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 Emily Raboteau: Excavating the Bronx

April 7, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 6

Fintan O’Toole: Europe After Angela Merkel

Fred Kaplan: NATO’s Fateful Error
Ange Mlinko: The Shock of Baudelaire
Linda Greenhouse: Reimagining the Supreme Court
Colin Grant: Wole Soyinka’s Terrible Truths
Elvia Wilk: Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley’s Videos
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Contents
4 Fintan O’Toole The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel by Kati Marton
10
14
Colin Grant
Linda Greenhouse
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka
Final Report by the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court
BENEVOLENT
of the United States
18
22
Colin B. Bailey
Howard W. French
The Letters of Edgar Degas bilingual edition edited and annotated by Theodore Reff
Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain by Padraic X. Scanlan
TERROR
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera
25 Ingrid D. Rowland Pollak’s Arm by Hans von Trotha, translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer
27 Fred Kaplan Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate
by M. E. Sarotte
29 Ange Mlinko Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed
by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French and edited by Richard Sieburth
The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) by Charles Baudelaire, translated from
the French by Aaron Poochigian, with an introduction by Dana Gioia
The Salon of 1846 by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French
by Jonathan Mayne, with an introduction by Michael Fried
32 Ariel Dorfman Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients
to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz
34 Suzanne Buffam Two Poems
35 Clair Wills The Letters of John McGahern edited by Frank Shovlin
38 Elvia Wilk Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: Blood Moon an exhibition
at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Karen Patterson
40 Geoffrey Wheatcroft George V: Never a Dull Moment by Jane Ridley DOR O T H Y R O BE R T S
41 Yuri Andrukhovych Poem
43

49
Wendy Doniger

Emily Raboteau
The RƗmƗya۬a of VƗlmƯki: The Complete English Translation revised and edited
by Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman
Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin by Peter L’Official
TORN APART
52 Tim Judah Holding On in Irpin How the Child Welfare System
53 Letters from David Eltis, Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sean Wilentz,
Vladimir Alexandrov, and Gary Saul Morson Destroys Black Families —
CONTRIBUTORS and How Abolition
YURI ANDRUKHOVYCH’s latest collection of poems in English LINDA GREENHOUSE teaches at Yale Law School and contrib-
translation is Songs for a Dead Rooster; his latest collection of es- utes regularly to the New York Times opinion pages. Her book Justice Can Build a Safer World
says is My Final Territory. JOHN HENNESSY is the author of two on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy
volumes of poetry, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims, Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme
and, with Ostap Kin, cotranslator of A New Orthography, selected Court was published in November.
poems by Serhiy Zhadan. OSTAP KIN is the editor of New York
Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City and the cotranslator of Songs
TIM JUDAH is the author of In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. He
has reported for The New York Review from Ukraine, the Balkans,
“A brilliant and impassioned
for a Dead Rooster. Niger, Armenia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
COLIN B. BAILEY is the Director of the Morgan Library and Mu- FRED KAPLAN is Slate’s national security columnist and the
call for abolition of our
seum. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in author, most recently, of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the
Pre-Revolutionary Paris, which was awarded the 2004 Mitchell Prize, Secret History of Nuclear War. He was the Boston Globe’s Moscow racist and disastrous systems
and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. Bureau Chief from 1992 to 1995.

SUZANNE BUFFAM’s most recent book, a hybrid of poetry and

ANGE MLINKO is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at of family policing.”
the University of Florida. Her new poetry collection, Venice, will be
prose, is A Pillow Book. She teaches creative writing at the University
of Chicago.
published in April. — MIC HE L L E A L E X A N DE R ,
FINTAN O’TOOLE is a columnist for The Irish Times and the
WENDY DONIGER has published translations of the Rig Veda, the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. His new author of The New Jim Crow
Kamasutra, and the Laws of Manu. Her most recent book is Winged book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ire-
Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History. Af- land, was published in the US in March.
ter the War, her translation of the final books of the Mahabharata, will EMILY RABOTEAU is the author of Searching for Zion and a Pro-
be published in August. fessor of English at the City College of New York. Her new book,
Lessons for Survival, will be published next year. “A bold and critically
ARIEL DORFMAN, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Lit-
INGRID D. ROWLAND is a Professor of History, Classics, and
erature at Duke, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden, the
novels Cautivos and The Compensation Bureau, and the forthcoming Architecture at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gate- important reimagining of how
collection of poetry Voices from the Other Side of Death. way. Her latest books are The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and
the Invention of Art, cowritten with Noah Charney, and The Divine to better protect children.
HOWARD W. FRENCH is a Professor at the Columbia Graduate Spark of Syracuse.
School of Journalism. His latest book, Born in Blackness: Africa,
Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT’s books include The Controversy of This is a compelling,
Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! His latest
World War, was published last fall. book, Churchill’s Shadow, was published last year.
ELVIA WILK is the author of the novel Oval and the essay collection
thoughtful, and urgent work.”
COLIN GRANT’s books include Negro with a Hat: The Rise and
Death by Landscape, which will be published in July.
Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa. He is the — BR YA N S T E V E N S O N ,
director of WritersMosaic, a platform for new writing and an initiative CLAIR WILLS is currently a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for
of the Royal Literary Fund. Ideas and Imagination in Paris. author of Just Mercy
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On the cover: Emily Hass, Altonaer Straße, 2 Plan 8, 2008. © Emily Hass; photo by Myriam Babin.
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3

The Chancellor:
The Remarkable Odyssey
of Angela Merkel
by Kati Marton.
Simon and Schuster,
344 pp., $30.00
In 1989, as the Berlin Wall
was breached and the polit-
ical order of Europe was up-
ended, two obscure people
in their mid-thirties watched
it happen from inside an im-
ploding Communist state,
the German Democratic Re-
public. In Dresden, Vladi-
mir Putin, an agent of the
KGB, burned secret files in
a furnace at the intelligence
agency’s headquarters. He
most probably observed the
chancellor of the other Ger-
many, Helmut Kohl, sweep
into Dresden and address
an enthusiastic crowd about
the unity of the German na-
tion. Putin knew the end was
nigh.
Just 120 miles away in East
Berlin, Angela Merkel, a dis-
illusioned and rather bored
quantum chemist, joined
a good-natured crowd of
her fellow easterners surg-
ing across the Bornholmer
Bridge into West Berlin. She
looked around for a while and met some
of the native westerners. But she did not
overdo the celebrations. “I had to get
up early the next morning,” she later
explained. “And this much foreign com-
pany was enough for the time being.”
While Putin saw these events as cata-
clysmic, Merkel already seemed to have
the strangely phlegmatic attitude to-
ward grand ideas of history that would
characterize her sixteen-year reign as
chancellor of the united Germany.
In the dissolution of the GDR, both
Putin and Merkel lost a kind of home.
Putin’s wife, Lyudmilla, recalled, “We
had the horrible feeling that the coun-
try that had almost become our home
would soon cease to exist.” Except for
the first weeks of her life in her birth-
place, Hamburg, Merkel had spent all
of her thirty-five years in the GDR.
Both, too, experienced the overthrow
of a presiding pantheon: the gods of
Marxism-Leninism.
In Putin’s case, the violent aftereffects
of that psychological shock remain all
too obvious. It is striking, though, that
Merkel told her friend the film director
Volker Schlöndorff that he and other
westerners would never quite under-
stand those like her who had grown up
behind the wall: “We can learn to be
like you. But you can never figure us
out. Because our master”—she used the
German word Lehrmeister, which also
connotes a teacher or instructor—“is
dead.” The dead master, the disappear-
ing homeland, the need to start again
in a new polity (post-Soviet Russia for
Putin, the new united Germany for
Merkel)—the leaders had a great deal
in common. (They could speak to each
other freely, because she spoke Russian
and he German.)
Both, too, gained from these shared
experiences a sense of the fragility of
states, the existential vulnerability that
4 The New York Review
The Last of Her Kind
Fintan O’Toole
German chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian president Vladimir Putin meeting with journalists
at Putin’s house in Sochi, Russia, January 2007. Putin summoned his dog Konni into the room
since Merkel was known to be afraid of dogs.
lies beneath their claims to perma-
nence. Putin has used this knowledge
for dark purposes, deploying all the
tools he possesses—from disinfor-
mation and subversion to crude mili-
tary force—to destabilize or destroy
those countries he sees as apostates
or enemies. Merkel, however, came to
embody the opposite impulse. Her as-
tonishing rise from awkward outsider
who saw even other Germans as “for-
eign company” to national and global
leadership suggested that a radical
disturbance in the established order of
things might lead not just to dissolution
but to the creation of hitherto unimag-
inable democratic possibilities.
E ven as that hope now recedes rap-
idly into the past, there is something
magical in the way a young woman
who had never had a meaningful vote,
who had no political experience and no
rhetorical skills, could, scarcely more
than a year after the fall of the wall,
be a full member of the federal cabi-
net governing the European Union’s
most powerful state. Her ascent to
long-term power was no less improb-
able than Putin’s, but it seemed, at
least for a while, to give a much more
optimistic meaning to the events that
allowed one of them to dominate Eu-
rope in the East, the other in the West.
While he emerged from the collapse of
the old Eastern bloc with a Hobbesian
vision of disorder as a state of decline
held in check only by the strong hand
of a ruthless leader, she was by far the
most spectacular example of the way
the collapse of an old regime might
create a much more benign sense of
opportunity.
In 2019 Merkel told graduating stu-
dents in a commencement address at
Harvard, “Anything that seems to be
set in stone or inalterable can indeed
change.” This, for her, was a wonder-
ful thing. For Putin, it most certainly
was not. His assault on Ukraine is in
the name of an imaginary fixed and
unchanging Russianness: in his view,
what seems to have changed can, by
the exercise of unilateral power, be re-
stored to what it used to be.
These very different ways of under-
standing the experiences that shaped
them both may be why Putin always
seemed to be more anxious about
Merkel than any other world leader.
He plays childish power games with
visiting presidents and prime minis-
ters—most recently seating French
president Emmanuel Macron and then
Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, at the
far end of an absurdly long table. But
with Merkel, the games were more se-
rious and more personal. In 2007, at
a meeting between them in Sochi, he
made sure that his big black Labra-
dor was free to approach and sniff at
Merkel, who was known to be fright-
ened of dogs. She was indeed visibly
scared.
Yet she surely also realized that this Merkel expressed her own dread that
stunt was a backhanded compliment.
Putin had taken the trouble to think
about her as a person, deploying his
KGB training to imagine what might
make her vulnerable to coercion. The
trick did not work, because Merkel
had a remarkable gift for not taking
things personally, and also a woman’s
skepticism about male display. “I un-
derstand why he has to do this—to
prove he’s a man,” she told a group
of reporters. “He’s afraid of his own
weakness. Russia has nothing, no suc-
cessful politics or economy. All they
have is this.”
It does not seem too much of a stretch,
then, to see Putin’s ratcheting up of
his long war on Ukraine as another
Dmitry Astakhov/AFP /Getty Images
backhanded compliment to
Merkel. She announced in
October 2018 that she would
not seek another term in of-
fice, setting in train a long
farewell that surely loomed
large in Putin’s mind. The
buildup to his invasion of
Ukraine began in November
2021, just as her chancel-
lorship was winding down.
The timing was probably
not accidental. What better
moment to test the nerve of
Western Europe, and of the
wider NATO alliance, than
that at which it was losing its
Lehrmeisterin, the quiet au-
thority figure who had come
to seem, in a world of dem-
agogues and dictators trying
to prove their manhood, an
increasingly indispensible
marker of reassurance and
stability? Putin decided to
send a sharp probe into the
highly uncertain territory
of post-Merkel Europe. In
this, at least, his instinct
seems right: Western Europe
really is a different place
without Merkel, and no one
is yet quite certain what it
looks like. More than those
of any other individual, her
strengths and weaknesses,
her achievements and failures, have
made it what it is.
T he Chancellor, Kati Marton’s ele-
gant, concise, and accessible biogra-
phy of Merkel, is a portrait not just of
a person but of a kind of centrist and
consensual politics that once seemed
drab but now has the fascination of an
almost extinct species. Merkel made a
kind of decency that could be viewed as
dull feel almost exotic. Once, it might
have seemed in postwar Europe that
careful, patient, managerial politicians
who wanted nothing more or less than
to make things work as well as possible
without threatening existing structures
were a dime a dozen. Now the fear that
hangs over Western and Central Eu-
rope is that Merkel was the last of that
tribe. She has departed in a cloud not
of glory but of anxiety. Putin made sure
that Merkel’s era would recede into the
past with dizzying rapidity.
In a valedictory interview with the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszei-
tung published at the end of October,
something big might be coming to an
end. She did so, typically, without talking
about herself. Her thoughts were framed
more abstractly, but she did suggest that
Europe might be at a dangerous moment
precisely because of a generational shift
in leadership and what it implies for the
workings of collective memory:
We have to take care now not to
enter a historical phase in which
important lessons from history
fade away. We have to remind our-
selves that the multilateral world
order was created as a lesson from
the Second World War. There will
be ever fewer people left who have
lived through that period. In history

“A deeply informed account of how
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yalebooks.com
5
 there is a recurring pattern where
people begin to deal recklessly
with [political] structures when
the generations that created those
structures are no longer alive.
What Merkel remembers is not
World War II but its long epilogue in
the cold war. Her father, Horst Kasner,
a stern and idealistic Lutheran pastor,
moved his family to the East just after
she was born, settling in the small town
of Templin, fifty miles north of Berlin,
in 1954. It seems important, though,
that Merkel’s memories included a pre–
Berlin Wall Germany. She was seven
when the GDR sealed its borders—her
parents had taken it for granted that
they could travel freely to and from
the West. One of the political “struc-
tures” she would therefore never take
for granted was the freedom of move-
ment created by the EU. This was why,
for example, she immediately under-
stood (and was repelled by) the impli-
cations of the possible reimposition of
a hard border on the island of Ireland
after Brexit. The British found it hard
to grasp why she took this question so
seriously, but, she explained, “For 34
years I lived behind the Iron Curtain
so I know only too well what it means
once borders vanish, once walls fall.”
No doubt this memory also played
into Merkel’s boldest and most radical
decision: the opening in 2015 of Ger-
many’s borders to a million refugees
from the Syrian war. She knew that the
policy was highly controversial and that
it left Germany more divided than at any
time since the wall fell. But she point-
edly reminded her compatriots that she
herself was one of those who had been
HORTU S
excluded from the freedoms and oppor-
tunities of Western Europe: “I was part
of the group that wanted to be let in.”
Merkel is surely the last-ever de facto
leader of the EU to have looked from
the outside, and with longing, at liberal
democracy. Fair elections, freedom of
expression, independent courts, indi-
vidual rights—for her these were never
mundane realities. She also had to dis-
cover for herself, in her thirties, the
basic facts of recent European history,
which in her youth had been shaped by
the GDR’s official narratives of heroic
antifascist resistance, playing down,
most notably, the centrality of the
Shoah in Nazism.
These absences were not, moreover,
just external influences on her. Merkel’s
entire personality is that of a survivor
(rather than a dissident) in a totalitar-
ian state: careful, nonconfrontational,
watchful. Her gift for political com-
promise was that of a girl who learned
how to function simultaneously as a
loyal believer in her father’s Lutheran
Church (an awkward presence in an
atheist state) and as a member of the
official Communist youth movement.
Living in a country with perhaps the
most thorough system of official sur-
veillance ever created in Europe, she
learned to have an inner life, a secret
self that she almost never betrayed,
even when she had one of the most pub-
lic jobs in the world.
Marton recalls Merkel’s press con-
ference after her first swearing-in as
chancellor. Judy Dempsey of the Inter-
national Herald Tribune asked her
a very American question: “Madam
Chancellor, how do you feel?” It was
the last question Merkel would ever an-
swer publicly. She mumbled, “Well, yes,
well, under the circumstances . . .” and
trailed off. How Merkel feels has always
been her own business. Marton quotes
her saying, “I have tried to maintain
spaces where I can be happy or sad with-
out explanation to the public.” In that
commencement address at Harvard in
2019, she touched on the relationship
between political repression and the rich
interior life that would make her, as a
politician, so enigmatic and so resilient:
However, there was one thing
which [the Berlin Wall] couldn’t
do during all of those years: it
couldn’t impose limits on my own
inner thoughts. My personality,
my imagination, my dreams and
desires—prohibitions or coercion
couldn’t limit any of that.
It is deliciously contrary that she
avoided becoming an informer for the
Stasi by posing as a silly blabbermouth.
She recalled, “My parents always told
me to tell Stasi officers that I was a
chatterbox and simply couldn’t keep
my mouth shut. I also told the agents I
couldn’t keep being an informant secret
from my husband.” In fact, Merkel’s
great skill as a political operator was
her extraordinary ability to keep her
mouth shut. Her practice, as she told
the Harvard graduates, was not to al-
ways “act on our first impulses, even
when there is pressure to make a snap
decision, but instead take a moment to
stop, be still, think, pause.” Her char-
acteristic mode in high-level meetings
and in wider debates about policy was
strategic taciturnity. She would wait
for others—usually voluble men with
very high levels of self- esteem—to talk
themselves out before swooping in with
her own conclusion. As Marton puts
it, her “power move” was “letting an
alpha male keep talking and waiting
tory. Yet when de Maizière was falsely
accused of having been a Stasi infor-
mant, Merkel did nothing to help her
mentor. And in 1998, when Kohl was
caught up in a scandal concerning ille-
gal donations to his campaigns, it was
Merkel who acted as his political assas-
sin. Kohl had patronizingly referred to
his protégée as his Mädchen—girl. He
learned the hard way that she was a girl
with a razor up her sleeve.
The mastery of these weapons made
Merkel the most formidable demo-
cratic politician in Europe and allowed
her to accumulate the authority with
which she held the EU together. She
also, however, had a weakness that
threatened to pull it apart. Merkel al-
ways saw herself as a scientist. She re-
marked once that she chose to study
physics “because even East Germany
wasn’t capable of suspending basic
arithmetic and the rules of nature.”
Breaking problems down into their
basic arithmetic was her habitual way
of doing politics. Insofar as there was
anything that might be called Merkel-
ism, it was a revival of Benthamite utili-
tarianism. The quintessential claim she
would make about any policy option
she chose was that “the advantages out-
weigh the disadvantages.”
But this self-image as a hardheaded
pragmatist, concerned only with the
pursuit of the best available outcomes,
obscured the importance of her heri-
tage as the daughter of a Lutheran pas-
tor. At one of the crucial moments of
contemporary European history, she
behaved essentially as a religious mor-
alist. Part of the problem was that she
never seemed to understand this about
herself.
It is, in retrospect, deeply ironic that
Merkel was at her most narrowly prag-
matic in dealing with Putin and at her
most punitive in her approach toward
fellow citizens of EU democracies.

ALCHEMICUS patiently as he self- destructs.”
I n A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, James Joyce’s alter ego Stephen
Dedalus speaks of “the only arms I
allow myself to use—silence, exile, and
cunning.” These were Merkel’s weap-
ons too. She kept quiet while others
expatiated. She entered the Western
world as an immigrant among “foreign
company,” with all the alertness and
self- control of the émigré. And she de-
SIX MIRRORS ployed the cold cunning of the supreme
political opportunist. This was learned,
BY no doubt, in the GDR, where she de-
veloped the habit of steely calculation
M A R I A N N A K E N N E DY in order to avoid the dangers of being
either an informer or a dissident.
Certainly by the time she entered
public life, in the immediate aftermath
of the fall of the wall, Merkel had a
knack for cool political patricide. Lo-
thar de Maizière, the first and last dem-
ocratically elected prime minister of
the GDR, brought her into high-level
politics by making her deputy spokes-
person for his government. It was he
who recommended Merkel to Kohl,
who was then looking for an East Ger-
man woman to fill the “soft” position
Inspired by the gardens of of minister for women and youth in the
federal government of the newly united
V I L L A B U O N A C C O R S I 2022 state. These were, as de Maizière wryly
noted, “two subjects Angela really did
not care about at all,” but the position
plvrser vices.com mariannakennedy.com
nonetheless made her, at thirty-six,
the youngest minister in German his-
With Russia, even after its annexation
of Crimea in 2014, she was all business,
to the extent of believing that depend-
ing on Putin for Germany’s supplies of
natural gas was just a commonsense
calculation of mutual economic inter-
ests. Yet in the crisis of the eurozone
following the great banking crash of
2008, Merkel treated an economic and
political problem as if it were a test of
moral righteousness. She threw her
weight behind a division of the EU into
good creditors (Germany and the other
Northern European nations) and bad
debtors (the so- called PIIGS : Portu-
gal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain).
Marton usefully reminds us that in
German, the word for debt—Schuld—
is the same as that for guilt. Those
countries whose banks had borrowed
recklessly were guilty; those (like, of
course, Germany) whose banks had
lent recklessly were innocent. And the
sinners must be punished—ordinary
citizens of the debtor nations should
be made to suffer so they would learn a
lesson they would never forget.
This way of defining the crisis suited
Germany, but it had nasty conse-
quences for Merkel’s larger ambition
to unify Europe. The imposition of
drastic austerity measures prolonged
and deepened the economic recession.
Merkel, meanwhile, did very little to
counter the impression that Germany
was taking charge and dictating terms.
Irish fans at the 2012 European soccer
championship carried a flag that said,

6 The New York Review


Defining the Age
Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours
PAUL STARR
AND JULIAN E. ZELIZER, EDS .
“Defining the Age captures like no
other book on Daniel Bell the range
of his interests, the reach of his
learning, and the drama of the
historical moment in which he lived. ”
—Mark Lilla, author of
The Once and Future Liberal
Hollywood and Israel
A History
TONY SHAW
AND GIORA GOODMAN
“Combining pioneering research
with meticulous scholarship, this
wonderful book illuminates an
unknown dimension of Hollywood
history and the U.S.-Israel
‘special relationship’. With a cast
of world-famous actors, mighty
moguls, colorful propagandists,
and a rabbi to the stars, it’s also
a hugely entertaining read.”
—Hugh Wilford, author of
America’s Great Game
April 7, 2022
Line of Advantage
Japan’s Grand Strategy
in the Era of Abe Shinzō
MICHAEL J. GREEN
“A detailed and thoughtful analysis
of the strategic ambitions of one
of Japan’s most important postwar
political leaders.”
—Sheila A. Smith, author of
Japan Rearmed
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU
The Essential Writings
of Vannevar Bush
G. PASCAL ZACHARY, ED .
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will find that Bush’s writings,
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introduction, provide both the
compass and true north for
our digital world.”
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Computer History Museum
Crisis Under Critique
How People Assess, Transform, and
Respond to Critical Situations
DIDIER FASSIN
AND AXEL HONNETH, EDS .
“Rich in originality, this collection
revisits the classic tropes of
critique and crisis, but reorients our
relationship to them ... opens up
valuable new horizons of inquiry.”
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Owe to Refugees?
Not Exactly Lying
Fake News and Fake Journalism
in American History
ANDIE TUCHER
“[A] beautifully written and
deeply researched history of ‘fake
news’ and ‘fake journalism’
in the United States.”
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Journalism and Jim Crow
The Wuhan Lockdown
GUOBIN YANG
“Enriched by Yang’s expert
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and politics, this is a valuable record
of the early stages of the pandemic.”
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“A uniquely valuable contribution to
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COVID-19 as well as that on
contemporary China.”
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Undoing the Liberal
World Order
Progressive Ideals and Political Realities
Since World War II
LEON FINK
“[A] gripping book that manages
to elicit a vision of postwar
liberalism as a global project and to
suggest some of the real difficulties
that it encountered.”
—Kimberly Phillips-Fein, author of
Fear City
7

Discover Early
Christendom with
Judith Herrin
Far-reaching histories of faith, women, and empire
“A sweeping and engrossing
history . . . brilliantly illustrated.”
—Anthony Kaldellis,
and decolonializes Byzantium.”
Wall Street Journal
“The freshness and enthusiasm of
her book is its real point. Not just
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8 The New York Review
“With zest and insight, it
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scale . . . decenters Europe . . .
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New York Review of Books
“Opens up a new
perspective on a vital period
of Byzantine history.”
—Michael Angold,
Times Literary Supplement
“Angela Merkel thinks we’re at work.”
In Greece, rather less good-natured
protesters displayed caricatures of her
as Hitler—a grotesque travesty, but
one that arose from Germany’s insis-
tence that everything would be OK in
the eurozone if only everyone could
learn to be more German.
By lending her authority to the
idea that the debtors must be made
to purge their guilt and mend their
ways, Merkel fueled two contradic-
tory passions. On the one side, she
created deep resentment in the debtor
countries by dressing up the defense
of narrow German fiscal interests as
a moral cause. The self-righteousness
that was served as an accompaniment
to the bitter dish of economic austerity
made it even more difficult to swallow.
The treatment of Greece in particular
could be cited by those who were al-
ways opposed to the EU as evidence
that it was, in the end, nothing more
than a front for German hegemony.
(This distortion of reality was a signif-
icant theme for Brexiteers.)
Yet on the other side, the moraliza-
tion of the debt crisis could also feed,
in Germany itself, a self-pitying nar-
rative in which the frugal, responsible
Germans were being taken for a ride by
the feckless Southern Europeans. This
was the founding mentality of the Al-
ternative für Deutschland (A f D) party,
which emerged to challenge Merkel in
2013, and it subsequently fused with
anti-immigrant sentiment to create a
more virulent form of grievance that
propelled the far right into the Bund-
estag for the first time since the fall of
the Nazis.
Hence the larger paradox of the
Merkel era: the leadership of a centrist
Christian Democrat as the undisputed
first among equals in the EU coincided
with the loss of Christian Democracy’s
dominance of the right- of- center space
in European politics. The rise of far-
right parties like the A f D, the League
in Italy, Poland’s Law and Justice, the
National Rally in France, Spain’s Vox,
and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary
has created a profound identity crisis
in what used to be the dominant con-
servative parties, leaving them unsure
whether they should fight against what
Orbán calls “illiberal democracy” or
shore up their own support by embrac-
ing it. In a short essay on Merkel’s de-
parture, Orbán claimed that while Kohl
had been “a dear, old friend, a Christian
brother,” Merkel had created a “rup-
ture” on the European right by support-
ing the “migratory invasion” of 2015.
The temptation to heal that breach
by adopting the rhetoric of the far
right is, for the old centrist conser-
vatives, very strong. In France, for
example, Valérie Pécresse—the presi-
dential candidate of the Republicans,
the mainstream center-right party,
whose former leader Nicolas Sarkozy
was once Merkel’s closest European
ally—has now legitimized the white su-
premacist trope of the “great replace-
ment” of white Christians by people of
color and Muslims. It is increasingly
hard to see, among Europe’s estab-
lished conservative parties, Merkelism
surviving without Merkel.
T he wider question Merkel has left
unanswered is whether it is possible, in
the new wartime that Putin has inau-
gurated, for a leader of the democratic
world to combine ambition and vision
on the one hand with modesty and de-
cency on the other. She mattered so
deeply because she had no interest in
what has animated Putin and so many
of his fellow nationalist authoritarians:
the pursuit of greatness. The promise
to make Russia (or America or Britain
or China) great again has been at the
core of reactionary politics over the
past decade.
Merkel always knew that Germany,
above all, must not be great. She visi-
bly winced in 2011 when, during the
eurozone debt crisis, the leader of her
party’s parliamentary bloc, Volker
Kauder, boasted, “Now, all of a sudden,
Europe is speaking German.” Merkel’s
desire was to make Germany not great,
but ordinary. Her relentless personal
modesty—she continued as chancellor
to live in an unpretentious flat in a pre-
war building in east Berlin and to push
her shopping cart around the local su-
permarket—was her intimate and min-
iature version of how she thought her
country should be. No contemporary
leader had less truck with national ex-
ceptionalism. “I don’t think,” she once
said, “Germans are particularly bad,
or outstandingly wonderful. . . . I grew
up here. I like living here. I have con-
fidence in this country, I am part of
its history, with all its pain and all the
good things.” That understated sanity
became, over the course of her chan-
cellorship, paradoxically remarkable.
Being unflashy made Merkel, however
reluctantly, a shining beacon.
Must, however, the eschewal of
greatness involve the loss of any sense
of large-scale and long-term purpose?
Merkel once described herself as being
“as focused and as concentrated as a
tightrope walker, only thinking about
the next step.” No one walked the high
wire as sure-footedly as she did—and
even after sixteen years she had not
fallen off but chose to dismount grace-
fully. But that exclusive focus on think-
ing about the next step also meant that
she had little sense of what might await
at the end of the rope.
Nowhere was this more true than
in her relations with Putin. In the cri-
sis that followed his annexation of
Crimea in 2014, Merkel became the
West’s Putin whisperer. She spoke to
him, according to Marton, thirty- eight
times during that crisis and did more
than anyone else to create the Minsk
accords, which established the resto-
ration of Ukraine’s sovereignty as a
mutually recognized goal. They were
a great testament to her skill, tenacity,
and selfless care for the lives of those
who would be threatened by a wider
war. But they barely outlasted her
chancellorship.
It has not taken long for Europe
to pay Merkel the tribute of becom-
ing painfully aware of both what she
achieved and what she left unresolved,
of what she meant to the defense of de-
mocracy and the fragile condition in
which she left it. In The Life of Gali-
leo, her compatriot Bertolt Brecht has
the young Andrea sigh, “Unhappy the
land that has no heroes!” and Gal-
ileo reply, “No. Unhappy the land
that needs heroes.” For much of her
remarkable career, Merkel was the
marvelous exemplar of happily unhe-
roic leadership. Now Western Europe
finds itself very unhappily in need not
of a swaggering hero, but of someone
who can, in a suddenly altered world,
fill her silences with urgency and
purpose. Q
April 7, 2022 9
 A Country Out of Control
Chronicles from the Land
of the Happiest People on Earth
by Wole Soyinka.
Pantheon, 444 pp., $28.00
In Welcome to Lagos, a TV miniseries
broadcast a dozen years ago, the BBC
claimed to turn a compassionate lens
on the sprawling Nigerian city of at
least 10 million, which it portrayed as
an uncaring and brutal place populated
by resourceful poor people, rogues,
and vagabonds. The program followed
impoverished inhabitants eking out a
living on the beach, at the lagoon, and
at a rubbish dump.
When Nigeria’s Nobel laureate Wole
Soyinka watched the episodes, he strug-
gled to contain his ire at what he consid-
ered a reflection of the worst aspects of
Britain’s attitude toward its former col-
ony. The depiction was “jaundiced and
extremely patronizing,” he lamented,
as if it were saying, “Oh, look at these
people who can make a living from
the pit of degradation.” Lagos, as a mi-
crocosm for Nigeria, acted as a soiled
canvas, Soyinka implied, on which
others, largely ignorant of the society’s
nuances, had too often and without
sanction imprinted their prejudices.
The BBC was guilty of a reductive por-
trayal of a richly vibrant city.
Soyinka’s complaint has long been
echoed by his contemporaries and by
younger generations, who have ques-
tioned the myriad hackneyed ways the
continent and its cities are depicted by
outsiders. In his fiercely satirical essay
“How to Write About Africa,” the
Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina
advised:
Never have a picture of a well-
adjusted African on the cover of
your book. . . . An AK- 47, prom-
inent ribs, naked breasts: use
these. . . . Taboo subjects: ordinary
domestic scenes, love between Af-
ricans (unless a death is involved).
Soyinka would concur, though in
writing about Nigeria he has at times
sounded like a relative who is happy
to voice criticism of family members
himself but takes umbrage when a non-
member articulates similar sentiments.
When he was in his early thirties this
prolific poet, playwright, and essay-
ist had two intensely solitary years to
ponder his homeland: in 1967 he was
imprisoned without trial for twenty-six
months by Nigeria’s military regime
for presuming to act as a peacemaker
during the war over Biafran secession.
Soyinka chronicled his detention in
the memoir The Man Died, recalling
how he was cruelly kept in a compound
where the condemned were usually
housed ahead of their execution.
He had thought to call the book A
Slow Lynching, but the final title ar-
rived unbidden one day when he was
inquiring about a Nigerian journalist
who’d been badly beaten by police and
hospitalized. A cable informed him
simply, “The Man Died.” Later So-
yinka reflected on the terrible news:
I was struck first by the phrasing.
It sounded weird, yet familiar. . . .
The ending to a moral tale . . . a cat-
10
Colin Grant
Wole Soyinka; illustration by Hanneke Rozemuller
echumenical pronouncement, the
eyes of a surgeon above the mask,
or the surprise of a torturer that
misjudged his strength. I heard
the sound in many different voices
from the past and from the future.
It seemed to me that this really is
the social condition of tyranny—
the man died . . . the matter is dead.
The man dies in all who keep si-
lent in the face of tyranny.
In numerous plays, essays, and
speeches over the decades, Soyinka
called out the tyranny of Nigerian re-
gimes and their moral corrosion, which
infected the country’s institutions and
schooled its population. He called for
fundamental change, even as he was tol-
erated by each new government only be-
cause he was Africa’s first winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature. The critical
assessment outlined in those hundreds
of thousands of unsparing words has
not, though, found its way into one of his
novels for almost fifty years, until now.
The title Chronicles from the Land
of the Happiest People on Earth is
ironic. Finland ranks as the world’s
happiest country; Nigeria is nowhere
near the top ten. And in this novel-
ized rendition of Africa’s richest and
most populous nation, a satire in broad
brushstrokes focused mostly on the
elite and establishment figures, all the
characters accept the title’s description
of the country as a necessary or useful
fiction.
T he book sets out to be an all-
encompassing state-of-the-nation novel,
looking at Nigeria’s broken society
through four fictional figures: the ole-
aginous prime minister, Sir Godfrey
Danfere (Sir Goddie); a media mogul,
Chief Modu Udensi Oromotaya, pro-
prietor of the salacious newspaper The
National Inquest; Papa Davina, an
evangelical preacher who presides over
a megachurch; and an altruistic public
servant, the philosophical surgeon Dr.
Kighare Menka. Only Menka is clear-
eyed, enraged, and passionate enough
to articulate the urgent need for the
population to wake from its torpor (his
voice and outlook are perhaps closest to
Soyinka’s); the other three are cynical,
self-serving narcissists.
Ekumenika, Papa Davina’s healing
ministry, is located in a festering neigh-
borhood with “scattered ledges of iron
sheets, clay tiles, and corrugated tin
rooftops” alongside isolated pockets
of “ultra-modern high-rise buildings.”
To get to his sacred retreat, seekers and
penitents must wade through “pebbles
and screed, garbage that sometimes
featured both human and animal fae-
ces.” Early on Papa Davina puts a pos-
itive spin on the negative assumptions
about Nigeria:
There are many, including our fel-
low citizens who describe this na-
tion as one vast dung heap. . . . [But]
if the world produces dung, the
dung must pile up somewhere. . . .
It means we are performing a ser-
vice to humanity.
Davina has worked hard to create
his ministry, but his evangelism has
garnered him a fortune. Preacher-
entrepreneurs have long attracted the
attention of novelists and journalists.
In 2011 Forbes published a list of the
five richest pastors in Nigeria, whose
combined net worth was estimated at
$199–$235 million. Soyinka compli-
cates the stereotype with Davina’s idio-
syncratic backstory.
Like several of the other characters,
as a young adult Davina (then known
as Dennis Tibidje) spent time studying
in Europe, but he took more interest in
female companions than his required
reading list and dropped out to try
his luck traveling without a visa to the
US, a folly that earned him months in
a detention center. His incarceration,
during which he read widely about
self-made men, brought on a kind of
epiphany: God called and, on being
deported, Dennis Tibidje, fired by the
captivating story of the messianic Afri-
can American preacher Father Divine
(circa 1876–1965), transformed himself
into a pastor.
Father Divine provided the template
for Papa Davina, who began sporting
a gold-topped walking stick and dress-
ing “mannequin sharp in a three-piece
suit . . .with an embroidered waistcoat
that glittered with gemstones.” His sig-
nature hybrid look, “his face wreathed
in camouflage,” included a “neutral-
izing turban and sunglasses,” and his
voice exuded rapture.
Early chapters of the novel devoted
to Davina can be confusing, partly be-
cause of Soyinka’s layering of detail
without giving any initial sense of its
relative importance, but primarily be-
cause of the character’s various name
changes. From Dennis Tibidje, the
overseas student goes through several
versions of himself before he settles
on the vision of a “creative spiritual
trafficker.” He starts by traversing the
country in a camper and holding im-
promptu revivalist meetings, and fi-
nally becomes a national celebrity, “the
Gardener of Souls,” Apostle Tibidje.
T he obsessive zeal for taking a new
name, thereby reinventing oneself and
improving on one’s identity, is found
throughout the population. Even the
dissatisfied prime minister Sir Goddie
upgrades his title to “the People’s Stew-
ard.” “‘Branding’ is a word entirely free
of irony,” the Nigerian writer Chima-
manda Ngozi Adichie has said, “and
[Nigerians] use it to refer even to them-
selves. ‘I want to become a big brand,’
young people brazenly say.”
In Chronicles, the country’s leaders
have also learned its value. The phrase
“The Happiest People in the World” is
a consummate exercise in rebranding.
The Ministry of Happiness distracts
the population with fiestas and innu-
merable nationwide awards, including
the Yeomen of the Year Award (YoY)
and the People’s Award for the Com-
mon Touch (PACT). The competitive
awards seem tantalizingly winnable,
and though resignation to one’s fate is a
national pastime, there’s also a popular
belief in divine intervention to improve
the chances of winning and escaping
one’s destiny. The power of prayer-
ful change for individuals is echoed
in the state’s National Day of Prayers
“against drought, floods, diseases, cor-
ruption, locust invasion, . . . kidnappers,
paedophiles, traffic carnage, ritual kill-
ers, etc., etc.” Luckily the “Gardener
of Souls” does not just confine himself
to his congregation’s spiritual health;
he’s a modern Moses with an electronic
staff, we’re told, tuned to detecting oil
reserves, for instance, beneath farm-
land and ancestral fishing ponds.
Papa Davina assuredly navigates a
world of increasing religious militancy
The New York Review
 Donald Judd
Untitled, 1993–94
Woodcut, Edition of 150
23 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches, 60 x 80 cm

info@pazdabutler.com

April 7, 2022 11
predating Boko Haram. The Maitat-
sine, for example, warred against or-
thodox Muslims and, incensed by “all
who rode in any mechanical convey-
ance,” strangled cyclists with their
own bicycle chains. He builds a new
church and religious movement: Chris-
lam, a unifying hybrid of Christian-
ity and Islam. More than a building,
though, it’s a religious city that rises
on an island near the town of Lokoja
where two rivers met. His new ministry
also becomes a political hangout, and
Davina is appointed the prime minis-
ter’s official spiritual adviser.
In Soyinka’s critique of the rule and
confluence of politicians and religious
figures, obsequiousness is the govern-
ing characteristic; the nation is on its
knees. Sir Goddie’s office is “a heaving
Uriah heap of oozing unctuousness.”
His assistant, Shekere Garuba, whose
job appears to be little more than “en-
suring that the prime ministerial kola
nut bowl was steadily replenished,”
is the personification of this attitude.
Soyinka devotes a page to describing
the simple act of Garuba preparing to
knock on the PM’s door as he adjusts
his demeanor for a favorable response
from the boss. The message appears
to be: in a society of scoundrels, you’d
best get up off your knees and work
your way into a position where others
will genuflect to you. “Victims act in-
humanly,” Soyinka has argued, “to
become the very things that had de-
graded them as human beings in the
first place.”
Soyinka readily admits that he’s
more of a dramatist than a novelist. He
has struggled to capture the unwhole-
someness of the tumult and collective
lack of self-awareness of Nigerian so-
ciety and has proposed that the novel
offers the best format for composing a
contemporary tapestry of the country.
Chronicles is energetic and sets off at
quite a pace. The ambition is admirable
but the book bulges with a superabun-
dance of characters barely sketched
beyond caricature; as a consequence
it soon becomes unbalanced and un-
wieldy. Even a significant character
such as Papa Davina is absent for long
passages.
Nevertheless, a lacerating satirical
sharpness propels the book, and if at
times it appears overwritten, that is con-
sistent partly with the feeling of hysteria
and a country careering out of control:
bombs explode with sickening regular-
ity and the collapse of buildings “had
become the companion sounds of exis-
tence”; bizarre killings happen on the
streets in broad daylight, including at
one point a decapitation, succinctly de-
scribed: the assailant “whipped off the
brown paper wrapping and out flashed
a machete . . . . [He uttered] a violent
curse in some unfamiliar language . . . a
swish, and with that single stroke the
man lopped off the head” of another
man standing in line at a bus stop.
Elsewhere, hapless victims pile up
on Lagos’s treacherous roads from ac-
cidents, and sometimes a driver caught
in traffic risks becoming a statistic of
“accidental discharge” from a police-
man’s or soldier’s gun. The randomness
of state violence following an unwitting
transgression is rendered in one of the
most chilling passages of the book:
All it took was for even a low-
ranking sergeant to take offence at
another motorist, who perhaps re-
fused to give way to his car, a mere
12
“bloody civilian,” never mind that
the latter had the right of way. An
on-the-spot educational measure
was mandated. Guns bristling,
his accompanying detail, trained
to obey even the command of a
mere twitch of the lip, leapt from
their escort vehicle, dragged out
the hapless driver, unbuckled their
studded belts, whipped him sense-
less, threw him in the car boot or
on the floor of the escort van, and
took him to their barracks for
further instruction. However, the
wretch sometimes created a prob-
lem by suffocating en route.
T he idealistic Dr. Menka is one of
four friends who style themselves the
“Gong of Four”— an allusion to the
Chinese Communist Gang of Four, but
these Nigerians are socially engaged
and altruistic. The Gong of Four have
remained close since their days abroad
at university, when they pledged on re-
turning home to do something, as re-
payment for the investment in them, for
the betterment of the country. With the
passage of time, pragmatism has tem-
pered their ambition. Now, seasoned
and in their fifties, none is so naive as
to doubt the wisdom of the assertion
once made by Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie: “To live in Lagos is to live on
distrust.” That distrust is most evident
in electoral corruption, which elicits
a collective shrug of the shoulders in
Soyinka’s novel: “International observ-
ers had their say, then went home to
document their findings. What differ-
ence did it make? mocked the victori-
ous, lamented the losers.”
All the members of the Gong of Four
hope to swim free from this sea of cor-
ruption but cannot entirely; to do so
would be to surrender to its tyranny.
Prince Badetona (aka the Scoffer), a
fastidious government accountant, be-
comes embroiled in a financial scandal
(engineered by the authorities) and is
imprisoned. Farodion is an elusive pro-
moter in the entertainment industry
who has strayed from the gang and is
barely mentioned.
Duyole Pitan-Payne remains the
most upbeat of them, buoyed by a per-
manent amusement that helps him rise
above Nigeria’s squalor, physical and
psychological. He’s an engineer and en-
trepreneur who, to the bewilderment of
civil servants such as Shekere Garuba,
is promoted to a post at the UN as a
consultant to its Energy Commission
on the basis of his actual experience
and expertise. “He was sufficiently im-
modest to know that he had earned it
on merit,” the narrator notes, and that
in itself presents a problem. Pitan-
Payne is not a party man, cannot be
influenced, and is not biddable. Why
then, the PM’s adviser wonders, would
such a man be rewarded when there are
other more deserving candidates who
are eager to pay for the honor of repre-
senting their country at the UN?
One of the frustrations of the book
is that Garuba, along with a handful of
other characters whom Soyinka spends
only a brief time developing, primarily
serves the satire. They include Pitan-
Payne’s siblings: the feckless rascal
Teahole, whose illogic gets the better
of any logical thinker; and Selina, a
disparaging snob whose brittle voice
resembles “a piece of grit scratch-
ing on the windows.” Both exemplify
the elite Nigerians who loathe their
poor compatriots and unsophisticated
country. They exist in a vacuum, un-
encumbered by any sense of morality;
they are delightfully despicable, and
drive the conscientious Dr. Menka to
distraction.
Soyinka places his surgeon at the moral
center of the novel; he is the touchstone
of empathy. It’s a fascinating choice. If
there’s one character who can possibly
act as a “repairer of the breach,” then
it is the doctor. For much of the time
Menka appears sanguine, accepting, as
all surgeons must, the brutality of their
profession even when they are obliged
to violate the medical code that has ex-
isted for millennia: First, do no harm.
In yet another backstory—the book
is replete with reports of seminal mo-
ments from characters’ pasts—we learn
that Menka carried out the instruction
from a sharia court to amputate the
arm of a convicted thief. Slowly the
good doctor’s resilience starts to un-
ravel. In the past, witnessing each
abuse “merely sealed up channels of
emotional response except one—rage.”
Soyinka appears to be saying that in a
society like Nigeria, the temptation is
to surrender to despair, but as long as
we still have the capacity for rage, then
hope remains.
In the midst of the chaos and jeop-
ardy Menka takes refuge in his gen-
tlemen’s club, the Hilltop Manor at
Jos, in the Plateau State. The elegant
imperial hangout—with glazed wood
paneling; bleached, outdated British
journals; and a welcoming banner in-
scribed “Manners Maketh Man”—
offers respite from the ill-mannered
chaos beyond its doors. But Menka
causes consternation when, his nerves
beginning to fray, he lashes out in an
extraordinary “round of self-savaging”
at his own complacency and especially
that of his fellow members. Dr. Bedside
Manners (as they call him) suffers men-
tally not from the escalating horror of
Boko Haram’s increasing atrocities but
rather from the “civilian demonism”
pervading the land. Perversely he finds
relief in attempting to rationalize be-
liefs that justified the horror, and in
trying “to configure visions of that fu-
ture whose gateway some could only
glimpse through mangled humanity.”
Even Menka, though, cannot re-
ally fathom the overtures from sinis-
ter businessmen—who are aware of
the amputation he performed on the
thief—to involve him in their venture,
trading body parts, which the narrator
describes as “Human Resources.” This
dark commerce— one that will have a
deleterious impact, especially on the
heroic Gong of Four—is the turning
point of the novel and the inevitable
conclusion, the narrator suggests, of de-
cades of dehumanizing the population:
Indifference turns to active toler-
ation, butchery turns vicarious, a
form of grim but gleeful participa-
tory theatre. How was it possible
not to anticipate the logical end,
the terminus of remorseless logic
of a progressive dulling of sensi-
bilities that underlay the furtive
patronage of a once unthinkable
commerce.
Notwithstanding some perfunctory
plotting about the alignment of church
and government in the business of
Human Resources, it is a riveting con-
ceit; the trade in human body parts—
centered in Badagry, a small town close
to Lagos from which enslaved Africans
were dispatched during the Atlantic
slave trade—is a metaphor for the state
devouring its own people.
When Pitan-Payne comes close to
discovering the scheme, he is sent a
mail bomb and blown up, an event as
calamitous as “a sinkhole opened up in
the midst of a crowded intersection.”
Here Soyinka reprises the trope of
The Man Died about the dangers and
necessity of resisting tyranny. Pitan-
Payne is a fictional stand-in for Dele
Giwa, the Nigerian investigative jour-
nalist who was assassinated in 1986, the
same year that Soyinka won the Nobel
Prize. (Giwa is one of the three people
to whom Soyinka dedicates his novel.)
The assassination of Pitan-Payne—
the best the country has to offer—is a
shock and a travesty that diminishes
everyone; it should not be possible or
countenanced. Could it help rejuvenate
others, a challenge to the notion that
“once breath is gone, the rest is sen-
timent”? The narrator notes that the
intense and torturous preparations for
the repatriation of the body of Men-
ka’s friend from Salzburg (where he
had been airlifted for emergency treat-
ment) serve “as a palliative for the ne-
glected areas of [Menka’s] existence.”
But the state’s cynicism is unending.
Pitan-Payne is declared a martyr, and
Sir Goddie and his advisers plan for a
regular festival to be inaugurated in his
name.
Satire is always difficult to get right.
If a writer has to spell out his inten-
tions, then satire fails. It was the sa-
tirical edge of many of Soyinka’s early
plays and essays that made his writing
so forceful. The satire here is more of
a blunt instrument. This long-awaited
novel, a fusion of dark comedy and
grotesque exaggeration, invites sympa-
thetic reverence for the author, now in
his eighties, and the kind of unrealistic
hope for another masterpiece found in
admirers of genius artists whose best
work is behind them.
Even so, Soyinka has created a por-
trait of a nation that has lost its way, is
inured to corruption and violence, and
can seemingly no longer be shocked
beyond a pervasive ennui. It’s a bleak
picture that nonetheless has cracks of
optimism about the possibility of find-
ing allies to retrieve humanity. Soy-
inka is neither defeatist nor downcast.
His book is sometimes vexing and at
other times exhilarating. Its form—
loose yet always charged with explo-
sive potential— perfectly mirrors the
elusive idiosyncrasies of a society that
others, less able and emotionally in-
telligent than he, whether writers or
broadcasters, have struggled to convey.
Soyinka saves some of his most droll
and visceral writing for the denoue-
ment of the final chapter, when a power
outage sends swaths of Lagos into
darkness:
The huge gloved hand silenced
him and blotted out the neighbour-
hood. . . . A thin streak of residual
light lingered over a distant rim of
rooftops, treetops, and hilltops,
the last being sometimes camou-
flaged mounds of multi-textured
garbage jutting out between the
glove’s widespread fingers and
unseen ooze. . . . [A] progres-
sive orchestration of generator
spurts, gearing up for extended
The New York Review
 BOLD NEW BOOKS
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“The first bold and incisive
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century: ‘Islam and the West.’”
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“Gives humanity and dimension
to a culture that, all too often,
is portrayed exclusively through
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indeed to have made this —Molly Yeh, Food Network host
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13
 runs . . . drowned out the agonised
and resentful shrieks.
Finally, the tone of Soyinka’s writ-
ing, as he looks squarely at the terri-
Should We Reform the Court?
Final Report
by the Presidential Commission on the
Supreme Court of the United States.
288 pp., December 2021, available at
whitehouse.gov/pcscotus/final-report/
The Presidential Commission on the
Supreme Court of the United States
had an image problem from the mo-
ment President Biden established it last
April, fulfilling a campaign promise
that he would examine what might be
done with a Court that was “getting out
of whack.” The Democratic left, hun-
gry for payback for the two seats they
regard Donald Trump and Mitch Mc-
Connell as having “stolen,” dismissed it
as an effort to shield the president from
having to confront their demand to add
two or even four additional seats to the
Court. Others simply shrugged after
noting that Biden asked the thirty-four-
member commission— mostly law pro-
fessors, arrayed from the center-left to
the center-right— not for concrete rec-
ommendations but simply analysis, for
the president’s consideration, of “the
principal arguments in the contempo-
rary public debate for and against Su-
preme Court reform.”
The heavily footnoted 288-page re-
port the commission delivered eight
months later was received with no more
enthusiasm by skeptics who seemed to
forget that it was never supposed to
endorse a plan of action. “Why Did
Biden’s Supreme Court Commission
Fail So Completely?” a headline in
Slate asked. At least that was a head-
line. Media attention was sparse, re-
flecting the initial cynicism and giving
the public little reason to care what the
experts had to say about any of the pro-
posals they reviewed.
That’s a loss, because the project was
in fact highly instructive, although not
necessarily in ways the White House
or the participants intended. While os-
tensibly about whether and how to “fix”
the Court, what the project drove to the
surface was a profound debate about the
institution itself. How should we think
about the Court today—its extraordi-
nary power, the agenda of its new con-
servative supermajority, its place in a
democracy suddenly turned fragile?
Justice Stephen Breyer’s plan to re-
tire at the end of the current term might
have brought such questions to the fore
in any event; a Supreme Court vacancy,
along with the televised shadow play
that passes these days for a Senate con-
firmation hearing, invites people to
think about the Court and what they
want from it. But in view of the deeper
questions underlying the commission’s
work, there is something special about
Breyer’s imminent retirement, a meld-
ing of man and moment. He happens
to be this Court’s last remaining link to
the remarkably different one that came
to an end fifty-three years ago: the Su-
14
ble truths of his homeland, is one of
weary impotence as the ghoulish de-
tails unfold and the story grinds to its
end. Though the rendering of violence
is not pornographic, the novel reveals
Linda Greenhouse
Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson with former US senator Doug Jones, left,
after a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the Capitol,
Washington, D.C., March 2, 2022
preme Court under Chief Justice Earl
Warren.
Of the six former Supreme Court law
clerks currently serving as justices— a
number without precedent— Breyer is
the only one who clerked during what
I’ve recently called the Court’s heroic
age; Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson,
Biden’s nominee to succeed him, was
not yet born when the Warren Court
ended. Breyer spent the 1964–1965
term in the chambers of Justice Arthur
Goldberg. That was the term the Court
decided Griswold v. Connecticut, hold-
ing that married couples have a consti-
tutional right to use birth control and
laying the groundwork for Roe v. Wade.
The one-person- one-vote landmark
Baker v. Carr had been decided three
years earlier. Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation was only a decade old. Miranda v.
Arizona, giving criminal defendants the
well-known warnings, lay ahead.
Those were the years, in other words,
when the Court harnessed the Consti-
tution as an engine of progress for ra-
cial minorities, for criminal suspects,
and for the right of all Americans to
have their votes receive equal weight.
On the legislative front as well, it was
a time of enormous accomplishment.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had just
become law when the young Breyer
arrived in Washington. The Voting
Rights Act of 1965 was enacted as his
clerkship was ending.
The point isn’t that Stephen Breyer is
today’s Earl Warren. Clearly he is not,
whether by temperament or opportu-
nity; the Court’s liberals have been play-
ing defense for the past half-century. But
he is, nonetheless, the Supreme Court’s
last romantic, holding fast all these years
to a belief in its ability to deliver fair
a dispirited population resigned to
amoral leaders who are quietly con-
structing a state governed by a kind
of cannibalism. The passage of fifty
years between Soyinka’s second novel
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
and workable solutions to the problems
Americans persist in laying at its door.
Call this pragmatism. Call it justice.
“What did the Warren Court stand
for?” the legal historian Morton J. Hor-
witz asked in The Warren Court and
the Pursuit of Justice (1998), a paean
to the period. Horwitz and Breyer were
both born in 1938. Their contempo-
raries, titans of liberal constitutional
scholarship like Owen Fiss of Yale and
Laurence Tribe of Harvard, eventually
came to staff and even dominate the
nation’s law school faculties. Nearly
any member of this cohort, many of
them Warren Court clerks like Fiss and
Tribe, might have given an answer sim-
ilar to the one Horwitz offered: “Like
no other court before or since, it stood
for an expansive conception of the dem-
ocratic way of life as the foundational
ideal of constitutional interpretation.”
T he commission was headed by Bob
Bauer, who was Barack Obama’s White
House counsel, and Cristina Rodrí-
guez, a Yale Law School professor who
also served in the Obama administra-
tion. The commissioners divided into
five working groups, each group writ-
ing one of the report’s chapters: ori-
gins and history of the reform debate;
membership and size of the Court; life
tenure; the Court’s role in the constitu-
tional system; and the Supreme Court’s
procedures and practices. The full
commission saw the individual chapters
only toward the end of the process. The
negotiations among the commissioners
that followed enabled the report to re-
ceive their unanimous approval.
What shines through the testimony
presented by younger scholars at the
and his third suggests that Chronicles
from the Land of the Happiest People
on Earth may be his last. It is very dark;
depictions of postcolonial Nigeria don’t
get much darker. Q
commission’s public hearings is how
little idealism remains, or at least how
little of it has been embraced by a gen-
eration for which the Warren Court
exists only in books. The Supreme
Court in retrenchment, in thrall to the
mid-twentieth- century’s invented con-
struct of “originalism” as the key to the
meaning of the Constitution, has been
the overriding fact of their professional
lives. (Along with the report itself, the
testimony is posted on a dedicated
White House website.)
Taken as a whole, the commission’s
work lets the public in on the fact that
the legal academy is close to giving up
on the Supreme Court. Not that this
development could have remained a
secret for much longer: as the spring
semester began, an op- ed in the Los
Angeles Times by Erwin Chemerinsky,
the dean of the law school at Berkeley,
and Jeffrey Abramson, a professor of
law and government at the Univer-
sity of Texas, captured the mood with
an anguished question: “What do we
teach law students when we have no
faith in the Supreme Court?”
There are exceptions, naturally:
well-known law professors who bite
their tongues as long as an incumbent
justice might hire one of their students
as a law clerk. But among the commis-
sion’s invited witnesses, serious and
even despairing critiques of the Court
from progressive scholars were so strik-
ing that one conservative witness, Curt
Levey, the president of the right-wing
Committee for Justice, gloated with
undeniable accuracy, “It wasn’t long
ago that when one heard such charac-
terizations of the Supreme Court, they
typically came from conservatives.”
Indeed, the tables have turned. But
there is something deeper, even more
painful at work than nostalgia for a
paradise lost: an acknowledgment that
what once looked like paradise was
in fact a deviation from the historical
norm, unlikely to be replicated in the
foreseeable future. Across the span of
American history, the Supreme Court
has most often been the obstacle to
progress; as some witnesses empha-
sized, for reasons of practice and struc-
ture it is highly likely to remain so.
There is more at stake, in other words,
than payback for stolen seats.
One commission witness, Samuel
Moyn of Yale Law School, dismissed
as entirely beside the point the current
hand-wringing over whether the Su-
preme Court’s “legitimacy” is at risk.
“The problem to solve is not that the
Supreme Court has lost legitimacy,”
he said, “but that it thwarts the dem-
ocratic authority that alone justifies
our political arrangements.” Moyn dis-
paraged proposals to add seats to the
Court or to abolish the life tenure of
its members, steps that would leave it
unchanged in its day-to- day exercise
The New York Review
 MICHAEL HEIZER
Gagosian New York

April 7, 2022 15
of power. Rather, he told the commis-
sioners, the goal should be to “disem-
power” the Court through such means
as limiting its jurisdiction or requiring
that only a supermajority of justices
could invalidate an act of Congress.
Jamal Greene, a professor at Co-
lumbia Law School, had something yet
more drastic in mind to counter what
he considers the Court’s most serious
structural failing, “the disproportion-
ate amount of power each individual
justice wields.” He proposed expanding
the Supreme Court to include every ap-
pellate judgeship on the federal bench,
currently 179 positions. This would
be the “formal” Supreme Court. The
“functional” Supreme Court that would
actually decide cases would consist of
sixteen members drawn from the entire
group to serve sixteen-year terms.
In Greene’s view, because all 179
“justices” would retain their life ten-
ure and most would simply keep doing
their current jobs of appellate judging,
this structure could be put in place by
statute without the need for a consti-
tutional amendment. “Such a Court
would help to diffuse the judicial
power,” he said, “resting less control
over the course of US law in the hands
of a tiny number of unaccountable and
life-tenured individuals.” Greene listed
notable cases, both celebrated and infa-
mous, decided by a single vote during
the past dozen years: Citizens United in
2010, saving Obamacare in 2012, taking
a hatchet to the Voting Rights Act in
2013, recognizing same-sex marriage in
2015. “The amount of power individual
justices wield over American life should
concern policymakers, lawyers, and cit-
izens of all political and ideological per-
spectives,” he told the commission.
Not too many years ago, the idea
of imposing term limits on Supreme
Court justices sounded radical; the
received wisdom was that life tenure
was an essential safeguard of judi-
cial independence. A 2006 article by
two conservative law professors at
Northwestern University, Steven G.
Calabresi and James Lindgren, put in
play the idea of eighteen-year staggered
terms, a system that would provide two
vacancies in every four-year presidential
term. They noted with dismay that there
had been no turnover between Breyer’s
appointment in 1994 and the arrival
of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005;
average length of service on the Court
had jumped from 14.9 years during the
period from 1789 to 1970 to 26.1 years
for justices who had retired since 1970.1
The article generated considerable
conversation within the legal academy,
but never really penetrated beyond its
walls. While the stability of the Court
was at that point a source of frustration
for conservatives—President George
W. Bush had no vacancies to fill during
his first term and only two during his
second— stability seemed to strike the
general public as just fine. That changed,
at least for Democrats, with Donald
Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch
to the seat the Republicans had blocked
President Barack Obama from filling for
nearly a year. Why, the question went,
should a president who lost the popular
1
Steven G. Calabresi and James Lind-
gren, “Term Limits for the Supreme
Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered,”
Harvard Journal of Law and Public
Policy, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Summer 2006).
16
vote be able to install, in a seat that was
not legitimately his to fill, a forty-nine-
year-old man who could be expected to
serve for thirty or even forty years?
Gradually, the notion of abolishing
life tenure— an anomaly among the
constitutional courts of the world—
began to sound less like an academic
thought experiment and more like
something that could actually happen.
It now seems the least radical proposal
under consideration. Despite a lack of
consensus on how to bring term limits
about, the question of whether there
should be term limits has morphed im-
perceptibly from “Why?” to “Why not?”
The commission report’s chapter on
term limits is a meaty one that, while
not claiming a consensus, conspicu-
ously omits the notation in the Court-
expansion chapter that “there is profound
disagreement among Commissioners.”
Instead, the chapter stresses the “consid-
erable, bipartisan support” that propos-
als to impose term limits have attracted.
With staggered eighteen-year terms, it
notes, predictability would replace the
randomness of vacancies occurring by
death or strategically timed retirements:
This predictability, proponents
argue, would strike a more appro-
priate balance than the current
system between two important fea-
tures of our constitutional system
of checks and balances: judicial
independence on the one hand and
long-term responsiveness of the ju-
diciary to our democratic system
of representation on the other.
The report also acknowledges argu-
ments for maintaining life tenure—for
example, that to the Court’s detriment,
a guarantee of two vacancies in each
presidential term would “further po-
liticize appointments and heighten
the belief that Justices are allies of the
President and the President’s party.”
Still, it’s hard to read this chapter as
doing something other than bestow-
ing a tacit establishment imprimatur
on the idea of abolishing life tenure. It
marks an impressively swift migration
from “off the wall” to “on the wall,” to
borrow an image that Jack Balkin of
Yale Law School, a commission mem-
ber and longtime advocate of term lim-
its, often uses in describing the process
of constitutional change.
There are many thorny implementa-
tion questions: By statute or constitu-
tional amendment? What to do about
vacancies that arise off schedule?
What constraints might be put on jus-
tices whose terms have expired? And
what kind of transition period should
there be? Assuming that incumbent
justices would retain their life tenure,
with the new system relegated to future
appointments, an awkward transition
could last for decades.
F or those seeking a quicker fix for the
present ideological imbalance on the
Court, expansion— or packing, to use
the pejorative that is forever attached
to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failed pro-
posal of 1937—has obvious appeal. Two
members of the commission, Laurence
Tribe and Nancy Gertner, a retired fed-
eral district judge, began by favoring
term limits but came to support expan-
sion as the only effective counter to the
Republicans’ manipulation of the con-
firmation process, as they explained in
a Washington Post op- ed shortly after
the report was issued. “A Supreme
Court that has been effectively packed
by one party will remain packed into
the indefinite future, with serious con-
sequences to our democracy,” the two
wrote. “This is a uniquely perilous
moment that demands a unique re-
sponse.”2 (Tribe’s disillusionment with
the Court is acute, as he recently made
clear in these pages. 3)
Marking a dramatic departure from
the commission’s overall stance of scru-
pulous collegiality, the op- ed under-
scored how deep the feelings have run
on the expansion issue. That is in part
because of the theoretical ease with
which it could be accomplished; unlike
term limits, which many think would
require a constitutional amendment,
there is no doubt that Congress has the
power to set the size of the Supreme
Court through ordinary legislation.
Before the November 2020 election,
when the Democrats’ wishful thinking
suggested that they might achieve a
filibuster-proof majority in the Senate,
those on the party’s left fixed on expan-
sion as a real possibility and have had a
hard time letting go of the idea in the
face of today’s electoral reality.
Still, as the report’s carefully worded
chapter on the subject explains, there
are reasons to keep talking about ex-
panding the Court even if there is little
prospect now of actually doing it. “For
some proponents of expansion, even
the calls for such reform could help pre-
vent further democratic backsliding,”
the report notes, adding that
an attempted expansion— or even
just the prospect of expansion—
could lead the Supreme Court to
be restrained in its jurisprudence
and more respectful of the role of
the political branches, at least in the
short term.
An interesting chart shows that with
nine judges, the US Supreme Court is
one of the world’s smallest constitu-
tional courts. Belgium, Ireland, Spain,
and the United Kingdom all have
twelve judges, and Germany’s highly
respected court has sixteen.
The chapter on expansion also looks
at proposals for restructuring the
Court, either by having the justices sit
in panels, as is standard procedure on
the federal appeals courts, or having
them rotate on and off the Court along
the lines of Jamal Greene’s proposal.
The treatment of this indisputably star-
tling idea is respectful:
We cannot conclude that the Consti-
tution precludes rotation and panel
reforms, at least as long as pro-
cesses exist to ensure that a juridical
body operates in some meaningful
sense as a single “Court.”
(Article III of the Constitution pro-
vides that “the judicial Power of the
United States, shall be vested in one
supreme Court.”)
The report is more skeptical whether
Congress has the constitutional author-
ity to enhance its own power by requir-
ing that only a supermajority of justices
could invalidate a federal statute. But
no matter whether Congress could im-
pose such a requirement, the discussion
2
“The Supreme Court Isn’t Well. The
Only Hope for a Cure Is More Jus-
tices,” December 9, 2021.
3
“Politicians in Robes,” March 10, 2022.
of whether it should comprises one of
the more novel and interesting sec-
tions of the report. On the one hand, “a
central concern is that such measures
would undercut judicial capacity to pro-
tect constitutional rights against major-
itarian overreach.” On the other hand,
supporters of disempowering pro-
posals counter that supermajority
voting requirements actually may
bolster constitutional rights. . . .
They see an important role for the
political branches in promoting con-
stitutional freedom that courts re-
cently, in their view, have undercut.
(Of course, conservatives already have
a supermajority of six justices, so 5–4
decisions may be yesterday’s problem.)
And then, almost as an aside, the re-
port offers this observation:
Any ultimate assessment of the sys-
temic consequences of supermajor-
ity voting requirements will depend
on one’s perspective on the role the
Supreme Court and the federal
judiciary ought to play within our
system of government and on how
well the democratic lawmaking
process and its various institutions
currently operate. Evaluating these
proposals will hinge in large part
on one’s view of the relative abil-
ities of courts and legislatures to
protect constitutional rights.
And isn’t that really the point? This
passage reminds us that the Supreme
Court is not an object under glass to be
examined by experts in an empty room.
How we think about the Court—what
we think we need from the Court—is
deeply dependent on how we view the
functioning of the rest of the Ameri-
can system. That system includes not
only Congress, the presidency, and
the states, but also the institutions
of civil society—the universities, the
workplaces, the countless platforms on
which claims of rights clash. To wrestle
with the Court, even to criticize it pas-
sionately in the course of seeking its re-
form, is its own kind of fidelity to the
notion that law—the Constitution in
the hands of its judicial interpreters—
provides the American experiment’s es-
sential underpinning. Alienation from
the Court means that help needs to
come from elsewhere, if it comes at all.
No doubt, the presidential commis-
sion’s accomplishment is modest. It
gives no answers. It simply lays out all
the proposals for change, treats them se-
riously, and takes account of the best ar-
guments for and against each one. Does
that amount to “paralysis-by-analysis,”
as Brian Fallon of the reform group De-
mand Justice charged?4 Maybe.
But maybe not. “If the commission
was intended to be the place where
Court reform went to die, its effect in
the long term may be the opposite,”
Samuel Moyn and Ryan Doerfler wrote
in The Atlantic days after the report
was released, because “ideas that were
once fringe have now moved to the
center of Court discourse.” It was just
possible, they said, that “the attempt
to contain Court reform might have
helped unleash it.” Q
— March 10, 2022
4
Josh Gerstein, “Biden SCOTUS Re-
form Panel Also Mulls ‘Dysfunctional’
Confirmation Process,” Politico, Octo-
ber 14, 2021.
The New York Review
 THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

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April 7, 2022 17

The Letters of Edgar Degas
bilingual edition edited and
annotated by Theodore Reff.
Wildenstein Plattner Institute,
3 volumes, 1,461 pp., $200.00
(distributed by Pennsylvania
State University Press)
Why do you say that Degas has
trouble getting a hard- on? Degas
lives like a little notary and doesn’t
like women, knowing that if he
liked them and fucked them a lot
he would become cerebrally ill
and hopeless at painting. Degas’s
painting is virile and impersonal
precisely because he has resigned
himself to being personally no
more than a little notary, with a
horror of riotous living.
Vincent van Gogh’s crude speculations,
written to Émile Bernard from Arles
in August 1888, would have appalled
the intensely private fifty-four-year- old
Edgar Degas, who had recently started
selling his work through Vincent’s
brother, Theo, a director at Boussod,
Valadon & Cie. (Degas’s own collec-
tion, formed during the 1890s, would
include two glorious still lifes and an
early drawing by Vincent.) The pruri-
ent reader will look in vain among the
1,240 letters transcribed, dated, an-
notated, and translated in Theodore
Reff’s monumental edition of Degas’s
correspondence for revelations about
his sexuality and erotic life, although
there is a businesslike letter to the Ital-
ian painter Giovanni Boldini—with
whom he was about to travel to Spain—
written from Pau, in southwestern
France, on September 3, 1889, in which
he instructs Boldini to buy condoms
for them both from Milan, a Parisian
establishment that Degas clearly knew
well: “Buy an ample number. There
might be seductions in Andalusia, first
of all for you, and even for me.”1
Daniel Halévy, the younger son of
Degas’s good friends the librettist and
member of the Académie française
Ludovic Halévy and Louise Breguet,
heiress to a clockmaking fortune,
noted in his memoir, Degas parle, that
his family, and their friends and asso-
ciates, were part of the “liberal bour-
geoisie, who joined material comfort
and a simple way of life to the joys of
culture and a love of music.” Degas,
who dined weekly with the Halévys for
almost fifteen years, shared these val-
ues, although in his case one hesitates
to use the term “liberal,” since his in-
creasing conservatism and unbridled
anti- Semitism cast a shadow over his
final decades. Not given to introspec-
tion or confession; rarely expounding
upon the theory of his art or his ambi-
tions as a modernist (a term he would
have despised, given his veneration of
the old masters); a perfectionist and to
some degree a compulsive (he attended
thirty-seven performances of the 1884
opera Sigurd, by the now-forgotten
Ernest Reyer)—Degas reveals himself
intermittently in his voluminous corre-
spondence, in instances of unexpected
self-awareness and candor.
1
Translations from the letters follow
those provided in Reff’s volumes but
are occasionally my own.
18
A Compulsive Perfectionist
Colin B. Bailey
Edgar Degas: Degas and Évariste de Valernes, 1865
But as Reff also points out, there are
lacunae and surprising absences: only
a handful of letters from the 1850s and
1860s, few surviving letters to Degas’s
family or fellow Impressionists, and a
preponderance of transactional items,
in the form of letter and telegram cards
requesting money or giving financial
instructions to his dealer, Paul Durand-
Ruel. Had Degas been willing to install
a telephone, introduced in France in
1878, one sixth of the published cor-
respondence might not have existed.
When his friend the illustrator and
painter Jean-Louis Forain arranged
for him to witness a phone call, he re-
mained unimpressed: “So that’s the
telephone! . . . They ring, and you run.”
Degas was an advocate for a re-
formed state-sponsored annual Salon
to which artists might contribute their
work without the oversight of an offi-
cial jury, a founding member of the
Impressionist movement, and a major
force behind six of the eight Impres-
sionist exhibitions held between 1874
and 1886. So it comes as something of
a shock that he was so dismissive of
plein air painting and of working out-
doors in general, central tenets of the
New Painting in the 1870s. The dealer
Ambroise Vollard recalled him saying,
“If I were the government I would have
a special brigade of gendarmes to keep
an eye on artists who paint landscapes
from nature. Oh, I don’t mean to kill
anyone: just a little dose of bird-shot
now and then as a warning.” Staying
with the Halévys at their country house
Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Alamy
in Étretat in July 1882, he quipped
to the young painter Jacques-Émile
Blanche, “The weather is beautiful, but
more Monet than my eyes can stand.”
In the early 1870s, when he made a
rare effort to articulate his aesthetic
principles, Degas championed natural-
ism and realism, terms he used inter-
changeably. The word “Impressionist”
never passed his lips; he preferred the
less provocative epithet “indépendant,”
which he ensured was used in the ti-
tles of the fourth and seventh Impres-
sionist exhibitions in 1879 and 1882.
To his great friend Henri Rouart, the
industrialist and early collector of the
Impressionists, Degas wrote from New
Orleans in December 1872, “I dream of
creating something well made, a well-
ordered whole (in the style of Poussin)
and like Corot in old age.” In February
1873, while still in America, Degas ad-
vised the painter James Tissot:
Remember the art of the Lenain
brothers and the French Middle
Ages. Our race will produce some-
thing simple and bold. The nat-
uralist movement will draw like
the great schools, and then will its
strength be recognized.
Back in Paris in the spring of 1874,
he urged Tissot—without success—to
participate in the first Impressionist
exhibition, which opened on April 15:
“The realist movement no longer needs
to struggle against the others. It is, it
exists, it needs to be seen on its own
terms. There has to be a realist Salon.”
Advocating for a prescribed repertory
of subjects to which he would return
throughout a fifty-year career—ballet
dancers rehearsing and performing,
musicians in the opera pit, jockeys pre-
paring for a race, laundresses, shop
assistants, women taking their baths—
Degas had confided in November 1872
to the Danish artist Lorenz Frølich,
“Art does not expand, it condenses. . . .
Only a very long stay would give you
the habits of a race, that is to say, its
charm.” This is consistent with an ob-
servation he made over a decade later
to his closest companion of the time, the
sculptor Paul-Albert Bartholomé: “You
have to redo the same subject ten times,
a hundred times. Nothing in art should
appear accidental, not even movement.”
Degas’s resistance to plein air paint-
ing was also due to chronic problems
with his sight, his fear of blindness, and
recurring anxiety about his vision. (He
suffered from photophobia and even-
tually saw only out of his left eye.) 2
Working outdoors by the Seine in the
summer of 1871, Degas experienced
severe eyestrain. He told Tissot that
discomfort in his eyes “first happened
on the river bank in Chatou under the
blazing sun, while making a watercolor;
it cost me three weeks of being unable
to read, work, or go outside much, and
made me tremble with fear that I would
remain this way.” While visiting his
brother René’s family in New Orleans in
the winter of 1872–1873, he wrote to Tis-
sot, “There are so many beautiful things
I could have made and rapidly, were the
bright sunlight not so unbearable to me.”
Blindness and sight are powerful
themes in Degas’s letters, and his pre-
occupation with conserving his vision
for his art, against the demands of read-
ing and writing, is a constant refrain.
(In the early 1890s he also asserted, to
the contrary, that “differences in vision
are of no importance. One sees as one
wishes to see and it is this falseness that
constitutes art.”) Cold weather, the
damp, and fog were bad for his eyes;
by the early 1880s he complained that
he needed a magnifying glass to read.
He insisted that his correspondents
write more legibly and in January 1892
ordered his sister Thérèse “to adopt
a new manner of writing, forming
round letters with one of those pens
cut with a square tip, using very black
ink, not putting tails on your letters,
and spacing the words far apart.” His
housekeeper, Zoé Closier, a former
schoolteacher, read aloud to him ev-
erything that did not need to be kept
in confidence, and beginning in 1892,
Degas’s lunches were accompanied
by Zoé reading the latest vitriol from
Édouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole, a
virulent anti- Semitic daily.
Degas’s letters of the 1870s reveal
him to be a determined adversary of
the official art establishment, notably
its control of the annual Salon with
its prizes, awards, and acquisitions.
He had large ambitions for his art and
2
See the magisterial article by Richard
Kendall, “Degas and the Contingency
of Vision,” The Burlington Magazine,
Vol. 130, No. 1,020 (March 1988).
The New York Review
unrealistic expectations of financial suc-
cess. He was attentive to the careers of
more fashionable realists such as Tissot
and Alfred Stevens, noting with some
envy that the former earned the equiva-
lent of 95,000 francs in 1872. Extending
his stay in New Orleans so that he could
complete A Cotton Office in New Or-
leans—one of his early masterpieces—
he boasted to Tissot in February 1873
that the English dealers Thomas Agnew
and Sons, with whom he had no asso-
ciation whatever, would be able to find
wealthy cotton-mill owners in Manches-
ter for such pictures. Degas’s expecta-
tion that they might command Tissot’s
prices of £900—the equivalent of 22,500
francs—is so unrealistic as to appear
slightly unhinged. 3 Five years later,
thanks to his friendship with prominent
figures in the community, A Cotton Of-
fice in New Orleans was acquired by
the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau for
2,000 francs: a considerable reduction
from Degas’s asking price of 5,000
francs. Thanking the curator in March
1878, Degas wrote, “I must confess that
this is the first time that a Museum hon-
ors me in this way, and that such official
recognition both surprises and flatters
me to a considerable degree.”
Degas referred to the paintings and
pastels he made for the market—dis-
tinctly signed, sometimes dated—as his
“articles,” a term he first used in May
1877. For one reminded since youth
of the “need to earn one’s bread and
butter in this world,” he was always
attentive to commercial networks and
possibilities, but he approached his
more ambitious projects—scenes of
what Édouard Manet had termed Pari-
sian “high life”—somewhat differently.
With such paintings, his treatment of
collectors and patrons could be will-
ful, at times self- destructive. A case in
point was Jean-Baptiste Faure, the cel-
ebrated baritone and early enthusiast
of Manet and the Impressionists, who
in 1874 commissioned five new works
from Degas and entered into a compli-
cated arrangement with Durand-Ruel,
whereby a certain number of Degas’s
paintings were returned to the artist so
that he could rework them. Of the new
commissions, only two were delivered
to Faure in 1875–1876. In July 1886
Degas was still requesting time to fin-
ish “your large horse races” (The Race
Track, Amateur Jockeys Near a Car-
riage, 1887), pleading, “Just give me a
few days more and you’ll receive satis-
faction.” Finally losing patience, in May
1887 Faure sued Degas in civil court,
which found in Faure’s favor and held
the artist responsible for legal costs. The
three remaining canvases were com-
pleted well before the end of the year.4
3 two-year- old Baudot (“Si j’épousais
As Reff notes, Degas may have
learned about the collection of modern
paintings formed by the Manchester
industrialist William Cottrill—whom
the painter called “Cottrell”—from il-
lustrated articles in the Art Journal in
1870–1871.
4
Reff discovered the legal documents
and published them in “Degas in
Court,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol.
153, No. 1,298 (May 2011), an article
not cited in the bibliography of Reff’s
edition of the letters. As Reff noted, it
was Degas’s restless perfectionism, his
“imperative need to innovate, to exper-
iment, to find new solutions to prob-
lems of composition, expression and
April 7, 2022
Henri Rouart was rumored to have
kept Degas’s Dancers Practicing at the
Barre (1877) secured to the wall to pre-
vent him from taking it back to his ate-
lier to retouch it. The young Leo Stein
asked the collector if the story was true:
“He said the padlock was a fiction but
that he kept his eye on Degas when
Degas left the house after his customary
dinner on Thursday, even though the
picture was a little large to be hidden
under the painter’s cape.” In Decem-
ber 1897 Joseph Durand-Ruel—more
trusting than his father, perhaps—al-
lowed Degas to take back the portrait
of Viscount Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic
and his daughters, the celebrated Place
de la Concorde (1875), which the dealer
had acquired at an auction of Lepic’s
collection in March 1897, in order to add
some finishing touches. Degas held on to
the painting until October 1904—caus-
ing a sale to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin
to fall through—and it was finally ac-
quired in December 1911 by the Berlin
insurance magnate Otto Gerstenberg.
Long believed to have been destroyed by
fire during World War II, it made a spec-
tacular reappearance in 1995 as one of
many Impressionist masterpieces looted
by the Soviet army from German collec-
tions in 1945 and is today still in the State
Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
In the 1890s, the most fully docu-
mented decade in Reff’s Letters, Degas
appears as a reluctant but honorable
paterfamilias, responsible for the well-
being of a far-flung and somewhat dis-
appointing family (his siblings and their
children lived in Buenos Aires, Naples,
and Geneva). Between 1874 and 1882
he had served as the chief creditor for
his impulsive brother Achille, who had
defaulted on a loan of 66,000 francs to
shore up the failing family bank. 5 From
1892 on, Degas gave his sister Thérèse
a monthly allowance, a sum that in-
creased after her husband’s death in De-
cember 1894. Beginning in 1893, Degas
was also paying a quarterly stipend to
one of his oldest and dearest friends,
the painter Évariste de Valernes, a
teacher at the municipal art school in
Carpentras. Not inclined to marry—
although apparently “haunted” by the
desire to do so in October 1890, and
flirting in public in 1898–1899 with
Renoir’s pupil Jeanne Baudot6 —Degas
execution that seems to have driven
him to rework Faure’s pictures.”
5
Reff, “Degas in Court,” pp. 318–322.
6
In October 1890 Pierre-Georges Jean-
niot reported to Degas’s good friend
Paul Lafond in Pau, “Je crois Degas
hanté d’idées de mariage, ceci entre
nous.” Denys Sutton and Jean Adhémar,
“Lettres inédites de Degas à Paul La-
fond et autres documents,” Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, April 1987, p. 166. For
Degas’s infatuation with the twenty-
Mamzelle Baudot! . . . ce serait un drôle
de mariage”) and Julie Manet’s encour-
agement of it, see Julie Manet, Journal,
1893–1899: Sa jeunesse parmi les pein-
tres impressionnistes et les hommes de
lettres (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1979), pp.
202, 206, and 213. In December 1894
Edmond de Goncourt told a malicious
story about Degas and the naturalist,
novelist, and playwright Léon Hennique
having shared two sisters as their mis-
tresses, with Hennique’s “belle soeur en
détrempe” complaining of “des moyens
amoureux de Degas.” Edmond de Gon-
court, Journal: Mémoires de la vie lit-
téraire, edited by Robert Riccatte (Paris:
R. Laffont, 1989), volume 3, p. 1,040.
19
found a surrogate domesticity through
the family life of his closest friends, in
particular Paul Valpinçon, the Rouart
brothers Henri and Alexis, Henri Le-
rolle, and the Halévys.
He also formed strong attachments
to artists of a younger generation (and
lesser talent)—such as Pierre- Georges
Jeanniot, Forain, and Louis Braqua-
val—and was an early admirer of Su-
zanne Valadon and Paul Gauguin.
With the sculptor Bartholomé, a pupil
of Jean-Léon Gérôme, in the late sum-
mer of 1890 he undertook an eccentric
three-week trip through Burgundy,
traveling in a tilbury carriage har-
nessed to a white horse, ostensibly to
visit the Jeanniots on their large estate
at Diénay par Is-sur-Tille.7 (Their jour-
ney, “une promenade en voiture sans
raison,” as Bartholomé remembered
it, is recounted in thirty letters to var-
ious correspondents.) From this well-
documented expedition Degas would
harvest, two years later, the group of
twenty-five surpassingly strange, al-
most abstract, landscapes in pastel and
monotype that he exhibited at Durand-
Ruel’s gallery in September 1892 (and
again in October 1894), the only one-
man show in Paris that he permitted
during his lifetime. In these “imagi-
nary landscapes”—as Degas described
them to his sister Marguerite in Buenos
Aires—Bartholomé claimed to be able
to identify quite precisely many of the
sites they had visited en route to Diénay
two years earlier.
In the 1890s Degas, encouraged by his
friend Stéphane Mallarmé, embarked
upon a series of sonnets, some twenty
in number, which Paul Valéry consid-
ered “of high and original quality.” In
1895 he experimented with photogra-
phy, corralling the Halévys and other
friends to sit for him, and in August
he transported his equipment to the
spa town of Mont-Dore in the Dor-
dogne, from which he supervised the
printing, retouching, and enlargement
of his plates by his supplier in Paris,
Guillaume Tasset. On August 15 Degas
sent Marguerite and her family a photo-
graphic kit with instructions for its use:
I calculate that with one month and
a little patience, you’ll be able to
send me (instead of letters, if you
are hardworking) some good por-
traits of people and places, or even
of rooms. Wrap this correspon-
dence carefully: humidity is fatal.
Degas’s growing prosperity—with
Monet, he was the best-selling of the
Impressionists in Durand-Ruel’s stable
of artists—also allowed him to indulge
his voraciousness (and discrimination)
as a collector. His chief passions were
the paintings and drawings of Ingres
and Delacroix, but also the graphic art
of Gavarni, Manet, and Mary Cassatt,
and the work of Gauguin in all media.
(Between 1898 and 1899 alone, Degas
spent an estimated 61,000 francs on
works for his collection.) At an auc-
tion in February 1895 to raise money
for Gauguin’s return to Tahiti, Degas
bought, among other things, Gauguin’s
copy of Manet’s Olympia, which he
had never seen. According to Daniel
7 9
On the accommodating and amena-
ble Bartholomé, see Thérèse Burollet,
Albert Bartholomé, 1848–1928 (Paris:
Arthéna, 2017).
20
Halévy, “He turned to his neighbors
and asked them, ‘Is it beautiful?’”
Around this time Degas seems to
have considered creating a museum
to house his collection, which would
expand to more than 1,100 works. As
early as March 1895 he had mentioned
this possibility to the painter Berthe
Morisot, who wanted to make sure he
included a work by her brother-in-law:
“If he founds a museum, he must choose
a Manet.” In March 1896 Degas entered
into discussions with the vice-president
of the Municipal Council of Paris, whom
he hoped to meet in Mont-Dore the fol-
lowing summer. As Reff notes, Degas
may have been inspired by the example
of the portraitist Léon Bonnat, whose
collection was to be housed in a museum
in Bayonne, on which construction had
begun in 1896. From 1897, Degas’s col-
Private Collection
Edgar Degas: Mlle Bécat aux
Ambassadeurs, circa 1875–1876
lection was shown on the second floor
(French style) of his three-story Paris
apartment at 37, rue Victor-Massé. The
English painter Walter Sickert recalled
threading his way with Degas, by can-
dlelight, through a “forest of easels
standing so close to each other that we
could hardly pass between them, each
one groaning under a life-size portrait
by Ingres, or holding early Corots.”
Given Degas’s distrust of the state and
distaste for public education in general,
it is not surprising that nothing came
of these discussions. He disliked the
Musée Gustave Moreau, which opened
in 1903, noting that it was so “truly sin-
ister” that “it might be a family vault.”
And he was unmoved by the pleas of
the painter, collector, and art historian
Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, who had do-
nated his collection of French paint-
ings and drawings—including Manet’s
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe—to the Louvre
in 1906. Moreau-Nélaton visited Degas
in his studio in December 1907 to re-
vive negotiations, assuring the painter
that he would be able to name his
own director should he leave his col-
lection to the state. For lack of space,
Moreau-Nélaton’s collection was being
presented at the neighboring Musée
des Arts Décoratifs, and Degas ended
the conversation by insulting the peti-
tioner: “For a start, your paintings are
not at all well shown there.”
The most dramatic—and saddest—as-
pect of Degas in the 1890s relates to his
increasingly outspoken anti- Semitism
and his reaction to the efforts to reha-
bilitate Captain Albert Dreyfus, who
had been found guilty of espionage in
December 1894 and sentenced to life
imprisonment on Devil’s Island. 8 As
8
For what remains the best introduc-
tion, see Linda Nochlin, “Degas and
the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the
evidence tending to exonerate Drey-
fus and implicate the highest echelons
of the French military came to light in
1897, Degas’s relations with the Halévy
family became more and more fraught.
The Halévys’ elder son, Élie, noted in
November 1897, “I have a Jewish name,
even though I am Protestant.” (Degas
also harbored an irrational dislike of
Protestants.) The Halévys associated
with journalists and intellectuals com-
mitted to proving (and publicizing)
Dreyfus’s innocence. At their Thurs-
day dinner on November 25, 1897,
the day on which Le Figaro published
Émile Zola’s first article in support of
Dreyfus, Ludovic expressly forbade any
discussion of the topic (“Papa was very
annoyed, Degas very anti- Semitic”).
Although no one knew it at the time,
the last family dinner that Degas at-
tended at the Halévys took place on
January 13, 1898, the day on which
Zola’s “J’accuse” appeared on the
front page of L’Aurore. Their ebullient
younger guests, whose company Degas
usually relished, offended him with
their pro-Dreyfusard opinions. He
canceled the following week’s dinner
on the day itself, writing to Louise:
You will have to excuse me tonight,
and I would rather tell you right
away that I am asking you to do so
for some time. You could not have
thought that I would have the heart
to continue being cheerful and en-
tertaining. The time for laughter is
over. You kindly introduced me to
these young people, but I constrain
them and they are unbearable to
me. Let me remain in my corner.
I’ll be happy there. There are many
good moments to remember.
The decision must not have been
easy for Degas to take. Unaware of
this crisis, on the evening of January
20 nineteen-year- old Julie Manet—
another anti-Dreyfusard who would
contribute funds to La Libre Parole
for the repatriation of Jews to Jerusa-
lem—went to Degas’s apartment to
invite him to dinner. “We found him
so worked up into such a terrible state
against the Jews,” she noted in her
diary, “that we left without asking him
anything at all.” “To live alone, without
any family, it is really too hard,” he had
confided to Madame Giuseppe De Nit-
tis in May 1877. In his rupture with the
Halévys, Degas administered a self-
inflicted wound.
A riveting (and dispiriting) glimpse
of Degas in old age—increasingly
conservative, cantankerous, and alien-
ated—is provided in the diary of Count
Harry Kessler, the German patron and
impresario, for whom Vollard orga-
nized a dinner in the cellar of his gal-
lery in June 1907 so that Kessler could
meet the seventy-two-year- old painter.9
Artist as an Anti- Semite,” in The
Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice,
edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt (Univer-
sity of California Press, 1987). Degas
was joined by Renoir (and to a lesser
degree Cézanne) in their at times vio-
lent anti-Dreyfusard positions; Monet
and Pissarro were ardent supporters of
Dreyfus’s cause. Degas and Renoir both
broke with Pissarro over the Dreyfus
Affair.
Fifteen years before Kessler’s diaries
were translated into English in 2011,
the episode was first published in these
pages by James Fenton. See “Degas in
Attended also by the artists Forain,
José Maria Sert, and Pierre Bonnard,
the dinner was not a success. Degas,
who initially appeared to Kessler like
“an elegant grandfather . . . an apostle,
untouched by the world,” became agi-
tated when conversation turned to the
Bernheim family, who dealt in his work.
Referring to the father, Alexandre, who
had established the business, Degas ex-
claimed, “How can one chat with peo-
ple like that? Let’s see, with a Jewish
Belgian who is a naturalized French-
man! It’s as if one wished to speak with
a hyena, a boa. Such people do not be-
long to the same humanity as us.”
Kessler recorded that Degas’s most
deranged invective was reserved for
compulsory education:
“It’s the Jews and the Protestants
who do that” [Degas said] . . .
Degas became completely angry,
thundering against the popular-
ization of art and the unrestrained
increase in exhibitions, pictures,
and artists. “Truly, with all of this,
the profession of artist is becoming
disgusting. Today one wants every-
one to have taste the same way one
has clothes, a vest, pants, boots. It’s
shameful! It’s come to where the
garrison in Paris has ordered that
each week a detachment of soldiers
should visit the Louvre under the
supervision of an officer! I wonder
a bit at what soldiers are supposed
to do in the Louvre, and under the
supervision of an officer? Is it not
shameful, shameful?”
Amused and horrified in equal mea-
sure, Kessler left the dinner concluding
that the artist was “a deranged and ma-
niacal innocent.”
A kinder, more affectionate Degas
does emerge in his letters, but rarely,
and notably in those to his friend and
fellow artist Valernes, whom he had
known since the mid-1850s, and next
to whom he is shown in his self-portrait
Degas and Évariste de Valernes (1865;
see illustration on page 18). Writing to
Valernes on October 26, 1890, Degas
begged forgiveness:
I am going to apologize for some-
thing that recurs often in your
conversation and even more so in
your thoughts: namely, throughout
our long artistic relationship, my
having been or having appeared
to be hard on you. I was singularly
so on myself, as you must remem-
ber since you reproached me for
it and were astonished that I had
such little self- confidence. I was, or
appeared to be, hard on everyone,
due to a habitual brutality born
of my self- doubt and bad temper.
I felt so poorly made, so poorly
equipped, so weak, and yet it
seemed to me that my calculations
on art were so right.
According to Degas’s first cataloger,
Pierre-André Lemoisne, “He who al-
ways had difficulty revealing himself in
his letters wrote often to Valernes with
abandon and affection.”
the Evening,” The New York Review,
October 3, 1996. Fenton’s transcrip-
tion is more complete than the entry
in Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of
Count Harry Kessler, 1880–1918, ed-
ited and translated by Laird M. Easton
(Knopf, 2011), pp. 412–415.
The New York Review
Printed in large quarto format, in a
handsome three-volume boxed set,
Reff’s edition of The Letters of Edgar
Degas is the fruit of sixty years of sus-
tained engagement with the artist. A
professor emeritus in Columbia Uni-
versity’s Department of Art History
and Archaeology—where he started
teaching in 1957—Reff is also an au-
thority on Manet and Cézanne. He
published Degas’s thirty- eight note-
books in 1976, with a revised edition
appearing in 1985; coauthored the
Supplement to Lemoisne’s four-volume
catalogue raisonné in 1984; and since
1960 has contributed innumerable
articles and catalog essays on the art-
ist. Reff’s bilingual edition of Degas’s
correspondence demonstrates his ex-
traordinary tenacity in tracking down,
reviewing, and dating more than 1,200
letters. Like many of their literary con-
temporaries (and any well- educated
bourgeois of the period), the long-
lived Impressionists were energetic
letter writers. Pissarro’s published
correspondence comprises more than
2,000 letters; Monet’s more than 3,000;
Renoir’s, currently in preparation, will
likely include over 1,700.
Most impressive are Reff’s footnotes
to each entry, which distill informa-
tion from cadastral records, state and
municipal archives, and published ac-
counts that bear on the contents of
the letter in question. His third vol-
ume contains English translations of
all the letters; succinct—and wherever
possible, illustrated—biographies of
the 125 most frequently mentioned
correspondents; a map of Degas’s
Montmartre and L’Opéra, with ninety-
seven addresses, including those of his
homes and studios as well as those of
his closest associates (we can see that
it took Degas less than five minutes to
walk from his studio on the rue Victor-
Massé to the Halévys on rue de Douai);
a chronological listing of all the letters;
and indices spanning sixty pages. The
three volumes are a tour de force of
scholarship, and will become invalu-
able companions not only for students
and admirers of Degas, but also for
those interested in the Impressionists
generally and in the city of Paris in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Among the Impressionists, Degas
has been the best served by the many
scholars, art historians, and catalog-
ers who have devoted themselves to his
art. Since the magnificent and compre-
hensive retrospective exhibition seen
in 1988–1989 at the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art in New York, the National
Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in
Paris—with a catalog that remains the
standard reference on the artist10 —there
have been exhibitions and publications
devoted to every aspect, period, and
genre of Degas’s work: his portraiture,
nudes, dancers, jockeys, and landscapes,
for example, as well as his sculpture,
monotypes, and photographs.
With its rigor and precision, Reff’s
edition of Degas’s letters brings insight
and new information to examples of
each of these. A receipt to Faure for
5,000 francs dated March 6, 1874, es-
tablishes conclusively that the Metro-
politan Museum of Art’s The Dance
Class, commissioned in late October or
10
Degas, 1834–1917, edited by Jean
Sutherland Boggs (Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art/National Gallery of Can-
ada, 1988).
April 7, 2022
early November 1873, in which Degas
flattered his patron by including in the
background a poster for Gioachino The devastating second collection
Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (one of
Faure’s greatest roles), was completed
by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look,
early in 1874. It was the first version of a
composition repeated with minor vari-
a finalist for the National Book Award
ations on a canvas that is today in the
Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Furthermore,
Reff establishes once and for all that it
I said what I meant
was the Met’s picture that appeared in but I said it
the first Impressionist exhibition in Na-
dar’s studio in April 1874, where it was in velvet. I said it in feathers.
listed as Examen de danse au théâtre,
belonging to “M. Faure.” And so one poet reminded me
Similarly, in republishing Degas’s
letter of October 23, 1874, to Charles Remember what you are to them.
William Deschamps, the manager of
the London branch of Durand-Ruel’s Poodle, I said.
gallery, Reff notes Degas’s reassurance
from the dealer’s enthusiasm for the re-
cent arrival of a painting that would be
And remember what they are to you.
exhibited in London the following year.
This was most likely Dancer Posing for Meat.
a Photograph (Dancer in Front of the
Window), which until now had reason- —from “Patronage”
ably enough been dated to 1875, since
it was shown in the spring of that year
at Deschamps’s New Bond Street Gal- “Sharif’s commanding voice reverberates throughout
lery as Ballet Dancer Practising. De-
gas’s letter confirms that the painting
this complex and confident collection.”
was completed by October 1874, and —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Reff speculates that it reached London
too late to be included in the catalog
of Deschamps’s current show, which “Sharif demonstrates remarkable talent in her ability to
opened on November 16. By such so deftly portray the traumatizing balance required
means does one arrive at refinements
in dating and chronology. to live in the West with deep roots in Iran.”
Reff’s edition of the correspondence —Michael Ruzicka, Booklist, starred review
has been published under the auspices
of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute,
established in New York and Paris in
2016 to support the production of cat-
alogues raisonnés and the digitization
Irene Solá’s spellbinding novel
of archival sources, so one hopes that places one family’s tragedies against
an online edition of it might one day be
forthcoming. This would be the ideal the uncontainable life force of
way in which to incorporate the rare
item that has escaped Reff’s notice or the land itself.
to publish correspondence that might
one day reappear, such as Degas’s
letters to the actress Ellen André or Translated from the Catalan by
Cassatt. In the ranks of the former is a
receipt in the Morgan Library and Mu- Mara Faye Lethem
seum dated January 16, 1915. It records
the sale by Degas for 4,000 francs of “The overlapping, multifaceted
a small painting on Haviland ceramic
tile representing a singer at a café con- points of view serve to deepen
cert to Pierre Cloix, an intermediary and enrich the human struggles,
for the Jewish art dealer Paul Rosen-
berg, who had recently opened glamor- which, far from being muted,
ous new quarters at 21, rue la Boétie, are rendered instead more urgent,
and with whom Degas, unsurprisingly,
had no relations.11 Cloix sold it to more moving by being inextricably
Rosenberg on the same day for 4,400
francs, earning a modest commission
linked to the region’s natural
of 10 percent. Q history and its past. ”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
11
“Vendu à Monsieur Cloix une peinture
sur carreau d’Haviland représentant “Translated with great musicality and wit. . . rich
une chanteuse de café concert,” Morgan
Library and Museum, MA 9076.30, gift and ranging, shimmering with human and nonhuman life,
of Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg, 2013
(unpublished). For the painting Mlle the living and the dead, in our time and deep time;
Bécat aux Ambassadeurs (circa 1875–
1876), see Michael Shulman, Edgar
a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny,
Degas, 1834–1917: The Digital Critical and profoundly moving.” —Max Porter
Catalogue, MS-2420; available at degas-
catalogue.com. Haviland and Co. was
a porcelain manufactory founded by “Like nothing I’ve read before. This novel is a feral,
Charles Edward Haviland, for which, in
the late 1870s, Degas provided designs
yowling love howl to a place of such staggering majesty that
for vases. Haviland’s personal collection it resists usual comprehension.” —C Pam Zhang
of modern French paintings included
Degas’s superb Jockeys Before the Race
(circa 1879). See Renoir Portraits: Im-
pressions of an Age, edited by Colin B. GRAYWOLF PRESS
Bailey (Yale University Press, 1997), graywolfpress.org
p. 206.
21
 Slavery, Empire, Memory
Enslaved people working in the boiling house of a sugar plantation in British Antigua; etching by William Clark, 1823
Slave Empire:
How Slavery Built Modern Britain
by Padraic X. Scanlan.
London: Robinson,
448 pp., £25.00; £12.99 (paper)
Empireland: How Imperialism
Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera.
London: Viking,
306 pp., £18.99; £9.99 (paper)
In 1833 Britain allocated the extraor-
dinary sum of £20 million—40 percent
of the British treasury’s annual expen-
ditures at the time, and the equivalent
today of some $3.35 billion—in com-
pensation payments to make a clean
and final break with slavery. This was
the year that it freed enslaved people
throughout its empire and a quarter
of a century after it outlawed partici-
pation in the transatlantic commerce
in Africans, which it had dominated
for 150 years. During that time it had
shipped three million slaves to the
Americas.
Since then the country has attempted
to recast the historical understanding
of how it profited from the forced labor
of millions of Africans. Britons were
taught—and many still believe—that
slavery had never been a foundation
of their country’s commercial prosper-
ity but was a millstone that needed to
be removed so capitalism could truly
flourish. Echoes of such thinking can
be heard in the claims of Prime Minis-
ter Boris Johnson and his predecessor,
Theresa May, that exiting the Euro-
pean Union was a way for Britain to
reconnect with its proud traditions as a
global trading power.
In the place of remorse or even
meaningful dialogue about their
slave-trading and plantation- operating
past, Britons have been encouraged
to embrace feel-good messages about
22
Howard W. French
freedom. Such efforts began in the
early nineteenth century with the pro-
motion of their country as the very av-
atar of the liberation of human chattel.
A central prop in this national image
management was Britain’s West Af-
rica Squadron, the ships that period-
ically swept the African coast in the
nineteenth century, interdicting re-
calcitrant traders in human beings,
whether from Europe or the Americas,
and freeing the Africans they seized.
Britons were also regaled with tales of
the gratitude of former slaves who had
been freed from bondage on West In-
dian plantations and allowed to work
for themselves in the New World for
the first time.
What was wrong with such a flatter-
ing picture? To begin with, the gener-
ous compensation paid in 1833 went
not into the pockets of the enslaved,
or even toward their care or rehabili-
tation, but to the former slave owners.
Many of them increased their fortunes
by investing in the emerging industries
of the day, including banks, railroad
stocks, mines, factories, and, for some,
American cotton, then a booming new
slave industry. Seventy-five baron-
ets are listed in the compensation re-
cords, along with dozens of members of
Parliament.
The legend of the West Africa Squad-
ron, though not trivial, was blown out
of all proportion to its actual impact on
the shadowy last years of the illicit in-
ternational trade in slaves. As Padraic
X. Scanlan writes in Slave Empire:
How Slavery Built Modern Britain, his
bracingly revisionist work on the era of
Black bondage and its aftermath, pop-
ular histories about this interdiction
force bore subtitles like “The Ships
That Stopped the Slave Trade.” But in
reality it did nothing of the sort. More
than 2.6 million enslaved Africans
were shipped across the Atlantic after
British Library/Granger
1810, when the British patrols, always
sparse in number, began: “The Squad-
ron was more useful as a fighting force
for intimidating and destroying West
African coastal kingdoms and chief-
taincies that happened to defy British
demands.”
And what became of the enslaved
people who were freed from their
chains when total abolition finally
came? Scanlan says they were paid
wages far too low to allow them to pur-
chase land of their own, so they had
to continue producing sugar and cof-
fee, cotton and indigo for others under
harsh conditions in the Caribbean. In
fact, he argues, that was the goal all
along. Even among the most progres-
sive of English abolitionists, many be-
lieved that the best outcome of this new
era of nominal freedom for formerly
enslaved Black people would be for
them to toil indefinitely under the tu-
telage of wealthy white plantation own-
ers whose commodities British comfort
and prosperity required.
T he intellectual background of Scan-
lan’s book, which he acknowledges
early on, is the argument—first made
by the former Trinidadian prime min-
ister and scholar Eric Williams and
recently elaborated and refined by nu-
merous other historians—that an em-
pire in the Caribbean based on slavery
was foundational to British capitalism
and prosperity. To say that Western
historians have not always embraced
this interpretation would be an un-
derstatement. For decades after the
publication of Williams’s landmark
work, Capitalism and Slavery (1944),
the scholarly pendulum mostly swung
in the opposite direction. Mainstream
British and American historians at-
tacked his writings as overwrought
and unsupported, and made light of his
overall argument by seizing on two of
his claims: that profits from the slave
trade had been an essential part of the
financing of British industrialization,
and that Britain only renounced slav-
ery once it was no longer profitable.
This second idea is clearly indefensi-
ble, but today many historians believe
that the first can only be considered
wrong if it is viewed in the most lim-
ited way.
Scanlan, like other recent scholars,
argues quite sensibly that profit from
the slave trade derived from other ac-
tivities besides the outright buying and
selling of human beings. He makes
clear, though, that this brutal com-
merce was immensely lucrative. Slave
traders of the late eighteenth century
averaged a handsome 9.5 percent an-
nual rate of profit, more than double
the appreciation in value of British real
estate. Another way of understand-
ing the profitability of this business
comes from examining its effects else-
where. In a 2014 paper, the economists
Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman
argued that the value derived from the
trade and ownership of slaves in Amer-
ica was greater than that from all of the
country’s factories, railroads, and ca-
nals combined.* And imports of slaves
to the United States represented less
than 5 percent of the total transatlantic
trade, with much larger numbers going
to Brazil and the Caribbean.
Many of Williams’s critics narrowly
considered the market prices of slaves
to attack the idea that profit from the
trade could have been a decisive fac-
tor in British industrialization. Yet it
is only when one considers the overall
wealth creation made possible by slave
labor, which is implicit in Piketty and
Zucman’s calculation, that one can
begin to take the true measure of the
trade’s impact on British (as well as
European and American) prosperity.
Chattel slavery was the foundation of
a great many economic activities, in-
cluding what was arguably the most
transformative one of its era: the sugar
plantation.
As businesses, Scanlan reckons,
plantations were roughly as profitable
as the trade in human beings, but even
this falls far short of providing the
full picture of how decisively slavery
boosted Britain’s (and America’s) for-
tunes. Limiting the estimate to sugar,
or even adding in the profits from the
ceaseless buying and selling of mil-
lions of human beings, would be akin
to measuring global carbon emissions
from the internal combustion engine
alone. By the mid-1660s, sugar pro-
duced in the tiny British colony of
Barbados was worth more than all the
silver and gold shipped to Spain from
its American colonies.
With the sharp growth of sugar plan-
tations, in Barbados and then Jamaica,
the contribution of trade to Britain’s
gross domestic product rocketed from
4 percent in 1700 to 40 percent in 1770.
But as this happened, the boom in
*“Capital Is Back: Wealth-Income Ra-
tios in Rich Countries, 1700–2010,”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Vol. 129, No. 3 (August 2014).
The New York Review
sugar and other slave-grown commodi-
ties, along with the slave trade itself, in
turn drove all kinds of highly profitable
ancillary activities that employed large
numbers of Britons, from rope making
to shipbuilding, from firearms and iron-
works to banking, from textile produc-
tion (for two very different markets: to
clothe both slaves and their masters) to
insurance and finance. It was the cas-
cading wealth derived from this partial
list of booming slavery-related busi-
nesses that made London the leader in
financial services and the biggest city in
Europe in the eighteenth century, with
more than 750,000 residents—over
200,000 more than Paris and six times
larger than Vienna or Madrid. As a re-
sult, Scanlan writes, “trade made the
empire; slavery made trade.”
To capture the essence of all of these
money-making activities even more
HMS Tourmaline, a flagship of the West Africa Squadron; engraving by
Josiah Robert Wells after a sketch by H. P. Neville, 1876
damningly: “Slaves. Cotton. Sugar.
This country’s nothing but an off-shore
laundry for turning evil into hard cur-
rency.” The line comes from the pop-
ular television series Succession and is
quoted in Sathnam Sanghera’s Empire-
land: How Imperialism Has Shaped
Modern Britain.
The contribution of slavery to Brit-
ish wealth was not limited to things
measured as trade or easily captured
in the bookkeeper’s ledger. As the an-
thropologist Sidney Mintz pointed out
in his classic work Sweetness and Power
(1986), in the eighteenth century sugar
plantations, kept running by the en-
slaved, were important precursors of in-
dustrialization. Not only were they much
larger than almost any other type of pro-
duction common to Europe at the time,
they operated on the basis of clear spe-
cialization of regimented labor working
under severe time pressure and relied
on the synchronization of multiple com-
plex operations, anticipating the modern
factory. These operations included not
only planting, weeding, and harvesting,
as well as the management of a large
enslaved workforce, but also the highly
time-sensitive boiling and “purging” of
the cane juice into molasses and sugar.
They were brutal, Scanlan writes, but
also among “the most prosperous, heav-
ily capitalised and mechanised work-
places of the pre-industrial era.”
To grasp the full import of Scanlan’s
statement that slavery in effect made
the empire, though, one must move
even further away from classical eco-
April 7, 2022
nomics. He argues, for example, that ment, sugar, and other commodities
it was the creation of new productive were especially important in forging
economies in the New World, and unity within Britain:
above all in the West Indies, that fa-
cilitated the political stitching together The profits of trade and slave-
of what became the United Kingdom. holding drew wealthy English,
The story of white indentured servants Scots and Irish landowners and
in places like Barbados in the early sev- merchants closer together, and
enteenth century, at the very outset of provided ambitious and edu-
the sugar boom, is well known, at least cated young men, especially from
to historians of slavery and empire. Scotland, with a steady source of
In that era, before they were replaced employment.
after midcentury by enslaved Africans,
whites of varying backgrounds, some The trade in enslaved Black bodies
economically desperate, others merely from ports in Scotland and the constant
chancers seeking their fortunes in the cycling through the Caribbean islands
booming plantation world, supplied of the Scottish professional class com-
much of the energy and no small por- bined to help make Glasgow the unoffi-
tion of the labor that launched these cial second capital of Britain’s lucrative
complex, wealth-generating operations. Atlantic empire, in Sanghera’s phrase.
This outpouring of Johnny New- Scots and Irish who made a fortune
Comes, as they were sometimes called in in slavery could also acquire a proper
the popular culture of the time, relieved London address, which gave them so-
some of the destitution in England that cial entrée to England’s elites, helping
to establish a single political class.
The Illustrated London News
A further way that the British Em-
pire was built can be explained by the
thesis of the late American sociologist
and political thinker Charles Tilly that
“war makes states.” Scanlan’s book
joins a growing body of historiography,
including my Born in Blackness (2021),
that argues that the English, and subse-
quently British, states grew in admin-
istrative capacity and robustness as a
direct consequence of prolonged mili-
tary contests with the Dutch, the Span-
ish, and especially the French over who
would dominate the slave trade and the
plantation economy centered in the
West Indies.
War with France, Scanlan notes,
whether alone or in coalition, lasted
for nearly the entire eighteenth cen-
tury, and much of it explicitly involved
slavery, although this is seldom em-
phasized in standard accounts of the
resulted from enclosure laws that barred period. In British narratives, for ex-
commoners from access to vast tracts of ample, the Seven Years’ War largely
land beginning in 1604. The West In- took place in Europe. In the United
dies (and the American mainland) thus States, in contrast, it is mostly remem-
became a vital “escape valve” at a time bered as the French and Indian War,
of tremendous social upheaval. “For a fight for control of the Ohio River
the enslaved, the British empire was a Valley, a story enlivened for Ameri-
prison,” Scanlan writes. “For many Brit- can readers by the appearance of the
ons, the slave empire opened a path to young and not-yet-surefooted George
‘British liberty.’” For those whites who Washington. For the French, however,
survived, one might add, passage to “the an important rationale behind the war
islands,” and the slave regime being built in continental America involved tying
there, also constituted an enormous eco- down their British rivals there to pre-
nomic opportunity and a historically vent them from taking over France’s
unique social upgrade, in which they be- West Indian colonies.
came part of a new racial master class. As Scanlan points out, William Pitt
No less important was the way that the Elder urged Parliament to borrow
this new emigration outlet became a as much money as the government’s
locus of self-reinvention and wealth creditors would allow in order to mus-
creation for the already well-off, thus ter and deploy huge numbers of troops
serving as a vital catalyst in the consol- in a conflict that became truly global.
idation of a still-fragile union encom- British victories were won from Nova
passing what are now the British Isles. Scotia to the Philippines, but the rich-
Scanlan writes that the West Indies est prizes were concentrated in the
(as well as the then much less wealthy Caribbean: Guadeloupe, Dominica,
American mainland) were open to the Grenada, Saint Vincent, and Tobago,
migration of a managerial class of Scots as well as Spanish Havana, all of which
and Irish in a way that England in the were vastly more lucrative for Euro-
mid-eighteenth century was generally peans than the American mainland.
not: “The Americas offered ambitious After Pitt’s navy seized Guadeloupe
Scots and Irish a new place to earn in 1759, Britain imported more slaves
their fortune and secure land for them- there in two years than France had
selves far from an England where Celts since the beginning of the century.
often got a chilly reception.” At an As a result, by 1761, this small island
elite social level, the demand for pro- led all of London’s possessions in
fessional services, especially from the the export of sugar, cotton, rum, and
lawyers who ran plantations on behalf coffee.
of absentee owners, and the opportuni- Despite all this, a diminishment and
ties for striking it rich through enslave- trivialization of the place of slavery in
23
Britain’s modern economic life is still
a powerful, even dominant current in
the country’s mainstream historiogra-
phy. Sanghera observes that P. J. Cain
and A. G. Hopkins’s major study Brit-
ish Imperialism: 1688–2015, published
to acclaim in England in 2016, barely
mentions slavery at all.
Such erasure is not limited to dis-
cussions of the economics of empire.
Determined to control the richest of
the sugar islands following its seizure
of Guadeloupe, in 1793 Britain sent the
largest naval expedition it had ever as-
sembled to capture Saint-Domingue,
which under the leadership of Tous-
saint Louverture had risen up against
the French. The former slaves of what
would soon become Haiti, however,
defeated the British; more of their
soldiers died there in battle and from
disease than had died in the Ameri-
can Revolutionary War two decades
earlier. As Louverture said, rallying
his men to victory, “We are fighting
that liberty—that most precious of all
earthly possessions—may not perish.”
Neither the name Saint-Domingue nor
Haiti has ever appeared on a British
regimental banner in remembrance
of this campaign, unlike major de-
feats by European armies. British stu-
dents, furthermore, are rarely taught
about these events, because they run
so contrary to the preferred national
narrative.
E mpireland is deeply preoccupied
with questions of memory and for-
getting, with Britain’s vexed and con-
torted feelings about empire, and with
the grudging place accorded to non-
24
whites of all backgrounds in its society.
Although he is of Indian extraction,
Sanghera, a British-born journalist
and documentary filmmaker, describes
himself as having been “clueless” about
topics like these for most of his life, and
his book opens in a confessional mode
about how the scales of ignorance tum-
bled from his eyes.
Sanghera’s personal approach—
much more anecdotal than most histor-
ical writing—is disarming and makes
his account of occasionally horrified
discovery all the more effective. De-
spite having a degree in history, he
nonetheless says that he learned more
about the dark side of Britain’s im-
perial past during the recent bout of
what he calls “statuecide”—the top-
pling of statues of some of the most
ignoble figures in the country’s impe-
rial past—than he did from all the lec-
tures he attended and books he read in
school.
A similar revelation came to him
during a visit to India, where he went to
film a documentary in 2019. Sanghera
says that he first learned about the 1919
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, one of the
worst British atrocities in the country
of his ancestors and what he calls “one
of the key events of the twentieth cen-
tury,” from watching the movie Gandhi
while tipsy on a long flight. By confess-
ing his ignorance, though, Sanghera
is all the better equipped to invite his
readers to question their own lack of
awareness and shame about Britain’s
actions in South Asia and elsewhere.
His book begins with the atrocities
that first opened his eyes to the vio-
lence and looting (a word imported
into English from India as a direct re-
sult of this history) that characterized
the British takeover of India. From
there, he dwells on London’s pro-
longed and extraordinary economic
exploitation of its rich Asian colony.
Estimates of the wealth that accrued
to Britain vary. One of Sanghera’s
Indian sources writes that his coun-
try was “bled anything between 5 to
10 percent of her GDP annually for
close to two centuries.” Another cal-
culates that the colony was “drained”
of nearly $45 trillion in today’s money
between 1765 and 1938, or seventeen
times the total annual gross domestic
product of the United Kingdom today.
Still other estimates are cited, leaving
both Sanghera and the reader uncer-
tain how exactly to appraise the eco-
nomic relationship between metropole
and colony.
More interesting is the contrast be-
tween reckonings like these and the
statements of powerful British figures
over the years, which are steeped in
denialism. Santham quotes a speech by
Benjamin Disraeli in 1872: “It has been
shown with precise, with mathematical
demonstration, that there never was a
jewel in the crown of England that was
so costly as the possession of India.”
A line can be drawn from this to the
remarks made by former British prime
minister David Cameron during a visit
to India in 2013, where he said, “I think
there is an enormous amount to be
proud of in what the British Empire
did and was responsible for.” These
two remarks share the idea that Britain
was doing others a favor by coloniz-
ing them, purportedly even at its own
expense. Here is the essence of “the
white man’s burden,” the phrase im-
mortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899
poem of that name, and a keystone in
the refashioning of the country’s sense
of itself in the post-slavery nineteenth
century.
Sanghera is at his best in exploring
the many contradictions raised by all
this. Britain wants its people to be
proud of the country’s grand imperial
past, but it doesn’t seem to want them
to know much about it. Another Brit-
ish prime minister, Gordon Brown, ar-
gued during a 2005 visit to East Africa
that Britain should stop apologizing
for its empire and recognize that what
he called some of the “greatest ideas”
in history came from it. It is—to say
the least—curious, then, that so little
is taught about the imperial past in
schools. Beyond the silence of his own
elite boarding school education on the
topic, Sanghera cites numerous others,
including professional historians such
as Bernard Porter, who has written
that he did “not remember the empire
ever being discussed or even men-
tioned at home as a child,” and that he
had encountered “no imperial history
whatsoever” before his postgraduate
studies. The novelist Charlotte Men-
delson claimed that she had “one of
the best educations Britain can offer”
but that she had been “taught nothing
about slavery or colonialism. Nothing.
Ever.”
“The British Empire,” Sanghera
writes,
was not only the biggest thing
that ever happened to us, but one
of the biggest things that ever
happened to the world. At its
height it covered a quarter of the
world’s land surface and governed
nearly a quarter of the world’s
population.
He quotes the Financial Times colum-
nist Gideon Rachman, who observed
that “for a Martian historian” this
would surely be the most interesting as-
pect of Britain’s modern history. And
yet, Sanghera says, the country’s pre-
vailing sense of itself is almost entirely
built instead around carefully tended
tales of national sacrifice, heroism, and
victory in the twentieth century’s two
world wars.
But that is not all. One of the dis-
coveries that seems to have touched
Sanghera most during his research is
the fact that during those wars mil-
lions of troops were conscripted from
all over the empire to fight on Britain’s
behalf, which receives scant mention
in standard histories and is all but ab-
sent in films or war commemorations.
This makes Sanghera ruminate about
the treatment of brown and Black peo-
ples of all descriptions who settled in
Britain in the postwar era, often as
the result of official recruitment drives
aimed at economic recovery and recon-
struction. In doing so, he returns once
again to his previous naiveté: “The
narrative that brown people imposed
themselves on Britain is so powerful
that I absorbed it myself, as a young
brown Briton.” Later he writes, “We
forget not only that black and Asian
people were invited to work here, but
that many came as citizens; we forget
more generally that Britain was built
on immigration.”
Sanghera’s most powerful question
looms throughout his book. Through
the slave trade and subsequent col-
onization, the British Empire pre-
sided over “one of the biggest white
supremacist enterprises in the history
of humanity.” How, then, should it be
recognized today? For many, he con-
cludes, understanding of empire has
merely become a shallow proxy for
nationalism. Britons don’t like to be
faced with uncomfortable details, and
they confront people like Sanghera,
sometimes angrily, with the question
of whether intellectuals like him aren’t
overemphasizing the negative.
The British, he says, take comfort in
the idea that the US is, in the popular
view, more “screwed up” than their
own country. But at least in the US,
which also struggles with denialism
about its racial history, the tragedy of
slavery has finally become a prominent
feature in popular culture. French pres-
ident Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile,
has gone much further than any British
leader, calling his country’s colonial-
ism “a crime against humanity, a real
barbarity.” This, Macron said, is “a past
that we need to confront by apologiz-
ing to those against whom we commit-
ted these acts.” For Britain, Sanghera
warns,
the way we fail to acknowledge we
are a multicultural society because
we had a multicultural empire makes
our national conversations about
race tragic and absurd. . . . Our col-
lective amnesia about the fact that
we were, as a nation, wilfully white
supremacist and occasionally geno-
cidal, and our failure to understand
how this informs modern-day rac-
ism, are catastrophic.
Q
The New York Review

Pollak’s Arm
by Hans von Trotha, translated from
the German by Elisabeth Lauffer.
New Vessel, 141 pp., $16.95 (paper)
How do we respond to barbarians at
the gates? On February 25, 2022, as
Russian troops invaded her country,
the young Ukrainian congresswoman
Kira Rudik tweeted, “I learn to use
#Kalashnikov and prepare to bear
arms.” When the Nazis invaded France
in 1940, the physicist and Nobel lau-
reate Frédéric Joliot- Curie smuggled
his working papers out of Paris but
stayed behind to help lead the Resis-
tance, turning his scientific talents to
the manufacture of Molotov cocktails.
The ancient historian Livy tells us that
in 390 BCE , as a troop of Gauls bore
down on Rome, the most distinguished
senators among those too old to fight
and too proud to flee dressed in their
most elaborate togas. Each one sat in
silence in the atrium of his own house,
on the ivory throne that symbolized
his high office, his hands holding the
insignia of imperium— high command.
At first the old men’s surreal tran-
quility cowed the invaders, but when
a Gaul stroked the beard of a senator
and was smacked in return by an ivory
mace, the raiders realized that these
men, too, were human and massacred
every one. In Hans von Trotha’s haunt-
ing novel Pollak’s Arm, published in
Germany in 2021 and now beautifully
translated into English by Elisabeth
Lauffer, the setting is Nazi- occupied
Rome on October 16, 1943, the Satur-
day when the Gestapo rounded up the
city’s Jews— the day when the barbar-
ians came knocking door to door.
German troops had seized the city
only a month earlier, on September
10. The Italian prime minister, Mar-
shal Pietro Badoglio, and King Victor
Emmanuel III had fled on the ninth—
one day after the truce Italy had signed
with the Allies on September 3 be-
came public knowledge— and taken
refuge behind Allied lines in south-
ern Italy. The Nazis wasted no time
in going about their brutal business
in Rome because they had no time:
Germany had been defeated at Stal-
ingrad in February and faced a slow
but inexorable Allied advance up the
Italian peninsula. A Nazi commando
unit sprang Mussolini from his Italian
prison on September 12 and set him up
with a puppet regime, the Italian So-
cial Republic, at Salò on the shores of
Lake Garda, far enough north to buy
them both time.
In Rome, however, SS officer Her-
bert Kappler worked swiftly to impose
a reign of terror as the Eternal City’s
new chief of security police, his atten-
tion fixed on Communists, anarchists,
Roma, and, above all, Jews. On Sep-
tember 26, he summoned two heads of
the Jewish community to his office on
Via Tasso and informed them that “we
will not deprive you of your lives if you
do what you are asked. With your gold
we want to equip new armies for the
Fatherland. Within 36 hours you must
provide 50 kilograms of gold.” Other-
wise, he threatened, he would deport
two hundred Jews to the Russian front.
The community delivered eighty kilo-
grams to Via Tasso on September 28,
April 7, 2022
Caught in the Coils
Ingrid D. Rowland
Illustration by Alain Pilon
convinced that the tribute would guar-
antee their safety.
In early October, however, Reichs-
führer- SS Heinrich Himmler entrusted
Italy to Theodor Dannecker, who had
coordinated the deportation of Jews
from France, Macedonia, and northern
Greece and would move on to Hun-
gary. At 5:30 on the morning of Octo-
ber 16, 365 Gestapo men sealed off the
former Roman Ghetto and delivered
a mimeographed sheet of paper to its
Jewish families, giving them twenty
minutes to pack “for eight days” and
assemble in front of the ancient Portico
of Octavia. Other detachments sought
out the more affluent Jews scattered
elsewhere in the city. By 2 PM, more
than 1,200 people had been loaded on
trucks and taken to the Collegio Mili-
tare in Trastevere. Some two hundred
were released as non-Jews on closer ex-
amination of their papers, but on Octo-
ber 18 those remaining— more than a
thousand people—were crammed into
cattle cars at the Tiburtina railroad
station and dispatched to Auschwitz by
way of Padua and Vienna. (In Padua,
bystanders reported their appalling
condition and forced the SS guards to
let the prisoners get water.) Of those
deported, fifteen men and one woman
returned to Rome after the war. None
of the children survived.
T he narrator of Pollak’s Arm, known
only as K., is “a secondary school
teacher from Berlin stranded in occu-
pied Rome and harbored in the Vati-
can.” It is October 17, 1943, and he has
just arrived at the office of Monsignor
F. in “a building near the German cem-
etery Campo Santo Teutonico,” a suffi-
cient clue to identify it as the German
College (Collegio Teutonico) within
Vatican City. Here, during World War
II, a courageous Irish priest, Monsi-
gnor Hugh O’Flaherty, used his office
as papal chamberlain to set up a rescue
network, the Rome Escape Line, that
saved some 6,500 people from certain
death. Monsignor F., “a retired prel-
ate and ecclesiastical diplomat whose
German is flawless, virtually accentless
except for a trace of Italian inflection,”
is a member of O’Flaherty’s opera-
tion, and K. has come to report what
occurred the day before, when he had
been charged with bringing the Jewish
archaeologist Ludwig Pollak and his
family to safety in the Vatican.
The people of von Trotha’s novel
are real. Pollak was one of the most
colorful characters among the many
expatriates who found themselves in
early-twentieth- century Rome. Prague-
born, educated in Vienna at its famous
Archaeological-Epigraphic Seminar,
he reached the Eternal City in 1893 and
set up shop as an art dealer of wide in-
terests and exquisite taste. His work as
a consultant for the wealthy collector
Senator Giovanni Barracco eventually
led to his appointment as the director
of Barracco’s Museum of Comparative
Ancient Sculpture (featuring some
two hundred Greek, Roman, Etrus-
can, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Cypriot
objects, as well as some choice medie-
val works).
Barracco donated this distinctive
collection to the city of Rome in 1902
in exchange for the rights to a plot of
land at the end of the new Corso Vitto-
rio Emanuele II. The Museo Barracco
opened in 1905 but fell victim to Mus-
solini’s schemes for urban renewal in
1938, just one of the demolitions that
heralded the successive incarnations of
New Rome in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries. Pollak, when K. comes
to fetch him, has seen too many of
them:
His presence is as awe-inspiring as
ever, the way he holds your gaze
with those piercing eyes. However,
he seems weakened by pain, I my-
self was pained to see. How old do
I reckon he is? Mid-seventies, I’d
say. Yes, he must be in his mid-
seventies.
Quick, we must leave for the
Vatican this instant—you, your
wife, your daughter and son. Ev-
erything’s been taken care of; we
just have to go downstairs. The car
is waiting.
But Pollak, as calm as those ancient
Roman senators before the invading
Gauls, chooses instead to talk, to take
K. on a long tour through his memories.
We hear spellbinding tales of Rome as
it was in the first flush of the Kingdom
of Italy; of Pollak’s long-demolished
studio on the Via del Tritone with its
frescoes by the eighteenth- century
painter Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the
sanctum where he played host to so
many works of art and so many distin-
guished collectors; and of the great dis-
covery that marked the triumph of his
career. In 1906 Pollak recognized the
battered marble carving of a bent elbow
in a stonecutter’s shop as the missing
arm of one of the world’s most famous
ancient sculptures: a statue of the Tro-
jan priest Laocoön and his two sons
being throttled by snakes. It had been
unearthed in the ruins of the Golden
House of Nero in 1506, requisitioned
for the Vatican’s collections by the papa
terribile Pope Julius II, and restored by
Jacopo Sansovino—who added an arm
outstretched rather than bent back, re-
placed in 1532 by Giovanni Antonio
Montorsoli’s still-straighter version.
K. listens, half- enthralled and half-
impatient, petrified as time and op-
portunity tick away and the danger
increases by the second. Pollak’s sole
concern is to testify—to his vanished
world and his vanished life, to the en-
during beauties that will survive even
this cruelty, this ugliness, like the Col-
osseum as it is now, bleached clean of
the suffering of the animals and people
sacrificed to ancient Rome’s unspeak-
able public spectacles:
He gets caught up in pathos some-
times, K. says, and he’ll start using
dated language or unbridled ges-
tures. I think his emotions get the
better of him. He also wants to
share, and thereby preserve, what-
ever is unleashing these feelings,
including the force with which it
does so. Pollak erects monuments
25
 with such phrases, and in Pollak’s
world, monuments serve as mile-
stones, whether of cultural prog-
ress or an individual life. They are
what counts.
T he Laocoön group provides von
Trotha’s Pollak with a monument
freighted with as many layers of signif-
icance as Rome itself. In Vergil’s Ae-
neid, Laocoön, in his authority as priest
of Neptune, warns his fellow Trojans
not to accept the gigantic wooden horse
that their Greek adversaries have mys-
teriously left on the beach. “I’m afraid
of Greeks even when they’re bringing
gifts,” he declares (timeo Danaos et
dona ferentes). Swiftly, troublemaking
Minerva sends a pair of supernatural
snakes to rid Troy of this turbulent
priest, with results that Vergil describes
in lurid detail (here in John Dryden’s
translation):
And first around the tender boys
they wind,
Then with their sharpen’d fangs
their limbs and bodies grind.
The wretched father, running to
their aid
With pious haste, but vain, they
next invade;
Twice round his waist their
winding volumes roll’d;
And twice about his gasping
throat they fold.
The priest thus doubly chok’d,
their crests divide,
And tow’ring o’er his head in
triumph ride.
With both his hands he labours at
the knots;
“We love love love our Vitsœ system.
The build quality and easiness of
assembly is amazing, but it was
your service that made the whole
process such a joy.”
‘Love’ is a word we hear a lot at
Vitsœ. Other verbs just don’t seem to
cut it. Like in this heartfelt message
from Melvin in Sydney, Australia to
his personal Vitsœ planner Sophie in
London, England.
As with any customer, Sophie ensured
that every detail was considered so
that Melvin’s shelving was perfect for
his needs.
Like everybody at Vitsœ, she’s
passionate about good service, and
communicates with all her customers
26
His holy fillets the blue venom
blots;
His roaring fills the flitting air
around.
Thus, when an ox receives a
glancing wound,
He breaks his bands, the fatal
altar flies,
And with loud bellowings breaks
the yielding skies.
The marble sculpture depicting the
“doubly chok’d” seer and his “tender
boys” may date from the same time
as Vergil: the age of Augustus, who
reigned from 31 BCE to 14 CE . It is
probably the same work praised two
generations later by the Roman writer
Pliny as the creation of three sculptors
from Rhodes—Agesander, Atheno-
dorus, and Polydorus— but Pliny gives
no indication of its date or the patron
who commissioned it. Scholars con-
tinue to debate when it was created
(possible dates range over some three
hundred years, from 200 BCE to the
70s CE) and whether it is a precise copy
of a lost bronze original or an elabo-
rated version.
To Michelangelo, who rushed to see
the statue as soon as it was discovered,
the priest’s exaggerated muscles and
anguished expression revealed heroic
new ways to portray human endurance.
Laocoön in his agony embodies ev-
erything that separated “bread- eating
mortals” from the gods of antiquity.
He has stood in the Vatican since 1506
next to one of those marble divinities,
the lithe, elegant Apollo Belvedere, as
graceful as Laocoön is contorted, as
youthful as Laocoön is aged, as blithe
in his arrogance as Laocoön is racked
Photo by
Melvin T
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by suffering. Renaissance sculptors
often claimed that the Laocoön group
had been carved from a single block
of marble, but Michelangelo certainly
knew better, and so, probably, did ev-
eryone else who took a close look and
saw the carefully crafted joins. But the
challenge of producing a three-in- one
statue appealed irresistibly, and around
1512 another Tuscan sculptor based in
Rome, Andrea Sansovino, carved just
such a marvel: a Virgin, Child, and
Saint Anne, still on view in the church
of Sant’Agostino.
Laocoön, who saw so clearly, pro-
vides a powerful image of impending
doom, but Pollak, the first modern
person to imagine the sculpted Laoc-
oön in its original form, seems to resist
acknowledging his own dire situation.
K. urges the elderly archaeologist to
act:
We know how this journey ends,
though, I responded. That’s why
I’m here.
With all due respect, Pollak
countered, even the highest au-
thority among those who sent you
does not know what the future
truly holds. The here and now is
not his concern; it is the hereafter,
which in my case does not apply.
Although—
He didn’t finish the sentence.
But, he added, please convey my
sincerest thanks to everyone in the
Vatican. Yes, he said, I am touched
that they sent you.
In 1766 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
used the Laocoön group, which he had
seen only in engravings, to engage in
philosophical battle with Johann Joa-
chim Winckelmann, who had seen the
real statue, albeit outfitted with its Re-
naissance arm rather than the original.
Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imi-
tation of Greek Works in Painting and
Sculpture (1755) had asserted that La-
ocoön, befitting his own idea of Greek
art as a triumph of “noble simplicity
and quiet grandeur,” exhibited the
“anxious and subdued sigh described
by [the Renaissance poet Jacopo] Sado-
leto” rather than Vergil’s “loud bellow-
ings.” To Lessing, comparing a work of
sculpture to a poem was an exercise in
nonsense. In Laocoön: An Essay on
the Limits of Painting and Poetry, he
insisted that each art retains its own
distinctive character; hence Vergil’s
poetry and the ancient sculpture set
for themselves, and achieve, entirely
different expressive aims. Neither illus-
trates the other, nor can it, for each is
an entirely independent creation. Lao-
coön’s pain, moreover, is anything but
subdued: it is explicit.
Von Trotha’s Pollak, in turn, believes
that his discovery of Laocoön’s bent
arm has entirely changed the meaning
of the statue. The outstretched arm,
reaching upward through the chaos,
expressed the priest’s extremities of
suffering as an epic struggle toward im-
mortality. The bent arm, the real arm,
has brought Laocoön and his agony
crashing back down to earth, bound by
the incurable pain of being human:
He’s no hero, and neither nobility
nor grandeur is on display. Simplic-
ity, maybe. And a bloodcurdling
scream ringing in the silence. . . .
The extended arm is monumen-
tal, sublime, and wrong. The arm
that will never reach out again. My
arm—the arm of a doomed man—
that is the real arm.
K. fidgets, and still Pollak spins out
his siren song as the light of day be-
gins to fade (von Trotha has taken that
small liberty with the facts—the Ge-
stapo may have wrapped up operations
just before a late lunch, but his version
of Pollak’s story requires the light of a
setting sun):
He turned and looked me straight
in the eye. One must give a per-
sonal account, he said. Particularly
when the end is imminent. One
must tell stories. One must write
them down. One must ensure that
memory remains, so that others
might remember when you no lon-
ger can.
Pollak’s memories are indissolu-
bly linked to the glorious, weighty
heritage of Judaism, and hence to
anti- Semitism, the serpent that has
confined him in its coils since his birth,
a monster unleashed by an angry God
for some unfathomable reason— or
perhaps the same reason that drove
Minerva to throw snakes at Laocoön:
to stifle a seer’s second sight. From an
earlier encounter with Alfred Dreyfus
to his gradual exclusion from every as-
pect of contemporary Roman life amid
Germany’s, and then Italy’s, growing
compliance with Adolf Hitler’s racial
doctrines, Pollak’s devotion to beauty
has been wrung at the price of a con-
stant battle against ugliness and evil.
One of the unkindest cuts occurred
in 1935, when he was denied entry to
the great art-historical library founded
in Rome by the Jewish benefactress
Henriette Hertz as a place where
women could read alongside men. “I
was the first and most faithful visitor
the Hertziana ever had,” Pollak tells
K. “And then—”
Yet Pollak’s long soliloquy ends with
apparent denial. He tells K., “They will
not come for me tomorrow.” And they
didn’t. They came that same day.
The Gestapo arrested Pollak and
his entire family, corralled them in the
Collegio Militare with more than a
thousand other prisoners for two hell-
ish nights, and then sent them off to
the ultimate hell of Auschwitz. Like
the senators of Rome in 390 BCE , von
Trotha’s Pollak discovers that his noble
stand could hold off the barbarians
only to a certain point, but the story of
that stand, that refusal to bend to bar-
barism, would outlive them all.
The Gestapo’s roundup, or rastrel-
lamento, of October 16, 1943, lives in
infamy. But as a military operation it
failed in its objectives, which were to
deport eight thousand people, not one
thousand, and to terrorize the Ro-
mans, who instead resisted the Nazis
more stubbornly than ever. Before the
trucks arrived, Roman Jews had been
warned to take refuge in the country-
side, and many did. Others escaped the
Gestapo’s net by climbing over roof-
tops or knocking on their neighbors’
doors. Hundreds hid in out- of-the-way
corners of churches and convents, in
private homes, or within the walls of
the Vatican with the help of Monsignor
O’Flaherty and his associates. One
man simply got into a Roman cab; the
driver spent the rest of the day chauf-
feuring him around the city and saved
his life. Q
The New York Review

Not One Inch:
America, Russia, and the Making
of Post–Cold War Stalemate
by M. E. Sarotte.
Yale University Press, 550 pp., $35.00
The last thing Joe Biden must have ex-
pected upon fulfilling his dream of be-
coming president in January 2021 was
that a year later he would face a Rus-
sian invasion of Ukraine and the largest
armed conflict in Europe since World
War II. This wasn’t supposed to hap-
pen. China was seen as the new threat.
The Quad—the alliance of the US,
Japan, India, and Australia, designed
to contain Beijing’s geopolitical am-
bitions—was the main focus of Wash-
ington’s foreign policy. Now suddenly
Vladimir Putin, keen to prove Russia’s
status as a great power, was hell-bent
on reconquering the second-largest re-
public of the former Soviet Union. The
scope and brutality of his invasion has
been shocking; yet to many of those
old enough to remember the end of the
cold war—when the USSR lay supine
and a series of American presidents set
out to expand (or as their aides put it, in
an attempt to avoid accusations of neo-
imperialism, “enlarge”) the NATO mil-
itary alliance to include nearly every
nation in Central and Eastern Europe
that had been a vassal of the Krem-
lin for the previous half- century—the
attack, at least initially, came as little
surprise. In a sense, it was a backlash
waiting to happen.
Not One Inch, M. E. Sarotte’s highly
detailed, thoroughly researched, and
briskly written chronicle of NATO’s
expansion in the first decade after the
end of the cold war, leaves the impres-
sion that Putin has a case for resenting
how the United States and its allies took
in the western parts of his country’s
erstwhile empire—though not as good
a case as he seems to believe. Sarotte, a
professor of history at Johns Hopkins,
takes her title from Putin’s frequent ref-
erences to a “promise,” allegedly made
by American leaders at the end of the
cold war, not to expand NATO into the
power vacuums of Central and Eastern
Europe. “‘Not an inch to the east,’ we
were told in the 1990s,” Putin said in a
December 2021 speech. “They cheated
us—vehemently, blatantly.”
But as Sarotte documents, the US
made no such promise. On February
9, 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall
fell but before the Soviet Union im-
ploded, James Baker, President George
H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, met with
Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet leader
had no illusions that he could prevent
the unification of East and West Ger-
many, but he wanted assurances that the
new German state would not be part of
NATO, the US-led military alliance that
was created in 1949 to contain the Soviet
Union. West Germany had been a mem-
ber of NATO since 1955; East Germany
was a member of the Soviet- controlled
Warsaw Pact. For the reunified German
state to be a part of NATO would rub
defeat a bit too harshly in the Russians’
faces. It might be better, Gorbachev
said, to keep the new Germany neu-
tral. Baker replied that a unified neutral
Germany might not be in anyone’s in-
terest, that it might even build its own
April 7, 2022
‘A Bridge Too Far’
Fred Kaplan
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US secretary of state James Baker
in the Kremlin, Moscow, February 9, 1990
nuclear arsenal. He asked, according to
a transcript of the meeting:
Would you prefer to see a united
Germany outside of NATO, inde-
pendent and with no US forces, or
would you prefer a unified Ger-
many be tied to NATO, with as-
surances that NATO’s jurisdiction
would not shift one inch eastward
from its present position?
It was a question, not a pledge. Gor-
bachev said that, put that way, he pre-
ferred the latter; Baker said he did too.
But upon returning to Washington,
Baker was upbraided. “To hell with
that!” President Bush exclaimed, dis-
missing the notion of letting the Sovi-
ets have a say on the fate of the new
German state. “We prevailed and they
didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch
victory from the jaws of defeat.” Baker
never mentioned “not one inch” again.
But the dilemma couldn’t be
sidestepped so easily. The Soviet
Union—which at this point hadn’t yet
dissolved—had thousands of troops
and hundreds of tactical nuclear weap-
ons in the eastern part of Germany,
which gave Gorbachev leverage to un-
dermine any effort to establish a new
order in the heart of Europe. Bush,
German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and
other Western leaders worried about
what they might have to concede in
order to win his consent to keep a uni-
fied Germany in NATO and to get the
Soviet troops and weapons out. Re-
markably, though, Gorbachev gave up
the one strong card in his otherwise
meager hand. In a meeting the day
after Baker’s, Kohl asked Gorbachev
if he agreed “that the Germans them-
selves must now decide” all questions
about unification. Gorbachev allowed
that this was “very close” to his view.
Kohl was stunned. He proceeded
to boast publicly that Gorbachev had
agreed to German unification without
conditions—and Gorbachev did not
dera once defined a small country as
Boris Yurchenko/AP Images
“one which knew it could disappear
at any moment,” and if the leaders of
these newly independent states hadn’t
read Kundera, they’d witnessed enough
modern history firsthand to draw the
same lesson.
Václav Havel knew Kundera very
well. When the dissident playwright im-
probably became president of Czecho-
slovakia in 1989, he touted a grand
vision of a “Europe free and whole”
and pressed for US and Soviet troops
to leave Central and Eastern Europe.
However, by the summer of 1990, he
saw the appeal of NATO’s Article 5,
which pledges that an attack on one
member will be treated as an attack on
all members. As he later put it to Pres-
ident Clinton, in a one- on- one meeting
during a trip to Washington, “We are
living in a vacuum. . . . That is why we
want to join NATO.” Lech WałĊsa, the
hero of Poland’s Solidarity movement
who emerged as his country’s presi-
dent, expressed the same sentiment,
compounded by a deep fear of a Rus-
sian resurgence. Sarotte writes (based
on declassified memos of conversa-
tions) that these pleas affected Clinton
deeply and convinced him that NATO
push back. The Soviet foreign minister, was “key” not just to Europe’s security
Eduard Shevardnadze, later wrote in but also to its stability.
his memoir that the concession left him Many were skeptical about the no-
in “a melancholy and fatalistic mood.” tion of enlargement. General Colin
Bush announced that the unified Ger- Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
many would hold full membership in Staff, said he “was not sure what NATO
NATO. Kohl’s task was now to mol- would mean” with the influx of so many
lify Gorbachev—whose economy was nations that didn’t share the democratic
tanking—with vast financial assistance. traditions of its original twelve members
(Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France,
Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Neth-
And so the pattern was set for the erlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and
next decade: NATO expanded, first into the US) and the four that were added
the former East Germany, then beyond; between 1952 and 1982 (Greece, Tur-
Gorbachev—and later Boris Yeltsin, key, West Germany, and post-Franco
the president of the Russian Federation Spain).1 Clinton’s first two secretaries
after the USSR’s implosion in 1991— of defense, Les Aspin and William
put up a fuss; the US, Germany, and the Perry, feared that pushing NATO closer
IMF sent Moscow billions of dollars to to Russia’s border might agitate the
quell his protests (though much of the Kremlin into pulling out of nuclear
money disappeared, as the elites con- arms–reduction talks. Many in the
trolling Russia’s government shifted it State Department worried that NATO’s
to foreign bank accounts). When Pres- eastward expansion might endanger
ident Clinton told Yeltsin that Estonia, Yeltsin’s fragile democratic experiment
Latvia, and Lithuania—the three Baltic and usher ultranationalists into power.
states that had once been Soviet repub- In May 1995 eighteen former US offi-
lics—would join NATO at some point, cials, mainly retired Foreign Service of-
Yeltsin begged him not to pile on such ficers, signed an open letter expressing
deep humiliation. Clinton held out the concern that NATO enlargement risked
bribe of Russian membership in sev- “exacerbating the instability that now
eral Western institutions, including the exists in the zone that lies between Ger-
prestigious Group of Seven, consisting many and Russia” and might convince
of the most powerful industrial democ- “most Russians that the United States
racies. Yeltsin caved; he had no alterna- and the West are attempting to isolate,
tive. (Russia was expelled from the G- 8, encircle, and subordinate them, rather
turning it back into the G-7, in 2014, as than integrating them into a new Eu-
punishment for annexing Crimea.) ropean system of collective security.”
All this said, it is crucial to note that In a New York Times op- ed, George
the campaign to expand NATO was not Kennan, the dean of Russia hands and
simply a power play by the West’s cold the architect of America’s cold war
war victors. The most excited advo- containment policy, agreed, castigating
cates of enlargement were the leaders NATO enlargement as “the most fate-
(and to a great degree the populations) ful error of American policy in the en-
of the Central and Eastern European tire post- cold-war era.”2 Senator Sam
states, who were eager to throw off the
Kremlin’s yoke and join the West. To
1
some, this was a matter of principle; to NATO eventually grew to thirty mem-
others, it posed an irresistible opportu- bers, most recently with Montenegro in
nity to get on the winning side. Either 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.
way, neutrality was not an attractive 2
George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,”
option. The Czech novelist Milan Kun- The New York Times, February 5, 1997.
27
Nunn and Brent Scowcroft, who had
been President Bush’s national security
adviser, wrote another Times op-ed,
calling for “a definite, if not permanent
pause” to enlargement, quoting John
Maynard Keynes on the errors made in
the aftermath of World War I: “the fatal
miscalculation of how to deal with a de-
moralized former adversary”—an error
that “we must not repeat.”
B ut some of Clinton’s senior aides
took on NATO enlargement as a mis-
sion. His top Russia adviser (and for-
mer Oxford classmate) Strobe Talbott
wrote in these pages that containing
Russia was not NATO’s only function;
the West might face threats from else-
where, and besides, the alliance helped
strengthen its members’ democratic
institutions and devotion to free mar-
kets. He acknowledged the critics’ case
that Russia might see enlargement as
evidence “that the noose is tightening
around its neck and will take defen-
sive if not offensive countermeasures,”
and allowed that “unless it is handled
with skill and foresight, the process of
expanding NATO could create new ten-
sions and divisions,” but he argued that
“freezing NATO in its cold war configu-
ration would itself be a huge mistake.”3
It was a weak argument and was the
subject of a rebuttal in the following
issue.4 Sarotte’s archival research re-
vealed, to her surprise, that Talbott
himself didn’t fully believe his own
case. In a memo to Secretary of State
Warren Christopher on September 12,
1994, a year before his New York Re-
view article, Talbott admitted, “NATO
expansion will, when it occurs, by
definition be punishment, or ‘neo-
containment,’ of the bad Bear.” He also
dismissed contending views as irrele-
vant or worse. When French president
Jacques Chirac warned a colleague of
Talbott’s that NATO was expanding too
far and too quickly—writing, “We have
humiliated them too much . . . the situa-
tion in Russia is very dangerous,” and
“One day there will be dangerous na-
tionalist backlash”—Talbott suspected
that Chirac and some other European
leaders were colluding with Russia’s
foreign ministry to develop an alternate
plan for European security, one that re-
lied less on NATO, i.e., less on the US.
He appointed Richard Holbrooke—his
State Department colleague and a mas-
ter at bureaucratic politics—to chair an
interagency panel on NATO enlarge-
ment, all but ensuring that its report
to Clinton would highlight all the ar-
guments in favor and downplay those
opposed.
However, even some of the policy’s
most ardent advocates thought that
enlargement had its limits—and one of
those limits was Ukraine. As enlarge-
ment unfolded—beginning in 1999
with the Czech Republic, Poland, and
Hungary—Ukraine seemed like a log-
ical candidate for membership in the
near future. But as Sarotte puts it, even
Holbrooke “refrained from his usual
role of bulldozing away all opposition,
3
Strobe Talbot, “Why NATO Should
Grow,” The New York Review, August
10, 1995.
4
R.T. Davies, “Should NATO Grow? A
Dissent,” The New York Review, Septem-
ber 21, 1995. Davies’s letter to the editor
also included the text of the letter from
the eighteen former officials.
28
saying, ‘Ukraine is the most delicate
issue.’”
Christopher mused at a conference
of NATO foreign ministers that if the
alliance kept up its pace of expansion,
it would be “hard to see how Ukraine
can accept being the buffer between
NATO, Europe and Russia”—and for
that reason he favored slowing the pro-
cess down. To nearly all the ministers,
offering NATO’s Article 5 guarantees
to a large country with still- extensive
ties to Russia—geographical, histori-
cal, cultural, and economic—would be
too provocative. Ukraine seemed, in
Sarotte’s words, “a bridge too far for
membership, and it was thought best to
leave it in a separate category for the
time being”—though nobody took the
trouble to devise a “separate category,”
so the issue was kicked, like an explo-
sive can, down the road.
George W. Bush picked up the can
in April 2008 at a NATO conference in
Bucharest. It was his final year as presi-
dent. He wanted, as one of his aides put
it, “to lay down a marker” for his legacy
as an advocate of promoting democracy
throughout the world. The invasion of
Iraq, which he’d believed would spark
a wildfire of freedom across the Middle
East, wasn’t working out so well, but
he was impressed by the Orange Rev-
olution in Ukraine and the country’s
election of opposition leader Viktor
Yushchenko as president. NATO was
already set to announce Albania and
Croatia as new members at the sum-
mit. In a surprise move, Bush urged
letting Ukraine, as well as the former
Soviet republic of Georgia, embark on
a “Membership Action Plan,” with the
aim of accepting their full ascension at
some point.
His idea was instantly, in some cases
angrily, opposed by the other NATO
leaders, especially German chancel-
lor Angela Merkel, who thought—like
several US officials in the previous two
administrations—that such a move
was, first, impractical, since Ukraine
couldn’t meet many of NATO’s require-
ments (among them a firm anticorrup-
tion policy), and, second, needlessly
provocative to Russia. 5 Yet by the end
of the summit, Bush prevailed. The
official communiqué read, “NATO
welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s
Euro-Atlantic aspirations for mem-
bership in NATO,” then added—more
definitively than anyone could have
predicted—“We agreed today that
these countries will become mem-
bers of NATO.” It may have been no
coincidence that four months later,
ethnic-Russian militants in Georgia
launched a separatist war, expelled
Georgian nationals from South Ossetia
and Abkhazia, and “requested” Rus-
sian military aid, including the instal-
lation of permanent bases.
It was certainly no coincidence that
in 2014, when Ukrainian protesters
chased out their Moscow-backed pres-
ident, Viktor Yanukovych, and elected
a new government that made moves to
join the European Union, Russia re-
acted to the Western push by annex-
ing Crimea (which Khrushchev had
given to Ukraine as a symbolic gift
in 1954) and sending special forces,
wearing unmarked uniforms, to help
5
See Steven Erlanger and Steven Lee
Myers, “NATO Allies Oppose Bush on
Georgia and Ukraine,” The New York
Times, April 3, 2008.
pro-Russia separatists fight Ukrainian
army troops in the eastern provinces
of Donetsk and Luhansk. (In the eight
years since, more than 14,000 people
have died in that war, including at least
500 Russians.)
The warnings of two decades earlier by
Kennan, Perry, and others that after the
Russian economy revived to some de-
gree, an ultranationalist might come to
power and act on the resentments over
the expansion of NATO were vindicated
by the emergence of Vladimir Putin. A
former KGB officer who watched the
Berlin Wall come down, and a prime
minister of Yeltsin’s who watched the
Kremlin accede to the Westernization
of Eastern Europe, Putin was deter-
mined to regain Russia’s old empire, or
at least not to let another chunk of it,
especially Ukraine, slip away.
Putin, who famously pronounced the
implosion of the Soviet Union to be
“the greatest geopolitical catastrophe”
of the twentieth century, also once
told President George W. Bush that
Ukraine was “not a real country.” On
February 21 of this year, in an angry,
rambling, hour-long televised speech,
which climaxed with his recognition
of Donetsk and Luhansk as indepen-
dent republics (shades of South Ossetia
and Abkhazia), Putin not only railed
against NATO expansion but asserted
that Ukraine was not a legitimate sov-
ereign state, claiming (in a false read-
ing of history) that it was a creation of
Bolshevik Russia and must now return
to the fold or at least assume the sta-
tus of neutrality in the renewed era of
East–West rivalry. The demand would
have been unacceptable enough after
thirty years of Ukraine’s democratic in-
dependence; it was outrageous—“neu-
trality” could only be a euphemism
for surrender—with 190,000 Russian
troops poised on its border, and Putin
must have known it.
Is NATO enlargement to blame for
Putin’s revanchism, or has it served
as a pretext for fulfilling his obsessive
nostalgia for empire? Probably a bit of
both. His resentment over Russia’s loss
of empire following its cold war defeat
has some valid basis. But that doesn’t
give him, or the leader of any coun-
try, the right to reverse that loss by fiat
and force. Three American presidents
pushed NATO enlargement too eagerly,
with too many insincere assurances that
the latest step was the last one. NATO’s
declaration at Bucharest that Ukraine
and Georgia “will” be brought into the
alliance at some point was a profound
error, as most member states realized
at the time, not least because there was
no real intention to bring them in any-
time soon, and saying otherwise merely
handed Moscow a gratuitous provo-
cation and filled Kyiv and Tbilisi with
false hopes. Still, the former captive na-
tions of the Soviet empire were—and
in the case of Ukraine and Georgia,
still are—genuinely eager to ally with
the West after suffering the oppression
of the East for so long.
In any case, a Russian leader more
reasonable than Putin would not have
demanded a legal document guaran-
teeing that Ukraine would never join
NATO. Knowing that no such docu-
ment could exist as a practical matter,
he would have discerned the many
reasons that membership wouldn’t
be offered, probably in his lifetime or
beyond. Biden in fact publicly said as
much. He also offered Putin transpar-
ency in military exercises in the region;
onsite inspections of the US missile-
defense launchers in Poland and Ro-
mania, to verify that they couldn’t fire
offensive cruise missiles (as Putin has
charged they could); and a conference
to reconsider twenty-first- century Eu-
ropean security, with special attention
to legitimate Russian interests. A less
grandiose leader—especially one with
an interest in building a more inclusive
society and a more productive econ-
omy (neither of which has been a goal
of Putin’s in his twenty-two years of
rule)—might have seen the political
advantages to be gained from these
“confidence-building measures” and
recognitions of his grievances.
Two questions remain to be asked.
First, if NATO had not enlarged, if the
nations of Central and Eastern Europe
had been left to manage their own se-
curity, would Putin have let them live
in peace? If Estonia, Latvia, and Lith-
uania had not joined NATO, would
they still be independent states? From
the vantage of 2022, both notions seem
doubtful.
Second, was there a plausible alter-
native to NATO enlargement? Was
there some way to satisfy the security
needs of Central and Eastern Europe
without threatening Russian interests,
as Moscow defined them? Sarotte ar-
gues that there was. Toward the end of
President Clinton’s first year in office, a
group of his advisers—notably General
John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff—formulated an
idea called the Partnership for Peace
(P f P). It would appeal to the same
newly independent nations (others too,
if they liked), help them integrate with
the West through free markets and
democratic institutions, and build up
their defenses without drawing a new
militarized line through Europe and
thus without alienating Russia.
Clinton was keen on the idea. Yeltsin
praised it as “brilliant” and wanted
Russia to join too. For the year or so
that it lasted, the P f P worked “surpris-
ingly well,” Sarotte observes. But in the
end, the NATO juggernaut proved too
captivating. WałĊsa feared the West
was losing the opportunity to “cage the
bear.” Havel wouldn’t sign on to the
P f P until Clinton assured him that it
was “a first step leading to full NATO
membership.”
Sarotte also spells out domestic pres-
sures in the US and Russia. Clinton’s
scandals and impeachment trial dis-
tracted him from international affairs,
leaving the enlargement enthusiasts
around him to control policy. Yeltsin’s
1993 shelling of the Russian parliament
building—the only way he could see to
keep a coalition of hard-line Commu-
nists and outright fascists from gaining
control of the government—revealed
that the Russian Federation’s demo-
cratic reforms were even more fragile
than they appeared. And his invasion
of Chechnya the following year made
the former Warsaw Pact members all
the more eager for NATO’s protection.
The transformative events of the past
two decades—the expansion of NATO,
the failure of Russian reform, and the
rise of empire nostalgia in Moscow’s
ruling circles, climaxing with the an-
nexations and finally the brutal in-
vasion of Ukraine: none of them was
inevitable. But especially with the rise
of someone like Putin, they would have
been hard to prevent. Q
The New York Review
 His Nemesis Was Stupidity
Ange Mlinko
Late Fragments:
Flares, My Heart Laid Bare,
Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed
by Charles Baudelaire,
translated from the French
and edited by Richard Sieburth.
Yale University Press, 427 pp., $30.00
(to be published in May)

The Flowers of Evil

(Les Fleurs du mal)
by Charles Baudelaire,
translated from the French
by Aaron Poochigian, with an
introduction by Dana Gioia and
an afterword by Daniel Handler.
Liveright, 343 pp., $27.95

The Salon of 1846

by Charles Baudelaire,
translated from the French
by Jonathan Mayne, with an
introduction by Michael Fried.
David Zwirner, 159 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Last year was the two hundredth anni-

versary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth.
We now have new translations of his
poetry and prose, and a reissue of the
essays that revolutionized art criticism.
This trio of works leapfrogs from The
Salon of 1846 to the first and second
editions of Les Fleurs du mal (1857–
1861), to the frightening, unpublishable
prose fragments from the last five years
of his life. Among these late writings
we find a letter Baudelaire wrote to
the editor of Le Figaro raging against
the celebration of Shakespeare’s three
hundredth birthday: he accused the
organizers of using the occasion for
political purposes, to gild their own
reputations and dishonestly recast the
Bard as a prototype of the egalitarian,
humanitarian, proletarian artist.
No such apologia can be made for
Baudelaire, who was nonetheless the
greatest poet- critic of his time and who
will remain a titan for as long as there is
literature. Defending Les Fleurs du mal
from the charge of immorality brought
against it in criminal court, Baudelaire
argued that his poetry was not corrupt-
ing, but that even if it were, the scope
of its influence would be limited by the
perfection of his verse, which sailed
over the heads of the masses.
Indeed, the trial in 1857 brought him
closer to fame, or rather infamy, than
his art did: indebted to his publishers,
shunned by the Académie française,
self- exiled in 1864 to Belgium, which
he loathed, debilitated by addiction and
syphilis, and left aphasic by a stroke, in
1867 he died utterly wretched, in rela-
tive obscurity, at the age of forty-six.
What would he make now of Dana
Gioia’s inventory, in his introduction to
Aaron Poochigian’s translation of Les
Fleurs du mal, of “Baudelaire coffee
mugs, T-shirts, and caps . . . posters, pil-
lowcases, corsets, hoodies, socks, and
beach towels . . . plaques, statues, rings,
and medallions”? Not to mention the
shot glass bearing his exhortation to
enivrez-vous sans cesse!
The answer likely would not be flat-
tering to the consumer. “Merch” is
not in any aesthete’s vocabulary, and
Baudelaire was a devoted acolyte of
l
art pour l
art. He is likely to have clas-
sified all that as chic and poncif, the
Charles Baudelaire; illustration by Henning Wagenbreth
two damning words he defines in The
Salon of 1846:
The word “chic”—a dreadful word
of modern invention, which I do
not even know how to spell cor-
rectly, but which I am obliged to
use, because it has been sanctioned
by artists in order to describe a
modern monstrosity—the word
“chic” means a total neglect of the
model and of nature. . . .
The meaning of the word “pon-
cif” has much in common with that
of the word “chic.”. . .
When a singer places his hand
upon his heart, this commonly
means “I shall love her always!”
If he clenches his fists and scowls
at the boards or at the prompter, it
means “Death to him, the traitor!”
That is the “poncif” for you.
We could substitute “meme” for poncif.
Baudelaire’s nemesis was stupidity, la
bêtise, cognate with bête, beast, and red-
olent of cattle: the herd. “God, I thank
thee for not having granted me the bê-
tise of Victor Hugo,” he wrote of his
wildly popular, populist contemporary.
Baudelaire was a Romantic: Ro-
manticism, he declared, “is precisely
situated . . . in a mode of feeling.” As
Michael Fried points out in his in-
troduction to The Salon of 1846, Ro-
manticism was old news; realism à
la Courbet was about to overturn it
when the twenty-five-year- old poet
came charging at the art world full
tilt, extolling Delacroix (twenty years
his senior) and declaring that a paint-
er’s work should have the quality of
“naïveté and the sincere expression
of his temperament,” while criticism
should “be partial, passionate, and po-
litical.” The eighteen treatises that bear
out his critique of establishment art are
frequently ecstatic reveries: on color,
on the erotic, on models and portrai-
ture, vividly aphoristic (“A portrait is a
model complicated by an artist”). The
artist is heroic in service of an ideal:
“Drawing is a struggle between nature
and the artist.”
The critic, too, is in service of an
ideal. It follows that to love strongly one
must also hate strongly, and the paeans
to Baudelaire’s loves are accompanied,
dialectically, by excoriations of his
hates: after defining the chic and the
poncif, he offers us a taste of brimstone
in his takedown of M. Horace Vernet,
whose roughly sixteen-by-thirty-four-
foot painting of the Battle of Isly (where
French troops routed the Moroccans in
1844) gives him fits:
M. Horace Vernet is a soldier who
practices painting. Now I hate
an art which is improvised to the
roll of the drum, I hate canvases
splashed over at the gallop, I hate
painting manufactured to the
sound of pistol shots, since I hate
the army, the police force—every-
thing, in fact, that trails its noisy
arms in a peaceful place.
Baudelaire doesn’t just hate Vernet’s
painting; he hates that Vernet is a na-
tionalist and that he is popular. It is an
indictment of the French that they can
enjoy this stuff:
Who knows better than he the cor-
rect number of buttons on each
uniform, or the anatomy of a gai-
ter or a boot which is the worse for
innumerable days’ marching, or
the exact spot on a soldier’s gear
where the copper of his small arms
deposits its verdigris?
If realism is not yet in Baudelaire’s
vocabulary, literalism, at least, is
anathema: mindless and petty—mere
journalism.
This impatience with his countrymen
is the focal point of his sardonic pref-
ace to the Salon, “To the Bourgeois”:
“You, the bourgeois—be you king, law-
giver, or businessman—have founded
collections, museums, and galleries.”
They, naturally, are looking for divi-
dends from their investments—Baude-
laire mocks their language with relish:

April 7, 2022 29
 Enjoyment is a science . . .when you
have given to society your knowl-
edge, your industry, your labor and
your money, you claim back your
payment in enjoyments of the body,
the reason, and the imagination.
This tone, while jeering, is not yet cur-
dled; the poet is strong-minded but im-
bued with youthful optimism. Young
Baudelaire will be recognizable in late
Baudelaire, but stripped of politics
(after the defeat of 1848, he was “depo-
liticized”) and hope.
Looking at art was for the young
Baudelaire what it would be for Rilke
half a century later—an apprenticeship
to poetry. A year before The Salon of
1846, he had published his first poem,
“À une dame créole,” dedicated to his
girlfriend, the French Haitian dancer
and demimondaine Jeanne Duval. He
was working on a poetry collection with
the title Les lesbiennes, and other writ-
ing projects—some fiction, a collection
of aphorisms. He was also living a life-
style that rock stars a century later imi-
tated. It began in earnest after he passed
his baccalauréat exam (though he was
expelled from his lycée) and enrolled
in law school. Richard Sieburth puts it
pithily in his extensive chronology at the
end of Late Fragments: “1840 . . . First
poems. Debts. Prostitutes. Syphilis.”
At their wit’s end, his mother and his
stepfather, General Jacques Aupick,
sent the twenty-year- old Baudelaire to
Calcutta on a steamboat; he hopped off
at Mauritius and Réunion before wan-
dering back to France. Following that,
he came into his father’s inheritance
and started squandering it immedi-
ately on a fancy address, to which he
brought Duval as his mistress, treat-
ing her and his cohort to all the perks
of the high life in Paris. The Aupicks
came down on him again—this time
naming a notary, one Narcisse Ancelle,
as the trustee of Baudelaire’s estate.
He was, in modern terms, placed under
conservatorship, which remained until
his death. But this did nothing to stop
Baudelaire’s profligacy. In defiance of
Ancelle, parents, society, and even the
syphilis that was wrecking his health,
he persisted in his habits and merely
racked up debt, which tormented him
and led him down a treacherous path of
evasions and double- dealings.
By 1857 Les lesbiennes had evolved
into Les Fleurs du mal, exactly one hun-
dred poems in five thematic sections,
meticulously assembled and organized,
assiduously copyedited, formally per-
fected. Baudelaire, now thirty-six, had
been working on these verses since he
was twenty- one. The book was brought
out by an anarchist publisher, Poulet-
Malassis, in an edition of 1,300 copies.
Shortly after, the Ministry of the Inte-
rior brought both poet and publisher to
trial on charges of obscenity and blas-
phemy, and won its case. Only partly,
though: the book was allowed to stand
if six particularly egregious poems
were excised (they were not reinstated
until 1949). Even this was a crushing
blow: it maimed the architectural and
numerical perfection of the book. The
notoriety resulting from the trial did
not translate into sales, and Les Fleurs
du mal was a commercial failure.
Baudelaire embraced his aesthetic
martyrdom. He continued to add to the
book, publishing a second edition in
1861, with a sixth thematic section, Tab-
30
leaux parisiens, including new poems
written during a creative storm at his
mother’s house in Honfleur, on the Nor-
mandy coast. These poems are notable
for what Sieburth calls Baudelaire’s
“evolution toward the prosaic,” away
from Romanticism and into the modern.
In Honfleur he produced one of his
most powerful and tender poems, “Le
cygne.” Its thirteen quatrains, whose
alexandrines are almost bursting with
imagery too newfangled for them to
contain, toggle between a Paris in the
throes of Haussmann’s modernization
schemes and Andromache after the fall
of Troy. Andromache is a figure of exile;
in the Aeneid, she builds a “toy Troy”
and feeds its river, the Simoïs, with her
tears. Baudelaire, too, is in exile, as
the medieval warrens of his youth are
demolished: “The old Paris is gone.”
He sees, incongruously, a swan in the
street where a menagerie once stood
(here in Poochigian’s translation):
a swan, who had somehow found
freedom, passed
clumsily, wings laid flat, along the
walk.
His wealth of feathers draggled in
the dust.
Right by a ditch, he opened up his
beak.
Flapping excitedly, wings on the
ground,
heart roused by lakes he once was
giddy with,
he said, “Come on and rain, sky!
Thunder, sound!”
I see him as a strange and fatal
myth.
Although Baudelaire thinks of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, this isn’t Zeus in dis-
guise. This swan with no lake is closely
related to an earlier bird in Les Fleurs
du mal (there are numerous doubles
throughout the collection, reinforc-
ing his theory of nature’s “correspon-
dences”)—the albatross, a symbol for
the poet. Graceful and at home in the
sky, he is ungainly and out of place on
the ship where he lands, exhausted, only
to become sport for bored sailors. There,
in a precursor of the lines above, he “lets
his expansive white wings dangle, like/a
pair of oars, clumsily at his side.”
A valediction for Paris, “Le cygne”
is also a valediction for Duval, his on-
again, off-again paramour, who was, at
this point, dying faster of syphilis than
he was (he financially supported her,
however meagerly, to the end):
I think of a black girl, tubercular,
searching with tired eyes, as she
slogs through mud,
for palms she knew in Africa
somewhere
behind a massive barrier of cloud.
For Baudelaire, the ideal of beauty will
always be punished on this earth. And
that is perhaps why, after this final burst
of metrical, rhymed verse, he ceased to
write it. He turned—to punish himself,
or the world?—to the prose poem.
I s there a definitive English translation
of Les Fleurs du mal? Richard How-
ard’s 1982 edition may come close, but
it always seems a labor that ever falls
short of its ideal. The disparity between
English, a rattlebag containing some
600,000 unique words, and French,
containing a more mellifluous 100,000,
is the first obstacle. If the literary apo-
theosis of English is Shakespeare, for
French it is Racine: Clair, simple et
logique—clear, simple, and logical,
which may strike an English reader as
verses stripped of poetry. Likewise, iam-
bic pentameter doesn’t map onto the
French alexandrine at all well.
And then there is the problem of
rhyme in modern times—with our ears
being so out of tune with it, how can
quatrains escape the taint of light verse?
There’s nothing light about Baudelaire.
Histrionic, indignant, lustful, scathing,
and even sometimes, more than some-
times, tender and tremulous—think
luxe, calme et volupté—but never light.
Ideally, one wants a language austere
and chaste to discipline high-pitched
tones, vocatives that seethe, imagery
that rubs our noses in filth. The danger
is that devils and angels and corpses and
odalisques inevitably appear anachro-
nistic and poncif to contemporary eyes.
Aaron Poochigian’s translation was
written at breakneck speed. “The
months I spent summoning and sub-
mitting to Baudelaire (the months of
March, April, May, and June of 2020,
as the Covid-19 pandemic raged) were
intense and exhausting,” he writes in a
translator’s note. The correspondence
between a world enveloped in a miasma
of disease and Baudelaire’s sickly an-
thology (a word whose Greek derivation
means a floral bouquet) is aptly evoked.
Four months seems a rather short
time to translate 133 poems, and
Poochigian’s versions do bear the traces
of haste. Take the famous prefatory
poem, “To the Reader,” a direct address
in the manner of “To the Bourgeois” in
the Salon. Here is how Stanley Kunitz
and Robert Lowell begin their versions
of that poem, both with a hammering:
Ignorance, error, cupidity and sin
Possess our souls and exercise
our flesh;
Habitually we cultivate remorse
As beggars entertain and nurse
their lice.
(Kunitz)
Infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice
possess our souls and drain the
body’s force;
we spoonfeed our adorable
remorse,
like whores or beggars nourishing
their lice.
(Lowell)
And here’s Poochigian:
For all of us, greed, folly, error,
vice
exhaust the body and obsess the
soul,
and we keep feeding our
congenial
remorse the same way vagrants
nurse their lice.
Baudelaire’s line “La sottise, l’er-
reur, le péché, la lésine” loses its force
in Poochigian’s version, which begins
with a weak prepositional phrase that
isn’t there in the original. The empha-
sis on the list is important: it is echoed
later in the poem in the lines “Si le viol,
le poison, le poignard, l’incendie” and
“Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères,
les lices,/Les singes, les scorpions, les
vautours, les serpents . . .” The list is a
rhythmic, incantatory device, but the
trick is to maintain it within the integ-
rity of the line, as Kunitz’s and Lowell’s
translations do. Likewise, the enjamb-
ment of the third line—“congenial/
remorse” is an infelicity committed for
the sake of a weak rhyme.
A similar problem besets another
important poem early in the collection.
In “Correspondences,” the first line
is immediately enjambed and made
awkward: “Nature, a temple in which
porticoes/are growing, gives at times
confounding talks.” Richard Wilbur
(God rest his soul!) has it thus:
Nature is a temple whose living
colonnades
Breathe forth a mystic speech in
fitful sighs; . . .
The mastery of rhythm here—from the
trochees that switch into iambs on the
other side of the caesura in the hexame-
ter of the first line, to the perfect iambic
pentameter of the second, gratifying
the ear—suggests to us what Baude-
laire might sound like. (As he says in
“La Beauté”: “Je hais le mouvement
qui déplace les lignes.” Poochigian: “I
hate excitement that displaces lines.”)
Occasionally a line struck me as
appallingly maladroit. “Sur ce teint
fauve et brun, le fard était superbe!”
from “Jewels” is rendered, ludicrously,
“What great artiste had daubed her
outside brown?”(Compare that to
Richard Howard’s translation, in which
the room’s dim firelight “flushed that
amber-colored flesh with blood!”) Call
it a first draft that simply needed more
time to ripen. Yet the haste with which
it was produced, the short, tacked- on
afterword by Daniel Handler (aka
Lemony Snicket), and even Dana
Gioia’s introduction, which is compre-
hensive but passionless—left me won-
dering who this book is for.
In 1861, after publishing the second
edition of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire
did an about-face: he campaigned for a
vacant seat at the Academie française.
He was deeply in debt, his health was
going, and he wanted to redeem him-
self after the humiliation of his trial
and the mangling of his book. He was
also fighting, in a way, on behalf of
other nonmembers of the establishment
who shared Baudelaire’s belief in l’art
pour l’art, like Flaubert and Théophile
Gautier (to whom Les Fleurs du mal was
dedicated). The effort failed miserably,
and the poet, waking up to his mistake,
wrote, “Today, January 23, 1862, I was
given a special warning: I felt the wind
of the wing of imbecility pass over me.”
Baudelaire had entered, as Sieburth
puts it, his endgame. That is where Late
Fragments begins. Composed of un-
finished works written after 1861 and
appearing in English together for the
first time, Flares, My Heart Laid Bare,
Belgium Disrobed, and a selection of
“late prose poems and projects” deliver
what their titles seem to promise: a soul
stripped of guises and illusions. They
were unpublished in his lifetime, except
for the prose poems, which he published
(sometimes repeatedly) to generate in-
come. “From the very outset,” Sieburth
writes, “Baudelaire conceived the prose
poem as a form that emerges after or
that belatedly displaces” the lyric.
Baudelaire’s late turn toward the
fragmentary—or toward the form
of the unfinished, the abandoned,
the aborted, the ruined, or the à
venir—involved not only a con-
The New York Review
 scious renunciation of his Par-
nassian aesthetics of perfection
and unity but more specifically a
desertion of the harmonies of the
traditional lyric in favor of the dis-
junctions of prose.
This is where his theory of les sobresauts,
or shocks, comes in: modern life itself,
with its collisions and discrepancies, is
incompatible with harmony and beauty.
Detailing the poet’s desperate
double-bookkeeping, Sieburth con-
nects his “late work” to the fact that
“when it came to money matters, he
was therefore condemned to being al-
ways late—chronically behind on his
rent, forever in arrears to his credi-
tors”—which also aligns with Michael
Fried’s observation of Baudelaire’s be-
lated relation to Romanticism.
Sieburth’s lengthy introductions to
each section carefully prepare the reader
for the bombshells that follow. He traces
the influences on Baudelaire’s thought,
beginning with Edgar Allan Poe: it was
around the time that he was writing
about Poe’s magazine pieces, “Margina-
lia” and “Suggestions,” that he started
jotting down the entries for Flares
(Fusées). Poe’s scorn toward the indif-
ferent American scene, his poverty and
addiction and need to write for money,
made him Baudelaire’s “semblable,—
mon frère.” From the time he first read
him in 1847, two years before Poe died
mysteriously at the age of forty, he rec-
ognized a soul mate, and his translations
and commentaries on Poe formed a sub-
stantial part of his published oeuvre—
the most lucrative piece of it.
Baudelaire may have discovered a
path around “high poetry’s sovereign
euphonies” (and the compensatory
modernity of the prose poem) in the
“ironies of la discrépance”—Poe’s “dis-
crepancy,” with its roots in the Latin
crepare, “to rattle, creak, or crack.”
Emerson was another eye- opening
American influence, from whom he
stole an opening to a prose poem:
“Life is a hospital where each patient
is driven by the desire to change beds.”
The French aphoristic tradition was
bred in the bone, of course—Sieburth
notes that Pascal, Chateaubriand,
and La Rochefoucauld were French
moraliste models, providing an “in-
heritance of aphorism, apothegm, epi-
gram, maxim, réflexion, sentence, and
pensée”—but it was the Jesuit-trained
counter-Enlightenment philosopher Jo-
seph de Maistre and his Les soirées de
St. Petersbourg that unleashed Baude-
laire’s latent religious fervor: “Reli-
gions are the only interesting things on
earth.” Writing to his publisher: “All
literature derives from sin—I mean this
quite seriously.” Sieburth writes that
after 1861, “the modes he now favored
were rancorous irony, outright insult, or
provocative farce (bouffonerie).” They
give rise to some of his more radical
pronouncements:
There are only three beings wor-
thy of respect:
The priest, the warrior, the poet.
To know, to kill, to create.
All other men are mere stable
boys doing their master’s bidding,
that is, exercising what are known
as professions.
As for me, I say that the sole and
supreme pleasure of making love
April 7, 2022
lies in the certitude that one is
doing evil.—And both man and
woman know from birth that it
is in evil that all sensual pleasure
resides.
Not only would I be happy to be the
victim, but I wouldn’t mind being
the executioner either—to feel the
Revolution from both sides!
The intensity of Baudelaire’s scorn
increases with each section. Part 1, con-
taining Flares, Hygiene, and My Heart
Laid Bare, reads like a commonplace
book: notational, improvisational, per-
turbing, but with the feeling of the
philosophical laboratory to the prose
poems. The eleven late prose poems,
which were to be published under the
title Le spleen de Paris (reprising one
of Baudelaire’s crucial words), are
more sardonic and scandalous, like
“Let’s Beat Up the Poor!” or “Por-
traits of Mistresses”—they, too, read
like thought experiments, but those of
a Nietzschean Übermensch seeing how
far he can go. Sieburth rejects the no-
tion that Baudelaire “subscribe[d] to
all the incendiary bombs,” suggesting
that the multiple levels of irony make
for multiple readings, from divertisse-
ment to parody. (Eliot’s term for this
was “entertaining” ideas.) They were
written in Belgium, which goes some
way toward explaining their invective.
Baudelaire arrived in Brussels in
April 1864, lodging at the Hôtel du
Grand Miroir and staying for two
years, during which he accumulated, in
the words of his publisher, “a farrago of
notes” about the stupendous bêtise of
the Belgians. He hated their mercan-
tilism and materialism: “Everybody
in sales, even the rich. Everybody has
something they want to unload second-
hand.” He hated their spirit of confor-
mity: “Hatred of beauty, to complement
the hatred of wit. Not to Conform, the
ultimate crime.” He hated their phi-
listinism: “No Latin, no Greek. Pro-
fessional studies. Hatred of poetry.
Education to train engineers or bank-
ers./No metaphysics.”
Reading Belgium Disrobed, I almost
laughed in astonishment at the extrav-
agance of hatred Baudelaire lavishes
on the little country; the book reads
as a reprise of his fury at the French
in The Salon of 1846. Belgium is like
France, only worse. But what it’s really
like is America—now and, apparently,
then: “Belgium and the United States.
The newspapers’ spoiled brats.” “How,
some twenty years ago, we used to
chant the praises of the United States
of America in all their liberty, glory,
and good fortune! Belgium inspires
similar idiocies.”
In March 1866, while visiting a ba-
roque church in Namur, in central
Belgium, Baudelaire collapsed with a
stroke; in the weeks that followed, he
descended into partial paralysis and
aphasia. He was apparently lucid, but
unable to utter anything but Non! and
a single swear word, Crénom, an abbre-
viation of sacré nom de Dieu. (A liter-
ary man to the marrow, Sieburth traces
Crénom! to “Nevermore!”) More than
a year later, still speechless, “suffering
from gangrene and bedsores,” Baude-
laire motioned for last rites and died in
his mother’s arms on August 31, 1867.
Among those attending his burial in
the Aupick family vault in Montpar-
nasse Cemetery were Félix Nadar, Paul
Verlaine, and Édouard Manet, whose
unfinished painting L’enterrement
is thought to be a recreation of that
stormy day.
B audelaire never forgave America for
what it did to Poe. In his “Notes nou-
velles sur Edgar Poe” (1859), he wrote:
To burn negroes in shackles, guilty
only of having felt their black
cheeks flush with the red of honor,
to wave revolvers around in the or-
chestra pits of concert halls, to es-
tablish polygamy in the paradises
of the West which even the Savages
(a term which does them no justice
whatsoever) had not yet befouled
with these shameful utopias, to
place posters on walls, no doubt in
order to enshrine the principle of
unfettered liberty, advertising cures
for nine- month illnesses—these
are some of the striking features,
some of the moral illustrations of
the noble country of Franklin, the
inventor of shopkeeper morality,
the hero of a century given over
to matter. It is worth calling atten-
tion to these marvels of brutality,
at a time when Americanomania
has almost become a respectable
passion.
To read Late Fragments is to realize
what an impression America made on
Baudelaire, via Poe and Emerson; it is
also to realize what a Catholic he was,
albeit a heretical one—almost gnos-
tic, as Sieburth points out, in his self-
canceling antinomies: love and hate,
God and Satan, beauty and stupidity,
feeling them “from both sides.”
HEADED INTO
THE ABYSS
THE STORY OF OUR TIME,
AND THE FUTURE
WE’LL FACE
Brian T. Watson
Brian T. Watson is an architect
and cultural critic. For eighteen
years, he was a columnist with the
Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts,
focused primarily on current affairs
and the forces that were and are
shaping societies both here and abroad.
btwatson20@gmail.com
(781) 367-2008
Paper, $13.00
e-Book, $9.99
Available on Amazon
Theory of true civilization.
It does not entail gas, steam, or
table-turning; it entails the dimi-
nution of the traces of original sin.
Sieburth notes that
Baudelaire will also associate the act
of writing with the efficacy of magic
or prayer to tap into this higher
reservoir of power. Writing here is
associated no longer with the accu-
mulation of capital but with archaic
ritual, with witchcraft, with the sor-
cerer’s performative capacity to call
up energies and voices at will.
Religion, then, was the solution to
la bêtise belge, the cretinism of Amer-
ica, incipient technocracy and self-
congratulatory market democracy; it
was the solution because it took suffer-
ing as axiomatic of the human condition.
Writing to a critic who suggested that
Heinrich Heine’s miserable death was
somehow a comeuppance for the gaiety
of his poetry, Baudelaire sputtered:
You are a happy man. I pity you for
being so easily happy. A man must
fall very low indeed to believe himself
happy! Or perhaps this is just a sar-
donic outburst on your part; perhaps
you are merely smiling to hide the
fox that is gnawing at your entrails.
In his landmark 1863 essay “The
Painter of Modern Life,” he had writ-
ten, “A dandy may be blasé, he may
even suffer; but in this case he will
smile like the Spartan boy under the
fox’s tooth.” He signed his letter with a
drawing of a badelaire: a scimitar. Q
Independent of the pandemic, we are beset by
a range of unprecedented developments that
together, in this century, threaten the very
existence of civilization. The current states
of just ten forces — capitalism, technology,
the internet, politics, media, education,
human nature, the environment, population,
and transportation — are driving society in
predominantly negative ways.
These forces are powerful and interconnected
and their combined dynamics will carry us
into any number of disasters well before 2100.
We have the knowledge and solutions to address
our difficulties, but for many reasons we will
not employ them.
There is urgency to this story. We face many
threats, but one of them — the internet and
its hegemony and imperatives — is rapidly
changing nearly everything about our world,
including our very capacity to recognize how
profound and dangerous the changes are.
Headed Into the Abyss is comprehensive. It
presents a satisfyingly round story of our
time. It crosses disciplines, connects dots, and
analyzes how each force — in synergies with
other forces — is shaping society. Individually,
we tend to see and address things in parts,
but the forces shaping our lives exist now in
ecologies that defy piecemeal solutions.
Uniquely, Watson brings human nature and
trauma into his assessment of the future. People
have limitations, and these are playing a large
role even now.
What it all adds up to — the big picture — is a
sobering conclusion.
31
 The Futility of Censorship
Dangerous Ideas:
A Brief History of Censorship
in the West, from the
Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz.
Beacon, 308 pp., $29.95
According to Eric Berkowitz’s Danger-
ous Ideas, the first public book burning
in recorded history likely occurred in
430 BCE . Because the Sophist philos-
opher Protagoras questioned the ex-
istence of the gods, who had inflicted
defeats in war and a devastating pes-
tilence on Athens, his fellow citizens
wanted to appease them by incinerat-
ing his sacrilegious writings.
Two hundred years after Protagoras’s
works were devoured by flames, Chinese
scrolls and wooden tablets suffered the
same fate during the reign of Qin Shi
Huang.1 In Imperial Rome books were
burned assiduously, including many
Christian texts, and then pagan texts
once the emperor Constantine con-
verted to Christianity in the fourth cen-
tury. A religion “rent by its own internal
battles,” Berkowitz writes, required fiery
measures to ensure orthodoxy and a uni-
fied church, which “became the model
for speech suppression for centuries to
come.” And so the pyres continued to
blaze, through the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation, the Enlighten-
ment and the Industrial Age, and reach-
ing, shamefully, into our own times.
Fire’s sheer destructiveness and ca-
pacity for spectacle make it dear to cen-
sors, as exemplified by two of the most
infamous cases of book burning in
recent centuries. The first comes from
the United States, where in 1873 An-
thony Comstock persuaded Congress
to enact laws making it illegal to send
lascivious materials through the mail.
As a postal inspector, and with the help
of mobs associated with his New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice,
Comstock claimed to have burned 160
tons of obscene literary material in the
forty-year period following passage of
the so-called Comstock laws, as well as
illustrated playing cards, sex toys, mar-
riage guides, and abortion and birth
control devices.2
The second example is the notorious
Nazi bonfires in 1933 that turned to
cinders and smoke hundreds of thou-
sands of books, including “degenerate”
works by Marx, Mann, Proust, and
Einstein. Both at the time and subse-
quently, this was so widely condemned
that it seemed no one would dare to
1
This “First Emperor” was praised and
emulated by Mao thousands of years
later as he wreaked havoc on his coun-
try’s intellectuals and libraries during
the Cultural Revolution, boasting that
he had far outdone his predecessor. See
John A. Lynn, Another Kind of War:
The Nature and History of Terrorism
(Yale University Press, 2019).
2
The figure of 160 tons comes from
Margaret A. Blanchard, “The Amer-
ican Urge to Censor: Freedom of Ex-
pression Versus the Desire to Sanitize
Society—From Anthony Comstock to
2 Live Crew,” William and Mary Law
Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (March 1992).
32
Ariel Dorfman
Illustration by Oliver Munday
repeat it, or at least would not film
and display it to the world. And yet in
Chile, forty years later, that is exactly
what happened after the coup against
the democratically elected president
Salvador Allende. Watching television
in September 1973, I saw soldiers cast-
ing books on a smoldering pyre, among
which was my own How to Read Don-
ald Duck, an experience that helped
convince me, as it has authors over the
ages, that it was necessary to go into
exile lest I endure the same mistreat-
ment. Heinrich Heine expressed it best
in 1823: “Where they burn books, they
will ultimately burn people also.” Eight
years later, he went into exile in Paris to
escape German censorship.
E xiles appear throughout Dangerous
Ideas3 ; Berkowitz observes that those
who flee their oppressive homelands
can air their views abroad, but he does
not engage with the paradox that exile
also limits the influence that émigrés
can exercise back home, which turns
banishment into yet another deterrent
in the arsenal of censorship. What
Berkowitz does describe abundantly
are other punishments: publishers are
chopped to pieces and scholars are
buried alive, bishops are beheaded and
scribes are crucified for copying a de-
rogatory book, translators are knifed
and plays are shuttered, the Talmud
is put on trial and songs are banned,
reports are redacted, cinema content
is restricted, books are used as toilet
paper, references to sex are excised as
obscene, and workers are forbidden to
3 4
Aristotle, Ovid, Dante, Tyndale, Vol-
taire, Joyce, Brecht, Rushdie, and many
more are mentioned but, strangely, no
female authors, such as the Algerian
novelist Assia Djebar or the Cuban
poet Lourdes Casal.
read what affluent members of society
peruse at their leisure. During World
War I an unregistered alien in America
was even imprisoned because his par-
rot spoke German (“the bird [was] sent
to . . . a ‘loyal’ pet store”).
Given how repetitive these actions
are, one might expect Berkowitz’s
book to be tedious, but it always man-
ages to surprise, especially with a lively
flow of villains. Among those I hadn’t
come across, a few stood out. Frederick
Mead, the magistrate at proceedings in
1929 against the English gallery that
exhibited D. H. Lawrence’s watercol-
ors (in which pubic hair peeked out at
visitors), refused to hear testimony that
they constituted art, thundering that
“I would destroy these pictures, as I
would destroy wild beasts.” Eight years
later, the president of the British Board
of Film Censors boasted, “We may
take pride in observing that there is not
a single film in London today which
deals with any of the burning questions
of the day.” The nineteenth-century
Spanish general Ramón Narváez de-
clared, “It is not enough to confiscate
papers; to finish with bad newspapers
you must kill all the journalists.”
Malesherbes, the chief censor in
eighteenth-century France, intervened
to help the circulation of ideas of re-
ligious tolerance and social criticism,
but he seems to have been an outlier.4
It would have served Berkowitz well to
spend more time on the enforcers im-
plementing these policies of silencing,
because they are crucial to the history
of censorship. Rather than admitting
that they act on behalf of oligarchs,
For more on the collaboration between
bureaucrats and writers in that time,
see Robert Darnton, Censors at Work:
How States Shaped Literature (Norton,
2014); reviewed in these pages by Timo-
thy Garton Ash, October 23, 2014.
politicians, and religious potentates de-
termined to keep their hold on power,
these censors often perceive themselves
as protecting the land and its most vul-
nerable members—women, children,
the poor—from corrosion and corrup-
tion, paternally sheltering them from
scandalous and disturbing emotions
and pictures.
And yet the interaction between cen-
sors and those they suppress can be
complex, as illustrated by an encoun-
ter I had with one of these guardians
in the late 1970s while I was in exile
in Holland. A compilation of my short
stories was under contract with Auf-
bau, a prestigious East German pub-
lishing house, so my wife and I crossed
into foreboding East Berlin to discuss
the final contents with my editor. Over
lunch, he explained that only one of
the stories would not appear in the
collection. Before he named it, I knew
it had to be “Reader.” Its protagonist,
Don Alfonso, an eagle-eyed censor
serving a Latin American dictatorship,
receives the manuscript of a treason-
ous novel whose main character seems
based on his own life, revealing his
most secret desires. Ultimately, rather
than suppressing that story—akin to
suffocating his own image in a mir-
ror—he allows it to circulate, putting
himself and his son in danger.
Though I may have been naive to
think that such a tale could be pub-
lished under a regime that was restrain-
ing speech in the name of the victorious
proletariat, I nevertheless trusted that
my editor would find a way to include
it. He did not lack courage, having
fought for the Spanish Republic and
then against Hitler, and I knew that he
respected literature that was not typical
social-realist fare. But when I asked him
what was wrong with the story, he cited
aesthetic arguments: it was stylistically
awkward, not well constructed. Why
embarrass him by pointing out that
the real reason behind his decision was
political, that my fiction, inspired by
events in my native Chile, could be con-
strued as criticism of the government
to which he had pledged allegiance?
He had Schere im Kopf (scissors in the
head)—a phrase that Berkowitz quotes
about censors in East Germany.
I did not, however, valiantly withdraw
my truncated collection from Aufbau.
Choosing compromise over confron-
tation, I opted not to forfeit the rest of
the stories by defending one of them.
That sort of calculation also forms part
of the history of censorship. There are
innumerable authors who have accom-
modated themselves to the strictures of
the state or worked their way around
them. One cannot fully grasp how the
struggle for free expression has devel-
oped without taking into account such
maneuvers, the kind I would have to
learn when I was allowed, a few years
later, to return to dictatorial Chile.
H istory is full of writers wondering
how far they can go, which themes to
avoid or disguise, how to frame what
is said as allegorical or transpiring in
distant lands or future times; painters
wondering how much to depict; singers
gauging what might land them in jail;
The New York Review
reporters holding back incendiary rev-
elations about influential people; ac-
tors eliminating lines so their theaters
can stay open; humor being deployed
to imply what cannot be said openly.
Berkowitz hardly mentions any of these
stratagems or subterfuges. He does al-
lude to Shakespeare, mostly to show
how publishers cut potentially seditious
scenes or how Bowdler purged words of
the Bard as “unfit to be read aloud by
a gentleman to a company of ladies.”
Absent is any examination of the ways
in which Shakespeare shaped his plays
with an eye to the Master of the Rev-
els, whose approval was necessary for
performances. It could be argued that
his fear of state intervention influenced
how Macbeth or the Roman tragedies
cunningly engage in politics.
It is under the shadow of censorship
that many of humankind’s greatest cre-
ations have been forged by those who
chose neither the exemplary death of
martyrdom nor the death-in-life that
is often the result of banishment. Ri-
cardo Piglia, for instance, stayed in
Argentina (a country unmentioned
by Berkowitz) and produced Artificial
Respiration, one of the masterpieces of
experimental fiction in Latin America.
In that novel, without once alluding to
the Dirty War raging around him, he
denounced the disappearance of thou-
sands of his compatriots and dissected
the grinding machine of censorship that
was trying to silence the survivors. 5
An entire book could be written
about these and other surreptitious
strategies of communication. It is not
the book Berkowitz set out to write.
This is not because he is unaware of
how ingenuity can outwit the overseers
and smuggle offensive material into
the mainstream, or because of a lack
of sensitivity to the intricacies of liter-
ary expression, as proven by his subtle
approach to Flaubert and Baudelaire.
If he sidesteps the vast gray areas of
human creativity, it is because he is
singularly focused on those heroes and
heroines who refused to submit to the
dictates and biases of their time. The
fact that their works are still with us
today hammers home the central thesis
of Dangerous Ideas: censorship is ulti-
mately futile and cannot permanently
extinguish the thirst for freedom of
expression.
Berkowitz has assembled a stirring
cast to demonstrate this point. There
is Margaret Sanger, arrested in 1914
because, in violation of the notorious
Comstock Act, she wrote a sex educa-
tion column, What Every Girl Should
Know, that was distributed through the
mail. Berkowitz writes: “The column
was suppressed; a blank box was put
in its place that read ‘What Every Girl
Should Know—nothing, by order of
the United States Post Office!’” Sanger
was not dissuaded and doggedly kept
campaigning for women’s reproductive
rights.
Just as admirable in his defiance,
though less to my liking, is the fanat-
ical English lawyer William Prynne,
sentenced in 1634 for seditious libel
and thereafter “pilloried, fined, im-
prisoned, and deprived of his ears,”
because of his hysterical criticism of
5 Tom Engelhardt, “My Life with Maus,”
For more on Piglia, see Adam Thirl-
well, “Imaginary Conspiracies,” The
New York Review, July 19, 2018, which
analyzes his “technique of the implicit,
the unsaid.”
April 7, 2022
the indecency of plays, actresses, and
spectators. Revelry of any sort, he
believed, was an abomination, con-
demned by the Scriptures. The fact
that Berkowitz chooses someone with
whom he strongly disagrees accentu-
ates the need to respect adversaries
whose views we find distasteful. More
inspiring is Titus Labienus, a victim of
Rome’s draconian decrees against sat-
ire. Though he committed suicide after
“his entire oeuvre was set aflame,” his
friend Severus was true to his memory,
declaring, “If they really want to de-
stroy the works of Labienus, they must
burn me alive. For I have learned them
by heart!”
T his solidarity that preserves a perse-
cuted person’s work for future readers
is crucial in the eternal battle to defeat
censorship. It is what happened with
Giordano Bruno, defiant even when he
was burned alive, along with his books,
in 1600 in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.
Others hid his books and passed them
from hand to clandestine hand until the
world was ready to celebrate them.
Berkowitz fills many pages with
those who, from the relative safety of
their privilege, expanded the borders
of free speech. There are thinkers who
began to map out the need for protect-
ing destabilizing ideas (John Milton,
Baruch Spinoza, John Stuart Mill,
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison,
Leslie Stephen, and the lesser-known
William Walwyn and Thomas Maule)
and the legislators, judges, and activists
(Charles Pinckney, Richard and Jane
Carlile, and Supreme Court justices Ol-
iver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis,
Robert Jackson, and Hugo Black) who,
through a series of tentative steps, cre-
ated laws guaranteeing the liberty to
speak our minds that some of us take
for granted today.
As is evident from the names just
listed, Berkowitz centers this slow
progress primarily in England and
the United States, an emphasis that I
can appreciate, having found refuge
here from the Pinochet regime. And
yet I would have preferred that less
attention be lavished on the details of
judicial wrangling and political and
legislative accomplishments in these
nations to make space for other parts
of the world.
Spain, for instance, despite being
part of the “West,” is almost entirely
neglected. Surely General José Millán
Astray’s ominous words in 1936 at the
University of Salamanca—“Down with
intelligence! Long live death!”6 —are
worthy of inclusion, especially as they
anticipated what awaited the nation
that was one of the post–World War
II allies of the “free world” and yet
applied to its citizens, in the name of
god, civilization, and the purity of the
family, a ferociously comprehensive
system of censorship whose boundar-
ies were constantly tested by struggling
intellectuals and artists (for example,
the filmmakers Carlos Saura and Luis
Berlanga).
6 7
See my analysis of how these phrases
reflect on Trump’s attitude toward sci-
ence and truth in “Trump’s War on
Knowledge,” nybooks.com, October
12, 2017; and “I Warned of Trump’s
Attack on Science. But I Never Pre-
dicted the Horror That Lay Ahead,”
The Guardian, April 20, 2020.
Something similar could be said
about South Africa, which merits one
paragraph from Berkowitz on Steve
Biko without probing, even in passing,
some of the richest examples of resis-
tance in literature, theater, music, and
graffiti of the twentieth century.7 Brazil
is touched upon, mainly in order to de-
nounce the mistreatment of an Amer-
ican, Glenn Greenwald. I deplore that
persecution but lament the absence of
the many Brazilians who risked their
lives fighting censorship. Berkowitz
employs the same anecdotal tactic re-
garding Israel, where the suppression
of one Israeli author’s book in Arabic
on the intifada is mentioned, but not
a word about the flagrant persecution
of Palestinian journalists or the con-
straints on the kind of news that can be
published in that country and the ruses
used to foil these limitations.
Lip service is paid to the colonies
that gained independence after World
War II in a page on Indonesia that,
welcome as it is, cannot make up for
the omission of so many other coun-
tries where democracy is besieged but
dissident voices find a way of shrewdly
expressing themselves. Think of what
we can learn from the Arab world,
Vietnam, South Korea, Nigeria, India,
and Sri Lanka, just to name a few. This
dearth is even more regrettable be-
cause, as democracy is besieged every-
where and crises loom ahead—war and
plagues, mass migration, and climate
apocalypse—the temptation to censor
and control will increase exponentially.
As I read through Berkowitz’s wide-
ranging overview, I could not help but
notice parallels with our own time. Au-
gustus Caesar forbade satiric insults
against his person, and millennia later
Winnie the Pooh was banned in China
because apparently the portly, lovable
bear was being used by dissidents to
mock President Xi Jinping. The Su-
preme Court in 1920 upheld the sentenc-
ing of the Socialist Eugene Debs to ten
years in prison for “a speech denouncing
[World War I] as a capitalist plot,” and
the ayatollahs of Iran, a century later,
imposed harsh sentences on Arash
Ganji for translating a book on the
Kurdish struggle in Syria, and on others
like Nahid Taghavi and Mehran Raoof
for “propaganda against the state.”
The British government in 1792
sought to put Thomas Paine on trial
for his seditious writings, forcing that
hero of American Independence and
supporter of the French Revolution to
flee the country of his birth; more than
two hundred years later came the dis-
quieting news that my friend Sergio
Ramírez, Nicaragua’s most prominent
living author, whom I had met when
we were both in exile, had been forced
again to wander the earth, this time be-
cause President Daniel Ortega, the man
he had served as vice-president in the
Sandinista government, had ordered
his arrest for “acts that foment and in-
cite hatred and violence.” All the more
depressing because Ortega himself had
See J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense:
Essays on Censorship (University of
Chicago Press, 1996); André Brink,
Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege
(London: Faber, 1983); and Margreet
de Lange, The Muzzled Muse: Liter-
ature and Censorship in South Africa
(John Benjamins, 1997).
once been a revolutionary jailed for
fighting for freedom—as depressing as
news from Cuba that its government is
harassing artists and dissidents.
The parallels seem endless: heretics
murdered in Tudor England and jour-
nalists murdered in today’s Russia, the
shaming of dissidents in Puritan Massa-
chusetts and the shaming of professors
with controversial views in our times,
the Nazis’ use of force to “compel cul-
tural homogeneity” and House Bill
3979 in contemporary Texas forbidding
the teaching of critical race theory in
schools—a not-so- covert way of stop-
ping students from discovering the deep
roots of white supremacy in America’s
past. 8 And, of course, recent book
burnings echo the pyres of yesteryear.9
Berkowitz has wisely decided not
to be distracted by the alarming con-
tinuities between past and present,
waiting until a brilliant final chapter
to describe the many persecutions that
still threaten us while also emphasizing
how much has changed, as well as the
new challenges brought about by seis-
mic alterations in “the nature of infor-
mation and its transmission,” akin to
what happened after the invention of
the printing press. Inspired, perhaps,
by the fearless predecessors he ad-
mires, he does not shy away from any
number of controversial issues. Most of
them derive from the paradox that the
Internet—initially hailed as “a technol-
ogy of freedom”10 that would let “all
voices be heard in equal measure”—is
now “marred by hate, threats, data pri-
vacy breaches, and fake news driven
by bots, troll armies, and unseen ac-
tors,” forms of online speech man-
aged by “self-serving corporations . . .
whose readiness to manipulate people
is matched by their platforms’ suscep-
tibility to exploitation.” “It may be
time,” Berkowitz declares, “to rethink
some cherished assumptions” about
unrestrained discourse.
How to balance the need to restrict
hate speech with the need to safeguard
people’s right to express repulsive, im-
moral, toxic, and, yes, dangerous ideas?
How to deal with evident falsehoods that
poison today’s polarized electorate and
undermine democracy? How to make
sure that the need for new ways of includ-
ing racial and social equality in our com-
mon conversation does not lead to the
false innocence of hygienic “safe spaces”
8
For those interested in current vio-
lations of free expression, some re-
sources: PEN America’s Freedom to
Write report; the Committee to Protect
Journalists; International Emergency
Campaign to Free Iran’s Political Pris-
oners; Project Censored: The News
That Didn’t Make the News; and Index
on Censorship (full disclosure, I am a
member of its advisory committee).
9
For example, seminarians in Boone,
North Carolina, consigning to the
flames books that question the tradi-
tional teachings of the Catholic Church;
authorities in Ontario setting fire to five
thousand books, including copies of the
comics Tintin and Asterix, because they
denigrated indigenous peoples; and offi-
cials in China burning “illegal” and “bi-
ased” books at a state-run library. On
the recent banning of Art Spiegelman’s
Maus by a Tennessee school board, see
tomdispatch.com, February 17, 2022.
10
The term comes from Ithiel de Sola
Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Har-
vard University Press, 1983).
33

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34
that preclude genuine debate?11 How of how easily a system that tolerated free
to counter those who have been the ben- inquiry—as Athens did—can turn into
eficiaries of the vicious suppression of a repressive society when its identity is
the right to speak of the enslaved, Native threatened. After all, thirty years before
Americans, immigrants, and gay people Protagoras’s books were burned, he was
and who now weaponize free speech to allowed to freely speak his mind. A cau-
safeguard odious prejudices about gen- tionary tale: disasters breed censorship;
der and race, privilege and history? Who yesterday’s champions of liberty can be-
will be the judges of what can be dissem- come the repressors of tomorrow; our
inated without themselves becoming freedoms can be reversed and intellec-
censors? tual autonomy sacrificed on the altar of
Berkowitz wades into these issues security.
armed with the perspective that comes As we navigate the uncertain waters
from having just explored the ways that await us, we do not lack inspiring
in which humanity managed, over stories to give us a cautious optimism.
thousands of years, to forge a certain In 1974, a year after the coup in Chile,
agreement that debate on public issues the actor and playwright Óscar Cas-
“should be uninhibited, robust, and tro was arrested for performing a play
wide-open.” Though he acknowledges that obliquely criticized the dictator-
that “there is no consensus in the West” ship, and he spent the next two years in
about how to resolve the thicket of di- concentration camps. Despite having
lemmas he examines, he comes down been tortured, despite his mother and
strongly on the side of allowing more brother-in-law being “disappeared,” he
freedom rather than less,12 clinging to expressed his creativity by staging a se-
the certainty that we should not treat our ries of works with his fellow inmates. On
fellows as if they were children unable one occasion, he managed to convince
to distinguish truth from deception. He the commander of the Melinka deten-
makes this choice in the full knowledge tion center to approve a subversive text,
of democracy’s precariousness, mindful adducing that it had been written by
the “famous” (and fictitious) Austrian
playwright Emil Kan (an anagram for
11 Melinka). Under the very nose of those
For two differing views on the se-
riousness of this problem, see Anne who could harm him, Óscar Castro
Applebaum, “The New Puritans,” The did not cease to defy the censors.13 If
Atlantic, August 31, 2021; Michelle he could nurse freedom behind barbed
wire, if Margaret Sanger could persist
Goldberg, “The Middle-Aged Sadness
Behind the Cancel Culture Panic,” The despite indictments and proscriptions,
New York Times, September 21, 2021; if Giordano Bruno never recanted
and Goldberg’s response on October 2,
as his body burned, how can we be-
2021, in the same paper to mostly crit- lieve that censorship will have the last
ical reactions from readers. A valuable word? Q
perspective on the unintended conse-
quences of “deplatforming” on campus
is Dax D’Orazio, “Deplatforming in 13
Óscar Castro died last year of Covid
Theory and Practice: The Ann Coulter
in Paris. For more on his exceptional
Debacle,” in Dilemmas of Free Expres-
life and works, see my homage to
sion, edited by Emmet MacFarlane
him, “How Theater Can Help Us Sur-
(University of Toronto Press, 2021).
vive,” The Nation, May 6, 2021; and
12
For a forceful and nuanced defense “El Teatro en los campos de concen-
of the same position, see Susan Nossel, tración,” Araucaria, No. 6 (1979), the
Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech result of several days and nights of re-
for All (Dey Street, 2020). Nossel is the cordings carried out by my wife and me
CEO of PEN America. in our Amsterdam exile.
NO CONSOLATION
“Imagine being me,” I don’t say to the friend who has lost, over
the past seven years, both parents, her only brother, a cous-
in, an uncle, a childhood crush, a newly discovered half sister
and beloved family dog to a cruel array of accidents, crimes of
passion, and unpronounceable afflictions too ghastly and pro-
tracted to fathom, “with all that ahead of me.”
SUCCESSION
The cactus thrived until they brought home the goldfish, which
thrived until they brought home the dog. When they brought
home the baby they sent the dog to live with her mother, who
sent him to “live” on a “farm.” Now the baby, too, has been
replaced, this time by a toddler, who casts aside her dolls one
by one, each time a new one is placed in her lap.
—Suzanne Buffam
The New York Review
 Letters from a Scattered Place
The Letters of
John McGahern
edited by Frank Shovlin.
London: Faber and Faber,
851 pp., $40.00
Seamus Heaney once char-
acterized the Irish novelist
John McGahern as a rumi-
nant, given to chewing the
cud. He meant it as a com-
pliment. He was defending
McGahern’s third novel,
The Leavetaking (1974),
against the charge of re-
cycling material from his
first, The Barracks (1963).
The accusation wasn’t un-
fair. The death from can-
cer of McGahern’s mother,
Susan, when he was ten, is
at the core of both novels,
and it’s described in very
similar terms. Later he re-
turned to it again, in terri-
fying detail, in his memoir
All Will Be Well (2005).
But, Heaney suggested,
the echoes and repetitions
were irrelevant. This is how
memory becomes imagina-
tion, by repeating itself.
John McGahern was
born in County Leitrim in
the northwest of Ireland in 1934, the el-
dest son of a police sergeant and the vil-
lage schoolteacher. He was of the same
generation, broadly speaking, as Hea-
ney, the playwright Brian Friel, and
the poet and critic Seamus Deane, who
were growing up on the other side of
the newly constituted Irish border, and
like them he was lucky in his schooling.
While Heaney and Deane got to take
advantage of the British government’s
extension of free secondary education
for all, landing themselves places at
St. Columb’s College in Derry, Mc-
Gahern’s good fortune was the newly
opened secondary school run by the
Presentation Brothers in Carrick- on-
Shannon, the largest town in Leitrim,
an eight-mile bicycle ride from home.
His place at the school (“years of
luck and privilege—and of grace, ac-
tual grace”) saved him from a job in a
hardware store, and eventually led to a
teaching qualification, a degree in liter-
ature from University College Dublin
(he attended night classes while work-
ing as a teacher), and a dedication to
writing. When he died, aged seventy-
one, he had published six acclaimed
novels, more than thirty short stories,
an autobiography, some reviews and
essays on the art of fiction, and one
really terrible play (a hypermelodra-
matic version of Tolstoy’s The Power of
Darkness crossed with the Kerry Ba-
bies double-infanticide scandal of the
mid-1980s).
All but the last of these works turn
on the events of McGahern’s early life
in Roscommon and Leitrim, or are set
in that landscape. His experiences as a
young man in London and Dublin, de-
scribed in his 1970s novels, The Leave-
taking and The Pornographer (1979),
are filtered through memories of his
youth at home. All Will Be Well mainly
focuses on his life up to the age of about
fifteen, as it was lived in various houses
in the two northwestern counties. In a
April 7, 2022
Clair Wills
John McGahern; drawing by Patrick Swift, circa 1960
few score pages toward the end he races
through his teaching career, a first
marriage in London, and being sacked
from his job after his second novel, The
Dark, was banned for obscenity by the
Irish Censorship Board in 1965.
“My own separate life, in so far as
any life is separate, I detailed only to
show how the journey out of that land-
scape became the return to those lanes
and small fields and hedges and lakes,”
he writes. He gets back as quickly as
possible to where he began, the Leitrim
landscape of his childhood, which is
also the setting of his masterpiece,
the 2002 novel By the Lake, about a
returned emigrant, Joe Ruttledge, or
rather, about the community to which
Joe returns, with his English-born wife,
after years in London.
There is no real plot to By the Lake.
Instead, in highly patterned and almost
incantatory prose, McGahern evokes a
year in the life of a rural village, attend-
ing to the effects of the seasons and the
rhythms of ordinary life and speech.
“Nothing has changed or seems likely
to change,” says Ruttledge:
The lambs were now out with their
mothers on the grass, hopping as
if they had mechanical springs
in their tiny hooves, sometimes
leapfrogging one another. Jamesie
helped Ruttledge harness the old
horse plough to the tractor and
guided the handles as they turned
sods and tore up ground at both
houses for spring planting. Jamesie
had been in the bars of Shruhaun
on Patrick’s Day and complained
that people with big bunches of
shamrocks in their coats who had
been off drink for Lent were foot-
less. The fruit trees were fertilized
and pruned. Flowers were planted
out. The bees were making cleans-
ing flights from the hives and gath-
ering pollen. Out on a bare rock,
in the middle of the drinking pool
by the house, the black cat sat as
studious as a scholar amid all the
spawn and stirring of the pool as
she waited to scoop up with one
white paw any amorous frog that
rose too close to the rock.
What’s extraordinary is the way these
simple, declarative sentences (such hum-
ble verbs: “showed,” “turned,” “helped,”
“sat,” and, most simply, “were”) unfold
into an account of a border community’s
fifty-year habits of evasion, indirection,
and obfuscation. The plain prose hides
a pileup of cruelties and injustices. One
storyline features a man on the run
from British soldiers, his cry for help
caught “between the need to be heard
and the fear of being heard.” It’s a per-
fect description of McGahern’s nar-
rative voice, like an anthropological
participant- observer, both inside the
life of a place and uneasily independent
of it.
As he puts it in The Barracks, “The
road away became the road back.” It’s a
phrase he repeats in The Pornographer.
Again and again the novels and the
stories say: back home, back in those
early days of childhood, back in
the room where his mother died, or the
room where he slept with his father,
the river where they fished, is where
you will find the real.
T he letters in this volume, edited by
Frank Shovlin, an Irish scholar and
professor at the University of Liver-
pool, were written after that life back
home had ended, and the “journey out”
had begun. (Apart from one, a letter
written by the young John—known as
Sean at this point—in 1943, to thank
his father for a present of a comic
book.) They tell the story of a public,
professional man, through his interac-
tions with agents, publishers, editors,
and translators, and his
Estate of Patrick Swift
colleagues in the English
Department at Colgate
University in upstate New
York, where he taught
for many years. The let-
ters are time off from the
writing life, and so, in ef-
fect, time off from that
chewing of memory into
imagination.
McGahern was a cau-
tious letter writer. In the
mid-1960s he apologized
to Patrick Gregory, his
American editor at Knopf,
for fussing about other
people seeing his corre-
spondence: “I only meant
when I was there in NY in
your flat that there were
letters about which made
me uneasy since they were
mine. Forgive the fear.”
Letters left lying about
are hostages to fortune.
Not only are they open to
being read by a third party,
but they can be misread
and misinterpreted. Or
perhaps even worse, their
secrets can be correctly
interpreted, but by the
wrong person. “I think the
difficulty of dealing with letters is that
they are never quite honest,” he wrote
apropos a collection of letters by the
Irish novelist Michael McLaverty, with
whom he corresponded. “Often out
of sympathy or diffidence or kindness
or affection or self interest we quite
rightly hide our true feelings.”
I have a hunch that McGahern’s fear
of letters getting into the wrong hands
was laid down early. The striking thing
about the family he grew up in was that
relationships were, for long stretches
of time, conducted primarily by corre-
spondence. For seven years after they
became engaged his parents lived a
considerable distance apart, when his
father was posted to a Garda (police)
station in Galway. They wrote back and
forth; she waited; he played the field.
They eventually married only after she
called a halt to the delay and mailed
back the engagement ring. But most of
their married life was also spent living
separately—she with the children near
the various primary schools where she
worked, he in the barracks, visiting on
days off. That’s why McGahern was
writing to his father to thank him for
the comic book, because his father
wasn’t there. When his mother was in
the hospital, the children stayed with
their father and wrote to her.
This habit of letter writing marks the
family out as part of the emerging rural
Irish middle class, despite their relative
poverty. McGahern’s memoir looks
like an account of remembered days in
rural Leitrim in the 1930s and 1940s,
and that’s partly what it is, a celebra-
tion of the ordinary and the rhythms of
the day-to- day. But it’s also an analy-
sis of his parents’ correspondence, in
which he’s a third party, decoding his
mother’s diffidence and kindness and
skewering his father’s self-interest.
McGahern was growing up inside an
epistolary novel with a tragic plot—an
experience that would surely teach you
35

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36
the power of writing, and the need to
keep control of it.
He appears not to have kept copies
of his own letters—most of them were
handwritten, occasionally they were
typed by his wife Madeline, and toward
the end of his life they were dictated to
her and sent via e-mail. Shovlin has gath-
ered this collection together by search-
ing through institutional archives (the
records of publishing houses and the
BBC written archives, for example),
and by contacting individual corre-
spondents. But some people couldn’t
find their old letters from McGahern,
and others preferred to keep them pri-
vate. Although Shovlin doesn’t say this,
some were destroyed. McGahern’s first
wife, Annikki Laaski (“Anu”), a silent
presence in this volume, explained in a
2006 interview in the Irish Independent
that she had torn up their correspon-
dence. She found herself wishing she’d
kept some, if only to disprove the ex-
culpatory account in his memoir of the
breakup of their marriage.
In the pre-phone era of the late
1950s and 1960s McGahern wrote long,
chatty letters to various male friends,
such as Tony and Jimmy Swift, whom
he met in a Dublin dancehall; Tony
Whelan, met at St. Ann’s hostel in
Bethnal Green while working on Lon-
don building sites during the summers
off from his degree; and Joe Kennedy,
met in a lodging house while teaching
for a short spell in Drogheda. The talk
is mostly serious; he’s given to lush de-
scriptions of the natural world and re-
flections on loneliness. He indulges in
a kind of weary postadolescent search-
ing for truth and “vision” in writing:
“Life for me is a physical thing like a
woman. I love the bitch and try and
tell all sorts of things because I must”;
“No one seems to even know about lit-
erature anymore; to realise death.” To
Whelan he sends a clutch of poems that
read like a hybrid of Auden, Yeats, and
parts of the Mass. Here are a few lines
of “The Cross”:
The shudder through our flesh
forgets
To ripple to its sob
And we are sure the shadow met
In the night is ours at last
And that a cross on the road is
turned
To the rectangular beast.
McGahern writes long letters to his
youngest sister, Dympna, encouraging
her, in a distinctly paternalistic way, to
expand her mind:
Do you read much now? You must
be careful, what you read and do
now will shape the whole richness
of your lifetime. Do try and be alive
to things all day, not bored or su-
perior to others or critical or clever
or full of notions and opinions.
Remember that life is eternally
passing—for others as for yourself
and they too have to endure in the
lonely cell of themselves.
With the Belfast novelist Michael
McLaverty he discusses Tolstoy, in
comparison with Joyce and Proust;
his dislike of Sean O’Faolain’s novels;
his favorite work by Thomas Mann,
Felix Krull. He finds a Maeve Brennan
story in The New Yorker “vulgar”; he
dismisses The Bell Jar as “poor-poor,
all the adjectives.” He objects to “the
common notion that you can make
an art out of your life”—what he calls
“the autobiography stunt!” For this
reason he is also (at this early stage in
his experiments with writing) against
plot. Instead, “there must be some
morality”:
I often think the realest reason
I write is, having lost my formal
faith, I am self compelled to pray
or praise. If I did not need to do
it I would stop tomorrow, but there
seems little else.
His ambition, he explains to Patrick
Swift, is “to give passion and pattern
to the lives of people being eroded out
of their existence in the banality and
repetitiveness of themselves”—a sen-
tence written in September 1960 that
serves as a good description of By the
Lake, published over forty years later.
Letters to Charles Monteith in 1963
describe the “frightful shindy” at home
following the publication of The Bar-
racks, when his father—incensed by
McGahern’s portrayal of him—refused
to allow him into the house. And they
hint at something close to a nervous
collapse later that year, while he was
writing The Dark. The first draft of the
novel, he explains in November 1963,
“almost finished me”:
Images of old horror started to
come at me without warning and
with horrible violence, atmo-
spheres of evil. For weeks I lived
in a state of pure panic. They’d
always come suddenly. And the
only time I was free of them was
strangely when I was working with
them.
These were images, surely, of his
domineering and frustrated father
masturbating against him in the bed
they shared after his mother had died,
and the sexual undercurrent to his fa-
ther’s violent beatings of his children.
Those passages in The Dark are still
disturbing to read, years after first en-
countering them.
But for a year or more before this
collapse McGahern had been in cri-
sis. Following a broken love affair with
an unnamed woman, he had become
“crazed with suffering” the previous
summer. Then in the spring of 1963 he
had got Joan Kelly, a journalist with the
Irish Press, pregnant—an experience
he later wrote about in The Pornog-
rapher (a novel about which the kind-
est thing to be said is that the sexual
politics are of their time). Both the
letters written around this time and
the novel display a singular lack of em-
pathy. He apologizes to Joe Kennedy
for a “chaotic time” in May 1963 and
explains, “This person will be on my
hands till the end or almost the end of
June. Then she goes.” As though that
would be the end of it. Joan did go, to
London, where she gave birth to a son
whom she raised by herself.
In the novel the Joan character is
represented as culpable because she
doesn’t want to use contraception,
and the John character is punished by
being punched in the face— as though
that were the end of it. Shortly before
the novel was published, nearly sixteen
years after the affair, Joan approached
him for support, and McGahern had
this to say to Jimmy Swift (who was
acting as go-between):
Do you have any idea of the boy’s
position, as such: does he feel he
should have a father like others,
rights to assert, see the actuality or
whatever?
There was no formal request
previously. This woman—a Mrs
Capon—had been told the story by
Joan, and approached me herself.
From what she said, I understand
that Joan was pushing for the boy’s
recognition, at that time, 8 years or
so ago. When Joan elected to keep
the child, as opposed to having it
adopted, I told her that this situa-
tion was likely to arise. And when
it did that I would be unavailable.
It was considered part of my bru-
tality at the time.
From my point of view, for what
it’s worth now, there is just the
chance of a concessionary lie to
the boy OR wait in the knowledge
that anybody can call on any of us
at any time, with the usual hazard-
ous consequences.
The last sentence is puzzling. McGahern
wasn’t facing the possibility that any-
body could call on him at any time—just
his son and his son’s mother. And in the
end he did see them.
Later in the summer of 1963, presum-
ably after Joan was off his hands and
while he was working on the first draft
of The Dark, McGahern met Mary
Keelan, a graduate student at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, to whom he wrote a
number of letters in which he gave his
views on women and love: “Very few
women have a deep religious sense, only
social religion, establishment”; for a
man “to be loved is almost to lose his
identity, but I have often noticed this
difference”; “I think you fog things,
Mary. I think that woman and earth
are the opposite not the same as work,
which is murderous and destructive, a
road that leads to the wall”; “I know this
impersonality is hard for you or for any
woman, but I need you to be patient, if
you press too hard or force, and it seems
to be particularly American, you kill.”
It’s true that these letters were writ-
ten when he was young—but not that
young. He was turning thirty. I imag-
ine he’d have been a real pain to meet
in the flesh at this age. An emotional
drama king, who had somehow con-
vinced himself of his own rectitude and
self- control, and gave himself a pass
to be condescending about emotion in
others. Actually, I must be wrong about
that. He must have been charming.
Women so easily fell in love with him.
Perhaps predictably, given the tone
of these letters to Mary Keelan, when
they met again the following summer
in Paris it was a disaster, and they
soon went their separate ways. On that
same Paris trip McGahern met An-
nikki Laaksi, a Finnish radio producer,
and by October he had dedicated The
Dark to her (the book was already in
production) and moved to Helsinki to
marry her. Eighteen months later he
met Madeline Green, the daughter of
a wealthy businessman, in New York,
and when she moved to London in 1967
(where the McGaherns were then liv-
ing) they began an affair. As the situ-
ation at home became more and more
untenable, McGahern tried to keep
the different parts of his life separate.
By March 1968 McGahern was ask-
The New York Review
ing Gregory, his American editor, to
“write two letters, one with no hint of
disturbance to 43B Gore Road; and the
other to the school. Please forgive me
for this.” I found myself relieved—for
everyone involved but also for myself
as reader—when he settled down.
T he second half of the book—let-
ters from the late 1970s onward—of-
fers a respite from all the relationship
shenanigans and the dubious views
of women. By 1975 he was, he wrote,
“tired of climbing other people’s stairs.
It’s eleven years of having no place
now.” After being sacked from his
teaching job in Dublin (either for writ-
ing The Dark or for getting married in a
registry office—it’s never entirely clear
which was the greatest sin), he had
lived in London (first with his twin sis-
ters who were nurses at Whipps Cross
Hospital, and then with Anu in various
rented properties in Bethnal Green,
Walthamstow, and Victoria Park), with
Anu in Helsinki and southern Spain,
and with Madeline in Paris, where she
owned a flat on the Rive Gauche. There
was also a spell in a house found for
McGahern and Madeline by the poet
Richard Murphy in Cleggan, County
Galway.
Finally he and Madeline bought Fox-
field, a house and farmland “beside
the lake,” or one of the many lakes, in
County Leitrim: “It’s a scattered place.
Foxfield is the post-office and church.
Fenagh is the village, 2 pubs, 2 miles
away.” But it was a good deal less scat-
tered than the life they had been living.
They began experimenting with part-
time, summer farming: “We bought 4
in-calf cows, and they’ve had 4 calves,
all heifers. One of them got joint ill, but
was treated, and seems all right, if a lit-
tle shaky. We’ve started to put up a shed,
and seem owned as well by the acres.”
Foxfield was the road back, but just
at this point in McGahern’s career all
sorts of international offers came his
way. He spent two years teaching in
Newcastle and Durham in England;
there were spells teaching summer
schools in Devon and Galway, and at
Trinity College Dublin; for over thirty
years he taught regularly at Colgate
University, sometimes for a semester,
sometimes for the whole year.
That meant plenty more climbing
of other people’s stairs, and it put him
squarely on the Irish American liter-
ary circuit, much of which—including
teaching gigs for Heaney, McGahern,
and Murphy—appears to have been ini-
tially brokered by Monteith. For some
years McGahern alternated at Colgate
with Murphy. Bitchy tales of Murphy,
dubbed “the Poet” and sometimes
“kissy Dicky,” were a form of currency
exchanged in letters with editors Mon-
teith and Gregory and Matthew Evans,
such as this account of Murphy’s visit
to Paris in 1969: “There’s no conceal-
ing the homosexuality anymore, it
rampages in the face. As always he was
more fun in his absence than presence.”
In 1981 the McGaherns bought a
house in Dublin’s Stoneybatter neigh-
borhood, and five years later another
farm. They also had Madeline’s flat
close to Notre Dame in Paris, and they
spent long periods in New York. But the
letters make very evident that Foxfield
was where they felt at home. “We have
no telephone but mostly because the
April 7, 2022
lines have not come this far,” McGahern
wrote to the English poet and translator
Michael Hamburger (himself a connois-
seur of orchards), describing the farm.
We live in 45 acres of poor land
between two lakes close to the bor-
der. Enniskillen [across the Irish
border] is the nearest big town and
we go there almost every week. We
have animals and trees, our or-
chard and garden, but it is all more
happy go lucky/unlucky than effi-
ciently run. Though we are not the
worst around.
Throughout the 1980s, through hun-
ger strikes, border violence, and the
Anglo-Irish Agreement, McGahern
makes no mention of the political situa-
tion in Northern Ireland. I was surprised
to find nothing about the Enniskil-
len bombing, which killed twenty-nine
people in 1987, given that the town was
where the McGaherns shopped and so-
cialized. Nothing on the abortion and
divorce referendums of the 1980s. Al-
most nothing on politics at all. Which
doesn’t mean that McGahern didn’t
think about politics, just that he didn’t
write about it.
Instead the news he sent to his inter-
national correspondents was ultra-local.
In August 1981 he described in a letter
to Alain Delahaye, his French trans-
lator, how the brother of his neighbor
Francie had died on a visit home from
England and he and “a crazy chemist
from Dublin” had laid out the body.
The following year, he wrote again:
Not much news in Foxfield. The
cow had a bull calf the colour of
café au lait on Good Friday. The
early plum tree is in white blossom.
There’s fine weather, frost at night.
The old woman up the lane—I
was mowing her meadow when
you were here—died in Sligo last
Thursday, was buried in Fenagh
on Sunday. She broke her hip and
died of homesickness. The post-
man scolded me and a few locals
for standing on neighbouring tu-
lips as we started to fill the grave.
The postman is known as Weedy,
from weeds in the garden, he is bad
tempered and busy and small. The
hunger for news is a symptom of
a long oppressed people. It rages
here. Francie hates to see you twice
the same day—“No good. Nothing
new. No news. No news.”
Readers of By the Lake will recognize
both these passages. “No news. Came
looking for news,” cries Jamesie, the
Ruttledges’ neighbor from across the
lake, ritually.
But this isn’t McGahern nostalgi-
cally chewing the cud of his childhood
memory. He was describing the world
as he encountered it on his doorstep.
Some of the most tetchy letters in this
volume were written when he was
driven to fury by book- cover designs or
publicity that he felt over-Irished him.
He didn’t want to be pigeonholed as
an Irish writer, and he also objected to
being described as a realist. The drama
over The Dark, the banning and the
sacking, and then the leave-taking, set
him up in the public imagination as an
antiauthoritarian figure, a champion of
the “separate life,” saying no to church
and state in the name of personal lib-
erty and independence. But he was al-
ways looking for a road back. Q
MR. BEETHOVEN
Paul Griffiths
Paperback • $17.95
Also available as an e-book
“[A] quixotic and original work of
historical fiction . . . Mr. Beethoven
is the work of a skillful and
imaginative writer, gifted at evoking
the sights and sounds, the custom
and attire, of an earlier era.”
—Joseph Horowitz,
The Wall Street Journal
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
GHOSTS
Edith Wharton
Selected and with a preface by
the author
Paperback • $16.95
Also available as an e-book
ALSO FROM NYRB CLASSICS
THE NEW YORK STORIES
OF EDITH WHARTON
SELECTED AND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY ROXANA ROBINSON
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
“The great composer pays a visit to Boston in
this high-concept novel about Old World musical
genius and emerging American society . . . .
Stylistically rich and thoughtfully conceived
historical fiction.” —Kirkus, starred review
It is a matter of historical record that in 1823
the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active
to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to
write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffiths’s
ingenious novel is that Beethoven accepted the
commission and traveled to the United States
to oversee its first performance. Griffiths grants
the composer a few extra years of life and,
starting with his voyage across the Atlantic and
entry into Boston Harbor, chronicles his adven-
tures and misadventures in a new world in
which, great man though he is, he finds himself
a new man.
Relying entirely on historically attested possibili-
ties to develop the plot, Griffiths shows Beethoven
learning a form of sign language, struggling to rein
in the uncertain inspiration of Reverend Ballou
(his designated librettist), and finding a kindred
spirit in the widowed Mrs. Hill, all the while keep-
ing his hosts guessing as to whether he will
come through with his promised composition.
(And just what, the reader also wonders, will this
new piece by Beethoven turn out to be?)
The book that emerges is an improvisation, as
virtuosic as it is delicate, on a historical theme.
“A masterly and witty historical fantasy. . . [that]
feels authentic. . . Griffiths incorporates music
criticism, send-ups of convoluted 19th-century
prose, excerpts from letters, and even auction-
catalog descriptions of correspondence and auto-
graphs. This wild quilt of styles brings a very human
giant of the Classical and Romantic periods viv-
idly to life.)” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A formidable display of fantasy scholarship.”
—Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian
EDITH WHARTON’S GHOST STORIES
A collection of spectral tales,
selected by the author
No history of the American uncanny tale would
be complete without mention of Edith Wharton,
yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers
are unaware that she was a master of the form.
In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was
assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her
most chilling stories, written between 1902
and 1937.
In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale in-
cluded here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress
continues from beyond the grave, and in “All
Souls’,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly
woman treads the permeable line between life
and the hereafter.
In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mer-
cilessly illuminate the motives of men and women,
and her ghost stories never stray far from the
preoccupations of the living, using the supernat-
ural to investigate such worldly matters as vio-
lence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the
rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that
stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul.
These are stories to “send a cold shiver down
one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton ex-
plains in her preface, her goal in writing them
was to counter “the hard grind of modern
speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space
of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely
the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of
the shudder”—its delight.
“It’s this alertness to the terror of being a
stranger in one’s own house, in one’s own self,
that makes Wharton such a fine and frightening
writer of ghost stories.” —Hermione Lee, The
New York Review of Books
“Mysterious and coolly menacing stories of the
supernatural.” —Dan Chaon, The Week
37
 Corpus Meets Corpse
A video still from Blood Moon by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, 2021
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley:
Blood Moon
an exhibition at the Fabric Workshop
and Museum, Philadelphia,
September 24, 2021–April 3, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition
edited by Karen Patterson.
Fabric Workshop and Museum/
Gregory R. Miller, 319 pp., $45.00
Seeing a video made by the artists Mary
Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley for the
first time can feel like encountering a
newly invented language. How best to
take it in? Should you sit? Stand? Close
your eyes and listen? Take notes? In
each of their black-and-white videos,
usually about ten minutes long, a hand-
ful of characters, most of them acted
by Mary, tell a story in rhyming verse
full of off-kilter wordplay, double en-
tendres, and semantic switcheroos. The
density of the puns and the breakneck
pace of their delivery, combined with
the visual cacophony of the set design,
might compel you to watch it on loop.
My first encounter with their work
was at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in
2010, which included their fifteen-
minute You Make Me Iliad. In what
has become the duo’s signature visual
style, all props, scenography, and cos-
tumes are intricately designed, thickly
painted, and ornately decorated: no
surface is left untouched. Animations
and digital effects are often added.
The many layers of artifice create a
cascade of optical illusions and visual
puns. Is that object casting a shadow, or
is the shadow a painting of a shadow?
Is that wood grain, or wood painted
with grain? Not only the sets and props
but the characters are painted; in You
Make Me Iliad, the hollows of their
38
Elvia Wilk
cheeks and nostrils and nasolabial folds
are carved out with black paint, false
eyes protruding from their faces like
golf balls with black vertical stripes for
pupils. The whole visual field is made
to resemble an animation, and the ap-
pearance of a simulated flat plane—a
drawing is usually meant to be seen
from only one angle—moving and
shifting is continually disconcerting.
How many dimensions are the charac-
ters inhabiting?
You Make Me Iliad takes place toward
the end of World War I, in German-
occupied Belgium, as a German soldier
(played by Mary) is attempting to write
a Homeric epic. He remarks that with
the war waning he has experienced “a
sad deflation of my three dimensions”—
not only an indicator of his emotional
state but an apt description of the aes-
thetic universe he inhabits: a spooky
silhouetted scenography that would not
be out of place in The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari.
The self-aggrandizing author-soldier,
believing he has “reproduced the ar-
chetypes of drama,” nonetheless sus-
pects that something is lacking in his
“heroic tale.” Then it comes to him:
“I’m missing women!” So, in search
of a heroine he ventures to a brothel,
where he is greeted by a medical offi-
cer, a stout, helmeted man played by
Mary’s sister Alice Pruisner. After
offering a smelly tincture to ward off
venereal disease, the officer blames the
loss of the Trojan War on a paucity of
sex workers, suggesting that the current
conflict may yet be won thanks to the
strength of Belgium’s sex trade.
The soldier then meets a sex worker
(played by Mary) who is no stranger to
classical literature—nor to the violence
but ends up getting “the clap” from a
Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia/Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley
sailor.
Mutilation, disease, and death per-
vade this suite of videos, but the grue-
some material is punnified and neatened
into metered language, then given an
almost singsong quality by Mary’s un-
pretentious and sometimes melodic
delivery. Each tale confronts standard
history and historiography with the fact
of the body: the corpus meets the corpse.
Whether the dead body is the butchered
soldier about whom the Queen’s En-
glish has nothing genuine to say, or an
exhausted sex or factory worker whose
unrecognized labor supports the vio-
lence of war, in the Kelleys’ videos we
see and hear the people most dramatic
renderings, even tragedies, omit. Where
is the front line, really? And where are
the “front lines”—the outlines—of the
body itself?
The soldier in You Make Me Iliad
remarks on the sex worker’s “tech-
nique of keeping Oral tradition” alive.
He’s making a comparison between
her speech acts and sex acts (just as
she equates his writing with sexual
violation), but the subtext is that oral
practices—in all senses—have a long
tradition, and that many unrecorded
stories are no less important to history
for not having been written down. “I’m
Alpha Female, and I’m Alpha Bet-
ting,” the sex worker retorts, “that you
can author, but can’t spell, disaster.”
In this work it’s only through misspell-
ings, slips of the tongue, denials of sin-
of war. She may not be on the front gle meanings, and a certain wrongness
lines, but her own home was “sacked” of language that the human toll of the
and she’s been worn to “the nub” by disaster comes into focus.
men. She argues that the soldier’s use The films set in World War I were
of her life story in his historical drama followed by a trilogy rooted in classi-
would be no better than a man’s taking cal mythology, starting with the truly
sexual advantage of her: “You scribes maximalist Priapus Agonistes (2013),
just utilize a different orifice. / So stick which intersperses scenes from the Mi-
it in your ear!” The woman is topless in notaur’s labyrinth with a contemporary
the scene, yet her nakedness is clothed church volleyball game (Priapus, god
in paint—her breasts are overlaid with of fertility, defeats the Presbyterian
drawings of breasts, a body overlaid on team), and ending with The Thong
her body—and both her lips and her of Dionysus (2015), which features a
teeth are blacked out, her speech ema- brilliant prop collection of op-art up-
nating from a peculiar kind of void. dates on Minoan pottery; a Dionysus
with drawn- on abs and a goofy, floppy
stuffed penis; and a chorus of merkin-
Y ou Make Me Iliad is the last in a se- wearing maenads.
ries of four videos by the Kelleys set Considering her self-made drag,
during World War I. The series began Mary’s acting could be compared to
with Camel Toe (2008)—their first col- the self-portraiture of Cindy Sherman.
laborative moving-image work—a short The pathos of both their performance
film in which a bug- eyed, stubbled Brit- styles comes with a dose of mordant
ish aviator narrates the story of his two hilarity—it is the hyperbole of the
loves: his aircraft (a Sopwith Camel pantomime that is both charming and
biplane) and his woman (“A charming disarming. But the Kelleys are gonzo
ballet dancer, /I call her Camel Toe”). historians, and their art-historical
Alas, he reports, his beloved Camel references are far-reaching. Among
Toe has disappeared into a bathroom their inspirations the artists have cited
with an airplane-shaped vibrator and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic
hasn’t returned. In The Queen’s En- strips, Samuel Beckett, and tombstone
glish (2008), a nurse stationed on the epitaphs. The curator and critic Rob-
western front delivers a twenty- one- ert Storr calls their style an “amal-
stanza soliloquy about the inadequacy gam of Fernand Leger–like Cubism,
of formal written language to describe Robert Crumb–like caricature, and
the carnage of war: “While a hand’s Mack Sennett and Jean Cocteau–like
for writing letters, /What exactly do mise-en-scène.” For a show at Kunst-
you use /To put an eggshell back to- halle Bremen in 2016–2017 called “A
gether?” And Sadie, the Saddest Sadist Marquee Piece of Sod,” Mary selected
(2009) centers on a munitions-factory works by artists including Max Beck-
worker with black coins for eyes and mann, Otto Dix, and Käthe Kollwitz
another lipsticked hole for a mouth, from the museum collection to dis-
who dreams of shucking her “bond- play alongside their World War I–set
age” and becoming a “Modern Girl”— videos, making clear their allusions to
The New York Review
the collapsing picture planes and stark
portraiture of early-twentieth- century
objectivism and expressionism.
B ut the Kelleys’ work is fundamen-
tally language-based in a way that most
visual and even performance art is not.
Each film begins with the text. The
pair, who are married, began collabo-
rating in 2008, when Mary was enrolled
in Yale’s MFA program. Their work-
ing process is essentially this: Mary
compiles source texts (she has called
this process a self-initiated “poetry
school”), everything from Greek epics
to nineteenth- century verse to inscrip-
tions found on military monuments.
She then starts to stretch the text, tan-
gle it, throw it in the air—to play.
Sometimes source material is bor-
rowed wholesale and recombined, as
with the 2017 video In the Body of the
Sturgeon, whose script is a cento com-
posed entirely of words from Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hi-
awatha. In other cases, the material
becomes a jumping- off point for im-
provisation. In general, the scripts are
neither completely borrowed nor com-
pletely novel, neither estranged from
history nor beholden to it. After the
script is composed, Mary and Patrick
begin to storyboard and design the cos-
tumes, props, and sets together. Mary
constructs and paints all the costumes
and sets, then performs for the camera,
and Patrick shoots the footage, which
he digitally manipulates to some de-
gree in postproduction.
Initially, artistic authorship was at-
tributed to Mary, until their 2011 The
Syphilis of Sisyphus (syphilitic sex
worker strolls 1852 Parisian streets,
gets arrested by “the Morals Police”),
which was credited to “Mary Reid Kel-
ley with Patrick Kelley.” In 2016, after
Mary won a MacArthur fellowship,
the conjunction “with” was replaced
with “and”—and past works were re-
attributed as such. Given their work’s
fascination with the names history for-
gets, it is curious to note that this type
of career evolution, in which one artist
is given credit and accolades for what
institutions later acknowledge to be a
collaborative practice, typically pro-
ceeds along different gender lines. The
curator Jenelle Porter writes:
This rectification has challenged gal-
leries and museums, whose markets
and histories extol solo virtuosity
and have not, generally, adopted
nonhierarchical frameworks for
creative collaborations—especially
ones that are artistic and romantic.
Mary and Patrick are highly skilled,
crafty, ingenious. They have added a
few technological enhancements to
their process over the years, but their
approach is remarkably consistent.
Some critics have said that their proj-
ects have a “handmade” look, and it’s
true that they tend to make only what
can be produced together on-site. (For
a while, a green screen was set up in
their living room.) But they both em-
phasize that a DIY or ad hoc vibe is not
the goal. Mary has said that this is “not
an aesthetic that we’re choosing among
the vast range of available ways of solv-
ing problems.” Their work relies on the
agility and intimacy of using the tools
at hand. The cracks in what might oth-
erwise be a totalizing experience (bits
of tape peeking out, not- quite-perfect
April 7, 2022
perspectival lines) in turn create an
intimacy with the viewer. While watch-
ing, I find myself trying to reverse-
engineer what they’ve done.
T he couple’s most recent work, com-
missioned by the Fabric Workshop and
Museum in Philadelphia, represents a
slight departure, in that others were in-
cluded in the production process. The
Kelleys originally intended to do a res-
idency there, but the pandemic turned
this into a long- distance effort. Workers
at the museum made many of the cos-
tumes and props based on drawings or
3D computer models from the Kelleys,
which were then mailed to them for
further tweaking. The resulting show,
called “Blood Moon,” is a two-floor in-
stallation that includes two new videos,
several wall projections, and a series
of totemic sculptural assemblages that
look as if they were composed of props
from the videos. The sculptures also
contain video monitors that show flick-
ering videos of the moon, importing
the moving image into static objects.
The Fabric Workshop has published
the first substantial monograph on the
Kelleys’ work; the richness of the ac-
companying essays, including those by
Storr and Porter, matches the abun-
dance and complexity of the material
at hand.1 Equally valuable, though, is
the comprehensive section at the end:
every work by the Kelleys since 2008
has an entry with detailed description,
imagery, and script. For the first time,
I had all the texts before me at once;
I read them one after another, finding
jokes inside jokes inside jokes, and
many connections I never would have
been able to make otherwise. Reading
the scripts by themselves felt almost
like cheating.
In Blood Moon (2021), shown on the
ground floor of the Fabric Workshop,
we find two pumpkin-headed lovers,
Lenny and Betty, seated on haybales
in an otherwise empty white space, the
lack of an elaborate set representing
another departure in method. Lenny is,
at first, a floppy dummy with a feature-
less pumpkin head; Betty is played by
Mary and her pumpkin has a carved-
out space for her nose and mouth.
From Betty’s polka- dotted shirtwaist
dress and Lenny’s worker overalls and
dirtied boots, we might gather that
they’re on a Depression- era farm. And
Lenny shares the name of John Stein-
beck’s character Lennie from Of Mice
and Men, a poor and mentally disabled
itinerant farmhand who repeatedly
commits unintentional acts of violence.
Betty ostensibly stands in for the un-
named wife of the lead farmhand in
the novel, who, in the climactic scene,
falls victim to Lennie’s misguided
force. (Her name may also allude to the
childish-but-sexy, huge-headed Betty
Boop of the same era.)
After punning on the great masters
(“It was Manet and Monet a moon
ago, /We were close as two coats of
warm paint”), Betty expresses a desire
to create her own living masterpiece:
she slathers paint on Lenny’s pumpkin
head (“Oh Pumpkinhead boy, let me
trompe your l’oeil, /Let me draw on
1 exhibition are ten looping wall projec-
The monograph includes a script and a
discussion of another new work by the
Kelleys, The Rape of Europa, which
was exhibited at the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum in Boston, August
12, 2021–January 2, 2022.
my own expertise!”) and then carves
out his face like a demented jack- o’-
lantern. At this point Lenny becomes
animate. Mary plays both characters,
who converse about the colonialism
and exploitation upon which North
America was founded. “There’s Min-
nie and Mickey a curse on the land,”
Lenny declares. “I hit Plymouth rock
with a powerful shock,” he confesses
to Betty; “I made all my stacks laying
whips onto backs, /. . . And I spent it on
project Manhattan.”
Lenny and Betty joke about their
status as pumpkins, the fact that they
are, like the economic underclasses,
used and exploited as resources. At the
end Betty dismembers herself into a
stew—or rather a stock, as in the stock
market, the current “larder” for wealth
far abstracted from goods like gourds
grown from the soil. As Betty boils,
Lenny exults: finally “we can live off
our own liquid assets!” His pumpkin
head escapes his body and floats across
a black screen, becoming the titular
blood moon, the enduring witness of
the curse over the land (perhaps also a
reference to Georges Méliès’s Le voy-
age dans la lune).
At its most literal, this is a spooky
Halloween tale about the violence of
treating people as raw material, like the
land, for exploitation and extraction.
The video is preoccupied with the dis-
tinctions between the human, organic,
and inert, as well as the structures of
power that distinguish them. As Lenny
says, “I’ve been sucking my meals
through a straw in my heels / Since God
planted my feet on the ground.”
In this and many of the Kelleys’ vid-
eos, bodies are dismembered—hacked
apart and repurposed, composted or
stewed—just as syntax and grammar are
mangled to produce unexpected, novel
meanings. This Is Offal (2016)—which
was also staged in live performances at
the Tate Modern, the Berliner Festspiele,
and STUK Kunstencentrum & M-
Museum—shows a drowned woman
lying dead on a slab at the morgue. The
attending doctor performs an autopsy
and removes her parts and organs, which
each speak out loud: the heart, liver, and
foot joke, argue, babble, and harangue.
The result is not quite body horror, the
verisimilitude not great enough for out-
right repulsion, yet the cartoonishness
of the gore is one reason the work is so
disconcerting. There’s a threat beneath
the charade.
Language accompanies violence;
language can be violent. In You Make
Me Iliad the soldier tells us that the
“hero” of his epic tale is “punctuated /
By shrapnel”—and by line breaks
(“every comma, /Pauses”). Only by
dismembering and reassembling lan-
guage, such work suggests, can history
be composed anew, be repurposed for
the current time. Text lifts off the page,
becomes a new form of oral history. In
an interview included in the catalog,
Mary says, “Rhyme happens in the
body. The meaning doesn’t make it
rhyme. . . . Our ears and our body make
it rhyme.” Perhaps this is why silently
reading the texts feels almost improper.
T hroughout the Fabric Workshop
tions that depict a solitary figure with
a misshapen squash-like head covered
in Band-Aids. The figure stands or
crouches, lonely and odd and isolated
under a spotlight in what looks like
an underground burrow. Upstairs is
another pumpkin-based video, I’m
Jackson Pollock (2021). A man with
a pumpkin head and dressed in a suit
loses his clothing piece by piece and
gains more pumpkins all over his limbs
while reciting rhyming lines that follow
a simple pattern: artist, social phenom-
enon. Here are the first four:
I’m the Jackson Pollock of service
to Moloch,
I’m the Nat King Cole of selling
your soul,
I’m the Maria Tallchief of climate
grief,
I’m the Mae West of the Trinity
Test.
A critique accumulates about how
high culture is complicit in systems of
power, but it comes across as somewhat
generalized moralizing. Flattening a
slew of cultural figures into a list obfus-
cates more than it enlightens, because
it suggests that there is no variation in
their levels of complicity. Quips like
“I’m the Bad Bunny of fiat money” and
“I’m the Audre Lorde of chairing the
board” just don’t land the same way.
That these punch lines fall flat only
highlights what is usually so thrilling
about the Kelleys’ work: it complicates
or estranges language’s meaning rather
than reducing it.
In the catalog interview, Patrick
points out that “nonsense is not the ab-
sence of sense, but a parody of sense.”
As I first found in 2010, the effect of all
that exuberant nonsense can be vertigi-
nous. One can feel overwhelmed by the
sheer quantity of references. “Much
will be lost on viewers not steeped in
French history,” wrote a critic in The
New York Times of The Syphilis of Sis-
yphus. This may be true, but a feeling
of overload is central to the encounter.
As Mary put it in a 2014 interview:
Active interpretation is so ex-
quisite, and so intimate, but also
frightening . . . it can be frightening
to encounter something complex,
and to know that the onus is on you
to interpret it in real time. I know
that’s how people feel when they
watch my videos, because that’s
how I feel when I see or read some-
thing complex. It’s a pressure-filled
situation.2
This pressure-filled situation is, par-
adoxically, the container for wild
playfulness.
No work of art is explainable by its
individual components, much less its
set of inspirations and reference points
or the artist’s biography. I know this,
and yet in order to write this essay I re-
visited chapters from Frantz Fanon and
Simone Weil, dug out my high school
copy of Of Mice and Men, brushed
up on the plot of the Iliad, watched a
Marx Brothers film, and read every-
thing I could find about or by the Kel-
leys. Their work repeatedly prompts
me to consider the pleasures of inter-
pretation and reinterpretation—and
at the same time to acknowledge the
futility of parsing every element. It’s
more than the sum of its parts. I joy-
fully did my homework, and then joy-
fully threw it aside to watch the videos
again. Q
2
Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects
and Videos, edited by Daniel Belasco
and others (SUNY Press, 2014), p. 56.
39
 An Unexpectedly Modern Monarch
King George V; illustration by Hugo Guinness
George V: Never a Dull Moment
by Jane Ridley.
Harper, 559 pp., $35.00
Why does monarchy exist, and what
purpose does it serve? At a time when
the British monarchy has been much
troubled, even those who think it an
absurd anachronism must concede that
it has shown an astonishing capacity for
survival. If you start with Athelstan,
who from around 930 was called “king
of the English,” then England has been
ruled by kings and queens for nearly
eleven hundred years. Four years after
King George V acceded to the throne
in 1910 a terrible war ravaged Europe
and ended with the collapse of four
empires as well as the demise of many
other kingdoms and principalities
across the continent. But George—who
during that war changed his dynasty’s
name from Saxe- Coburg to Windsor in
an attempt to disown its German ori-
gins—was more secure than ever.
Maybe that flourishing genre, the
royal biography, helps explain this. Un-
like those historical figures who have
achieved greatness by personal qual-
ities quite out of the ordinary, many
monarchs have been exceedingly or-
dinary people, chosen by an accident
of birth to occupy extraordinary posi-
tions—and never was that truer than of
King George V. The title of Jane Rid-
40
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
ley’s splendid George V: Never a Dull
Moment is half ironic. He reigned, as
she says, for “twenty-five of the most
tumultuous and eventful years” in re-
cent times; or as the courtier Sir Alan
Lascelles wrote in his diary, George
“was dull, beyond dispute—but my
God, his reign (politically and interna-
tionally) never had a dull moment.”
And never a dull book about him.
In 1983 Kenneth Rose wrote a prize-
winning life of the king, and there’s a
brilliant account by H. C. G. Matthew
in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. Those had been preceded
by two official biographies: in 1941 King
George V: A Personal Memoir by John
Gore, a prolific journalist and author
well known in his day, written with “the
agreeable virtues of tact and taste,” in
the words of the diplomat and writer
Sir Harold Nicolson, who published
in 1952 his own full-length life of the
king, in many ways an excellent book,
albeit marked not only by tact but by
quiet condescension and patriotic self-
congratulation. As Nicolson recorded
in his diaries, he had been instructed
by Lascelles that “I should not be ex-
pected to say one word that was not
true. . . . All I should be expected to do
was to omit things and incidents which
were discreditable.” Lascelles added,
“You will be writing a book on the sub-
ject of a myth and will have to be myth-
ological,” which is the way quite a few
other biographers, of Churchill for no-
table example, have worked unbidden.
Nearly seventy years later Ridley
isn’t quite tactless or tasteless, but she’s
untrammeled by any restraints. This is
her third outstanding royal biography,
following The Heir Apparent (2013),
a full- dress life of King Edward VII,1
and Victoria (2016), a short life of the
queen. And George might claim to
have done more, almost by accident,
than his grandmother or father to cre-
ate the modern monarchy.
Like Henry VIII and Charles I,
George V didn’t at first expect to in-
herit the throne. All three were younger
sons who became heirs because of the
death of elder brothers. George, the
second son of the future Edward VII,
was born in 1865, a year after Prince
Albert, Duke of Clarence—“Eddy”
to the family—an unfortunate youth
of ungainly appearance and slow wits.
By 1892 Eddy was betrothed to Prin-
cess May of Teck, but he suddenly fell
ill and died, whereupon the families
adroitly married her to his brother in-
stead. George found himself second
in line for the throne and before long
1 mutilated their legislation, culminating
See my review in these pages, Septem-
ber 25, 2014.
the father of five boys and a girl. They
settled in York Cottage—“this horrible
little house,” as Nicolson called it—on
the royal estate at Sandringham.
During George’s years at York Cot-
tage, “all the basic stupidity of his char-
acter becomes apparent,” Nicolson
sneered in his diary; “he did nothing at
all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”
It was true that stamp collecting became
one of George’s passions, and shooting
the other. This was the golden age, if
that be the phrase, of battue shooting,
which Ridley writes about with undis-
guised distaste. Artificial breeding of
pheasants coincided with the advent
of the double-barreled twelve-bore
shotgun, which together meant that
birds could be slaughtered on an in-
dustrial scale. George became one of
the half- dozen best shots in the coun-
try, and was fiercely competitive. In his
personal tally of “Game Killed by Me
During Season 1896–97,” he reckoned
that he had shot 11,006 creatures of
all kinds, including 1,116 grouse, 2,509
partridges, and 5,993 pheasants.
With Victoria’s death in 1901, Ed-
ward VII became king and George
heir to the throne. He and Mary (as she
was now officially known, although he
always called her May) made a lengthy
imperial tour to Ceylon, Singapore,
Australia—where he opened the par-
liament of the new commonwealth—
South Africa, and Canada. George was
made Prince of Wales on his return to
a turbulent country, with increasingly
bitter industrial conflict, women agitat-
ing violently for the franchise, Ireland
unreconciled, and looming political
deadlock at Westminster.
Over the previous century the mon-
archy had changed character. George
III had been very much his own chief
executive, and his ministers were a pa-
trician oligarchy supported by a corrupt
and unrepresentative House of Com-
mons. In 1780 John Dunning’s famous
parliamentary motion had asserted
that “the influence of the crown has in-
creased, is increasing, and ought to be
diminished,” and much diminished it
was in Victoria’s time. Successive Re-
form Acts had widened the franchise
to about 60 percent of male citizens,
and the prime minister was no longer a
royal favorite but whoever commanded
a majority in the Commons.
By the time Walter Bagehot pub-
lished The English Constitution in
1867 he could distinguish between the
“dignified” monarchy, whose purpose
was to “excite and preserve the rever-
ence of the population,” and the “effi-
cient” prime minister and cabinet, who
could “employ that homage in the work
of government.” A monarch could no
longer make or break a government but
retained what Bagehot called “the right
to be consulted, the right to encour-
age, the right to warn,” as well as the
authority to choose the prime minister
in some circumstances and to act as an
impartial referee in political disputes.
And yet reform had left untouched
the hereditary House of Lords, which
threw out William Gladstone’s second
Home Rule Bill for Ireland in 1893 and
then, after the Liberals won a landslide
election in 1906, habitually rejected or
in 1909 in the outrageous rejection of
The New York Review
David Lloyd George’s “People’s Bud-
get,” which proposed modestly higher
taxes on the rich to pay for both social
programs and battleships. It was finally
passed the following year, but not be-
fore it had provoked a constitutional
crisis. And so when Edward VII died in
May 1910, George ascended the throne
“at one of the few moments in the de-
velopment of the modern British consti-
tution,” in Matthew’s words, “when the
powers of the crown, so often regarded
as dormant, were required to be alive
and active.” The crisis only ended in
August 1911, when the peers, or enough
of them, caved and passed the Parlia-
ment Act, curbing their own power.
For George, it was a relief to leave that
autumn on a magnificent imperial visit
to India. Cheering crowds and the great
Durbar in Delhi, where gorgeously ca-
parisoned Indian princes paid homage,
gave him a comforting but misleading
sense of loyalty. He returned in Febru-
ary 1912 as H. H. Asquith introduced
the third Home Rule Bill, offering Ire-
land self-government within the United
Kingdom. Arthur Balfour had been
ousted as Tory leader and succeeded by
Andrew Bonar Law, who openly urged
Protestant Ulster to resist Home Rule
by any means, including armed force,
and was soon unmistakably inciting the
army to mutiny. When the king implied
to Asquith that he might refuse to give
royal assent to the Home Rule Bill, it
was something so utterly without prec-
edent that Nicolson brushed over it, but
even so, George was surely right when
he told Asquith that it was his own “duty
by every means in his power to prevent
civil war.” The bill was finally passed in
1914 but suspended with the outbreak
of war. In 1930 the king looked back
and said, “What fools we were not to
have accepted Mr. Gladstone’s Home
Rule Bill,” which would have avoided
so much woe and bloodshed.
One of the few men in Europe who
could match George as a shot was
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.
In the spring of 1914, and with painful
dramatic irony, the archduke invited
both George and Kaiser Wilhem II to
shoot with him that autumn, not guess-
ing that by June he would be a target
himself. The Great War that followed,
Ridley writes, “tore apart the dynastic
realm of Queen Victoria’s extended
family,” with sorry consequences for
most of her descendants who ruled
European countries in 1914, of whom
there were no fewer than nine, but it
only enhanced the position of the Brit-
ish Crown. “To the arbitrator monarch
of 1910–14 was added a service monar-
chy, making direct contact with ordi-
nary people, similar to the institution as
it is today.” The king visited the army
in France, where he was badly injured
when thrown from his horse, and he
and the queen toured the industrial cit-
ies of northern England with their great
munitions factories and shipyards.
When H. G. Wells’s novel Mr. Brit-
ling Sees It Through (1916) derided “an
uninspiring and alien Court,” George
snorted, “I may be uninspiring, but I’ll
be damned if I’m alien.” All the same,
Wells was right when he said that “the
European dynastic system, based upon
the intermarriage of a group of mainly
German royal families, is dead to-day.”
Implicitly recognizing this, the king re-
luctantly allowed the removal from St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor of the ban-
April 7, 2022
ners of the German knights of the Gar- “not help doubting, on general grounds
ter, before the “Change of Name,” as a of expediency,” in Stamfordham’s
new file opened by Lord Stamfordham, words, “whether it is advisable that the
the king’s private secretary, was called. Imperial Family should take up their
After some puzzlement as to what to residence in this country.” The fate of
call the royal family (or indeed what its that family was sealed by the Bolshe-
existing name actually was), Stamford- viks’ October Revolution. “Nicky and
ham hit on their most famous castle, and Alicky,” as George knew the tsar and
Windsor was chosen as a pleasing new tsarina, were sent to Yekaterinburg,
name. In July 1917 George recorded that where in July 1918 they and their son
“I relinquished all my German titles for and four daughters were brutally killed
myself & family.” Just as significant was on Lenin’s orders. Ridley admits that if
his decision “that our children should be George felt sorry for their fate, there’s
allowed to marry into British families.” no sign that he felt remorse. Successful
All that was nothing compared with dynasties don’t survive without a ruth-
events in Russia. In 1917 the February less instinct for self-preservation.
Revolution overthrew George’s cousin
Tsar Nicholas II, and Sir George Bu-
chanan, the British ambassador in After the Armistice in November
Petrograd, reported that the provisional 1918 the royal couple drove for five days
government expected the tsar to be of- through cheering crowds in the poor-
fered refuge in England, as previous est quarters of London. The king was
deposed rulers like Louis Philippe and alarmed by the threat of socialism and
Napoleon III had been. But Nicholas shared Stamfordham’s hope that the
was not. Much later a completely false masses would come to see the Crown
story was mentioned by the American- “as a living power for good.” He was
born social butterfly and brilliant dia- dismayed by the violence that erupted
rist “Chips” Channon and subsequently in Ireland soon after, not only the IRA’s
repeated by the deplorable Lord terrorist campaign but the Black and
Mountbatten: the king wanted to help Tans’ cruel reprisals. “Are you going
the tsar but Lloyd George prevented to shoot all the people in Ireland?” he
him. This was the reverse of the truth. angrily asked Lloyd George. “I cannot
Lloyd George was ready to give the have my people killed in this manner.”
tsar refuge if it kept Russia in the war Lloyd George tried to spirit the prob-
but, as Ridley unravels the story, it was lem away with his 1920 Government of
George, nervous about his own position Ireland Act, offering separate parlia-
amid republican murmurs, who could ments for six- county Northern Ireland
SET CHANGE
Within the church they opened a train station:
waiting room, altar lamps, icons, and booths.
The crowded choirs buzz like a cauldron,
and female cashiers with mouths like fake rubies.
Restrooms and frescoes. The Christmas star
turned to ash like Mary dressed in black.
You open the altar gates like doors—
exit and walk down the first platform.
And there, trains and wind before rain. The light
from candles guttering like voices at a banquet.
We cluster around the car. And blowing a whistle,
a proletarian prophet in a red service cap.
Within the school they opened a hotel:
someone gets ready to sleep with somebody.
Wet stalactites pulsate from the ceiling,
high school girls crave cotton candy
and, twisting the channels of intertwined arms,
master the essence of the natural sciences.
Within the castle they opened a hospital:
there chivalry rambles in shabby pajamas
as if beaten by fire or plucked from a stake,
and they prepare a diagnosis like planning a murder.
Because at night in each of the dimly lit towers
chivalry’s treated for shame. With hammer and nails.
Within the circus they opened a factory:
there a proud people fly over the lathes
in gaudy clown makeup from ear to ear.
Within the sky they opened a prison.
Within the body they opened darkness.
Within the spirit they opened bedlam.
—Yuri Andrukhovych
(translated from the Ukrainian
by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin)
and the twenty-six- county south, and in
June 1921 the king courageously went
to Belfast to open the smaller parlia-
ment with a speech pleading for peace
and unity of spirit in Ireland. (A hun-
dred years on, there may be peace, but
unity of spirit has proved more elusive.)
By then George’s position as an in-
dependent arbitrator was stronger than
ever, which was just as well given the
bewildering succession of events that
awaited: from 1922 to 1924 there were
three elections, four governments, and
four prime ministers. The king was ap-
palled by Lloyd George’s sale of hon-
ors to unworthy men, which came to a
head in June 1922 when the birthday
honors “were flagrantly corrupt,” Rid-
ley says. “Five new peers were listed,
four of whom were crooks or tax evad-
ers.” Weakened by the scandal, Lloyd
George resigned in October 1922 after
a majority of Tory MPs decided to leave
the coalition, to be succeeded by Bonar
Law, who served as prime minister for
only seven months before resigning
when he was diagnosed with terminal
throat cancer.
Now the king had to choose a suc-
cessor. Some thought that it should be
Lord Curzon, the imperious foreign
secretary, a view certainly held by Cur-
zon himself, but George chose Stanley
Baldwin instead. Soon afterward, and
against the king’s expressed wish, Bald-
win called a general election in which
the Tories lost their majority. Although
“the palace had dreaded a Labour gov-
ernment,” it came to power on January
22, 1924, with Ramsay MacDonald as
prime minister. While wondering what
“dear Grandmama” Victoria would
have thought of it, George told his
mother, “They have different ideas to
ours as they are all socialists but they
ought to be given a chance.”
MacDonald depended on the pas-
sive support of the Liberals, which was
withdrawn after little more than nine
months. The Tories won the ensuing
election in a landslide after playing up
the threat that Labour could be pene-
trated by the Soviets and making much
of the “Zinoviev Letter.” This purport-
edly came from Grigory Zinoviev, the
head of the Communist International
(and shot twelve years later as Stalin’s
great purge began), urging the British
Communist Party to foment sedition
and, more damagingly, claiming that
the recognition of Soviet Russia by the
Labour government would radicalize
the British working class.
Throughout Ridley’s richly enter-
taining book we’re reminded of King
George’s mundane personality and
conventional outlook, not least his ob-
session with correct dress, a subject on
which he continually berated his eldest
son, among others. As Nicolson put
it, George was a man who always pre-
ferred the fashion before last, and when
others had moved on he continued to
wear frock coats, buttoned boots rather
than shoes, and trousers creased at the
sides. He welcomed the postwar return
of formal levee dress of white breeches
and silk stockings at court, though he
relented and permitted Labour minis-
ters to wear evening dress. And yet with
all his stiff conventionality, George was
also blessed with basic decency and the
sheer common sense that ought to be
the cardinal Tory virtue but that some-
times, as at present, goes missing.
His decency was exemplified by
his anger when it was proposed that
captured U-boat crews should suffer
41

HANNAH ARENDT’S
FIRST BOOK IS BACK IN PRINT
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish
Woman was Hannah Arendt’s first book,
largely completed when she went into
exile from Germany in 1933, though not
published until the 1950s.
It is the biography of a remarkable, com-
plicated, passionate woman, and an im-
portant figure in German romanticism.
“Rahel Varnhagen is best understood
as a laboratory in which Arendt
experimented with the ideas that
would later form the core of her
political philosophy. That makes it
a book worth reading even today,
when the German-Jewish world that
produced both Rahel Varnhagen and
Hannah Arendt survives only in the
pages of books.” —Adam Kirsch, Airmail
“In recounting Varnhagen’s life,
Arendt documents the paradoxes of
German Jews’ emancipation between
the breakdown of the Jewish ghetto
in the eighteenth century and the
emergence of the nineteenth-century
bourgeois Christian nation-state. . . .
What interested her was the evolu-
tion of Varnhagen’s psychology and,
especially, her Jewish identity.”
—Seyla Benhabib, The New York
Review of Books
“Arendt’s insight into the psychology
and the situation of pariah and par-
venu is essential.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This brilliant and original biography
offers a valuable picture of a crucial
era in the life of German Jewry.”
—Jewish Social Studies
“In reading Rahel Varnhagen one
soon realizes that only Hannah
Arendt could have written Rahel. . .
Arendt lived with Rahel Varnhagen’s
life long enough to see the unmistak-
able likeness between her own as
a Berlin Jew in the early twentieth
century and Rahel’s at the end
of the Enlightenment.”
—Vivian Gornick, The Nation
RAHEL VARNHAGEN
THE LIFE OF A JEWISH WOMAN
Hannah Arendt
Introduction by Barbara Hahn
Translated from the German by
Clara Winston and Richard Winston
Paperback • $18.95
Also available as an e-book
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
42
punitive “differential treatment” from
other prisoners of war, his instinct for
fair play by his openness to a Labour
government, and that common sense
by his canny—and correct—suspicion
that the Zinoviev Letter was a forgery.
During the general strike of May 1926
in support of the miserably ill-paid
miners, the king was hawkish to begin
with but softened, criticizing “an un-
fortunate announcement” in Winston
Churchill’s hysterical British Gazette
that advised the armed forces to take
any action necessary against the strik-
ers, as well as a cruel attempt by the gov-
ernment to block strike pay. As Ridley
perceptively says, stuffy and absurdly
rigid though the king could be, he ac-
tually moved away from high society,
while the monarchy gained what Ross
McKibbin, the Australian-born Oxford
historian and author of Classes and
Cultures (1998), has called “a cultural
centrality to British life” and “became
more public, ceremonial, and glamor-
ous, but also more obviously domestic.”
O ver the winter of 1928–1929 the
king was gravely ill and seemed close
to death, while primitive remedies
were attempted by the inept Lord Daw-
son, his personal physician. The diag-
nosis that eluded him was doubtless
obstructive pulmonary disease, and
the cause was also clear: his smoking,
which shortened the lives of the present
queen’s father, grandfather, and great-
grandfather. But George recovered and
within months “smoked my first ciga-
rette which I enjoyed.” This was shortly
after the May 1929 election in which
Labour was returned to power though
still in a parliamentary minority.
In October the Wall Street collapse
set off the Great Depression, but Mac-
Donald was preoccupied with foreign
affairs, until the financial time bomb
at last exploded in the summer of 1931.
It had been ticking since Churchill, an
improbable and incompetent chancel-
lor of the exchequer, had returned to
the gold standard in 1925, and now a
run on the pound seemed to threaten
disaster. One courtier told the king that
“we are sitting on the top of a volcano”
and foresaw that “Your Majesty might
be asked to approve of a National Gov-
ernment”—a coalition of all parties.
Orthodox wisdom held that financial
confidence could only be restored by
severe cuts in public spending, begin-
ning with unemployment pay, although
the cause of the crisis—as of the 2008
crash—wasn’t the fecklessness of the
poor but the recklessness of the rich:
irresponsible lending by bankers.
When most of the Labour cabinet
refused to accept drastic cuts, Mac-
Donald told the king that he wanted
to resign, but George “said that he be-
lieved I was the only person who could
carry the country through.” MacDon-
ald, the son of a penniless unmarried
farm servant in the remote north of
Scotland, was unmistakably in awe of
royalty; in 1924, unlike his colleagues,
he had donned formal levee dress. For
his part, George liked MacDonald
more than any of his other prime min-
isters and, as Ridley acutely says, saw
him as a faithful Highland ghillie. In
all MacDonald offered his resignation
four times, and four times the king re-
fused. By August 26 a National Gov-
ernment, in name at least, had been
formed, made up of Conservatives and
Liberals as well as MacDonald and a
couple of other ministers who had de-
serted the Labour Party. The run on
the pound nevertheless continued until
the guardians of financial rectitude fi-
nally gave up on September 21, when
England came off the gold standard,
which effectively devalued the pound
by a quarter and ended the panic.
Although Ridley says that “the ap-
pointment of the National Government
was the right thing to do in the circum-
stances,” that is not what the Labour
Party thought, then or since. George’s
“they ought to be given a chance” might
be seen as his way of helping Labour
become a democratic party of govern-
ment, but the view on the left was that
he had neutered Labour and drained it
of its radical impulse. Although damag-
ing Labour may not have been the king’s
conscious motive, that was certainly the
effect. An election was called in October
1931 with all the “Nationals” campaign-
ing together. Labour was routed, falling
from 288 seats in the Commons to 52,
and a Tory government in all but name
continued in office for nearly nine years,
until a far graver crisis in May 1940 saw a
truly national government formed.
For George there was a last huzzah,
his Silver Jubilee in 1935. In keeping
with Lascelles’s command, Nicolson
described this climax to the reign:
“The proletariat welcomed . . . a public
festival,” while for the populace as a
whole there was pride
in the fact that, whereas the other
thrones had fallen, our own monar-
chy, unimpaired in dignity, had sur-
vived. . . . Reverence in the thought
that in the Crown we possessed a
symbol of patriotism, a focus of
unison, an emblem of continuity in
a rapidly dissolving world. Satisfac-
tion in feeling that the Sovereign
stood above all class animosities,
all political ambitions, all sectional
interests. Comfort in the realisa-
tion that here was a strong benev-
olent patriarch personifying the
highest standards of the race.
Yes, Nicolson surely earned the knight-
hood that followed his book.
O n one sensitive subject Gore’s A
Personal Memoir was censored by
George VI: George V’s distant and diffi-
cult relations with his children. Nicolson
censored himself, treating the matter in
a cursory paragraph. The youngest son,
Prince John, was likely autistic and died
aged thirteen. Princess Mary married
Lord Lascelles, son of the Earl of Hare-
wood (they were the parents of the most
remarkable recent member of the larger
royal family, the late George Harewood,
a central figure in British musical and
especially operatic life), while the sec-
ond son, Bertie, Duke of York, married
another earl’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth
Bowes-Lyon, and the third, Henry,
Duke of Gloucester, married a daughter
of the Duke of Buccleuch.
More of a problem were the fourth
son, George, Duke of Kent, and the el-
dest, the Prince of Wales. (The family
had a habit of confusing nicknames: the
Prince of Wales who briefly became Ed-
ward VIII was “David,” and the Duke
of York who became King George VI
was “Bertie.”) Both ran wild, George
reputedly as a bisexual cocaine user—
what would today’s tabloids do with
that!—while David had a series of liai-
sons with married women, to his father’s
dismay. “I am not interested in any wife
except my own,” said the uxorious King
George, a contrast to both his father and
his eldest son, and his last years were
clouded by David’s infatuation with
“that woman,” Wallis Simpson.
By early 1936 the king was more
gravely ill. The nation listened raptly
to regular bulletins on the BBC, until
the memorable words from Dawson on
the evening of January 20: “The king’s
life is drawing peacefully towards its
close.” Peacefully, but not unaided: in
order to ensure that his death would
be announced in The Times rather
than “the less suitable” evening papers,
Dawson “decided to determine the
end,” as he put it, and polished the king
off with shots of morphia and cocaine.
Dawson made his deadline and George
died punctually at five minutes to mid-
night, the full story only revealed half
a century later. Since he was in no pain
and had made no request to be sped on
his way, at least one lawyer has said that
this was legally murder.
Everyone knows the sequel. George
V was succeeded by King Edward
VIII, who reigned for 327 days be-
fore abdicating in order to marry Mrs.
Simpson. (As Queen Mary exclaimed,
“Really, this might be Rumania!”) The
following year he justified apprehen-
sions about him by meeting Hitler and
giving the Nazi salute. “The Yorks will
do it very well,” said Queen Mary, and
so King George VI and Queen Eliza-
beth did when war came.2
This February George V’s grand-
daughter, the ninety-five-year-old Queen
Elizabeth II, marked her seventieth
anniversary on the throne, not only
the longest reign in English or British
history but almost the longest in Euro-
pean history. 3 But her Platinum Jubilee
coincides with the worst travails the
royal family has known since the Abdi-
cation, what with the lawsuit in Amer-
ica accusing the Duke of York of sexual
abuse in connection with his friendship
with Jeffrey Epstein, which he has
now settled out of court in humiliat-
ing fashion; Prince Harry and his wife,
Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of
Sussex, grumbling away in California;
and few people apart from the Prince
of Wales himself looking forward with
much enthusiasm to his becoming king.
On April 21, 1926, Chips Channon
woke to the sound of booming guns
announcing that the Duchess of York
had given birth to a daughter, to be
known as Elizabeth like her mother.
With eerie prescience at a time when
his friend the Prince of Wales was still
expected to marry and beget an heir,
he wrote, “I have a feeling the child
will be Queen of England. And,” he
added in words that could now sound
more than ominous, “perhaps the last
sovereign.” Q
2
Queen Mary received perhaps the
best biography of all, by James Pope-
Hennessy in 1959, a wonderful pendant
to which appeared four years ago, The
Quest for Queen Mary, Pope-Hennessy’s
record of all his interviews with royalties
English and European while writing his
biography. See the review in these pages
by Alexander Waugh, June 7, 2018.
3
She has already passed the Austrian
emperor Franz Joseph’s sixty- eight
years, and in 2024 she can beat the rec-
ord of King Louis XIV, who inherited
the French throne at the age of four and
reigned for seventy-two years and 110
days.
The New York Review
 Hearing the ‘Ramayana’ Again
Rama and Lakshmana searching for Sita; illustration from the Ramayana, Mewar, Rajasthan, India, circa 1680–1690
The RƗmƗya৆a of VƗlmƯki:
The Complete English Translation
translated from the Sanskrit by
Robert P. Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland
Goldman, Rosalind Lefeber, Sheldon
I. Pollock, and Barend A. van Nooten;
and revised and edited by
Robert P. Goldman and Sally
J. Sutherland Goldman.
Princeton University Press,
943 pp., $27.50 (paper)
In 2007 the Indian government planned
to dig a deepwater channel through the
thirty-mile stretch of sea that separates
the southern tip of the country from Sri
Lanka, which is too shallow for cargo
ships to navigate, forcing them to go
around the island. The shipping chan-
nel would have reduced the journey by
some 250 miles and saved a great deal
of time, fuel, and money.
But a group of hard-line Hindu ac-
tivists protested that the digging would
disturb a shelf of shells and shoals,
once visible but now submerged, which
they believed to be the remains of an
ancient causeway or bridge. Accord-
ing to the great poem called the Ra-
mayana, a prince named Rama, an
incarnation of the god Vishnu, was ex-
iled to the forest through the machina-
tions of the mother of one of his three
half-brothers. There, the demon Ra-
vana carried Rama’s wife, Sita, off to
his island kingdom of Lanka. A simian
army built a bridge between the main-
land and Lanka so that Rama could
cross the channel. With the help of an-
other brother, Lakshmana, and a mag-
ical monkey named Hanuman, Rama
killed Ravana and rescued Sita.
After widespread, disruptive demon-
strations by Hindu groups on September
12, 2007, the government abandoned the
channel project. To this day, the ship-
ping lanes continue to wind all the way
around Sri Lanka.
No one was harmed in the channel
protest, but that was not the case in the
notorious storming and illegal demoli-
April 7, 2022
Wendy Doniger
tion of the Babri Masjid (the sixteenth-
century mosque of Emperor Babur) on
December 6, 1992, in the city of Ayod-
hya, in northern India. The Ramayana
says that Rama was born in Ayod-
hya, and many devout Hindus believe
the Babri Masjid once was the site of a
Hindu temple. More than two thousand
people, mostly Muslims, were killed in
the riots that followed the demolition
of the mosque and in related riots else-
where in India. In the summer of 2021
Prime Minister Narendra Modi ritually
laid an eighty-eight-pound silver brick
for the construction of a Rama temple on
the site of the devastated Babri Masjid.
Such is the power of the Ramayana, a
story whose many retellings constitute
an entire literature. The oldest surviv-
ing version is a 25,000-verse Sanskrit
poem that the poet Valmiki composed
in India sometime in the first millen-
nium BCE . No one in India ever hears
the Ramayana for the first time, as the
poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan re-
marked. If they don’t know Valmiki’s
Ramayana, they may know one of the
numerous other retellings and trans-
lations in Sanskrit or in other Indian
languages, such as Tulsidas’s popular
sixteenth- century Early Hindi Ram-
charitmanas or Kampan’s beautiful
twelfth- century Tamil poem.
Among the many reimagined Ra-
mayanas in our day, there was the series
of Amar Chitra Katha comic books de-
voted to Ramayana characters, begin-
ning in 1967; the televised Ramayana
(1987–1988), which added fuel to the
fanaticism that brought down the Babri
Masjid; and Sita Sings the Blues (2008),
an award-winning film by an American
director, Nina Paley, who came, pre-
dictably, under heavy fire from conser-
vative Hindus for portraying Rama as
both brutal and cowardly. Even within
the seven books of Valmiki’s Sanskrit
text (of which there are numerous edi-
tions), there are revisions: book 6 has a
happy ending in which Rama and Sita
are triumphally reunited; in book 7 Sita
Metropolitan Museum of Art
leaves Rama, who rules in lonely isola-
tion ever after.
T he centrality and vitality of the Ra-
mayana in Indian culture today, its
enormous historical importance and
continued use in mythological histori-
cizing, can be only roughly approxi-
mated in Europe and America by the
Bible. As Robert Goldman and Sally
Sutherland Goldman remark in their
introduction to the new edition of their
translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana,
“Reading the RƗmƗya۬a . . . as history
is much like reading the Old Testament
as a history of the Jewish people in an-
tiquity.” Hindu kings throughout In-
dian history commissioned inscriptions
bragging that they had destroyed their
enemies just as Rama killed Ravana
and that they had made their lands a
Hindu paradise like Rama’s kingdom,
“Ram-raj.”
In 1975 a group of distinguished In-
dian scholars at the Oriental Institute
of Baroda produced for the first time
a full critical edition of Valmiki’s Ra-
mayana. Subsequently, an English
translation of that edition was made by
a group of scholars under the direction
of Goldman and Sutherland Goldman
(professor and senior lecturer, respec-
tively, at the University of California at
Berkeley). Goldman translated volume
1; Goldman and Sutherland Goldman
together translated volumes 5 and 7,
and, with Barend A. van Nooten, vol-
ume 6; Sheldon Pollock translated vol-
umes 2 and 3; and Rosalind Lefeber
volume 4. Princeton University Press
published the individual volumes be-
tween 1984 and 2016. (The first five
volumes of this translation were also
republished in 2009 by the Clay San-
skrit Library, through New York Uni-
versity Press, in handy small volumes,
with only the glossary remaining from
the original appendices but with the
useful addition of the Sanskrit text in
Roman transliteration on the facing
page, in the style of the Loeb Classical
Library.)
The seven-volume Princeton trans-
lation is a masterpiece of scholarship,
one of the great landmarks of Indol-
ogy of the past generation. The trans-
lations are painstakingly accurate and
thoroughly annotated, incorporating
the extensive scholarship in the field.
The long introduction to each volume
provides a synopsis, an analysis of that
volume’s characters, and an overview
of its structure, while the many notes
and several appendices furnish all the
information any reader could want to
clarify every aspect of the text.
This publication, with its enormous
technical apparatus, was intended for
academic specialists or, as the editors
put it, “a scholarly audience with some
degree of competence in Sanskrit.” It
is an essential part of the working li-
brary of any serious English-speaking
Sanskritist—or, perhaps, a well-heeled
amateur, for the full set is pricey. (Vol-
ume 7 alone is listed at $180.) Even
those who read the Ramayana in San-
skrit (the Baroda critical edition is now
conveniently available online) find the
full Princeton translation invaluable
for its illuminating notes and insightful
interpretations.
B ut how many people do read Val-
miki’s Ramayana in Sanskrit? More
than you might think. Sanskrit has a
bad rap outside of India. Walt Kelly’s
Pogo used the word “Sam-skrimps”
to describe highfalutin double-talk or
manipulative twaddle. Marcel Proust
(near the start of the fourth volume
of À la recherche du temps perdu) re-
ferred sneeringly to “those people who,
at the Collège de France, in the room in
which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures
without an audience, attend his course
only for the sake of keeping warm.”
But many people in India do know
Sanskrit. Narendra Modi’s water re-
sources minister, Uma Bharti, recently
proposed that Sanskrit should replace
English as a “link language” in the coun-
try, since “in every village of India, you
will find two or three people who are ex-
tremely knowledgeable about Sanskrit.
The same cannot be said of English.”
Moreover, an impressive number of peo-
ple outside India read Sanskrit. (It can
even run in families. Robert Goldman
is my cousin: his father’s sister Minnie
married my father’s brother Jack.) And
one might argue that anyone who is se-
rious about the Ramayana really ought
to learn Sanskrit.
Still, many people in India and
abroad want to read Valmiki’s Ra-
mayana without all the bother of learn-
ing Sanskrit. I noted in passing just two
of the many retellings in other Indian
languages. And in addition to the var-
ious partial English translations and
summaries and retellings in Sanskrit
and other languages, there have been
several serious attempts to render Val-
miki’s entire Sanskrit text in English,
of which one of the earliest was by
William Carey and Joshua Marshman,
in 1806–1810, and the most readable
(though abridged) by Arshia Sattar in
1996.
The remarkable condensation of
the Princeton scholarly edition (the
43

Winner of the 2021 National
Jewish Book Award for Fiction
A 2021 National Book Critics
Circle Award Finalist for Fiction
seventh volume of which alone is 1,522
pages long) into a new one-volume
paperback intended for “the general
reading public” has been achieved in
part by jettisoning the notes, the seven
long introductions, and the appendi-
ces, though there is still a forty- one-
page introduction, a ten-page glossary
of important Sanskrit terms, and a
seventy- one-page index. Considerable
space was saved by changing the origi-
T he sorts of decisions that translators
of Sanskrit have to make can be illus-
trated by comparing a few translations
of one of the most famous passages in
the Ramayana (1.2.12–14). In these
three verses, Valmiki sees a hunter kill a
waterbird in the act of mating and spon-
taneously cries out in the first instance
of both poetry in general and the partic-
ular meter in which he will compose the
compassion, thinking “This is not-
dharma [adharma],” the twice-
born brahman, hearing the female
waterbird [krauñcƯ] weeping, said
this speech: “Hunter [NiৢƗda], may
you not find a final resting place for
eternal ages, since you slaughtered
the one male of this mating couple
of waterbirds [krauñcas] when he
was infatuated by sexual passion.”

Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

A New York Times Notable
Book of 2021
A Wall Street Journal Best
Book of 2021
A Kirkus Best Fiction
Book of 2021
“The Netanyahus is funny, exuberant,
and intellectually stimulating, with
an absorbing story culminating in a
riotous climax—a virtuoso performance
by a master. It’s not to be missed.”
—Bob Goldfarb, Jewish Book Council
“Absorbing, delightful, hilarious,
breathtaking and the best and most
relevant novel I’ve read in what feels
like forever.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner,
The New York Times Book Review
“Riffing freely on a true story, this
brilliant and hilarious new book takes
a cozily familiar form, the campus
novel, and turns it into a slyly oblique
fable about history, identity and the
conflicted heart of Jewishness,
especially in America.”
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“With [The Netanyahus] Cohen
proves himself not just America’s
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THE NETANYAHUS
AN ACCOUNT OF A MINOR AND
ULTIMATELY EVEN NEGLIGIBLE
EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF A
VERY FAMOUS FAMILY
Joshua Cohen
Paperback • $16.95
Also available as an e-book
Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
nal verse formatting to paragraphs and
by using smaller print, which will be a
problem for many readers (especially,
but not only, older scholars who have
ruined their eyes poring over Sanskrit
texts). The book might be sold with a
little magnifying glass like the one that
comes with the compact one-volume
edition of the Oxford English Dictio-
nary in tiny print.
Inevitably, there are losses. Drop-
ping the notes made it necessary from
time to time to insert information into
the translation itself to clarify the iden-
tities of the huge cast of divine, human,
and animal characters. But readers of
the new one-volume edition do need
some notes on other subjects; not as
many, and certainly not as technical,
as in the big edition, but a thoughtful
note might often have guided read-
ers through puzzling passages. And I
miss the grand appendices. The reader
of the new edition is at one point ad-
vised that “an extensive glossary of
flora and fauna [in the Ramayana]
has been posted online” at Prince-
ton University Press’s website, but I
couldn’t find it.
It’s puzzling, and a shame, that the
one appendix the editors did decide
to keep in the one-volume edition
concerns weapons (such as half-iron
arrows, barbed darts, nooses, cudgels,
axes, ploughshares, and double- edged
swords), which have only a minor part
in the Ramayana. I wish they had in-
cluded instead one of the other appen-
dices, such as the genealogical charts
of Ravana’s paternal and maternal
lineage, blood relations, and marital
alliances. And the index is so com-
prehensive that it sometimes collapses
under its own weight; what reader will
search through five pages of index
under “Hanuman”?
A translation can’t be all things to
all audiences. If you don’t let go of the
scholars, you won’t draw in other read-
ers. And this new edition can’t bear to
let go of the scholars. The introduction
is thoroughly laced with superfluous
Sanskrit terminology, such as a refer-
ence to the poem’s upodghƗta, or “pro-
logue.” Why not just say “prologue”?
And why use Sanskrit diacritics at all?
These puzzling little dots beneath and
dashes and slashes above certain letters
will stop many otherwise enthusiastic
non- Sanskrit-readers in their tracks The poet Valmiki seeing a hunter kill a waterbird in the act of mating; illustration from the
and forestall casual attempts by pur- Ramayana, northern India, 1597–1605. Wendy Doniger writes that the bird’s death caused
chasers of the e-book version to search Valmiki to ‘spontaneously [cry] out in the first instance of both poetry in general and the
the text. particular meter in which he will compose the entire Ramayana.’
On the other hand, the one word they
should have left in Sanskrit, and did entire Ramayana. This meter is called There are several challenges here. Val-
not, is dharma, an untranslatable term the shloka, because the poet spoke it miki is called a ‫܈܀‬i (rishi), an inspired
for the way things are, or the way things out of sorrow (shoka). In this myth of poet who is also a sage or seer. In this
are not but should be. The new edition the origin of poetry, the sound of heart- context, I think it best to call him a
usually renders this crucial term as break is the sound of the first poem. poet rather than a sage. Then there is
“righteousness” but also, variously and Let me begin by providing a very lit- a pun on “twice-born” (dvi-ja), a word
confusingly, as “religion, duty, inherent eral translation of this passage: that means both a bird (born first as
nature, law, . . . character, and insignia, an egg from the mother bird and then
among others.” Since, however, the And when he saw that twice-born reborn from the egg) and a brahman
word is by now familiar to Anglophone bird brought down like that by (born first from his mother and then re-
readers, and its more complex shadings the hunter [NiৢƗda], compassion born as an adolescent in the ceremony
emerge from the contexts in which it arose in that poet/sage whose soul of initiation, the Hindu equivalent of a
appears, it need not be translated at all. was dharma. From this emotion of bar mitzvah or first communion). The

44 The New York Review

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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Mask Production Division Lt. L. A. Elliott
Medical Department Major T. L. Gore
Pathological Division Lt. H. A. Kuhn
Quartermaster Capt. H. L. Hudson
Department
Finance Department Capt. C. R. Insley

Development Division
The Development Division had its origin in the research
laboratories of the National Carbon Company and of the National
Lamp Works of the General Electric Company. Both of these
companies knew charcoal, and they were asked to produce a
satisfactory absorbent charcoal. The success of this undertaking will
be seen in the chapter on Absorbents. After a short time all the
laboratory work was taken over by the National Carbon Co., while
the developmental work was assigned to the National Lamp Works.
When the final organization of the Chemical Warfare Service took
place, the National Carbon Laboratory became part of the Research
Division, while the National Lamp Works became the Defense
Section of the Development Division.
The Development Division may be considered as having been
composed of the following sections:

1. Defense
2. Offense
3. Midland
4. Willoughby
5. Special Investigation.

The work of the Defense Section consisted of the development of

a charcoal suitable for use in gas masks, and its manufacture. While
the details will be given later, it may be mentioned here that three
weeks after the organization of the Section (April 28, 1917) the
furnaces of the National Carbon Company were turning out cedar
charcoal, using a straight distillation procedure. Cedar was selected
from a large variety of materials as giving the highest absorptive
value against chlorine. But phosgene and chloropicrin were also
being used, and it was found that the cedar charcoal was not
effective against either. Proceeding on a definite hypothesis, fifty
materials were investigated to find the charcoal with the highest
density. Cocoanut hulls furnished the raw material, which yielded the
most active charcoal. By a process of air activation a charcoal was
obtained which possessed high absorptive power for such gases as
chloropicrin and phosgene. Later this air process was changed to
one in which steam is used; the cocoanut shell charcoal activated
with steam was given the name “Dorsite.”
Complete apparatus for this air process was installed at the plant
of the Astoria Light, Heat & Power Company, Long Island City, and
the first charcoal was prepared during September, 1917. This was
followed by a large amount of experimental work, relating to the raw
material, the method of activation, and the type of furnace used.
Because of the shortage of cocoanut hulls, it later became
necessary to use a mixture of cocoanuts with cohune nuts, apricot
and peach pits, cherry pits and vegetable ivory. Another substitute
for cocoanut charcoal was found in a steam activated product from
high grade anthracite coal, called “Batchite.”
The Offense Section and the Midland Section were concerned
with the manufacture of mustard gas. This work was greatly delayed
because of the unsatisfactory nature of the so-called chlorohydrin
process. Another difficulty was the development of a satisfactory
ethylene furnace. Finally in February, 1918, Pope in England
discovered the sulfur chloride method of making mustard gas. At
once all the energies of the Research Division were concentrated on
this process, and in March steps were taken to put this process into
production. An experimental plant was established at Cleveland; no
attempt was made to manufacture mustard gas on a large scale, but
the results obtained in the experimental studies were immediately
transmitted to the manufacturing plants at Edgewood Arsenal, the
Hastings-on-Hudson plant, the National Aniline & Chemical
Company (Buffalo) plant, and the Dow Chemical Company (Midland)
plant. The details of the work on mustard gas will be given in a later
chapter.
Special investigations were undertaken to develop a booster
casing and adapter for 75 mm. gas shell, and to duplicate the French
process of lining gas shell with glass.
The organization of the Development Division at the signing of
the Armistice was as follows:
Colonel F. M. Dorsey Chief of the Division
Major L. J. Willien Supt., Offense Section
Capt. O. L. Barnebey Supt., Defense Section
Supt., Experimental
Lt. Col. W. G. Wilcox
Station
Capt. Duncan Special Investigation
MacRae Section
Dr. A. W. Smith Midland Section
Capt. J. R. Duff Administrative Section

Proving Division
The Proving Division had its origin in the decision to build an
Experimental Ground for gas warfare under the direction of the
Trench Warfare Section of the Ordnance Department. While this
decision was reached about September, 1917, actual work on the
final location (Lakehurst, N. J.) was not started until March 26, 1918,
and the construction work was not completed until August 1, 1918.
However, firing trials were started on April 25, 1918, and in all 82
were carried out.
The Proving Division was created to do two things: To experiment
with gas shell before they reached the point where they could be
manufactured safely in large numbers for shipment overseas; and to
prove gas shell, presumably perfect and ready for shipment, to guard
against any mechanical inaccuracies in manufacture or filling. It is
evident that the second proposition is dependent upon the first. Shell
can not be proved to ascertain the effect of gases under various
conditions and concentrations until the mechanical details of the
shell itself, purely an Ordnance matter, have been standardized.
Unfortunately many of the tests carried out had to do with this very
question of testing Ordnance.
For field concentration work two complete and separate lines of
trenches were used and also several impact grounds. The trenches
were built to simulate the trenches actually used in warfare. Each
line of trench contained several concrete shell-proof dugouts and
was also equipped with shelves into which boxes could be placed for
holding the sample bottles. At intervals of one yard throughout the
trenches there were electrical connections available for electrical
sampling purposes. The various impact grounds were used for cloud
gas attacks, and experiments with mustard gas or in many cases for
static trials. The samples were collected by means of an automatic
sampling apparatus.
The work of the Division consisted in the first instance of
determining the proper bursting charge. While a great deal of this
work had been carried out in Europe, American gas shell were
enough different to require that tests be carried out on them. The
importance of this work is obvious, since phosgene, a substance
with a low boiling point, would require a smaller bursting charge to
open the shell and allow the substance to vaporize than would
mustard gas, where the bursting charge must be not only sufficient
to fragment the shell but also to scatter the liquid so that it would be
atomized over the largest possible area. In the case of low boiling
liquids it was necessary that the charge be worked out very carefully
as a difference of one or two grams would seriously affect the
concentration. Too small a charge would allow a cup to be formed by
the base of the shell which would carry some of the liquid into the
ground, while too great an amount of explosive tended to throw the
gas too high into the air.
After the bursting charge had been determined a large number of
shell were repeatedly fired into the trenches, wooded areas, rolling
and level ground, and the concentration of gas produced and the
effect upon animals placed within the area ascertained. From the
results of these experiments the Proving Division was able to furnish
the artillery with data regarding how many shell of given caliber
should be used, with corrections for ranges, wind velocities,
temperatures, ground conditions, etc. Trials were also held to
determine how many high explosive (H.E.) shell could be fired with
gas shell on the same area without unduly affecting the
concentration. This was important, because H.E. shell were useful in
disguising gas bombardments. Gas shell can usually be
distinguished by the small detonation on bursting.
Experiments were performed to determine the decomposition of
various gases on detonation. The shell were fired at a large wooden
screen and burst on impact. Samples of gas were taken immediately
and analyzed.
Co-operative tests were carried out with the Gas Defense
Division to determine the value of given masks under field
conditions. Companies of infantry, fully equipped for the field, would
wear masks for hours at a time digging trenches, cutting timber,
drilling, etc., and imitating in every way, as far as possible, actual
field conditions. During these activities tons of gas in cylinders were
released in such a way that the men were enveloped in a far higher
concentration than would probably ever be the case in actual battle.
These tests gave valuable data for criticizing gas mask construction.
Another line of activity consisted of a study of the persistency and
relative effectiveness of various samples of mustard gas, in which
the liquid was distributed uniformly upon the surface of grassy zones
one to three feet in width, which formed the periphery of circular
areas 14 to 21 feet in diameter, the central part of each circle being
occupied by animals.
The work of the Proving Division was brought to an end (by the
Armistice) just at the time when it had reached its greatest
usefulness. Not only were the physical properties and personnel of
the Division developed to the maximum degree, but the production of
gas shell in this country for shipment to France had just reached the
stage where the Proving Ground could have been used to its fullest
extent in their proving.

Training Division
From the standpoint of the man at the front the Training Division
is one of the most important. To him gas warfare is an ever present
titanic struggle between poisonous vapors that kill on one side, and
the gas mask and a knowledge of how and when to wear it, on the
other. Because of this it is rather surprising that we did not hear more
about this branch of the Service. It did exist, however, and credit
must be given to those camp gas officers who remained in the
United States performing an inconspicuous and arduous duty in the
face of many local obstacles.
 Fig. 8.

The Field Training Division of the Gas Defense Service in the

United States was organized in September, 1917, and consisted of
Major J. H. Walton and 45 first lieutenants, all chemists. These men
were given a three months’ military training at the American
University. The arrival of Major (now Colonel) Auld during this time
was very helpful, as he was able to give the Section first-hand
knowledge. About 12 of the 45 men wore sent to France, while the
remainder, together with British Gas Officers, were assigned to
various Divisions still in training. There was little idea at that time as
to what constituted real gas training. No one knew how much gas
training would be received in France, and since little was often
received due to lack of time, many men went into action with no idea
of what this training really meant. Moreover, an order that the gas
officers should not go to France with their Divisions had, as was only
natural, a discouraging effect upon the men and upon gas training
and discipline generally.
In January, 1918, the gas officers were transferred to the
Engineers, and designated as the 473d Engineers. Later an Army
Gas School was established at Camp Humphreys. Because of the
rapidly changing personnel, owing to overseas assignments, the
policy was adopted of sending specialized gas officers only to
Divisional Camps and the larger training centers. The need of a
larger unit and increased authority was recognized by all intimately
associated with the work, but little was accomplished until the
transfer to the Chemical Warfare Service. Upon the appointment of
Brigadier General H. C. Newcomer as Assistant Director of the
Chemical Warfare Service, he was placed in charge of all military
affairs of the Service, and the administrative officers of the Training
Section became his “military assistants.” A few weeks later the
Training Section of the Administration Division, C.W.S. was formed.
At this time new duties fell to the lot of this
Section, among the more important being:
(1) The organization of gas troops and casual
detachments for overseas duty;
(2) The establishment of a Chemical Warfare
Training Camp;
(3) The procurement and training of officers for
overseas duty.
For this purpose a training camp was established near the
Proving Ground (Camp Kendrick) to hold 1300 officers and men.
Line officers were sent from the larger camps for training, the best of
whom might later be transferred to the Chemical Warfare Service for
duty as Gas Officers.
The work of the Section eventually grew to such proportions that
it was recognized as the Training Division of the Chemical Warfare
Service. It differed from other Divisions in that all administrative
routine was carried on through the offices of the Director, and with
the assistance and co-operation of its various Sections.
Because of the formation of the Chemical Warfare Service and
the apparent need for officers, the office was soon flooded with
applications for commissions. These were carefully examined and
the men were sent first, by courtesy of the Chief of Engineers, to
Camp Humphreys for a month’s course of military training. At the
end of this period they were sent to Camp Kendrick as students of
the Army Gas School. Toward the last of October all the officers and
enlisted men were transferred to Camp Kendrick where an Officers’
Training Battalion was organized.
It is obvious that the gas training of troops was the most
responsible duty of the Training Division. There was constantly in
mind an ideal of supervised and standardized training for all troops in
the United States, and the Division, at the time of the Armistice, for
the first time found itself with a nearly adequate corps of officers
through whom this ideal could be realized.

Medical Division
Dr. Yandell Henderson of Yale University was the logical man to
inaugurate the medical work of the Bureau of Mines, because of his
experience with oxygen rescue apparatus. A member of the first
committee of the Bureau, he secured, in July, 1917, an appropriation
for the study of toxic gases at Yale. This was in charge of Doctors
Underhill, therapy; Marshall, pharmacology; and Winternitz,
pathology. When the American University Station was opened
Marshall was given charge of the pharmacology. About the same
time a factory protection unit was organized under the direction of
Doctors Bradley, Eyster and Loevenhart. At first this committee
reported to the Ordnance Department, but later the work was
transferred to the Gas Defense Service.
In December, 1917, the Medical Advisory Board was organized.
This included all the men who were carrying on experimental work of
a medical nature. This board had as its object the correlation of all
medical work; new work was outlined and attempts were made to
secure the co-operation of scientific men throughout the country. The
following groups of workers assisted in this effort: At Yale, Underhill
studied therapy, turning his animals over to Winternitz for
pathological study. Henderson was specially interested in the
physiology of aviation. At the American University Marshall carried
on pharmacological research, specially as regards mustard gas, the
toxicology being covered by Loevenhart. A pathological laboratory
was also started, under Winternitz, where many valuable studies
were made.[14] At Cleveland Sollmann was busy with mustard gas
and protective agents. Pearce, working in co-operation with Dr. Geer
of the Goodrich Rubber Company, perfected the Goodrich Lakeside
Mask. His study was very valuable as concerning the physiology of
the gas mask. At Ann Arbor Warthin and Weller[15] were studying the
physiology and pathology of mustard gas. Wells, Amberg, Helmholz
and Austin of the Otho Sprague Memorial Institute were interested in
protective clothing, while at Madison, Eyster, Loevenhart and Meek
were engaged in a study of the chronic effect of long exposures to
low concentrations, and later expanded their work to protective
ointments and certain problems in pathology.
In the spring of 1918 many of these men were commissioned into
the Gas Defense Service of the Sanitary Corps, and were later
transferred to the Chemical Warfare Service as the Medical Division,
with Colonel W. J. Lyster, M.C., in charge.
One of the most important functions of this Division was the daily
testing of a large number of compounds for toxicity, lachrymatory or
vesicant properties. The accuracy of these tests might and probably
did save a large amount of unnecessary experimental work on the
part of the Research Division. These tests are described in a later
chapter.
Very interesting and likewise valuable was the study of mustard
gas by Marshall, Lynch and Smith. They were able to work out the
mechanism of its action and the varying degrees of susceptibility in
individuals (see page 171).
 Another interesting point was the fact that in the case of certain
gases there is a cumulative effect. With superpalite and mustard gas
the lethal concentration (that concentration which is fatal after a
given exposure) is lower on longer exposures. On the other hand
there is no cumulative effect with hydrocyanic acid. Whether the
action is cumulative or not depends on the rate at which the system
destroys or eliminates the poison.

Liaison Officers
This chapter should not be closed without reference to the
Liaison Service that was established between the United States and
her Allies, especially England.
During the early days no one in the States was familiar with the
details of gas warfare. At the request of the Medical Corps, upon the
urgent representations of the Gas Service, A.E.F., Captain (now
Major) H. W. Dudley was sent to this country (Sept., 1917) to assist
in the development and manufacture of gas masks. For some time
he was the Court of Appeal on nearly all technical points regarding
matters of defense. Dudley’s continual insistence on the need for
maintaining the highest possible standard of factory inspection was
one of the factors resulting in the excellent construction of the
American Mask. In March, 1918, Lieut. Col. Dewey and Captain
Dudley made a trip to England and France, during which the idea of
a liaison between the defense organizations of the two countries
originated. Dudley was transferred to the Engineers, promoted and
placed in charge of the Liaison service. While the time until the
Armistice was too short to really test the idea, enough was
accomplished to show the extreme desirability of some such
arrangement.
Probably the best known liaison officer from the British was
Colonel S. J. M. Auld, also sent upon the urgent representations of
the Gas Service, A.E.F. He arrived in this country about the middle of
October, 1917, in charge of 28 officers and 28 non-commissioned
officers, who were to act as advisers in training and many other
military subjects besides gas warfare. Since Auld had had personal
experience with gas warfare as then practiced at the front, his advice
was welcomed most heartily by all the different branches of the Army
then handling gas warfare. On questions of general policy Auld was
practically the sole foreign adviser. The matter of gas training was
transferred from the Medical Corps to the Engineers, and was
greatly assisted by four pamphlets on Gas Warfare issued by the
War College, which were prepared by Major Auld with the assistance
of Captain Walton and Lieut. Bohnson. Later Auld gave the
American public a very clear idea of gas warfare in his series of
articles appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, and re-written as
“Gas and Flame.”
Major H. R. LeSueur, who was at Porton previous to his arrival in
this country in December, 1917, rendered valuable aid in
establishing the Experimental Proving Ground and in its later
operations.
Towards the close of the war the British War Office had drawn up
a scheme for a Gas Mission, which was to correlate all the gas
activities of England and America. This was never carried through
because of the signing of the Armistice.
The French representatives, M. Grignard, Capt. Hanker and Lt.
Engel furnished valuable information as to French methods, but they
were handicapped by the fact that French manufacturers did not
disclose their trade secrets even to their own Government.
About August, 1918, Lieut. Col. James F. Norris opened an office
in London. His duties were to establish cordial and intimate relations
not only with the various agencies of the British Government which
were connected with gas warfare, but also with the various
laboratories where experiments were being conducted, that
important changes might be transmitted to America with the least
possible delay. The English made Colonel Norris a member of the
British Chemical Warfare Committee. Here again the signing of the
Armistice prevented a full realization of the importance of this work.
 CHAPTER IV
THE CHEMICAL WARFARE SERVICE
IN FRANCE

It is worth noting here that the Chemical Warfare Service was

organized as a separate service in the American Expeditionary
Forces nearly ten months before it was organized in the United
States, and that the organization in the United States as heretofore
described was patterned closely on that found so successful in
France.
Very soon after the United States declared war against the
Central Powers, a commission was sent abroad to study the various
phases of warfare as carried on by the Allies, and as far as possible
by the enemy. Certain members of this commission gave attention to
chemical warfare. One of those who did this was Professor Hulett of
Princeton University. He, with certain General Staff officers, gathered
what information they could in England and France concerning the
gases used and methods of manufacturing them, and to a very slight
extent the methods of projecting those gases upon the enemy. Some
attention was paid to gas masks, but there being nobody on the
General Staff, or anywhere else in the Regular Army, whose duty it
was to look out particularly for chemical warfare materials, these
studies produced no results.
As has already been stated, the Medical Department started the
manufacture of masks, and the Bureau of Mines, under the
leadership of the Director, Mr. Manning, began studies upon
poisonous gases and the methods of manufacturing them just before
or shortly after war was declared.
Nevertheless, although American troops left for France in May,
1917, it was not until the end of August—the 17th to be exact—that
definite action was taken toward establishing a Chemical Warfare
Service, or, as it was then known, a Gas Service in the American
Expeditionary Forces. On that date a cablegram was sent to the
United States to the effect that it was desired to make Lieut. Col.
Amos A. Fries, Corps of Engineers, Chief of the Gas Service, and
requesting that no assignments to the regiment of gas troops
authorized in the United States be made which would conflict with
this appointment. On August 22d, Lieut. Col. Fries entered upon his
duties as Chief of the Gas Service.
There were then in France about 30 miles from the German lines,
some 12,000 American troops without any gas masks or training
whatever in Chemical Warfare. Immediate steps were taken to teach
the wearing of the masks, and English and French gas masks were
obtained for them at the earliest possible moment. At the same time
efforts were made to obtain officer personnel for the C. W. S., and to
have sent to France a laboratory for making such emergency
researches, experiments, and testing as might become necessary.
From that time to the end of the war the C. W. S. continued to
develop on broad lines covering research, development, and
manufacture; the filling of shell and other containers with poisonous
gases, smoke and incendiary materials; the purchase of gas masks
and other protective devices, as well as the handling and supply of
these materials in the field; the training of the Army in chemical
warfare methods, both in offense and defense; and the organization,
equipment and operation of special gas troops.
This gave an ideal organization whereby research was linked
with the closest possible ties to the firing line, and where the
necessities of the firing line were brought home to the supply and
manufacturing branches and to the development and research
elements of the Service instantly and with a force that could not have
been obtained in any other manner. The success of the C. W. S. in
the field and at home was due to this complete organization. To the
Commander-in-Chief, General Pershing, is due the credit for
authorizing this organization and for backing it up whenever
occasion demanded. Other details of this work will be considered
under the following heads: Administrative; Training; Chemical
Warfare Troops; Supply; Technical; Intelligence; and Medical.
 Administrative Duties
The duties of administration covered those necessary for a
general control of research, of supply, of training, and the operation
of special gas troops. At first the Chief of the Gas Service comprised
the whole of the Service since he was without personnel, material,
rules, regulations, or anything else of a chemical warfare nature.
The experience in getting together this organization should be
sufficient to insure that the United States will never place on any
other man’s shoulders the burden of organizing a new and powerful
service in the midst of war, 4,000 miles from home, without
precedent, material, or anything else on which to base action. It is
true the Americans had available the experience of the English and
the French, and it should be said to the credit of both of these
nations that they gave of their experience, their time, and their
material with the greatest freedom and willingness, but just as
Americans are Americans and were Americans in 1917, just so the
methods of the French and English or of the enemy were not entirely
suitable to American conditions.
If there is any one thing needed in the training of U. S. Army
leaders of today and for the future, it is vision—vision that can
foresee the size of a conflict and make preparations accordingly. We
do not mean vision that will order, as happened in some cases, ten
times as much material as could possibly be used by even 5,000,000
troops, but the sort of vision that could foresee in the fall of 1917 that
2,000,000 men might be needed in France and then make
preparations to get materials there for those troops by the time they
arrived.
In order to cover the early formative period of the C. W. S. in
France and to show some of the difficulties encountered, the
following running account is given of some of the early happenings
without regard to the subdivisions under which they might properly
be considered.
Assignment of Chief of the Gas Service. Sailing from the
United States on the 23d of July, 1917, Fries arrived in Paris on the
morning of August 14, 1917, and was immediately assigned the task
of organizing a highway service for the American Expeditionary
Forces. Five days later and before the highway order was issued, he
was asked what he would think if his orders were changed so as to
make him Chief of the newly proposed Gas Service. Being given one
night to think it over he told the General Staff he would undertake the
work. The road work was immediately closed up and on the 22d of
August the organization of a Gas Service was actively started.
At that time some information concerning gases and gas troops
had been gathered by Colonel Barber of the General Staff. Likewise,
Colonel (later Brigadier General) Hugh A. Drum had made a rough
draft of an order accompanied by a diagram for the establishment of
the Gas Service. This information was turned over to Fries who was
told to complete the draft of the order, together with an organization
chart, for the action of the Commander-in-Chief. After one and a half
days had been put on this work the draft and chart were considered
in good enough shape to submit to General Pershing, Commander-
in-Chief.
First Trip to British Gas Headquarters. Noting that the
proposed organization provided for the handling of 4-inch Stokes’
mortars by gas troops, General Pershing asked why this work could
not be done by regular trench mortar companies. He was told that
gas operations were too technical and dangerous to be intrusted to
any but especially trained troops, and that, furthermore, it was
understood that 4-inch Stokes’ mortars were used only by the British
troops. General Pershing said, “You had better beat it to the British
Gas Headquarters in the field and settle definitely that and certain
other minor points.” Fries told him he was only too glad to do this,
and, having completed preparations, left on the morning of August
25th with Colonel Church and Captain Boothby, both of the Medical
Department, for St. Omer, Headquarters of the British Gas Service in
the Field.
Colonel Church of the Medical Department had been in France
nearly one and a half years prior to the entry of the United States
into the war, and had taken sufficient interest in Gas Warfare to
collect considerable information and a number of documents from
French sources bearing on the defensive side of the subject. Captain
Boothby had done the same with the British, including a course in a
British Gas Defense School. On this trip they took up the defensive
side with the British, while Fries took up the offensive side of the
Service. The latter included gases used, gas troops, and ammunition
and guns used in Gas Warfare by the Artillery and other branches of
the Service. The trip included a brief visit to the headquarters of the
First British Army in the vicinity of Lens, where the British Gas
Service had a large depot of offensive gas material.
Order Forming Service. Returning on the 28th of August the
order, together with a chart organizing the Service, was completed
and submitted to the General Staff. This was published as G. O. 31,
September 3, 1917. As a result of a study of the information
submitted by Colonel Barber and General Drum, together with his
own observations of British organization and work, Fries decided it
was advisable to make the Service cover as complete a scope as
possible and to make the order very general, leaving details to be
worked out as time and experience permitted. This proved to be a
very wise decision, because the entire absence of gas knowledge
among Americans either in France or the United States made it
necessary to build from the bottom up and do it rapidly. At that time,
and at all times since, it was found utterly impossible to separate the
defensive side from the offensive side. Indeed, many of the worst
troubles of the British with their Gas Service throughout nearly the
whole war arose from such a division of duties in their Service. Thus,
the development of masks must be kept parallel with the
development of gases and methods of discharging them. Otherwise
a new gas invented may penetrate existing masks and preparations
be carried far towards using it before the development of masks are
undertaken to care for the new gas. Obviously a gas which our own
masks will not take care of cannot be safely used by our own troops
until new masks are developed to protect against it.
American and British Masks. Just prior to Fries’s assignment
as Chief of the Gas Service twenty thousand American-made masks
or box respirators were received from the United States. Through the
energy of Captain Boothby several of these had been sent at once to
the British for test. The test showed that the granules in the canisters
were entirely too soft, the charcoal of poor quality, and more than all
else, the fabric of the face piece was so pervious to gases that
chloropicrin became unbearable to the eyes in less than a minute
under the standard test used by the British. A cable containing this
information had been framed and sent to the United States just prior
to Fries’s appointment as Chief of the Service.
August 23d, the day after Fries took charge, it was decided to
adopt the British mask or box respirator as the principal mask and
the French M-2 as an emergency, both to be carried by the soldier,
the French M-2, however, to be used only when the British mask
became lost or unfit for use. A requisition for one hundred thousand
of each was at once submitted and very shortly approved by the
General Staff.
Getting Gas Supplies. It should be stated here that inasmuch as
no Gas Service had been organized in the United States, no money
appropriation had been made for it, thereby making it necessary for
the Gas Service to obtain all its supplies through other departments
ordinarily handling the same or similar materials. Thus defensive
supplies were obtained through the Medical Department and
offensive supplies through the Ordnance Department, while other
miscellaneous equipment was obtained through the Engineer
Department, the Quartermaster Department, or the Signal Corps.
This procedure proved exceedingly embarrassing, cumbersome and
inefficient. To begin with it was necessary to get some agreement
between the departments as to what each would supply. This was
very difficult, resulting in delays and consumption of time which was
urgently needed on other work.
Not only was there trouble in getting orders accepted and started
on the way but following them up became practically impossible.
None of the Departments furnishing the materials were especially
interested in them nor in many instances did they realize the vital
nature of them. Accordingly in order to get any action it was
necessary to continually follow up all orders and doing this through
another department created friction and misunderstanding. Officers
of these departments took the attitude that the whole question of
obtaining supplies should be left to them, once the requisition was
turned in. This could not be done. The Chief of the Gas Service was
absolutely responsible for gas supplies, and he fully realized that no
excuses would be accepted, no matter who stood in the way. It was
necessary to get action. Finally the matter was settled, some six
months after the Service was organized, by giving the Chemical
Warfare Service the right of direct purchase.
Purchase of Offensive Gas Supplies. Realizing the difficulty
that would probably be encountered in getting supplies at all times
from the British and French, two requisitions for offensive gas
supplies to be purchased from the British were submitted on
September 8th and 10th respectively. It would seem proper to state
here that investigation showed the British gas organization to be far
superior to the French. Indeed, the latter practically had no
organization.
Consequently it was determined to purchase complete equipment
for gas troops and for the defensive side of the service from the
British and to make no attempt to produce new materials, methods
or equipment until ample supplies of the standard equipment of the
British were at hand or in process of manufacture or delivery. This
was another exceedingly wise conclusion. No supplies of any kind
were received from the United States for the next eight months, and
then only masks and certain defensive supplies. Indeed, no
cylinders, mortars, projectors or artillery shell containing gas were
received from the United States until just before the Armistice,
though gas had been available in the United States for months in
large quantities, over 3,600 tons having been shipped in one ton
containers to the English and French. The Ordnance material was
what was lacking.
Obtaining Personnel. On September. 8, Colonel R. W. Crawford
was assigned to duty with the Gas Service. This matter of obtaining
personnel became immediately, and continued for almost a year to
be, one of the most serious difficulties facing the new Gas Service.
The troubles here again were the same as those in respect to
supplies. None of the old departments were especially interested in
gas and hence none of them desired to let good officers be
transferred.
Officers were scarce in the early days in France in every
department of the Service, consequently a new department with no
organization in the United States and no precedents or opportunities
for promotion made the obtaining of officers almost a matter of
impossibility. Further than this, while the Engineer Department was
at first supposed to furnish most of the officer personnel, it failed to
do so, apparently looking upon the Gas Service as an unimportant
matter when compared with the regular work of the Engineers. It was
necessary to make direct application to the Chief of Staff to obtain
Colonel Crawford and shortly thereafter to cable directly to the
United States for officers. A year later enough officers were obtained
but only after the organization of a separate Service in the United
States.
Supplies for Gas Troops. Colonel Crawford was at once put in
Charge of all supplies for the Gas Service, including the location and
construction of separate depots for that Service. Prior to this the
General Staff had decided to have chemical supplies stored in
depots separate from those of other supplies on account of the
poisonous nature of the gases which might prove very annoying if
leakage occurred near any other class of supplies. Colonel Crawford
took hold of this work with zeal and energy and so conducted it as to
relieve the Chief of the Gas Service of all anxiety in that matter. As
before stated, on the 10th of September a requisition for a very large
quantity of offensive supplies for gas troops was submitted to the
General Staff for approval. Inasmuch as this involved approximately
50,000 gas cylinders, 50,000 Liven’s drums, with at least 20,000
Liven’s projectors and a large number of Stokes’ mortars and
bombs, there was considerable difficulty in getting it approved.
Finally Colonel Malone of the Training Section, who took an active
interest in the Chemical Warfare Service, got it approved. Then
began the difficulty of getting the order placed and of trying to
expedite the filling of the order on time. These difficulties were never
overcome until after the entire purchase of supplies was, as
previously related, taken care of by the Gas Service.