The New York Review of Books – N.

05,
March 24 2022 Various Authors
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-new-york-review-of-books-n-05-march-24-2022-v
arious-authors/
 Tim Judah: Disbelief in Ukraine

March 24, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 5

Sheila Heti: The Rigorous Novels of Lena Andersson

Christopher Browning: Consensus at Wannsee
Anahid Nersessian: Louise Glück’s Late Style
Jerry Brown: Groupthink on China
Madeleine Schwartz: Anne Hidalgo’s Green Paris
IN THEATERS A FILM BY
NOW SEBASTIAN MEISE
ON MUBI STARRING
MAY 6 FRANZ ROGOWSKI mubi.com/greatfreedom
Contents
4 Peter Brooks The American Scene by Henry James, edited by Peter Collister
8 Jenny Uglow The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein by Franny Moyle
Holbein: Capturing Character an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum,
New York City
THE
12 Jerry Brown
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Anne T. Woollett
The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict
by Elbridge A. Colby
NATURE
The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi
China Unbound: A New World Disorder by Joanna Chiu
and two other books and a report about US foreign policy and China
OF THE
15
16
Jorie Graham
Sheila Heti
Poem
Willful Disregard: A Novel About Love by Lena Andersson
Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson
BEASTS
Son of Svea: A Tale of the People’s Home by Lena Andersson
18 J. Hoberman Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn a film written and directed by Radu Jude
The New Romanian Cinema edited by Christina Stojanova
The Romanian Cinema of Nationalism: Historical Films as Propaganda and Spectacle
by Onoriu Colăcel
19 William Logan Poem
21 Madeleine Schwartz Une femme française by Anne Hidalgo
24 Jed Perl Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life by Debra Bricker Balken
The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly, Portraits and Sketches,
1942–2011 by Edith Schloss, edited by Mary Venturini
27 Anahid Nersessian Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück
29 Christopher R. Browning Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution by Peter Longerich
32 Michelle Nijhuis A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It by Alex Riley
38 Tim Parks An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans
The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans
A Guardian Angel Recalls by Willem Frederik Hermans
Beyond Sleep by Willem Frederik Hermans A S HL E Y WA R D
41 Tim Flannery Coral Reefs: A Natural History by Charles Sheppard
Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald
43 Tim Judah Ukraine on the Brink
THE SOCIAL LIVES
45 Letters from Laurence Senelick and Christopher Benfey
OF ANIMALS
CONTRIBUTORS
PETER BROOKS is the author of Henry James Goes to WILLIAM LOGAN’s latest book of poems is Rift of Light;
Paris. His new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of his latest book of essays is Broken Ground: Poetry and the
Narrative, will be published in October. Demon of History. “A great antidote to the
JERRY BROWN was Governor of California from 1975 to
ANAHID NERSESSIAN is a Professor of English at the dog-eat-dog view of nature
1983 and 2011 to 2019. He is the Chair of the California–
China Climate Institute at the University of California at University of California at Los Angeles. A new edition of her that we grew up with.”
Berkeley and the Executive Chair of The Bulletin of the book Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse will be published in
Atomic Scientists. the fall. — F R A N S D E WA A L ,
CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING is the Frank Porter MICHELLE NIJHUIS is a Project Editor at The Atlantic,
author of Mama’s Last Hug
Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of a Contributing Editor at High Country News, and the author
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Origins of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction,
of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, which was published last year.
September 1939–March 1942. “A delectable read that leaves
TIM FLANNERY’s most recent book is Europe: A Natural TIM PARKS is the author of many novels, translations, and you with a sense of kinship for
History. works of nonfiction, most recently The Hero’s Way: Walking
with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna. social creatures big and small.”
JORIE GRAHAM’s forthcoming poetry collection is [To]
the Last [Be] Human. She teaches at Harvard. JED PERL’s Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts —LUCY COOKE,
SHEILA HETI is the author of the novels Motherhood and has just been published. author of The Truth About Animals
How Should a Person Be?, among other books. Her latest
novel, Pure Colour, was published in February. MADELEINE SCHWARTZ is a regular contributor to The
New York Review based in Paris.
J. HOBERMAN’s most recent book is a monograph on the
1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup. “A thoughtful exploration of the
JENNY UGLOW’s books include A Gambling Man: Charles
TIM JUDAH is the author of In Wartime: Stories from II and the Restoration and Hogarth: A Life and a World. Her complex minds that share
Ukraine. He has reported for The New York Review from new book, Sybil and Cyril: Cutting Through Time, was pub-
Ukraine, the Balkans, Niger, Armenia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. lished in the UK in February. the planet with us. Ashley Ward
will give you a new appreciation
Editor: Emily Greenhouse Publisher: Rea S. Hederman
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae
Executive Editor: Jana Prikryl
Associate Publisher, Business Operations: Michael King
Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning: Janice Fellegara
for the bonds, emotions, and
Senior Editors: Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein, Hasan Altaf
Contributing Editors: Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen
Editor-at-Large: Daniel Mendelsohn
connections that we thought set
Art Editor: Leanne Shapton
Lauren Kane, Managing Editor; Lucy Jakub, Associate Editor; Nawal Arjini and Willa Glickman, Assistant Editors; Jazz Boothby and Edgar Llivisupa, Editorial
us apart, but in reality, just bring
Interns; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher; Will Palmer, Copyeditor; Daniel Drake, Production Editor; Will Simpson, Type Production; Kazue Jensen, Production;
Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Sharmaine Ong, Advertising Associate; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janis Harden, us closer to the animal world.”
Fulfillment Director; Andrea Moore, Circulation Manager; Angela Hederman, Special Projects; Diane R. Seltzer, Office Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights;
Max Margenau, Comptroller; Vanity Luciano, Assistant Accountant; Teddy Wright, Receptionist. — VA N E S S A W O O D S ,
Founding Editors: Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) and Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
nybooks.com: Matt Seaton, Editor New York Times–bestselling
author of Bonobo Handshake
Ŷ Gal Beckerman: Samizdat and the USSR’s Downfall Ŷ Molly Crabapple: The Joy of a Yiddish Bookstore
What’s new on
Ŷ Peter Beinart: Why Ukraine Is Not Taiwan for the US Ŷ Ariel Dorfman: Chile’s Bold Adventure in Democracy
nybooks.com Plus: Joyce Carol Oates on the voice of the critic, David Cole on academic freedom, and more . . . basicbooks.com

On the cover: Clara Adolphs, Close, 2019 (Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney, and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide).
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April,
May, June, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001
and at additional offices. Canada Post Corp. Sales Agreement #40031306. Postmaster: Send address changes to The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big Sandy,
TX 75755-9310. Subscription services: www.nybooks.com/customerservice, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info, or call 800-354-0050 in the US, 903-636-1101 elsewhere.

3

The American Scene
by Henry James,
edited by Peter Collister.
Cambridge University Press,
664 pp., $110.00
A few days before his sixtieth birth-
day, in 1903, Henry James wrote to his
brother William of his desire to return
to his native land after twenty-some
years of self- exile. William quickly re-
sponded that the trip was a bad idea;
he could imagine “the sort of physi-
cal loathing with which many features
of our national life will inspire you,”
including “the vocalization of our
countrymen. . . . It is simply incredibly
loathsome.” Henry was undeterred:
Simply and supinely to shrink—on
mere grounds of general fear and
encouraged shockability has to me
all the air of giving up, chucking
away without a struggle, the one
chance that remains to me in life
of anything that can be called a
movement: my one little ewe-lamb
of possible exotic experience, such
experience as may convert itself,
through the senses, through ob-
servation, imagination and reflec-
tion now at their maturity, into
vivid and solid material, into a
general renovation of one’s too
monotonised grab-bag.
A slightly campy challenge to his
older brother this was, joined to the
claim that he would gain material for
his writing from a return to his be-
ginnings. He wanted the shocks that
William mentioned, wanted also the
“exotic experience” of traveling beyond
New York and New England to see the
entire country: the South and the Mid-
west and the Far West all the way to
California.
Henry did, of course, experience the
horrors predicted by William, includ-
ing the “slovenly” use of “vocal sound,
in men and women alike . . . a mere
helpless slobber of disconnected vowel
noises,” as he put it in “The Question
of Our Speech,” a commencement ad-
dress he gave at Bryn Mawr. But his
essay-travelogue about the trip, The
American Scene, which features as
narrator-protagonist a self that James
calls “the restless analyst,” is com-
plex, nuanced, and brilliant as well as
exasperating, one of the great works
of American sociology, and an endur-
ing indictment of what Americans had
made of their land.
Between August 1904 and July 1905
James traveled: south to Philadelphia,
Washington, Richmond, Charleston,
Palm Beach, and St. Augustine—
despite frequent returns to Boston for
bouts of dentistry—then west to St.
Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Mil-
waukee, then on to Los Angeles and
San Diego and up to San Francisco,
Portland, and Seattle. It was all done by
train: even Chocorua, New Hampshire,
where William had a summer house,
could be reached by train—it then was
close to the apogee of the American
rail network. The trip also turned out
to be profitable, since James soon was
commanding $500 to present a lecture,
on the French novelist Balzac of all
improbable subjects, to audiences not
4 The New York Review
Visions of Waste
Peter Brooks
Henry James; illustration by James McMullan
only in Philadelphia and Chicago but
also St. Louis and Indianapolis. The
American Scene ends following the trip
to Florida; a projected second volume
on the trail west never was written.
It’s his birthplace, New York, that
especially engages James’s restless at-
tention. At times his four chapters on
the city make for very unpleasant read-
ing, especially his visits to the Jewish
“Ghetto” on the Lower East Side and
to the “visible act of ingurgitation”
of immigrants on Ellis Island. James
is a snob, nostalgic for the traditional
cityscape of Washington Square that
he knew as a boy, and for a more ho-
mogeneous upper class. He speaks
the unreflective anti- Semitism of his
time and caste—yet he also spends an
evening in the Yiddish theater. He is
shaken by the flood of immigration (a
record 1,004,756 arrivals were recorded
in 1907, the year The American Scene
was published). Yet all this leads him
not to rejection but rather to the reflec-
tion that old New Yorkers held the land
in “unsettled possession,” and it is they,
not “the aliens,” who must adjust, must
go more than halfway toward meet-
ing the new arrivals. Who in America
is not an alien? he asks. New York is
for James a lesson in “dispossession,”
a theme that haunts the whole of The
American Scene, suggesting that Amer-
ican civilization is a kind of temporary
encampment in a land grabbed but not
truly possessed.
James summarizes the moral that
America emerging from the Gilded
Age seems to offer: “To make so much
money that you won’t, that you don’t
‘mind,’ don’t mind anything—that is
absolutely, I think, the main American
formula.” It follows that if you don’t
make money you will “mind” the pub-
lic thinness and waste of American life,
and be reduced to “the knowledge that
America is no place for you.” There is
a grim social price paid by American
“progress”; finding in the city streets a
“new style of poverty” compared with
what he had observed in European cit-
ies, James notes: “There is such a thing,
in the United States, it is hence to be
inferred, as freedom to grow up to be
blighted, and it may be the only free-
dom in store for the smaller fry of fu-
ture generations.”
The “restless renewal” of the city, the
constant destruction and rebuilding of
the New York skyline, obsesses him.
He could not appreciate the skyscraper,
and he abhorred the “religion” of the
elevator, “the packed and hoisted bas-
ket” that made tall buildings possible,
which he turns into “an almost intoler-
able symbol of the herded and driven
state” of New Yorkers. In contrast to
European cities, New York never pro-
poses to have the dignity of the old.
Buildings and entire blocks are always
coming down, and new ones going up.
He hears the “powers above”—those
who crack the whip—speak to the city:
There’s no step at which you shall
rest, no form, as I’m constantly
showing you, to which, consistently
with my interests, you can. I build
you up but to tear you down, for if
I were to let sentiment and sincer-
ity once take root, were to let any
tenderness of association once ac-
cumulate, or any “love of the old”
once pass unsnubbed, what would
become of us, who have our hands
on the whipstock, please?
New York, in sum, gives James the “in-
teresting, appealing, touching vision of
waste.”
What America offers in lieu of a
settled social order is the artificial so-
ciety of the hotel, a place of apparent
free enjoyment for an army of pup-
pets under the control of the “master-
spirits of management.” The hotel is “a
synonym for civilization,” and James
asks if “the hotel- spirit may not just
be the American spirit most seeking
and most finding itself.” He wanders
through the “immense promiscuity”
of the Waldorf-Astoria, finding in it
the notably American “supremely gre-
garious state.” It’s an institution de-
voted to “the greatest happiness of the
greatest number,” a kind of utilitarian
luxury available to all who can pay the
price.
He returns to “hotel- civilization”
when he stays at the Breakers in Palm
Beach. Finding that this grand estab-
lishment doesn’t really pay attention to
the individual’s wants, James reflects in
more and more inflated terms on the
tyranny of the hotel spirit and its will-
ing victims. The hotel comes to stand
for the lack of understanding of what
is being passed off as civilization to the
American populace: “Beguiled and
caged, positively thankful, in its vast
vacancy, for the sense and the definite
horizon of a cage.” So it is that the com-
promise demanded of the individual by
the “jealous cultivation of the common
mean, the common mean only, the re-
duction of everything to an average of
decent suitability” becomes a kind of
betrayal of the original democratic idea.
James’s strictures on the simulated
civilization of the hotel don’t quite pre-
pare us for his appreciation of a differ-
ent American innovation, the country
club. But he recognizes in it the inven-
tion of a new form of sociability proper
to a democracy, anchored in the fam-
ily. The country club, he claims, “is ev-
erywhere a clear American felicity; a
complete product of the social soil and
air which alone have made it possible.”
James, who belonged to the Athenaeum
and the Reform Club in London, per-
ceives that the country club “wouldn’t
do in Europe”; it belongs to the new so-
ciety: “It becomes, for the restless ana-
lyst, one of the garden-lamps in which
the flame of Democracy burns whitest
and steadiest and most floods the sub-
ject.” To see the country club as a pre-
eminently democratic institution has
struck some of James’s commentators,
including W. H. Auden and F. O. Mat-
thiessen, as obtuse. To be sure, from
most perspectives it represents hierar-
chy, selection, and exclusion. No Jews,
no Blacks, no working class, no lower-
middle class: the country club was for
the aspiring American elite, those who
had made enough money and estab-
lished themselves as sufficiently genteel
to raise barriers and close gates against
others.
Yet I think James is on to something
here. He doesn’t see American de-
mocracy as dedicated to equality—it
never has been—but rather to what he
calls “eligibility,” which can be made
good only through acquired wealth.
He isn’t naive about qualifications for
this eligibility; they simply strike him
as definitional of American democracy
in a way he often and loudly deplores
throughout The American Scene. If
the country club plays a redemptive
part in American culture, it’s be-
cause it takes what is most character-
istic of New World society and makes
it pleasant. Country clubs represent
American manners as “the apotheosis
 Explore Our
New Exhibitions

Charles Ray: Jacques Louis David: Fictions of Emancipation:

Figure Ground Radical Draftsman
Through June 5 Through May 15
Provocative, profound works from the Moments of inspiration captured on
American sculptor’s 50-year career. paper reveal the creative process
behind David’s celebrated paintings.
Carpeaux Recast
Now On View
A single marble bust sparks an in-depth
look at portrayals of Black enslavement,
emancipation, and personhood.

Plan your visit at metmuseum.org. Find our publications in The Met Store.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

Charles Ray: Figure Ground is made
possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee
Wigmore Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the
Jane and Robert Carroll Fund, Angela A. Chao
and Jim Breyer, Lisa and Steven Tananbaum,
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund,
and the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund.
The catalogue is made possible by
Lannan Foundation and The Sachs
Charitable Foundation.
Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman
is made possible by the Eugene V. and
Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust.
Additional support is provided by the
Margaret and Richard Riney Family
Foundation and The Schiff Foundation.
The catalogue is made possible by the
Drue E. Heinz Fund.
Additional support is provided by the
Tavolozza Foundation and Hubert and
Mireille Goldschmidt.
Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast
is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald
Cantor Foundation.
Additional support is provided by Allen R. Adler
and Frances F. L. Beatty.
The catalogue is made possible by The Met’s
Fund for Diverse Art Histories, Mary J. Wallach,
Robert E. Holmes, and the Ford Foundation.
Details: Charles Ray, Mime, 2014.
Kunstmuseum Basel. © Charles Ray,
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Photo by Josh White. Jacques Louis David,
The Oath of the Tennis Court, 1791.
Musée du Louvre, Paris, on deposit at the
Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles
et de Trianon. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais /
Art Resource, NY. Photo by Gérard Blot.
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Why Born Enslaved!,
modeled 1868, carved 1873. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson
Wallace, Wrightsman Fellows, and Iris and
B. Gerald Cantor Foundation Gifts, 2019.

March 24, 2022 5

of the Family—a truth for which they
have by no means received due credit.”
If family is important in Europe as
well, it is in a vertical sense of descent,
how your origins and blood define you,
whereas in America it’s horizonal, a
question of “lateral spread.” Country
clubs accept “the Family as the social
unit—accept its extension, its whole ex-
tension, through social space.”
James sets in relief the radical na-
ture of an institution based on neither
gender nor age exclusion, though in-
evitably creating other exclusions that
bring it into being as the appanage of
families that have acquired wealth and
status:
With no palpable result does the
democratic idea, in the States,
more bristle than with the view
that the younger are “as good” as
the elder; family life is in fact, as
from child to parent, from sister
to brother, from wife to husband,
from employed to employer, the
eminent field of the democratic
demonstration. This then is the
unit that, with its latent multipli-
cations, the Country Club takes
over. . . .
It was thus a new and original
thing—rare phenomenon—and ac-
tually an “important” one; for what
did it represent . . . but the active
Family, as a final social fact, or in
other words the sovereign People,
as a pervasive and penetrative mass,
“doing” themselves on unprece-
dented lines?
In his search to articulate what his
native land has become following the
Gilded Age, James is by no means
wrong to single out the country club.
James’s itinerary led him through the
major cities on the eastern seaboard.
He is particularly eloquent in his por-
trait of Richmond, Virginia, as tasting
of “the very bitterness of the immense,
grotesque, defeated project—the proj-
ect, extravagant, fantastic, and to- day
pathetic in its folly, of a vast Slave
State.” The monumental equestrian
statue of Robert E. Lee is a reminder
“of having worshipped false gods.” But
he expresses a curious affection for
Washington, D.C.—the “City of Con-
versation,” he calls it—largely because
it’s a place where no one is in business,
and you can forget “the colossal greed
of New York.” We don’t today much
identify Washington as a place of good
conversation, but for James it may have
been since he lodged with his old friend
Henry Adams, next door to another
old friend, John Hay, now secretary of
state, and renewed acquaintance with
others long known: the sculptor Augus-
tus Saint- Gaudens, the painter John La
Farge.
Through Hay’s influence he lunched
with the man he dubbed “Theodore
Rex” at the White House and then
attended a grand diplomatic recep-
tion, where he was seated at President
Roosevelt’s table. They were far from
friends: James, firmly opposed to jin-
goistic empire building, once called
Roosevelt “the mere monstrous em-
bodiment of unprecedented and re-
sounding noise”; and Roosevelt was
on record as saying that James was “a
miserable little snob.” No one could be
further from his manly ideal of “the
strenuous life.” But they both behaved
6 The New York Review
politely, and James in a letter to Edith
Wharton described the president as
“verily a wonderful little machine.”
The architect Charles McKim in-
vited him to still another dinner, with
the president and Supreme Court jus-
tice John Marshall Harlan among the
guests, a dinner “beautifully done—
but the Eagle screamed in the speeches
as I didn’t know that that Fowl was
still (after all these years and improve-
ments) permitted to do.” America was
now, for better and mostly worse, a
world power.
It came as something of a surprise
to the deeply private James that he
proved such a success as a lecturer,
attracting audiences of five to six hun-
dred people in packed halls. His lec-
ture “The Lesson of Balzac” is a rich
and dense affair even on reading. But
Balzac was far better known in 1904
America than he is now, and James’s
audiences were often women’s clubs
firmly devoted to cultural uplift. He
was by then a celebrity-by-absence in
his native land, and people came, if just
to see him. In Indianapolis, he brought
out the whole of the city’s cultural elite
when he spoke before a joint session
of the Indianapolis Literary Club, the
Contemporary Club, and the Irvington
Atheneum (their names remind us of
the place of cultural associations and
societies in the cultivation of the Amer-
ican mind)—an event celebrated in the
local press. The talk was reviewed by
some with enthusiastic praise, by others
with more reserve: “It was a panorama
of word pictures requiring an hour to
unroll. . . . He apparently assumed that
all the brilliant assemblage were au-
thors, novelists, or shortly to become
so.”
Peter Collister’s helpfully if overly
annotated scholarly edition of The
American Scene includes in an appen-
dix “The Lesson of Balzac” and “The
Question of Our Speech,” as well as
an article James wrote for Harper’s
Bazaar, “The Manners of American
Women.” This last is a remarkably in-
teresting reflection not simply on the
apparent lack of manners among young
American women he observes “shout-
ing, flouncing, romping, uproariously
jesting” on a train (“romping” is never
a good thing for women to be doing in
James), but on the question of what
“manners” are and are for. He sees
them as a system of social relations, as
“forms” that permit social interaction
without undue friction and anxiety,
and once again, the antidote to “a civ-
ilization addicted to nothing if not to
waste”:
Manners are above all—and it is
the best plea for them—an econ-
omy; the sacrifice of them has al-
ways in the long run to be made
up, just as the breakages and dilap-
idations have to be paid for at the
end of the tenancy of a house care-
lessly occupied. These changes in
the mass become so large that the
tenant ruefully asks if a little less
smashing mightn’t have been the
better plan. By an excess of misuse
moreover a house is fatally disfig-
ured . . . the vision of such waste is a
vision of barbarism.
James’s indictment claims that Amer-
ican social life has been made more,
not less, difficult by the abolition of
forms. Lack of form is everywhere a
problem, in the American landscape
as well. James praises the fencing in
of Harvard Yard (completed early in
the twentieth century) as “an admira-
bly interesting example of the way in
which the formal enclosure of objects
at all interesting immediately refines
upon their interest, immediately es-
tablishes values.”1 The pastoral New
England landscape through which he
tramped during his stay with William
in New Hampshire is Arcadian but
nonetheless lacking in form: “vague,
empty, rock-roughened pastures,” with
many a sign of farms abandoned. This
makes him think of the difference
made in the English landscape by “the
squire and the parson,” not, I think, as
important persons in the social hier-
archy so much as agents whose build-
ings and enclosures give form to the
landscape.
As he travels southward, James
notes the uncared-for, “forlorn and
depressed” people and landscapes
outside the window of his train with a
sense of unease, that of
the spectator enjoying from his
supreme seat of ease his extraor-
dinary, his awful modern privilege
of this detached yet concentrated
stare at the misery of subject pop-
ulations. . . . It was a monstrous
thing, doubtless, to sit there in a
cushioned and kitchened Pullman
and deny to so many groups of
one’s fellow- creatures any claim to
a “personality.”
Yet this view of abject persons and
places in the richest of countries, from
the comfort of the expensive Pull-
man car, offers a dramatic rendition
of James’s position and his diagnostic
problem. The view from the Pullman
window becomes the framing device
of the eloquent final passage of The
American Scene—a passage so po-
tent that James’s American publisher,
Harper & Brothers, dropped it; it ap-
peared only in the English edition.
As he looks from the window, the
rumble of the train’s wheels seems to
say, “See what I’m making of all this,”
a question then picked up by one of the
indigenous people displaced by Amer-
ican civilization, “one of the painted
savages you have dispossessed”:
Beauty and charm would be for me
in the solitude you have ravaged,
and I should owe you my grudge
for every disfigurement and every
violence, for every wound with
which you have caused the face
of the land to bleed. . . . You touch
the great lonely land—as one feels
it still to be—only to plant upon it
some ugliness about which, never
dreaming of the grace of apology
or contrition, you then proceed to
brag with a cynicism all your own.
You convert the large and noble
sanities that I see around me, you
convert them one after the other
to crudities, to invalidities, hid-
eous and unashamed; and you so
leave them to add to the number
of the myriad aspects you simply
1
On fencing and framing in The Amer-
ican Scene, see the interesting discus-
sion by Susan Winnett in Writing Back:
American Expatriates’ Narratives of
Return (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2013).
spoil, of the myriad unanswerable
questions that you scatter about as
some monstrous unnatural mother
might leave a family of unfathered
infants on doorsteps or in waiting-
rooms.
The “missionary Pullman” becomes
symbolic:
It seemed to stand for all the ir-
responsibility behind it. . . . “You
deal your wounds—that is the
‘trouble,’ as you say—in numbers
so out of proportion to any hint
of responsibility for them that you
seem ever moved to take. . . . Is the
germ of anything finely human,
of anything agreeably or success-
fully social, supposably planted in
conditions of such endless stretch-
ing and such boundless spreading
as shall appear finally to minister
but to the triumph of the super-
ficial and the apotheosis of the
raw?”
James an early ecologist? The ecol-
ogy he cares about is not only of the
land but of a people he finds failing to
implant an ordered vision on the land.
“Painted savage” may offend our con-
temporary sensibility, but choosing the
perspective of the Native American
to record how the white man has laid
waste to the landscape is brilliantly ef-
fective. It anticipates the famous last
page of The Great Gatsby, with its vi-
sion of a pristine Long Island just be-
fore the settlers landed:
For a transitory enchanted mo-
ment man must have held his
breath in the presence of this con-
tinent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither under-
stood nor desired, face to face for
the last time in history with some-
thing commensurate to his capac-
ity for wonder.
After The American Scene, James
undertook to deal with his Ameri-
can experience in a novel, The Ivory
Tower, never finished, not even very
far advanced, which features the ra-
pacious capitalist Abel Gaw—what a
name—and the consequences of great
wealth and enormous inheritances in
the doubtful “society” of Newport.2 It’s
all about what the young European-
educated protagonist Graham Fielder
calls “the awful game of grab.” The
plot apparently was intended to turn
on the inheritance Fielder receives
and lets himself be defrauded of, but
James’s notes for the novel emphasize
the background:
It’s a question of all the intensest
modernity of every American de-
scription; cars and telephones and
facilities and machineries and re-
sources of certain sorts not be ex-
aggerated; which I can’t not take
account of.
But it is a story that seems once again
to speak at the last of dispossession.
Rich as never before in possessions,
America is ultimately barren. Q
2
The Ivory Tower was reissued by New
York Review Books in 2004, with an
introduction by Alan Hollinghurst,
a preface by Percy Lubbock, and an
essay by Ezra Pound.
 UTP Celebrates University of Toronto Authors

PAPER 9781 4875 40 82 1 PAPER 9781487528959 PAPER 978 14875242 10 CLOTH 9 78148752 83 48

"With his customary lucidity,
David M. Beatty has produced
a work that is remarkably
accessible, edifying, and
insightful."
HONOURABLE FRANK IACOBUCCI
Dean Emeritus, University of Toronto Law School
"Degrees of Dignity is a tour
de force of a work on higher
education in the Arab world."
NATASHA RIDGE
Executive Director, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al
Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research
"The Daily Plebiscite is an
absolutely fascinating journey
through David R. Cameron’s
five decades of intellectual
engagement with Canadian
constitutional politics, Canadian
federalism, and Quebec politics."
LUC TURGEON
University of Ottawa
"A deeply personal narrative of
how humanizing relationships
between clinicians and patients
heals trauma."
ALIKA LAFONTAINE
President-Elect, Canadian Medical Association

CLOTH 9781 4875 0 8494 CLOTH 978 1487509057 PAPER 978 1487528416 PAPER 9 78148752 7488

"We come away from "Lambek’s reflections, and the "Miglena S. Todorova "Impeccably edited and
Wittmann’s volume with a commentaries that follow, offer examines the political, helpfully annotated, this is
fresh appreciation and an a remarkable glimpse of what social, and cultural forces a wonderful collection of
enriched understanding of the anthropology and philosophy, that affected a wide range detailed reports that has a
preeminent trial to address the artfully combined, can of women, including great deal to tell us about
crimes of the Holocaust." accomplish." Roma, Muslim, and Social Democracy in a leading
Bulgarian workers in several industrial area of Imperial
LAWRENCE R. DOUGLAS ANDREW SHRYOCK
Amherst College
University of Michigan occupations." Germany."
ELAINE TYLER MAY SIR RICHARD EVANS
University of Minnesota University of Cambridge

@utpress

March 24, 2022 7


The King’s Painter:
The Life and Times of Hans Holbein
by Franny Moyle.
Abrams, 380 pp., $35.00
Holbein: Capturing Character
an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles, October 19,
2021–January 9, 2022; and the Morgan
Library and Museum, New York City,
February 11–May 15, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Anne T. Woollett.
J. Paul Getty Museum, 179 pp., $50.00
Franny Moyle begins The King’s
Painter, her substantial and copiously
illustrated biography of Hans Holbein,
with the story of Henry VIII’s hunt for
a fourth wife. In 1539, two years after
the death of Jane Seymour, he was
looking for a bride from the German
principalities, hoping for allies who
would deter invasion threats from Fran-
cis I of France and the Holy Roman
emperor Charles V. After a couple of
other forays he dispatched Holbein, his
court painter, to Brussels to paint him
a portrait of a likely prospect, Anne of
Cleves. The image pleased; the woman
herself did not. A few weeks after Anne
arrived, on New Year’s Day 1540, a dis-
mayed Henry declared himself unable
to consummate the marriage. Within a
few months it was annulled.
The debacle brought about the
downfall of Thomas Cromwell, the
king’s chief minister, who had negoti-
ated the match, but Holbein, though in
peril, survived. In Moyle’s intriguing
account, Holbein, a genius of multi-
ple talents, is a canny pragmatist and
a master of ambiguities. Alert to both
possibilities and dangers, he negotiates
the complexities of guilds, the shifting
sands of religion, the whims of royalty,
and the traps of politics with impecca-
ble skill. As an artist, his detailed ob-
servation and brilliant technique are
combined with a shrewd sense of what
his patrons want. Yet while Holbein set
out to please, Moyle persuades us that
his own judgments can nonetheless be
read in the subtleties of his drawings
and paintings. In the case of Anne of
Cleves, for example, the full-face com-
position and bland expression hint at a
two- dimensional quality, a certain vac-
uousness. The portrait offered a warn-
ing that the king did not heed.
No one, however, questioned the
accuracy of the likeness. Above all, it
was Holbein’s verisimilitude that made
his contemporaries hold their breath.
Truth to life, the uncanny evocation of
physical likeness, was admired in fash-
ionable humanist circles enthralled by
Pliny the Elder’s account of the illu-
sions of reality produced by the ancient
Greek painters Zeuxis and Apelles.
In the first of six illuminating and
scholarly essays by contributors to
the sumptuous catalog for the exhibi-
tion “Holbein: Capturing Character,”
which moved from the Getty in Los
Angeles to the Morgan in New York in
early 2022, Anne T. Woollett defines
the essence of Holbein’s “pictorial elo-
quence” as a blend of observation and
allusion. The catalog bears this out.
Examining Holbein’s portraits through
8 The New York Review
A Master of Ambiguity
Jenny Uglow
Hans Holbein: Erasmus of Rotterdam, circa 1532
his work as a designer, it traces the de-
velopment of his unnervingly percep-
tive style through a series of striking
paintings, including the famous por-
traits of Erasmus, Thomas More, and
Thomas Cromwell. These illustrate
how he varied his designs to suit his
sitters, and how his use of emblematic
backgrounds and references, ranging
from books and inscriptions to luxu-
rious ornaments and badges, ampli-
fied their impact. For his patrons, his
portrait studies, “visually seductive,
materially complex, and confidently ex-
ecuted,” as Austơja Mackelaitơ puts it
in her essay, defined a likeness, but be-
yond that they constructed an identity.
Holbein’s verisimilitude was not
entirely self-taught. In Woollett’s
words, he “appropriated the Flemish
trait of vivid realism,” learning from
older contemporaries like Albrecht
Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
As Moyle points out, Holbein learned
this realistic approach from his father,
Hans Holbein (or Hanns Holbain) the
Elder. Other artistic traits they shared
were the use of geometric patterns—
as in the famous “Holbein carpets”—
brilliant fabrics, and a favorite palette
of soft pinks and reds, vivid blues and
greens.
In 1497, when Holbein was born, his
father ran a workshop with his brother
Sigmund in Augsburg, a hub of the tim-
ber, paper, and textile industries, and
a center for metalworkers, armorers,
artists, and printers. Holbein the Elder,
a fine painter and sculptor specializing
in devotional works, belonged, Moyle
writes, to “the last generation of art-
ists for whom the traditional Catholic
Church was the patron sans pareil,” and
although he painted in the angular late
Gothic style, he enriched his religious
subjects with a new humanist fidelity
to the “real,” seen in the characterful
faces of the saints, virgins, and kneel-
ing paupers. In Augsburg Holbein grew
Kunstmuseum Basel
up among the wealthy, erudite men and
women who were placing Bavaria at the
forefront of the Northern Renaissance.
The region’s patrons and collectors
were obsessed with classical culture:
the emperor Maximilian, for example,
was keen to trace his ancestry back to
Hector of Troy.
Moyle argues persuasively that in one
panel of a tripartite memorial to the
Walther family in Augsburg’s St. Cath-
erine’s Convent, Holbein the Elder
included a portrait of his cherished
son Hans, a five-year- old with a snub
nose and pudding-bowl haircut. By his
teens, Hans was employed in the Hol-
bein workshop with his older brother
Ambrosius, and Moyle suggests that he
may have contributed figures and ar-
chitectural details to some altarpieces.
This “is entirely feasible” within a fam-
ily workshop, she writes, and “there
is no doubt” such work “would have”
served as a training ground.
Speculation of this kind is found
throughout the book, but although the
use of “must have,” “possibly,” and “is
likely” usually engenders distrust, in
this case it is inevitable. The known
facts of Holbein’s life are sparse, and
Moyle carefully bolsters her intriguing
suggestions with evidence. She writes
particularly well about Holbein’s early
career in Europe, where he acquired
the varied skills that would propel his
rapid rise in the Tudor court.
T he Augsburg years ended in 1516
when Holbein the Elder fell into debt
and fled to Alsace. A year earlier his
two sons had moved to Basel, and
Holbein was living there when Luther
is believed to have pinned his protest
against indulgences to the door of All
Saints’ Church in Wittenberg in Octo-
ber 1517. The most potent influence on
his life, however, was not Lutheranism
but the humanism of Erasmus, another
Basel resident. When the schoolmas-
ter Oswald Geisshüsler, nicknamed
“Myconius” by Erasmus, asked the
Holbein brothers to illustrate his copy
of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, the
eighteen-year-old Hans produced witty,
sympathetic sketches and was soon
making designs for the entrepreneurial
printer Johann Froben, another ally of
Erasmus, who dominated the town’s
printing trade. Eventually, Moyne
writes, Holbein became “one of the
most sought after and prodigious illus-
trators of the sixteenth century.”
Keen to make his name, he defied
the guild rules for journeymen by in-
scribing his initials on his portraits of
Froben, Erasmus, and Basel’s wealthy
mayor, Jacob Meyer, taking refuge in
the fact that “HH” could also stand
for his master, Hans Herbst. As Moyle
notes, “Holbein’s determination to dis-
play his signature showed his resolve to
have his name linked with great men
for all to see.” Erasmus, Froben, and
Meyer all became significant patrons
of his.
Holbein’s dogged desire to prove
himself showed still more clearly in
1517 when he moved to Lucerne, an-
other city of grand merchants that was,
like Basel, “awash with mercenaries.”
Here his designs for stained glass led
to commissions from the mayor, Jakob
von Hertenstein, a powerful leader of
Swiss mercenary forces in the Italian
wars. Holbein’s portrait of von Her-
tenstein’s son Benedikt, a forceful
likeness, employed a clever illusion of
perspective that became typical of his
work: as the viewer moves from left to
right, at an angle of forty-five degrees
from the painting’s surface, “the sitter
projects out from the canvas in a hyper-
real three- dimensional manner.”
The portrait contains a German in-
scription on one wall, testifying to the
painting’s accuracy. This is matched in
the portrait of Holbein’s friend Bon-
ifacius Amerbach, painted two years
later, by a Latin inscription written on
a board nailed to a tree, which can be
translated as “I am not inferior to the
living face; I am indeed the counter-
part of my master, and distinguished
by accurate lines.” (Both portraits are
in the catalog of “Holbein: Capturing
Character.”)
By the time he was twenty, when he
painted Benedikt von Hertenstein’s
portrait, Holbein’s flagrant success was
already rousing animosity from local
artists, even leading to a serious knife
fight. But his rise continued, with a
dramatic scheme for the external dec-
oration of Jakob von Hertenstein’s new
house. It was demolished in 1825, but
pencil sketches reveal the boldness of
the conception, which incorporated
fantastical elements and intricate
trompe l’oeil arches, balconies, stair-
cases, and niches, and was dominated
by a frieze based on Mantegna’s fa-
mous Triumphs of Caesar.
Holbein was equally daring on an in-
timate scale. In his extraordinary paint-
ing Dead Christ in the Tomb, painted
around 1519 for the Amerbach family
of printers and lawyers, he depicted
Christ seen from the side, lying in a long
rectangular stone niche, as in a Roman
catacomb. His jaw hangs open, his
bony, bruised ribs and knees protrude,
 Dead palms, partially uprooted, Ontario, California, 1983

Robert Adams
April/May Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco

SEA STONE, A NEW BOOK BY ROBERT ADAMS, IS AVAILABLE AT FRAENKELGALLERY.COM

March 24, 2022 9

his skin sags, and his dark hair strag-
gles over the white winding sheet. The
truth to life, or rather to death, is dis-
turbing and moving. The painting was
influenced, Moyle suggests, by the
shared grief of Holbein and Amer-
bach over the loss of their brothers (no
more is heard of Ambrosius after this
date). But she argues, too, that it was
a deliberate attempt on the part of the
two young men to realize Erasmus’s
challenge to see holy figures as living,
physical beings while losing no sense
of their spiritual power—to present
Christ, in Erasmus’s words, as “the es-
sence of simplicity and truth.”
B y 1522, Holbein had returned to
Basel. Already a member of the
painters’ guild, he only needed a
wife—a strict requirement—to
be made a master, and he found
one in a young widow, Elsbeth
Schmidt, who had married into an
old tanning family; her husband
had died with the Swiss merce-
naries at Marignano. Holbein
left tender silverpoint drawings
of her, and Moyle also finds her
portrait in the Solothurn Ma-
donna, a flawed beauty wrapped
in a voluminous cloak. With Els-
beth’s help (despite her alleged
temper) the workshop grew. Hol-
bein took on journeymen and ac-
cepted commissions for portraits
and devotional works, as well as
designs for decorative metalwork,
book illustrations, stained glass,
and the façades of houses. The
greatest was his Haus zum Tanz,
or “House of Dance,” built for
the goldsmith Balthasar Angel-
roth (demolished in 1909), where
whirling, stocky peasant dancers
conjured up both the spirit of car- ‘Death and the Plowman’; woodcut by Hans Lützelburger, interests, “each one providing a
nival and fertility and the Dance
Mania or Dancing Plague that
was currently sweeping across Europe,
with people dancing in a mass hysteria
until they collapsed, as well as the me-
dieval Dance of Death.
By then Basel, aflame with Protes-
tant zeal, was ringing with protests
against the wealthy Catholic merchants
who had patronized Holbein. He drew
back, abandoning his murals for the
Great Council Chamber in the town
hall after only two walls were com-
pleted, although his reputation won
him payment in full. He played it safe:
his 1519 woodcut Luther as Hercules
Germanicus, in which Luther is beat-
ing a group of Roman Catholic church-
men with a club, like Hercules slaying
the Hydra, while a tiny pope dangles
from his nose, could be read as either
approval or protest. But despite draw-
ing title pages for Luther’s German
translation of the New Testament, he
remained firmly associated with the re-
formist group of Catholic intellectuals
surrounding Erasmus.
In Moyle’s view, “The Holbein work-
shop embraced the creation of ‘Eras-
mia’ as part of what in today’s terms
was a visual marketing campaign for
the scholar.” In the catalog for “Hol-
bein: Capturing Character,” Peter van
der Coelen deftly explores Erasmus’s
understanding of the power of the
image and the extent to which he “really
was the ‘author’ of his portraits,” doz-
ens of which were made. By 1524 Hol-
bein had painted at least three, one of
which was sent to William Warham, the
archbishop of Canterbury. He may have
10
taken another of them to France, where
he hoped to gain commissions from
Francis I; they did not meet, but the trip
allowed him to see the royal collection
of Renaissance art at Blois and Amboise
and to meet the painter Jean Clouet, en-
counters that had a great impact on his
art. In Lyons, his miniature Dance of
Death woodcuts were engraved for the
Trechsel family of printers. As author of
the series he had free rein, Moyle ob-
serves: “All his wry observations about
bribery, social inequality and hypocrisy
are expressed here.”
In 1526, when Protestant pressure
led to riots and the removal of religious
works from churches, it became im-
possible for Holbein to work in Basel.
The rich patrons left, and eventually,
after designs by Hans Holbein, circa 1526
after completing the fine Darmstadt
Madonna for Jacob Meyer, Holbein
left too. Carrying letters of recommen-
dation from Erasmus, he arrived in
London after a long stay in Antwerp
and went first to the Chelsea house of
Thomas More, the most renowned of
English humanists. There he painted
his Noli me Tangere, depicting Mary
Magdalene at Christ’s tomb, “informed
stylistically by those works Holbein
had seen in Francis I’s collection in the
Loire,” according to Moyle. His fine
portrait of More, “an essay in simultane-
ous simplicity and detail, of understate-
ment and yet penetrating observation,”
was followed by an affectionate group
painting of the More family.
Through More he came to know the
influential Sir Henry Guildford, comp-
troller of the royal household, and
was employed to produce decorations
for the Greenwich Revels, held for
the French ambassadors in 1527. For
these, Holbein designed a panorama of
Henry VIII’s victory over the French at
the siege of Thérouanne in 1513, which
covered a great arch through which
the king’s guests—including the am-
bassadors—had to pass after dinner.
Then they entered the theater, where
Holbein and the young court astrono-
mer, Nicolaus Kratzer, who became his
close friend and the subject of one of
his finest portraits, had created a huge
planetary canvas for the ceiling show-
ing the signs of the zodiac.
More acclaim came when Hol-
bein designed an elaborate decora-
tive scheme for the suit of armor the
king wore at the Shrovetide joust and
painted portraits of luminaries includ-
ing Archbishop Warham and his wife.
But despite widespread praise, the fol-
lowing year he returned to Basel, where
he bought a house for his family next
to that of Johann Froben and painted a
touching portrait of Elsbeth and their
children, Philipp and Katherine. There
was little to keep him there profession-
ally, however, and although he took on
work for printers and goldsmiths, by
1532 he was back in London again.
M uch had changed in Holbein’s ab-
sence. In 1531 Henry, thwarted in his
desire to procure the papal dispensa-
tion annulling his marriage to
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource
Katherine of Aragon that would
allow him to marry Anne Bo-
leyn, had declared himself head
of the Church of England. More
resigned as Lord Chancellor, and
his power at court passed grad-
ually to Cromwell. As More had
left Chelsea, Holbein found a
new base among his own country-
men, the German merchants of
the Steelyard. This branch of the
trading Hanseatic League had
its headquarters in a fortified en-
closure on Thames Street, front-
ing the river, and was virtually a
German colony, enjoying specific
privileges, or “liberties,” granted
by the king.
Living in the Steelyard Tav-
ern in Thames Street, Holbein
painted several vivid portraits
of the Hansa merchants, the
most striking of which was of the
thirty-four-year-old Georg Gisze
from Danzig, surrounded by
objects signifying his trade and
layer in a rich narrative descrip-
tion,” Moyle writes. This story-
telling through objects reached its most
elaborate peak in The Ambassadors, a
double portrait of the French diplomats
Georges de Selve and Jean de Dinteville,
“a painting with messages that are still
to be unlocked,” full of musical, astro-
nomical, and other objects, and a strange
elongated shape that when viewed at a
certain angle turns into a skull.
Commissions flowed in, including
one for a portrait of Cromwell, which
Moyle reads as a deliberate contrast to
that of Cromwell’s erstwhile rival More:
Almost a caricature, the epitome
of rigidity, his thin lips shut tight.
His eyes, looking into a mid dis-
tance away from the viewer, feel all
the more small since they are set
in a solid fleshy face, with a heavy
double chin.
(For many years these paintings have
faced each other dramatically at the
Frick Collection in New York.) At the
same time, Holbein was producing
drawings and engravings, miniatures
and roundels, and designs for fabulous
jewels—several of which are included
in “Holbein: Capturing Character.”
One design was for the silver cup that
Anne Boleyn gave to Henry VIII. His
drawings of the many women of Anne
Boleyn’s court are among his most del-
icate and sensitive works.
Holbein’s association with the Bo-
leyn circle and Cromwell, and with the
Protestantism they supported, was at-
tested to not only by the portraits and
jewels, but by his title page for the Cov-
erdale Bible of 1535, the first complete
modern English translation. Yet as
Moyle notes, even at the heart of court
life he “was careful not to be seen as
partisan.” Thanks to Henry’s personal
admiration and affection, he escaped
any royal fury at the time of Anne’s
trial and execution. Soon he was paint-
ing Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour,
and designing another dazzling cup to
celebrate the birth of their son, Edward.
Holbein’s greatest triumph, however,
was the mural of the Tudor dynasty on
the wall of the privy chamber at White-
hall, showing Henry VIII, Jane Sey-
mour, and the king’s parents, Henry
VII and Elizabeth of York, grouped
around a central marble plinth. The
first full-length, life-size portrait of a
monarch painted in England, the por-
trayal of Henry created the defining
image of the king, a forceful, physical
presence, feet apart, hands on hips,
sumptuously clothed, glaring directly at
the viewer, and, Moyne writes, “report-
edly capable of instilling fear in those
who encountered it.” The plinth’s long
Latin inscription vaunts Henry’s supe-
rior power. The father, it declares, may
have overcome enemies and brought
peace, but the son is “born indeed for
greater things . . . The arrogance of the
Popes has yielded to unerring virtue,
and while Henry VIII holds the sceptre
in his hand religion is restored.”
Although the mural was lost when
the palace burned in 1698, surviving
copies proclaim, Moyle notes, that
Henry is “an embodiment of raw, terri-
fying power.” At least at first: like many
of Holbein’s works it can be read in two
ways. Several small details, like the
emasculated figure of Mars on the pan-
eling behind Henry’s feet, undermine
the overt message. Is he a Colossus,
a savior of religion? Or is he an Anti-
christ, the destroyer of the Catholic
faith, and a fool of questionable virility?
Holbein kept his place, his true
opinions unknown. Following Jane
Seymour’s death in October 1537 he
painted more potential brides: the
young Christina of Denmark, Duchess
of Milan, severe in her dark dress yet
humanized by her twisting of her gloves
and sweet half-smile; then the Guise
sisters in France; and finally Anne of
Cleves, in her cloth of gold headdress
and heavy German clothing. But al-
though Holbein received no more royal
commissions after that fatal portrait,
apart from a drawing of Prince Edward,
aged around five, his salary was paid
until his death. He painted more fine
portraits, notably of the poet Thomas
Wyatt, but he received many fewer re-
quests for work. He died, possibly from
plague, in 1543. His family in Basel was
already well provided for, and he left
his goods to two children born in Lon-
don—their mother’s name is unknown.
He remains a mysterious figure: the
self-portrait painted at the end of his
life, Moyle notes, is “full of contradic-
tions,” the face of a man whose art is
defined by ambiguity. Even in the most
elaborate design or startlingly lifelike
portrait, Holbein leaves a space for
the viewer, asking us to make our own
judgment of his subject and to guess,
if we can, at his views and feelings.
As Moyle’s rich study suggests, and as
“Holbein: Capturing Character” pow-
erfully demonstrates, Holbein’s great
paintings open doors onto the crowded
rooms of the past. But the artist himself
stands back, or turns aside. Q
The New York Review
 A major new biography of the iconic An in-depth look at the many An authoritative economic A compelling account of how a group
Austrian empress that challenges the ways immigration has redefined history of Israel from its of Hasidic Jews established its own
many myths about her life and rule modern America founding to the present local government on American soil

A compelling book that casts the The definitive English translation of Why violence in the Congo has A riveting account of espionage for
Qur’anic encounter with Jews in the classic Sanskrit epic poem—now continued despite decades of the digital age, from one of America’s
an entirely new light available in a one-volume paperback international intervention leading intelligence experts

Mixing passion and humor, A vivid portrait of African American An expansive look at how culture An engaging and illuminating
a personal work of literary criticism life in today’s urban South that shapes our emotions—and how we can exploration of grief—and why,
that demonstrates how the greatest uses food to explore the complex benefit, as individuals and a society, despite its intense pain, it can
books illuminate our lives interactions of race and class from less anger and more sham also help us grow

March 24, 2022 11

 Washington’s Crackpot Realism
The twenty years of war since the Sep-
tember 11, 2001, attacks have killed
more than 900,000 people, displaced
at least 38 million, and cost the United
States an estimated $8 trillion.1 During
these two decades of intense fighting
and killing, the US has been respon-
sible for a quantity of suffering that
would have been unthinkable when
President George W. Bush, with the
near-unanimous backing of Congress,
launched his assault on Afghanistan.
It is clear now that America’s leaders
deluded themselves and failed to ask
basic questions about the ultimate goal
of the war before invading: its human
and financial costs, its benefits, or how
it would end.
One might assume that such disas-
trous results, and the ignominious end
of the war in Afghanistan last year,
would lead to a period of reflection
and soul-searching. Yet no such in-
quiry has occurred—at least not one
that fully grapples with the shocking
self- deception, pervasive misreading
of events, and powerful groupthink
that drove the longest war in American
history.
Instead, without missing a beat,
Washington power brokers and pundits,
in and out of government, have fixed
their gaze on a new foe: China. Think
tank specialists and defense insiders
are churning out books and articles on
how to contain China and engage in
what they have called a “great power
conflict,” a vague description encom-
passing all manner of hostile interac-
tions—ideological, economic, political,
and military. Last year, Admiral Philip
Davidson, head of the US Indo-Pacific
Command, told a Senate Armed Ser-
vices Committee hearing that China is
accelerating its ambitions to supplant
America’s leadership in the world, and
that it could invade Taiwan within “the
next six years.”
The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge
Colby well exemplifies this new con-
frontational and Manichean zeal.
Colby’s book clearly, but perhaps un-
wittingly, exposes the extreme peril
we face, as he and others like him lay
the intellectual foundations for yet an-
other war thousands of miles from our
shores, and one that is more treacher-
ous than those we fought in the Middle
East.
Colby worked under Defense Secre-
tary Jim Mattis and helped write the
2018 US National Defense Strategy,
which proclaimed that “inter-state stra-
tegic competition, not terrorism, is now
the primary concern.” His book re-
flects a growing perception throughout
the country that China poses a mortal
threat to America and its Asian allies.
A Gallup poll in March 2021 found that
the share of Americans who see China
as our greatest enemy doubled in just
one year, from 22 percent to 45 percent.
Colby’s focus is not on human rights
or democratic values, ours or anyone
else’s, but rather on how to deter China
and “wage war” against it to prevent it
1
These figures are drawn from Brown
University’s Costs of War Project, a
scholarly effort to catalog the human
and budgetary costs of the US-led war
on terror during the past two decades.
12
Jerry Brown
Then defense secretary Jim Mattis speaking with marines
at the US embassy in Beijing, June 2018
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
The Strategy of Denial:
American Defense in an
Age of Great Power Conflict
by Elbridge A. Colby.
Yale University Press,
356 pp., $32.50
The Long Game:
China’s Grand Strategy to
Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi.
Oxford University Press,
419 pp., $27.95
China Unbound:
A New World Disorder
by Joanna Chiu.
House of Anansi, 369 pp.,
$19.99 (paper)
from dominating Asia—and ultimately
the entire world. He emphasizes re-
lentless military competition among
states, while omitting any discussion of
how we might compete economically
with China or what part international
institutions could play. He considers
Asia the most important region in the
world because it produces 40 percent
of global GDP. There are, in his view,
stable balances of power in Europe and
the Persian Gulf, leaving the Pacific as
the primary theater of conflict between
America and China.
Colby believes that if China were
ever to achieve what he calls “hege-
mony” in Asia, it would have substan-
tial incentives to use such power to
exclude the US from the region and
“compromise Americans’ freedom,
prosperity, and even physical security.”
To contain China, he proposes a “bind-
ing strategy” that would enmesh the
military of the US with those of our
Pacific allies, such as Japan, Austra-
Barney Low/Alamy
The Avoidable War:
The Dangers of a Catastrophic
Conflict Between the US
and Xi Jinping’s China
by Kevin Rudd.
PublicAffairs, 420 pp., $32.00
Limit, Leverage, and Compete:
A New Strategy on China
a report by Melanie Hart
and Kelly Magsamen.
46 pp., April 2019, available at
americanprogress.org
The United States vs. China:
The Quest for Global
Economic Leadership
by C. Fred Bergsten.
Polity, 362 pp., $29.95
lia, South Korea, the Philippines, and
Taiwan. This, he believes, would force
China, if it invaded Taiwan, to attack
these countries as well—resulting in
a much wider war. The US position
would thus be stronger because more
countries would be fighting alongside
us in an “anti-hegemonic coalition”
against China.
He also looks to what he calls “thu-
motic impulses”—spiritedness or pas-
sion—to spur on the coalition to fight
with greater resolve. Colby takes the
concept from Homer’s Iliad, in which
Achilles, driven mad by his anger
(șȣμȩȢ, thumos) at the killing of his
friend Patroclus, slays Hector. In recent
years this theme has been articulated
by a number of conservative scholars,
such as Harvey Mansfield in his book
Manliness (2006); Michael Anton, who
served on President Trump’s National
Security Council, in his essay “The
Flight 93 Election” (2016); Robert
Kagan in The Return of History and
the End of Dreams (2008); and the po-
litical science professor Carson Hollo-
way, who published an essay on thumos
in which he described Trump as “a pre-
eminently thumotic being.”
Colby acknowledges that war with
China over Taiwan could lead to the
“limited” use of nuclear weapons and
that as a last resort, “selective nuclear
proliferation”—which is to say, provid-
ing nuclear weapons to allies—might
be necessary. He adds:
Selective nuclear proliferation to
such states as Japan, South Korea,
Australia, and even Taiwan might
help bridge the gap between re-
gional conventional defeat and US
willingness to employ its nuclear
forces, especially at scale.
Colby tries to assure us that China
would be deterred from escalating to
a broader nuclear exchange because of
America’s retaliatory power.
Confident about his strategy and
markedly unconcerned about its cat-
astrophic implications, Colby seems
cavalier about the fog of war and the
possibility of errant intelligence. He
blithely ignores how much can go
wrong. For evidence, consider the re-
cently declassified video footage of a
US drone strike during the final days
of our withdrawal from Afghanistan
that mistakenly killed ten innocent ci-
vilians, including seven children. In its
subsequent review of more than 1,300
documents from a hidden Pentagon
archive, The New York Times found
that this wayward bombing was no ab-
erration, but rather part of a pattern of
airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghani-
stan over the past eight years that were
“plagued by deeply flawed intelligence,
rushed and imprecise targeting and the
deaths of thousands of civilians, many
of them children.”
These are just the latest examples of
shocking intelligence failures stretching
back to the Korean War, Vietnam, and
the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the US
totally missed the fact that Russian mis-
siles in Cuba were already loaded with
nuclear weapons and would have been
launched before any disabling US strike.
T he danger here is not this specific
book, but that Colby is not an outlier
in Washington. In The Long Game:
China’s Grand Strategy to Displace
American Order, Rush Doshi, cur-
rently Biden’s director for China at the
National Security Council, writes from
a similar zero-sum perspective but fo-
cuses more broadly on what he sees as
China’s decades-long determination
to become the world’s new hegemon.
Citing voluminous Communist Party
documents, he carefully traces the
emergence of what he believes is Chi-
na’s grand strategy to drive America
out of Asia and displace its paramount
influence in the world.
Writing in scholarly, sometimes
jargon-laden prose, Doshi presents the
US– China contest as “a competition
over regional and global order, as well
as the various ‘forms of control’ that sus-
tain it.” According to him, the US can-
not maintain its preeminent position
The New York Review
 Robert Mangold
Multiple Panel Paintings 1973-1976, Edition C, 1992
Suite of nine screenprints on Fabriano paper
11.75 x 24 in, 29.8 x 61 cm
Edition of 300

info@pazdabutler.com

March 24, 2022 13

unless it blunts China’s worldwide mil-
itary, economic, and political “order-
building” and simultaneously reinvests
in “the foundations of American order.”
With respect to military engagement,
this will entail deploying and shar-
ing with allies a number of advanced
weapons systems throughout the Indo-
Pacific and conducting joint training
and war exercises. On the political and
economic front, Doshi calls for expan-
sive industrial policies and innova-
tive initiatives to keep America at the
forefront of the vital technologies of
the future. Though he recognizes the
country’s polarized political environ-
ment, he believes that there is enough
bipartisan consensus on the threat
from China that America can rise to
the challenge.
Despite this unrelenting competi-
tion, Doshi envisions cooperation with
China on what he calls “transnational
challenges,” such as nuclear prolifera-
tion and climate change. Unfortunately,
he does not explain how cooperation
on these threats would ever be possible
in view of the mutual hostility and deep
mistrust inherent in his grand strategy.
It’s worth noting that “political real-
ism,” the school of thought that Colby
and Doshi in their different ways rep-
resent, has genuine value. Such an ap-
proach can sharpen our understanding
of the way nation-states have histor-
ically acted as they jockey for advan-
tage over competitors. The doctrine
explains why the competition between
China and the US is so dangerous, and
how diplomacy and human judgment
can be overwhelmed by the powerful
forces of nationalism—even more so
when exacerbated by historical griev-
ances and rapid weapons innovation.
World War I is the classic example
of how nations move from competition
to miscalculation to war, even though
it results in mutual catastrophe. In his
2012 book The Sleepwalkers: How
Europe Went to War in 1914, the his-
torian Christopher Clark diagnoses
self-reinforcing “processes of interac-
tion” that led to the unforeseen and
unwanted war, inducing each state to
repeatedly react to the other in an at-
tempt to gain an advantage.2 So it could
be, too, with respect to the current
“great power competition” between
the US and China. Few want war, but
highly competitive actions are foster-
ing increasingly hostile perceptions
based on profoundly different histories
and social systems.
Compounding the danger is a long
history of self-assured but mistaken—
even delusional—thinking in Wash-
ington. More than sixty years ago, the
sociologist C. Wright Mills coined the
phrase “crackpot realism,” referring to
leaders who he believed were making
incredibly reckless decisions with little
understanding of the consequences,
while believing themselves to be ex-
ceptionally rational. 3 In The Hell of
Good Intentions (2018), Stephen Walt
describes countless blunders made by
the foreign policy elites in the Clinton,
2
Harper, p. 560. See R. J.W. Evans’s re-
view in these pages, February 6, 2014
3
Proving the point, only a couple of
years after Mills wrote about “crackpot
realism,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff met
and formally approved a plan to launch
more than three thousand nuclear
weapons if the US was attacked by the
USSR—a strike that could have killed
600 million people.
14
Bush, Obama, and Trump administra-
tions. He convincingly demonstrates
that very bright people with the best
of intentions, no matter their party
or ideology, get caught up in “ratio-
nal” processes that lead to disastrous
outcomes.
T his is what makes current groupthink
on China, based almost exclusively on
zero-sum assumptions, so alarming.
General Mark A. Milley, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described
China’s recent testing of a hypersonic
missile as “very close” to a “Sputnik
moment,” referencing the technological
advantage that US planners perceived
the Soviet Union to have achieved with
its satellite launch in 1957. Such state-
ments reinforce the notion that China
or America must subordinate the other
and engage in a new cold war, rivaling
the contest between the US and the
USSR. But this one would be, in many
ways, far different.
First, China, unlike the USSR, has
an enormous and growing economy.
Second, it is a major trading part-
ner with neighboring countries and is
tightly integrated with the rest of the
world, including the US. Third, it is
making huge investments in research
and development and driving techno-
logical innovations of all kinds. Finally,
China is intensifying its nationalistic
fervor with repeated invocations of its
victimhood during a “century of na-
tional humiliation.”
This nationalistic fervor is on display
in China’s efforts to threaten and pres-
sure even ordinary people if they dare
to criticize Chinese policies. In China
Unbound: A New World Disorder, Jo-
anna Chiu, a reporter for the Toronto
Star, provides a powerful, heartfelt
account of Chinese immigrants and
their fraught encounters with Beijing’s
United Front Work Department, a lav-
ishly funded government agency that
works with the Ministry of State Secu-
rity. Chiu tells gripping stories of influ-
ence operations in such disparate places
as Australia, Canada, the US, Italy,
Greece, Turkey, and Russia. Chinese
agents are sent throughout the world
to intimidate international students
and others of the far-flung Chinese
diaspora. Chiu’s stories demonstrate
in human terms just how formidable a
task it will be to put the US and China
on any kind of cooperative path.
The most telling example of China’s
nationalism is its deep and pervasive
conviction that Taiwan is a part of
China. This is an area where compro-
mise seems inconceivable. I can’t imag-
ine China accepting defeat, ever, in a
conflict with the US over Taiwan.
Kevin Rudd, a former prime min-
ister of Australia and a Mandarin
speaker, recognizes this stark reality in
The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a
Catastrophic Conflict Between the US
and Xi Jinping’s China. Rudd directly
confronts the growing possibility of war
and offers well-thought-out proposals
to prevent that catastrophic outcome
and the “global carnage” it would cause.
Rudd is undaunted by the fact that, in
his view, for both Washington and Bei-
jing, “the question is no longer whether
such confrontation can be avoided,
but when it will occur and under what
circumstances,” and he rejects “decou-
pling, containment, confrontation, and
perhaps ultimately the unthinkable it-
self.” Instead, he sketches out “a joint
strategic framework” that would allow
China and America to (1) agree on
procedures for navigating each other’s
strategic red lines, which if inadver-
tently crossed would lead to military
escalation; (2) identify acceptable
areas of “nonlethal” but “full-blown
strategic competition”; and (3) define
those areas where cooperation would
be recognized and encouraged, such
as on climate change. All of this would
be anchored in negotiation, verifica-
tion, deterrence, and mutual respect.
Rudd calls this “managed strategic
competition.” He sees a military con-
flict between China and the US as a
catastrophe “beyond imagining” and
therefore makes the case for “all nec-
essary precautionary measures” to re-
duce the risk of war.
Like Rudd, several leading scholars
envision a future where both China and
the US, despite their radically different
systems, learn to coexist and even co-
operate without waging a new cold war.
In Limit, Leverage, and Compete: A
New Strategy on China, a 2019 report
from the Center for American Prog-
ress, Melanie Hart and Kelly Mag-
samen (who now hold senior positions
at the US Departments of State and
Defense, respectively) detail a “new
strategic framework” for the US–China
competition, which they call the “cen-
tral contest of this century.” Hart and
Magsamen grant that China is “actively
undermining US interests around the
world,” but they diverge from the more
hawkish China hands in their strong
emphasis on policies that would rejuve-
nate and strengthen America, “regard-
less of how China acts.”
In plain language, the writers ex-
plain what America must do to reassert
global leadership and rectify a “pattern
of serious missteps” and “decades of
strategic inertia.” Hart and Magsamen
emphasize the dramatic investments
needed to transform American educa-
tion, specifically calling for debt-free
undergraduate education for all stu-
dents; tuition assistance for postgrad-
uate science, technology, engineering,
and math degrees; federal funding for
state and local colleges; a redesigned
workforce development system; and a
substantial commitment to research
and development, and public infra-
structure. It all sounds plausible, but
the politics of getting it done seem re-
mote. The unrecoverable trillions spent
on fighting terrorism could have paid
the bill; alas, this is not how official
Washington sees America’s challenges.
Looking outward, Hart and Mag-
samen are concerned about China’s ef-
forts to obtain sensitive US technology.
They recommend a variety of preven-
tive measures aimed at curbing “op-
erations that threaten US prosperity
or national security,” though the con-
sequences of these measures remain
unclear. They also suggest finding ways
to “leverage” Chinese investments in
development projects, such as those in
its Belt and Road Initiative. The idea
here is for America to invest, along
with others, to make development proj-
ects more transparent and sustainable.
This will require the US to work with
countries in the Belt and Road target
areas and provide competitive financ-
ing so that recipient countries are not
solely dependent on China. Addition-
ally, they call for partnering with China
on such public goods as disaster relief,
ocean protection, climate initiatives,
and combating pandemics.
Focusing on global economic and
financial structures, The United States
vs. China: The Quest for Global Eco-
nomic Leadership by C. Fred Bergsten
makes an even more urgent case for
US–China cooperation: work together
to stabilize the world economy or risk
a disaster on par with the Great De-
pression of the 1930s. Bergsten doesn’t
ignore the deep differences between
our political systems, but he says that
the world economy will encounter dan-
gerous disruptions unless the US and
China ensure orderly functioning of
trade, currencies, lending, and invest-
ment. He categorically rejects decou-
pling the two economies and asserts
that if America follows this path, China
will just continue to rise and America will
falter. He notes that the tariffs imposed
by Trump failed to slow China’s growth
and adds that most other countries will
not follow America if it goes its own way.
Bergsten calls for “conditional
competitive cooperation,” with both
strenuous competition and substan-
tive cooperation on global economic
issues that are vitally important to
both countries—and to the world. He
acknowledges that China has engaged
in currency manipulation, theft of in-
tellectual property, and forced trans-
fer of technologies, but he argues that
these problems are best confronted
through global institutions and skill-
ful diplomacy. Like Hart and Mag-
samen, Bergsten sees the absolute need
for America to straighten out its own
economy; make serious investments in
research and development, and infra-
structure of all kinds; and enact poli-
cies that reduce its gross inequalities
and wage stagnation.
Framing the China threat as irre-
deemably antagonistic, as many “po-
litical realists” are currently doing,
misses the reality that both countries—
to prosper and even to survive—must
cooperate as well as compete. While
competition is inevitable, the US and
China do share common interests,
which could help form the basis of what
I would call “planetary realism.” This is
an informed realism that faces up to the
unprecedented global dangers caused
by carbon emissions, nuclear weapons,
viruses, and new disruptive technolo-
gies, all of which cannot be addressed by
one country alone. Both America and
China recognized such planetary real-
ism when they pledged, albeit loosely,
at the Glasgow climate summit in late
2021 to work together to cut green-
house gas emissions. The stakes for the
world have never been higher, and there
has never been a greater need to see the
world as profoundly interdependent.
It would be foolish to minimize the
military dangers that China poses, but
it would be even more foolish to act in
ways that actually exacerbate them.
The better path—in fact, the only
path that avoids the horror of war—is
to accept that China’s system is dif-
ferent from ours, get our own house
in order, and seek a decent modus vi-
vendi. Given America’s recent history
of ill- conceived and disastrous wars,
we should be skeptical of any other
course—especially of loud calls for po-
tentially catastrophic confrontations.
Rather than thumos and grand strate-
gies, America desperately needs clar-
ity about the perilous predicament in
which it now finds itself, and the cour-
age to think and act anew. Q
The New York Review

Here it comes now, at the last, the woodpecker.
It’s come from afar.
It’s put its beak in above my heart.
Lie still it says.
Very still.
Listen.
You loved the light, it says, of day.
You let it touch yr face all yr life & u never apologized, never felt
the distance in it—its howling—its gigantic
memory. You did not bury yr face in yr hands,
in the soil, in the grass with
gratitude. Something warbled.
Something flew past
in the air—a ravine quietly opened—water
deep in the earth narrowly
darted between rocks to
reach you. It was
wild. Your blood
took violent turns
left and right inside you—it gave you
time—
Now it drops
its needle in deeper.
You are dying it says. Maybe today,
maybe another. Rain is starting somewhere,
it’s coming down fast it says,
I’m busy it says,
I’m attending to shorelines I’d like to save,
its body like a small golden trombone,
its crest like a fretboard day cld be thrumming—as they are
friends—we’re from the same
district, it explains, we share hometowns,
we don’t want to ruin your day but we’re
busy. The needle is turning in me again.
It wants to play music I imagine.
It too wants to live its brief glorious moment,
right to the end please,
as a civilization might also like if possible,
right to the end,
the very end.
Is there a right end I ask the bird
as it bows from the waist over me, as if starting
to dance while
digging in deeper,
widening and opening the hole
in my heart,
dust all over the floor from its work.
What would have given you enough, it asks,
working furiously,
I think its face is puffed from the effort,
is daylight coming back again
for me I
ask, as someone adjusts the pillow under my head,
is this the end of the second
movement or the third
it says to the air—
do you still have another round of day in you?—
as they pull a wet cloth
over my eyes,
to clean them out I hope to myself,
that I might see once more
a bit of the something that blues-in softly
after furious night.
Is that a nurse now pulling at my neck,
is that a window coming clear or is it blank wall,
are those letters in the air spelling something firm even
possibly urgent
or are they just the bits & pieces of shadow
the pre-dawn world tosses
flagrantly around,
March 24, 2022
DAY
wasting nothing but making it feel
as if there were plenty, overmuch, endless—oh way more than enough to be
wildly wasted. I lift up my palm
and stare at it
as per usual,
as I have done for a thousand years,
& this nightgown believe me it is not satin
although it too makes its little music.
February 2022 I’m singing you out,
if nothing else let me finish my song.
I’m not enough but I
could have been less.
When it is done it cranes up and stares.
Its crest is stupendous.
Its stare is righteous.
You must have come from somewhere far away I think
as I’ve never seen the likes of you
around me
anywhere.
What do you think your strength is for, it asks—
what do u think yr intelligence is.
Surgical clips blink.
They imitate day.
Was it my strength which was my mistake, I ask,
yr back is golden and red,
yr feathers stretch into every direction, they point,
u could be mosaic, yr gold seems chipped from
what used to be Venice,
Torcello specifically, in the old world,
yr legs are rolled tight
into their sacred scrolls—
oh you’re done with something—I’m not sure what,
you’re done with the warnings & the
proclamations,
yr notebook is overflowing with second
chances. Now it is
silent. It has moved up. It pecks at the bone
at the back of my neck.
I lift my arm up
to try to
touch.
No pity anywhere.
It’s then I hear it, the first call breaking
what used to be dawn.
Will you let me hear it?
What will you hear this time it asks.
What will you make of the chorus
when it comes.
What will you make.
You had a lifetime
to get this story,
to write its long and bitter poem.
You had thousands of hearts, one for each day
which let you into its cool new body,
for free,
unstopped.
What will you make.
I saw you turn away.
I watched you arrange and rearrange your minutes.
Lie back down now.
Be very still.
I do not know
if you will be entertained again.
And it left then.
There was no weeping, just feathers passing.
And I am here now listening for day
with all I’ve got.
What have I got.
—Jorie Graham
15

Willful Disregard:
A Novel About Love
by Lena Andersson, translated
from the Swedish by Sarah Death.
Other Press, 196 pp.,
$15.95 (paper)
Acts of Infidelity
by Lena Andersson, translated
from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.
Other Press, 332 pp.,
$16.99 (paper)
Son of Svea:
A Tale of the People’s Home
by Lena Andersson, translated
from the Swedish by Sarah Death.
Other Press, 278 pp.,
$16.99 (paper)
In the opening pages of Lena Anders-
son’s novel Willful Disregard, we are
told that Ester Nilsson, a thirty- one-
year- old poet and essayist in Stockholm
with “eight slim but densely written
publications to her name,”
renounced expensive living, ate
cheaply, was always careful about
contraception, only traveled ratio-
nally, had never been in debt to the
bank or to any private person, and
did not get herself into situations
that forced her away from what she
wanted to spend her time doing:
reading, thinking, writing and
debating.
We’re prepared to be in the company of
a fairly sober actor. Instead, Ester soon
makes one vain man the subject of all
her “reading, thinking, writing and de-
bating,” losing her sense of herself as a
strictly logical creature. She is forced
by her feelings to contend with the be-
wildering “other” that is any human
being.
Willful Disregard won Sweden’s pres-
tigious August Prize in 2013. Crisply
translated by Sarah Death, it is sub-
titled “a novel about love” and not “a
love story,” for while the latter phrase
conjures sensuality, bliss, dreaminess,
and pleasure, this rigorous and cere-
bral novel offers none of that. It is a
pleasure, but the pleasure comes from
Ester’s detailed analysis of her lover,
and the narrator’s detailed analysis of
Ester.
Ester first begins to fall in love while
engaged in the unromantic task of aca-
demic research. Commissioned to give
a lecture at a seminar about a famous
artist named Hugo Rask—whom she
has never met but whose work she has
been “watching with great interest”—
she finds that with every day of prepa-
ration for the talk, “her sense of affinity
with its subject grew”:
From feeling respect on Sunday
she progressed to reverence on
Tuesday and by about Thurs-
day she felt an insistent yearning,
which on Friday turned into a deep
sense of lack.
It turned out that a person could
miss someone she had never met,
except in her imagination.
After the talk, Rask, who is in the au-
dience, is full of admiration and praise.
16
Trouble in Paradise
Sheila Heti
Lena Andersson; illustration by Simone Goder
He takes her hands and kisses her on
both cheeks in gratitude. Their story
has begun.
Rask’s most famous pronouncement
is “Any artist who fails to engage with
society and the vulnerability of the in-
dividual in a cruel existence should not
style him- or herself an artist,” so we
can safely assume that he will fail to
notice the vulnerability of the individ-
ual he is actually involved with. Soon
enough, we are deep in the thickets of
unrequited love. Ester and Rask meet
for dinner, exchange gifts, discuss eth-
ics. She waits anxiously for his e-mails
and calls him six times in a row. He
ignores her to make art. She counsels
herself, “What she must definitely not
do now was to expose herself to the
anguish of sending a text message that
would go unanswered.” She consults
the “girlfriend chorus” and wonders
about the nature of his relationship
with a female studio assistant. She de-
spairs at his silences, then all is golden
when he writes.
Andersson renders Ester’s emotional
vicissitudes with thoughtful attention
rather than scorn, and yet it is impossi-
ble not to see Ester as a faintly ridicu-
lous creature. The book’s humor comes
partly from the distance between Es-
ter’s obvious intelligence and how little
use that intelligence is in making sense
of her situation, or in bringing about
her happiness. Wondering why Rask
hasn’t yet made a move—after weeks
of dinners and intimate conversa-
tions—Ester deludedly assures herself,
“Anything important takes time. . . .
When both are equally eager it takes
longer.” When she invites him to her
house for a romantic dinner, she is dis-
appointed to find them, after the meal,
sitting on a couch watching the Winter
Olympics. She comforts herself with
the thought that, after all, she “wanted
to usher normal life into their relation-
ship. They could not sit in restaurants
all their lives, looking into each other’s
eyes and conversing. At some stage
they would have to start watching tele-
vision together as well.”
A ndersson was born in 1970 in Swe-
den. She is a prominent cultural critic
there, and she is also the author of eight
novels, which have sold more than half
a million copies in her native country.
Three of these—Willful Disregard,
Acts of Infidelity, and Son of Svea—
have been translated into English. Acts
of Infidelity, published in Sweden a year
after Willful Disregard and translated
by Saskia Vogel, is also about Ester
Nilsson. Again she is in love with a man
who cannot properly love her back, this
time because he—Olof Sten, a theater
actor—has a wife. Responding to an
interviewer about why she had writ-
ten a diptych about a woman repeating
such a similar situation, Andersson ex-
plained that she was interested in “the
question why women never learn,” and
that “the answer in Ester Nilsson’s case
is that she rationally thinks that no two
people are exactly the same, so there is
no reason to think she will be unlucky
twice.”
Cultivating the reader’s sympathy for
Ester is not what Andersson is after;
she is more interested in tracking Es-
ter’s mistakes of deduction, which lead
her deeper into her painful predica-
ments. In a literary landscape in which
we are tirelessly reminded that the
great value of novels lies in their ability
to teach us empathy, Andersson’s proj-
ect is refreshing: her books offer us a
respite from the endless demands for
our care. She seems to believe that the
novel is a place where we can, finally,
put feeling to the side, and that this is a
good, since not feeling is impossible in
life, and feeling clouds thinking. Where
are we able to consider ourselves pa-
tiently, analytically, and at a distance if
not in literature?
Andersson’s writing is concise and
direct, and it moves quickly, like an
argument. The Ester books are writ-
ten in the third person, and one senses
that Andersson is writing them not
only for her readers, but somehow to
or for Ester, as if she could somehow
be reached before all this happened,
so that in an ideal world, these books
wouldn’t have had to be written at all,
because Ester would never have acted
so foolishly. The books’ narration
seems concerned less with telling a
story than with sorting out a story. And
the narrator always sorts it out differ-
ently from Ester, whose analysis is
ever colored by how the men she loves
treated her last, and her faith in their
ultimate union.
In Acts of Infidelity, after Olof tells
Ester, “If we’ve got to talk about us
all the time, I’m going to lose inter-
est in this,” Andersson writes, “Not
a great comment but she clung to the
word ‘this.’ They now had something
he called ‘this.’” It is subtly brilliant
writing—simultaneously showing us
Ester’s thoughts and the narrator’s
thoughts about Ester’s thoughts. The
dueling interpretations give these
books their tension: Will Ester ever see
her situation the same way her narrator
does? If not, why not?
We are advised in the opening pages
of Willful Disregard that the book
is about “the dreadful gulf between
thought and words, will and expres-
sion, reality and unreality, and the
things that flourish in that gulf.” Yet
even more than that, the books seem
to be about the gulf between being an
actor in a story and being its narrator,
as if the source of our relational prob-
lems is that the actor is never detached
and objective enough to also be the
narrator. But that’s the thing about act-
ing—being. It is an entirely different
thing from narrating. And, as we are re-
peatedly shown in the case of Ester, our
narrating to ourselves is also not narrat-
ing—it is only more being. The distance
between being and narrating is this dip-
tych’s deeper, even more dreadful gulf.
Andersson’s thorough, investigative
style animates the intellectually bold
columns on politics, society, and cul-
ture that she writes for Swedish news-
papers. Her mind is always reaching for
the fascinating and unexpected conclu-
sion: in a recent consideration of the
Swedish documentary television series
Under the Knife, published in Svenska
Dagbladet, she argues that “appreci-
ation of beauty wherever it appears
has nothing to do with superficiality,
but with soulfulness,” yet those who
undergo cosmetic surgery must know
that they are forgoing the “cardinal vir-
tues” inherent in us of “wisdom, brav-
ery, moderation, and righteousness.”
She wonders whether cosmetic sur-
gery is “the logical consequence of the
ambition of Enlightenment ideas and
modern liberalism to free people from
shackles” and observes that, since it
strives “to obliterate all signs of lineage
and history,” its goal is “the end of his-
The New York Review
tory.” It’s as though no one whom An-
dersson narrates—real or fictional—is
equipped to see the many meanings
and hidden dimensions of their choices;
Andersson makes this her job.
Often her point is more political:
perhaps no thinking could ever be suf-
ficient to prevent us from experiencing
pain under structures that have no in-
terest in our protection. Indeed, after
much suffering, toward the end of Will-
ful Disregard, Ester finally strikes on a
broader interpretation of her situation
than that there is something wrong with
Rask; perhaps the real problem is that
she lives in a world that has abandoned
the customs that once governed love and
courtship. Ester longs for a past in which
the strict rules then governing life
together were in actual fact far
more rational, in the sense of being
properly planned and thought out,
than this idiocy of caprice and sen-
timent into which she had thrown
herself and to which all modern-
day people were consigned. No
rules, no traditions, no crutches to
lean on, nothing.
In Andersson’s latest book to be
translated into English, Son of Svea: A
Tale of the People’s Home, she elabo-
rates on a question that was quieter in
Willful Disregard and Acts of Infidelity:
the relationship between one’s charac-
ter and the ideals of the world in which
one was raised. Ragnar Johansson, the
protagonist of Son of Svea, is a living
embodiment of the Swedish welfare
state, known regionally as folkhem-
met (“the people’s home”). The book
traces his life from his birth in 1932,
“year zero” of that political project,
through and beyond its next forty-plus
years, as the Social Democratic party
helped elaborate a society based on the
principles of universal fellowship and
care, with a planned economy, univer-
sal health care, free universities, child
benefits, and new suburbs to house the
working class. Although the party was
voted out in 1976, marking the end of
folkhemmet, it holds the prime min-
istership again today, and many of its
programs remain.
We are first brought into Ragnar’s
story in late 1999, through his twenty-
nine-year-old daughter, Elsa—like Ester,
an intellectual. She has taken him to a
café in Vällingby—the planned commu-
nity outside Stockholm where he lives,
which was built in 1954 as “a suburb
of the future”—to introduce him to
an ethnologist in search of people who
might be said to represent “the Swed-
ish mentality in the age of modernity.”
Although he has agreed to the meeting,
Ragnar, who thinks of himself as a sim-
ple man, doesn’t see the point.
Elsa watches the ethnologist care-
fully, aware that she is missing the
very cues that mark Ragnar as a typi-
cal Swede of his time—the way he says
his name, the way he eats his bun—
and perhaps mercifully, before the
chapter’s end, the project is called off.
“The ethnologist’s supervisor criticized
her from the word go for trying to re-
produce essences in so- called reality
outside discourse,” Elsa unhelpfully
explains to her father. The book begins
again with a more direct narration of
Ragnar’s life. Of course, a novel, not
an ethnological study, is a more ap-
propriate medium in which to attempt
to show that a person might represent
their country’s political project.
March 24, 2022
“This is the story of a twentieth-
century Swede,” we are told at the start
of the second part of Son of Svea. “A
man without cracks but with a great
split running through him, and in this
he entirely resembled the society he
populated and shaped.” In character-
istically straightforward and economi-
cal language, once again translated by
Death, Andersson highlights incidents
from Ragnar’s youth that show him as
an analogue for the modest, egalitarian
ideals of Sweden, almost to the point
of alienation from the people around
him. In grade school, a teacher asks
him to look after her lunchbox while
she leaves the room. He puts it on the
radiator and it tumbles off, spilling the
pancakes on the floor. The other boys
laugh. Ragnar is humiliated:
Miss Aronsson should have under-
stood the blow that being chosen
inflicts, thought Ragnar, and he
would never stop thinking that.
She had raised him above the
crowd and told him he was worthy
of guarding her pancakes.
It seemed unreasonable that you
had to pay for your sense of order
with shame and dread, but that
was the way it was. Distinguishing
yourself was too costly; you were
entrusted with things that were too
much for you. And he thought that
as long as you were normal and
blended in, you wouldn’t make any
mistakes.
The cause of your shame was
what you had to divest yourself
of. Being chosen. Being different.
Being special.
This principle of not distinguishing
oneself—which is at once socialist and
truly Ragnar’s—defines the choices
that direct his life. Though he has the
talent to be a master craftsman, he de-
cides to be a woodworking teacher in-
stead, subsuming his distinction as an
individual under his general principle
of not standing out. In the schools of
Stockholm’s new suburbs,
he taught the children the basics of
handling the materials, persuaded
them to see their form as some-
thing fundamental to existence,
encouraged them to smell the
wood and feel with their fingertips
how alive it was. He taught them to
work with the grain and the life of
the wood, not against them, tried
to make them understand that a
knothole was part of the wood and
not a troublesome inconvenience,
to see how the lathe could bring
out the loveliest lines, and that
none of this was gratuitous.
He too strives to work with the grain
of his society. Everyone—even knot-
holes—might have a legitimate place
in modern Sweden, a society that can
function as a working whole if it can
continue to make room for all its peo-
ple, in a spirit of reason and equality.
When he reads about socialist East
Germany’s construction of the Berlin
Wall, and its intent to “block off the
West,” he thinks that even though there
is outrage in Sweden about it, “the ar-
guments in favor of the wall had an ir-
refutable truth to them”:
If the state had paid for everything
in your life, you were not free in
your relationship to the state. You
owed it something. That was how it
had to be, he thought, and nothing
else would be logical or reason-
able. It was not acceptable to keep
receiving and never give.
Ragnar’s devotion to Sweden is
traced back to the childhood of his
mother, Svea. When she was two years
old, her mother died, and when she
was seven—in 1912, the same year that
the Titanic sank—her father went to
America to find work, leaving Svea and
her brother in the care of their grand-
mother until he could send for them.
But the two children never heard from
their father again. It was only after
their grandmother died, thirty years
later, that Svea found a trove of letters
and learned the truth: their father had
written to them every month for years,
sending money for their passage and
pleading for news, but their grand-
mother was afraid that she would end
up lonely and in the poorhouse if the
children left her, so she never replied.
“It was when Ragnar Johansson
thought about Mother Svea’s childhood
that he began worshipping the state,”
we learn.
He based this on its self- evident su-
periority to human beings. In the
state there was no room for passion
or apathy. . . . Its principles of equal-
ity, clarity, and absence of emo-
tion’s caprices should be striven
for, even in individual lives. . . . The
state was humankind’s better self.
Solid. Exemplary.
Ragnar is thirty-four when he marries
Elisabet, a woman from northern Swe-
den who, he thinks, “seemed mentally
well-balanced and independent in her
ways.” They have two children in quick
succession and move into a “purpose-
built suburb” called Paradise, where
everyone is obliged by the principles of
equality to build the same home, “with
no scope for willful variation.” Ragnar
approves of this, and he also approves
when he hears a politician remark on
television that “if the Swedish people
wanted to show greater solidarity with
the social project, they ought to stop
baking and making jams and fruit juices
at home, as this was to be considered
a form of tax evasion.” Ragnar thinks
of his jam-making mother, Svea, and is
confirmed in “his vision of her as an an-
cient monument from the agrarian age.”
However, Ragnar soon starts to feel
critical of his wife. Unlike himself—
or the country—she seems to have no
inner cohesion. “She had read a good
deal,” Ragnar thinks, “but it all went
whirling around inside her, like torn-
out pages without any central point for
the interpretation of what had been
read and the contradictions in it.” This
fundamental disorganization extends
to her homemaking. When she offers
her mother-in-law a savory tart for
lunch and then a gooseberry tart for
dessert, even Svea disapproves. Two
tarts are “one too many,” Svea thinks.
“You really ought to have something
else with your coffee if you’d had a
tart for your main course.” Whereas in
Elisabet’s view, “things could be com-
bined however you liked, and at any
juncture she would make whatever she
liked best for any component of a meal,
regardless of the overall effect.”
Earlier we are told, “Order and civili-
zation were the result of a guiding hand,
Ragnar knew, not an invisible one.” If
Ragnar is a stand-in for the “people’s
home,” Elisabet can be seen as a cor-
ollary for the world as it’s progressing
outside Sweden: the onslaught of empty
Western capitalism. Ragnar’s view of
Elisabet’s apparently chaotic, free-
market lack of interest in “the overall ef-
fect” is reminiscent of Ester’s experience
of love in Andersson’s earlier novels.
For the men Ester desires, it is women—
wives, studio assistants, and admirers
like her—who “could be combined how-
ever you liked.” At any juncture, these
men were free—as a result of a lack of
an organized, moral, ruling principle—
to do “whatever they liked best.”
F or Ester, the tragedy is being sepa-
rate from one’s time, whereas for Rag-
nar, it is being too like it. His middle
years are “wonderful” ones for Swe-
den. Andersson writes:
The country had sped like a jave-
lin through the sixties, and by the
seventies it was near the top of
every list of national comparisons.
It had the most day care places,
the lowest income disparity, the
greatest film director, the foremost
children’s writer, the best slalom
skier, tennis player, and pop group,
the most impressive gender equal-
ity, the highest taxes—all of them
sources of real pride.
These are also good years for Ragnar
and Elisabet as they raise their family.
But times change. For their children,
it turns out, not everything was better
under the Swedish welfare state: the
country was more homogeneous and
xenophobic then. When Ragnar tries to
explain to his family the principles by
which he lives, they now just leave the
room. The world has outgrown him, as
it has outgrown the socialist project.
Like Ragnar’s devotion to the ide-
als of his country’s experiment, Ester’s
is extreme compared with that of the
people around her. She claims to want
love affairs based on “clarity and equal-
ity”—or, as Ragnar characterizes the
virtues of the state, “equality, clarity,
and absence of emotion’s caprices.”
When, during one of their debates,
Rask complains that Ester is too criti-
cal of other people and that she should
instead be critical of “pharmaceutical
companies, Western regimes, top public
officials,” she objects. His argument is
just a way of letting himself off the hook:
According to you, everybody who
is formally powerless also lacks
responsibility for their actions. . . .
But we can demand moral insight,
moral deliberation and that each
individual acts in a way that causes
the least harm to others.
Near the end of Willful Disregard,
Ester writes a long and passionate
essay, fueled by her unhappy experi-
ences, in which she tries to work out why
she believes that sleeping with a woman
imposes obligations on the man, even
when she knows that Rask is not obliged
to love her. “It was stuffy old honor cul-
ture,” she thinks to herself, and “turn-
ing the idea round,” she writes:
Honor culture should not be un-
derstood as a deliberate curtail-
ment of freedom but as the result
of an observation of something en-
tirely fundamental in human life:
17
 the fact that one has no right to
run away from the wonderful thing
that formed between two peo-
ple who have come close to each
other. . . . Having intercourse with
another person brings responsibil-
ity onto the scene, the deeper and
Bad Luck Banging,
or Loony Porn
a film written and
directed by Radu Jude
The New Romanian Cinema
edited by Christina Stojanova,
with the participation
of Dana Duma.
Edinburgh University Press,
323 pp., $110.00; $29.95 (paper)
The Romanian Cinema of
Nationalism: Historical Films
as Propaganda and Spectacle
by Onoriu Colăcel.
McFarland, 212 pp.,
$65.00 (paper)
Bad Luck Banging, or Loony
Porn, the Romanian director
Radu Jude’s exuberantly rude
and bawdy new film, is a movie
about us. Or rather, it’s a com-
edy about our world: how we
live under surveillance, with di-
minished boundaries, plagued
by conspiratorial thinking and multiple
pandemics—virtual as well as actual.
As if tossed in a bottle, Jude’s message
arrives from an obscure corner of Eu-
rope, albeit one that as of last Novem-
ber was suffering the world’s highest
per capita death rate from Covid-19.
Romania is another land where vaccine
hesitancy has mutated into a political
movement. The leader of the country’s
vaccination effort told The New York
Times that this is a result of widespread
disinformation: “Fake news has a
huge influence on our population.” In
the same article, Alina Bargaoanu, a
Bucharest communications professor
who studies Internet- driven conspiracy
theories, explained that many of them
originate in the United States and are
given particular credence because
“Romania is a very pro-American
country.”*
The title itself is a provocation. The
graceless English translation sanitizes
the original Romanian Babardeală cu
bucluc sau porno balamuc, which in its
offensive combination of Romani slang
and tabloid vulgarity ensured that Ro-
manian media would have difficulty
mentioning the film by name, while
others would be angered by it sight
unseen. (In English, it would more ac-
curately be titled something like Trou-
blesome Fucking, or Madhouse Porn.)
According to Jude, Bad Luck Bang-
ing was inspired by a local news story.
The movie concerns a conjugal sex
video that goes viral, jeopardizing, if
*Andrew Higgins, “In Romania, Hard-
hit by Covid, Doctors Fight Vaccine
Refusal,” November 8, 2021.
18
more naked the intercourse, the
more far-reaching the injunction.
Honor culture had understood
this and regulated it. . . . The crux
of the matter was to induce people
not to start associating in the first
place if one party knew that he did
Romanian Masquerades
J. Hoberman
Nicodim Ungureanu (center) in Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn, 2021
not terminating, the career of the vid-
eo’s female participant, Emi Cilibiu
(Katia Pascariu), an award-winning
history teacher at an elite Bucharest
primary school. Despite more or less
beginning by filling the screen with an
engorged male member and ending,
after a prolonged parent-teacher meet-
ing that’s more like a show trial, with a
Romanian version of Wonder Woman
ramming a dildo down a priest’s throat,
Bad Luck Banging is nothing if not di-
dactic. It also intends to add to the his-
torical record.
Bad Luck Banging is to some de-
gree a documentary of its own making.
The movie was conceived well before
the onset of Covid-19. Preproduction
happened under lockdown, so casting
and rehearsals were done on Zoom.
Lockdown in Bucharest ended in late
May 2020; sensing the imminence of
Covid’s second wave, Jude and his
producer, Ada Solomon, rushed the
film into production before it was fully
funded, shooting on the city’s streets
with masks mandatory for the crew
and cast, off camera as well as on. Peo-
ple on-screen are forever telling one
another to mask up or “sanitize,” with
varying degrees of civility and success.
Appropriately, Bad Luck Banging had
a virtual world premiere at the 2021
Berlin Film Festival, where the Zoom-
linked jury gave it the Golden Bear—
making it the third Romanian film in
the past decade to win the top prize, a
better record than any other country.
E merging on the international film
scene some fifteen years ago, the New
Romanian Cinema (NRC) was one of
not wish to be involved with the
other but planned to toss her aside.
Perhaps, Ester thinks, in writing and
publishing this article she can change
the culture to become a bit more like
what she wants it to be, rather than hav-
the twenty-first century’s least antici-
pated developments. Romania’s sub-
sidized film industry, unlike those of
other nations of the former Soviet bloc,
never produced a “new wave.” The na-
tion’s most distinguished filmmaker,
Lucian Pintilie, spent much of his ca-
reer self- exiled in Paris. Particularly
after Nicolae Ceau‫܈‬escu came to power
in the mid-1960s, Romania was known
mainly for kitschy, hypernationalist
historical spectacles. The advent of the
NRC was all the more surprising in that,
with the fall of communism, the film in-
dustries of other Warsaw Pact nations
had tended toward artistic decline.
Cannes was the stage on which the
NRC first received international atten-
tion. In 2005 Cristi Puiu’s tour de force
The Death of Mr. L ăzărescu, a series of
intricately choreographed scenes track-
ing a stricken elderly man’s odyssey
through several Bucharest emergency
rooms, won the festival’s venturesome
Un Certain Regard section. The fol-
lowing year Corneliu Porumboiu’s
droll 12: 08 East of Bucharest, satiriz-
ing Romania’s self- deceiving memories
of the 1989 revolution, won the Caméra
d’Or for best first film. The year after
that, Christian Nemescu’s posthumous
California Dreamin’, a comedy about a
NATO train stalled in rural Romania,
took the Un Certain Regard award,
and Cristian Mungiu’s gripping thriller
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, about
the travails of obtaining an illegal
abortion in Ceau‫܈‬escu’s Romania, was
crowned with the Palme d’Or.
However welcome, the efflorescence
of Romanian cinema is something of a
mystery. In the introduction to her an-
thology The New Romanian Cinema,
ing to submit to its frustrating and de-
moralizing reality. Andersson allows her
this creative frenzy, but in the end, the
journal she sends it to declines to publish
it. Of course they do. Only in a rational,
state-run paradise would anyone under-
stand her, let alone agree. Q
Magnolia Pictures
Christina Stojanova suggests
that, with Ceau‫܈‬escu’s overthrow
and execution in late 1989, Ro-
mania experienced a more vi-
olent political rupture than did
the other Communist states.
Like the neorealist movement
that emerged from the rubble of
Mussolini’s Italy, the NRC was a
response to a traumatic upheaval
that demanded a break with ex-
isting aesthetic norms.
Puiu’s and Mungiu’s early
films did have a number of neo-
realist elements. Characterized
by location shooting, ordinary
protagonists, strict chronologies,
contemporary settings, and the
absence of musical soundtracks,
they were further distinguished
by long, choreographed shots
and a level of ensemble acting
that clearly required hours of
rehearsal. With virtually every
scene shot in a single setup, their
movies felt as though they were
unfolding in real time. This un-
derlying documentary aspect (what
Irina Trocan, one of the essayists in
The New Romanian Cinema, calls the
“mystique of the diegetic world”) re-
flected a desire to show the world as
it actually is. Indeed, Puiu’s and Mun-
giu’s first films involved ordeals in the
face of oppressive institutions. Rather
than expressions of new freedom, they
were suffused with existential dread.
Jude is a decade younger than Puiu and
Mungiu, who were in their early twen-
ties when Ceau‫܈‬escu was overthrown.
After making two contemporary do-
mestic dramas, The Happiest Girl in
the World (2009) and Everybody in
Our Family (2012), he created an alter-
native version of the nationalist epic or
“heritage movie” that was the central
Romanian genre of the Ceau‫܈‬escu era.
This provided his breakthrough. The
jaunty title of his folkloric period piece
Aferim! (2015) might be translated as
“good job” or “mission accomplished,”
and describes the movie itself.
Set in early-nineteenth-century Wala-
chia, an area in southern Romania dom-
inated at different times by the Russian
and Ottoman Empires, Aferim! con-
cerns a local constable and his son who
are engaged by a nobleman to track
down a fugitive Romani slave; based on
a true story, it was the first Romanian
movie since 1923 to address the issue of
slavery. Bearing out the observation that
introduces Onoriu Colăcel’s The Roma-
nian Cinema of Nationalism—“The
Romanians love to watch their fictional
ancestors on screen”—Aferim! was a
modest hit at home, selling a bit more
than a tenth of the tickets purchased
The New York Review
for the Hollywood import Fast and Fu- ing reenactors in the various armies.
rious 7, but a critical success abroad, (Some are upset that there are Romani
where it was typically described as a members of the cast.) Her most intense
Romanian western. discussions are with the amiable gov-
Jude’s follow-up, Scarred Hearts ernment watchdog assigned to the pro-
(2016), was a different sort of histori- duction. She is a true believer in art’s “Reveals how prestigious natural
cal movie, based on the life and writ- capacity for “moral enlightenment.”
ings of the Romanian Jewish writer
Max Blecher, who died at twenty- eight
He is a crafty realist who slyly suggests
she take Schindler’s List as her model.
scientists once sought physical
of spinal tuberculosis. Set almost en- Against the odds and with a certain
tirely in a sanitarium, Scarred Hearts amount of subterfuge, the show pro- explanations, in vain, for a social
suggests a scaled- down, mordant take ceeds as planned. Crowds of specta-
on The Magic Mountain. Like Hans
Castorp, Max has political discussions
tors are entertained by the marching
bands of the various “armies.” The
identity that continues to carry
and even a love affair, but he is a far supposed German troops are greeted
more sardonic, anguished figure and with sporadic cheers, the designated enormous significance to this day.”
suffers more acutely from misdiagno- Russians with lusty boos, and the Ro-
sis. As the Mann novel ends with the manians with wild enthusiasm. A bat-
outbreak of World War I, so Max dies tle is staged. Speeches are made. First
—Nell Irvin Painter, author of
on the eve of World War II, heralded by a priest and then a Romanian general
a rise in Romanian anti- Semitism, an rail against the “dirty Jews,” who, in a
The History of White People
element Jude added to the story to the departure from the approved script, are
evident displeasure of some Romanian rounded up and locked in a barn that
commentators. is purportedly set aflame. The govern-
Jude (who despite his last name is ment watchdog is taken aback by this
not Jewish) addressed the Holocaust unexpected deviation. So, ultimately, is
directly with his documentary The Mariana, if not for the same reason: she
Dead Nation (2017) and then again in hadn’t anticipated the crowd’s enthu-
his next feature, the Pirandellian back- siasm. The spectator is left to wonder
stage drama I Do Not Care If We Go whether Jude directed the audience’s
Down in History as Barbarians (2018). approving response to the spectacle or,
In I Do Not Care, a fierce young the- in the manner of Sacha Baron Cohen,
ater director (played by Ioana Iacob), provoked and documented it.
named for the Romanian dissident poet
Mariana Marin, has received a govern-
ment grant to stage an outdoor his- Jude followed I Do Not Care with
torical pageant as part of a Bucharest another sort of adaptation. Based on
cultural festival. Her chosen subject a 2013 documentary play drawn from
is the 1941 Odessa massacre, in which the files of the Ceau‫܈‬escu- era security
the Romanian army, at the behest of police, Uppercase Print (2020) involves
its German allies, slaughtered tens of a 1981 epidemic of subversive graffiti.
thousands of Ukrainian Jews during An extensive investigation leads to the
the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. arrest of a sixteen-year- old boy named
The movie’s title is a quote from Roma- Mugur C ălinescu, who was inspired
nia’s wartime fascist dictator, Marshal by Poland’s Solidarity movement but
Ion Antonescu, about the massacre. acting on his own. The case, which
I Do Not Care is shot like a docu- Jude intersperses with snippets of ar-
mentary—it even begins with Iacob chival television, proceeds through
introducing herself as an actor who round-the- clock surveillance of Mugur
plays a character in the movie. It is ba- (played by Serban Lazarovici) and his
sically a thought experiment, much of parents, as well as multiple interroga-
it devoted to Mariana defending her tions of his teachers, who are tasked
piece, arguing about historical details, with deciding on an appropriate pun-
and rehearsing civilians who are play- ishment. The teen, who is surprisingly “To read [these essays] is to witness
European intellectuals, in the age of the
Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after
another, to justify atrocity.”
BURKE ON PRINCIPLE
—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths
The blackout curtains were drawn—
it was night, I mean—though dawn
should have come. Beeches, maples, “An indispensable book for anyone who is
interested in the origins of racism.”
the dying horse-chestnuts, all had surrendered
to the general fall, like men to a cause not —David Diop, author of the Booker
understood. Sacrifice I do not understand
Prize–winning At Night All Blood Is Black
in the general sense. It had been a week
of the feathery rain
“An invaluable historical study, with all too
the trees were gluttons for—not punishment,
many applications today.”
but history. The passing dumb-show cannot
bring back that sense of generosity, theft. —Adam Gopnik, author of A Thousand
Snow falling through the tracery of the rose
Small Sanities
window, how much would the lord
of the manor have paid for his private folly,
his sublime? The churches lie redundant.

—William Logan
hup.harvard.edu

March 24, 2022 19

stubborn, finally breaks down and re-
cants. Readmitted to society, he dies
four years later under mysterious cir-
cumstances. In some respects, it seems
like a rehearsal for Bad Luck Banging.
Like Jude’s previous four features,
Bad Luck Banging is a period piece
about the present moment. Since the
movie was conceived as a time cap-
sule, it’s a reasonable assumption that
its raunchy prelude is set before Ro-
mania’s lockdown ended and was not
immediately uploaded to the Inter-
net. Convincingly amateurish as well
as explicitly hardcore (requiring at
least one body double), the video is
not just an expression of conjugal af-
fection but a symptom of enforced
boredom. Perhaps a bit stir- crazy,
Emi and her husband embark upon a
spell of self- documented adult play,
replete with wigs, masks, toys, theat-
rical dirty talk, and, on the other side
of the bedroom door, an interrupting
mother-in-law: “Don’t forget to fill
my prescription.” (Domestic life in-
trudes on sex as it might on a Zoom
meeting.)
Introduced with a few bars of the
World War II ballad “Lili Marlene,”
this humorously clumsy dramatization
of Emi’s private life segues into the
scarcely less messy public arena. The
movie’s first part—titled, perhaps after
Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street”—
follows Emi as she makes her way
through central Bucharest. She seems
prim and brisk—nothing like the vid-
eo’s pink-wigged sex sprite, who we just
saw decked out in butterfly panties and
a sequin-spangled leopard-skin mask.
The public Emi wears a different kind
of mask, as does nearly everyone else.
C ing a context for the sex video. (Emi is
The first third of Bad Luck Banging is
essentially a documentary of Bucharest
in the summer of 2020. The segment
has a raw vérité quality. Jude keeps
his camera at a distance, observing the
streets as much as Emi, who is inter-
mittently glued to her cell phone as she
tries to figure out how the sex video es-
caped her husband’s computer.
Bucharest is half built and half dere-
lict—a semiotic jungle and a ruin wait-
ing to happen. Detritus is everywhere,
as are shoddy consumer goods. A bill-
board advertising a self- defense school,
Superkombat Academy Romania, pre-
sides over the symbolic economy. The
mall is stocked with ersatz Disney crea-
tures, gaudy princess dolls, and pink-
orange Paw Patrol toys. Everyone is
stressed. Rudeness is endemic. “Mask
on your muzzle,” a shopkeeper snaps at
a gabby customer. Class warfare breaks
out in a supermarket checkout line,
where one customer is unaccountably
dressed as Superman.
Jude told an interviewer that he saw
Romania’s main problem as the ab-
sence of social solidarity. The perva-
sive hostility of the people is echoed
by the assaultive environment. Bu-
charest is not only ramshackle in its
visual cacophony but also aurally abra-
sive: the endless clamor of the traffic,
the blaring horns and constant sirens.
The street is so noisy that when Emi’s
husband calls with the bad news that
their amateur video has surfaced on
Pornhub, she seeks quiet in a gaming
arcade. Later she stops at a bookstore
and buys a copy of Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology. “So timely
for the pandemic,” the clerk tells her
and, as further reading, recommends
Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem
Testimony, which, in its found archival
material cataloging atrocities, presages
Bad Luck Banging’s second move-
ment. (Jude is the most literary of Ro-
manian directors—every one of his
recent movies includes a reference to
Isaac Babel.)
The sequence is replete with “stolen”
documentary shots. As with I Do Not
Care If We Go Down in History as Bar-
barians, Jude blurs the line between
the observed and the contrived. Did
the filmmaker find or place the several
broken mannequins glimpsed lying on
the street, or position the plaster ice-
cream cones leaning against a build-
ing? The scene in which Emi enters a
drugstore and attempts to purchase
a single Xanax is clearly staged, but
did the actress deliberately provoke
a cursing match with the owner of a
car parked on the sidewalk? Was the
elderly woman who, spotting the cam-
era, laughingly says, “Eat my cunt!”
coached or spontaneous?
E mi’s tour of Bucharest—which
Jude, interviewed via Zoom during
the New York Film Festival, compared
to the excavation of Pompeii—con-
cludes with the camera tilting up at the
mock- classical columns of an ancient,
shuttered movie house. That temple
to cinema may be closed, but there’s a
religious aspect to the movie’s second
part, titled “A Short Dictionary of An-
ecdotes, Signs, and Wonders.” Rather
than offering manifestations of the
Holy Spirit, Jude creates a sort of lex-
icon in brief sections titled after words
and concepts—ranging from “Jesus” to
“Social Distancing”—with found video
clips and photographic material largely
culled from the Internet, thus provid-
absent from this section, although the
In preparation for the movie’s final
part, titled “Praxis and Innuendos,”
the word “Family” is accompanied
by the image of a young boy’s scarred
back and “Children” defined as “politi-
cal prisoners of their parents.” The two
previous sections come together as Emi
goes on trial before the parents of her
students in what Jude calls, in the sec-
tion’s subtitle, a “sitcom.” For reasons
of social distancing, the inquisition is
held in the school courtyard. Masks
and exhortations to “please sanitize”
take on double meanings—as does the
suggestion that, during the meeting,
the school is being cleaned up for an
anticipated health inspection.
The parents, who are largely cari-
catured types, demand to see the sex
video. “I couldn’t watch it, I was on
shift,” one man explains. Thus, to
add to her humiliation, Emi is forced
to sit in silence, fuming behind her
mask, beside the self-righteous parent
who displays the video on her tablet.
Katia Pascariu’s acting, largely con-
veyed in the intensity of her glare, is
magnificent.
Emi is being taught a lesson even
as she attempts to teach one. The par-
ents blame her for traumatizing their
children. She tries to defend herself
(“My private life is my own”) and sug-
gests that they should do a better job
of policing their children’s Internet
consumption, which, of course, has
increased during lockdown. Like the
protagonist of I Do Not Care, Emi is
amply equipped to answer for herself,
pose difficult questions, and even deal
with a mansplaining intellectual who
imagines he is defending her when he
defines teaching as a form of symbolic
violence.
Meanwhile, one grandparent’s Woody
Woodpecker laugh punctuates the ex-
traneous sound effects—sirens, ringing
telephones—that infiltrate the meeting.

O actress who plays her makes a brief

cameo.)
The confrontation soon becomes an ex-
cuse to make schoolyard puns and dig

N W
Sometimes funny but more often up Emi’s other offenses. The trolling is
discomfiting, this barrage of images relentless. (In one notable irony, an on-

N O
can be read as a taxonomy of the ob- line discussion includes a commenter
scene or a series of one-liners. Begin- calling Emi’s attackers “leftist, politi-
ning with “23rd of August” (the day cally correct, shit-eating scum.”) The

E R in 1944 on which Romania switched

sides from the Axis to the Allies), pro-
parents question not only Emi’s mo-
rality but her pedagogic philosophy, as

C L ceeding through “Aborigines” (posed

photographs of European men abusing
well as her patriotism, and they accuse
her of indoctrinating children by, in

T D
naked African women), “Military” (a effect, teaching a Romanian (or “Jew-
parade of tanks), and “The Romanian ish”) version of critical race theory.

S
Orthodox Church” (nuns serenad- Although Jude makes light of the
I ing an Orthodox patriarch with a fas-
cist hymn), the segment is devoted to
culture wars, he is not a satiric populist
like Norman Lear. Rather, he belongs

N showing civilization at its worst. Most

entries—like a selfie-friendly tour of
to a tradition of politically minded East-
ern European filmmakers who have

G
Ceau‫܈‬escu’s monstrous palace, known
as the “House of the People,” and cell-
phone footage of a bus driver fighting
CONNECTING WORLDS with an elderly Romani woman—are
St. John’s College seminars in poetry and philosophy, fiction and nonfiction, specifically Romanian, although the
math and science, and the cinematic and performing arts offer programs river of garbage following the title
where you can connect with fellow lifelong learners, share ideas and examine “Global Warming” seems universal.
what it means to be a human in the world. As this jokey symphony of social dis-
gust continues, references to atrocities
“intellectually stimulating, horizon-expanding, fun week !” proliferate. “Montage” is the juxtapo-
sition of clowning soldiers and piled-up
corpses. “Christmas” provides a pretext
GREAT DISCUSSIONS ON GREAT BOOKS
for citing a wartime massacre of Jews
Weeklong in-depth seminars, JULY 2022 and Romani. We learn that “blow job”
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE ONLINE is the most looked-up term in an online
July 4–8 | July 11–15 dictionary, with “empathy” second.
IN PERSON AT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, SANTA FE, NM Commodification rules (French Rev-
July 11–15 | July 18–22 | July 25–29 olution–brand éclairs are juxtaposed
with Romanian Revolution–brand
To claim your own seat at a seminar table, visit our website wine), as does alienation, visualized as
sjc.edu/SummerClassic toy robots at war. The final title, “Zen,”
is illustrated with a petrified corpse.
20
taken as their subject the nature of the
media and the circulation of images.
These include the Soviet montage the-
orists Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisen-
stein, the Yugoslav “new wave” director
Dušan Makavejev (whose 1971 sex-pol
farce WR : Mysteries of the Organism
is Bad Luck Banging’s most obvious
precursor), the Andrzej Wajda of Man
of Marble (1977), and, most recently,
the Ukrainian documentarian Sergei
Loznitsa. All subscribe to the faith that
cinema has the power to change the
world; some, like Jude, understand that
it will not. The plague is here to stay.
As Emi’s ordeal winds down, the movie
presents three possible endings—happy,
unhappy, and apocalyptic. The last op-
tion (which suggests divine intervention
in the form of a superheroine) is the
greatest crowd-pleaser. Not just popular
but Pop. Q
The New York Review
 Bike Lane to the Élysée
Une femme française
by Anne Hidalgo.
Paris: Éditions de l’Observatoire,
208 pp.,
18.00 (paper)
On a Wednesday evening in December,
I took a tour of a parking garage that
had been transformed into housing. It
was located in the northeast of Paris,
in the nineteenth arrondissement, a
working- class quarter that has been
growing more expensive for over a de-
cade. The building had an imposing
entrance and was surrounded by thin
shrubs and anemic grass. People stood
by space heaters while waiting for the
ribbon- cutting ceremony to celebrate
149 new apartments, the rents for 74 of
them capped at between
14 and
18.5
per square meter—far less than the av-
erage cost in the neighborhood.
The project combined several pol-
icies that Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo
has fought for since she was elected
to the first of two terms in 2014: more
housing for low- and middle-income
families, less space for cars, and the
use of recycled and sustainable mate-
rials in construction. In the past eight
years she has transformed the French
capital, making it more modern, envi-
ronmentally friendly, and bikeable, and
has done much to “give back space to
Parisians,” according to Dominique
Alba, the managing director of APUR,
the city agency for urban planning.
Hidalgo has made these changes ag-
gressively, often testing the limits of
her powers as mayor. She prohibited
cars from the roads along the Seine
only to have the ban contested by the
French Ministry of Justice. (Hidalgo
prevailed: the roads are now filled with
runners, not taxis.) She has built more
than 43,000 units of public housing for
people with lower- and middle- class
incomes, including in wealthy neigh-
borhoods. The redevelopment of the
long- empty Samaritaine building near
the Pont Neuf into a new department
store and hotel—which opened in
June with rooms starting at $1,250 a
night—included ninety-six affordable
apartments with rents averaging $504
a month.
In recognition of her efforts to build
a city of the future, she has been in-
cluded in rankings such as Politico’s
“Most Influential People in Europe”
(number 1 in the “Dreamers” category)
and Time magazine’s “100 Most Influ-
ential People of 2020.” She talks about
rubbing shoulders with San Francisco
mayor London Breed and former New
York mayor Michael Bloomberg. She is
admired by urban planners around the
world, especially in the United States.
A recent article in French Elle notes,
“It’s no secret, Americans ‘loooove’
Paris. But if there’s one thing many
of them love even more than but-
tery croissants and Montmartre, it’s
Anne Hidalgo.”
And yet none of this has helped her
in this year’s presidential election,
in which she is the Socialist Party’s
candidate. French president Emman-
uel Macron, who in 2016 founded a
new centrist party, La République en
Marche, is planning to run for reelec-
tion. But the campaign has been dom-
inated less by his record in office than
March 24, 2022
Madeleine Schwartz
Anne Hidalgo inaugurating a new bicycle path on rue de Rivoli, Paris, September 2018
by controversies over crime, immigra-
tion, and identity politics driven by two
far-right candidates, Marine Le Pen
and Éric Zemmour.1 Hidalgo has been
nearly absent from debates on these is-
sues, which are far removed from the
urban planning and environmentalism
she has built her career on.
H idalgo appears to have the perfect
credentials for a center-left presiden-
tial candidate. She was born “Ana
Hidalgo” in Spain in 1959, and her
family immigrated to France when she
was two. She grew up in Lyon, where
her father, Antonio (“later on, he will
also like to be called Antoine,” she
says), worked as an electrician and
her mother as a seamstress. In her
book Une femme française, she cred-
its her love of France to her time in
school, which “gave all the children in
my situation a common feeling of be-
longing,” and describes her feelings of
elation when she gained French citi-
zenship at fourteen. She studied labor
law and worked as a labor inspector, a
1
See James McAuley, “Who Does Éric
Zemmour Speak For?,” The New York
Review, January 13, 2022.
Chestnot/Getty Images
rare woman in a male- dominated field,
after which, in 1997, she became an
adviser to the Socialist labor minister
Martine Aubry, who is now the mayor
of the northern city of Lille. Starting
in 2001 Hidalgo worked her way up
in Paris politics under the mentorship
of her predecessor as mayor, Bertrand
Delanoë, whose policies of urban re-
newal, such as finding new uses for the
city’s industrial areas, she has contin-
ued. She has three children, two from
her first marriage; her second husband,
Jean-Marc Germain, is also a Socialist
Party politician.
Paris, like many large cities, is under-
going a housing crisis that has pushed
many residents out. The average rent
increased by 19 percent between 2011
and 2020, according to Geneviève
Prandi of the Rent Observatory of
the Paris Metropolitan Area. Officials
have calculated that the larger urban
region needs to build 70,000 homes a
year to meet demand.
Hidalgo’s commitment to address-
ing the problem was evident at the
ribbon- cutting ceremony in December.
Politicians spoke in praise of the proj-
ect. “It’s good for a city to look toward
the future and reinvent itself by trying
to rethink the place of cars, by trying
to find suitable housing solutions for
families,” said François Dagnaud, the
Socialist mayor of the nineteenth ar-
rondissement. He was followed by Ian
Brossat, Hidalgo’s deputy mayor for
housing and a Communist Party mem-
ber who is the campaign director for its
presidential candidate, Fabien Roussel.
(Hidalgo governs Paris at the head of
a coalition made up of the Socialist,
Green, and Communist parties.) “We
have a great example here of what we
are able to do when we work well with
the state services,” he said. “This is a
building that belonged to the state.”
The city of Paris had bought and repur-
posed the garage. The architects noted
with pride that they had reused seven
thousand tons of its materials in the
construction. “That’s seven hundred
dumpsters that didn’t cross Paris!” one
said. A few minutes later, a colleague
came onstage and raised the amount to
ten thousand tons.
The ribbon cut, I went inside behind
Stéphane Dauphin, the head of Paris
Habitat, the public housing agency
that had overseen the construction
of the rent-regulated half of the new
building. (The other half, affordable
rent-to-buy housing, was overseen by
a for-profit developer.) By the elevator,
a woman stopped to say that she had
just moved in and was thrilled—espe-
cially because the building was heated.
A teacher, she had waited seven years
to get public housing. Dauphin told me
that he had recently been contacted by
the New York State Affordable Hous-
ing Corporation, which wanted to learn
more about the practice of repurposing
real estate.
On my tour, I was accompanied by
an Italian journalist writing his own ar-
ticle on Paris. He took out his phone to
show us pictures of apartments he had
visited that day. One was six square
meters (sixty-four square feet), which
left little room for more than a bed and
some storage. The landlord, he said,
knew it was illegal. But why should he
care? It could still be rented out.
Unlike her predecessors, Hidalgo is
trying to alleviate the housing shortage
while also pursuing green initiatives.
Construction is the largest source of
nonrecyclable waste in France; new
buildings alone create some 42 mil-
lion tons of waste a year, according to
Clara Simay, a Paris-based architect
who works with sustainable materials.
She notes that the city government has
tried to approach the problem from
all angles, most recently launching a
training course to teach people to re-
store buildings and encouraging the
use of biosourced materials like straw
and hemp. Hidalgo has vowed to make
Paris carbon neutral by 2050. “We won
a cultural battle in Paris,” says Em-
manuel Grégoire, Hidalgo’s deputy
mayor, who oversees urban planning
projects. “It’s the idea that our great
cities of the world . . . are facing a major
sustainability issue.” (Hidalgo did not
answer questions for this article.)
Hidalgo’s environmentalism has
meant a careful repurposing of space
in Paris, which has more than twice as
many inhabitants per square mile as
New York City and far fewer skyscrap-
ers. Each square meter must be useful,
21
environmentally friendly, attractive, rondissement. “The former offices of
and good for the inhabitants—yet also the Ministry of Defense will be trans-
appealing to tourists. The challenge is formed into 254 public housing units,”
exacerbated by Paris’s strict rules about he boasted. The mayor of the seventh
building height. In 1977, as a result of is Rachida Dati, who served in Presi-
backlash against the Tour Montpar- dent Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing gov-
nasse, a 689-foot black- clad skyscraper ernment. She has said she worries that
in the fifteenth arrondissement, a the inhabitants of her neighborhood
height limit of thirty-seven meters (121 will be “aggrieved” by public hous-
feet) was imposed. Since 2010, this has ing residents “throwing things over
been slightly relaxed: certain commer- the balcony.”
cial buildings can go up to 180 meters.
Hidalgo has been inventive in taking
advantage of this to create housing and L ike Justin Trudeau or Jacinda Ar-
more greenery, arguing for creative dern, Hidalgo is a politician more be-
use of public spaces and roofs. She has loved outside her country than within
also cracked down on Airbnb and has it. Many Parisians complain that the
passed legislation to control rents. construction of new housing has done
A large concentration of new public nothing to slow the increase in rents.
housing is located in neighborhoods The Economist recently ranked Paris
like the nineteenth arrondissement, as the second most expensive city in
but Hidalgo has also managed to add the world. Living there has become
low-income housing in neighborhoods so costly that its population has been
whose right-wing representatives have decreasing by about 10,000 inhabi-
been openly hostile to it, such as the tants a year since 2014—so many that
tony sixteenth, where large Art Nou- schools have reduced the number of
veau apartments sell for millions of classrooms. According to a local of-
euros. She has achieved this in part by ficial, Catherine Lécuyer, the eighth
working with the national government arrondissement lost about 14 percent
to buy up land, as with the parking of its schoolchildren between 2020
garage. However, Emmanuelle Cosse, and 2021. Some families may have
who was the French minister of hous- left because of the difficulty of living
ing from 2016 to 2017 under Presi- in small apartments under pandemic
dent François Hollande and now leads restrictions, but increasingly it is a
France’s public housing agencies, notes city that only the affluent can afford.
that such renovations are “far from suf- Even the food for sale has changed:
ficient” to solve the housing crisis, and between 2014 and 2017, the number
blamed the Macron administration for of organic grocery stores increased by
its lack of interest in the issue. 47 percent.
That December night in the nine- Hidalgo, of course, cannot stop mar-
teenth, Brossat, the housing deputy, ket forces or a pandemic. But many of
described a new development in the her innovations, which have earned her
conservative and wealthy seventh ar- prizes and recognition abroad, have
“A voice like no other”
Last Pages is a rich miscellany by the
Belgian-American author Oscar Mandel,
consisting of two bright novellas: Two Gentle-
men of Nantucket and Wickedness; a comedy:
The Fatal French Dentist; ten poems; and six
essays: “Unacceptable Poetry,“ “Against
Castrated Art,” “Concerning Imbecility,”
“Otherness,” “To Be or Not To Be a Jew,” and
“Melancholy Thoughts of a Nonagenarian.”
AGAINST THOSE of us impressionable subject is a desperately childish
who perpetuate this — someone, perhaps,
one. No one, it should
civilized view of free more responsive to
be noted, ever taunts a
choice, a small army of ethics than to the pop Catholic or a Presbyte-
the scribbling intelli- psychology of the rian with the charge of
gentsia, anxious about “well-adjusted person- “self-hatred” when he
losses to the Jewish ality” — might remind or she leaves the
community, brandish a these hardliners that Church once and for all.
psychological weapon the best theologians, I can assure the impla-
of which they are Jewish and Christian cables and their allies
astonishingly fond. We alike, have always that the emotion of
who favor dissolution, recommended hating in self-hatred is perfectly
they cry, are eaten up by oneself that which unknown to me.
Aversion yes: aversion,
“self-hatred”. In transla- deserves to be hated:
that is, toward those
tion: you are neurotic; where else does
you are sick. This salvation lie? So that, if who would enforce
“argument” is thought it is true that we hate upon me an ineradica-
to have a devastating ourselves, we can retort ble being contrary to
effect on its target. with some satisfaction my will and my convic-
Perhaps, for all I know, that we have found out tions. So much for
it has in fact stopped our sins and meekly “self-hatred”, about
short several would-be hope to mend them. But which little said is more
defectors and returned this is by the way. In than enough.
them shamefaced to serious reality, the [from “To Be or Not To
their kin. A less “self-hatred” invention Be a Jew”]
330 pages, $18. From Turner Publishing, Amazon, et al.
22
encountered opposition at home. Chief
among them is her effort to ban cars.
She has vowed to make Paris car-free,
promised to make the city entirely
bikeable by 2026, and subsidized the
purchases of electric bikes. These ini-
tiatives have not been met with univer-
sal admiration. Posts on social media
with the hashtag #saccageParis (the
ransacking of Paris) regularly point to
pictures of trash on the streets or scoot-
ers blocking the sidewalks. “Until very
recently, no one, or almost no one, was
interested in one aspect of the Paris
city hall’s actions: the methodical de-
struction of the heritage of the capital
as we know it,” writes the art historian
Didier Rykner in his new book, La
disparition de Paris, which includes
pictures of aspects of the city he finds
particularly ugly.
Another problem for Hidalgo as a
presidential candidate is that French
people in the provinces hate Paris—
both the city and what it represents.
The highest-paying jobs are here, as
are the best schools. Many French
businesses are based here, and it is the
country’s cultural and political center.
Hidalgo’s supporters like to mention
that French president Jacques Chirac
had been mayor of Paris. But as the
political scientist Olivier Rouquan
notes, Chirac had also twice been min-
ister before he ran for president—a far
stronger position from which to build
his national campaign.
In addition, Hidalgo doesn’t really
seem to want to be president. In Mon
combat pour Paris (2013) she wrote:
I could have been a minister, I’ve
been offered it. My ambition is
elsewhere. I am a candidate to be-
come the next mayor of Paris. Un-
like others, I do not consider this
function as a stepping stone to a
national destiny, but as a full-time
job. Paris is enough in itself.
She maintained this throughout her
reelection campaign in 2020, almost
word for word: “I am satisfied by Paris.
I will not be a presidential candidate.”
T he Socialist Party, once France’s
largest, won only 6 percent of the vote
in the 2017 national election. Unable to
decide if it is a party of workers or the
elite, where it stands on questions of
migration and identity politics, or what
it wants to do for the French economy,
the main message the party has sent in
recent years is one of reticence.
While the party positions itself
against the rising French right, the gov-
ernment of its most recent president,
François Hollande (2012–2017), was
responsible for evacuations of Roma
camps in France and, following deadly
terrorist attacks, controversial anti-
terrorism legislation that many crit-
icized as discriminatory. Between
2015 and 2020, the French newspaper
Le Monde has calculated, the party
has lost some 30 percent of its lead-
ers, many to Macron’s La République
en Marche. Few Socialists have been
able to respond effectively to the re-
cent flood of far-right rhetoric. The
party has lost so much money that it
had to sell its historic headquarters
in the seventh arrondissement and do
what so many Parisians dread: move
to the suburbs, in this case the much
cheaper town of Ivry- sur- Seine, south
of Paris.
One might expect that Hidalgo
would be able to regain support for her
party by pointing to her considerable
achievements as mayor of the country’s
largest city. But instead her campaign
has downplayed them, waiting months
to reveal plans and platforms, as if try-
ing to anticipate what voters want. Her
problems point to those of her party—
she is not well known outside Paris,
and where she is, her policies are often
attacked for catering to rich liberals.
In Paris, the symbol of Hidalgo’s time
as mayor has been streets filled with
bikers. But across France, bike jackets
have another meaning: the gilets jaunes
worn by antigovernment protesters
since late 2018.
Une femme française, her campaign
biography, was released last year and
seems to point away from her time as
mayor of Paris, perhaps anticipating
the antipathy that many have to the
capital. She only announced her plat-
form in mid-January, after her compet-
itors had spent months talking about
fears of migrants or rising crime rates.
She hasn’t always known how to sell
her accomplishments to voters outside
Paris. As mayor, she has aggressively
fought against cars. But she recently ar-
gued that the gas tax should decrease,
in an attempt to appeal to rural voters.
At a campaign rally on January 22 in
Aubervilliers, north of Paris, a promo-
tional video showed Hidalgo traveling
by train across France, meeting the
elderly, listening to nurses, visiting a
farm. Sometimes she spoke to the cam-
era, wearing a black leather jacket. The
screen flashed the names of all the cit-
ies she had visited: Amiens, Perpignan,
Clermont-Ferrand. “I listened to your
voices, your fears, your desires,” said
her voiceover. Paris appeared for a split
second and disappeared.
The room was about two-thirds full;
I sat toward the back behind party
members who waved rainbow flags,
which they dutifully returned at the
end of the rally. In her speech, Hidalgo
said she would raise the minimum
wage, increase teacher pay, and con-
tinue to support the EU. She offered
these proposals in a list, but they felt
very much like possibilities rather than
plans. Perhaps this was humility, but
what exactly did she have in mind when
she spoke of an “international court for
environmental crimes”? The meaning
of the campaign posters was also hard
to fathom. “Samir, Léa, Sarah want
public housing,” one red sign said in big
letters. Below, so small I could barely
read it, was added: “If the issue here
for you isn’t their names, join us.” Her
campaign was trying to set itself apart
by pointedly not engaging with identity
politics. But what was she suggesting?
Almost everyone I talked to, whether
party members or sympathizers, said
that they would vote for her because
she was the Socialist candidate. Few
cited the candidate herself. “It’s more
for the values of the Socialist Party,”
said Guillaume, a party member and
university student studying interna-
tional relations. “We have one candi-
date,” said Sibt Muzzamil, a politician
from the town of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine,
north of Paris. “Our candidate of all the
Socialists will be Ms. Hidalgo. That’s it.”
The only exceptions were Franck,
Cécile, and Marion, three younger
party members from the southern city
of Toulouse. While we listened to Daft
Punk over the loudspeakers, they ex-
plained that they found the idea of
The New York Review
the first woman mayor of Paris inspir-
ing. Marion was particularly drawn to
Hidalgo’s proposal to create a public
program for childcare. “I’m a young
mother,” she said.
How many parents struggle to find
childcare? How many parents find
themselves having to adjust their
work life to balance family plans
and their child’s development? It’s
a crucial subject and nobody talks
about it. She talks about it. She is
connected to what happens in peo-
ple’s lives.
It occurred to me that in three months
of reporting, this was the first I had
heard of this proposal in conversations
about Hidalgo.
Unfortunate political decisions have
also weakened Hidalgo’s campaign. In
an effort to strengthen her candidacy,
she called for a primary so that the
left could unite behind a single choice
among seven candidates, then backed
off when the Green Party candidate
said he would not participate. Her un-
certainty muffled whatever noise she
might have been able to make about
her platform. Former Socialist jus-
tice minister Christiane Taubira came
in first in the primary. Hidalgo, who
had declared it inconsequential, came
in fifth.
Even if Hidalgo remains in the race,
she may not get 5 percent of the vote,
the threshold required for candidates
to have campaign costs reimbursed by
the state. Many in the party, the politi-
cal scientist Rouquan told me, are just
trying to “survive” this election in the
hope that things will go better in 2027,
when they’ll next have a chance to put
forward a candidate. According to a
recent story in Le Nouvel Obs, “The
mayor of Paris feels that she is sup-
ported by her party like a hanged man
is supported by the rope.”
P erhaps nowhere is the tension be-
tween Paris and the rest of France
clearer than in Hidalgo’s own backyard.
The Paris metropolitan area has some
7.2 million people—comparable to
many world capitals. But the city itself
is small: 2.2 million. Hidalgo’s remit is
much closer to that of the mayor of Phil-
adelphia than of the mayor of New York.
She governs about thirty- eight square
miles, less than two thirds the size of
Brooklyn. In many ways, the city is an
island: it is surrounded by a ring road,
the périphérique, which physically and
symbolically cuts it off from the 130
small towns that surround it.
Paris and its banlieues have huge in-
equalities—from household incomes to
the number of doctors—but they need
each other. Every day 800,000 people
come into Paris to work, according to
Pierre Mansat, who served as deputy
mayor under Delanoë and Hidalgo.
Parisians have always been part of a
larger metropolis, says the urban geog-
rapher Aurélien Delpirou. Coordina-
tion is important to solve many of the
city’s problems. Hidalgo’s new public
housing projects, for example, cannot
fix Paris’s housing crisis on their own.
The city added 41,354 new low- and
middle-income apartments between
2014 and 2020. By 2025, one fourth of
its units will be categorized as public
housing. But this is not nearly enough,
notes Frédéric Gilli, an economist at
Sciences Po who studies urban devel-
March 24, 2022
opment. “There is currently a shortage
of between 400,000 and 500,000 homes
in the Paris region,” he says. “We will
never build 400,000 to 500,000 new
homes in Paris.”
As mayor, Hidalgo has had to co-
ordinate between her turf and the
communes outside it, what is known
as “Le Grand Paris.”2 A new subway
system, announced in 2010 and sched-
uled to begin service around the time
of the Summer Olympics in 2024, will
connect the suburbs to the city. This
has been accompanied by a new in-
stitution, the Métropole du Grand
Paris, created in 2016 to link them po-
litically, but they have not coalesced.
The Métropole encompasses 131 com-
munes, many of which align politically
with the president of the Île- de-France
region, Valérie Pécresse, who is the
presidential candidate of the center-
right Republicans.
Paris is “a capital that is folded on
itself, which nevertheless lives on the
enormous contribution of all its neigh-
bors,” says Mansat, the former deputy
mayor, who is also considered to be
an architect of Le Grand Paris. He
cites Hidalgo’s attempt to end Paris’s
pandemic lockdown before the rest
of France does—without considering
those who travel into the city every day
to work. Delpirou notes that even as
jobs and companies have moved out-
side the city, many of the highest-paying
jobs are concentrated in Paris. Choices
that might seem good for the city’s in-
habitants, like making the roads along
the Seine car-free, may be disruptive to
commuters who do not have access to
the same transport options. Hidalgo’s
first book about the city, Mon com-
bat pour Paris, describes its future as
an extended metropolis. In Le lieu de
possible, written five years later, she
implicitly sets up borders by discussing
“the Parisians and the visitors.”
These questions are very much in
the air at city hall. “I am the first to say
that the institutional situation is not
satisfactory and that we will have to
think about it collectively in the com-
ing months and years,” says Grégoire,
Hidalgo’s deputy. He notes that Paris
donates money to the surrounding
areas—$160 million this year—and
has been working particularly hard to
invest in and improve the areas on the
edge of the city. “This is really the work
of the next forty years.” In the next few
months he hopes to launch a new plan
to do away with the périphérique, trans-
forming it into an “urban boulevard”
that will be more open and greener.
“Naturally, there can be this feeling
of a form of imperialism of the big over
the small,” says Grégoire. Paris, he says,
is huge compared to the towns around
it. “But I believe that we show on a
daily basis how much we try to erase
this in our relations with the neighbor-
ing towns. And we do it not because we
are nice, even if we are nice. I am nice!
But because it is where our fellow citi-
zens live and breathe.”
In December I asked Delpirou to
show me an area on the edge of Paris
that had recently changed. He chose
Paris Rive Gauche, a former industrial
area in the thirteenth that now houses
2
See Atlas du Grand Paris: Une
métropole en mutations, edited by
Daniel Béhar and Aurélien Delpirou
(Paris: Autrement, 2020).
residences and offices. As I waited for
him at the métro station, I received a
text message: he had twisted his ankle
while riding his bike to meet me.
We met instead a few weeks later
at an Italian restaurant in Station F,
a former freight-train station in the
thirteenth that reopened in 2017 as
“the world’s largest start-up campus,”
with some one thousand wannabe tech
unicorns. I watched the crowds order
lunch via app. One woman had a tote
bag with an image of a large rooster
and a logo reading, “French Tech.” I
wondered why Delpirou, who does not
have the polished gleam of a start-up
employee, had chosen this restaurant.
When he arrived, he explained that it
illustrated what was wrong with Paris
today: tech-focused, expensive, homo-
geneous. Even the food, he added, was
“not very good. It’s medium plus. It’s
way too expensive. . . . I actually find
[the place] pretty unbearable.”
Once we had picked at our pasta
and incoherent salad, I noted gently
that while I understood the many com-
plaints about the mayor, I had recently
been home in New York and had been
shocked by what I saw. In the West Vil-
lage, I had walked through streets of
empty storefronts, decimated by the
pandemic and a lack of government co-
ordination. I returned to Paris with the
feeling of relief: finally I was in a city
where it seemed that someone was in
charge.
“If you knew how much I agree with
you!” Delpirou exclaimed. “Yes, we
have an incredible opportunity here
in France. . . . Urban planning remains
controlled by the public powers. . . . Of
course, everything is not perfect.” He
Big ideas from the MIT Press
“Kinney takes on some “An essential guide to
of the most controver- the age of artificial intel-
sial issues of current ligence written by two
research and treats of its leading scholars.”
them with uncommon
—Madeleine Albright,
subtlety and nuance.
former US Secretary
An excellent read.”
—Brian Greene,
of State
professor of physics
and mathematics at
Columbia University
mitpress.mit.edu
noted that he had recently been in To-
ronto, where he had talked with urban
planners in despair over “disgusting
skyscrapers” built out of materials that
wouldn’t last three years: “We’re light-
years away from that.”
We walked along the Avenue de
France, which is meant to resemble the
Haussmannian boulevards of central
Paris and is lined with modern build-
ings and new trees. Delpirou showed
me the area’s different stages of devel-
opment under successive mayors, in-
cluding the imposing new Bibliothèque
nationale de France, inaugurated in
1996. The next stage of linking the city
with the suburbs is currently under-
way, but the plans are being revised,
according to Grégoire. It is not possi-
ble to say how Paris will reach out to
its neighbors.
I left Delpirou and walked down
the Avenue de France. The end of
Paris looked fixed. Any further and
you would fall off or crash into the
périphérique. Two controversial new
buildings designed by the French ar-
chitect Jean Nouvel hovered over-
head—thirty-nine stories of offices
and luxury hotel rooms. On the other
side of the ring road was the town of
Ivry, long a stronghold of the left,
where large apartment buildings jutted
out like teeth. The avenue ended at a
concrete barricade topped with a wire
fence. Graffiti in English said, “Fuck
Them Middle Class.” The périphérique
blocked the view. Below it, train
tracks led out of Paris. The suburbs
seemed very close, and at the same
time I couldn’t figure out how to get
to them. Q
—February 23, 2022
“Iskenderian reminds
us to ask where our
bank finance flows
and how much is used
for building unequal
wealth or destructive
institutions.”
—Ela Bhatt, founder of
India’s Self-Employed
Women’s Association
23
 Proud of His Conundrums
Harold Rosenberg:
A Critic’s Life
by Debra Bricker Balken.
University of Chicago Press,
640 pp., $40.00
The Loft Generation:
From the de Koonings to
Twombly, Portraits and
Sketches, 1942–2011
by Edith Schloss, edited by
Mary Venturini, with photo
editing by Jacob Burckhardt.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
312 pp., $32.00
The art critic Harold Rosen-
berg is remembered as a swash-
buckling player in a sprawling
American intellectual dra-
ma—a sort of epic family ro-
mance—that extended from
the 1930s to the 1960s. The
Old World was fading, the
New World was taking center
stage, and many American
artists, writers, and thinkers
were eager to celebrate what
they saw as New York City’s
intellectual and cultural dom-
inance. The works and days of
Rosenberg’s unruly cohort—
which included friends now far
more famous than him, among
them Willem de Kooning, Bar-
nett Newman, Saul Bellow, and
Mary McCarthy—have some
of the fascination of a genesis
story.
We are drawn to the com-
plications and controversies
of those times, whether the
personal lives of de Kooning,
Bellow, and McCarthy or the
violent split among New York
intellectuals that Hannah Ar-
endt, another friend of Rosen-
berg’s, precipitated with her
report on Adolf Eichmann’s
trial in Jerusalem. Rosenberg
was in on the action, jazzing up
the new art with the striking
catchphrase “action painting”
and provoking another critic,
Clement Greenberg, to take
aim at him in an essay enti-
tled “How Art Writing Earns
Its Bad Name.” The disagree-
ments between these two men have a
primal resonance. By some reckonings
Greenberg (the formalist) and Rosen-
berg (oversimplified as the antifor-
malist) are as entangled as Cain and
Abel.
Rosenberg, who at the time of his
death in 1978 was a regular contribu-
tor to The New Yorker and a member
of the Committee on Social Thought
at the University of Chicago, was fasci-
nated by the paradoxes that plague the
discerning mind. He was skewering the
delusions of his own rowdy crowd as
well as the culture industry more gen-
erally when he coined one of his most
winning phrases, “the herd of indepen-
dent minds,” as the title for an essay
published in 1948. But the essay didn’t
necessarily fulfill the title’s promise.
Was he saying that intellectual inde-
pendence was an illusion? Or was that
clever takedown just his way of navi-
gating a time of peril and possibility,
when artists and intellectuals were
24
Jed Perl
Saul Steinberg: Portrait of Harold Rosenberg, 1972
finding their bearings after two world
wars, the Holocaust, and the rise of
authoritarian regimes on the right and
the left?
More than half a century later, as we
confront our own diminishing pros-
pects, we may be right to believe that
our troubles began back then. True, it
was a period of American optimism,
but the boom times were shadowed by
a gathering awareness that the faith in
human progress that had emboldened
nineteenth- century thinkers was fail-
ing. No wonder there has been so much
interest in recent books that cover those
years, including Louis Menand’s The
Free World, Benjamin Moser’s biog-
raphy of Susan Sontag, Mary Gabriel’s
Ninth Street Women, and Mark Greif’s
The Age of the Crisis of Man. Two new
additions to this literature—Debra
Bricker Balken’s Harold Rosenberg:
A Critic’s Life and Edith Schloss’s The
Loft Generation: From the de Koo-
nings to Twombly—provide a few more
close-ups of the mid-twentieth- century
drama.
In The Loft Generation, Schloss re-
calls de Kooning complaining “that
Marx and Freud and Einstein had led
us astray.” Those were the words of a
man who, however engaged he was with
what Rosenberg dubbed “the tradition
of the new,” also had his doubts about
modernity. As for Rosenberg, who had
embraced Marxism in the late 1920s
and never entirely escaped its influ-
ence, he might be described as a dis-
abused optimist. Schloss, a painter and
writer who for some years was part of
New York’s downtown art scene, offers
quick, penetrating portraits of Rosen-
berg and de Kooning, as well as the
dance critic and poet Edwin Denby,
the painter and critic Fairfield Porter,
and the poet and critic Frank O’Hara.
Although her memoir, which was left
unfinished at her death in 2011, is by no
means a success—Schloss doesn’t make
herself enough of a protagonist—along
Jewish Museum, New York/Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS ), NY
the way she provides the strik-
ing glimpses of midcentury life
and thought that are missing in
Balken’s biography of Rosen-
berg, the most extensive study
of the critic to date. Instead
of sharpening our sense of
Rosenberg, whose writing Mc-
Carthy praised for its “zestful
freedom” and “gleeful boyish”
energy, Balken loses focus as
she weaves from one old intel-
lectual controversy to another.
I realize that the intellec-
tual and imaginative achieve-
ments of postwar New York
resist easy summary. What
I think it’s safe to say is that
there was a recoil from the
all-encompassing visions of
human history that had thrilled
artists, writers, and thinkers in
the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. For a time the
collapse of Marxist ortho-
doxies saw many intellectuals
turning to Freud or existen-
tialism, but mostly in a search
for personal rather than com-
munal answers. The rejection
of big ideas could be a good
thing, when it led to fresh,
more sharply focused observa-
tions and insights. Or it could
be a bad thing, when it pushed
people to reject any system or
idea, however promising.
De Kooning, a central figure
in Schloss’s memoir, dismissed
the grandiose theorizing of
Kandinsky and Mondrian, al-
though he very much admired
their work; he wanted to oper-
ate from instinct. Rosenberg’s
first essay collection, The Tra-
dition of the New, was graced
with a brilliant jacket design by
de Kooning (see illustration on
page 26). The critic was eager to
align himself with the artists he
admired and who, as Schloss re-
calls, had already “freed them-
selves from the pieties of social
consciousness” but were willing
to accept some of his thought
even though it “was colored by
Marxist logic.” Rosenberg was
always trying to reimagine the
grandiose theorizing of an earlier age
in a more fluid and contemporary form.
H arold Rosenberg was born in 1906 in
Brooklyn. He attended public schools
in New York and received a degree
from Brooklyn Law School in 1927.
By the time he was in his twenties he
was a striking presence, tall, with dark
hair and eyes and dramatic features. In
time he became “a regal person,” Bel-
low recalled in a memoir written after
his friend’s death. Rosenberg’s father,
Abraham, who had immigrated from
Poland, was a tailor, an observant Jew,
a Zionist, and according to his son a
man “devoted to literature, ideas and
study.” On Sundays he took Harold and
his brother, David, to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Although Rosenberg,
according to Balken, had little feeling
for Jewish life, whether the synagogue
or the Zionist cause, he later wrote
about “the fantastic emotional residues
The New York Review
of the Jewish family.” Some ancient,
biblical sense of the individual as an
actor in history, mediating between
tragedy and triumph, must have helped
propel him to the not inconsiderable
place he held in intellectual life in the
1960s.
Rosenberg’s early years bring to
mind the struggles of another young
man, Alfred Kazin, as he described
them in two masterpieces of memoir,
A Walker in the City and Starting Out
in the Thirties. Both men, even as they
grappled with the deprivations and aus-
terities that their working- class families
knew all too well, found an outlet for
their dreams of glory in the literature,
art, and ideas that were available to
just about any New Yorker with a sub-
way token and a library card. Balken’s
book opens on the steps of the New
York Public Library in the summer
of 1928, where Rosenberg found him-
self talking with Harry Roskolenko, a
writer who never became well known
but immediately impressed Rosenberg
with his talk of Marx and his followers.
The library steps, Roskolenko wrote in
a memoir published after Rosenberg’s
death, were “our Roman circus and our
Greek forum.”
The scene, as Roskolenko described
it, had a madcap intellectual exhila-
ration, with a range of characters in-
cluding Kenneth Burke, a formidable
literary critic too little read today, Sidney
Hook, the bold philosophical thinker
who moved from principled leftist to
principled conservative, and an assort-
ment of “philosophers, critics, grammar-
ians, Marxists, Trotskyites, Stalinists,
technocrats, vegetarians, free lovers—
everybody with a talking and a reading
mission.” If that wasn’t enough to excite
a young man, Rosenberg’s brother, an
aspiring poet, had already embraced
life in Greenwich Village, where Har-
old became familiar with the work of
Stravinsky and Schoenberg and mod-
ern writers, among them Stein, Joyce,
Gide, and William Carlos Williams.
It wasn’t until the early 1950s, with
the publication of “The American Ac-
tion Painters” in ARTnews, that Rosen-
berg really became an art critic. Before
that he moved in downtown New York’s
overlapping literary and artistic worlds,
a figure of some significance but with-
out a clear direction. He did some edit-
ing and writing, published a book of his
poems, and worked on the WPA Amer-
ican Guide series. During the war he
was involved, in both Washington and
New York, with the Office of War In-
formation, and at the end of the war
he found a job with the American Ad
Council. Balken has brought together
a considerable amount of information
about Rosenberg’s contributions, as
author or editor or both, to a range
of magazines, many never well known
and some hardly known today, includ-
ing Poetry, Art Front, Partisan Review,
View, VVV, Possibilities, and Location.
She plunges into the tangled leftist
politics around Art Front and the rival
Surrealist camps that fueled View and
VVV, and explains why Possibilities,
which Rosenberg edited with Robert
Motherwell, lasted only one issue and
Location, which he edited with the
critic Thomas B. Hess, only two.
Balken, a well-regarded art historian
and curator, seems overwhelmed by her
material. By the time I closed her book
I felt that I’d learned more about the
politics of Artforum, a magazine with
which Rosenberg was only tangentially
March 24, 2022
involved, than about his marriage, his
daughter, or his death. She relates some
of the bickering and backbiting that
characterized the art community on
Long Island; the Rosenbergs bought
a house near East Hampton and spent
many summers there. But she doesn’t
make good use of But Not for Love,
a novel by Rosenberg’s wife, May Na-
talie Tabak, the early pages of which
evoke the beauties of life away from
the city: a couple could be “stretched
out on the sand, reading and drowsing
until the tide went out,” gather clams as
they walked home, and then cook them
while burning “dead branches of an
apple tree in the fancy parlor stove with
its proud German silver trimming.”
What’s missing in Balken’s biography is
the joy—maybe even the romance—of
New York artistic, literary, and intel-
lectual life.
Rosenberg, Balken would have us be-
lieve, was a perpetual outsider—a man
who “always resisted the in- crowd.” I’m
left wondering how she reconciles this
with his later years, when he was on
the faculty of a prestigious university
and had a permanent post at one of the
country’s most important magazines.
Balken loses sight of the man whom
Bellow, in his magnificent story “What
Kind of Day Did You Have?,” reimag-
ined as Victor Wulpy, “a major figure,
a world- class intellectual.” Bellow’s
eminent art critic hobnobs with finan-
ciers and knows his way around café
society. Perhaps there’s an element of
hyperbole in Bellow’s fictionalization.
Nevertheless, if Rosenberg can be de-
scribed as an outsider, it’s only because
in the 1960s a little antiestablishment
cred didn’t hurt if you were aiming for
a place on the inside track.
Rosenberg was forever shaped—and
reshaped—by the social upheavals and
Marxist and socialist thought that had
dominated his younger years. But in the
face of the Stalinist trials and purges of
the 1930s he rejected, as did Green-
berg, Dwight Macdonald, and others in
the circle around Partisan Review, the
Soviet view of an artist or a writer as
a disciplined representative of a cause.
Rosenberg wanted to free the artist
from all social constraints; he believed
that was in line with Marx’s concept
of the artist as representing “the liber-
ation of work.” For a time Rosenberg
and his friends put great store in the
writings of Trotsky, who from Litera-
ture and Revolution, published in the
1920s, through some essays produced
in his final years of exile had refined
and extended Marx’s ideas, arguing
that artists must be left to pursue their
own dreams.
Years later Greenberg acknowledged
the impact of Trotsky’s ideas on the art-
ists and intellectuals of his generation,
suggesting that “some day it will have
to be told how ‘anti- Stalinism,’ which
started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’
turned into art for art’s sake.” But there
was a catch in Trotsky’s version of artis-
tic freedom, one that I’m not convinced
either Greenberg or Rosenberg or any-
body else in the Partisan Review circle
ever quite resolved. Trotsky believed
that the artist’s insights, however freely
achieved, were important because they
revealed the nature of society—and
thereby helped clarify the direction that
the revolutionary struggle had to take.
If Trotsky made it possible for Rosen-
berg and others to reject any mechanis-
tic equation when it came to the artist
and society, the old Bolshevik never-
theless left them feeling that a creative
spirit’s relationship with society had to
be nailed down, in one way or another.
In Greenberg’s most famous essay,
“Avant- Garde and Kitsch,” the rise of
kitsch, with prepackaged images engi-
neered for mass consumption, pushes
the most original artists into an Olym-
pian escape—an increasingly isolated
position. It’s as if society’s impurities
force the artist to seek purification.
In “The American Action Painters,”
the essay with which Rosenberg will
forever be associated, the artist makes SHAKESPEARE PLAYING CARDS
another kind of escape. The Marxist or Play your favorite card games with Romeo
socialist emphasis on taking action in and Juliet as King and Queen of Hearts,
society is transformed into a different Lady Macbeth as Ace Villain, Ariel as the
kind of action: the artist acts (maybe Joker, and more. This artist-illustrated deck
even acts out) on the canvas. A brief of playing cards features 54 of Shakespeare’s
paragraph has become notorious: most famous characters, arranged in four
suits: hearts=lovers; clubs=fools; diamonds=
At a certain moment the canvas heroes and heroines; and spades = villains.
began to appear to one American The deck includes a booklet with text about
painter after another as an arena in each character and their place in literary
which to act—rather than as a space history.
in which to reproduce, re- design, #05-75936 • Size: Poker • $14.99
analyze or “express” an object, ac-
tual or imagined. What was to go on
the canvas was not a picture but an
event.
Action, the watchword of so many of
Rosenberg’s political friends in the
1930s, remained, but the arena in which
the action occurred was no longer the
wide world but the enclosed space of
the artist’s studio.
“The American Action Painters”
is a strange essay, composed not in a
single arc but in fragmentary sections
with subtitles including “Getting In-
SHAKESPEARE’S BRITAIN
side the Canvas,” “Drama of As If,” The beautiful image on this 1,000-piece
and “Apocalypse and Wallpaper.” It puzzle is a pictorial map of Britain as it
suffers from a problem more general
in Rosenberg’s essays. He had a genius
was in 1583, with the geographical settings
of Shakespeare’s history plays labeled. The
for the telling phrase and the provoc- map is decorated with symbols and icons
ative sentence but had more trouble of towns and abbeys, castles, battlefields,
when it came to building from striking forests, and heaths, and includes panoram-
observations to broad conclusions. My ic insets of London showing the Globe
feeling is that once he’d come up with Theatre, and another inset of Stratford-
the action painting idea he didn’t really upon-Avon. Also on the map is a list of
know where to go with it. His literary Shakespeare’s plays with British settings.
gifts can seem scattershot. Macdonald
#05-NPZNG • 26½" x 19¼" • $29.95
wasn’t entirely mistaken when he ob-
served of Rosenberg’s “most epigram-
matic and gnomic style” that “if he
could just once develop a point, he’d
become a serious writer.”
Nobody has captured both the highs
and the lows of his work better than
McCarthy, in her review of The Tradi-
tion of the New, which included “The
American Action Painters.” She ad-
mired Rosenberg’s energy and vigor
but was too clear- eyed to accept his
rather melodramatic account of the act
of creation. I worry that Balken, swept
up by McCarthy’s almost comic good
cheer, does not fully grasp the devastat- STORY MAP OF IRELAND
ing conclusion of this otherwise genial All Irish literature might well be able to
salute to a friend. “You cannot hang an trace its roots back to this map. This detailed
event on the wall,” McCarthy wrote to- pictorial map (1935) on this 500-piece
ward the end of her review, a comment puzzle features historical facts about major
battles, discoveries, and cultural events; geo-
that punctured all the drama of Rosen-
graphic details; and borders and title deco-
berg’s essay. Art, she was saying, wasn’t
rations adapted from the Book of Kells and
activism.
Book of Mac Durnan illuminated man-
In the years before his death, when
uscripts. Ships of many centuries sail the
he was the art critic for The New
surrounding seas; included are the portraits
Yorker, Rosenberg’s writing became
of “Dublin’s Sons,” “Irish Patriots,” “Erin’s
more disciplined and more convention- Heroes,” and “Modern Bards.”
ally structured. William Shawn, the
magazine’s editor, must have encour- #05-AA852 • 18" x 24" • $29.95
aged greater transparency, which was Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
all to the good. The essays from The TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
New Yorker collected in The Anxious 646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
Object (1964), Artworks and Packages
25

“The inevitable comparison of Lees
with the late, great Oliver Sacks is
entirely just.” —Raymond Tallis
As a trainee doctor, A.J. Lees was
enthralled by his mentors: esteemed
neurologists who combined the preci-
sion of mathematicians, the scrupulos-
ity of entomologists, and the solemnity
of undertakers in their diagnoses and
treatments. For them, there was no
such thing as an unexplained symp-
tom or psychosomatic problem—no
difficult cases, just interesting ones—
and it was only a matter of time
before all disorders of the brain would
be understood in terms of anatomical,
electrical, and chemical connections.
Today, this kind of “holistic neurology”
is on the brink of extinction as an ad-
herence to protocols and algorithms—
plus a worship of machines—runs the
risk of destroying the key foundational
clinical skills of listening, observation,
and imagination that have been at the
heart of the discipline for more than
150 years.
In this series of brilliant, insightful, and
autobiographical essays, Lees takes
us on a kind of Sherlock Holmes tour
of neurology, giving the reader insight
into—and a defense of—the deep
analytical tools that the best neurolo-
gists still rely on to diagnose patients:
to heal minds and to fix brains.
BRAINSPOTTING
A.J. Lees
Linen bound hardcover with a red
ribbon marker • $19.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale April 5th
ALSO BY A.J. LEES
BRAZIL THAT NEVER WAS
MENTORED BY A MADMAN: THE
WILLIAM BURROUGHS EXPERIMENT
New York Review Books
represents selected Notting
Hill Editions titles in the US
and Canada
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
26
(1969), and Art on the Edge (1975) re-
main a considerable contribution to the
historical record. Rosenberg was some-
thing of a master when it came to docu-
menting shifting trends and taking the
temperature of the art world. But even
when he wanted to experience a paint-
ing or sculpture for itself, he couldn’t
help slipping into socio-philosophical
mystifications. Artistic individualism
was always becoming something else—
protest, alienation, estrangement. “If
politics haunts post-war painting,” he
wrote of one of the artists he most ad-
mired, “de Kooning haunts the ghost.”
De Kooning, he continued, “is the nui-
sance of the individual ‘I am’ in an ideo-
logical age.” His “art is a refusal to be
either recruited or pushed aside.” We
are back to the artist as actor—but now
a ghostly actor. As for Barnett New-
man, another one of Rosenberg’s en-
thusiasms, his “art must remain partly
inaccessible. It belongs to a one-man
culture, which as it becomes more in-
tegrated becomes more estranged from
shared ideas.”
I can forgive Rosenberg his conun-
drums. What I can’t forgive is his pride
in his conundrums. He’s so caught
up in his own speculative pyrotech-
nics that he can’t or won’t let himself
believe that a work of art has a free-
standing value. He thinks more than
he feels. His intellectuality overwhelms
his avidity—and that’s disastrous for a
critic. While he waxes enthusiastic and
even lyrical about particular artists,
from his beloved Abstract Expression-
ists to the work of his good friend Saul
Steinberg, what’s missing is some sense
of what he really wants or demands
from the work of art itself. A reader
can disagree with practically every-
thing that Greenberg ever wrote about
art but still come away from his writing
with an exhilarating feeling for his sen-
sibility—for what Greenberg wanted or
even needed from art. With Rosenberg
that fever, those hot likes and chilly
dislikes, aren’t there. He was a great
personality—Bellow turned that per-
sonality into Wulpy, an unforgettable
character—but in Rosenberg’s own
writing his personality doesn’t emerge,
at least not fully enough.
Rosenberg’s overintellectualization
has led his biographer astray. Balken
is so busy nailing down this or that
argument or alliance that she misses
the lust for debate that consumed New
York’s artists and intellectuals, even
when they weren’t sure where the argu-
ment was going or how it could ever be
resolved. You feel that wild hunger in
McCarthy’s memoir of the 1930s, the
brilliant Intellectual Memoirs, where
at some point the disagreements about
Stalinism and formalism get so tangled
that it’s not clear to her where anybody
stands. Denby, one of the central fig-
ures in Schloss’s memoir, wrote that in
the 1930s he and his downtown New
York friends were relatively uninter-
ested in Marx’s ideas but could not
help but feel “the peremptoriness and
the paranoia of Marxism as a ferment
or method of rhetoric.” The energy of
dispute sometimes seemed more im-
portant than the nature of the dispute.
Without understanding that, you can’t
understand Rosenberg.
Schloss’s memoir catches some of the
heat of those times. She’s very good on
Rosenberg’s wife. Like her husband,
Tabak “had a big air about her.” With her
jagged features and a wild black
mane, in black caftans and swinging
beads—[she] was more flamboyant
than he was. At their lively parties
in their first-floor apartment near
St. Mark’s Place, there reigned the
high, thin air of intellectualism and
a fervid faith in abstraction.
Schloss, who was married for a time
to Denby’s closest friend, the photogra-
pher and painter Rudy Burckhardt, is
an unsentimental romantic. Students of
dance and poetry will be especially in-
terested in her portrait of Denby, whose
reputation as a downtown secular saint
she complicates with suggestions of
misogyny and passive-aggressive be-
havior. She’s anything but dismissive
Da Capo Press
The cover of The Tradition of the New, 1959,
featuring a drawing by Willem de Kooning
of him, evoking with affection the
“slim, elegant man” who lived in a loft
that was “a long, white, softly shining
place.” And she’s obviously sympa-
thetic with the apolitical orientation of
this writer who, after embracing mod-
ern dance in Germany, “found Bill [de
Kooning] and Balanchine in America.
One was about power, the other about
grace.” But Schloss can’t forgive Denby
for using his platonic intimacy with her
husband to unhinge her marriage. It
was the ambiguities of Denby’s person-
ality that must have led Anne Porter,
the poet who was married to Fairfield
Porter, to observe that “Edwin will
make you see the justice in injustice.”
The bohemian celebration of personal
freedom could lead to a free-for-all
that left some as trapped as anybody
ever had been by the old morality.
De Kooning comes to life in Schloss’s
flashing sentences: “Small, dapper Bill
was always attractive to women. His
curtness, his no-nonsense comebacks,
the humor lurking in his eye, his quick,
precise, small movements, his work
clothes—all were irresistible.” Her Bill-
isms ring true. In what must have been
a riposte to Rosenberg’s action painting,
de Kooning declared, “Life, the moment
it is made into art, is only art.” Schloss
remembers, as others have, how de
Kooning’s Dutch accent turned words
into other words—and created new
meanings. His friends were confused
when he boasted that he now had “a job
teaching at jail!,” not immediately un-
derstanding that he was headed for the
Yale School of Art. Schloss has a sweet
sense of humor. “I danced the tango
with Franz [Kline],” she writes of some
party. “I danced the polka with Bill. The
Action Painters were not the world’s
greatest dancers, but there was nothing
more fun than dancing with them.”
A mong the men Schloss evokes with
clear-eyed affection is Hess, who both
as a writer and an editor at ARTnews did
much to shape art criticism in the 1950s
and 1960s. “Tom,” she remembers,
“had a high oval forehead, a crew cut,
a fleshy nose, sensual lips, and a bright,
questioning look.” Rosenberg and Hess
were good friends. I suspect that Rosen-
berg’s occasional efforts to embrace the
sensuous qualities of paintings in his
writing of the 1960s and 1970s owed
something to Hess, who at ARTnews
brought together a group of poet-critics
and encouraged them to emphasize their
immediate impression of a work of art.
It was their writing that Greenberg dis-
missed—along with Rosenberg’s—as
“pseudo-description,” “pseudo-poetry,”
and “perversions and abortions of dis-
course” in “How Art Writing Earns Its
Bad Name.” But what Greenberg re-
garded as fuzzy thinking reflected—at
least at its best, often in the critical prose
of Fairfield Porter and John Ashbery,
another friend of Schloss’s—a convic-
tion that artistic experience was idiosyn-
cratic and intuitive, the celebration of an
ineradicable inner necessity. Most of the
critics Hess gathered around ARTnews
felt no need to fit the artist into some
grand scheme or interpret artistic in-
dependence as a criticism of the wider
society, as was Rosenberg’s habit.
There was always something mes-
sianic about Rosenberg’s enterprise.
Although he had worried about the
popularization of the avant-garde in
“The American Action Painters,” writ-
ing mockingly about “the expanding
caste of professional enlighteners of the
masses,” he embraced the much larger
audience that he could reach at The
New Yorker. I wouldn’t put it past him
to have sometimes imagined that he
was leading a revolution in taste among
the democratic public that subscribed
to the magazine. Balken has relatively
little to say about Rosenberg’s work
at the American Ad Council, a public
service organization that over the years
has promoted the American Red Cross,
the Peace Corps, and other honorable
efforts. Rosenberg worked there from
1946 to 1973; the job helped pay the
bills in the decades before he found his
way to the University of Chicago and
The New Yorker. But I have a sneak-
ing suspicion that he fit in pretty well.
Wasn’t Rosenberg always, at heart, a
kind of advertiser—an expert in a very
lofty form of what we would now call
branding? The phrases we associate
with him—“the de- definition of art,”
“the anxious object,” “art on the edge,”
and the rest—are explosive rather than
deep.
In Bellow’s “What Kind of Day Did
You Have?” there’s a suggestion that
the Rosenberg character is “nothing but
a promoter.” That wasn’t Bellow’s view
of his friend. He praised Rosenberg for
taking up “the challenge of the new
world, its cultural wildness.” But it was
a view Bellow invited his readers to con-
sider. As a writer and thinker Rosen-
berg dazzles but fails to ever quite come
into focus. What is beyond question is
that he stands out in the herd of inde-
pendent minds he so gleefully exam-
ined. It takes one to know one. Q
The New York Review

Winter Recipes from the Collective
by Louise Glück.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
42 pp., $25.00
The website of the Nobel Prize Com-
mittee describes Louise Glück’s po-
etry as “free of poetic formalities”
and notable, by contrast, for its use of
“daily spoken language.” This has the
distinction and utility of being almost
exactly wrong. Rather, Glück subjects
conventional poetic tropes to a rigor-
ous process of abstraction until they
become close to indistinguishable from
everyday speech. Behind each modest
“you” looms a ceremonial “thou”; the
oracular glows inside the ordinary.
A good analogue might be Robert
Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning
Drawing, which, if you’ve never seen it,
is exactly what it sounds like. In 1953
Rauschenberg asked Willem de Koo-
ning, an artist he greatly admired, for
a piece of work he could subject to an
ambiguous process of effacement and
defacement. To his credit de Kooning
agreed. The final product, mounted
inside a golden frame, looks from one
angle like no more than a smudged and
dirty piece of paper. From another, it
looks like the Veil of Veronica, a relic
of incalculable price. Although it in-
vites allegations of nihilism or trolling,
Rauschenberg was emphatic that his
de Kooning was meant in good faith.
“It’s not a negation,” he insisted, “it’s a
celebration.”
In Winter Recipes from the Collec-
tive, Glück’s first volume of poems
since winning the Nobel Prize in Lit-
erature in 2020, her own instincts for
erasure are in full swing. This is an
intensely technical book and a work
of extreme concision, in which compli-
cated feelings have been pared down
to their minimum and a life’s worth of
experience reduced to strange, some-
times tender and sometimes ominous
detail. What we have here are less the
recipes of the title than a demonstra-
tion of Glück’s knife skills. These have
been used to shave the poems tissue-
thin and, behind each one, another,
more conventional poem is just barely
visible. Familiar tropes are treated to
an experimental expunction, and in the
process Glück finds a way to write and
think that seems, or so she suggests, best
suited to her subjects: old age, obsoles-
cence, and how to live toward dying.
Resistance to Glück is a real thing;
her poems even seem to encourage it.
They are frequently aloof and always
unbiddable. As Helen Vendler puts it,
Glück likes to make “inflexible state-
ment[s]” in situations where other
poets would use the suppliant tones
of “protest, plea, confiding, interces-
sion, and defense.” Her love poems are
brusque, her poems about children icy
and odd. Now, at nearly eighty years
old, she is as indifferent to the demand
to make nice as she was in 1968, the
year her first collection was published.
Adjectives typically assigned to
Glück’s work include terse, harsh, aus-
tere, severe, unyielding, cold. They are
sometimes appropriate and also hard
to separate from threadbare but none-
theless durable ideas about how women
ought to write and how they ought to
be. If Glück is vulnerable, it’s not for
March 24, 2022
Knife Skills
Anahid Nersessian
Louise Glück; illustration by Arinda Crăciun
you; if she is soft, it’s not for long. She
never quite gives us what Sylvia Plath
called (with no little self- contempt) “the
big strip tease” of traumatic revelation
and seems mortified by the idea of play-
ing to the crowd. Not surprisingly, this
apparent indifference to being liked
has been met with both admiration and
disdain. Vendler has said that she “ex-
erts a clear sovereignty that attracts our
assent rather than inquiry”; even at her
most dejected she, like Shakespeare’s
Cordelia, will never heave her heart all
the way into her mouth. By contrast,
critics without sympathy for this sort of
performance have accused Glück of a
standoffish self-obsession, a lack of in-
terest in making the reader feel at home
in her private domain.
Glück is fond of describing herself
as “private.” But if she is personally
shy (which is her own business) her
poems make no such apologies for
their tendency to retreat or withhold.
Rather, they express their author’s non-
negotiable desire to dictate the exact
terms on which she is seen, even when
she’s knee- deep in what she calls “our
important suffering.” The outrageous,
unbearable indignities that follow from
living intimately with others, in small
rooms and behind closed doors, are
manageable to her just to the extent
that they can be given a form that con-
tains them. Writing seems to offer an
implicit redress to the wounds of first-
person life, sustained most grievously
in childhood and then, later, in adult
relationships—marriage and infidel-
ity are common themes in her poems.
“There is always something,” she ob-
serves in The House on Marshland
(1975), “to be made of pain.”
So what happens when a poet of this
sort arrives at an advanced age, when
the domestic trials of growing up, fig-
uring out sex, raising children, and get-
ting divorced are long in the rearview
mirror and even the world’s most enor-
mous problems seem diminished, not
because they’re not real but because
one can do no more about them? For
starters, she wastes no breath. Winter
Recipes from the Collective is a short
book, fifteen poems on forty pages.
Most of those poems have short lines—
five words, ten, rarely more—and use
words of one or two syllables: “Halfway
through the sentence/she fell asleep”;
“Along the path, there were/things that
had died along the way—”; “How heavy
my mind is,/filled with the past.” There
is a great deal of white space around the
poems and within them, as if to suggest
an absence of normal activity that is
both foreboding and a relief.
It suggests, too, that aging bodies
do not need aging forms, that conven-
tional means of poetic self- expression
aren’t a match for the difficult con-
dition of being close to death. We
get glimmers and glimpses of a lyric
mode—emotionally intense, dreamy, a
bit sentimental—as it fades out of view,
a souvenir of other days but no longer
of much use. In the first poem, impa-
tiently called “Poem,” stock images
and graceful rhythms give way first to
satire and then to a profound, restless
sadness:
Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
pausing only to eat wild berries
out of a dish
painted with pictures of birds.
They climb the high ice- covered
mountain,
then they fly away. But you and I
don’t do such things—
We climb the same mountain;
I say a prayer for the wind to lift
us
but it does no good;
you hide your head so as not
to see the end—
Glück opens with mock solemnity and
perhaps a dash of self- criticism. For all
its hard edges and emotional inclem-
ency, her poetry has always been loaded
with symbols of bourgeois comfort: big
houses, soft beds, nice plates, a garden
of one’s own. Her 1980 volume, De-
scending Figure, contains a poem actu-
ally called “Porcelain Bowl,” in which a
woman “in a lawn chair” is compared to
flatware so precious it “rules out use.”
In “Poem,” however, the painted dish
belongs to the realm of bygone plea-
sures, along with the fairy-tale two-
some—the boy and girl—who haven’t
yet discovered any limits to their move-
ments or needs. This in contrast to the
speaker and her addressee, the “you”
Glück invokes using the distinguished
poetic figure of apostrophe, a remark
to some second-person presence who
cannot or will not respond. Apostrophe
is one of the most recognizable features
of lyric poetry, a device for enhancing
its sense of intimate urgency. Here,
however, it is used to tug the poem
earthward. Glück’s “you and I” don’t
march to the portentous beat of those
opening lines and they are no longer
children. They tire easily, they need to
be sung to “as mother sang” to them
and not to hear—much less compose—
the song of poetic artifice or effusion.
This kind of thing happens so often
in the book as to suggest a pattern. A
poem opens with intimations of some-
thing familiar—day and night, boy and
girl, berries and birds—only to turn
briskly on its heels toward the offbeat,
unsettling, or else weirdly mundane.
The fourth section of the title poem
begins, “It was as dark as it would ever
be,” a line of perfect iambic pentame-
ter that quickly goes to seed, the quin-
tessential form of English verse falling
away as the drama and romance of a
December morning vanish in the light
of a kitchen where “sandwiches were
being wrapped for market.” “Night
Thoughts,” which borrows its name
from Edward Young’s dense and loopy
mid- eighteenth- century poem, kicks
off in the romantic language of once
upon a time—“Long ago I was born”—
before segueing abruptly to a discus-
sion of colicky babies, finally rounding
off as Glück describes her adult self as
“robust but sour, /like an alarm clock.”
Old age, Glück suggests, goes hand in
hand with the quotidian. It is plainspo-
ken and would even be dull, if it weren’t
necessarily accompanied by the most
extreme sorts of experience a person
can have. Death is everywhere in this
book but so is the threat of bodily and
cognitive disintegration. Sometimes,
these inevitabilities are greeted with
waggish humor. This is especially true
when Glück summons a character re-
ferred to only as “my sister,” who says
things like “Say goodbye to standing
up” or, hilariously, that life
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly . . . the mind is not
there to receive it.
Both Glück’s younger sister, Tereze,
who died in 2018, and an elder sister,
27

THE VERY
LAST INTERVIEW
David Shields
Paperback • $14.95
On sale April 12th
“Very, very funny.” —Sheila Heti
“A delightful and utterly Shields-ian
work. . . Totally deadpan and
irresistibly hilarious.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“The Very Last Interview confirms
Shields as the most dangerously
important American writer
since William S. Burroughs.”
—Kenneth Goldsmith
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
PETER THE
GREAT’S AFRICAN
EXPERIMENTS IN PROSE
Alexander Pushkin
Edited and with a preface and
afterword by Robert Chandler
A new translation from the Russian
by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth
Chandler, and Boris Dralyuk
Paperback • $16.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale April 12th
Peter the Great’s African is a selection
of the NYRB Classics Book Club.
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
28
A sequel of sorts to Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,
which Literary Hub recently named one of the
most important books of the last decade
David Shields decided to gather every interview
he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If
it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he tran-
scribed it. He wasn’t sure what he was looking
for, but he knew he wasn’t interested in any of
his own answers.
He condensed and collated the well over 2,000
questions that interested him into twenty-two
chapters focused on such subjects as Process,
Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and
Comedy. Then, according to Shields, “the real
work began: rewriting and editing and remixing
the questions and finding a through-line.”
The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which
the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white
man—is strangely, thrillingly absent.
“An autobiography in question form, with the
reader working to supply the answers based on
the questions that follow. Brilliant.”
—Bret Easton Ellis
“Remixing and reimagining 2,000 of the most
annoying questions he’s been asked during his
40-year writing life, David Shields’s The Very Last
Interview is an often hilarious, operatically tragic
sojourn across American cultural life.”
—Chris Kraus
VIRTUAL EVENTS WITH DAVID SHIELDS
Thursday, March 31st, 7:30pm ET
With Laura Kipnis
Hosted by Community Bookstore, Brooklyn
Register at communitybookstore.net
Tuesday, April 5th, 6:00pm PT
With Susan Daitch
Hosted by City Lights, San Francisco
Register at citylights.com
Thursday, April 7th, 7:00pm PT
With Claire Dederer
Hosted by Third Place Books, Seattle
Register at thirdplacebooks.com
A new translation of unfinished works by
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s foundational writer,
was constantly experimenting with new genres,
and this fresh selection ushers readers into his
creative laboratory.
Politics and history weighed heavily on Pushkin’s
imagination, and in “Peter the Great’s African”
he depicts the Tsar through the eyes of one of
his closest confidantes, Ibrahim, a former
slave, modeled on Pushkin’s maternal great-
grandfather. At once outsider and insider, Ibrahim
offers a sympathetic yet questioning view of
Peter’s attempt to integrate his vast, archaic
empire into Europe.
In the witty “History of the Village of Goriukhino”
Pushkin employs parody and self-parody to explore
problems of writing history, while “Dubrovsky” is
both a gripping adventure story and a vivid picture
of provincial Russia in the late eighteenth century,
with its class conflicts ready to boil over in
violence.
“The Egyptian Nights,” an effervescent mixture
of prose and poetry, reflects on the nature of
artistic inspiration and the problem of the poet’s
place in a rapidly changing and ever more com-
mercialized society.
A LONDON EVENT FOR
PETER THE GREAT’S AFRICAN
Tuesday, April 5th, 7pm
Robert Chandler will talk about Peter the Great’s
African at Pushkin House (5a Bloomsbury Square,
London). For more information and to register,
visit pushkinhouse.org/events.
ALSO BY
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
who died before Glück was born, have
made frequent appearances in her
work, but whereas in the past she’s been
careful to make clear which one she
means—“Father has his arm around
Tereze./She squints” or “Nothing’s
sadder than my sister’s grave/unless
it’s the grave of my cousin, next to
her”—here she introduces an ambigu-
ity that heightens the book’s dreamlike
and even hallucinatory atmosphere.
Maybe these poems record conversa-
tions that did happen or could have
happened, conversations with a sibling
who “remember[s]/running around
the park in Cedarhurst.” Maybe they
are imaginary dialogues with a ghost
never known in life. Maybe these sorts
of distinctions are no longer important;
maybe they can no longer be made.
Winter Recipes from the Collective
runs low on proper names, and when
they appear they seem arbitrary: Ce-
darhurst, Pontiac, Freud, Aunt Posy,
and Leo Cruz, with whom Glück
“make[s] plans /to walk the trails”
knowing they’ll do no such thing.
(“Never again:/that is what we do not
say.”) Nonetheless, the book has a
small cast of characters who, like “my
sister,” are spoken of in general terms
as “my friend,” “my neighbor,” “my
teacher,” and, of course, “the old.” As
these catchall descriptions might sug-
gest, Glück’s speaker often struggles
to remember the content and quality
of her closest relationships. In the un-
settling “An Endless Story,” a group
of people gathers around the bed of a
dying woman referred to only as “she,”
who loses consciousness while telling a
story about “a young girl who wakens
one morning/as a bird.” Contemplating
one of the men next to her, the speaker
notices that “something . . . existed be-
tween us, /nothing so final as a baby, /
but real nevertheless.” Whatever it was,
she can’t seem to place it, and the poem
ends by defining love as something lo-
cated in an unrecoverable past, “if by
love we mean the way we loved when
we were young, /as though there were
no time at all.”
We all know people who are unusu-
ally anxious about getting older. Win-
ter Recipes from the Collective seems
designed alternately to terrorize them
and to tweak their noses. It contains
several vivid images of bodies not just
decaying but nullified, their limbs “a
deserted hive,” and recurs again and
again to the ever more frightening per-
ils of senility. “Old people . . . burn their
houses down,” warns that straight-
talking sister, while perhaps in refer-
ence to that same sibling “Afternoons
and Early Evenings” recalls:
The beautiful golden days when
you were soon to be dying
but could still enter into random
conversations with strangers,
random but also deliberate, so
impressions of the world
were still forming and changing
you,
and the city was at its most radi-
ant, uncrowded in summer
Subscription Customer Service Center
Go to: nybooks.com/customerservice
Renew subscription • Check account status • Change address • Make a paymentFPO •
Renew a gift • Change auto-renew status • Report missing/damaged issue • Cancel with refund
The New York Review of Books
though by then everything was
happening more slowly—
“Where did you go next,” the poem
wonders at its close, “after those days, /
where although you could not speak
you were not lost?” Losing a grip on
language appears, understandably, as
a very specific fear for the poet. To my
mind, what’s most daunting about this
book is that everyone in it is tired.
The end of “Afternoons and Early
Evenings” contains a faint but sugges-
tive echo of the last line of John Mil-
ton’s sonnet “When I Consider How
My Light Is Spent,” which Glück dis-
cusses at some length in her 1993 essay
“Against Sincerity.” Milton’s poem was
written in the 1650s, after its author had
gone completely blind but before he had
composed his masterpiece, Paradise
Lost, and it expresses anxiety about
what he presents as his lackluster lit-
erary output. (He had already written,
among other things, “Lycidas,” Comus,
and the celebrated polemic Areopagit-
ica.) Ultimately, Milton is comforted
by the allegorical figure of Patience,
who reassures him that God needs nei-
ther his contributions to the world nor
anyone else’s. Besides, Patience adds,
“they also serve who only stand and
wait.” The effect, Glück writes, is to still
“the petulant questioner” and provide
“a glimpse of insight, a directive.” At
the very least, Patience “corrects a pre-
sumption,” namely that the best Milton
can offer is his poetry, when all God
wants is his composure and endurance.
In Glück’s poem, the midlife crisis
is exchanged for an end- of-life act of
witnessing, for being present in the mo-
ment when someone’s light is not just
spent but nearly out. The comfort of
knowing that standing and waiting is
also a form of service is supplanted by
the frustration and perhaps the terror
of being conscious without being able
to talk. Things may have felt bad then
to Milton, Glück seems to say, but he
was still inside an “also”; “Loss makes
his starting place,” as she put it in her
essay, but it is a starting place and not
the last word. By contrast, the uniden-
tified addressee of “Afternoons and
Early Evenings” can be at best compos
mentis, of sound mind but just barely
able to prove it. There is no encour-
agement or consolation here, only the
question posed by those who remain
behind, standing and waiting for their
own time to come.
All of this must sound very grim.
And yet, for all the losses “piling up,”
the comedy here is conspicuous. In
“Winter Journey,” a poem set in a nurs-
ing home, Glück suddenly announces,
“We were having a fine time getting
old” and even seems partly to mean
it. Old age brings its infirmities, but
it has also brought Glück a surprising
sociability. This is, after all, a book
bequeathed both from and to the col-
lective. Famously, we all die alone. But
as for those days when we are “soon to
be dying,” Glück discovers in them the
companionship of others, from talk-
ative strangers to friends we remember
we love even when we can’t always re-
member their names. Q
The New York Review
 When Did They Decide?
Christopher R. Browning
Wannsee:

ullstein bild/Getty Images

The Road to the Final Solution
by Peter Longerich,
translated from the German
by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes.
Oxford University Press, 176 pp., $25.95

On January 20, 1942, SS chief Heinrich

Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich,
presided over a meeting at a villa on
the shore of the Wannsee, a lake in an
affluent Berlin suburb. Of the fifteen
participants, eight held doctorates.
They represented important minis-
tries in Berlin, German occupation
administrations on Polish and Soviet
territory, and various SS agencies. The
two sources for our knowledge of what
transpired in this meeting are a surviv-
ing protocol (a summary of discussion
points—some detailed and some very
brief—but not a verbatim transcript)
and the postwar testimonies of one
participant, Heydrich’s adviser for Jew-
ish policy, Adolf Eichmann.
The conference opened with a mono-
logue by Heydrich, who announced his
appointment “to take charge of prepa-
rations for the final solution” and as-
serted Himmler’s “overall control of
the implementation.” He then noted
that Jewish emigration, the previous
policy for “the exclusion of the Jews”
from Germany, was now banned. “With
prior approval from the Führer” it had
been replaced with the “evacuation
of the Jews to the East,” which would
eventually encompass 11 million Jews
from every country in Europe. “As part
[italics mine] of the final solution . . .
Jews fit for work” would be separated by
sex and forced to do road construction,
“in the course of which the majority will
doubtless succumb to natural wastage,”
and “the remaining Jews . . .will have to
be dealt with accordingly” to prevent “a
new Jewish regeneration.” The protocol
is silent on the other “part” of the Final
Solution, namely what was to happen to
Jews not fit for work. Eichmann subse-
quently emphasized that Heydrich had
heavily edited the text of the protocol
before thirty copies were circulated.
Following Heydrich’s monologue, sev-
eral other participants made comments.
The only issue over which actual discus-
sion and disagreement occurred was the
fate of German half Jews and German
Jews in mixed marriages. Heydrich fa-
vored deporting half Jews; the secretary
of state for the Interior Ministry, Wil-
helm Stuckart, favored sterilization of
half Jews and compulsory dissolution
of mixed marriages. Ultimately none
of these proposals was adopted; Hitler,
who was more cautious than any of the
conference participants about the com-
plications that might arise from killing
or sterilizing half Jews so connected to
non-Jewish society or dissolving their
parents’ marriages and killing the Jew-
ish partner, left policies toward half Jews
and mixed marriages (especially exemp-
tion from compulsory wearing of the
Jewish star and deportation) unchanged.
Only at the end does the protocol
ever so briefly touch upon important
topics that I assume occasioned lon-
ger comment at the meeting. Joseph
Bühler, the secretary of state for the
General Government—the German
colonial regime in occupied Poland
SS chief Heinrich Himmler (center) with officials from the police branch of the SS (from left): Franz Josef Huber, Arthur Nebe,
Reinhard Heydrich, and Heinrich Müller, Munich, November 1939. Heydrich and Müller attended the Wannsee Conference,
and all five were deeply involved in the deportation and mass murder of Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others.
headed by Hans Frank—“would wel-
come it if the final solution” were to
begin there because this would involve
“no significant transport problem.”
Moreover, “the operation would not
be impeded by labour issues” because
“most [of the Polish Jews] were unfit
for work.” In short, despite the silence
of the protocol, it was obvious to all the
participants that most Polish Jews were
to be killed immediately, near the ghet-
tos in which they were then confined.
The protocol concludes cryptically,
“Finally, the various possible types of
solution were discussed.” Eichmann
admitted that this was a cursory and
euphemistic formulation: “During the
conversation they minced no words
about it at all. . . . They spoke about
methods of killing, about liquidation,
about extermination.” It should also be
noted that during the later parts of the
meeting, which lasted somewhat over
an hour, refreshments were served, and
according to Eichmann, Heydrich was
exceedingly pleased that all the partici-
pants had proved so supportive.
T he Wannsee Protocol was among the
most spectacular discoveries made by
those searching through German docu-
ments for incriminating evidence to use
in postwar trials. Found too late to be
introduced in the trial of the major war
criminals before the International Mil-
itary Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–
1946, it was a crucial document in the
“Ministries Trial” before the Ameri-
can military tribunal of 1947–1949, in
which indicted top Nazi bureaucrats
had previously denied any knowledge
of, much less participation in, the Final
Solution.
Two movies have been made about
the meeting. Die Wannseekonferenz
(1984) sought to recreate the grotesque
ambience of elite Nazi functionar-
ies sitting around a table, partaking
of food and drink, while matter- of-
factly—sometimes even boisterously—
discussing mass murder. For dramatic
tension the film overplayed Stuckart’s
conflict with Heydrich.
In the late 1990s I was approached
to be the historical adviser for an
American movie about the Wannsee
Conference that appeared in 2001
under the title Conspiracy. I said that
I would gladly read the script and alert
the filmmakers to possible historical
howlers, but I would not serve as an
adviser because my advice would be at
cross purposes with the film’s dramatic
needs. The significance of the Wann-
see Conference is precisely that there
was overwhelming consensus and no
dissent about the projected murder of
11 million Jews, even if there was one
minor squabble about the fate of Ger-
man half Jews, but one could not make
a commercial film about consensus.
As in the earlier film, someone would
have to be a foil to Heydrich to create
some tension and conflict. Friedrich
Wilhelm Kritzinger, who represented
the Reich Chancellery and was the
only participant to express postwar re-
morse, was depicted in Conspiracy as
the discomforted outsider, but in the
protocol there is no indication that he
ever spoke.1
The Wannsee Conference has also at-
tracted much scholarly attention. There
is no shortage of books dedicated to the
conference and its immediate histori-
cal setting.2 Peter Longerich’s Wann-
see: The Road to the Final Solution is
the most recent addition. Longerich
is an extraordinarily prolific historian
who has written major biographies of
Hitler, Himmler, and propaganda min-
ister Joseph Goebbels, as well as the
highly esteemed Holocaust: The Nazi
Persecution and Murder of the Jews, 3
1
There is also a new docudrama, Die
Wannseekonferenz, that aired on Ger-
man television in January 2022.
2
Kurt Pätzold and Erika Schwarz, Tages-
ordnung: Judenmord: Die Wannsee-
Konferenz am 20. Januar 1942; Eine
Dokumentation zur Organisation der
“Endlösuung” (Berlin: Metropol, 1992);
Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake,
the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final
Solution (London: Allen Lane, 2002);
Die Wannsee-Konferenz am 20. Januar
1942: Dokumente, Forschungsstand,
Kontroversen, edited by Norbert Kampe
and Peter Klein (Cologne: Böhlau,
2013); and The Participants: The Men
of the Wannsee Conference, edited by
Hans- Christian Jasch and Christoph
Kreutzmüller (Berghahn, 2017).
3
Oxford University Press, 2010; trans-
lated from the original German Politik
der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstel-
lung der nationalsozialistischen Juden-
verfolgung (Munich: Piper, 1998). The
Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the

March 24, 2022 29

among other books. Historians of the
Holocaust, including Longerich and
myself, have reached general agree-
ment on many aspects of the origins
of the Final Solution, but Longerich’s
latest book offers the opportunity to
examine differences of interpretation
of the Wannsee Conference and the
wider background of Nazi Germany’s
last steps to the extermination of the
Jews of Europe.
Longerich and I agree that from 1939
to 1941 Nazi Jewish policy focused on
a sequence of three schemes to rid Eu-
rope of Jews through expulsion and
decimation (what the Nazis euphemis-
tically called “evacuation” and “reset-
tlement”): first to a reservation in the
Lublin district of Poland and as much
as possible over the demarcation line
into Soviet- occupied eastern Poland
(1939), second to Madagascar (1940),
and finally to Siberia (early 1941).
If any of these schemes had come to
completion, Hitler would have fulfilled
his prophecy, during a speech to the
Reichstag in January 1939, that the
next world war would lead to the “de-
struction of the Jewish race in Europe.”
In January 1941 Heydrich claimed full
authority for the planning of the third
scheme for a “wholesale deportation of
the Jews” that would take place “at the
end of the war” to a territory “yet to be
determined” (i.e., Siberia after the de-
feat of the Soviet Union).
Longerich and I also agree that there
was no comprehensive decision, order,
or plan for the immediate mass mur-
der of all Soviet Jews before the inva-
sion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, but
that Himmler was deeply engaged in
increasing the number of shooters, es-
calating the scale of executions of Jews,
and above all shifting the targets in
late July from male Jews in leadership
positions or of military age to Jewish
women, children, and the elderly. This
marked the effective onset of the Final
Solution for Soviet Jewry.
Longerich’s explanation is that
Himmler, who had previously left
Jewish matters primarily to Heydrich,
was upset by the unexpected extent of
the authority Hitler granted to Alfred
Rosenberg’s civil administration in
occupied Soviet territory. By using his
police powers in this manner, Himmler
sought to edge out Rosenberg, reassert
his involvement in shaping Jewish pol-
icy vis-à-vis Heydrich, and prove his
indispensability to Hitler. For months
to come, according to Longerich,
Nazi Jewish policy developed along
two tracks: Heydrich continued plan-
ning for the total deportation of Jews
to Siberia after victory and procured
Hermann Göring’s renewed authoriza-
tion for such planning, while Himmler
seized every opportunity during the
war for radicalizing Jewish policy but
not within any overall plan and no mat-
ter how chaotic the results.
I find this scenario unconvincing.
Immediately after the invasion of the
USSR, Himmler and Heydrich traveled
together behind the advancing German
lines, inciting and sanctioning the exe-
cution of Jews and recruiting killing
Final Solution (Stroud: Tempus, 2001)
was a revised version of Longerich’s
expert witness report for the libel case
between the Holocaust denier David
Irving and the historian Deborah
Lipstadt.
30
units beyond the Einsatzgruppen for In this renewed atmosphere of mil-
this task. After midsummer both Hey- itary success and continued pressure
drich and Himmler gave instructions from all sides to begin deportations,
to different units to now target Jewish on September 18 Hitler approved the
women and children. Although the action he had previously postponed
onset of the Final Solution in Soviet until the defeat of the USSR: the de-
territory in midsummer 1941 sealed the portation of as many Jews as possible
fate of Soviet Jews, the fate of the rest of from Germany by the end of the year.
European Jewry remained undecided. Longerich is emphatic that this deci-
Heydrich did not need a new authoriza- sion did not yet mean the death of the
tion to continue his previous planning. deportees. He argues that, for Hitler,
He procured one from Göring on July holding the Jews as hostages to black-
31 to submit a plan for a Final Solution mail Roosevelt and prevent him from
for the Jews in the rest of the German entering the war against Germany was
sphere in Europe precisely because paramount at this time, but blackmail
he faced a new task— determining if would turn to revenge after Pearl Har-
and how the Final Solution underway bor and American entry into the war.
on Soviet territory could be extended I find Longerich’s emphasis on an
to the rest of Europe. And it was alleged hostage strategy unpersuasive,
Heydrich, not Himmler, who in August since Hitler was simultaneously urging
unsuccessfully urged Hitler to begin the Japanese to attack the US with the
promise that Germany would immedi-
ullstein bild/Getty Images
ately join them by declaring war on the
US—ironically, one of the few diplo-
matic promises he actually kept. Hitler
was not blackmailing the US to keep it
out of the war; he was bribing Japan to
bring the US into the war, on the mis-
taken assumption that Japan would tie
down US war efforts in the Pacific, at
the expense of increased aid across the
Atlantic, long enough to enable Ger-
many to defeat the USSR in 1942.
The suburban Berlin villa where the Wannsee
Conference was held on January 20, 1942
I n Longerich’s version, Himmler con-
deportations of Jews from Germany tinued to push chaotic and unplanned
during the war. escalation and radicalization of Nazi
When Goebbels and Hitler met on Jewish policy by dumping the deport-
August 19–20, the former added his ees into overcrowded eastern ghettos,
pressure to begin deportations from thus inducing local German occupa-
Germany, but Hitler continued to insist tion authorities to engage in “feverish
that deportations “to the east” would preparations” to devise ways to kill
not commence until “immediately after their local nonworking Jews in order
the end of the campaign.” As for the fate to make room for the new arrivals.
of the deportees, Hitler noted, “Then This included both mass shootings
they will be worked over in the harsh and various local experiments with
climate there.” Thus it was Hitler, not gassing. When Heydrich issued invi-
Heydrich, who was still clinging to the tations to the Wannsee Conference
January plan, but among Heydrich and in late November 1941, the conflict
his own men impatience was growing. between the “two strands” of Jewish
On September 2, one of Heydrich policy—Himmler’s chaotic escalation
and Eichmann’s superiors in the SS, during the war and Heydrich’s planned
Rolf-Heinz Höppner, composed a deportation to Siberia after the war—
memo complaining about a significant remained unresolved.
problem in planning for deportations I would offer a different scenario. Fol-
into conquered Soviet territory. “To go lowing Hitler’s September 18 decision to
into further details . . .would be fantasy, begin deportations, he met with top Nazi
because first of all the basic decisions leaders on September 23–24. With deci-
must be made. It is essential in this re- sive victories on the northern and south-
gard . . . that total clarity prevail about ern fronts and a renewed offensive on
what finally shall happen” to the de- the central front about to be launched,
portees. “Is it the goal to ensure them Hitler told Goebbels that he expected
a certain level of life in the long run, serious fighting in the East to be over by
or shall they be totally eradicated.” The October 15. He reiterated that the Jews
crucial historical question to my mind should be removed from Germany. The
is exactly that posed by Höppner: When transports of Reich Jews that began on
did those in Hitler’s close circle obtain October 15 were sent to Lodz, Minsk,
“total clarity” that they were planning Kaunas, and Riga. The deportees in
for the total eradication of the Jews? six transports—five to Kaunas and one
Longerich’s answer is April–May 1942; to Riga—were murdered upon arrival,
mine is late October 1941. but most were taken into local ghettos,
The German advance ground to a and occupation officials were assured
halt in late July 1941 as the Wehrmacht that they would be sent further east
reached the limits of its supply chain “next spring” or “after the war.”
without achieving the collapse of Soviet The testing of three different meth-
resistance. In the ensuing pause, while ods of gassing—carbon monoxide poi-
Hitler resisted pressures to begin Jewish soning by diverting the exhaust from
deportations from the Third Reich, he internal combustion engines into ei-
determined that when the offensive was ther sealed compartments mounted
resumed, it would be against Leningrad on trucks (the gas van) or into sealed
in the north and Kiev in the south, not rooms, or poisoning with the fumigant
Moscow on the central front. In the first Zyklon B—occurred in August and
week of September, Leningrad was cut September, and in October the sites
off. In mid-September the Germans of three prospective death camps—
achieved another spectacular encircle- Chelmno, Belzec, and Mogilev—were
ment victory in the south, and Kiev was approved. Construction at Belzec
captured before the end of the month. began on November 1, and at Chelmno
soon thereafter, both following con-
sultation in Berlin. A death camp at
Mogilev was not constructed, but the
crematoria ovens ordered for it were
later redirected to Birkenau.
There was a third development in the
fall of 1941. Nazi policy had aimed to
achieve a Europe free of Jews through
expulsion from the German sphere
(with commensurate decimation). In
mid- October the Spanish government
approached Germany with a request: if
the German military administration in
France released Jews holding Spanish
citizenship who had been caught up in
the German army’s mass arrest of Jews
in retaliation for French Resistance
attacks on German soldiers, then the
Spanish government would transfer all
two thousand of them from France to
Spanish Morocco. The Foreign Office
was supportive of a proposal in accord
with past German policy of removing
Jews from Europe.
However, on October 17, Heydrich
rejected the proposal. The Spanish
Jews, if sent to Africa, would then be
“too much out of the direct reach of
the measures for a basic solution to the
Jewish question to be enacted after the
war.” The following day, after a long
telephone conversation between Hey-
drich and Himmler, all further Jewish
emigration from Europe was banned.
The old policy of expelling Jews from
the German sphere was replaced with
one of locking them in.
But what was the “basic solution . . .
to be enacted after the war” from
which no Jews were to escape? Sev-
eral other incidents are revealing. Back
from a recent trip to Belgrade on Octo-
ber 25, a traveling emissary and “Jew-
ish expert” of the Foreign Office, Franz
Rademacher, reported about how the
male Jews and “Gypsies” in Serbia
were all being shot by the military in
reprisal measures. As for the Serbian
Jewish women and children, he noted,
they would temporarily be interned in a
local camp: “Then as soon as the tech-
nical possibility exists within the frame-
work of a total solution to the Jewish
question, the Jews will be deported . . .
to the reception camps in the east.”
Two days earlier, on October 23,
Eichmann held a meeting in Berlin
with all of his men stationed in the east.
No official record of what transpired
at that meeting survives, but upon his
return from Belgrade Rademacher
opened a letter that a friend had sent
him on October 23:
Dear Party Comrade Rademacher!
On my return trip from Berlin I
met an old party comrade, who
works in the east on the settlement
of the Jewish question. In the near
future many of the Jewish vermin
will be exterminated through spe-
cial measures.
Also on October 23, Himmler was in
Mogilev discussing the construction of
a camp with gas chambers that would
alleviate the psychological burden on
the executioners tasked with shooting
Jews. The busy Eichmann met that day
with a representative of Rosenberg’s
ministry who had just learned that
while there was not a sufficient supply
of “gassing apparatuses” (i.e., gas vans)
for any to be sent to Riga, an expert
could be sent there for on-the-spot con-
struction. Eichmann assured him that
Jews unfit for work could then be “re-
moved” by this “helpful instrument”
The New York Review
without waiting for the relocation of
the recently deported Reich Jews fur-
ther east next spring.
And after a month of escalating anti-
Semitic rhetoric, Hitler met with Hey-
drich and Himmler (just returned from
Mogilev) on October 25. Recalling his
Reichstag prophecy, Hitler stated, “It is
good when the terror precedes us that
we are exterminating the Jews. . . . We
are writing history anew . . . from the ra-
cial standpoint.”
T he crux of my argument is that be-
tween September 18 and October 25
the Nazi regime crossed the line from
expulsion and decimation to envisag-
ing the total eradication of every last
Jew in its grasp—that is, the question
posed by Höppner was resolved. The
conjuncture of three developments—
the start of the deportation program,
the conception of camps equipped
with gassing facilities, and the ban on
Jews leaving the German sphere—was
crucial. The new vision now meant the
deportation of every Jew—even Jewish
women and children in Belgrade and
Spanish Jews in France—to camps in
the east equipped with gassing facil-
ities that would become operational
“next spring” or, alternatively, “after
the war,” so that the Jews could be “ex-
terminated through special measures.”
This vision posed many new ques-
tions for the planners. Would the death
camps, of which two prototypes in Bel-
zec and Chelmno were soon under con-
struction, actually work? Would they
be located primarily on Polish or So-
viet territory? What exceptions would
be made for Jewish workers? Would
Reich Jews have to be handled more
discreetly and cautiously than others?
And after the Soviet counteroffensive
on December 5 and America’s entry
into the war after December 7, there
was the issue of timing. “Next spring”
and “after the war” were no longer two
expressions for the same timetable.
Which would it be?
Longerich’s view that Himmler was
working at cross purposes with Hey-
drich that fall by pushing ad hoc radi-
calization is dubious. It was Heydrich
who sent Eichmann in late September
to the Lublin district, where he wit-
nessed preparations to test carbon mon-
oxide gassing in sealed peasant huts.
The subsequent report to Himmler on
the success of these tests led to the con-
struction of Belzec. It was Heydrich who
sent Eichmann first to Lodz and then
to Minsk to ensure that reluctant local
German occupation authorities would
receive the transports that Heydrich
and Eichmann were primarily responsi-
ble for organizing. And it was Heydrich
who sent Eichmann to witness an early
killing action at Chelmno after it began
operations on December 8.
Over the next three months both
Himmler and Heydrich disseminated
information to reorient and recruit
others to the new task. Beginning on
October 30, Heydrich ordered monthly
summaries of the Einsatzgruppen re-
ports to be distributed throughout the
German bureaucracy. The Foreign
Office copy was often marked as just
one out of one hundred in circulation.
On November 15, Himmler met with
Rosenberg for four hours. Afterward
Rosenberg confidentially told others
that the Jewish question “can only be
solved in a biological eradication of the
entire Jewry of Europe,” when “not a
March 24, 2022
single Jew lives on the European conti-
nent.” On November 29 Heydrich sent
out invitations for the Wannsee Con-
ference, which was originally sched-
uled for December 9 but subsequently
rescheduled for January 20. Hitler’s
meeting with top party functionaries
on December 12 was not postponed,
and there he made clear that the real-
ization of his prophecy was to proceed
immediately, not after the war.
Hans Frank attended this meeting
and repeated the gist of it to an assem-
bly of high officials in the General Gov-
ernment on December 16. Concerning
the Jews of Poland, the expectations
in Berlin were for German occupation
authorities there to “liquidate them
yourselves.” How this was to be ac-
complished was still unclear to Frank,
but a “successful destruction” would
be pursued “in conjunction with the
important measures to be discussed in
the Reich.” Thus for Frank one major
reason for Josef Bühler, the secretary
of state of the General Government, at-
tending the Wannsee Conference was
to find out how killing on such an un-
precedented scale was to be done.
Longerich is certainly correct that
those invited by Heydrich to the Wann-
see Conference were neither ignorant
nor innocent of the regime’s crimes up
to that point, and that at least two of
Heydrich’s motivations were to assert
his authority over the “impending final
solution” and ensure the participation
and complicity of the ministerial bu-
reaucracy. But he adds that Heydrich
deliberately did not invite anyone
who was beholden to Himmler, such
as the higher SS and police leaders in
the east, and that he was dismissive
toward Himmler’s fall initiatives, min-
imizing them as “stop-gap measures.”
According to Longerich, Heydrich was
still pursuing a “territorial solution,”
in which “all European Jews were to
be deported to ‘the east,’ where they
would perish through a mixture of
forced labour, unbearable living condi-
tions, and mass murder.” This was an
“unequivocally lethal” plan to be im-
plemented after the war.
In contrast, after the collapse of the
hostage strategy, Himmler “focused his
efforts on speeding up the deportation
project and expanding it into a pro-
gramme to murder all European Jews
while the war was still in progress.”
Thus in Longerich’s view Bühler’s in-
tervention “called into question Hey-
drich’s plan” rather than (as I have
argued) revealing assumptions that
were self- evident to the participants
though not spelled out in the protocol.
Longerich claims that in the months
following the Wannsee Conference
the two competing strands of the
SS’s “Jewish policy,” as represented
by Heydrich and Himmler, were
now being merged and combined
with Bühler’s proposals into a com-
prehensive programme to bring
about a European “final solution.”
But what he then describes is the tri-
umph of what he had previously con-
sidered to have been Himmler’s and
Bühler’s positions in every regard: the
Final Solution would take place during,
not after, the war; the Jews would be
killed immediately in gas chambers,
not gradually through exhaustive labor
and unbearable living conditions; and
this would occur primarily on Polish,
not Soviet territory. Now in Paperback
The resolution of these issues
“amounted to a decision to murder
indiscriminately all European Jews
within its reach as quickly as possi-
ble,” and according to Longerich this
decision was reached in late April
and early May 1942, when Heydrich
and Himmler had seven meetings.
Thereafter Reich Jews who had been
deported to the Lodz ghetto the previ-
ous fall were for the first time included
in transports to Chelmno, and Jew-
ish transports departing the Reich no
longer took all their victims to transit
ghettos in Poland but many now went
directly to death camps. The earlier
transports of Slovak Jewish workers for
labor in Poland were now followed by
transports of entire families, with most
deportees killed immediately after ar- “There are many kinds of magic. . .
rival and selection. and once magic is in your blood it
After May 1942 one crucial issue re- attracts more magic,” says the royal
mained to establish the contours of the cat Carbonel at the start of Carbonel
Final Solution, namely the treatment & Calidor.
of Jewish labor. At Wannsee, Heydrich
had envisaged sending Jews fit for work Sure enough, Carbonel’s human
to road- construction camps in the east friends Rosemary and John soon
as “part” of the Final Solution. Within encounter magic in the form of a
a week, Himmler had intervened and ring set with a fiery red stone that
ordered that Jews deported from the grants wishes to whoever wears it.
west who were fit for work were to be And it’s a lucky thing, too, because
sent to his concentration camps in Po- Carbonel needs Rosemary and
land instead. Oswald Pohl, head of the John’s help. It seems that his son
SS Economic and Administrative Main
Calidor has rejected his princely
Office in charge of concentration camp
status for the love of a street-wise cat
labor, issued the contradictory instruc-
named Wellingtonia (also known as
tions that their labor was to be both “as
productive as possible” but also truly Dumpsie). Even worse, Calidor has
“exhaustive.” In reality, Jews working apprenticed himself to the witch-
in the armaments industry in Germany in-training Mrs. Dibdin. With all
were not deported until February 1943. this going on, it’s just a matter of
Far greater numbers of Jews were time before Carbonel’s old nemesis
interned in the ghettos in Poland. As Grisana—accompanied by her sly-
late as June 1942 officials in the Gen- boots daughter Melissa—hatches
eral Government anxiously pressed for a plan to take control of Carbonel’s
the deportation of nonworking Jews, kingdom once and for all.
but faced with growing labor shortages
they still thought that working Jews This third and final volume of the
and their families would remain. But Carbonel series is as full of enchant-
on July 28, 1942, Himmler ruled that ment and adventure as its prede-
only a small portion of Polish Jewish cessors, Carbonel and The Kingdom
workers deemed truly essential for the of Carbonel. Read individually, or
war economy would be temporarily in sequence, Barbara Sleigh’s fan-
spared; otherwise the “resettlement of tastic and fantastical trilogy casts
the entire Jewish population” was to be an unforgettable spell.
completed by the end of the year.4
These events in April–May and July Carbonel and Calidor:
1942 indicate how decisions to imple- Being the Further
ment various aspects and stages of the Adventures of a Royal Cat
Final Solution had to be made contin- Barbara Sleigh
ually. Indeed, one issue on which his- With illustrations by Charles Front
torians of the Holocaust now agree is
that there was no one single decision on Paperback • $12.99
one single day that launched the Final For ages 8-12
Solution. The decision-making process On sale April 5th
was incremental and protracted, and
historians weigh and interpret the im-
portance of different stages of this pro-
cess differently. For me, the watershed
was September–October 1941, when
the goal of total eradication of the Jews
crystallized and new questions were
posed; for Longerich it was April–May Also by Barbara Sleigh
1942, when many of the new questions
posed were answered. For neither of us
was it the Wannsee Conference in Jan-
uary 1942, though clearly that was an
important step along the way. Q
4
See my Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers,
German Killers (Cambridge Univer- Carbonel • The Kingdom of Carbonel
sity Press, 2000), pp. 75–76; and “A
Final Hitler Decision for the ‘Final
Solution’? The Riegner Telegram Re-
considered,” Holocaust and Genocide Available from booksellers or from nyrb.com
Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 1996).
31
 The Downward Slope
Gertrude Abercrombie: Out in the Country, 1939
A Cure for Darkness:
The Story of Depression
and How We Treat It
by Alex Riley.
Scribner, 452 pp., $28.00;
$19.99 (paper)
In early 2015 Alex Riley, then twenty-
four years old, was working as a
researcher at the Natural History Mu-
seum in London, using CT-scanning
technology to study the teeth and skel-
etons of sharks and rays. A dinosaur
fan since childhood, he was thrilled
to be studying both living and extinct
species in such detail, and he spent his
lunch breaks wandering through the
museum, contemplating the remains of
giant sloths and prehistoric marine rep-
tiles. But Riley felt unmoored: his par-
ents had recently separated after three
decades of marriage, and he had left a
Ph.D. program in evolutionary develop-
ment for a less certain professional path.
When Riley and his museum col-
leagues published a scientific paper, he
didn’t feel worthy of being credited as
an author, even though he had worked
hard on it; instead, he believed he was a
failure. He took a leave of absence that
became permanent, and toward the
end of the year, he sought treatment for
depression. He joined a weekly cogni-
tive behavioral therapy (CBT) group
at a local psychiatric hospital, during
which a therapist led participants
through exercises designed to identify
and disrupt their negative thoughts.
While Riley found the sessions helpful
at times, they brought him no sustained
relief, and after four weeks he decided
to begin taking citalopram, an anti-
32
Michelle Nijhuis
depressant prescribed by his doctor.
The initial side effects made him feel
as if he had the flu, and even after his
body became accustomed to the drug,
he suffered from persistent nausea.
When he realized that his depression
was worsening, he stopped taking the
medication. The withdrawal symptoms
left him rocking on the floor of his bed-
room with his head in his hands.
“One of the most intolerable as-
pects of depression,” Daphne Merkin
observes in her memoir This Close to
Happy (2017), “is the way it insinuates
itself everywhere in your life, casting a
pall not only over the present but the
past and the future as well, suggest-
ing nothing but its own inevitability.”
Its general shape and form have been
familiar to students of the mind and
body for millennia: a condition well
beyond sadness, marked by sluggish-
ness, overwhelming feelings of guilt
and self-loathing, and, in severe cases,
suicidal thoughts and behavior. But as
Riley emphasizes in A Cure for Dark-
ness: The Story of Depression and How
We Treat It, individual experiences of
depression are as diverse as the animal
kingdom he once studied.
“Depression is a product of upbring-
ing, trauma, financial uncertainty,
loneliness, social bonds, diet, behavior,
sedentary lifestyles, neurotransmitters,
and genetics that cannot be encapsu-
lated in a word,” he writes.
It can be mild or severe, recur-
rent or unremitting. It can emerge
once and never appear again or it
can cast a dark shadow through-
out adulthood. Some people sleep
arguing—as William Styron did in
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Darkness Visible (1989)—that it is in-
adequate to describe the condition he
lives with. “A depression is a concavity,
a sloping downward and a return,” An-
trim writes, whereas his own experi-
ence is one of extended sickness, only
temporarily relieved by periods of re-
covery. “When telling the story of my
illness, I try not to speak about depres-
sion. I prefer to call it suicide.”1
T here is no known cure for depres-
sion; Riley’s title is ironic. In his book
he surveys the development of medi-
cal treatments for the condition in the
twentieth and early twenty-first centu-
ries, tracking how each approach was
conceived, deployed, and—in most
cases—discarded. His perspective is
that of a patient and a journalist, not
a medical expert, but his experience
as a researcher makes him alert to the
human side of science and skeptical of
its fads. He is particularly interested in
reducing the stigma that accompanies
many treatments even today, includ-
ing talk therapy, antidepressants, and
electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—and
in efforts to expand the reach of treat-
ments to people without access to men-
tal health care.
Riley begins his story in the late
nineteenth century, with the philo-
sophical and professional cleavage that
has defined the treatment of depression
ever since. On one side was Sigmund
Freud, who saw depression as the result
of childhood trauma and maintained
too much, others suffer from in- that it could be remedied only through
somnia. Some eat too much while psychoanalysis. On the other was Emil
others shrink toward starvation. Kraepelin, the great classifier of mental
Depression can emerge alongside disorders, who saw depression as a pri-
cancer, heart disease, diabetes, marily physical ailment, to be treated
and dementia and can make these with medical intervention. Freud and
diseases more lethal; it is a catalyst Kraepelin never met, Riley tells us, but
of mortality. they were born just three months apart,
in 1856, and both began their scientific
It is also possible to be depressed and careers as anatomists.
not know it: until a postpartum cri- In 1885, while Freud was studying
sis forced me to find treatment, I as- in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a
sumed that the baseless loneliness and physician who used hypnosis to treat
self-contempt that had hounded me his mentally disturbed patients, he de-
since adolescence were universal fea- veloped an interest in the unconscious
tures of the human experience. mind and became convinced that it
In the summer of 2017, Riley began governed much of human behavior. His
to investigate the history of his con- theories soon dominated the nascent
dition. He wanted to understand how field of psychoanalysis. Karl Abraham,
CBT and antidepressant medications an admirer and frequent correspon-
had become standard treatments for dent of Freud’s, developed the first
depression in much of the world, and psychoanalytic theory of depression in
whether there were alternatives that 1911, attributing the condition to a bro-
might prove more effective for him. ken maternal bond and a subsequent
As he soon discovered, the meaning of hostility toward humanity, including
“treating” or “curing” depression var- the self. Both men argued that psycho-
ies widely by patient, practitioner, and analysis could relieve depression by
era. How many symptoms can be ban- identifying a patient’s early, often for-
ished and for how long? Which side ef- gotten tragedies and connecting them
fects are tolerable and which are worse with his or her current state; Riley de-
than the disorder? It is not uncommon scribes them as “paleontologists of the
for sufferers to cycle through different mind, digging through the unconscious
treatments and medications for years, strata of their depressed patients, hop-
enduring unpredictable physical and ing to uncover the old bones of a patho-
emotional reactions and repeated dis- logical monster.” Freud’s 1917 essay
appointment. For Riley, as for me and “Mourning and Melancholia,” which
countless others, depression is a con- characterizes depression as a response
dition that can be fended off but never to personal loss, is heavily indebted to
left behind. Abraham’s ideas.
Donald Antrim, in his recent memoir
One Friday in April, takes exception 1
One Friday in April: A Story of Sui-
to the term “depression” altogether, cide and Survival (Norton, 2021), p. 14.
The New York Review
 Kraepelin, meanwhile, came to be- Among the dangers faced by those
lieve that the symptoms of mental dis- living with depression are specialists
orders, depression included, could be who fail to recognize the complexity of
traced to anatomical aberrations in the the condition. As Riley’s book makes
brain. Instead of plumbing the uncon- clear, the generations of practitioners
scious for causes, Kraepelin began, as after Freud and Kraepelin included
a professor at the University of Hei- many who dogmatically swore alle-
delberg in the 1890s, to keep detailed giance to a single approach—whether
records of individual patients’ symp- biological or psychological—and re-
toms, tracking their conditions over fused to consider that different patients
time. In his thousands of patient files, might benefit from different remedies.
he discerned two broad categories: Desperate patients and families some-
“dementia praecox,” later known as times agreed to invasive treatments that
schizophrenia, and “manic-depressive not only failed to relieve depression but
insanity,” which has since been subdi- debilitated or even killed the sufferer.
vided into depression, mania, and bipo- In the early twentieth century, adher-
lar disorder. (The distinction he drew ents of the biological theory of depres-
between psychotic and mood disorders sion tried treating patients with nitrous
endures to this day.) While Kraepelin oxide, opium, testosterone, X-rays, and
saw that patients could spontaneously even tooth extraction, all without suc-
recover from depression and other cess. Then, encouraged by reports of
mood disorders, he maintained that, individuals who displayed dramatic
like psychotic disorders, they were pri- changes in temperament and behavior
marily biological—not psychological— after their frontal lobes were damaged
and as such would not be curable until in accidents or by surgery, some practi-
major advances in microscopes and tioners began trying to physically excise
other technologies allowed researchers depression and other mental afflictions
to study the physical brain. from the brain. In 1935 the Portuguese
And so the line was drawn between neurologist Egas Moniz supervised the
biological and psychological approaches first prefrontal leucotomy, an operation
to treatment—a division that still af- that cut the connection between the
fects the way depression is treated. Psy- frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
choanalysis, Kraepelin thought, was Riley writes that while one early exam-
shamefully unscientific, guilty of “the iner reported that leucotomy patients
representation of arbitrary assumptions “were severely ‘diminished’ and had
and conjectures as scientific facts” and exhibited a ‘degradation of personality’
“generalization beyond measure from after the surgery,” Moniz claimed that it
single observations.” Freud, for his was a successful “clinical cure” and had
part, saw Kraepelin as the leader of an alleviated symptoms of depression and
enemy faction and denounced his pessi- other disorders in more than half of his
mism about prospective cures, accusing initial patients.
him of offering patients “a condemna- Walter Freeman, an American psy-
tion instead of an explanation.” chiatrist, took Moniz’s methods sev-
Please order books by using the contact information listed under each press’s name, or visit your local bookstore or online retailer.
HANDMAID BOOKS WAXING GIBBOUS BOOKS
tonymilne.net; +33 633 963 185 www.waxinggibbousbooks.com; (631) 332-6083
FAMINE
Ireland, India & China and the
British Empire
by Tony Milne
Ireland, India, and China suffered
appalling famines that killed mil-
lions while British citizens admin-
istered their tax infrastructure and
British sailors and soldiers enforced
their rules.
979-8744140076 • Paper, $16.00 •
454 Pages • History
Available on Amazon.
GATEKEEPER PRESS
www.gatekeeperpress.com; (866) 535-0913
OUR MARY
The Stage Life of Mary Anderson
by Ronald Tracy
From Louisville to London, the only
complete story of a nineteenth-
century superstar, illustrated with
bibliography.
978-1-6629-1421-8 • Paper, $14.00
• 284 Pages • History/Drama
Available on Amazon and Barnes
& Noble.
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or
March 24, 2022
eral steps further by pioneering the
frontal lobotomy, which not only sev-
ered the frontal lobes from the rest of
the brain but cut out parts of the lobes
themselves. Many of his fellow psychi-
atrists objected to the practice, but the
idea that a malfunctioning brain could
be fixed as easily as an automobile was
popular. “The brain has ceased to be
sacred,” The Saturday Evening Post
announced in a celebratory article in
1941. The same year, Freeman and a
collaborator performed a lobotomy on
twenty-three-year-old Rosemary Ken-
nedy, John F. Kennedy’s younger sis-
ter, after suggesting to her family that
the operation could relieve her intense
mood swings. (Not until the 1970s did
informed- consent laws and regulations
begin to give patients control of their
own treatment.) The botched opera-
tion reduced her intellectual capacity
to that of a two-year-old, and she was
institutionalized for the rest of her life.
Undeterred by such tragedies, Free-
man introduced a method that he in-
sisted needed no specialized training
to perform: he hammered a metal ice
pick into the brain cavity through the
back of an eye socket, then used it
to crudely brutalize the brain tissue.
“Why not use a shotgun? It would be
quicker!” an outraged colleague wrote
to Freeman. Of the estimated 50,000
patients who were lobotomized in
the US between 1949 and 1952, about
20 percent were subjected to these
transorbital or “icepick” lobotomies.
While reliable data are scarce, a Brit-
ish study of 10,000 standard lobot-
omies performed between 1943 and
1954 found that 6 percent had killed
the patient.
MATADOR
www.troubador.co.uk/matador; 01-16-279-2299
SPACE STORY
by W.W. Marplot
For two Earth-teens, waking up in a
spaceship would have been fine had
they gone to bed in one. Wander
the limits of Space, and of logical
thinking.
978-1734758337 • Paper, $17.99 •
398 Pages • Science Fiction/
Young Adult/Middle Grade
Available on Amazon and
IngramSpark.
Author’s website: WWMarplot.com
DWARF STORY BOLD PRINT PRESS
by W.W. Marplot www.annepfefferbooks.com
For Arty to miss a day of school, either
he is very, very sick or a fairytale-
character turf war has begun in his
backyard . . .
978-1734758306 • Paper, $17.99 •
420 Pages • Fantasy/Middle grade
(9–12 years old)
Available on Amazon and
IngramSpark.
Author’s website: WWMarplot.com
Lobotomies continued for as long
as they did not only because of Free-
man’s zeal but because the operation,
in some cases, delivered a dismal kind
of relief. The British study, published
in 1961, found that 70 percent of pa-
tients reported some improvement, and
18 percent no longer required institu-
tionalization. Though the patients who
survived lobotomies were profoundly
altered, those who had been tortured
by delusions or prone to violence be-
fore the operation often emerged
calmer and more compliant, sometimes
enough so that they could live at home
with their families. Until other treat-
ments emerged, the lobotomy could
look like the best of bad options.
Electroconvulsive therapy was one
of the treatments that replaced lobot-
omies. As Riley notes, philosophers
and physicians had observed since at
least the 1700s that epileptic seizures
seemed to have a therapeutic effect on
mentally ill patients. In 1937 the Ital-
ian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti learned
that electrical shocks could induce
convulsions in pigs, and he boldly ap-
plied this method to humans, finding
that after induced seizures, patients
reported shorter or less frequent de-
pressive episodes. Cerletti’s ECT en-
countered resistance when it reached
the United States, not only because it
reminded people of the electric chair
but because its side effects at the time
included memory loss and broken
bones resulting from powerful sei-
zures. Yet it appeared to be remark-
ably effective in treating certain forms
of depression, particularly those that
THE GLIMPSE
by Lis Bensley
A star of the Abstract Expressionist
era sabotages her career when she
has a child. Can she reclaim her
place and be a good mother?
978-1800462-95-3 • Paper, $13.99
• 304 Pages • Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon, IndieBound,
Alibris, and Bookshop.org.
Author’s website:
www.lisbensley.com.
BINGE
by Anne Pfeffer
Self-described “chubaholic” Sabrina
Hunter joins a support group for
compulsive overeaters and learns
you don’t have to be thin to find
serenity.
978-0578346298 • Paper, $12.97 •
258 Pages • Contemporary Fiction
Available on Amazon.
see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
33
 CHARLIE SUISMAN
charliesuisman.com
ARNOLD FALLS
by Charlie Suisman
The award-winning novel about a
small, Hudson Valley town “has the
feel of an instant classic” (BlueInk
Review). Kirkus calls it “incredibly
funny” and Chanticleer Book Re-
views says, “A visit to Arnold Falls is
a smart, funny, effervescent literary
escapade.”
978-1792332159 • Paper, $12.99 •
280 Pages • Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Ingram.
HOT AIR
An Arnold Falls Novel
by Charlie Suisman
Book two in the “laugh-out-loud”
(BookLife) Arnold Falls series
about a small, upstate town is “a
witty and engaging read” (Kirkus),
“a delightful tour de force” (Mid-
west Book Review), “effervescent”
(Foreword Clarion), and “hilarious”
(Chanticleer).
978-0578993287 • Paper, $12.99 •
272 Pages • Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Ingram.
BOOK BABY
bookbaby.com; (877) 961-6878
THE GIRL FROM
TAM HIEP
A Novel from the War
John W. Conroy
This is the war in Vietnam on the
fringe. Follow Pvt. Bill Collins on
his quest for love and survival on
the path to Tam Hiep.
978-1098371678 • Paper, $13.99 •
Available as Screenplay • 169 Pages
• Love/War Story
Available on Amazon, Barnes
& Noble, Books-A-Million and
BookBaby.
Author’s email: conroyvn@gmail.com
BLACK CAT TEXT
www.blackcattext.com; (612) 205-1021
STEEL
by Kathleen Novak
Suspenseful and poetic—exploring
the anguish of first love in an immi-
grant mining community against
the backdrop of the Great Depres-
sion and Chicago’s gangland shoot-
ings.
978-1-7342298-9-9 • Paper, $15.00
• 212 Pages • Historical Literary
Fiction
Available on Ingram, and Amazon.
Author’s website:
www.kathleennovak.com
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
34
A. K. FRAILEY BOOKS
akfrailey.com; (217) 313-4969
ONE DAY AT A TIME
And Other Stories
by A. K. Frailey
A collection of contemporary short
stories involving families, friends,
and distant relations. It is the haz-
ards of daily life that test the soul.
979-8494792242 8 • Paper, $14.00
• 212 Pages • Literary Fiction/
Short Stories
Available on Amazon.
FRIESENPRESS
www.friesenpress.com; 1(800) 792-5092
YAD
by Daniel Karpinski
Historiographic metafiction about
“the truth” of Narciso Tome—El
Transparente architect—love and
life of Goya, El Greco, Gusmao, and
Casanova in Spanish Toledo.
978-1-5255-2369-4 • Paper, $16.40
• 258 Pages • Fiction/Historical/
Transgressional
Available on Amazon, Indigo,
Barnes & Noble, Friesen Press.
Author’s Website: yad-book.com
BOUTIQUE OF QUALITY BOOKS
(BQB PUBLISHING)
BQBPublishing.com
BLOOD BEFORE DAWN
Book 2 of the Dung Beetles of
Liberia Series
by Daniel V. Meier, Jr.
In this gripping sequel to The Dung
Beetles of Liberia, Meier thrusts
readers into the turbulence of this
corrupt and wealthy nation to wit-
ness the overthrow of the Americo-
Liberian’s 130 years of political and
social dominance.
978-1952782350 • Paper, $16.95
• 272 Pages • Historical Political
Thriller
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and IndieBound.
Author’s website: danielmeierauthor.com
UNDER A
POACHER’S MOON
A Novel
by W. Aaron Vandiver
“An American woman looks for ad-
venture on safari and instead finds
a passion for a cause. . . . An exciting
and thought-provoking work that
will stay with readers.” —Kirkus
Reviews
978-1952782480 • Paper, $16.95, •
e-Book, $8.49 • 205 Pages •
Fiction/Thriller/Action &
Adventure/Women’s Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, and Apple Books.
Author’s website: aaronvandiver.com
GREENLEAF BOOK GROUP
www.greenleafbookgroup.com; (512) 891-6100
THRIVING
The Breakthrough Movement to
Regenerate Nature, Society, and
the Economy
by Wayne Visser
Thriving offers an inspiring and
pragmatic innovation agenda for
turning our biggest global societal
challenges into opportunities to
thrive.
9781639080076 • Hardcover,
$27.95 • 368 Pages • Sustainable
Development
Available, on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, Porchlight, IndieBound, and Bookshop.org.
Author’s website: www.jcbidonde.com
SOMEWHERE
ABOVE IT ALL
by Holli Fawcett Clayton
A poignant tale about a grieving
widow’s brave journey to summit
Mount Kilimanjaro after losing her
husband to opioid addiction.
978-1-62634-913-1 • Hardcover,
$22.95 • 296 Pages • Romance/
Action & Adventure
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor.
Author’s website:
www.hollifawcettclayton.com
IPBOOKS
IPBooks.net; (718) 728-7416
BY REASON OF
INSANITY
A Glimpse into the Lives and
Minds of the Criminally Insane
by Richard Sternberg
“Couldn’t put it down . . . Excel-
lent . . . solid, well-written, very smart
work . . . Sternberg is an excellent
storyteller. . . serious scholar, thinker
& writer.” —Lewis Aron, Ph.D.
978-1-949093-59-9 • Paper, $35.00
• 292 Pages • Forensic Psychoanalysis
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
iUNIVERSE
iUniverse.com
WHITE LIES MATTER
Decoding American
Deceptionalism
by John A. O’Connor
White Lies Matter: Decoding
American Deceptionalism reveals
the deceptions, lies, and cynicism
of America and the “fake news” and
“alt- facts” that permeate contem-
porary society.
978-1663210951 • Paper, $31.64 •
138 Pages • Politics/Art
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iUniverse.
Author’s website: oconnorartLLC.com
The New York Review
BOTTOM DOG PRESS, INC.
smithdocs.net; (419) 502-1556
CYCLING THROUGH
COLUMBINE
A Memoir
by JRW Case
“. . . a memoir, travelogue, dispas-
sionate look at a notorious school
massacre, by an author coming to
terms with unresolved memories
and heartfelt uncertainties . . . an
insightful scribe relentlessly pedal-
ing across space and time.” —Brent
Green
978-1-947504-31-8 • Paper, $18.00
• 264 Pages • Memoir
Available on Ingram, Amazon, and Baker & Taylor.
COYOTE POINT PRESS
coyotepointpress.com; www.AnArtistryLife.com; 650-619-3232
STAY WITH ME,
WISCONSIN
Short Fiction
by JoAnneh Nagler
Modern-day, Midwestern, sensual
short stories about love, loss, devo-
tion and overcoming, with provoc-
ative, brave characters who span the
glacier-strewn lake towns of Wis-
consin’s down-to-earth landscapes.
9781970151-93-0 • Paper, $18.99 •
278 Pages • Fiction/Contemporary
Fiction/Literary Fiction/Women’s
Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Bookshop.org,
and all ePub platforms.
CINDY BENEZRA
www.cindytalks.com; (828) 896-6727
UNDER THE
ORANGE BLOSSOMS
An Inspirational Story of Bravery
and Strength
by Cindy Benezra
A harrowing memoir by Cindy
Benezra about enduring childhood
abuse and learning how to cope,
heal, and find hope through the
darkest trials in life.
979-8477872688 • Paper, $14.00 •
255 Pages • Nonfiction/Memoir
Available on Amazon, Apple Books,
and Barnes & Noble.
NANCY CAVILLONES
lauraformentini.com; (347) 960-0617
TWENTYONE
OLIVE TREES
A Mother’s Walk Through
the Grief of Suicide to Hope
and Healing
by Laura Formentini
Twentyone Olive Trees, which re-
cieved a starred review from Kirkus,
traces the author’s path from grief
to understanding and healing. The
fables, accompanied by beautiful il-
lustrations, have a playful, childlike
way of helping the reader cope with
loss and embrace acceptance and
healing.
978-1955119061 • Paper, $19.99 • 230 Pages • Poetry
Available on Pathway Books, Bookshop.org, Amazon, and
IngramSpark.
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
March 24, 2022
STEVEN JOSEPH
www.StevenJosephAuthor.com; (914) 661-6279
A GROWNUP GUIDE
TO EFFECTIVE
CRANKINESS
The CrankaTsuris Method
by Steven Joseph
Steven Joseph provides tools and ex-
ercises to make room for crankiness
in all areas of your life plus so much
more. Unleash your CrankaTsuris
and learn how much fun it can be.
978-1-4808-9381-8 • Paper, $15.95
• 206 Pages • Self-Help/Humor/
Anger Management
Available on Amazon and
Barnes & Noble.
KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING
kdp.amazon.com; 1 (888) 280-4331
WARHOL THE
SKETCH ARTIST
A Play
by Kaveh L. Afrasiabi
Warhol as a young sketch artist
in Bronx in the 1960s. A murder
mystery and a new trope on the de-
structive relations between art and
capitalism. Mesmerizing.
9798410745451 • Paper, $10.00 •
51 Pages • Fiction
Available on Amazon.
Author’s website:
www.kavehafrasiabi.com
SHE WRITES PRESS
shewritespress.com
BUTTERFLY AWAKENS
A Memoir of Transformation
Through Grief
by Meg Nocero
One woman’s dark night leads her
on a physical, intellectual, emo-
tional, and spiritual quest to find
her light. A must-read memoir of
transformation and hope.
978-1647421755 • Paper, $18.95 •
312 Pages • Memoir/Inspirational
Nonfiction
Available on Amazon, Bookshop.org,
Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.
Author’s website: www.megnocero.com
VETERANSCRIBE PRESS
www.veteranscribe.com; (617) 803-4826
EVIL MUST NOT HAVE
THE LAST WORD
The Life of Mary Wygodski:
Holocaust Survivor, Mother,
Teacher, & Witness
by Tom Burke
Mary Wygodski survived three
concentration camps, lived in Israel
and America, and has dedicated
her life to combating anti-Semi-
tism and speaking truth about the
Holocaust.
9780578334097 • Paper, $17.99
• 320 Pages • Biography/History/
Holocaust Survival
Available on Amazon, Ingram Spark, and Barnes & Noble.
Author’s e-mail: tjburke@veteranscribe.com.
DIVING BOY BOOKS
www.divingboybooks.com; (208) 630-3991
SPARROW
by Brian Kindall
Tim wishes on a star, with disastrous
results—a snowstorm that won’t
quit! Can he undo his fateful wish
and bring back the sun?
978-1-7361068-4-6 • Paper, $16.99;
978-1-7361068-6-0 • e-Book, $3.99;
978-1-7361068-5-3 • Hardcover,
$29.99 • 218 Pages • Middle Grade/
Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, Google, and Apple.
Author’s website:
www.briankindall.com
DORRANCE PUBLISHING
www.dorrancebookstore.com
GOD’S EXISTENCE
Truth or Fiction? The Answer
Revealed
by Gary R. Lindberg
This is a scientific study about God’s
existence. The thesis is science actu-
ally proves that God exists. Science
and the Bible agree about creation.
978-1-6480-4273-7 • Paper, $12.00
• 108 Pages • Spirituality/Inspiration
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Dorrance Publishing Co.
Author’s website:
godsexistencebook.com
GIRL FRIDAY BOOKS
www.girlfridayproductions.com/girlfridaybooks
UNCONVENTIONAL
A Memoir of Entrepreneurism,
Politics, and Pot
by Jamie Andrea Garzot
Pioneer cannabis CEO gets down
and dirty in the political and regula-
tory trenches of California’s green-
est industry.
978-1-954854-29-1 • Hardcover,
$24.95 • 194 Pages • Memoir
Available on Two Rivers/Ingram
and Amazon.
Author’s website:
www.jamieandreagarzot.com
IGUANA BOOKS, TORONTO
iguanabooks.ca; (416) 214-0183
THE GREAT CYPRUS
THINK TANK
by Larry Lockridge
Second of four standalone yet
interrelated satirical novels, The
Enigma Quartet. “Mindful of all
kinds of disaster, this is a novel of
deep comedy, energy, and chas-
tened joy.” —Maureen N. McLane
978-1-77180-424-0 • Hardcover,
$26.99; 978-1-77180-337-3 •
Paper, $14.99; 978-1-77180-338-0
• e-Book, $9.49 • 182 Pages •
Literary Fiction
Available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Kobo.
Author’s website: www.LarryLockridge.com
35
 ARCHWAY PUBLISHING
www.archwaypublishing.com; 1 (888) 242-5904
ON THE ORIGIN OF
DIGNITY
Its Creation and Enhancement
by Walter W. Tunstall, Ph.D.
The book moves beyond thousands
of years of time-honored convention
to provide a new and alternate un-
derstanding of dignity that does not
depend upon social norms, or philo-
sophical and religious traditions.
9781480851740 • Paper, $8.99;
9781480851733 • Hardcover,
$28.95; 9781480851757 • e-Book,
$4.99 • 110 Pages • Psychology
Available at Amazon, Archway, and Worldwide.
Author’s website: www.ontheoriginofdignity.com
TOM CRONIN
tcronin@coloradocollege.edu; (719) 635-5432
WRITING AS A
PERFORMING ART
On Taking It to the House . . .
by Thomas E. Cronin
An invaluable motivational guide
for nonfiction writers. Editors have
called it “incredibly valuable” and
“absolutely marvelous.” Helps ev-
eryone discover their Inner Editor.
97978-1-64719-648-6 • Paper,
$14.99; 978-1-64719-649-3 •
e-Book, $3.99 • 156 Pages •
Writing/Performing Arts
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and BookLocker.com
MEDUSA BOOKS
THE ORPHAN KING
A Short Novel Based on the Brief
Life of Louis XVII
by Lizzi Wolf
“I knew the moment Papa was be-
headed because Maman fell to her
knees and hailed me as King Louis
XVII. I was seven years old.”
979-8768490867 • Paper, $6.99
• 204 Pages • Literary Historical
Fiction
Available on Amazon.
BLUE TRIANGLE PRESS
FredMisurella.com
A PONTIAC IN THE
WOODS
by Fred Misurella
A young woman’s rude, sometimes
primitive narrative about living
alone, in a novel that packs a sur-
prising punch. “Beautifully and em-
pathically written.” —lndieReader
978-0-578-71792-0 • Paper, $14.00
• e-Book, $4.99 • 306 Pages • Liter-
ary Fiction, Young Adult Fiction
Available on Amazon, Bookshop
.org, and FredMisurella.com
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
36
ROBIDOUX PRESS
www.robidouxpress.com
STILL THE
NIGHT CALL
by Joshua Senter
“Best Indie Book of 2021” —Kirkus
Reviews
A young dairy farmer with a past
plans to remedy the vicious Night
Call that haunts his present.
978-1-7375856-0-2 • Hardcover,
$21.99; 978-1-7375856-1-9 •
e-Book, $7.99 • 190 Pages •
Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, Bookshop.org, and
IndieBound.
Author’s website: www.joshuasenter.com
NANBEC BOOKS
www.nanbec.com
THE SANTORINI
SETUP
by Becky Bohan
Swept into dangerous intrigue on
a Greek island, a vacationing pro-
fessor uses wit and courage to save
the enchanting windsurfer who has
captured her heart.
9798750126934 • Paper, $14.00;
e-Book, $5.99 • 260 Pages • Lesbian
Suspense/Romance Blend
Available on Amazon,
Abuzzpress.com, and other outlets.
TOM ARANT
tomarant.com; 1(732) 881-2281
WELCOME TO OUR
REAL MATRIX
One with No Escape
by Tom Arant
Did you know that we are unknow-
ingly imprisoned? That our exis-
tence is similar to the virtual reality
in the movie The Matrix emerging
through evolution without inten-
tion or Red Pill?
978-1953910721 • Paper, $15.99 •
352 Pages • Philosophy/
Evolutionary Biology/Genetics/
The Matrix
Available on Amazon and IngramSpark.
Author’s website: tomarant.com
2869 PRESS
808-291-5120
THE KIDNAPPED SELF
Poetic Reflections on Dementia
by A. J. Fortin
The poet’s beloved has been stricken
with Lewy Body Dementia. Power-
ful personal and spiritual reflections
of close witness to a life so severely
interrupted.
978-1-00-631946-4 • Paper, $12.95
• 82 Pages • Poetry/Dementia
Personal
Available on Amazon and Barnes
& Noble.
FIAT JUSTITIA LITERARY INC.
fjlpress.com; (514) 377-5645
THE BASTARD OF
COLONIA
Volume One of The Song of the
Francs
by T. J. S. Hayes
The Bastard of Colonia, volume one
of The Song of the Francs, recalls
the life of Charles Martel, medieval
Europe’s greatest hero.
9781777724009 • Paper, $24.00 •
552 Pages • Historical Fiction
Available on Amazon.
TELLWELL PUBLISHING
tellwellpublishing.com; 1(888) 415-1541
COURAGE AND
COMPLICITY
The Simple Truth Is Complicated
by Claudette Languedoc
One teacher’s Indian Residential
School story.
“. . . succeeds in making the reader
think and feel . . . an impressive tale.”
—Kirkus Reviews
978-1-7750600-3-1 • Paper, $20.00
• 288 Pages • Historical Fiction/
Social Commentary
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Chapters/Indigo.
Author’s website: courageandcomplicity.com
INGRAMSPARK
www.ingramspark.com
HOW THE Ə GOT
PRODUCTED
A Love Story
by N. K. von S.
A citizen-consumer’s meditation on
gadgetry and the self, a slyly femi-
nist take on the Kafkaesque wound
around the axle of a love story that
isn’t.
978-0578769301 • Paper, $15.00 •
280 Pages • Literary Fiction/Satire
Available on Amazon and Barnes
& Noble.
VICTOR PRESS
OFF TELEGRAPH
A Novel of Berkeley in the Sixties
by Joseph Rodricks
A tale of scientific fraud that twists
its way through the cultural and po-
litical turbulence of the 1960s and
the wakening rebellion against the
scientific worldview. These themes
and the novel’s many brilliant char-
acters are woven into a plot having
many unexpected turns and endless
suspense.
978146362951 • Paper, $14.49 •
400 pages • Fiction
Available on Amazon.
Authors website: www.josephvrodricks.org
The New York Review
included delusions or psychotic ep-
isodes. Between the mid-1940s and
1960s it was a staple of psychiatric
treatment.
Today ECT is considered by many
specialists to be among the safest and
most effective treatments for severe
forms of depression. It now employs
briefer, more targeted electrical pulses
and can succeed in cases where anti-
depressants do not. Antrim, who ex-
perienced significant relief after first
undergoing ECT in the 2000s, writes
that despite serious initial doubts, he
came to see it as “a powerful measure
against suicide”:
After ECT, the feeling in my body
of immense weight went away; I
felt a kind of physical lightness. . . .
After months of waiting to get
well, I regained my sense of time
passing. These days, I think of ECT
as clean power, good electricity
added to a wet, saline medium in
which electrical signaling has be-
come chaotic and mistimed.
When ECT was falling out of favor
in the 1960s, the first generation of
antidepressants was on the rise. Phar-
maceutical researchers, noting that
tranquilizers decreased levels of neu-
rotransmitters such as serotonin and
norepinephrine, surmised that an in-
crease in the activity of these molecules
would reverse the effects of depression.
Monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors,
which prevent the breakdown of sero-
tonin and norepinephrine and thereby
increase their levels in the body, be-
came available in the late 1950s; tri-
cyclic antidepressants also debuted in
the late 1950s, followed by selective se-
rotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in
the late 1980s.
Antidepressants have benefited from
a succession of evangelists, the first of
whom was Nathan Kline, the psychi-
atrist who wrote From Sad to Glad
(1974)—at least one edition of which
included the words “Depression: You
Can Conquer It Without Analysis!”
on the cover. Kline energetically pop-
ularized the theory that depression was
caused by a chemical imbalance in the
brain. As Riley points out, while this
idea “isn’t categorically wrong, it is still
a far cry from being right.” While all
three classes of drugs can change brain
chemistry within hours, researchers
don’t understand why antidepressants
usually take weeks to begin relieving
symptoms. And though an increase
in serotonin and norepinephrine does
frequently lead to a decrease in depres-
sion symptoms, it doesn’t necessarily
follow that serotonin scarcity is a root
cause of the disorder.
Riley moves quickly through the long
public and professional debates over
the widespread use of antidepressants
and their short- and long-term effects,
noting that studies of antidepressant
effectiveness have often yielded con-
tradictory or inconclusive results. Yet
as controversial and imperfect as these
medications are, they remain among the
best tools we have. Riley, who after ex-
perimentation found that the SSRI ser-
traline lifted his depression, describes
himself as “overwhelmed with relief”
by the existence of antidepressants.
Still, he reflects, our dominant explana-
tion for depression is in some ways sim-
ply a modification of that proposed by
Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE .
Hippocrates blamed depression on an
March 24, 2022
excess of black bile; we blame it on a
shortage of neurotransmitters.
Like many people with depression,
Riley has also been willing to engage in
other forms of low-risk experimentation.
During his reporting on current research
he adopts a Mediterranean diet and a
moderate jogging routine. Both seem to
reduce his symptoms, and though he ac-
knowledges that the causal connections
are unproven, he comes to think of both
as “antidepressants that I prescribe.” He
also explores the therapeutic potential of
psychedelics, and while his own experi-
ment with psylocibin mushrooms is un-
eventful, he notes that many present-day
psychedelic therapies combine elements
drawn from the past century of both
psychological and biological treatments,
a marriage of chemistry and counsel-
ing that creates another opportunity, he
writes, to “push the two fields of psychi-
atry into closer union.”
As for that long-running division
between biological and psychological
treatments of depression, Riley notes
that the successors of Freud and Abra-
ham—in their work with patients using
psychoanalysis to excavate the early
experiences thought to be the primary
cause of mental suffering—didn’t nec-
essarily oppose medical interventions
for depression, but they typically re-
sorted to them only after the long pro-
cess of analysis failed. Even today there
is sometimes a bias against pharmaco-
logical treatments—a perpetuation of an
old stigma that can get in the way of what
could be a more collaborative approach.
In tracing the many forms of talk
therapy that grew out of psycho-
analysis, Riley discusses the psychia-
trist Aaron Beck, who in the late 1950s
proposed a new theory: depression was
a product not, as Freud had thought, of
“anger turned inward,” but rather of a
negative view of one’s current circum-
stances. Beck’s “cognitive” approach
to therapy proposed to help patients
recast their perceptions, using one-on-
one or group sessions with therapists
to guide them toward more forgiving
assessments of themselves and others.
This method was initially challenged
both by psychiatrists who preferred to
rely on their growing pharmacopeia
and by behavioral psychologists such
as Joseph Wolpe and B. F. Skinner,
who believed that human behavior
was essentially a collection of learned
reactions to external stimuli. Despite
this early competition, the cognitive
and behavioral schools of psychology
eventually merged to produce CBT,
which is now so common that it is what
most people mean by “therapy.” (Beck,
who died last November at the age of one
hundred, once joked that the lead char-
acter of The Sopranos, the mob boss and
sometime psychoanalysis patient Tony
Soprano, could have been cured of his
panic attacks with two sessions of CBT.)
Among the people Riley interviews
is Myrna Weissman, a professor of psy-
chiatry and epidemiology at Columbia
University, who with Gerald Klerman
in the 1960s and 1970s pioneered the
form of talk therapy known as interper-
sonal psychotherapy. Similar to cogni-
tive therapy, it considers the quality
of patients’ social relationships as well
as their perceptions of themselves and
others. “We were friends,” she says of
Beck, whose photograph is displayed in
her office. “We were not competing.”
Her expression of collegiality feels like
a radical departure from a hundred In the final section of his book Riley
years of internecine rivalries. looks at emerging and reemerging
“There shouldn’t be one psychother- treatments for depression, many of
apy,” Weissman tells Riley. “I think which combine biological and psycho-
that people who say, ‘This is the psy- logical strategies. He discusses the
chotherapy,’ are doing a disservice to work of the neurologist Helen May-
patients. It’s like saying there should be berg, whose studies in the early 2000s
only Prozac.” revealed that brain activity patterns
can help predict whether depression
sufferers are most likely to respond to
In the 1980s Weissman realized that talk therapy, antidepressants, or more
while psychiatrists had often assumed aggressive treatments such as ECT.
that depression was a first-world prob- He also speaks with researchers who,
lem—a side effect of modern urban troubled by psychiatry’s preoccupa-
life—there were little if any data on tion with low serotonin, are exploring
how common it was worldwide, or who the role of the microbiome and the
was most likely to suffer from it. She immune system in both causing and
and other researchers soon confirmed relieving depressive episodes. (So far
that depression was at least as common there is no conclusive evidence that the
microbiome affects brain chemistry.)
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
“Over the last decade,” Riley writes,
“there has been a trend in psychiatry
to do away with diagnoses” altogether.
Will we, he wonders, continue to use
the word “depression”?
A Cure for Darkness, with its combi-
nation of memoir, history, and report-
age, calls to mind Andrew Solomon’s
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of
Depression (2001). In that sprawling,
wise, and empathetic book, which
includes interviews with doctors, sci-
entists, policymakers, and others,
Solomon powerfully documents the
individual experiences of an expan-
sive range of people suffering from
depression, including himself. These
accounts are revealing and validating,
showing both the isolation felt by peo-
ple with depression and the global per-
vasiveness of their condition.
As Solomon puts it, depression is not
A friendship bench, Masvingo, sadness but “the aloneness within us
Zimbabwe, January 2020 made manifest.” His mordant comment
to a friend as he started to descend
in poorer communities and nations, into a breakdown, “I’m afraid of lamb
and that in some countries Western chops again,” is still my warning to
investigators hadn’t recognized it sim- family members when I sense my own
ply because it traveled under different depression coming on. Like Solomon,
names. Riley’s discussion of this re- Riley has responded to his depression
search and its consequences is one of by turning outward, seeking to place
the most moving sections of his book. his experience and its purported reme-
Speakers of Luganda, the most com- dies alongside the experiences of fellow
mon indigenous language in Uganda, sufferers past and present. This depar-
don’t have a word for “depression.” ture from the interior narrative typical
They use the terms yo’kwekyawa and of depression memoirs, it seems to me,
okwekubazida, which roughly trans- has therapeutic value as well as formal
late as “self-loathing” and “self-pity” significance. One of the great strengths
and describe two distinct conditions; of Riley’s book is that, like Solomon’s,
the former, which can include thoughts it refutes the perception of aloneness
of suicide, is considered more severe. that is perhaps the most distinguish-
In Zimbabwe in the 1990s, researchers ing characteristic of depression, and
learned that the local Shona language among its most terrifying.
had one word for everyday sadness (suwa) Depression remains a condition that
and another for a persistent, rumina- can be treated but not cured—and its
tive state that fit the clinical description toll is increasing. According to Riley’s
of depression. This term, kufungisisa, statistics, an estimated 322 million
which literally translates to “thinking people worldwide live with depression
too much,” unlocked communication be- today; of those with untreated depres-
tween practitioners and patients. sion, roughly 15 percent die by suicide.
In the early 2000s the Zimbabwean An analysis published in The Lancet
psychiatrist Dixon Chibanda recog- last October shows that the pandemic
nized that his rural patients, many of has led to a nearly 30 percent jump in
whom were severely stressed by pov- the prevalence of major depression.
erty and the multifold impacts of the Two decades after the first edition of
HIV epidemic, were dying from a lack Solomon’s book, and seven years since
of mental health care. He recruited a its last update, 2 Riley cannot report a
corps of rural community members, pre- cure for depression, but he does show
dominantly grandmothers, and trained that there have been some modest
them to conduct informal therapy ses- advances in how we think about and
sions with their neighbors on open-air treat it—including an increased aware-
“friendship benches.” In clinical trials, ness of the value of collaborative ap-
the grandmothers and their benches proaches. “We can’t kill depression,”
proved to be so successful in relieving Riley writes. “But, with treatment, we
the most incapacitating symptoms of can stop it from killing us.” Q
depression that the approach has since
spread to Kenya, Botswana, the Carib-
2
bean, New York City, and elsewhere. Scribner, 2015.
37

An Untouched House
by Willem Frederik Hermans,
translated from the Dutch
by David Colmer, with an afterword
by Cees Nooteboom.
Archipelago, 102 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Darkroom of Damocles
by Willem Frederik Hermans,
translated from the Dutch
by Ina Rilke.
London: Pushkin, 411 pp., £9.99 (paper)
A Guardian Angel Recalls
by Willem Frederik Hermans,
translated from the Dutch
by David Colmer.
Archipelago, 511 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Beyond Sleep
by Willem Frederik Hermans,
translated from the Dutch
by Ina Rilke.
London: Pushkin, 312 pp., £9.99 (paper)

Het behouden huis—literally “the
preserved (or surviving) house”—a
novella by the Dutch writer Willem
Frederik Hermans, was published in
1951 and translated into English by
Estelle Debrot as The House of Ref-
uge in 1966, then by David Colmer as
An Untouched House in 2018. If, in
the future, works of fiction must carry
content warnings, this one will re-
quire a red alert. As the story draws
to a close, nothing has been preserved
and very little deserves to be. It is a
work, observed the Dutch writer Harry
Mulisch, of “bestial destruction.”
Born in 1921 to upwardly mobile
parents, Hermans was obliged to inter-
rupt his university studies in physical
geography when the Germans invaded
the Netherlands in 1940. The closely
observed dramas of wartime behavior
that he then began to compose pro-
voked outrage for decades to come. In
Het behouden huis the unnamed nar-
rator, a partisan, has been fighting the
Germans for four years, twice escaping
from prison camps. On the front line of
an attack on a small town in Eastern
Europe, he appears to have no sense of
what he is fighting for and can barely
communicate with comrades who
speak a babel of different languages.
Entirely focused on the moment-by-
moment struggle for survival, he is no
more than an efficient war machine: “A
German emerged and ran for the road.
I shot him. A second, as well. A third.
A fourth. They bent double like butter-
flies being mounted. I stabbed them to
death with a pin six hundred feet long.”
However, when the partisan is sent
ahead to scout for booby traps, he finds
himself entering a well-to- do spa town
where “the abandoned houses . . . stir
and gather round me, offering them-
selves to me like women in travel sto-
ries about Indochina.” He steps into a
stately house whose occupants seem
to have left only moments before. At
once the ease and opulence of this first
“genuine home” that he has been in
for years begin to exert their influence.
He takes a bath, looks in the mirror,
shaves, and becomes someone else:
“Now that I was so clean, I expected to
discover all kinds of things in my face.
I discovered nothing. All the things
I had been through were gone with-
38
A Gift for Overkill
Tim Parks
Willem Frederik Hermans; illustration by Ruth Gwily
out trace.” He finds a suit, shirt, and
tie, and then, tapping cigarette ash on
the rug while studying gilded cherubs
on the ceiling, recognizes a “sense of
inner disapproval”: “It was like I had to
behave respectably again, even though
the owner of the house could count
himself lucky if I didn’t loot it.” All too
soon he is hearing his dead mother’s
voice complaining about muddy foot-
prints on expensive carpets. With each
passing hour the protected world of the
old bourgeoisie invites him to redis-
cover that blend of narcissism and re-
spect for property—books, paintings,
a well-stocked wine cellar—that passes
for culture.
The Germans retake the town and a
colonel appears at the door. The par-
tisan claims to be the owner of the
house and allows Nazi officers to be
billeted there. Assuring the impostor
that he has nothing to fear, the colonel
explains, “Since joining the army . . . I
have shaved every day without fail at
exactly half past six in the morning . . .
war or no war! That is what I under-
stand by culture!”
For weeks the partisan lives a life of
ease, doing “things that didn’t require
any thought,” “touching objects without
investigating them,” utterly forgetful of
wartime imperatives. Nevertheless it is
irksome that one of the upper rooms in
the house is locked. A black cat keeps
trying to get into it. As the partisan is
climbing a stepladder outside the house
to look into the window of this room,
the owner returns. Any anxiety one
might feel for the strangely numbed
protagonist is quickly dispelled when
he fetches his rifle and shoots the man
dead, then strangles his wife. One has
to own the well-preserved house to
possess and enjoy its culture.
A few minutes later an elderly gentle-
man, the owner’s father, also appears.
He has unlocked the door to the mys-
terious room. “All four walls were cov-
ered with racks of aquariums,” stocked
with rare fish requiring the most deli-
cately balanced environment. Pathet-
ically, the opulent bourgeois seek to
possess life in their palatial homes,
locking it away in rarely visited rooms.
“Something of unique cultural signifi-
cance,” the elderly man insists.
As they speak, war is once again
passing through the town. The parti-
sans are back, and the novella’s terri-
fying finale unfolds: “an apotheosis
of random cruelty . . . unparalleled in
literature,” observes Cees Nooteboom
in the afterword to Colmer’s unobtru-
sively efficient translation. The narra-
tor dons his old soldiering clothes and
claims to have been a prisoner of the
Germans. The house is desecrated in
every possible way, the German colonel
tortured, the owner’s father hanged.
Outrage after outrage is perpetrated.
Leaving at last, the narrator throws a
hand grenade into the hallway. After
the explosion,
I saw bundles of dead raggedy
reeds hanging down from the
broken ceilings that had depicted
heaven. I looked deep into the
house’s diseased and dying maw.
It was like it had been putting on
an act the whole time and was only
now showing itself as it, in reality,
had always been: a hollow, drafty
cavern, rancid and rotting at its
core.
Two contrasting energies galvanize
Hermans’s fictions. The wry invitation
to find symbols and deeper meanings is
balanced by a wealth of detail and me-
ticulously described action, all rapidly
delivered, convincingly concrete, and
psychologically persuasive. Binding the
two together is a flair for bizarre analo-
gies that compel recognition while dis-
pelling our instinct to sympathize in an
aura of the surreal:
The owner of the house was
lying . . . just as I’d left him, his
mouth wide open, the half-burnt
cigarette shot back into his throat,
like a pistil in a flower.
Or:
The plane changed into a comet of
soot and hit the ground somewhere
behind me. The explosion was
like the world making a swallow-
ing sound but amplified a million
times.
The reader is soon convinced that
Hermans knows life intimately and
that his knowledge is devastating. “He
lashed [readers] with the truth,” com-
ments the introduction to the Dutch
edition of his collected works. But
there is humor too, albeit of the gallows
variety. The Darkroom of Damocles
(1958), the novel that made Hermans’s
name, opens thus in Ina Rilke’s fine
translation, first published in 2007:
“He drifted around on his raft
for days, without a drop to drink.
He was dying of thirst, because
the water of the ocean is salty. He
hated the water that he couldn’t
drink. But when his raft was struck
by lightning and caught fire, he
scooped up the hateful water with
both hands to try and put out the
flames!”
The teacher was the first to
laugh, and finally the whole class
joined in.
Minutes after this initiation into
his schoolmaster’s macabre sense of
humor, the twelve-year- old Henri Os-
ewoudt is told that a terrible accident
has happened at home, though no one
has the courage to explain. The boy
is taken to his uncle Bart’s house and
later that night into his cousin Ria’s
bed. She is nineteen and offers a pred-
atory consolation. Only later does he
understand that his mother has killed
his father.
Henri is short; his flaxen hair and
smooth cheeks give him a girlish look;
even as an adult he will never develop
a beard. Constantly comparing him-
self with others, he feels he is a loser
and takes judo classes to improve his
self- esteem. At fifteen he realizes
Ria is ugly: “She would otherwise
have dumped him long ago.” And he
would dump her if only other girls
would pay him some attention. Nev-
ertheless, when he is eighteen, Henri
and Ria marry, taking over his dead
father’s tobacco shop along with Hen-
ri’s mother, now released from a men-
tal institution. Everything is done for
the merest economic convenience. A
picture is painted of dull, small-town
life characterized by the reliable trun-
dling of blue and yellow trams. Six days
The New York Review
after Henri’s marriage, the Germans
invade Poland, but he is half a centi-
meter too short to become a soldier.
Joining the Home Guard, he is “al-
lowed to stand [outside the post office]
with an old rifle, on the sidelines as
usual.”
At last Henri gets a chance to prove
himself. A Dutch lieutenant turns up
at the tobacconist’s asking for some
film to be developed. And after pages
of scrupulous realism, Hermans intro-
duces a surreal element into his story:
Lieutenant Dorbeck looks exactly like
Henri Osewoudt—his doppelgänger,
no less. When Henri protests that being
the same height Dorbeck should also
have been turned down for military
service, the lieutenant replies, “So was
I, almost. But I stretched myself.” Now
he will be asking Henri to stretch him-
self. First he must develop the photo-
graphs, none of which appear to have
any military significance. Then he must
bury the lieutenant’s uniform as, with
German victory complete, Dorbeck is
going into hiding. Without ever being
formally recruited, Henri comes to
think of himself as involved in the resis-
tance. He brushes up his judo and buys
a Leica to be more useful. Dorbeck
gives him a pistol and an appointment:
“As soon as we’re in the living room,
you shoot. Shoot whoever’s nearest to
you.”
Two features distinguish Dorbeck
from Henri: the ex-lieutenant has black
hair and a beard. Henri thinks of him
as a virile version of himself. He must
become like Dorbeck, “the successful
specimen.” Obeying his double’s every
order, he is caught up in a whirlwind of
disguises, betrayals, killings, conver-
sations at cross-purposes, and sudden
erotic encounters, to the point that all
identity dissolves. There are moments
of high comedy—as when, desperate
to avoid being recognized, Henri puts
on another partisan’s glasses and the
two men stumble about, both quite un-
able to see—but also of shocking cyn-
icism. “Spending a night of bliss with
you then doing you in would be right
up my street,” Henri reflects when he
sees a girl in the Youth Storm, a Dutch
movement that collaborated with the
Nazis. “And a patriotic deed into the
bargain.”
Authentic patriotism is scarce. When
a comrade speaks of having acted “for
my country,” Henri thinks, “What’s
that supposed to mean? The blue
tram? The yellow tram?” Only love
offers hope for some kind of mental
stability. He had done “every heroic
deed” not for his country but for her,
Henri claims on falling in love with a
hairdresser, Marianne. She urges him
to free himself of his obsession with
Dorbeck and “be yourself.” But Mar-
ianne is Jewish and on the run, and
the child they conceive is stillborn. In
the general confusion, as Henri os-
cillates between thinking of himself
as a “poor sod” and a “prince,” the
only thing that matters is staying alive,
coming out victorious. Hearing that
Ria has betrayed him to the Germans,
Henri stabs her to death with evident
satisfaction.
The Allies advance, and the end of
the war is in sight. Henri is confident
that he will indeed come out a win-
ner. But when he crosses the lines, dis-
guised, thanks to his looks, as a female
nurse, he finds that the British believe
him to have been a German double
agent who “delivered hundreds of good
patriots into the hands of the enemy.”
In a tour de force of interrogations,
newspaper articles, psychiatric exam-
inations, and even letters to the queen
of England, Henri’s involvement in the
war is reconstructed and deconstructed
far beyond the point of bewilderment.
Everyone has his or her version of
events; no one listens to anyone else.
Convinced that he is the victim of a
misunderstanding, Henri shows no re-
morse for his many killings. The one
man who might throw some light on
events, Dorbeck, is never found.
I t is hardly surprising that The Dark-
room of Damocles proved offensive to
anyone who believed in the patriotic
spirit of the Dutch resistance. Hermans
was a polemicist with a gift for the kind
of overkill that transforms ordinary
denunciation into something spectacu-
lar and terrifying. Had his novels been
translated into English at the time they
were written, no doubt their reception
would have been equally tumultuous.
At a distance of fifty and more years it
is easy for us to see the deeper aspects
of the work and forget the ruthlessness
with which Hermans rubbed postwar
complacencies into the dirt. He loathed
all pious illusions. In the 1970s he spent
much time and energy unmasking
Friedrich Weinreb, a prominent Jew
who claimed to have helped save many
other Jews during the war while in fact
selling them a fictitious escape route
that frequently led to their deportation
and death.
A Guardian Angel Recalls, pub-
lished in Dutch in 1971 and now ap-
pearing in English for the first time in a
gripping translation by David Colmer,
opens with a Jewish woman fleeing the
Nazis. At the Dutch port of the Hook

 AND  
A CURRENT LISTING
Helicline Fine Art Alexandre Yossi Milo Gallery
 KHOOR#KHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRPKHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRP 291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002 245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
Midtown Manhattan, Private Dealer by appointment (212) 755-2828 (212) 414-0370; info@yossimilo.com
alexandregallery.com
New Exhibition: American Art: The WPA Era and Beyond Cameron Welch: RUINS
Pat Adams: Works from the 1970s and 1980s March 24–May 7, 2022
Helicline Fine Art offers twentieth-century American and European March 6–April 16, 2022
modernist paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. We specialize in
American scene, modernism, social realism, mural studies, industrial
landscapes, regionalism, WPA, abstraction, and more.

Konrad Cramer
(1888–1963)
Farm Buildings Cameron Welch, Fugue State, 2021, marble, glass, ceramic, stone,
20" x 24" Out Come Out, 1980, oil, isobutyl methacrylate, spray enamel, oil, and acrylic on panel, 96" x 144" (244 x 366 cm)
Oil on board pastel, mica, eggshell, and sand on linen, 80" x 80" © Cameron Welch, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

LewAllen Galleries Marlborough Gallery

Railyard Arts District 545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001; (212) 541-4900
1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 988-3250 www.marlboroughnewyork.com; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM –6PM



contact@lewallengalleries.com; www.lewallengalleries.com
Maggi Hambling: Real time
Jack Roth: Works from the Estate
February 25–April 2, 2022 AND March 10–April 30, 2022

Paintings and   
works on paper
by the acclaimed
A collection of notable art and
abstract
expressionist exhibitions from around the world.
DQGFRORUÀHOG
painter Jack Roth
(1927–2004). If you would like to know more about the
listing, please contact
gallery@nybooks.com
Parametric Pressure,
or (212) 293-1630
1980, acrylic on
canvas, 67" x 80"
Maggi Hambling, Wall of Water XII, 2012, oil on canvas
78" x 89", 198.1 x 226.1 cm. © The Artist

March 24, 2022 39

of Holland, the public prosecutor Bert
Alberegt has just put the beautiful Sysy
on board a freighter that will take her
first to England, then America. This
time Hermans places his surreal ele-
ment at the heart of the novel’s struc-
ture: the story is narrated by Alberegt’s
guardian angel. Constantly anxious for
the fate of his ward’s soul, the angel
necessarily sees everything through a
Christian perspective of good and evil,
with Alberegt’s positive thoughts often
described as the result of his own celes-
tial prompting and negative thoughts
as suggested directly by the devil. But
this obsessive moral framework proves
comically inadequate to tell a story in
which the brutal drive for survival and
self-realization is always ascendant. Al-
beregt never shows so much as a hint
of religious feeling. The two value sys-
tems forever at war in Hermans’s work
are thus separated out and pointed up,
to great ironic effect.
Sysy is a Communist who was smug-
gled out of Germany by Alberegt’s best
friend, the liberal publisher Erik Lose-
caat, who persuaded him to use his
position to help forge her documents.
But was his help entirely altruistic?
Alberegt fell in love with Sysy and has
been living with her for four months.
“A fat man of thirty- eight,” he feels
she is his last best chance for a stable
domestic life. Thanks to her he has
overcome a ruinous drinking habit and
stopped smoking. However, now that
she is leaving, he wonders if she didn’t
share his bed merely because he was in
a position of power. She never had any
intention of marrying him. He is “too
fusty.”
Tormented by low self- esteem, Al-
beregt, after saying good-bye to Sysy,
wonders if he couldn’t get her back by
calling the police anonymously and
having her arrested before the ship
leaves. The guardian angel is appalled,
attributing such thoughts to the devil.
A more benign idea would be to go
immediately to England and catch up
with Sysy there, giving up his career for
love. Driving in haste to a court hear-
ing where he is to prosecute a writer
who has insulted Hitler in a news-
paper article, Alberegt is feeling ex-
tremely vulnerable and soon becomes
even more so when, taking a shortcut
down a remote country lane, he runs
over and kills a little girl. Human dig-
nity demands that he go at once to the
police and confess. The angel is clear
about this. The prosecutor throws the
small corpse in the bushes and hurries
to take his place in court.
Hermans does not disdain bizarre
coincidence. His strategy is to push his
uneasy protagonists to a limit where
whatever moral qualities they might
have are overwhelmed by the will to
survive. Having failed to kill himself
(the angel, who did not prevent the road
accident, contrives to have his revolver
jam), Alberegt hurries from court to a
party at his mother’s house, where his
friend Erik once again tries to enlist his
help: a little Jewish girl smuggled out of
Czechoslovakia and staying with other
refugees in a remote area out of town
has disappeared. Could he ask the po-
lice to look for her without disclosing
that she is Jewish? Both the angel and
the devil suggest that the terrified Al-
beregt borrow money and depart for
England that very night, the one to
have him pursue his love for Sysy, the
40
other to allow him to escape detection
and thus become “lord and master” of
the situation. It is a major problem, the
angel wryly acknowledges, that devils
and angels often give the same advice.
Alberegt’s mother’s home resembles
the great house of Het behouden huis:
walnut bureaus, satin- covered lounge
sofas, crystal chandeliers. Thilda
Alberegt- Grijze has just performed a
program of lieder at the local concert
hall and is celebrating her performance,
which was “a tremendous success.”
A born winner avid for praise, the el-
derly woman sings for her party guests
despite being exhausted. Alberegt’s
“failed brother” Rense, on the other
hand, is an artist who paints the same
plain blue canvas over and over again
and has never made a sale; his wife now
wishes she had married his more finan-
cially stable brother. It was to avoid
thinking of himself as “a loser,” we
discover, that Alberegt switched from
working as a defense lawyer, who is in-
evitably upset when a case goes against
him, to being a state prosecutor, who
has no emotional investment in the out-
come of a trial.
Seeing those around him downing
glasses of champagne and whiskey, he
longs to drown his miseries, but that
would mean a descent back into alco-
holism. Unlike the successful people
he envies, he cannot hold his drink.
For consolation he keeps peppermints
that he sucks hard whenever think-
ing becomes unbearable. The angel
is “overcome with tenderness for this
human, whose happiness had for the
greatest part always been derived from
insignificant habits.” Just as torment
and dilemma approach their climax
we hear the rumble of low-flying air-
craft. Bombs begin to fall. Thilda is
distressed that no one will find time to
read the reviews of her lyric triumph.
It is May 10, 1940, when German
paratroopers dropped all over the
Netherlands to prepare the way for ad-
vancing land forces. Driving toward the
coast through bucolic countryside, see-
ing a farmer’s wife carrying a bucket
to milk her cows—“the most beautiful
and most noble country that has ever
existed”—Alberegt is caught in an air
raid. Very soon the cows
were lying on their backs with their
legs in the air, except for two that
were still standing on their front
legs and dragging their bloody,
crippled hindquarters over the
grass, tongues floundering out of
their wide- open mouths. . . . He
couldn’t see the farmer’s wife
anywhere.
The angel is intrigued to see how im-
mersion in war galvanizes his ward. Al-
beregt has “forgotten everything that
had been oppressing him.” Suddenly
flight seems cowardly. He decides to
return to the town. But war, the angel
reflects, is just “a red mist that covers
the windows”: “Humankind is born in
Pain and dies in Sorrow and war can’t
change that.”
The speed of events and the rapidly
growing complexity of the story are
breathtaking. Rense is found to be on
an SS list of people the Nazis intend to
track down and neutralize. Is it because
his awful art is considered dangerously
decadent? He seems pleased with this
recognition. Or was “R. Alberegt” a
misprint for “B. Alberegt,” the pros-
ecutor who allowed a journalist who
insulted Hitler to go free? Alberegt
realizes that if he confesses to killing
the child, this will involve betraying his
friend Erik as a man offering refuge to
Jews, not to mention compromising any
future with Sysy. Rotterdam is bombed
and refugees block the road. A group
of well-to- do friends gathers at Erik’s
house to consider a possible escape to
England.
Here we discover that far from being
a paragon of virtue, Erik is a serial
philanderer, living in the lap of lux-
ury, enjoying fine wines and expensive
paintings, making an exhibition of his
very young mistress though never-
theless attached to his wife, who had
once been Alberegt’s fiancée. The Jews
he has smuggled out of Germany are
working for his publishing house. Sysy
is writing a book for him. “Ah, to be a
man like Erik,” Alberegt reflects. It’s
as if being a winner allowed Erik to act
with moral courage, or alternatively as
if being good were part of a winning
business strategy. Certainly the man is
a charmer. There is much witty discus-
sion of art and literature.
Meantime, the angel’s occasional in-
dignation at hearing the Lord’s name
taken in vain seems ever more irrel-
evant. Nor can the celestial guardian
offer the confused Alberegt much ad-
vice: “How could an angel see through
man’s dark ways without becoming
besmirched himself?” His only urgent
warning is that the prosecutor do pen-
ance before he dies. Alberegt pays no
attention. Meeting Erik’s flirtatious
neighbor, a married woman who makes
a point of letting him know her husband
is away, he is distracted by erotic fan-
tasies. Throughout this extraordinary
novel all the characters are shown to
be at the mercy of conflicting impulses,
of which the guardian angel’s admoni-
tions are but one. Their helplessness is
their pathos and their disgrace.
Hermans did not always write about
the war. Beyond Sleep, published in
1966 in the Netherlands and in Ina
Rilke’s English translation in 2007, is
narrated by Alfred, a doctoral student
determined to make his name in the
field of geology. His father’s ambitions
as a botanist ended when he fell to an
untimely death in the Swiss mountains.
“Losing my footing will not take me
unawares,” Alfred boldly declares. His
mother has been hugely successful as a
reviewer of British and American nov-
els that she never actually reads—she
plagiarizes reviews from prestigious
foreign journals. Alfred is disgusted
and fascinated. It was his mother who
discouraged his initial ambitions as
a flute player. “People don’t become
world famous for playing the flute,” she
told him.
In an earlier short story, another Her-
mans character observes that “only . . .
insane, totally futile, impossible un-
dertakings, can provide dignity.” The
only thing that matters in life is to do
something extraordinary: “Everything
else . . . is mimicry and slavish routine.”
So at the suggestion of his Ph.D. ad-
viser, Alfred sets out for Finnmark,
the northernmost territory of Norway,
to prove that a series of supposed “ice
holes” are, sensationally, “meteor cra-
ters.” He tells us, “I want to find some-
thing spectacular!”
At once he is the victim of academic
rivalries. The renowned, blind, and el-
derly Professor Nummedal in Oslo is
an enemy of Alfred’s adviser in Am-
sterdam and contrives to deny him ac-
cess to the aerial photographs essential
to his expedition. The young man feels
further hampered by having grown up
in the Netherlands, a geologically un-
interesting country, and by his imper-
fect English. English is the language of
success; citizens of small nations with
minority languages are condemned to
being losers.
Comically ill- equipped, Alfred pro-
ceeds by seaplane to the tiny northern
town of Alta, where he meets up with
three Norwegians who will be doing
research of their own in the area. He
is paired with Arne Jordal, who despite
his wealthy family uses an old battered
camera and a leaky tent because he
considers himself “not worthy” of “any-
thing new, anything costing money.” To
fail with poor equipment is dignified,
while to do so with state- of-the-art gear
would be shameful. Alfred’s one boast
is an expensive geological compass,
given to him by his religious sister: “It’s
quite large, with a rectangular base,
precision degree scale, sights, clinom-
eter, spirit level and mirror.” Having
studied physical geography, Hermans
knows the jargon and the territory.
But no compass could be a match
for the disorienting experiences ahead.
Alfred can’t sleep in the land of the
midnight sun. The endless light is op-
pressive. He is not used to carrying a
heavy pack across wastes of bog and
icy rivers. The mosquitoes are multi-
tudinous and relentless. He grows sus-
picious when the Norwegians speak
together in Norwegian. He is aston-
ished by their radical ideas when they
discuss life and ambition, never geol-
ogy. The other pair of explorers have
excellent equipment; they are more
comfortable, more expert: “Qvigs-
tad bites into the world with big white
teeth. Swings his hammer like a god.
Leaps across rivers unhampered by the
heaviest of loads.” Lavishly described
in counterpoint to the comedy of mis-
understandings between the young
men, the dramatic northern landscape
provides that blend of real and sur-
real that is the hallmark of Hermans’s
work: “The green is streaked with wa-
tercourses, sometimes at right angles
to each other like ditches dug for peat.
The sky is black, deep blue and dark
red, swirls of pigment running together
without blending.”
Petty rivalries, paranoia, insomnia,
and the fatal loss of his compass eventu-
ally leave Alfred alone in the vast land-
scape, reduced to the most essential
struggle for survival while simultane-
ously yearning for oblivion. “Oh, to be
crushed to death and done with it all,”
he sighs. This, Hermans appears to be
telling us, is how one arrives at the ab-
surd: a world where the only thing that
matters is success, but success is mean-
ingless; where one is condemned to go
on, without wishing to or understanding
why. “Never have I been so certain that
what I’m going through is utterly futile
and impossible to recount,” Alfred de-
cides. Hermans, however, is spectacu-
larly successful in drawing his readers
toward the same disorientation as his
characters. Like a partisan’s grenade
tossed into the plushly preserved house
of Western culture, these unrelenting
tragicomedies leave no complacencies
intact. In this regard, even though the
generation they were intended to shock
has long since disappeared, they could
hardly be more timely. Q
The New York Review

Coral Reefs: A Natural History
by Charles Sheppard.
Princeton University Press,
240 pp., $35.00
Life on the Rocks:
Building a Future for Coral Reefs
by Juli Berwald.
Riverhead, 336 pp., $28.00
Snorkeling or diving over a coral reef,
with its exceptionally vivid colors and
proliferation of life in utterly unfamil-
iar forms, is about as close as most peo-
ple get to visiting an alien world. The
temptation is to try to take in the reef
as a whole, but the true wonder lies in
observing it up close. The closer you
look, the more layers of complexity
and living brilliance are revealed: fol-
low a minuscule fish, its front half elec-
tric blue, its rear brilliant orange, as it
scoots along and you can find yourself
in the purple maw of a giant clam so
expansive as to appear at first glance
to be a mountain range. The most ex-
quisite variety of tubes, tendrils, star-
bursts, and spines make up something
so large that it can be seen from space.
The genesis of the world’s coral reefs
occurred 54 million years ago, in a long-
lost sea called the Tethys, in what is
today Southern Europe. Back then the
world was recovering from devastating
climate heating caused by carbon di-
oxide and methane that escaped from
Earth’s crust, and that both warmed
and acidified the oceans, precipitating
an extinction event and reorganizing
the circulation of ocean currents. As
the greenhouse gases were gradually
absorbed into rocks over the course
of hundreds of thousands of years, the
oceans cooled and regained their alka-
linity, creating conditions favorable to
reef-building corals. The biodiversity
characteristic of the modern coral reef
arose so quickly that it appears to have
been almost fully formed, like Diony-
sus springing from Zeus’s thigh. And
through all the subsequent ice ages
and drifting of continents, the essential
composition of coral reefs remained
unchanged.
Charles Sheppard’s Coral Reefs:
A Natural History not only explains
what corals are and how they live, but
reveals through exquisite photogra-
phy the glories of the reef at all scales.
Flipping through its pages I was filled
with both wonder and sadness, for few
reefs today possess such untrammeled
beauty. Many of those I’ve dived on of
late have begun to sicken and die. It’s
a worldwide trend that is accelerating
so quickly that we may live to see the
end of coral reefs. A scientific study
published this year indicates that once
global heating reaches 1.5 degrees
Celsius, almost no corals will avoid
severe bleaching, which leaves them
vulnerable to disease and starvation.1
If current trends continue, we’ll hit that
temperature mark in the early 2030s.
Just 0.2 percent of reefs will escape
bleaching—an outcome that research-
ers say will be catastrophic.
1
Adele M. Dixon, Piers M. Forster, et
al., “Future Loss of Local-Scale Ther-
mal Refugia in Coral Reef Ecosys-
tems,” PLOS Climate, February 1, 2022.
March 24, 2022
In Hot Water
Tim Flannery
A blue sea star clinging to a coral head where coralline algae, tunicates, and soft leather corals grow, Batanta Island, Indonesia, 2012
T he cause of this disaster, and what
can be done about it, is the focus of
Juli Berwald’s splendid new book, Life
on the Rocks. Berwald’s great strength
lies in revealing a fast-moving, com-
plex global catastrophe through easily
understood case studies, and few are
as troubling as that provided by Aus-
tralia’s Great Barrier Reef. The world’s
largest reef system stretches 1,400
miles north to south and covers an
area around the size of Italy. In the late
1920s the Royal Geographical Society
of Australasia organized an expedition
to study it in depth for the first time,
dispatching a young oyster researcher
named Maurice Yonge and his doctor
wife, Mattie, to the Low Isles, in the
northern section of the reef. In today’s
interconnected, environmentally dam-
aged world, it’s hard to comprehend the
adventure the young couple must have
had, living for months at a time with
twenty other researchers on a tropical
island in a maritime Garden of Eden.
Lacking diving equipment, the team
worked at low tide, documenting the
condition and diversity of the coral. In
February 1929 Maurice was astonished
to find that the seawater in the pools
left by the receding tide was “literally
hot to the touch,” and on a subsequent
low tide he noticed that large patches
of the stony, branching coral that dom-
inated the healthy reef had turned
white—the first recorded instance of
coral bleaching as a result of elevated
sea temperature. But by the time of
the next extreme low tide, in April, the
corals had returned to their usual color.
We now know that such bleaching and
recovery is a normal response to stress
by corals. Bleaching becomes deadly
only when high temperatures persist.
In 2019 researchers returned to the
location in the Low Isles studied by
Yonge and his team, repeating the ob-
servations taken ninety years earlier.
They found that the water temperature
had risen from an average of 26.6 de-
grees Celsius to 27.7 degrees Celsius,
the water was far more acidic, and the
level of the sea had risen by more than
eight inches. But what shocked them
most of all was the state of the coral
reef itself. The branching stony corals
that had dominated in 1929, and that
Yonge had seen bleach and recover, had
been almost entirely replaced with soft
corals. The massive stony corals, such
as boulder corals, had done a little bet-
ter: some had survived, but they were
on average 30 percent smaller than
those measured by Yonge. Soft corals
don’t provide the caves and smaller
refuges for marine life that branching
stony corals do. Without shelter, myr-
iad species of crabs, shellfish, and other
life-forms had vanished. The riot of life
that Yonge observed in the 1920s had
been replaced by a pale, ghostly, and
ecologically devastated simulacrum.
The great majority of the damage
inflicted on the world’s coral reefs has
occurred within the lifetimes of re-
searchers who are active in the field.
The most visible and widespread dam-
age is bleaching caused by global heat-
ing, and Berwald explains in detail how
this occurs. Coral reefs come about,
she says, because of a “badass merger”
between the coral animal (a polyp like
a miniature sea anemone) and single-
celled algae. Both partners receive
benefits—the algae get protection
and the CO 2 they need to grow, while
the coral polyp receives food in the
form of sugars produced by the algae
during photosynthesis. So powerful is
the partnership that it can increase the
production of food a hundredfold.
Bleaching is visible evidence that
the relationship has broken down. The
corals are themselves colorless—it’s
the algae that give color to the reef.
Each coral has its own algal partner,
and some kinds of algae don’t pro-
duce as much food when temperatures
Ethan Daniels/Alamy
rise. Berwald writes that it’s not clear
whether the coral animal actively ejects
the algae or the algae leave of their
own accord, but once the relationship
ends, the coral loses most of its food
supply. The algae won’t return until
the water temperature falls, and if the
algae are away too long, the coral dies
of starvation.
Coral bleaching is the single greatest
threat faced by coral reefs. Yet bleach-
ing leading to widespread coral death
was not observed until 1980, and the first
such event in the Great Barrier Reef,
according to Berwald, was observed
only in 1998, by which time bleaching
events had been seen around the world.
By 2015 bleaching had taken on ter-
rifying proportions, afflicting reefs
from Guam to Hawaii and from Fiji to
French Polynesia. Richard Vevers, a re-
searcher who dived on the reefs as they
died, recalls, “I can’t even tell you how
bad I smelt after the dive—the smell of
millions of rotting animals.”
Despite the scale of the threat, not
all researchers agree that bleaching
will cause the extinction of coral reefs.
Misha Matz uses algorithms to assess
the threat of bleaching. “I cannot make
[reefs] go extinct,” he tells Berwald
when she visits his lab. “I’m sorry, it’s
impossible.” Matz’s optimistic view is
clearly in the minority, but as Berwald
tells it, the biological complexity of
coral reefs is so great that it’s hard to
draw firm conclusions about anything.
Yet observations indicate that there are
limits beyond which coral reefs experi-
ence catastrophic decline. Even if Matz
is right and reefs don’t go extinct, is it
acceptable if only 0.2 percent of cor-
als escape bleaching after 2030, as the
2022 study predicted?
Life on the Rocks is far more than a
paean to coral. Interwoven with Ber-
wald’s research is an account of the
41

New York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics, NYRB Poets,
The New York Review Children’s Collection,
NYRB Kids and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank
Executive Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae,
Lucas Adams
Associate Editor: Alex Andriesse
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During,
Publicity Director; Abigail Dunn, Senior
Marketing and Publicity Manager;
Alex Ransom, Assistant Marketing Manager;
Evan Johnston, Production Manager;
Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.
Have you read this
NYRB Classics bestseller?
“Beneath its apparently affectless
façade, All for Nothing seethes with
human drama, contradiction and
complexity. No one is blameless; no
one wholly unsympathetic. The result is
an astonishing literary achievement.”
—Toby Lichtig, The Telegraph
“I encountered one masterpiece this
year—Walter Kempowski’s epic novel
All for Nothing. . . . What’s remarkable
is that Kempowski recounts this grave
story almost in a spirit of lightness,
with a slightly ironic distance and a
quiet, steady humor. . . the result is
a book at once searing and utterly
unsentimental, a historical epic that
doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that
it is being written in the twenty-first
century, decades after the events.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
“A crystalline translation by Anthea
Bell. . . All for Nothing isn’t easily
appropriated by any ideology. Kem-
powski’s sympathy for the suffering
of his characters and his acknowledg-
ment of the attendant destruction of
their civilization are diffused by a fine-
grained ambivalence. . . As a literary
response to a long-buried collective
trauma, All for Nothing is well worth
reading.” —Corinna da Fonseca-
Wollheim, The New York Times
ALL FOR NOTHING
Walter Kempowski
Translated from the German by
Anthea Bell
Introduction by Jenny Erpenbeck
Paperback • $16.95
Also available as an e-book
www.nyrb.com
42
mental health of her daughter, Isy. We
meet Isy when she’s in eighth grade.
She always had lots of friends, but
halfway through the year she abruptly
ditches them all, becomes reclusive,
and begins washing her hands com-
pulsively and receiving failing grades.
She is, we later learn, falling victim
to obsessive- compulsive disorder. The
creeping horror any parent feels at such
a transformation in a child is palpable
in Berwald’s response. At first she feels
helpless and blindsided, but then she
starts to investigate possible causes,
such as bacterial or viral infections that
may be linked to OCD. Despite some
short-term remissions, it is not until Isy
tries long-term therapy at a residen-
tial mental health program that real
progress is made. But success is always
qualified. Berwald puts the experience
to good purpose, astutely weaving to-
gether the story about uncertainty that
surrounds both OCD and reef science,
as well as the slow and uncertain nature
of recovery. Other tangents are less
fruitful—for example, Berwald dis-
cusses Black Lives Matter at length, on
the basis that “the work of academics . . .
is steeped in and has a very old legacy
of racism” and because of the colonial
histories of many countries where coral
reefs can be found. This is indisputably
true, but a book about everything risks
being a book about nothing.
Bleaching is not the only threat fac-
ing coral reefs. In Florida and the Ca-
ribbean, a disease known as stony coral
tissue loss is devastating reefs. It kills
swiftly and progresses through a com-
munity in the same pattern, first killing
the maze corals, then the elliptical and
star corals, then the brain coral, leaving
behind a nightmare landscape. It was
first seen near Miami, but at the time
of Berwald’s writing it had reached
beyond the Dominican Republic and
as far as St. Maarten, where it had
killed 70 percent of corals near a ma-
rine protected area. No cause has been
identified.
Then there are poisons and bombs.
In the islands of the southwest Pacific,
fishermen craft homemade bombs from
fertilizer and kerosene. By 2009, 70
percent of fish being sold in Philippine
fish markets bore the telltale scars of il-
legal blast fishing. The practice is dan-
gerous to fishermen as well as to reefs,
but it continues because it is rewarding
in the short term—even when fines are
taken into account, a blast fisherman
can earn ten to fifteen times as much
as someone using other methods. Yet
thirty years after the blast, an affected
reef remains rubble, since the loose
rock created by the explosion prevents
new coral from taking hold.
What the bombs spare often sops
up cyanide, which local fishers squirt
into the nooks and crannies of reefs
to stun small fish and sell them in the
aquarium trade. “In 2016,” Berwald
writes, “more than half the fish in
aquarium shops tested positive for cy-
anide poisoning.” In light of this, you
might expect her to be critical of aquar-
ists. But instead she finds a bright side
to their hobby, visiting a commercial
coral farm off Bali and meeting hobby-
ists who breed corals; Berwald argues
that their expertise might help scien-
tists who hope to breed heat-hardy
specimens.
One threat to corals that has perhaps
been overhyped concerns the effect
of sunscreen containing oxybenzone.
The issue was studied by Craig Downs,
whose laboratory research demon-
strated that oxybenzone affects coral at
various life stages. When this became
widely known, it led to calls to end the
use of the chemical. Yet studies of the
impact of oxybenzone on coral reefs
have yielded only equivocal results.
Perhaps, Berwald opines, the popu-
larity of the move to ban oxybenzone
owes as much to a desire to do some-
thing in the face of the threats to coral
reefs, even if that something is of mar-
ginal utility.
T he most surprising aspect of Life on
the Rocks is surely the many efforts
being made to save coral reefs. In the
Getty Images
Pillar coral near Cayman Brac,
Cayman Islands, 2019
waters off Sulawesi, Indonesia, an ini-
tiative funded by Frank Mars (a board
member of Mars Inc.) is restoring coral
reefs that were devastated by blasting.
The technique involves planting frag-
ments of coral onto star-shaped struc-
tures made of rebar (steel reinforcing
bars), then attaching them to what’s left
of the reef. Even after just two years,
the results are spectacular, the rebar
being so overgrown with coral that it
had disappeared from view. Berwald’s
reverie at the sight of one reviving reef
is, sadly, interrupted by an abrupt and
loud explosion. Somewhere within ear-
shot of the restoration, another reef
was being reduced to rubble.
One heartening initiative Berwald ex-
plores is a debt-swap system pioneered
by the Nature Conservancy, a complex
financial arrangement whereby coun-
tries indebted to the US have some of
their obligation discounted in exchange
for allowing an environmental orga-
nization to help manage the nation’s
biodiversity. The program has had a
positive effect in the Seychelles, where
enormous marine protected areas have
been established, creating local em-
ployment through tourism and manage-
ment. But it’s not clear whether these
protected areas can survive bleaching
in a world where temperatures have in-
creased by 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Line Bay, a geneticist working with
the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park
Authority, is attempting to breed hy-
brid corals that she hopes can cope
with hotter temperatures. Her vision
involves developing coral husbandry
programs, testing the hybrid corals for
hardiness, growing vast numbers in
nurseries, then planting them en masse,
monitoring them, and keeping stores of
frozen eggs and sperm in case of fail-
ure. Some progress has been made, but
the problem with this approach—as
indeed with almost all reef restoration
projects—is that of scale.
There are around 108,000 square
miles of coral reef in the world, around
half of which are already damaged or
dead. Frank Mars’s restoration project
in Indonesia spends only one to two
dollars on every coral it plants, but to
restore just 10 percent of the world’s
reefs using his method would cost $4
trillion to $8 trillion. That’s hundreds
of times more than the EPA’s entire an-
nual budget. And, of course, to make
rebar using conventional methods re-
leases enormous volumes of CO 2 .
There is one audacious approach,
however, that may be able to make a
large-scale difference. After consider-
ing a number of approaches to protect-
ing the Great Barrier Reef from heat,
including pumping cool water from the
deep ocean onto the reef and spreading
a chalk film on the water’s surface to
act as a sunshade, the Australian scien-
tist Daniel Harrison decided that the
only feasible method was to brighten
the clouds that protect the reef from
the sun. Bright clouds reflect more
light, thus preventing light from being
transformed into heat at the Earth’s
surface. Cloud brightening, Harri-
son hypothesized, could be achieved
by spraying tiny droplets of seawater
into the air, provided they could drift
up until they reached the surface of
clouds.
To test the idea, the Australian fed-
eral government funded the conversion
of an old ferry into a platform for spray-
ing droplets of seawater, and by March
2021 the experiment was underway.
While the effort was too small to af-
fect the brightness of any clouds, early
results did demonstrate that droplets
formed at the sea surface can ascend
to the cloud layer. Whether a greater
number of droplets would indeed
brighten clouds, and what effect that
would have on the Great Barrier Reef,
remains unknown. Ominously, how-
ever, the reef is increasingly falling vic-
tim to marine heat waves tens of yards
deep, which roll in from the Pacific
Ocean and hover against the reef front.
No amount of local cloud-brightening
effects is likely to prevent these heat
waves, which have their origins many
thousands of miles away.
Can coral reefs survive long enough
for our children or grandchildren to
wonder at them? We began to take the
threat to reefs seriously only in the very
late stages of their decline, and huge
commitments are required to scale
up potential solutions. Berwald finds
hope in two major philanthropies, the
Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and
the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foun-
dation,2 which together established the
Global Fund for Coral Reefs. In launch-
ing the $500 million investment, Prince
Albert II said, “In order to have a
chance to save corals, we would need
to take action within the next decade.”
And he was in no doubt about the kind
of action required: “It is by reducing
the damage of a carbon economy that
we will be able to protect corals sus-
tainably.” Sadly, it really is as simple
and as difficult as that. Q
2
A disclosure: I am a director of the
Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.
The New York Review
 Ukraine on the Brink
Editors’ Note: On February 24, six
hours after this article was filed, Russia
began an all-out attack on Ukraine.
Kyiv/Kiev weather forecast: +5C,
windy, chances of Russian attack
30% , feels like 95% .
—Tweet by the novelist Andrey
Kurkov, February 19, 2022
In the spring of 2014, when Russian-
backed separatists were seizing parts of
eastern Ukraine, I wrote a piece from
there for these pages titled “Ukraine:
The Phony War?”1 Well, here we are
again: for the past couple of months
Russian forces have been gradually
massing along Ukraine’s borders. One
day in mid-February, as darkness fell
over Kharkiv, the country’s second-
largest city, I noticed about twenty peo-
ple kneeling at the edge of a park on
Sumska Street, the central boulevard. 2
They were silent and were holding their
hands as if in prayer. Were they local
peace activists, I wondered? In 2014
I had seen a group of people close to
the front line in Mariupol who were
imploring the Lord to save their city.
But this time, as I got closer, I noticed
a little placard that said: “endccp.com.”
They were Chinese, maybe students
from among the thousands of foreign-
ers studying here, demanding, their
website explained, an end “to the evil
Chinese Communist Party.”
The next day the news was alarming.
A Russian attack was imminent, said
a US intelligence official. The center
of Kharkiv is only a fifty-minute drive
from the Russian border, or a bit longer
if you’re in a tank. So I went to the su-
permarket to buy some cans of tuna in
case war broke out. It was packed, but
the shelves were full. As a dutiful jour-
nalist I stood by the checkout with my
notebook watching to see if there were
any signs of panic buying. But there
were none. That night no attack came.
Millions of words have been spewed
in the last few weeks about what Rus-
sian president Vladimir Putin wants.
He wants to destroy Ukraine, say some.
No, he craves respect, say others. He
wants this . . . or maybe that. No one
knows, and in Ukraine very few people
I’ve met think he is about to launch a
full-scale invasion.
At the Hoptivka border crossing
twenty-five miles north of Kharkiv,
a steady stream of people were drag-
ging suitcases toward the Russian
side or coming the other way. I asked
some if they were worried; everyone in
Kharkiv had seen the videos on social
media of Russian military convoys al-
legedly near Belgorod, an hour or so
further north. One woman arriving
from Russia said with a serious face,
“Yes, and that is why I am coming
home to fight!” Before I could ask her
name, she hurried off, laughing loudly,
to catch a mini-bus to Kharkiv.
I asked for permission to visit the
border. By a hamlet called Zv’yazok
there were three guards in snowsuits
1
The New York Review, May 22, 2014.
2
Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odesa are the
Ukrainian spellings of the cities that in
Russian are known as Kharkov, Kiev,
and Odessa.
March 24, 2022
Tim Judah
A screenshot of a video released by the Ukrainian Police Department Press Service of military helicopters,
apparently Russian, over the outskirts of Kyiv, February 24, 2022
and a black Labrador called Lucky
on patrol. There was nothing to be
seen on the other side of the ditch the
Ukrainians had dug in 2014. On both
sides the snow lay thick on the fields,
and I wondered what the Labrador was
supposed to be sniffing for. Tanks? In
Washington and in European capitals,
leaders kept saying that an attack was
imminent. But at least where I was al-
lowed to visit, no preparations were
being made for it, and there was no
military activity on the main road from
Kharkiv, as might have been expected.
People in Kharkiv may not believe
much in a Russian attack, but by the
time you read this it may have begun.
When I started writing it in the Half an
Hour café in Kharkiv, there was news
that the puppet regime in separatist-
controlled Donetsk was evacuating
the population, which sounded like a
prelude to war. By the time I finished
it, Russian troops were reported to be
arriving there. Meanwhile they were
playing Michael Jackson’s “Heal the
World” in the café, which was full of
earnest young people poring over their
laptops or relaxing.
In my experience it is quite normal
to refuse to believe that you are about
to be engulfed by a cataclysm that will
change your life forever—or kill you.
In 2014 I was invited to a Passover
Seder by the Donetsk Jewish com-
munity. During the dinner the rabbi
said unexpectedly, “We have a foreign
guest, he can make a speech!” I said
that “Next Year in Jerusalem” was all
well and good but there were separat-
ists constructing checkpoints on the
highway into the city, so “Next year
in Donetsk” might be more apt. “Nah,”
they said, “it will all be fine!” A few
weeks later they probably all fled. It was
the same in Bosnia and Herzegovina just
before the war in 1992. People said that
since everyone knew that tens of thou-
sands would die, there would be no war.
I met a teacher who told me that she
veers between panic and shrugging
it all off. In January Ukrainian presi-
dent Volodymyr Zelensky said that the
Russians might try to occupy Kharkiv,
which alarmed people here. President
Joe Biden was said to have told Zel-
ensky a few days later to “prepare for
impact,” though that was later denied.
But then you think about it rationally,
which of course Putin may not be doing,
and you wonder how he could hope to
seize a city of some 1.5 million people,
let alone much of the rest of Ukraine.
In Kharkiv’s history museum there
is a section devoted to World War
II. Battles here were as bloody and
devastating as anywhere in Europe.
Millions of Ukrainian soldiers and ci-
vilians were killed or starved to death.
Then something caught my eye: a panel
explained that by the time the Red
Army expelled the Germans from So-
viet Ukraine in 1944, it numbered 2.3
million men. Putin has amassed any-
where between 150,000 and 190,000
on Ukraine’s borders, we are told, not
all of whom of course will actually
fight. Some are quartermasters, me-
chanics, and cooks. One of the videos
circulating on social media, also al-
legedly from Belgorod, showed army
mobile kitchens—identifiable by the
chimneys poking out from under their
tarpaulins— flowing past in a convoy.
In Lviv, in western Ukraine, I saw
Ukrainian soldiers practicing with
new antitank missiles that the British
had given them. Some commentators
scoffed that, in the face of overwhelm-
ing Russian military might, these were
symbolic. Oh no, said the Ukrainian
soldiers, these were great for the 200-
400-meter range, which they did not
possess, and were especially suited for
urban warfare.
When he talks about Ukraine, it is
clear that Putin believes many Russian
myths and has outdated views about
its people. He published a long essay
last year on the “historical unity” of
Ukrainians and Russians. But what
he and even many liberal, intellectual
Russians may not appreciate is that
Ukraine is not the same place it was
Ukrainian Police Department Press Service/AP Images
when Mikhail Bulgakov grew up in
Kyiv at the beginning of the last cen-
tury. It is not the same place it was at
independence in 1991 or at the time of
the Orange Revolution in 2004, nor is it
the same country that was wracked by
revolution and war in 2014.
In Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and finally
Kyiv, something struck me for the first
time after many years of coming here:
their post-Soviet feel has finally been
cast off. That is not the case in smaller
Ukrainian towns, but for the first time
these big cities feel like anywhere else
in Europe.
Unlike Russians, Ukrainians have
not needed visas to visit Europe’s
twenty-six-country Schengen area
since 2017, and thanks to cheap flights
millions have done so. Most young
Ukrainians, who have no memory of
the Soviet era (for which you need to
be close to forty), are now just like
other Europeans. They are no longer
people from Russia’s periphery who
mentally, culturally, and socially orbit
Moscow. I can imagine that older Rus-
sians like Putin, if he knows this, must
hate it. It relates directly to the wise
maxim of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the
former US national security adviser:
“It cannot be stressed enough that
without Ukraine, Russia ceases to
be an empire, but with Ukraine sub-
orned and then subordinated, Russia
automatically becomes an empire.” As
the links that have bound Russia and
Ukraine for centuries slowly snap with
every passing year, no wonder Putin
is worried and thinks this is his last
chance to suborn and subordinate.
And Putin’s war since 2014 has made
a big difference here. There are no
longer direct flights or trains between
the two countries. At Hoptivka, Lieu-
tenant Colonel Yuri Trubachev of
Ukraine’s Border Guard Service told
me that before 2014 some 25,000 peo-
ple crossed there every day. Now that
figure is 2,500, and even if you discount
the effect of Covid it is symbolic of the
frayed ties. While I was there a two-
mile line of trucks was waiting to enter
43
Russia. A driver told me they had been
there for perhaps three days, and it was
the same to enter Ukraine. There is
no logical reason for this, but as Taras
Danko, a professor of international
business in Kharkiv, noted tartly, “You
need the cooperation of the border au-
thorities and for that you need the co-
operation between states, not talk of
one state invading another.”
T he imposing Soviet-style façade
of the main government building in
Kharkiv has a giant Ukrainian flag
mounted across it. In front of it stretches
the city’s vast Freedom Square, one of
the largest in Europe. In the middle
people twirl happily around an outdoor
skating rink. At the far end there’s no
trace of the Lenin statue that still stood
here in 2014, close to Derzhprom, the
famous constructivist building, which
was finished in 1928 but looks like it
could have been built today.
On May 1, 2014, I was inside the gov-
ernment building while it was being
besieged by pro-Russian protesters
waving little flags of the “Kharkov Re-
public” that they believed was about to
be created alongside the ones in neigh-
boring Donetsk and Luhansk. Pension-
ers waved Soviet flags and some people
had the black, yellow, and white flag
that the Russian Empire used until
1883. The building was ringed by riot
police. It was not the first time that
pro-Russians had attempted to storm
it, but in the end they could not mus-
ter the numbers and dispersed. Many
of the people in such demonstrations
were not locals: they had been bused in
from Russia.
In those chaotic weeks entire parts
of the security services and adminis-
tration in Donetsk and Luhansk de-
fected to the pro-Russian cause, but in
Kharkiv things turned out quite differ-
ently. Later it emerged that the crucial
moment had come when Gennadiy
Kernes, the powerful mayor, had opted
for Ukraine, probably on the advice
of one of the Ukrainian oligarchs who
did not want to lose his assets if Russia
seized control. Until then he had op-
posed the Maidan Revolution, which in
February had kicked out Viktor Yanu-
kovych, the pro-Russian president.
Once Kharkiv was saved for
Ukraine—like Odesa, though for partly
different reasons—Russia’s aim of seiz-
ing Ukraine from within collapsed and,
apart from Crimea, which it annexed,
it was left with parts of Donetsk and
Luhansk in the Donbas region, which
it now has to support financially. Since
then Ukraine’s security services have
been purged of Russian sympathizers,
and Kharkiv has changed, like much of
the rest of the country. Tens of thou-
sands of locals have gained combat
experience fighting the Russians or
their proxies on the Donbas front line.
Behind them stands a network of com-
mitted volunteers. Denys Kobzin, the
head of the Kharkiv Institute for Social
Research, explained to me that if sol-
diers lack something, they put out a call
on social media, money is raised, and
the volunteers deliver the item. In this
way tens of thousands are mobilized,
beyond those under arms, in defense of
the country.
Socially the city has changed too. It
is hard for foreigners to understand,
but for many in places like Kharkiv,
the question “Am I Ukrainian or am
I Russian?” did not matter much until
44
2014, especially because in a city so imaginary Ukrainian genocide against
close to the border, many people have Russian-speakers. But that day was still
friends and family on the other side. significant. The fire was a tragedy, while
But, Kobzin told me, the events of 2014 for those who aimed to carve out a new
forced many to decide, and the major- Russian imperial “Novorossiya” from
ity, though not all, opted for Ukraine. half of Ukraine and link it to Russia, it
As time went on, other developments was the moment their plans collapsed.
began to change the situation too. No Those with pro-Russian sentiments
one knows the numbers exactly, but have not gone away, but as it became
tens of thousands of people from Do- clear that Odesa could not be plucked
netsk and Luhansk came to settle here. from Ukraine like Crimea, without
Kharkiv’s economy is growing, or it a shot being fired, and as fighting en-
had been until now. It is, as it has been gulfed the Donbas, most here decided
since the founding of the university that they would not die for Putin, nor
here in 1804, a major center for higher did they want to see their home turn
education, and graduates don’t have into a battlefield. They have also aged,
problems finding jobs. Much if not all and younger people who have only ever
of the old Soviet-era heavy machinery lived in an independent Ukraine tend
and defense industry has gone, but its to be more at home in it, unless they
place has been taken by hundreds of come from particularly anti-Ukrainian
IT companies and smaller enterprises families.
Some young Odesans also have direct
Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters
experience of what the end of Ukrainian
rule can mean. Evgenia Afonina, a
first-year philosophy student, came to
the city at the age of fourteen when
her family fled separatist- controlled
Donetsk. They are Ukrainian, and her
parents had told her and her younger
sister “to keep quiet about that.” The
anti-Ukrainian atmosphere in Donetsk
was “very aggressive,” she said. Her
family eventually left because her par-
ents did not want her younger sister to
be indoctrinated in a Donetsk school.
They were also frightened of Izolyatsia,
once a modern art and cultural center
in a converted factory, but after 2014 a
prison and a byword for terror by the
separatist authorities. 3
After the May 2 fire, pro-Russian
activists fled to Crimea or Donbas or
Russia. In Odesa, as in Kharkiv, the
mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, who had
tilted to the anti-Maidan, pro-Russian
side (which he now denies), changed
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky his position, and today he is very clear:
addressing the nation after the Russian Odesa is part of Ukraine and Putin
attack, Kyiv, February 24, 2022 should keep out.
When I went to see him, he was hold-
producing everything from consumer ing a meeting with local security chiefs
goods to processed food. and municipal officials. They watched
Another important change is that power points about bomb shelters, and
now almost all schools that once taught Trukhanov, a former military man,
in Russian have switched to Ukrainian, discussed asking Germany for help in
which has helped nurture a new gener- replacing their defunct air filtration
ation proud to be Ukrainian. It is often systems and the US for emergency
said that older people tend to harbor communication equipment in case, as
more positive feelings toward Russia seems likely, all communications are
because they are nostalgic for their cut by the Russians.
happy Soviet youth, and conflate the I discussed with Oleg Brindak, his
USSR with Russia. But the world looks deputy, what he expected to happen
different if you can fly to Barcelona for if there is a Russian attempt to take
the weekend for
30. the city. What worried him most, he
said, was that about one third of the
city council were pro-Russian, and
L ike Kharkiv, Odesa is mostly they might try to rabble-rouse and
Russian-speaking. Like Kharkiv, which seize buildings if there was conflict. I
side it would support in 2014 was uncer- wondered if they could try to mount a
tain. Ukraine is a country with strong local coup and take over the town hall.
regional identities, and Odesa has one Brindak laughed and asked if I could
of the strongest. More than one person imagine the mayor giving up power
laughed and told me that if they went just like that. Trukhanov has some
abroad and people asked them where legal problems. He has been charged
they were from, they would instinctively with corruption and accused of being a
say Odesa before they said Ukraine. former mafia member. “Lies,” he said
On May 2, 2014, fighting broke out when I questioned him about this, be-
in Odesa between Maidan supporters fore launching into a lengthy diatribe
and pro-Russians. The latter retreated against a local oligarch he claimed
into the old Trade Union building, near was responsible for cooking all this up.
the city’s very grand central station, True or not, the tough guy reputation
and when Molotov cocktails were ex- of the burly shaven-headed mayor does
changed it caught fire; forty-two died rather precede him.
inside. While pro-Russians have since
then constructed a myth of Ukrainian 3
The art and cultural center was
Nazis incinerating them in a modern- later recreated in Kyiv. See my “Will
day pogrom, that is clearly nonsense, Ukraine Ever Change?,” The New
like Putin recently babbling about an York Review, May 25, 2017.
O desa is in many ways the city of
Russian imagination. I stayed on
Mayakovsky Street. Pushkin was ex-
iled here, and I saw where Isaac Babel
lived. Outside the town hall there is a
cannon salvaged from a British ship
that ran aground in 1854 and was de-
stroyed by Russian forces defending the
city during the Crimean War. Today,
according to the analyst Hanna Shelest,
it is hard to predict how Odesans would
react if war comes, and “most don’t
even want to think about it,” but in the
main people just want to be left alone to
make money. It was ever thus, she said.
Artem Fylypenko, the head of the
Odesa branch of the National Institute
for Strategic Studies, told me that “the
majority of people are neutral” and that
their main concerns were higher sala-
ries and lower taxes. Still, he added, at-
titudes had shifted in Odesa in the last
few years, especially as anti-Ukrainian
TV channels spreading Russian propa-
ganda were gradually taken off the air.
I was told the same thing in Kharkiv
by Maria Avdeeva, who studies Rus-
sian disinformation and propaganda.
The shutting down of pro-Russian sta-
tions has led to criticism of Ukraine in
the EU and the US for restricting free
speech, but as she points out, Ukraine
is at war and the media are one of “the
tools of war.”
With the sociologist Viktoria Ba-
lasanian I discussed what being pro-
Russian even means anymore. One
thing is certain, she said: a liking for
Russian literature, music, TikToks,
and YouTube videos hardly means
you want Odesa to become part of a
renewed Russian empire, any more
than speaking English means Dublin-
ers want Ireland to rejoin the United
Kingdom. Still, old-fashioned snob-
bish prejudices continued to permeate
even the younger generations in Odesa,
“who think culture can only be in Rus-
sian.” At the same time more than 91
percent of young people in the tradi-
tionally pro-Russian south considered
themselves Ukrainian, only a little less
than the 98 percent in other, tradition-
ally more Ukrainian, regions.
When we talked, Fylypenko was
wearing a tie, because he was going
to participate in a TV panel; it was
quite likely that he would be speaking
Ukrainian while the others spoke Rus-
sian. Balasanian showed me research
that found that 61 percent of young
Ukrainians in the south spoke both
Russian and Ukrainian with their fam-
ilies. The languages are close, but Rus-
sians find it hard to understand much
in Ukrainian. Fylypenko said that he
planned to join Ukraine’s brand-new
Territorial Defense forces, which are
aimed at securing critical infrastruc-
ture and buildings away from the front
lines, thus releasing men from the army
and other branches of the security
forces to fight.
Capturing Odesa would be hard,
mused Fylypenko. We discussed the
White Russian amphibious landing
here in 1919, which had British naval
support and succeeded thanks to a co-
ordinated uprising in the city, and a So-
viet diversionary amphibious landing
in 1941, but now, he said, Putin was in
a pickle. If it came to fighting and civil-
ians died, it would destroy his concept
of Russians and Ukrainians being one
people. A week later, in the market in
Kharkiv, I asked people if they feared
an attack, and with astonishing una-
nimity they scoffed and said they did
The New York Review
not, but one woman became aggres-
sive and demanded to know if I had a
brother. When I said I did, she replied,
“Well would he attack you? No! So,
Russia will not attack us!” Still Fy-
lypenko cautioned me against assum-
ing everyone was rational. One of his
acquaintances had surprised him by
saying, “I am against the EU because it
is full of gays!”
Balasanian said that research showed
that Ukrainians were peculiarly pessi-
mistic. “People always say things are
getting worse and worse,” she said,
even if they are not, and when there
was a change in leadership people were
“full of hope for a year” before revert-
ing to a mood of gloom. As for Rus-
sians, she says, too many continue to
think of Ukrainians through the prism
of daft and old-fashioned stereotypes.
“Either we are good, happy peasants
or nationalist Banderites,” she said,
referring to Stepan Bandera, the con-
troversial Ukrainian nationalist leader
who had both allied with the Nazis and
been imprisoned by them.
I f you look for him, you can see Ban-
dera everywhere. There are streets
named after him, there are statues of
him, and his face is spray-painted on
walls. All this is grist to the mill of Rus-
sian propagandists, and it is lamentable
that many Ukrainians do not know that
his men not only fought the Soviets but
killed Jews and Poles too. But harp-
ing on about Bandera is a distraction.
Unlike in many Western countries, the
far right has made little headway here
and, in a country once infamous for its
pogroms, Zelensky, a Jew, was elected
president with 73 percent of the vote.
People who want to talk about Ban-
dera usually also want to talk about
the staunch nationalism of western
Ukraine and Lviv, its biggest city. But
people in Lviv want to talk about the
future, not the past. Around its glori-
ous former Austro-Hungarian cen-
ter new suburbs are sprouting. Like
Kharkiv it is a major IT center and,
says Stepan Veselovskyi, the head of
the Lviv IT Cluster, an industry lobby
group, the sector employs 30,000 peo-
ple, who in turn create another 40,000
jobs. Since Ukraine has not held a cen-
sus since 2001, no one knows exactly
LETTERS
‘RIVER’ RUNS
To the Editors:
Christopher Benfey’s dismissive description
of performances of Spoon River Anthology
as “aw-shucks . . . with straw hats and string
ties” and his belief that it first appeared on
stage on Broadway in 1963 need correction
[“Exile on Main Street,” NYR, December
2, 2021]. Edgar Lee Masters’s book was first
made into a theater piece in the summer of
1954, as the third act of an evening of Prairie
poets, including Carl Sandburg and Vachel
Lindsay, called Spoon River Speaks. It took
place in Masters’s New Salem, Illinois, on
a Greek-style, open-air stage, with a per-
manent backdrop of log cabins, used for
the season’s other play, a Lincoln piece by
E. P. Conkle, Prologue to Glory. Under a
starry night sky, the troupe of twenty-five,
mostly from Chicago’s Actors Company,
sat staggered across the stage like tomb-
March 24, 2022
how many people live in the country.
Officially there are 746,000 in Lviv, but
Mayor Andriy Sadovyi thinks the real
number is close to a million. About a
million Ukrainians work in neighbor-
ing Poland too, but mostly they come
and go rather than settling there, and if
people leave Lviv, he says, then others
come from poorer parts of Ukraine to
fill their jobs.
Across large parts of Central and
Eastern Europe populations have been
dropping because of low fertility rates
and increasing emigration, but as Lviv
has become part of the European and
global economy and begun to boom, it
has joined a string of cities across the
region that have halted these gloomy
demographic trends. Nowhere, un-
less it is destroyed by Putin, is a bright
future for all Ukraine as visible as in
Lviv. Indeed, says Sadovyi, the quality
of life in his city has risen so much that
“life expectancy here is seven years
higher than in the rest of the coun-
try.” According to the latest statistics,
a Ukrainian’s life expectancy is 71.35
years—ten years less than the average
in the European Union.
After I left Lviv, embassies began
evacuating there from Kyiv on the as-
sumption that it was far from any po-
tential military action and that if an
invasion came, attacking it would be
a step too far even for Putin. But Sa-
dovyi is not complacent. After all, the
Russians and then the Soviets captured
Lviv in 1914, 1939, and 1944. On the
way into his office I noticed a copy of
a biography of Golda Meir. When I
asked him about it, he talked of his ad-
miration for Israel and said that after
the Holocaust the Jews had drawn the
conclusion that “they could only rely on
themselves,” which was a “model” for
Ukraine as well as Finland and Swit-
zerland, countries he also admired.
He told me he was sending four hun-
dred teachers and municipal officials to
learn to shoot. I went to see the teachers
at the shooting range, where they were
giggling like teenagers and taking pic-
tures of one another. But asking them
to train seemed to me a shrewd move.
Quite apart from sending a message lo-
cally that the Russian threat was real,
their pictures would soon spread over
social media and be seen by friends
and family in Russia, which would send
stones. As a spotlight picked them out, each
one, without rising, would recite one of the
poems, sometimes looking across to others
referred to in the lines. Surrounded by the
woods, cornfields, and graveyards of San-
gamon County, with the cool of night draw-
ing on, the effect was ghostly and deeply
moving. I know because at the age of twelve
I was a member of that company.
Laurence Senelick
Fletcher Professor Emeritus
of Drama and Oratory
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts
Christopher Benfey replies:
Dramatic versions of Spoon River Anthol-
ogy were staged even before the 1954 pro-
duction Laurence Senelick remembers so
vividly. I did not mean to suggest that the
Broadway adaptation, which I noted “was
first mounted on Broadway in 1963,” was
the earliest but merely the most influential.
As Jason Stacy confirms in Spoon River
a message to them too. Most Russians
and Ukrainians may not believe that a “Woman Running in the Mountains
major war is coming, but a stream of captures the private intensity of
images of ordinary Ukrainians learn- early motherhood like none other.
ing how to shoot is part of the informa- Everyone should read Tsushima, a
tion war. fierce marvel of a writer, who seems
to write to us at once from the past
and the future.” —Rivka Galchen
In Kyiv I met the novelist Andrey
Kurkov in a wine bar. He told me he
was writing a series of detective sto-
ries that begin in Kyiv in 1919, when
the country was wracked by civil war.
One of the reasons he wanted to write
them, he said, was that Ukrainians
don’t know much about this period of
history. The Germans occupied Kyiv in
1918 and in 1919 came the Bolsheviks,
the Whites, Ukrainian forces, Poles,
and the Bolsheviks again. Then we
discussed whether Putin would go so
far as ordering an attack on the entire
country, including Kyiv. “It is unlikely,”
he said, “but I can imagine twelve Rus-
sian officers drinking wine here!”
We talked about his book Grey Bees,
which was first published in 2018 and
tells the story of Sergeyich, who is one
of only two people left in his village in
the dangerous gray zone that separates Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsum-
separatist regions from Ukrainian gov- mer, a young woman named Takiko
ernment control. Kurkov said he had Odaka departs on foot for the hospital
done some of the research in the town to give birth to a baby boy. Her preg-
of Sievierodontesk, which lies in the nancy, the result of a brief affair with
government-held part of Luhansk. In a married man, is a source of sorrow
2015 he reckoned that 90 percent of the and shame to her abusive parents. For
population there was pro-Russian; now Takiko, however, it is a cause for rev-
that figure was perhaps no more than erie. Her baby, she imagines, will be
30 percent because people had seen hers and hers alone, a challenge that
how miserable life was in the break- she also hopes will free her. Takiko’s
away “republics.” first year as a mother is filled with the
An hour after we talked Putin rec- intense bodily pleasures and pains
ognized them as independent states that come from caring for a newborn.
and Russian troops were reported to At first she seeks refuge in the com-
be moving in, raising the question of pany of other women—in the hospital,
whether he would now try to seize mil- in her son’s nursery—but as the baby
itarily those parts of the region, like grows, her life becomes less circum-
Sievierodontesk, that remain under scribed as she explores Tokyo, then
Ukrainian control. Putin rambled and ventures beyond the city into the
ranted that Russia had been robbed countryside, toward a mountain that
when the Soviet Union collapsed, that captures her imagination and desire
Ukraine had been created by Lenin, for a wilder freedom.
and that it had “never had a true tradi-
tion of statehood.” “This book is about calming the
Two days later Ukraine declared a demons that pursue women who
state of emergency. An attack was re- seek their own way, and about the
ported to be imminent. The streets of triumphant superiority of feminine
Kyiv were very quiet. Everyone was intuition.” —Susan Cheever,
holding their breath. Q Los Angeles Times
“The author of over 35 novels and
countless short stories and essays,
Tsushima left behind a stunning
legacy of stylistically inventive
and lyrically fierce prose that
America, “The best-known theatrical ad- continually featured individuals
aptation of Spoon River Anthology was pushed to the edges of society.”
Charles Aidman’s 1963 Broadway version,” —The Japan Times
with its “folk music score and attendant
homespun-and-string-tie costuming.”
I’d like to correct an error. Readers have
WOMAN RUNNING
informed me that I mixed up the geography IN THE MOUNTAINS
of the two towns in which Masters grew up. −ko Tsushima
Yu
The Spoon River is near Lewistown, Illi-
nois, not Petersburg. The Sangamon River Introduction by Lauren Groff
flows through Petersburg. Translated from the Japanese by
Geraldine Harcourt
Letters to the Editor: letters@nybooks.com. All other
correspondence: The New York Review of Books, 435 Paperback • $17.95
Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994; Also available as an e-book
mail@nybooks.com. Please include a mailing address
with all correspondence. We accept no responsibility On sale February 22nd
for unsolicited manuscripts.
Subscription Services: nybooks.com/customer-service Woman Running in the Mountains
or The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big is the February 2022 selection of
Sandy,TX, 75755-9310, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info.
In the US, call toll-free 800-354-0050. Outside the US,
the NYRB Classics Book Club.
call 903-636-1101. Subscription rates: US, one year
$99.95; in Canada, $110; elsewhere, $115.
Advertising: To inquire please call 212-757-8070, or
fax 212-333-5374.
Copyright © 2022, NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
Nothing in this publication may be reproduced with- Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
out the permission of the publisher. The cover date of
the next issue will be April 7, 2022.
45
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
attendance on her nursling. She even seemed to grudge her
permission to feed him, or to moisten his lips.
“I’m afraid I can’t come to-morrow, unless I am really needed,” said
Madeline plaintively. “You say there is no danger now—you are
sure? I may rely on you to tell me?”
“Yes; there is none whatever at present.”
“Because if there were, I should remain all night.”
“There is no occasion, especially if you are urgently needed
elsewhere,” rejoined the doctor, who nevertheless thought it rather
strange that this pretty, tearful, agitated young lady should not find it
the most natural thing to remain with her sick child—her only child.
Promising that she should have early news the next morning by
telegraph, he handed her into the fly, and bowed her off the scene,
just as another inquiring relative—equally near and equally anxious
—came hurrying up to him—in fact, the child’s father, who had taken
the short cut from the station by the path across the fields.
“Most peculiar state of affairs,” thought the doctor to himself; “there
must be a screw loose somewhere. The child’s parents apparently
well-off, fashionable people, living apart and visiting the farm
separately, and never alluding to one another. What did it mean?”
Mrs. Holt promptly set the matter before him in three words. It
meant that “they had quarrelled.” Mr. Wynne remained at the
farmhouse all night, sharing Mrs. Holt’s vigil, and watching every
turn, every movement, every breath of the little sleeper as anxiously
as she did herself. In the morning there was no positive change one
way or another. The pendulum of little Harry’s existence seemed to
have paused for a time before it made that one vital movement in the
direction of either life or death.
A message was despatched to Miss West in these laconic words
—“Slept pretty well; much the same.” And Madeline, relieved in her
mind, entered on the work of a long and toilsome day. In short, she
continued the grand preparations for a ball that they were giving that
evening. It was to be the ball of the season.
 Invitations had been out for four weeks. A native Indian prince, and
some of the lesser Royalties had signified their intention of being
present. Mr. West looked upon the festivity as the supreme occasion
of his life, the summit of his ambition—fully and flawlessly attained—
and he was happy. Only, of course, there is a thorn in every rose; in
this rose there were two thorns. One—and a very sharp one—the
disquieting rumours of financial affairs in Australia, where a great
part of his huge income was invested; and the other and lesser thorn
—the announcement of Lord Tony’s engagement to an old
acquaintance and partner, Miss Pamela Pace.
And so his dream of calling Lord Tony by his Christian name, as
his son-in-law, was at an end. However, he was resolved to make
the most of the delightful present, and to give an entertainment, the
fame of which should ring from one end of London to the other. He
fully carried out his motto, “money no object.” The floral decorations
alone for hall, staircase, ballrooms, and supper-table came to the
pretty penny of two thousand pounds. The favourite band of the
season was, of course, in attendance. As to the supper, it was to be
a banquet, the menu of which would make an epicure green with
envy; and Madeline’s dress was to come direct from Doucet, and
had been specially designed for the occasion by Mr. West’s
commands.
With all these splendid preparations in view, it will be easily
understood that it was with some trepidation that Madeline asked her
father to postpone the ball.
She made her request very timidly, with failing heart and faltering
lips—indeed, the end of her sentence died away in the air when she
beheld the terrible expression on her parent’s face.
“Put off the ball!” he roared; “are you mad? You must have a
shingle short. Put off the swells, after all the work I’ve had to get
them! Put off”—he actually choked over the words—“the Shah-da-
shah, when you know there’s not another day in the season! Every
night is taken. Why, what do you mean? What’s your reason?” he
almost screamed.
 “I—I thought the intense heat—I fancied Ascot—races happening
to-morrow, and I’m not feeling very—well,” she faltered lamely.
“Oh, bosh! You look as fit as possible. Your reasons are no
reasons. I suppose you are cut up about Tony—though why you
should be is more than I can say—seeing that you refused him
twice.”
“On the contrary, I’m delighted at his engagement. Pamela Pace
is, as you know, a friend of mine. He promised to bring her to the
dance without fail.”
“And the dance comes off on Wednesday without fail.”
The suggestion of its postponement had been made on Monday—
after her return from the farm.
“And remember, Madeline, that I shall expect you to stir yourself—
look after the decorations, have an eye to the supper-tables, and see
that the men do the floors properly, and that there are no old waltzes
in the programme. You will have your work cut out, and I mine. It will
be the busiest day in your life—one to talk of and look back on when
you are a grandmother. It’s not a common event to entertain the
Shah-da-shah!” As he said this he jumped up and began to pace the
room, rubbing his hands, in an ecstasy of anticipation.
On the morning of the ball Mr. West was early about, arranging,
ordering, superintending, and sending telegrams.
“Here’s a pile,” he suddenly exclaimed at breakfast-time, indicating
a heap of letters. “I got these all yesterday from people asking for
invitations—invitations for themselves, cousins, aunts, and so on,
from folk who wouldn’t know us last season; but it’s my turn now! I’ll
have none of them. Whatever else the ball will be, it shall be select,”
waving his arm with a gesture that was ludicrous in its pomposity.
“By the way, that fellow Wynne—he belongs to my club, you know—
and besides that, Bagge and Keepe have given him a brief in a case
I’m much concerned in. You remember him, eh?”
“Yes, I remember Mr. Wynne,” she answered rather stiffly.
 “Well, I met him in the street yesterday morning, and asked him for
to-morrow. He’s a presentable-looking sort of chap,” nodding rather
apologetically at his daughter; “but, would you believe it, he would
not come; though I told him it would be something out of the
common. And fancy his reason”—pausing dramatically—the little
man was still pacing the room—“you will never guess; you will be as
astounded as I was. He said his child was ill.”
Madeline never raised her eyes, but sat with them fixed upon a
certain pattern on the carpet, not looking particularly interested,
merely indifferent, white and rigid.
“He appeared quite in a fright,” proceeded Mr. West, volubly, “and
very much worried and put out. He had a case on in court, and
wanted to get away. I had no idea that he was a married man; had
you?”
Before Mr. Wynne’s wife’s dry lips could frame an appropriate
answer to this awkward question, a footman entered with another
bundle of notes on a salver, and thus Mr. West’s attention was
diverted from his unhappy daughter.
 CHAPTER XXXVII.
“GONE OFF IN HER WHITE SHOES!”

In due time all preparations were completed for the reception of

Mr. and Miss West’s guests. The grand staircase was lined with
palm-trees and immense tropical ferns, and lights were cunningly
arranged amid the dusky foliage; a fountain of scent played at the
head of this splendid and unique approach, and here stood the host
and hostess side by side.
Mr. West was adorned in a plain evening suit—(would, oh! would
that he might have decked himself with chains and orders!)—and a
perennial smile. His daughter was arrayed in a French gown of white
satin and white chiffon, powdered with silver. Diamonds shone on
her bodice, her neck, and in her hair. She required no such adjuncts
to set off her appearance, but there they were! Although tired and
fagged, she looked as superior to most of her lady guests—who
were chiefly of average everyday prettiness—as a Eucharist lily to a
single dahlia. Her colour and eyes were exceptionally bright, for she
was flushed by fatigue, excitement, and anxiety.
No news was good news, she told herself. The last telegram was
reassuring. There was no need to fret and worry. Half the miseries in
the world are those that have never happened! So she cast doubt
and care behind her as she took her place in the state quadrille and
prepared to abandon herself to the occasion. No one in their senses
would suspect for a moment that the beautiful, brilliant Miss West
had a care on her mind, much less that her heart was aching with
suspense with regard to her sick child.
She indeed lulled her fears to sleep, and played the part of
hostess to perfection—not dancing over much, as became the lady
of the house, till quite late in the evening, or rather early in the
morning, and having a word—the right word—and a smile for
everybody.

The ball went off without a single drawback. The most fastidious
young men avowed they had been “well done;” the most critical
chaperones could detect no shortcomings in manners, partners, or
refreshments. People enjoyed themselves; there was no after-
supper exodus; the men and maidens found that they were not
bored, and changed their minds about “going on.”
Yes, distinguished guests remained unusually late. The supper,
floor, and arrangements were faultless; and Mr. West was informed
by one or two important folk “that such an entertainment reminded
them of the Arabian Nights for its magnificence. It was a ball of
balls.”
The little speculator was almost beside himself with pride and self-
satisfaction. Truly those many cheques that had to be drawn were
already redeemed. He must, of course, pay for his whistle; but it was
a pretty whistle, and worth its price.
He unfolded his feelings to his daughter as they stood alone in the
big ballroom, after the last guest had taken leave and the carriages
were rapidly rolling from the door. His sharp little eyes shone, his
mouth twitched, his hand actually shook, not with champagne, but
triumph.
“You did it splendidly, Maddie. If you were a duchess you could not
have hit it off better! I often wonder where you get your manners and
air and way of saying things. Your mother was something of the
same style, too. She had real blue blood in her veins; but she was
not so sparkling as you are, though very vivacious. I must say those
Miss Harpers did their duty by you. Well,” looking round, “it’s all over.
They are putting out the candles, and there’s broad daylight outside.
It’s been a success—a triumph! I wish some of my old chums had
seen it. Bless me, how they would stare! A trifle better than Colonial
dances. And wouldn’t they like to get hold of this in the Sydney
Bulletin. There’s a personal paper for you! I feel a bit giddy. I expect I
shall be knocked up to-morrow—I mean to-day. Don’t you rise before
dinner-time. There’s the sun streaming in. Get away to your bed!”
Madeline had listened to this pæan of triumphant complacency
without any re-remark, merely opening her mouth to yawn, and
yawn, and yawn. She was very tired; and now that the stir and whirl
and excitement was over, felt ready to collapse from sheer fatigue.
She, therefore, readily obeyed her parent’s behest, and, kissing him
on his wrinkled cheek, walked off to her own room.
Josephine, half asleep, was sitting up for her, the wax candles
were guttering in their sockets, the electric light was struggling at the
shutters with the sun.
“Oh, mademoiselle!” said the maid, rubbing her eyes, “I’ve been
asleep, I do believe. I’ve waited to unlace your dress, though you
said I need not; but I know you could never do it yourself,” beginning
her task at once, whilst her equally sleepy mistress stood before the
mirror and slowly removed her gloves, bangles, and diamonds, and
yawned at her own reflection.
“It was splendid, mademoiselle. Jamais—pas même à Paris—did I
see such a fête! I saw it well from a place behind the band. What
crowds, what toilettes! but mademoiselle was the most charmante of
all. Ah! there is nothing like a French dressmaker—and a good
figure, bien entendu. There were some costumes that were ravishing
in the ladies’ room. I helped. I saw them.”
“It went off well, I think, Josephine, and papa is pleased; but I am
glad that it is over,” said her mistress, wearily. “Mind you don’t let me
sleep later than twelve o’clock on any account.”
“Twelve o’clock! and it is now six!” cried Josephine in a tone of
horror. “Mademoiselle, you will be knocked up—you——”
“Oh! what is this?” interrupted her mistress in a strange voice,
snatching up a telegram that lay upon a table, its tan-coloured
envelope as yet intact, and which had hitherto been concealed by a
silver-backed hand-glass, as if it were of no importance.
 “Oh, I forgot! I fell asleep, you see. It came for you at eleven
o’clock last night, just as the company were arriving, and I could not
disturb you. I hope it is of no consequence.”
But, evidently, it was of great consequence, for the young lady was
reading it with a drawn, ghastly countenance, and her hand holding
the message shook so much that the paper rattled as if in a breeze
of wind.
And this is what she was reading with strained eyes. “Mrs. Holt to
Miss West, 9.30.—Come immediately; there is a change.” And this
was sent eight hours ago.
“Josephine,” she said, with a look that appalled the little
Frenchwoman, “why did you not give me this? It is a matter of life
and death. If—if,” with a queer catch in her breath, “I am too late, I
shall never, never, never forgive you! Here”—with a gesture of
frenzy, tearing off her dress—“take away this rag and these hateful
things,” dragging the tiara out of her hair and flinging it passionately
on the floor, “for which I have sold myself. Get me a common gown,
woman. Quick, quick! and don’t stand looking like a fool!”
Josephine had indeed been looking on as if she was petrified, and
asking herself if her mistress had not suddenly gone stark-staring
mad? Mechanically she picked up the despised ball-dress and
brought out a morning cotton, which Madeline wrested from her
hands and flung over her head, saying—
“Send for a hansom—fly—fly!”
And thus exhorted and catching a spark of the other’s excitement,
she ran out of the room and hurriedly dispatched a heavy-eyed and
amazed footman for the cab, with many lively and impressive
gesticulations.
When she returned she found that Madeline had already fastened
her dress, flung on a cape and the first hat she could find, and, with
a purse in one hand and her gloves in another, was actually ready.
So was the hansom, for one had been found outside, still lingering
and hoping for a fare. Madeline did not delay a second. She ran
downstairs between the fading lights, the tropical palms, the
withering flowers, which had had their one little day, and it was over.
Down she fled along the red-cloth carpetings, under the gay
awnings, and sprang into the vehicle.
Josephine, who hurried after her, was just in time to see her dash
from the door.
“Grand ciel!” she ejaculated to two amazed men-servants, who
now stood beside her, looking very limp in the bright summer
morning. “Did any one ever see the like of that? She has gone away
in her white satin ball-slippers.”
“What’s up? What’s the matter?” demanded one of her
companions authoritatively. “What’s the meaning of Miss West
running out of the house as if she was going for a fire-engine or the
police? Is she mad?”
“I can’t tell you. It was something that she heard by telegram.
Some one is ill. She talked of life or death; she is mad with fear of
something. Oh, you should have seen her eyes! She looked, when
she opened the paper, awful! I thought she would have struck me
because I kept it back.”
“Anyhow, whatever it is, she could not have gone before,” said the
first footman, with solemn importance. “But what the devil can it be?”
he added, as he stroked his chin reflectively.
This was precisely the question upon which no one could throw
the least glimmer of light; and, leaving the three servants to their
speculations, we follow Madeline down to the Holt. She caught an
early train. She was equally lucky in getting a fly at the station (by
bribing heavily) and implored the driver to gallop the whole way. She
arrived at the farm at eight o’clock, and rushed up the garden and
burst into the kitchen white and breathless. But she was too late. The
truth came home to her with an agonizing pang. She felt as if a
dagger had been thrust into her heart, for there at the table sat Mrs.
Holt, her elbows resting on it, her apron thrown over her head. She
was sobbing long, long gasping sobs, and looked the picture of grief.
Madeline shook as if seized with a sudden palsy as she stood in
the doorway. Her lips refused to move or form a sound; her heart
was beating in her very throat, and would assuredly choke her. She
could not have asked a question if her life depended on it.
Mrs. Holt, hearing steps, threw down her apron and confronted
her.
“Ay, I thought it might be you!” she ejaculated in a husky voice.
“Well, it’s all over!... He died, poor darling, at daybreak, in these
arms!” holding out those two hard-working extremities to their fullest
extent, with a gesture that spoke volumes.
“I will not believe it; it is not true; it—it is impossible!” broke in the
wretched girl. “The doctor said that there was no danger. Oh, Mrs.
Holt, for God’s sake, I implore you to tell me that you are only
frightening me! You think I have not been a good mother, that I want
a lesson, that—that—I will see for myself,” hurrying across the
kitchen and opening a well-known door.
 CHAPTER XXXVIII.
DEATH AND SICKNESS.

Alas! what was this that she beheld, and that turned every vein in
her body to ice? It was death for the first time. There before her, in
the small cot, lay a little still figure, with closed eyes and folded
hands, a lily between them; the bed around it—yes, it was now it—
already strewn with white flowers, on which the morning dew still
lingered. Who strews white flowers on the living? Yes, Harry was
dead! There was no look of suffering now on the little brow; he
seemed as if he was sleeping; his soft fair curls fell naturally over his
forehead; his long dark lashes swept his cheek. He might be asleep!
But why was he so still? No breath, no gentle rising and falling
disturb his tiny crossed hands, so lately full of life and mischief—and
now!
With a low cry Madeline fell upon her knees beside the child, and
laid her lips on his. How cold they were! But, no he could not be
dead! “Harry, Harry,” she whispered. “Harry, I have come. Open your
eyes, darling, for me, only one moment, and look at me, or I shall go
mad!”
“So you have come,” said a voice close to her, and starting round
she saw Laurence, pale and haggard from a long vigil, and stern as
an avenging angel. “It was hardly worthwhile now; there is nothing to
need your care any longer. Poor little child! he is gone. He wanted
you; he called as long as he could articulate for his ‘mummy’—his
‘pretty, pretty mummy.’” Here his faltering voice broke, and he
paused for a second, then continued in a sudden burst of
indignation. “And whilst he was dying, his mother was dancing!”
glancing as he spoke at her visible, and incriminating white satin
shoes.
 “I only got the telegram this morning at six o’clock,” returned
Madeline with awful calmness. The full reality had not come home to
her yet.
“You were summoned when the child was first taken ill. Yes, I
know you had a great social part to play—that you dared not be
absent, that you dared not tell your father that another, the holiest,
nearest, dearest of claims, appealed to you,” pointing to the child.
“You have sacrificed us, you have sacrificed all, to your Moloch—
money. But it is not fitting that I should reproach you here; your
conscience—and surely you are not totally hardened—will tell you
far sadder, sterner truths than any human lips.” She stood gazing at
him vacantly, holding the brass bar at the head of the bed in both
hands. “It may be some poor consolation to you to know that,
although your presence would have been a comfort, nothing could
have saved him. From the time the change set in last evening, the
doctor pronounced the case hopeless.”
Madeline still stood and looked at the speaker as if she were in a
trance, and he, although he spoke with a certain sort of deliberation,
and as if he was addressing one whose mind found it difficult to
grasp a subject, surveyed her with a pale set face, and his eyes
shone like a flame.
“There is no occasion for you to remain; I will make all
arrangements. The tie between us is severed: you and I are as dead
to one another as the child is to us both. We have nothing now in
common but a grave.” His grief and indignation left no room for pity.
Incidents which take some time to describe, are occasionally
almost instantaneous in action. It was barely five minutes since
Madeline had entered the farmhouse, and become aware of her
loss, and now she was looking with stony eyes upon the destruction
of everything that in her inmost soul she valued. Her child had
wound himself into her heart. He was dead; he had died in a
stranger’s arms, neglected by his own mother. Laurence was also
lost to her for ever!
“Have you nothing to say?” he asked at last, as she still remained
silent and immovable.
 She clutched the brass rail fiercely in her grasp; there was a
desperate expression in her face. She looked like some guilty,
undefended prisoner, standing at the bar of judgment.
“Have you no feeling, no words—nothing?”
Still she stared at him wildly—speechless. He scrutinized her
sharply. Her lips were parched and open. There was acute suffering
in her pallid face, and dazed, dilated eyes. And, before he had time
to realize what was about to happen, she had fallen in a dead faint.
Mrs. Holt was hastily summoned, and she was laid upon Mrs.
Holt’s spare bed, whilst burnt feathers were applied to her nostrils;
her hands were violently rubbed, and every old-fashioned remedy
was exhausted. The farmer’s wife could scarcely contain her
resentment against this young woman, who had not deserved to be
the mother of her dead darling, especially as she took notice of the
diamonds still glittering in her ears, and of her white silk stockings
and satin shoes. These latter items outraged her sense of propriety
even more than Madeline’s absence the previous night. She lifted up
one of these dainty slippers from where it had fallen on the floor, as
its owner was being carried to bed, and surveyed it indignantly.
“It’s danced a good lot, this ’ere shoe! Look at the sole. Look at the
satin, there; it’s frayed, and it was new last night, I’ll be bound! It’s a
pretty little foot, though; but you need not fear for her, Mr. Wynne. It’s
not grief as ails her as much as you think. She never was one as had
much feeling—it’s just dancing! She’s been on the floor the whole
night, and she is just about done.” And, tossing the miserable tell-tale
shoe indignantly to one side, she added, “It’s dancing—not grief!”
When Madeline recovered consciousness, she could not at first
remember where she was, but gradually the dreadful truth dawned
upon her mind; yet, strange to say, she never shed one single tear.
“No; not one tear, as I live by bread,” Mrs. Holt reported truthfully.
“Her face was as dry as a flint. Did ever any one know the like?” The
worthy woman, who had wept copiously herself, and whose eyes
and nose testified to the fact for days, did not know, had never yet
seen “the grief too deep for tears.”
 Madeline went—her husband having returned to town—and
locked herself into the room, and sat alone with the little corpse. Her
sorrow was stony-eyed and hard; her grief the worst of grief—the
loss of a child. And it was edged with what gave it a searching and
agonizing point—remorse. Oh, that she might have him back—half
her life for half a day—to look in his eyes, to whisper in his ears! But
those pretty brown eyes were closed for ever; that little waxen ear
would never more listen to a human voice. Surely she was the most
unhappy woman who ever walked the earth, for to her was denied
the comfort of atonement! She had been weak, wicked, unnatural;
she had been a neglectful mother to her poor little son. And now, that
she was yearning to be all that a mother should, now that she would
verily give her life for his, it was too late!
So long did she remain still and silent, so long was there no
sound, not even of sobs, in that darkened room, that Mrs. Holt
became alarmed; and towards sundown came authoritatively to the
door with loud knocks and a cup of tea.
“A fly had arrived to take her back to the station. Mr. Wynne had
ordered it, and she must come out and have a cup of tea and go.
She would do no good to any one by making herself ill.”
And, by reason of her importunities, Mrs. Holt prevailed. The door
was thrown back, and Mrs. Wynne came out with a face that—the
farmer’s wife subsequently described—fairly frightened her. She had
to stand over her and make her drink the tea, and had all the work in
the world to prevail on her and coax her to go back to town. No, she
would remain; she was determined to remain.
However, Mrs. Holt had a still more robust will, and gradually
coaxed her guest into returning home for just that one night. Anyway,
she must go and fetch her clothes. She would be coming for the
funeral. Mr. Wynne had said something about Friday. She could
return. Best go now.
“Yes,” answered Madeline, leaning against the doorway from pure
physical weakness, and speaking in a curious, husky voice. “I am
going to tell my father all, and I shall return to-morrow.”
 And then she went reluctantly down the walk, looking back over
and over again at a certain window with a drawn blind, still wearing
her white shoes—Mrs. Holt’s were three sizes too large for her—
and, still without one single tear, she got into the fly and was driven
away.
When she returned to Belgrave Square—haggard, distraught, and
ghastly in colour—she found that Mr. West had kept his room the
whole day; that the house had returned to its normal condition, the
palms and awnings were gone, and “dinner was laid in the library.”
Thus she was blandly informed by the butler as she passed upstairs,
the butler being far too gentlemanly a person to even hint his
amazement at her appearance by look or tone.
But Miss West did not dine in the library. She went to bed, which
she never left for six long weeks. Diphtheria developed itself. The
drains of 365, Belgrave Square, were unjustly blamed. Miss West
had got a chill the night of the dance, and it was known in society
that for many, many days the charming hostess lay between life and
death.
Josephine, a romantic and imaginative Gaul, had long believed
that her mistress had a secret love affair. She drew her own
inferences; she sympathized, and she commanded the household to
keep silence respecting Miss West’s mysterious errand. The morning
after the ball, when diphtheria developed, the house was rapidly
emptied. Even Josephine fled, and left her lady in the hands of
trained nurses. Mr. West and a few domestics stuck to their posts,
the infected quarter being rigorously isolated by means of sheets
dipped in disinfectant fluid.
Few of the gay guests ventured to leave cards at the house.
Diphtheria is an awful scourge, and this is the age of microbes. In old
times ignorance was bliss.
Many kind inquiries and anxious messages came by letter, and not
a few men questioned Mr. West at his club. His daughter was such a
lovely creature, so full of vitality, she enjoyed every moment of her
life. Oh, it would be a thousand pities if she were to die!
 Strange as it seemed, there was no more regular inquirer than Mr.
Wynne. On the day when Madeline was at her worst, when three
grave doctors consulted together in her boudoir, Mr. Wynne actually
came to the house; and later he appeared to be continually in the
club—which was more or less empty. The season was past. People
were on the wing for the seaside or the moors; but Mr. Wynne still
lingered on in town. Mr. West was constantly knocking up against
him in the club hall or reading-room, and the more he saw of him the
better he liked him. He was always so sympathetic somehow about
Madeline, although he had scarcely known her, and took a sincere
interest in hearing what the doctors said, and how they could not
understand how or where she had caught the infection. There was
not a single case of diphtheria in their neighbourhood.
And his daughter’s dangerous illness was not the little man’s only
anxiety. Part of his great fortune was also in a very dangerous
condition. The panic in Australia was spreading, and though he bore
a stout heart and refused to sell—indeed, it was impossible to
dispose of much of his stock—yet he never knew the hour or day
when he might not find himself a comparatively poor man. As soon
as Madeline was better and fit to move he would go to Sydney, and
look after his own affairs. Meanwhile he began to retrench; he
withdrew his commission for the lease of a moor, for a diamond and
emerald parure; he put down all his horses but two; and he placed
the Belgrave mansion on the market. The house was too large to be
comfortable, and the sanitary arrangements were apparently unsafe.
As soon as the invalid was pronounced fit to move she was taken
to Brighton, where, there being no risk of infection, Mr. and Miss
West and suite were comfortably established in one of the best
hotels, and at first the invalid made tolerable progress towards
recovery. By the 1st of September she was permitted to go out in a
bath-chair, or even to take a short drive daily. All who saw her
agreed that her illness had told upon her most terribly. Her colour
had departed, her eyes and cheeks were hollow; her beauty was
indeed a faded flower—a thing of the past!
 CHAPTER XXXIX.
WHITE FLOWERS.

As soon as practicable Madeline stole a visit to Mrs. Holt, Mr. West

having much business of importance in London.
“I have been ill,” she gasped as she tottered into the familiar
kitchen, “or I would have come back long ago.”
“So you have, I declare. Dear heart alive! and aged by years, and
just skin and bone. Sit down, sit down,” dragging forward a chair and
feeling for the keys, with a view to a glass of wine for Mrs. Wynne,
who looked like fainting.
“No, no. Never mind; I can’t stay. But tell me where it is, Mrs. Holt
—where have they buried him?”
“No, no. Now sit you down,” enforcing her request with her hand.
“Mr. Wynne was thinking of burying him with his own people in Kent;
but it was too far away, so he is laid in Monks Norton, with a lovely
stone over him. I’ve been there,” and then she proceeded to give the
unhappy mother a minute description of the funeral, the coffin with
silver plates, and a full account of the last resting-place, keeping all
the while an angry and incredulous eye on her visitor’s coloured
dress.
“You are not in black, I see,” looking at her own new black merino
with some complacency.
“No, Mrs. Holt; I—I never thought of it, if you will believe me. My
head was full of other things and my heart too sore; but I will wear
mourning outwardly, as I wear it in my soul, and—heart—to the end
of my days.”
“Well, I do wonder as you never thought of a bit of black,” sniffed
the other, incredulously. “’Tis mostly the first thing!”
 “Sometimes, I suppose,” responded her visitor wearily. “And now,
Mrs. Holt, I must go; I know that you think badly of me, and I deserve
it.”
“Well, ma’am, I can’t say but I do!” Her tone was of an intensity
that conveyed a far greater degree of disapproval than mere words
could convey. “But my opinion ain’t of no value to the likes of you.”
“You were very good to him. You took my place; I will not thank
you. You do not want my thanks. You did all for his own sake and for
pure love. Oh, Mrs. Holt, if I could only live the last two years over
again!”
“There’s nothing like beginning a new leaf, ma’am. You have Mr.
Wynne still.”
“Mr. Wynne will never forgive me—never. He said so. He said——”
Then her voice failed. “Good-bye, Mrs. Holt.”
“Ay, I’m coming to the gate with you. I’ll tell Tom Holler where to
take ye; it’s in or about three miles. You’d like a few white flowers?
The lilies are just a wonder for beauty.”
“No, no, no. I won’t trouble you. I won’t take them,” she protested
tremulously.
“Oh, but indeed you must!” Mrs. Holt was determined that, as far
as lay in her power, Mrs. Wynne should respect les convenances,
and, seizing a knife as they passed through the kitchen, cut quite a
sheaf of white lilies, whilst Madeline stood apathetically beside her,
as if she was a girl in a dream.
Monks Norton was an old, a very old grey country church, thickly
surrounded by gravestones—a picturesque place on the side of a
hill, far away from any habitation, save the clerk’s cottage and a
pretty old rectory house smothered in ivy.
As Madeline pushed open the heavy lych gate, she was aware
that she was not the only visitor to the churchyard. On a walk some
little way off stood two smartly dressed girls, whom she knew—
London acquaintances—and an elderly gentleman, with a High
Church waistcoat, apparently the rector.
 They had their backs turned towards her, and were talking in a
very animated manner. They paused for a second as they noticed a
tall lady turn slowly down a pathway, as if she was looking for
something—for a grave, of course. Then resumed their discussion,
just where they had left it off.
“It’s too sweet!” said one of the girls rapturously, “quite a beautiful
idea, and you say put up recently?”
“Yes,” assented the rector, who took a personal pride in all the nice
new tombstones, “only last Saturday week. It’s quite a work of art, is
it not?”
“Yes,” returned the second lady. “You say that it was a child,
brought by the father, and that he was very much cut up. His name
was Wynne—one of the Wynnes. It can’t be our Mr. Wynne, Laura;
he is not married.”
“Oh, there are dozens of Wynnes,” replied her sister. “And you
said it was a sad little funeral, did you not, Uncle Fred? Only the
father and a friend and two country-people. The mother——”
At this moment the girl was aware of some one coming behind her
—a tall person, who could look over her shoulder—some one whose
approach had not been noticed on the grass; and, turning quickly,
she found herself face to face with—of all people in the world!—Miss
West, who was carrying an immense bunch of freshly cut lilies. She
gave a little exclamation of surprise as she put out her hand, saying
—
“Miss West, I’m so charmed to see you. I heard you had been so
ill. I hope you are better?”
“Yes, I have been ill,” returned the other languidly, wishing most
fervently that these gay Miss Dancers would go away and leave her
alone with her dead.
They were standing before the very grave she was in search of—a
white, upright marble cross, on the foot of which was written in gilt
letters—
 Harry Wynne,

Died [here followed the date],

Aged 2 years and 7 months.

“Is it well with the child? It is well!” (2 Kings iv. 26).

“We have just been admiring this pretty tombstone, Miss West—so
uncommon and so appropriate. I have never seen that text before,
have you?”
Madeline turned away her eyes, and with wonderful self-command
said, “No, she never had.”
“I wonder what Wynnes he belonged to. It does not say. The head
of the Wynnes is very poor. The old estate of Rivals Wynne has
passed out of the family. I saw it last summer. It is a lovely old place
—about two miles from Aunt Jessie’s—delightful for picnics. Such
woods! But the house is almost a ruin. The old chapel and
banqueting-hall and ladies’ gallery are roofless. It’s a pity when these
old families go down, is it not, and die out?”
“Yes, a pity,” she answered mechanically.
There was, after this, a rather long silence. Miss West was not
disposed to converse. Oh, why could they not go away? and her
time was so precious! Perhaps they divined something of her
thoughts; for the sisters looked at one another—a look that mutually
expressed amazement at finding the gay Miss West among the
tombs of a lonely rural churchyard; and one of them said—
“Is it not delightful to get into the country? I suppose you are
staying in the neighbourhood for the yeomanry ball?”
Madeline made no reply. Possibly her illness had affected her
hearing.
“This old church is considered quite the local sight. Our uncle is
the rector. If you have come to look for any particular grave, we know
the whole churchyard, and can help you to find it with pleasure.”