to get
uncomfortable or complain. Lvovsky
doesn’t address which of these pro-
prietors were queer themselves, but
she does cite some striking examples
of support for their clientele. “Tell me
© ESTATE OF BILL EPPRIDGE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
one thing,” Ruth Loomis, the owner of
Anthony’s in Paterson, New Jersey, said
in 1959. “These people who you call ho-
mosexuals, gays or whatever you call
them—what are they supposed to do?”
L esbian bars emerged as a conse-
quence of the freedom and mobil-
ity women gained from World War II. At
first, Lvovsky points out, these estab-
lishments “were often constrained by a
broader taboo against unaccompanied
women in public spaces, especially in
seedier establishments like bars and
taverns.” Lvovsky observes that there
The New York Review
was less classic police harassment of
lesbian bars, but she overlooks that
they were subject to a lot of nonstate
male surveillance. The methods and
theory of women’s history help us read
these differences. As late as the 1970s
and 1980s, most lesbian bars were run
by men, often men involved with or-
ganized crime: there would be a male
bouncer at the door and men crossing
the dance floor regularly to remind the
women that they were not in control.
Sometimes the line is thin between
such men and male employees of the
state. Lesbians have long been kicked
out of families, been denied employ-
ment, and had our work marginalized
without state intervention: Lvovsky
ignores that “policing” takes differ-
ent forms in our lives than in men’s.1
Just as the police identified gay men
by rouged faces, red ties, and bleached
hair, they spotted lesbians by actions
assigned male, like holding cigarette
stubs “back-handed” and drinking beer
directly out of bottles. In both cases
the police and liquor authorities saw
their task inside bars as a matter of
decoding social performance. People
were harassed for how they dressed,
their mannerisms, and their aesthetics,
not just for sexual acts. In the period
before gay liberation, Lvovsky points
out, a range of courtroom defenses
were based on the claim that the per-
son charged was not in fact homosex-
ual: that a man wore refined leisure
wear because he had gone to Harvard,
where the clean, tailored look was fash-
ionable, or that a woman wore pants
and boots not because she wanted to
find a femme partner but because she
worked in a factory. Although Lvovsky
doesn’t make this point explicit, with-
out the support of a political move-
ment, arrested queers had no choice
but to claim heterosexuality as their
defense for having a drink in a public
place—a desperate last resort.
Then there is the question of de-
coys, men employed to pretend to be
queer in order to catch gays. Lvovsky
acknowledges that
from the sordid tales of police-
men demanding sexual favors to
more benign rumors of decoys liv-
ing with male lovers, gay men ar-
rested by officers insisted that the
vice squads featured their share
of secret homosexuals.
And why shouldn’t they have insisted
so? After all, who knows more about the
secret gay sex lives of “straight people”
than the queers they have sex with?
She also examines the racial dy-
namics of decoys and their victims.
Apparently on occasion a well-to-do
white man could get away with invit-
ing a rugged white undercover over
for a beer on the pretext that he was
just starting up a friendship with a
“decent citizen.” But when a Black un-
dercover received an invitation from a
white man to socialize, it had to be sex-
ual. Lvovsky might have gone further
here toward noting that the period’s
marginalized and subterranean queer
subcultures were more racially mixed
1
Hugh Ryan’s brilliant new book, The Wom-
en’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a
Forgotten Prison (Bold Type, 2022), shows
how a wide range of tactics for gender en-
forcement and sexual control pushed queer
women into juvenile facilities and prisons
in a way that gay men were not.
March 23, 2023
and cross-class than these white men’s Most Americans experiencing queer shown his genitals and then arrested
lives would have been otherwise, had desire have lacked—and in many cases the man who responded, wrote:
they married white women from their still lack—access to grassroots queer
own backgrounds and stayed in their media and rely on the mainstream’s Courts are not so uninformed as
small towns. To me, one of the great misrepresentations for information not to be aware that there are such
losses that accompanies gay assimi- about themselves. things as flirtations between man
lation is that so many people have re- Lvovsky’s central argument is that and man. . . . And when flirtation
turned, via acceptance, to the family of authorities had little consensus about is encouraged and mutual, and
origin and its racial and class milieu. what homosexuality was and how it leads to a not unexpected inti-
When Lvovsky addresses the rise should be treated. On one hand there macy . . . such cannot be classified
of the Mattachine Society, an early were highly enthusiastic decoys like as assault.
gay rights group, or the midcentury Frank Manthos, a twenty-three-year-
gay publication One, which directly old vice officer who was responsible
addressed antigay state harassment,
she seems vague about the move-
ment’s relationship to queer peo-
for 150 arrests in eight months. In one
evening he could arrest six men after
elaborate enticements involving flirt-
“I n a system administered by mul-
tiple agents of the law,” Lvovsky
concludes somewhat anemically, “the
ple. “Most gay men and women,” she ing, invitations, and hotel rooms. On repression of marginalized social prac-
writes, “shied away from homophile the other hand there are figures like tices reflects the legal system’s many
groups, concerned about the optics the enlightened court of appeals judge ways of understanding—and misun-
of an organized homosexual lobby, or who, when faced with a decoy who had derstanding—the thing being policed.”
simply uninterested in turning their But isn’t that the problem of policing
personal lives into political platforms.” munists in Closets: Queering the History, in general? That a sector of empow-
But “most gay men and women” in 1930s–1990s (Routledge, 2022), extends pre- ered people is dedicated to constraining
America had never heard of homo- vious scholarship on the political origins of and punishing citizens either simply for
phile groups. Mattachine was a tiny Mattachine founders like Harry Hay and “marginalized social practices” or for
group of vanguard thinkers with a his- Rudi Gernreich (the designer of the topless actions that originate from problems
toric impact far beyond its numbers.2 bathing suit for women) in the Communist the punishment itself does not address?
movement, where they learned how to ana- One of America’s most respected grass-
2
Bettina Aptheker’s startling new book lyze their condition politically and organize roots leaders on that question, Mariame
on gays in the US Communist Party, Com- effectively. Kaba, has spent her career asking what
we would have to change if we stopped
arresting and jailing people and instead
offered them housing, health care, qual-
ity education, child care, functional
transportation, and meaningful jobs
that pay enough. To that end, she has
Cuttlefish recommended reasonable, imaginable
measures such as reparations to vic-
tims of police violence, the redirection
We were sitting on the floor. I started writing of police funding to social goods, and
as the window darkened and the grass grew the creation of elected civilian review
bright. By morning, half the trees were boards with the power to fire and disci-
submarine. What was it about being young and pline police officers and administrators.
wanting to write? You said it wasn’t choice, it Kaba returns repeatedly in her writ-
was dictation. You had to ask. A frog leapt ings to sexual policing and its effects
on Black women who fight back against
through the cat flap taking refuge by our feet. sexual violence. In a searing 2017 essay
You knew I had a brother, though we’d only met for The Appeal, reprinted in Kaba’s col-
that night. Each time you forget and remember lection We Do This ’Til We Free Us,3
the experience becomes truer. Like lightning Kaba and her collaborator Brit Schulte
in reverse the fuse blew. I was stirring a pot analyze the case of Cyntoia Brown, a
of dal, your dog Annie asleep on the floor beside sixteen-year-old Nashville sex worker
who in 2004 used her own gun to kill
me, snoring. We went to a café whose name a forty-three-year-old client after he
rhymed with dal, me playing with a small took her to his home, showed her his
saltshaker, you talking about your brother. He had guns, and “grabbed her violently by
to go and you were about to go with him but then the genitals.” Brown was tried as an
you’d changed your mind. That night there was an adult and “convicted of first-degree
accident. One second he was in his car asking if premeditated murder, first-degree fel-
ony murder, and ‘especially aggravated
you wanted to come and you were about to and robbery,’” for which she was given con-
that was that. We were strangers in a circle eating current life sentences.
peach cobbler. Someone played “Galway Girl” on “Courts historically mete out pun-
a child’s toy guitar. It’s me! It’s me! you screamed. ishment disproportionate to the acts of
You used to live on Grafton Street in Boston. Too self-defense by Black women, femmes,
late to leave and raining now, we talked about and trans people,” Kaba and Schulte
write, and “young women who don’t fit
your brother. It was after college that you started the perfect-victim narrative” often find
writing. Lightning crackled in the air. You were all themselves “harshly punished for self-
along me. I watched you heat a pot of dal, your dog defense” or forced “into ‘treatment’
asleep beside you. You planned to leave by that does nothing to address the con-
twenty-three but changed your mind. To talk with ditions under which they entered the
shadows you became a shade. Your eyes were sex trade in the first place.”
In 2013 Brown received a commuted
red. You looked like him. I didn’t know you had sentence of fifteen years after commu-
a brother. You had to ask, you don’t have to believe. nity members and celebrities launched
We were sitting on my parents’ couch. You said it a campaign on her behalf—a reminder
wasn’t choice. You were my brother. We were of the power that organized groups
events in language. The window darkened and can wield to resist sexual policing. As
the grass grew bright. Can you hear that, cuttlefish? Kaba’s writings show, a public opposed
to abusive policing has emerged as a
—Will Harris
.
powerful force. Only this sort of col-
lective response can break through our
current culture’s reductive thinking
about resistance.
3
Reviewed in these pages by Bill Keller,
November 3, 2022.
35
 Trees in Themselves
Elderflora:
A Modern History of Ancient Trees
by Jared Farmer.
Basic Books, 432 pp., $35.00
In the past, when a candidate for the
title of the world’s oldest tree was dis-
covered in the United States, many
predictable things tended to happen,
varying slightly by historical era. The
tree was usually found on land that had
been given away or sold cheap by the
federal government—and then had to
be repurchased at very high cost. If
the tree happened to be on ancestral
indigenous land, someone invented
racist, pseudo-indigenous fictions to
lend the tree an aura of romance.
Scientists examined the tree, and
now and then one of them behaved
badly. A road was built to the tree. Visi-
tors flocked there, and in so doing they
compacted the soil and damaged the
tree’s root system. They carried away
branches, leaves, needles, cones, pieces
of bark—whatever they could take.
They carved their names on the trunk
and nailed signs to it. Vandals tried
to set fire to the tree or cut it down.
Falsehoods, exaggerations, and factual
errors were repeated (and reprinted)
long after they’d been discredited.
Eventually the tree was forgotten,
because an even older tree had been
found. Or it succumbed to natural or
unnatural causes and was turned into
key rings, ornaments, souvenirs, mu-
seum samples, and tabletops. If the
tree was cross-sectioned into slabs for
public display, the timeline marked
across its rings was likely to reveal a
Christianized history of white West-
ern “progress”—a timeline the histo-
rian Jared Farmer calls “a totalizing
meta-narrative”—which terminated,
of course, in a dead tree. All of this I
conclude from reading Farmer’s ab-
sorbing new book, Elderflora: A Mod-
ern History of Ancient Trees.
“Curiosity, care, negligence and de-
spoiling”: those are the human habits
that surface in the presence of “the lat-
est oldest tree,” according to Farmer,
whether it’s a giant sequoia in one de-
cade or a bristlecone pine in another.
It’s as though the ancientness of the
trees provides a maypole around which
humans can perform their characteris-
tic dance. And here’s what makes it all
the stranger: the atoms in an ancient
tree and those in a human being are
equally old, formed billions of years
ago in the big bang and the early uni-
verse. Only the evanescent, organismic
shapes those atoms take, as tree or
human, can be said to differ in age.
Since we’re unable to feel the atomic
ancientness we’re actually made of, we
imagine that the world’s oldest tree is
“a bridge,” as Farmer puts it, “between
temporalities we feel and those we can
only think.” We visit the vicinity of the
world’s oldest tree to become aware of
time as a substance and, Farmer sug-
gests, because it grants us “emotional
access to timefulness.” But that’s a lit-
tle peculiar. You may feel small stand-
ing next to a lofty coastal redwood.
But next to an ancient pine, do you
feel brief? After all, the present en-
folds you both. Farmer may have this
wrong. To feel the temporality of an
36
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Andreas Eriksson: Tree Trunk, 2013
ancient tree, you have to think it first,
which is what Elderflora is meant to
help us do.
“  O ld Ones can be found every-
where,” Farmer writes, “if peo-
ple take time to look.” But how do we
know they’re actually old? That’s one of
the central questions in Elderflora—a
question that illuminates the transi-
tion from the legendary to the factual,
from oft-told but unprovable stories to
verifiable physical proof (or disproof)
of a tree’s antiquity.
Naturally, some kinds of trees live
longer than others. Only about twenty-
five species—mostly conifers—are
capable of living more than a thou-
sand years. Farmer calls these “perdu-
rables,” and most of them tend to be
“longevous on two scales”—in evolu-
tionary age and biological age. Some
tree species are also much better than
others at providing proof of their el-
derliness. The trunk of an ancient yew
in an English churchyard has probably
hollowed out over time, leaving almost
no usable evidence of its age. Olives
and ginkgoes and baobabs also hollow
out as they get older, and they have all
been revered for their timelessness.
The oldest individual trees found so
far1 are, famously, Great Basin bris-
tlecone pines (Pinus longaeva), which
live on a few windswept mountains in
California, Nevada, and Utah. They’re
gnarled and tortuous in form, superb
examples of what the dendrochronolo-
gist Edmund Schulman, who first an-
alyzed them in the early 1950s, called
“longevity under adversity.” What
1
As distinguished from clonal clumps of
trees, like the great aspen colony called
Pando, in Utah.
makes them scientifically import-
ant isn’t only their great age but the
amount of data they yield, includ-
ing their growth-ring record and the
“chemical compounds in the wood and
in the variable-length needles, which
persist on branches for decades as
records of photosynthate gains and
losses.” The tree-ring samples that
bristlecones yield when cored2 reach
back almost five thousand years in the
oldest specimens, and they show a re-
markable sensitivity to “climatic sig-
nals,” including spikes in the isotope
carbon-14. It’s a striking coincidence
that bristlecone pines are so data-rich.
“It almost seems miraculous,” Farmer
writes, “that the longest-living individ-
ual plants on Earth have turned out to
be perfect for Earth system science.”
In his previous book, Trees in Par-
adise: A California History (2013),
Farmer remarks that “botanists don’t
define trees; regular people do.” In
other words, “tree” isn’t a precise taxo-
nomic category. It includes many kinds
of plants with many kinds of growth
strategies—and many ways of grow-
ing old. Like redwoods, ginkgoes, and
olives, a venerable yew, for instance, is
capable of remarkable feats of regen-
eration, including the ability to regrow
from almost any of its parts, even after
catastrophic damage. “These trees,”
Farmer writes, “never lose their ability
to resprout and regenerate. . . . In the-
ory, such a plant is internally capable
of immortality, though some external
force inevitably ends its life.”
2
Using a tool called an instrument borer,
which removes a thin cylinder of wood with-
out harming the tree. This works far better
on a trunk of small diameter—like a bris-
tlecone pine’s—than on the massive trunk
of a sequoia or redwood.
In a sense, bristlecone pines have
sacrificed the yew’s vigorous, multi-
farious, nearly perpetual regenerative
capacity for a way of growing that’s
better suited to their stern habitat—
and to inscribing their history within
themselves in the form of tree rings.
They live through
sequential, sectorial deaths—
compartmentalizing their external
afflictions, shutting down, section
by section, producing fertile cones
for an extra millennium with the
sustenance of a solitary strip of
bark.
Chemically, Farmer writes, bristle-
cones “are off the charts,” full of the
resins characteristic of conifers, which
help preserve the trees against fun-
gus and insects. And because they live
in high, dry, cold, and windy places,
they routinely endure stress that would
kill trees of other species. They attain
great age not despite their habitat
but because of it. (That’s the mean-
ing of longevity under adversity.) And
their growth rings preserve a high-
resolution chronicle of climatic con-
ditions during their life span. It’s as
if they were scientific instruments set
in place fortuitously some five mil-
lennia ago.
E very ancient tree, Farmer writes,
raises a question that’s as phil-
osophical as it is practical: “Does a
naturally occurring tree of great age
have value in itself?” The critical words
are “in itself.” As interesting as a tree-
ring record may be on its own, its sci-
entific value fully emerges only when
the patterns from many tree-ring rec-
ords in a climatic region are compared
and coordinated and pegged to known
calendrical dates.
Scientifically, ancient trees “speak
collectively as populations,” Farmer
notes, after their data has been
gathered and smoothed—not as in-
dividuals. When their evidence is
cross-referenced with evidence from
glacial ice cores reaching much far-
ther back in time (as well as from
other calendrical tools in other sci-
ANDRE AS ERI KSSON/PR IVATE C OLL ECTION/ STEPHEN F RI EDMAN GAL LE RY, LON DON
entific disciplines), the result is an
ability to study climatic history with
surprising precision—and often with
absolute rather than relative dating.3
Much of what scientists know about
Earth’s earlier climates—essential for
understanding anthropogenic climate
change—derives from dendrochrono-
logical research. That’s one of the val-
ues of an ancient tree.4
3
A good example is a recent study from the
Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the
University of Arizona, which correlated data
from ice cores and bristlecone tree rings
to correct the probable date of the Minoan
eruption of Thera, circa 1600 BCE .
4
Among the things ancient trees have to
tell us, according to Farmer? “The period
from 1850 to 1950—California’s first cen-
tury as a US state—exhibited the lowest
frequency of drought for any hundred-year
period in the last two millennia. In other
words, Euro-American settlers reaped the
The New York Review
 But humans don’t experience a “per-
durable” like a bristlecone or a sequoia
“as populations” or as sets of data points.
We experience what Farmer calls “their
individual arborescence—their person-
hood,” a word that sounds almost like
a leap into Tolkien’s fantastic, arboreal
world. When it comes to trees, Farmer
argues, personification isn’t just a kind
of category error, a sideways slip into
fiction or myth or metaphor. “Personifi-
cation is intrinsic to treeness,” he sug-
gests, because trees tend to resemble
“a person-like being: an individual with
torso and limbs.” Anthropomorphizing
trees isn’t only a modern tendency.
As Farmer notes, “plants misunder-
stood as individuals have had cultural
standing for millennia.” This has usu-
ally meant understanding “treeness”
in terms of humanness.
Farmer envisions a different kind
of ethical kinship. He wonders, quiz-
zically rather than hopefully, whether
humans can mature into a different
sort of “plant thinking,” one that
doesn’t depend on “a special bias for
trunks,” especially the trunks of very
old trees. Perhaps, he writes,
people could learn to relate to
these modular, social, communi-
cative beings on their own multi-
tudinous terms, including sexual,
unisexual, and asexual reproduc-
tion, in all kinds of forms, big and
small, trunked and shrubby. Bio-
logical treehood, and the fullness
of tree time, could at last supplant
anthropomorphic treeness.
Farmer also imagines elder trees help-
ing us to recalibrate our perspective on
the geologic past, which, he argues, is
deformed by “an overemphasis on di-
nosaurs.” We don’t “see the big plants
among the big lizards; the leaves are
too familiar.”
You might infer from Farmer’s line
of thinking that elderflora actually
have more value in relation to humans
than they do in relation to organisms
within their natural ecosystem. That’s
not entirely wrong. Commercial forest-
ers, of course, think of trees in terms
of their lumber yield, and from that
perspective, ancient trees tended to be
considered “‘overage,’ ‘overmature,’ and
‘decadent.’” We’re also beginning to
understand that living trees do things,
like sequestering carbon and linking
together mycelial networks, that are
far more important than their eco-
nomic value as dead lumber. Farmer
writes that “the only ‘ecosystem ser-
vice’ a mature sequoia provides that
other Sierra conifers cannot is nest-
ing habitat for reintroduced condors.”
And yet they also provide “temporal
services for modern people.” Ancient
trees, Farmer argues,
are ethical gift givers. They invite
us to be fully human—truly sapi-
ent—by engaging our deepest fac-
ulties: to venerate, to analyze, to
meditate. They expand our moral
and temporal imaginations.
Since the enduring well-being of na-
ture itself—if not its actual survival—
rewards of the dumbest luck.” And: “Using
tree rings as proxies for snowpack and sum-
mer soil moisture, scientists determined
that this twenty-plus-year period [from
2000 to 2020] was the driest in the Sierra
Nevada since 800 CE .”
March 23, 2023
now depends wholly on the attitudes
of modern people, it may be that the
emotional services ancient trees offer
us should be folded into the broader
concept of “ecosystem services.”
I t’s not surprising that we honor the
uniqueness of the world’s one old-
est tree—the single bristlecone pine
that holds the record for longevity and
whose exact location is therefore kept
secret to protect it. We instinctively
relish superlatives. But there are old
trees everywhere—old for their spe-
cies, old for their habitat, old for their
immediate neighborhood, and often
far older than humans think they are.5
Biodiversity is usually understood
in terms of species richness. But to
Farmer—and to many ecologists—
temporal richness matters almost as
much. In other words, chronodiversity
is an essential aspect of biodiversity.
If we have trouble imagining this, it’s
because we habitually think of trees as
individuals, person-like, not as mem-
bers of interconnected communities
and rich interspecific and intergenera-
tional associations high in the canopy
and underground. Old trees are the
hubs of those communities.
It’s hard for humans to notice chro-
nodiversity, even in places where it’s
sure to be found. (Plain old diversity is
hard enough. Most people have trou-
ble telling a beech from a birch.) It’s
harder still to notice what you might
call demographic diversity within a
forest. Tree species grow old in differ-
ent ways, and the correlation between
a tree’s size and its age varies from
species to species. It’s one thing to
know how old the trees are in a stand
that was planted all at once after clear-
cutting a forest. But it’s entirely differ-
ent trying to grasp the chronological
complexity of an old-growth forest,
where “one-quarter of the trees . . .will
be triple or quadruple the median age,
and one-one-hundredth will be ten or
twenty times the median age.” Chro-
nodiversity isn’t just an aspect of bio-
diversity. It also “aids biodiversity.”
What matters isn’t simply the statis-
tical variation of ages in a forest. It’s
the way those differently aged trees
work together. It’s worth remembering
that, as Farmer writes, “each Old One
represents a specific moment in the
past—a matrix of favorable conditions
that existed upon establishment, and
may not recur for centuries.”
A living tree embodies a genetic her-
itage and a climatic heritage. And, as
in human communities, every different
age group in the forest has its part to
play—not on its own but in relation
to all the others. “During a seedling’s
precarious recruitment phase,” Farmer
writes, “the cooperative assistance of
a big old tree may mean the difference
between death and a long, long life.”
Farmer calls clear-cutting old-growth
forests in British Columbia or the Am-
azon “ecocide,” and for good reason.
The globalized Western rapine of the
natural world has a habit of leaving
5
A good example is northern white cedars
growing on the Niagara Escarpment in Can-
ada. Everyone had assumed they were re-
grown from a forest that had been cut down
around 1850. In fact, they were around five
hundred years old. Ten cedars growing in
cracks or on cliff ledges were more than a
thousand years old, including one that
dated to 688 CE .
behind only monotonous, even-aged,
“reforested” plantations wherever we
have been—nothing older than the
date of our most recent, violent eco-
nomic incursion.
Consider the case of Brazil nut
trees (Bertholletia excelsa) in Amazo-
nian forests. Genetic and demographic
evidence suggests that they’ve been
spread by humans for millennia, as
part of a culture of agroforestry. But
the age structure of existing Brazil
nut trees, Farmer points out, is top-
heavy—most of the trees date to the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
with few trees now entering maturity.
And why? “The missing stands of trees
represent missing cohorts of people,”
who died in the immediate aftermath
of European contact. Those ancient
Brazil nuts (castanhas in Portuguese,
though one would like to know their
ancient indigenous names) are still
bearing witness, after four or five hun-
dred years, to the destruction of the
people—the families and societies—
who planted them one by one.
W e live in a universe full of tem-
poral signals, everything from
a faint red blur of a galaxy 13.1 bil-
lion years old to the complex set of
signs—some vivid, some nearly in-
discernible—that tell us high au-
tumn is here. We inhabit bodies that
are wholly embedded in time, which
can feel like an erosive friction, if you
choose to pay attention to it. Many
of us choose not to, even though we
notice—when we name the decade
we were born in—how long ago that
now sounds. And yet nothing is new.
In a way, we make a mistake inherent
in the Western version of our species
when we think about “the world’s old-
est tree,” a mistake that’s easy to cap-
ture in an imaginary headline: “New
Oldest Tree Discovered.” If you were
able to stand beside that tree—what-
ever kind it happens to be—you would
have to work hard to admire something
more than the number associated with
it. You would have to work hard to see
the tree itself.
As for feeling the tree’s age, I think
what we feel isn’t a quality that’s in-
herent in the tree itself. We feel, as
in a time lapse, the changes that take
place as the world’s centuries whir past
in that one location. That’s the kind
of imagining we’re good at. We’re no
better at feeling the long time of an
ancient tree—the second-by-second,
day-by-day of its existence—than we
are at feeling the long time of evolu-
tion itself. It’s a truism that humans
aren’t very good at comprehending
large numbers. But it’s amazing how
hard it is to imagine even small num-
bers when they’re applied to the literal
passage of time. Five thousand years
(a bristlecone) is nearly as hard as 13.1
billion (a galaxy).
What we could be imagining when
we think about the long time of ancient
trees isn’t the number of human gener-
ations they’ve been coterminous with.
We could be admiring a difference be-
tween living organisms—utterly dis-
tinct and yet closely kinned—that’s as
beautiful as it is mysterious. Is time
in a bristlecone the same as time in
us? If that were an equation, you could
.
factor out “time,” leaving this ques-
tion: Is a bristlecone the same as us?
In every important respect, I think,
the answer is yes.
“A lyrical, meticulous inquiry
into the alchemy of memory.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Il rombo is an Italian term for the sub-
terranean rumble before an earth-
quake. In May and September 1976,
two severe earthquakes ripped through
the Friuli region in northeastern Italy,
causing extensive damage. About a
thousand people died under the rub-
ble, tens of thousands were left without
shelter, and many ended up leaving
their homes forever.
The highly original novel Rombo is
a record of this disaster and its af-
termath, as told by seven men and
women who were children at the time:
Anselmo, Mara, Olga, Gigi, Silvia, Lina,
and Toni. They speak of portents that
preceded the earthquakes and of the
complete disorder that followed, the
obliteration of all that was familiar.
Their memories, like the earth, are
subject to rifts and abysses.
“It reads cinematically; the cuts
are determined and stylistic. . . .
The book excels when it manages
to balance the grand geology of its
subject matter on the tiny gestures of
daily life. . . . Rombo is staggering.
There is something epic about it.”
—Magnus Rena, Review 31
“Kinsky expertly animates the
natural world around her while
removing her human hand. . . . If
trauma is the inability to redescribe,
Rombo offers a powerful antidote
in language and the infinite
possibilities of description.”
—Matthew Janney, Financial Times
“A chorus of seven villagers narrate
the novel from a vantage point close
to the present day. . . . Kinsky is also
a poet, and she has a poet’s ear for
rhythm and precision, elegantly
rendered in Caroline Schmidt’s
translation. The author has a great
gift for describing landscape.”
—Charlie Lee, Harper’s Magazine
ROMBO
A NOVEL
Esther Kinsky
Translated from the German by
Caroline Schmidt
Paperback • $16.95
On sale March 14th
Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
37
 








 
















 





 
 

 
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March 23, 2023 39

 Reckoning with a Troubled Past
L’invenzione del colpevole:
Il “caso” di Simonino da Trento,
dalla propaganda alla storia
[The Invention of the Culprit:
The Case of Little Simon of Trento
from Propaganda to History]
an exhibition at the Tridentine
Diocesan Museum, Trent,
Italy, December 13, 2019–
September 14, 2020.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Domenica Primerano and others.
Trento: Museo Diocesano
Tridentino/Temi, 368 pp., €45.00
Nieobecni—Z Dziejów
Społeczności Żydowskiej
w Sandomierzu
[The Absent: The History of the
Jewish Community in Sandomierz]
an exhibition at the Regional
Museum in Sandomierz, Poland,
October 23, 2020–April 2, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Karolina Gara and
Tomisław Giergiel.
Sandomierz: Muzeum Okręgowe
w Sandomierzu, 199 pp., available
at sandomierskiszlakzydowski.pl/
galeria.htm
Trent, in northern Italy, and Sando-
mierz, in eastern Poland, are hundreds
of miles apart but share a ghastly con-
nection: both were sites of anti-Jewish
libels hundreds of years ago. In 1475
in Trent and in 1698 and 1710 in San-
domierz, Jews were falsely accused of
killing Christian children. Both towns
have remnants of these hideous affairs,
but neither has a Jewish population
any longer.
In the past few years, as the Covid
pandemic raged, two remarkable ex-
hibitions—“The Invention of the
Culprit: The Case of Little Simon of
Trento from Propaganda to History”
at the Diocesan Museum in Trent and
“The Absent: The History of the Jewish
Community in Sandomierz” at the Re-
gional Museum in Sandomierz—sought
to reckon with that troubling past. Mu-
seums play a crucial part in shaping
public understanding of history and
thereby have the potential to fashion
cultural change. But even as they look
toward the future, museums, through
their dependence on scholarly research
and their need as public institutions to
accommodate current political dynam-
ics, remain tethered to the past. In the
two shows (and their printed catalogs),
these restraints could be felt in the lan-
guage used and objects displayed, in
uneasy efforts to maneuver around ob-
stacles, and in noticeable blind spots.
In March 1475 the body of a Chris-
tian toddler named Simon was found
washed up under a house in Trent,
Italy, that was being used as the Jews’
synagogue. It was the Christian Eas-
ter and the Jewish Passover. Simon’s
death led to a lengthy and uniquely
well-documented trial of all local Jews.
The men were arrested, tortured, and
executed, and the women and children,
under house arrest, forced to convert to
Christianity—a catastrophe that ended
the presence of Judaism in the town.1
1
For more on this subject, see my Blood Libel:
On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard
40
Magda Teter
Simon of Trent with the symbols of his supposed martyrdom; painting by an unknown
northern Italian artist, late sixteenth century
After Simon’s disappearance it was
assumed the child drowned in one
of the canals of the town. Soon ru-
mors implicating Jews began to circu-
late. Their homes were searched, but
nothing was found. Over the course of
the trial Jews’ testimonies, extracted
under torture, began to align with a
narrative casting Simon as a martyr
killed by Jews that was written and
published a few days after Simon’s
body had been found.
A cult of Simonino (Little Simon)
arose, promoted enthusiastically and
at great expense by the local prince-
bishop, Johannes Hinderbach, who
was eager to attract pilgrims to Trent.
The validity of the cult depended on
the acceptance of the child as a mar-
tyr worthy of veneration; his death,
therefore, had to be ascribed to Jews
who stood accused of killing him in
“hatred of Christ.” The bishop paid
writers, poets, and artists to produce
songs, tales, poems, and images about
Simon’s supposed martyrdom and the
miracles his relics were said to per-
form. Hinderbach harnessed a new
technology—the printing press—to
widely disseminate this work show-
ing Simon as an innocent, Christlike
victim of Jews, who were sometimes
portrayed as his murderous crucifi-
ers. As a result, the Trent affair left
University Press, 2018); reviewed in these
pages by Sara Lipton, September 23, 2021.
behind not only a trail of blood, tears,
and suffering but also an unsurpassed
record—literary, legal, and visual.
Hinderbach’s efforts did not go un-
challenged. Pope Sixtus IV set up a
commission to investigate his claims,
the legitimacy of the trial of the Jews,
and the authenticity of the miracles
that were said to have ensued. In 1478
the pope narrowly ruled the trial lawful
by the legal standards in place in Trent
though not by those in Rome—but he
explicitly forbade the veneration of
Simon. He exhorted Hinderbach not
to allow devotion that “might result
in injury to God or contempt of the
Apostolic See,” and stood by earlier
papal protections of Jews, threaten-
ing “those who oppose this decree or
rebel against it” with “the weight of
ecclesiastical censure and other [per-
tinent] laws.”
Hinderbach did not heed the pope’s
enjoinder. He continued to promote
the cult until his death in 1486, leav-
ing evidence of it in the cityscape
itself and across the region: pilgrim-
age sites such as Simon’s house, the
house where his body was found, and
the church where his relics were kept;
paintings, sculptures, and frescoes on
building façades and in churches; illus-
trated leaflets and booklets. Thanks to
the bishop’s efforts the story of Simon
was the first anti-Jewish libel to go
viral in the premodern era. The pu-
tative evidence was solidified in print
and entered the most authoritative
chronicles, becoming a much-repeated
and indelible tale that shaped Euro-
pean Christians’ perception of Jews for
centuries to come. The Nazis used it
in their anti-Semitic propaganda, and
neo-Nazi white supremacists return
to it even now to justify their violent
attacks on Jews in the United States.
In the 1530s, over a century after the
affair, the Catholic Church formally
recognized the cult, and Simon entered
the newly reformed liturgical calendar.
Across Europe, this recognition soon
came to be seen as the validation not
only of the cult in Trent but also of
other libels against Jews. The cult of
Simon was abrogated only on Octo-
ber 28, 1965, the same day the papal
declaration Nostra aetate was issued,
publicly marking a rapprochement in
Jewish-Catholic relations.
T he libel in Trent was first recorded
in Polish in 1579. But in 1700 a
local priest, Stefan Żuchowski—who
had two years prior instigated a trial
against a Jew in Sandomierz, accusing
him of killing a Christian girl—visited
Trent. There he would have seen the
art and sites associated with Simon’s
purported martyrdom along with pub-
lications devoted to the subject—in-
cluding at least one book the priest
is known to have bought. He may also
have purchased broadsheets relaying
the tale, because eighteenth-century
paintings in a Sandomierz church ap-
pear to copy some scenes from them
rather faithfully. Ten years later, in
1710, when the body of a vagrant Chris-
tian boy was found behind the San-
domierz rabbi’s house, Żuchowski led
another campaign—this time against
the town’s Jewish leaders. By the time
the trial ended in 1713, six of the Jews
had died in prison; three, including
the rabbi, had been executed; and the
rabbi’s teenage son had converted to
Catholicism.
The anti-Jewish libels are commem-
orated in a defamatory painting in the
town’s cathedral, one of sixteen large,
explicitly violent paintings devoted
to the martyrdom of Catholics at the
hands of non-Catholics, mostly pagans
butchering early Christians. The se-
ries follows the liturgical calendar into
which Simon was inducted in 1583 but
adds local events: the martyrdom of
Dominicans by Mongols and Tatars
in 1260, the destruction of the town
castle by Protestant Swedes in 1655,
and the imagined murders by Sando-
mierz Jews.
Like the portrayals in Trent, and cer-
tainly inspired by them, the art in San-
domierz emblazoned the anti-Jewish
libels in the town’s history and material
heritage. While similar accusations of
murder by and trials of Jews took place
in many places across Europe, they are
now largely forgotten, since no physical
traces have survived; those in Trent
PR IVATE C OLLE CTION
and Sandomierz are among the few
to still bear witness. In Poland these
relics have helped preserve a piece of
Sandomierz’s horrid past, denying its
residents the ability to forget, but they
have not shaped the town’s identity.
Sandomierz sees itself proudly as “a
The New York Review
 royal city” on a hill (the logo has a crown
resting on the S), a town of kings, a
home to and a place admired by famous
Polish writers, and a site of major his-
torical events, such as the Sandomierz
Consensus of 1570, which united three
major Protestant denominations. San-
domierz has steadfastly resisted being
at all defined by the anti-Jewish libels
and their legacy, choosing to highlight
other aspects of its history.
By contrast, the cult of Simon in
Trent, one of its patron saints, has
permeated the town’s history, culture,
and topography, with annual rituals
and periodic processions (the last one
in 1955) that involved parading his rel-
ics. Since the nineteenth century, as
photographs and postcards testify,
families joining the festivities would
dress their young sons as Little Simon.
“Simonino was an integral part of the
historical tradition,” a wall text in “The
Invention of the Culprit” explained, his
“innocent holiness capable of reinforc-
ing a feeling of communal identity.”
Questioning the truthfulness of the
story behind the cult was therefore
audacious. That Simon was also part
of the officially sanctioned Catholic
calendar meant further challenging
the authority of the church.
The exhibition devoted a section
toward the end to describing “the
lengthy process” required to abrogate
the cult and the courage it took to do
so, given how much was at stake lo-
cally and within the church itself. Al-
though there were voices questioning
the cult already in the early twentieth
century, it was only after World War II
and its destruction of European Jewry
(in which blood libels, including that
of Simon of Trent, were used as pro-
paganda) that such a challenge found
“a fertile ground.” The magnificent cat-
alog of the exhibition offers, among
other essays, a lengthy, gripping dis-
cussion by the historian Emanuele
Curzel of what was entailed in the ab-
rogation. It would make a strong film.
In 1961 an encounter between a Jewish
researcher from Trieste, Gemma Volli,
and a professor of church history at
the diocesan seminary in Trent, Iginio
Rogger, led to the abolition of the cult
in 1965 after years of delicate naviga-
tion around local interests and church
and national postwar politics.
The Trent exhibition builds on de-
cades of research, and some of the
most important scholars who have
written about the history of the libel
and the city appear in the catalog. It
was “a journey,” the current archbishop
of Trent, Lauro Tisi, notes in his intro-
duction, “into the depth and complex-
ity of historical truth,” supported by
historical sources and the “authority
of their interpreters.”2
B ut this was no mere scholarly ex-
ercise. The event and its catalog
had been planned as a response to con-
cerns of our time. As Tisi observes,
“Truth as a shared destination seems
to be today more than ever a distant
goal, even within the Church.” And then
there is the recent “renaissance of
anti-Semitism,” which, he says, seems
PR IVATE C OLLE CTION
2
The Trent catalog is in Italian, as were the
exhibition’s wall texts; the permanent in-
stallation has texts in Italian and English.
The Sandomierz catalog is in Polish, as were
that exhibition’s wall texts. All translations
are my own.
March 23, 2023
to be turning to history to regain valid-
ity. In Italy some groups began to agi-
tate for the reinstatement of the cult.
In the US the story of Simon was cited
by the shooter who in 2019 opened fire
in a synagogue in Poway, California,
as one factor motivating his actions.
The curators structured the exhi-
bition so viewers would understand
the cultural and political background
to the 1475 events in Trent. Panels of
text explained the process of the “con-
struction of the enemy” and the cumu-
lative isolation of Jews, even though
canon law asserted their right to prac-
tice their religion. One also learned
that since the thirteenth century,
Jews (although not only Jews) were
ordered to wear distinctive marks,
which, where implemented, came to
symbolize inferiority. Interpretation
Lamentation over the body of Simon of Trent; wood carving by the workshop of
Daniel Mauch, early sixteenth century
of sacred Christian texts by church
scholars and artists gradually created
“a negative and dangerous” image of
the Jew—made visual, for example, in
the representation of Jews as respon-
sible for Jesus’ crucifixion. As one wall
label read:
Christians forgave the Romans,
the actual killers of Jesus, but not
the Jews who contributed to his
condemnation. Precisely on the
basis of the accusation of deicide,
a specific anti-Jewish iconography
of the Passion and in particular
of the Crucifixion was developed
starting from the Middle Ages.
Another panel sought to convey how
anti-Jewish sentiments became cul-
turally embedded: the proliferation
of late medieval depictions of Jesus’
circumcision, with baby Jesus lying
“defenseless on the altar, menacingly
surrounded by Jews with caricatured
facial features,” only served, the text
asserted, to confirm for Christians “the
bloody inclination of Jews.”
Jews were attacked as moneylenders,
even though such lending activity, ac-
cording to the curators, was sanctioned
by local authorities. Preachers began
to rally the faithful, accusing the Jews
of exploiting poor Christians and thus
giving birth to the stereotype of the
Jew as usurer. For Franciscans usury
was “an act of war of Jews against
Christianity.”
Reaching the events of 1475, view-
ers encountered the inexorable Hin-
derbach and his “invention of the
culprit” and of the “blessed Simon,”
whose story, which “root[ed] the myth
of the murderous Jew in the system
of popular beliefs and superstitions,”
he helped popularize. These accusa-
tions against Jews, the wall text said
emphatically, were “not based on fact.”
The Trent exhibit offered, as Arch-
bishop Tisi had hoped, a nuanced
history of the affair, the culture that
produced it, and its aftermath, in-
cluding the importance of the cult of
Simon for the town’s identity. It dis-
played remarkable works of art and
reliquaries, some of which had not
been seen in public since the cult’s
abolition, including the urn that had
held Simon’s remains. It poked holes in
myths and legends while unpacking for
the broader public a complex history.
And yet, as some of the above quotes
suggest, there was something unset-
tling about the presentation and the
language deployed. Bolded phrases
in some of the generally thoughtful
wall texts amplified the exhibition’s
intended message, while others had
the opposite effect. References to
medieval stories known only from
literary sources as “facts” or “cases”
“reported in chronicles” (and, in an
English text in the smaller exhibition
still on display, “documented in liter-
ature”) turned imagined crimes into
real ones. I wondered how many visi-
tors simply glanced at the texts, taking
away the impression that the cult of
Simon had been validated rather than
exposed as a fabrication.
One panel titled “The Sacred Body”
appeared to have taken the claims of
Hinderbach and other advocates of
the cult at face value: “The devotion
to Simonino originated from the first
and most amazing miracle: the absence
of odor and the incorruptibility of his
body.” That there were doubts about
the validity of these miracles, that
fragrant oils had to be applied to the
corpse to conceal the odor, and that
the papal envoy nearly vomited when
he visited the decomposing relic go
unmentioned. (That last point was only
made in a multimedia installation that
included a reenactment based on a se-
lection of quotes from the historical
sources, giving voice to both sides but
leaving the viewer to decide what to
make of it.) The catalog offers more
detailed analysis, but occasionally it
too suffers from similar slippages.
Then there is the language unques-
tioningly inherited from earlier schol-
arship, such as the common use of the
word “cases” for legends and rumors.
Or the phrase “ritual murder,” coined
by anti-Semites and now frequently
accompanied by the word “alleged”
to qualify and ostensibly undermine
it but leaving open the possibility of
its reality. (Merriam-Webster says “al-
leged” can also mean “accused but not
proven or convicted,” “asserted to be
true or to exist,” and “questionably true
or of a specified kind.” The Oxford En-
glish Dictionary is even more explicit:
to allege is to assert something as true
“without proof” or “pending proof.”)
Such unreflective use of language has
subverted the goodwill of “The Inven-
tion of the Culprit.” These imagined
offenses and fake stories led to the
torture and deaths of many Jews over
the centuries. In the current moment
of resurgent anti-Semitism and unre-
lenting attacks on truth, it is vital to
be mindful of the language deployed
in scholarship and in public, to avoid
discourse historically loaded with am-
biguity or deleterious meaning, and to
call something false when it is.
T he exhibition in Sandomierz and
its catalog similarly suffered
from acquired linguistic habits. “The
Absent” sought to demonstrate the
presence of the town’s now-vanished
Jewish community over the centuries.
It was, as the curators note in the cat-
alog, one of the first major attempts
to explore “Jewish heritage” in the re-
gion.3 As such, this was a significant
development after decades when any
recognition of the history of Jews in
Sandomierz seemed a hard-to-breach
taboo—the legacy of both the Com-
munist era’s silencing of the Jewish
past and the blood libels and their
material remains, which, despite the
town’s efforts to obscure this history,
had stigmatized it and turned it into
a shameful symbol of anti-Semitism
that clashed with its identity as a royal
city. (The first such attempt was made
at the Diocesan Museum in Trent in
January 2014, with a brief exhibition
about Jews in Sandomierz to accom-
pany the celebration of the Day of Ju-
daism, a day of learning created to help
Jewish-Catholic rapprochement and
reconciliation.)
“The Absent” displayed artifacts or
facsimiles of those no longer available
from the medieval period to the after-
math of World War II. The curators
did not shy away from the blood libels
and the part played by the local priest
Żuchowski as their instigator, and they
reproduced images of the paintings
3
For other such efforts, see Eva Hoffman,
“Hearing Poland’s Ghosts,” The New York
Review, March 22, 2018.
41

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lines of World War I and then as a journalist
covering Russia’s violent spiral into revolution,
this vivid and suspenseful story of coming-of-
age in a time of troubles is lifted by the energy
and lyricism of Paustovsky’s prose and marked
throughout by his deep love of the natural world.
“Paustovsky imbued Soviet literature with ten-
der curiosity about ordinary people and loving
care for the natural world. He captured all the
beauty, turbulence and injustice of his youth,
and the strange blend of horrific violence and
intoxicating hope that arrived with the revolu-
tion.” —Sophie Pinkham, The Washington Post
“At its best, The Story of a Life rivals any autobiog-
raphy in world literature. Its hero is imagination it-
self.” —Gary Saul Morson, The Wall Street Journal
“The quality of [Paustovsky’s] narrative imagina-
tion make The Story of a Life, the Proust-length
autobiography he started in 1943, a master-
piece.” —Julian Evans, Daily Telegraph
“It is hard to choose among Magda Szabó’s
novels which is the most powerful or most
unforgettable, but The Fawn stands with
The Door, not only because one cannot put it
down but because it is a study of love found
and betrayed and the personal tragedies
that in Hungary were made so acute by
World War II.” —Donald Rayfield
Eszter, the narrator and protagonist of The Fawn,
may well be Szabó’s most fascinating creation.
She is an only child with an eccentric aristocrat
for a father and a harried music teacher for a
mother. The family fails to make ends meet,
and Eszter grows up poor, painfully aware of it
in a provincial Hungarian town.
This is before World War II, and Eszter, as she
tells her story of childhood loneliness and hunger,
has forgotten no slight and forgiven nobody, least
of all her beautiful classmate Angela, whose un-
forced kindness to her left the deepest wound.
And yet Eszter, post-war—which is when she has
come to remember all these things—is a star
of the stage, now settled in Budapest, where
Angela, a devout Communist married to an es-
teemed scholar and translator of Shakespeare,
also lives.
The Fawn unfolds as Eszter’s confession, filled
with the rage of a lifetime and born, we come to
sense, of irreversible regret. It is a tale of childhood,
of the theater, of the collateral damage of the
riven twentieth century, of hatred, and, in the end,
a tragic tale of love.
ALSO BY MAGDA SZABÓ
THE DOOR • IZA’S BALLAD • KATALIN STREET • ABIGAIL
that had sullied the town’s reputation.
The exhibition complicated previous
perceptions of Jewish-Christian rela-
tions—by showing, for example, that
local church officials lent money to
Jews with interest, whose repayment
was designated for music in the local
collegiate church; or by displaying im-
ages of eighteenth-century synagogue
accoutrements featuring the Polish
eagle, school photographs from the
interwar period with Jewish and Cath-
olic students learning together, and
pictures of a city council that included
Jews and Christians. And although for
the earlier period the curators some-
times mixed legends with historical
facts and nineteenth-century fantasies
with historical documents, the exhi-
bition left no doubt that Jews were
part of Sandomierz’s history. Some
of that presence is still visible in the
cityscape, and some was implied in the
captions accompanying the objects,
though these last were too often left
to the viewers’ interpretation.
The most striking descriptions
were those noting how the objects
were found. A splendid silver Hanuk-
kah menorah, made in the interwar
period and likely from the local syn-
agogue, was discovered decades after
World War II during excavations car-
ried out by the city to prevent the
collapse of the old part of town. The
menorah had been buried in the cellar
of a Christian house a short block away
from the synagogue. A Torah crown
was stowed under a wooden floor in a
village not far away. Also hidden un-
derground were kiddush cups as well
as rings and brooches worn by Jewish
women who were murdered and never
returned to claim them.
But despite the curators’ endeavor
to make Jews of the past visible, the
accompanying texts sometimes cast
Jews as outsiders and a community
apart. Jews were often referred to as
“Israelites”—a nineteenth-century
term used by modernizing Jews
themselves but one that has gained
an Orientalizing meaning as it ef-
fectively de-Europeanizes Jews—or
as “believers in old law,” an archaic
phrase used by Polish Christians to
describe Jews. The discussion of the
Jewish community’s structures and
life made them appear insular—not
part of the political and economic
life of Poland. A description of early-
twentieth-century photographs exot-
icized Jews, claiming that they added
“character” or “color” (koloryt) to the
streets of Sandomierz. This too is
language commonly used in scholarly
works about Jewish history in Poland
in general and about Sandomierz in
particular.
James Baldwin once said that “it is
to history that we owe our frames of
reference, our identities, and our as-
pirations.” Despite the curators’ best
intentions, Jews are identified as a
“them,” not part of “us.” And so, al-
though “The Absent” acknowledged
the Jews who had once lived in San-
domierz, it did not convey what was
lost when they were gone and why
it matters. Strikingly “absent” from
the exhibition were—with the few ex-
ceptions noted earlier—Jews’ Chris-
tian neighbors. The narrative often
used a passive voice to avoid impli-
cating local people in contributing to
the Jewish absence, noting that syn-
agogues were no longer where they
used to be: one in Staszów, for exam-
ple, “survived the war but was dis-
mantled in 1957.” This is the effect of
telling two separate histories of two
separate people for over a century. To
make it into one will take time, and
the exhibition, despite its drawbacks,
represented meaningful steps in that
direction.
W hen the museum in Trent took
up the question of whether to
incorporate the exhibition (and if so,
how) into its permanent collection,
visions clashed and the director re-
signed. Ultimately an abridged, one-
room version was made permanent,
casting the Trent affair as part of the
town’s history and cultural legacy. The
“strict juridical” approach of Hinder-
bach, whose tombstone dominates the
center space, and his investment in the
city’s architecture and art are high-
lighted. A text discusses the cult of
Simon and its abolition. On view are a
copy of trial records, a sculpture once
at the altar in the church where Si-
mon’s body was laid out, a broadsheet
engraving depicting the urn with his
relics, jewels donated by the queen of
Spain in 1649 and displayed on reli-
quaries until the twentieth century,
and an engraving of the procession in
1724. While central aspects of the orig-
inal exhibition are there, some panels
retain the vexed language cited above.
The show’s earlier impact is necessar-
ily blunted.
The Regional Museum in Sando-
mierz has tackled the ephemeral na-
ture of its show differently, mapping
historic Jewish sites online for those
who want to walk around the town and
visit them. Their website is accessible
but not easy to find. In town, the desti-
nations featured on the map are barely
acknowledged. A small, hard-to-read
plaque on the former synagogue (now
an archive) states only that it was built
at the end of the seventeenth century
and that the Jewish community was
granted “the king’s protection” in 1364.
The two churches acknowledged the
anti-Jewish paintings with informa-
tive signs. But the Jewish cemetery is
abandoned, full of litter and overgrown
with weeds, and other Jewish places
are not visible at all.
In an alley in Trent is the house be-
neath which Simon’s body was found in
1475. It was owned by Samuel, one of
the Jews killed after the trial. A plaque
affixed to its side reads:
In this place where intolerance has
written a dark page in human his-
tory, marking a long rift between
Jews and Christians with bloody
repression and secular ban, the
city of Trent wanted to make
amends by placing this marker
for future memory and as a tes-
timony of an active commitment
to building peace and tolerance.
This powerful statement of public
reckoning, hidden in an alley, contrasts
with two conspicuous eighteenth-
century reliefs on the building’s front
façade: one shows Jews murdering
Simon, the other Simon beatified, his
feet stomping on the Jews. The house
is a metaphor for two approaches to
history: the old, in full display, repre-
.
senting the traditional past, and the
new, demanding confrontation with
the past, only discernible to those will-
ing to see it.
The New York Review
 Bloody Panico
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

In 1991 Alan Watkins published A Con-

servative Coup, about the fall of Mar-
garet Thatcher the previous autumn.
By the time of his death in 2010, Wat-
kins had been writing a weekly polit-
ical column for the best part of fifty
years, he knew Westminster intimately,
and he interviewed many Tory MP s as
he tried to unravel an event that had
astonished the world. One of them
was the affable John Biffen, who had
served, somewhat unenthusiastically,
in Thatcher’s Cabinet and who was
quoted on the last page of the book:
“You know those maps on the Paris
Metro that light up when you press a
button to go from A to B? Well, it was
like that. Someone pressed a button,
and all the connections lit up.”
Those charming electric maps that
illuminated the route from Sèvres-
Lecourbe to the rue Saint-Maur have
gone the way of the petit bleu and
the vespasienne, and in any case no
such figure of speech would do for
the story of Thatcher’s party since
her departure, unless it were some
kinetic artifact flashing on and off at
random. Like Lord Salisbury, Stan-
ley Baldwin, and Winston Churchill
before her, Thatcher led the Conser-
vative Party for roughly fifteen years.
In the thirty-two years since her fall,
there have been nine Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, and Home Secretary Suella Braverman at the ceremonial welcome for
leaders, including five prime minis- visiting South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at Horse Guards Parade, London, November 22, 2022
ters in the past seven years. If 1936
was the year of three kings (George remarkable thing about the Tories political party in modern European of a superior kind.” Well, maybe, but
V, Edward VIII, and George VI), 2022 has been their endless adaptability history and have governed, alone or this political success might also have
will be remembered as the year of two to the times. In the 1840s the party in coalition, for eighty-five of the past something to do with the prosper-
monarchs and three prime ministers, of the squirearchal “gentlemen of En- 135 years. In Tory Nation, Samuel Earle ity created by the Tories’ embrace
not to mention four chancellors of the gland” brought down Sir Robert Peel, discusses and frets morosely over this of market capitalism, certainly by
exchequer, five education secretaries, its leader, because of his repeal of the success, which has confuted so many comparison with regimes that have
and more than thirty resignations from Corn Laws, which favored landowners’ hopes and indeed confident predic- claimed the inheritance of Marx and
the government. income, but before the century was out tions on the left. Engels. At times Labour has hoped
When Liz Truss made her sorry the Tories had reshaped themselves His informative book is enlivened to usurp the Tories as “the natural
last appearance in Parliament on to attract not only middle-class but by apt quotations. “It is not just that party of government,” but that has
October 19, 2022, before resigning working-class voters. the most humiliating formalities of never happened, and the saying that
as prime minister after all of forty- Since the Third Reform Act in 1884 the feudal era have been retained,” “England is a Conservative country
nine days—beating George Canning’s broadened the franchise to include Friedrich Engels lamented about that sometimes votes Labour” sounds
two-hundred-year-old record for the most adult men—all men, and most England in the 1840s. “The worst of plausible enough.
shortest premiership—it was one hun- women as well, were given the vote in it is that all these formalities really And yet at present the Conservatives
dred years to the day since Tory MP s 1918—the British Conservatives have are the expression of public opin- seem less a natural party of govern-
voted to leave the coalition led by the been the most electorally successful ion, which regards a Lord as being ment than barely capable of governing
Liberal prime minister David Lloyd at all. After the lamentable if often
George, who resigned immediately. risible three years of Boris Johnson’s
That vote was also a repudiation of premiership and then the altogether
Austen Chamberlain, the Tory leader, Books Discussed The Fall of Boris Johnson: ludicrous Truss, the calmer, not to say
and prompted A. J. Balfour’s sour ob- in This Essay The Full Story downright dull, figure of Rishi Sunak
servation that “it is not a principle by Sebastian Payne. appeared to offer some respite from
of the Conservative Party to stab its Macmillan, 275 pp., £22.00 the turmoil, but with the Tories in
leaders in the back, but I must confess Tory Nation: their present fractious state there’s
that it often appears to be a practice.” How One Party Took Over Out of the Blue: no telling. When I sent half-ironical
More recently, practice has become by Samuel Earle. The Inside Story congratulations to a don at Lincoln
addiction. At moments of disaffection Simon and Schuster, 294 pp., of the Unexpected Rise College, Sunak’s Oxford alma mater,
within the party half a century ago, £16.99 (to be published in May) and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss on the ascent of their eminent alum-
that grand old salt Rear Admiral Sir by Harry Cole and James Heale. nus, he replied, “We’re very proud of
Morgan Morgan-Giles used to steady Boris Johnson: HarperCollins, 324 pp., £20.00 Rishi and hope that he lasts at least
the ranks of his fellow Tory MP s with The Rise and Fall of a a year.”
the words “Pro bono publico, no bloody Troublemaker at Number 10 The Reign: But what an inheritance he found!
panico.” Now bloody panico has become by Andrew Gimson. Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, As if in the television series Life on
the Tories’ prevailing mode. Simon and Schuster, Part 1: The Way It Was, 1952–79 Mars, we seem to have been taken back
YUI MOK/ WPA POOL/GETTY I MAG ES

448 pp., £25.00 by Matthew Engel. fifty years to the 1970s and problems
London: Atlantic, 627 pp., £25.00 we’d hoped never to see again. Surely

W hat can have happened to

them? We’ve had something
called a Tory Party in England for
350 years, and while it’s difficult to
discern a direct line of descent from
the Church-and-King Cavaliers and
anti-Exclusionists of the reign of King
Charles II to the motley crew of the
reign of King Charles III, the most
Pandemic Diaries:
The Inside Story
of Britain’s Battle
The Worm in the Apple:
A History of the Conservative
“stagflation” was a thing of the past,
but no, here it comes once more: the
United Kingdom now has both the low-
Against Covid Party and Europe from est growth rate and, at more than 10
by Matt Hancock Churchill to Cameron percent, the highest rate of inflation
with Isabel Oakeshott. by Christopher Tugendhat. among advanced industrial nations. It
Hull: Biteback, 573 pp., £25.00 London: Haus, 248 pp., $29.95 is the only Western country whose econ-
omy hasn’t grown since the pandemic;
at the new year, the Financial Times’s

March 23, 2023 43

annual survey of leading British econ-
omists was cheerlessly headlined “UK
Faces Worst and Longest Recession in
G7 ”; and at the end of January the In-
ternational Monetary Fund predicted
that the British economy would per-
form worse this year than all other
advanced economies, including Rus-
sia’s. Disposable incomes and living
standards have been falling faster
than they have for decades, and the
Bank of England’s latest rise in in-
terests rates—the tenth consecutive
increase—in early February sent many
mortgage payments up again. Not sur-
prisingly, Christmas and the New Year
saw a wave of strikes for higher pay,
by border guards and railway, bus,
and post office workers, bringing the
country almost to a halt—and worse
than that when they were joined by
firemen as well as nurses and ambu-
lance drivers, aggravating the woes of
the National Health Service, which is
the object of so much patriotic pride
but which now sometimes seems near
collapse.
As if all those weren’t problems
enough for Sunak, he’s still cleaning
up the festering mess left behind
by Johnson. At the end of January
he sacked Nadhim Zahawi as chair-
man of the Conservative Party when
it transpired that he had been eva-
sive about a £1 million penalty he had
been obliged to pay for a question-
able tax return—and this at the very
time last year when he was serving as
chancellor of the exchequer. Sunak is
also under intense pressure to deal
with Dominic Raab, the deputy prime
minister and former foreign secre-
tary, after multiple accusations that
he bullied officials. Needless to say,
Zahawi and Raab were both appointed
by Johnson.
Most Johnsonian of all is the ap-
pointment of Richard Sharp as chair-
man of the BBC . Sharp is a rich former
banker who spent most of his career at
Goldman Sachs (for which Sunak also
worked, like everyone else, it some-
times seems). He was once an adviser
to Johnson, he has donated more than
£400,000 to the Conservative Party,
and when Johnson was at Downing
Street Sharp helped facilitate a pri-
vate loan of £800,000 for him.
One predictable political conse-
quence of the Tories’ antics is that
Labour, under the decidedly unchar-
ismatic leadership of Sir Keir Starmer,
has been leading in the polls by 20
to 30 percent or more. As Johnson’s
government disintegrated last July
amid a flood of ministerial resigna-
tions, Starmer made by his standards
quite a good joke about “the sinking
ships fleeing the rat,” but now comes
a different group of deserters: the
swelling numbers of Tory MP s who
have said they will leave Parliament
at the next election. Some are veter-
ans like Sajid Javid, who will doubtless
return to banking; others only arrived
in Parliament at the last election but
guess they would lose their seats if
they stood again.
T hree years ago I related in these
pages Johnson’s ascent to Dow-
ning Street in July 2019, followed
by the disgraceful way that he sub-
verted parliamentary government
and the rule of law before calling
and winning an election, and Fintan
O’Toole has written about his fall last
44
summer.* That story has now been
fleshed out by Sebastian Payne in The
Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story,
in which a significant part is played
by Charles Moore. Arguably the most
prominent right-wing English jour-
nalist of his generation, he has been
the editor of both The Spectator and
The Daily Telegraph, for which he still
writes, and he is also the author of the
excellent three-volume official life of
Margaret Thatcher.
In the final volume, Herself Alone,
there is a gripping day-by-day account
of the events leading up to her fall,
written mostly with restraint, for all
Moore’s deep emotional attachment
to his subject. That is expressed by
the book’s epigraph, “When lovely
woman stoops to folly,/And finds too
late that men betray . . .” (which well-
known lines, in the sense that Oliver
Goldsmith intended them, might seem
to apply more aptly to the personal life
of Boris Johnson than the political life
of Margaret Thatcher), and then when
the biographer writes with lachrymose
grandiloquence about the “tragic spec-
tacle of a woman’s greatness overborne
by the littleness of men.”
But not even Moore, embarrassingly
infatuated as he is with “Boris,” could
write similar words about his eviction
from Downing Street. Although An-
drew Gimson in Boris Johnson: The
Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at
Number 10 does his best to make a
case for Johnson, it’s a hopeless task.
He has been praised for his handling
of the Covid pandemic, but the real
heroes of that story were the scien-
tists who created the vaccines and all
those who jabbed us, from nurses to
eminent doctors who came out of re-
tirement to help. Johnson’s initial re-
sponse to the pandemic was all over
the place, as Matt Hancock, the former
health secretary, shows in convincing
and grim detail in his score-settling
Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of
Britain’s Battle Against Covid, writ-
ten with the political journalist Isabel
Oakeshott.
*“The Opportunist Triumphant,” Febru-
ary 13, 2020; “The Party’s Over,” Septem-
ber 20, 2022.
In one respect Johnson decidedly set
the tone for a contemporary Tory Party
that has been plagued by sexual and
financial scandal. Sexual impropriety
among politicians is nothing new or
necessarily important. The pious Wil-
liam Gladstone supposedly said that
he had known eleven prime ministers,
seven of whom he knew to have been
adulterers, by which he didn’t mean
that only the other four were fit for
office. And at the time of the Profumo
affair in 1963, Evelyn Waugh wrote to a
friend deriding the factitious indigna-
tion: “To my knowledge in my life time
three Prime Ministers have been adul-
terers and almost every cabinet has had
an addict of almost every sexual vice.”
But what distinguishes the Tories
nowadays isn’t marital infidelity or
sexual variety so much as sheer squa-
lor. One MP was imprisoned for sexual
abuse of minors, one was forced to re-
sign when a woman MP sitting in the
chamber of the Commons noticed that
he was looking at pornography on his
cell phone, and another, Chris Pincher,
was seen at a party at the Carlton Club
fondling the groins of younger men,
to which Johnson initially responded,
with his ready wit, “Pincher by name,
pincher by nature.” Hancock’s own
political career ended when a CCTV
camera caught him in a passionate em-
brace in his ministerial office with a
colleague who proved to be also his
mistress (transgressing lockdown rules
as well as the Seventh Commandment).
He has since appeared on a grotesque
“reality program” eating the genitals of
exotic animals in some distant clime,
and he looks more and more like our
present-day answer to the Rector of
Stiffkey, who was defrocked in the
1930s for devoting excessive pastoral
care to chorus girls and ended his days
exhibiting himself in a barrel at a cir-
cus before, sad to say, he was mauled
by a lion.
E veryone knew about Johnson’s
none-too-private life, with its in-
numerable marriages, mistresses, di-
vorces, abortions, and offspring in and
out of wedlock, but the Tories failed
to see that in this case the personal
really might be political. While John-
son was mishandling the pandemic
he would address the nation on tele-
vision in his rambling, bumbling man-
ner, which prompted Robert Harris,
the political journalist turned novelist,
to observe that as we listened to him
blathering on with his feeble excuses
and totally unconvincing explanations,
we all realized what being married to
him must be like. And so although
Johnson’s fall has been called unex-
pected, it was surely overdetermined.
He always had a transactional relation-
ship with MP s who knew very well that
he was a “seedy, treacherous chancer,”
in Ferdinand Mount’s phrase, a ruth-
lessly ambitious, totally unprincipled
opportunist who has never believed
in anything in his life apart from self-
advancement and self-gratification.
While they supported him as long as
he could win an election, the Tories
sensed that he was always a series of
accidents waiting to happen.
Intense public resentment over
bibulous parties in Downing Street
during lockdown was only one of the
dramas that led to Johnson’s resig-
nation, and Payne takes us back to a
now-celebrated dinner at the Garrick
Club in November 2021 for former col-
leagues at The Daily Telegraph, from
which Johnson emerged talking to
Moore. As one Cabinet minister has
said, “The first rule of politics is that if
you listen to Charles Moore and do the
complete opposite of what he says, you
won’t go far wrong,” but Johnson forgot
that when Moore urged him to help his
old friend Owen Paterson, an MP and
former minister who was facing sus-
pension for being paid to lobby min-
isters on behalf of outside interests.
“The average voter,” Payne says, could
see that Paterson “blatantly breached
Parliamentary rules,” and yet Johnson,
who has spent his life breaking rules
of every kind, tried to steamroller his
MP s into bending their own rules on
Paterson’s behalf.
When his Cabinet ejected him, his
successor as Tory leader was chosen by
the members of the Conservative Party
after weeks of excruciating “hustings”
debates between Truss and Sunak.
Queen Elizabeth always spent late
summer at Balmoral, the royal resi-
dence in Scotland, and on September
6 she had to receive first Johnson, who
flew there to resign, then Truss, who
arrived to be appointed as his succes-
sor. Having to see the two of them in
turn might be enough to polish off any
frail ninety-six-year-old, and two days
later the queen died, closing a chap-
ter more poignantly than any political
changing of the guard.
Returning to Westminster, Truss
appointed Kwasi Kwarteng, one of
her closest political friends, chan-
cellor of the exchequer. In 2010 they
were among a group of newly elected
Tory MP s who published a book called
Britannia Unchained, advocating a
utopian (or dystopian) Singapore-
on-Thames of low taxes and minimal
regulation and containing the memo-
rable words “The British are among the
worst idlers in the world,” maybe not
an ideal slogan for an election mani-
festo. On September 23 Kwarteng un-
veiled in Parliament his “growth plan,”
or scheme for unchaining, which pro-
posed large tax cuts without any bal-
ancing reductions in public spending.
Rarely has any abstract political
proposition been so quickly falsi-
fied. Sterling and government bonds
plunged, as it turned out that, al-
though the Truss government might
have loved the markets, the markets
didn’t love them. Kwasi Kwarcrash, as
Alistair Osborne of The Times dubbed
him, hung on for three weeks until Oc-
tober 14, when Truss sacked him, in a
desperate but unsuccessful attempt
to save herself. At that point Starmer
made another effective joke. “A book is
being written about the prime minis-
ter’s time in office,” he told the Com-
mons. “Apparently, it’s going to be out
by Christmas. Is that the release date
or the title?” It turned out to be both.
Truss resigned on October 20, while
the unfinished book by Harry Cole and
James Heale was, with admirable jour-
nalistic enterprise, hastily revised and
published as Out of the Blue: The In-
side Story of the Unexpected Rise and
Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, and it proves
a richly entertaining account.
P art of the Tories’ problem is sys-
temic and self-inflicted. Until
1965 Conservative leaders “emerged”
through no formal procedure. When a
Tory leader was also prime minister,
The New York Review
 the succession could be contentious,
as when Harold Macmillan rather than
R. A. Butler succeeded Anthony Eden
in 1957, and still more in 1963 when
Macmillan fixed the succession for
Lord Home rather than Butler. After
Sir Alec Douglas-Home (as he had be-
come when he gave up his peerage to
sit in the Commons) led the Tories to
a narrow defeat by Labour in 1964, the
Tories decided to follow Labour’s ex-
ample and choose their leaders by the
only proper way in a parliamentary de-
mocracy: election by the party’s MP s,
who have themselves been elected by
millions of voters. That was how Ed-
ward Heath was chosen, how Thatcher
deposed him ten years later, and how
she was deposed in turn.
After the Tories were routed in 1997,
they took a disastrous course with a
new system by which the MP s voted
on candidates until they had reduced
them to a short list of two, who then
went to a final vote by party members
across the country. The first leader
thus chosen was Iain Duncan Smith,
who was such an obvious dud that he
lasted for a little more than two years
before he was removed in one more
parliamentary coup.
Handing the choice to party mem-
bers might once have made some sense.
In the early 1950s the Conservative and
Unionist Party of Great Britain had 2.8
million members and was one of the
great popular political movements of
Europe. Membership is now a rump
of barely 180,000 who are much more
elderly, male, prosperous, white, and
right-wing than most Tory voters, let
alone the populace as a whole. In a
country with an electorate of 47 mil-
lion, Truss was made prime minister by
the votes of 81,326 people, fewer than
fill Wembley Stadium for the Cup Final.
Almost worse, this means that the Tory
MP s can be—and have been—led by
someone most of them don’t want, and
that, while they can depose a prime
minister, they can’t replace him or her,
which gives them, in Baldwin’s famous
phrase about the press lords (provided
by Rudyard Kipling, his cousin), “power
without responsibility, the prerogative
of the harlot.”
However that may be, there’s no
denying the Tories’ continued capac-
ity for reinvention, as manifested in
the personnel of our recent govern-
ments. The first names of the lat-
est four French finance ministers
are Bruno, Michel, Pierre, and Fran-
çois; of their German counterparts,
Christian, Olaf, Peter, and Wolfgang;
of American secretaries of the Trea-
sury, Janet, Steven, Jack, and Timo-
thy. The four successive chancellors of
the exchequer until last October were
called Sajid, Rishi, Nadhim, and Kwasi.
Bruno Maçães, the Portuguese poli-
tician who is now a prolific commen-
tator, has said that there is no other
European country where four people
with such names could have risen to
such an office. Three of the highest
offices—the premiership and the two
historic secretaryships of state—are
now held by people of color: the for-
eign secretary is James Cleverly, whose
mother was from Sierra Leone, and the
TONY HENSHAW/ALAMY
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March 23, 2023
whose parents were Indian by way of
Mauritius and Kenya.
Veneration of Churchill is a dogma
of the Tory Party (with which he had
a very checkered relationship over the
years) as well as of the American right,
although his racism is no secret. He
once told a colleague that “the Hin-
dus were a foul race” who deserved
to be extirpated, and in 1955, at the
last Cabinet meeting over which he
presided as prime minister, he said
that the Tories should fight the next
election on the slogan “Keep England
White.” At the Conservative Party Con-
ference the following year, one of the
speakers was Captain Charles Water-
house, a veteran of the Great War, an
MP since the 1920s, and a great con-
ference favorite. In his speech he used
Members of the Young Conservatives, the youth wing of the Conservative Party,
campaigning before the UK general election, 1955
the phrase “nigger in the woodpile”;
added in a stage aside, “Too many of
them about anyway”; and brought the
house down with raucous laughter—a
memory that must make today’s Tories
shudder, and not only them.
This was at a time when recently ar-
rived immigrants from the West Indies
faced gross discrimination and occa-
sional violence. In a particularly repel-
lent story related in Matthew Engel’s
new book The Reign: Life in Elizabeth’s
Britain, Carmel Jones arrived in En-
gland from Jamaica in 1955. A pious An-
glican, like many West Indians, she went
to her local parish church, where the
vicar told her, “Thank you for coming,
but I would be delighted if you didn’t
come back. My congregation is uncom-
fortable in the presence of black people.”
She joined a Pentecostal church instead.
Is it any wonder that the Church of En-
gland now has only a few hundred thou-
sand church-going members?
What Churchill would have made
of a Hindu (and a teetotaler!) at 10
Downing Street scarcely bears think-
ing about, but whatever else they might
be, the Tories today are plainly not a
nativist party. It might not be sheer
accident that the party that gave us a
prime minister named Disraeli in 1868
and a prime minister named Margaret
in 1979 (as well as two more women
prime ministers since) should now
give us one called Rishi Sunak. Ameri-
cans might bear in mind that they ha-
ven’t yet elected a Jewish president,
let alone a Hindu, and they haven’t
elected a woman either.
“E urope, fatal topic of Mrs Thatch-
er’s last term,” wrote Watkins
thirty-two years ago, and Europe
haunts the Tories still. This melancholy
tale is told in The Worm in the Apple: A
History of the Conservative Party and
Europe from Churchill to Cameron by
Christopher Tugendhat, who belongs
to an endangered species, the liberal
Europhile Tory. A journalist turned MP ,
he took the path to Brussels and the
European Commission, and today sits
in the House of Lords. He’s now eighty-
six, and his kind of enthusiasm for “the
European idea” was found among To-
ries who had served in the war or grown
up in its shadow far more frequently
than among their successors.
He gloomily describes British failure
to engage with continental Europe in
the decades after 1945; then the change
of heart in the 1960s with Macmillan’s
and Harold Wilson’s unsuccessful at-
tempts to join what was then the Eu-
ropean Economic Community, both
vetoed by French president Charles
de Gaulle; then Britain’s successful
entry in 1973, followed by increasingly
sour relations under Thatcher and the
rise of Europhobic parties of the right,
culminating in 2016 in the Brexit ref-
erendum. Tugendhat is honest enough
to concede that British advocates of
“joining Europe” were evasive about
the loss of sovereignty involved, which
created “a not-unjustified suspicion in
the minds of the electorate that, on
European matters, successive govern-
ments could not be trusted to speak
frankly about their intentions.”
But if Remainers or Remoaners need
to acknowledge that there has never
been much enthusiasm among the En-
glish for an “ever closer union,” voters
can now see for themselves how eco-
nomically damaging Brexit has been.
Ed Conway is the economics editor for
Sky News and writes for The Times (a
newspaper owned by the Europhobe
Rupert Murdoch). He says that we have
learned in practice what “every sensi-
ble economic analysis pointed out” in
2016: “Leaving the EU would reduce
Britain’s relative productivity and
prosperity. The damage would range
from small if we stayed in the single
market to big if we pursued a hard
Brexit. Britain chose the latter”—hard
Brexit outside the EU market being
what the Tory fanatics want.
No wonder that Brexit has been fol-
lowed by “Bregret” or buyers’ remorse:
an average of recent polls showed that
58 percent of voters not only regret
Brexit but favor rejoining the EU,
which is what 79 percent of eighteen-
to-twenty-four-year-olds want. And yet
you wouldn’t know that from our politi-
cal leaders. Both the Tories and Labour
are in a curious form of denial. Sunak
feels obliged to claim, against all evi-
dence, that Brexit was a great success,
but Starmer, a former Remainer, is no
better in his insistence not only that
Brexit is a done deal but by silent im-
plication that its malign consequences
must not be discussed in public.
In one wretched way the Tories are
worse than ever: to adapt Biffen’s
phrase, a connection is lit up between
the Conservative Party and business
and finance, or just money. Lloyd
George’s fall was partly precipitated
by his scandalous sale of honors, and
that scandal has taken new form, with
some startlingly improper peerages
handed out by Johnson. Apart from his
cronies such as Moore and the biog-
rapher and provocateur Andrew Rob-
erts, one new peer is Evgeny Lebedev,
a shadowy oligarch and son of a KGB
officer. But Johnson has no need to
worry. In the five months since he was
ejected from office he has collected
nearly £5 million. That includes part
of a multimillion-pound multibook deal
that he struck personally when he vis-
ited Murdoch at his Arizona ranch, as
well as fees for speeches he has given
or is going to give in America.
Meantime while Truss quite absurdly
claims that she was brought down by
“the powerful economic establish-
ment” (no, she was brought down by
the capitalist free market she affected
to revere), she has been conspicuously
disloyal to her successor, although not
as much as Johnson. When Baldwin re-
signed the prime ministership in 1937,
he promised he would neither “spit on
the deck nor speak to the man at the
wheel,” words that Harold Wilson re-
called when handing over his office
to James Callaghan nearly forty years
later. Johnson spits in the face of the
man at the wheel. February found him
grandstanding in America, raking in
money while recklessly waving the
bloody shirt of Ukraine. Three years
ago I described how Johnson had tried
to wish away the problem of Northern
Ireland after Brexit with a mixture of
treachery and mendacity. Now, just
as Sunak has been engaged in deli-
cate negotiations with the EU and
the Irish government to resolve the
impasse, Johnson has tried to spike
his guns—or betray him—with off-
the-record “warnings.”
As if the FT ’s and IMF ’s forecasts
weren’t depressing enough, one Tory
pundit told us at the New Year, “Brace
yourselves for a Boris Johnson come-
back.” It might even happen. In a re-
markable demonstration of his sheer
nerve and total indifference to any sense
45
of propriety, he attempted to return to
Downing Street when Truss fell, only
two months after he had been driven
out in disgrace, and as a sign of their
party’s moral decadence, more than a
hundred Tory MP s were prepared to
support him. If they still want him
to return, it demonstrates the depths to
which a once-great party has sunk—
and explains why veterans of the Tory
governments in the 1980s and 1990s
like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Hes-
eltine have said that it would be for the
best if the Tories lose the next election.


And it seems quite possible that they
Writing Programs
will indeed suffer a catastrophic defeat
to match those of 1906, 1945, and 1997.
Not just Sunak but everyone else has
expressed a wish that 2023 should be
an improvement on 2022. Maybe it will
be, but I’m haunted by the memory of
NEW YORK STATE SUMMER
the speech that the Albanian dictator
Enver Hoxha made to his unfortunate WRITERS INSTITUTE
.
people one January long ago: “This
JUNE 25 – JULY 22, 2023
year will be harder than last year. On
the other hand, it will be easier than
next year.”
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Letters
Respecting Second Thoughts
To the Editors:
One of the curious facts about Virginia
Woolf’s writing is that on several occasions
she published quite different versions of
her novels in the UK and the US. Edward
Mendelson [“Life, Death, This Moment of
June,” NYR, December 8, 2022] points out
that Merve Emre has taken it upon herself
to create a version of Mrs. Dalloway that
exists nowhere outside Professor Emre’s
imagination (but now given concrete form
by her publisher, who we have to assume
also cares little for Woolf’s own decisions
about her work). There are significant tex-
tual differences in other Woolf novels, such
as, for example, in To the Lighthouse, where
the first section (“The Window”) ends:
“Yes, you were right. It’s going to be
wet to-morrow.” She had not said it,
but he knew it. And she looked at him
smiling. For she had triumphed again.
In the American edition, this passage reads:
“Yes, you were right. It’s going to be
wet to-morrow. You won’t be able to
go.” And she looked at him smiling. For
she had triumphed again. She had not
said it; yet he knew.
Editors have long drawn attention to these
differences, some large, as above, some very
small matters of punctuation. It seems to
me more interesting, as well as more hon-
est, to ponder why Woolf corrected and
revised her English and American proofs
so differently than to charge ahead with
one’s own preferred readings.
Mark Hussey
General Editor, Harcourt Annotated
Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf
Editorial Board, Cambridge Edition
of the Works of Virginia Woolf
Nyack, New York
To the Editors:
Near the end of his generally admirable
essay on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,
Edward Mendelson writes:
One of the ways Woolf made Mrs. Dal-
loway more profound and more dis-
turbing than its model Ulysses was
by adding Septimus [Smith]’s chosen
death. No one in Ulysses is threatened
with death; the deaths that occurred in
the past were all natural ones.
Whether or not Woolf took as her model
a novel that she ultimately thought “pre-
tentious,” “underbred,” and “a mis-fire”
(diary for September 6, 1922), it is hardly
true to say that the deaths recalled in Ulys-
ses were “all natural.” While Stephen’s
mother died of cancer and Bloom’s son
Rudy died in infancy, Bloom is repeat-
46
edly haunted by the memory of his father’s Faculty, Fiction:
suicide.
Calvin Baker, Elizabeth Benedict, Adam Braver
James Heffernan Mary Gordon, Amy Hempel, Claire Messud
Professor of English Emeritus Rick Moody, Lionel Shriver
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire Faculty, Poetry:
Peg Boyers, Henri Cole, Campbell McGrath,
Edward Mendelson replies:
Gregory Pardlo, Vijay Seshadri, Rosanna Warren
Mark Hussey makes an important point, Faculty, Non-Fiction:
but the question of why Virginia Woolf
made different revisions in her American
Phillip Lopate, Thomas Chatterton Williams
and British proofs may have a straightfor- Writers-In-Residence:
ward answer. She corrected the American
proofs first because they needed a week Mary Gaitskill, Garth Greenwell, Jamaica Kincaid,
to cross the Atlantic by sea, and then the Honor Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky,
American publisher needed time to reset Francine Prose, Danzy Senna
the type for the American market. She cor-
rected the British proofs later, and, like
every writer correcting a later proof, she
revised her text to bring it closer to what
she wanted to say; her later revisions may
have included her second thoughts about
earlier ones. So an editor need not “charge
ahead with one’s own preferred readings,”
but can use the reading that Woolf, in her
final revisions, preferred.
About the difference between the Amer-
ican and British endings to the first sec-
tion of To the Lighthouse, it’s possible to
guess that the British version rearranges
the phrases, placing “triumphed again” at
the end, in order to emphasize that the
whole episode, ending in Mrs. Ramsay’s
triumph, occurs in Mrs. Ramsay’s head.
She imagines that her husband has silently
asked her to tell him she loves him, and she
imagines she has triumphed by letting him
know this without yielding to his demand
for words. But she merely imagines these
things, and this is slightly less evident in
the American text, which makes it eas-
ier for a reader to suppose that the final
phrase, “yet he knew,” is a factual report
by the narrator, not an indirect report of
Mrs. Ramsay’s satisfying fantasy.
James Heffernan is right about Bloom’s
father, who killed himself. The general
point that my piece made about Ulysses
remains true: almost everyone in Joyce’s
book is preoccupied by deaths that oc-
curred to other people in the past, but no
one confronts the more unsettling prospect
of his or her own death. All the main char-
acters in Mrs. Dalloway do exactly that.
Ulysses is the less disturbing of the two
books in another and more subtle way. Un-
like Mrs. Dalloway, it flatters its readers
by inviting them to identify with Leopold
Bloom, who makes absurd mistakes and
feels unhappy about many things, but, un-
like real human beings, has never done any-
thing that he morally regrets. (His exchange Creative Writing at Hollins: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
More than sixty years of achievement
of erotic letters and his masturbation are Write the next chapter of an epic. in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
not moral faults.) Joyce invites his readers Talented faculty. Visiting writers. Writer-in-Residence. Bachelor of Arts with major, minor, or
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morally perfect.” Another way in which the www.hollins.edu/jacksoncenter
Most of all, a vibrant, supportive community.
book flatters its readers, whether or not
Joyce intended it, is that many readers so
obviously feel complacent for having read it.
Mrs. Dalloway, in contrast, by portray-
ing Clarissa’s purgatorial quest, invites its
readers to make an unflattering purgator-
ial quest of their own.
The New York Review
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