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Contents
4 Simon Callow Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons by Jeremy Denk
10 Benjamin Nathans Lessons from the Edge by Marie Yovanovitch
Here, Right Matters: An American Story by Alexander S. Vindman
There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
THE
12
16
Wendy Xu
Kamran Javadizadeh
by Fiona Hill
Poem
Customs by Solmaz Sharif
PERSIAN
22
24
25
John Banville
Peter Gizzi
Erin Maglaque
Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts by Jed Perl
Poem
When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe
VERSION
by Maureen Quilligan
28 Nicole Rudick Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso
33 Geoffrey O’Brien Don Carlos an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City
34 Ange Mlinko Poem
35 Merve Emre A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited and with an introduction
by Alex Andriesse
40 Jackson Lears Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
by Samuel Moyn
43 M. W. Feldman The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
and Jessica Riskin by Kathryn Paige Harden
47 Ursula Lindsey Here Is a Body by Basma Abdel Aziz
The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz
You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works, 2011–2021 by Alaa Abd el-Fattah,
with a foreword by Naomi Klein
The Book of Sleep by Haytham El Wardany
50 Michael Gorra The Turning Point: 1851— A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World
by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst L L O Y D L L E W E L LY N-JO NE S
56 David Cole How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart
by Jamal Greene, with a foreword by Jill Lepore
59 James McAuley A Failure of Imagination PERSIANS
CONTRIBUTORS The Age of the Great Kings
JOHN BANVILLE’s novel The Singularities will be pub- JACKSON LEARS is Board of Governors Distinguished
lished in October. Professor of History at Rutgers and Editor in Chief of Raritan.
SIMON CALLOW is an English actor and director who His new book, Wild Card: Animal Spirits and Deep America,
has written about Richard Wagner, Orson Welles, Charles will be published next spring. “Superb, authoritative, and
Dickens, Charles Laughton, and Oscar Wilde. His latest book, URSULA LINDSEY writes about culture, education, and
with Derry Moore, is London’s Great Theatres. politics in the Arab world and cohosts BULAQ, a podcast on
compelling, a fresh history of
DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU Arabic literature. She has lived in Egypt and Morocco and is the Persian Great Kings that
and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and now based in Amman, Jordan.
Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. ERIN MAGLAQUE is a Lecturer in History at the Univer- combines exuberant storytelling
MERVE EMRE is an Associate Professor of English at Ox- sity of Sheffield and the author of Venice’s Intimate Empire.
ford. Her most recent book, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway,
with outstanding scholarship.
JAMES MCAULEY is a Paris-based contributing colum-
was published last year. nist for The Washington Post and the author of The House of A tour de force.”
M. W. FELDMAN is a Professor of Biology at Stanford and Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France.
the Founder and Codirector of Stanford’s Center for Com- ANGE MLINKO is a Professor of English and Creative Writ-
—SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE,
putational Evolutionary and Human Genomics. He was just ing at the University of Florida. Her new poetry collection,
awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for author of Jerusalem
Venice, will be published in April.
the Study of Evolution. JESSICA RISKIN is the Frances and
Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. She is currently BENJAMIN NATHANS, currently a Senior Fellow at the
writing a book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste La- Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, is work-
marck and the origins and history of evolutionary theory. ing on a book called To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: “A brilliant feat of resurrection,
The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.
PETER GIZZI’s recent books include Now It’s Dark and restoring to the Persian Empire
Archeophonics, a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. GEOFFREY O’BRIEN’s latest books are Where Did Poetry
MICHAEL GORRA is the author of Portrait of a Novel:
Come From and the poetry collection Who Goes There. the color, brilliance, and
Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece NICOLE RUDICK’s book What Is Now Known Was Once complexity that renders it one
and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, among Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle
other books. He teaches at Smith. was published in February. of the most fascinating and
KAMRAN JAVADIZADEH is an Associate Profes- WENDY XU’s most recent books of poetry are The Past and
sor of English at Villanova. He is working on a book called Phrasis. She is an Assistant Professor of Writing at the New influential of ancient civilizations.”
Institutionalized Lyric: American Poetry at Midcentury. School.
—T O M H O L L A N D,
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3
 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist
Every Good Boy Does Fine:
A Love Story, in Music Lessons
by Jeremy Denk.
Random House, 368 pp., $28.99
In The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953),
Dr. Seuss’s only original screenplay,
young Bart, living alone with his ha-
rassed mom, is compelled to endure
piano lessons from the local music
teacher, fussy, tyrannical Dr. Terwil-
liker. Exhausted by his fruitless la-
bors, Bart falls asleep at the piano and
dreams that he has been sent, along
with 499 other boys, to a pianistic penal
colony ruled over by Dr. T. A single
huge keyboard is at the center of the
colony; the children miserably take
their places at it and begin to play.
This, broadly speaking, is most peo-
ple’s view of piano lessons. Not mine, as
it happens, the only child in the United
Kingdom who begged his mother for
piano lessons and was refused them;
and not that of the American pianist
Jeremy Denk, who was in continuous
music education from the age of six
to thirty- one, under the tutelage of
a remarkable succession of teachers,
almost all of whom had something
valuable to contribute to his evolving
understanding of both the complex and
many-faceted instrument to which he
has devoted his life and the complex
and many-faceted person that he is.
Some forty years ago, as a very young
actor, I wrote a book called Being an
Actor, which attempted to describe
what it’s like to be an actor. Denk, at
the age of fifty- one, has written a book
that shows what it’s like to be a pia-
nist, but also what it’s like to be Jeremy
Denk. As if that were not enough, it is
also about the elements of music, and
beyond that an account of the ways in
which music and life mirror each other.
It is a book like none other—certainly
none by pianists, many of whom have
written their memoirs, notably Arthur
Rubinstein’s glamorous My Young
Years and My Many Years and Oscar
Levant’s three outrageously funny vol-
umes, A Smattering of Ignorance, The
Memoirs of an Amnesiac, and The
Unimportance of Being Oscar. There
are also practical books, like Boris
Berman’s lucid Notes from the Pia-
nist’s Bench and Piano Notes by the
polymathic Charles Rosen, who vividly
describes the physical and mental chal-
lenges of being a pianist. None of these
books, however, comes close to the
scope of Every Good Boy Does Fine.
Denk’s recorded catalog—some
twenty albums—includes a number
of outstanding releases, among them
c. 1300–c. 2000, a sequence of trans-
positions and individual movements
from larger pieces ranging from Guil-
laume de Machaut to Ligeti, taking in
Byrd, Beethoven, Brahms, Schoen-
berg, Stockhausen, and Stravinsky. He
plays a great deal of Bach and has been
a passionate advocate of twentieth- and
twenty-first- century American com-
posers—Ives, Kirchner, Dello Joio,
and Picker, among others; his most
recent recording, of two Mozart piano
concertos and the Rondo in A Minor,
has been received as something of a
revelation.
He is a writer of witty, challenging,
and highly personal pieces for The
4 The New York Review
Simon Callow
Jeremy Denk; illustration by Grant Shaffer
New Yorker and The New Republic;
he contributed a radical and profound
reassessment of Charles Ives to these
pages.* Perhaps his most characteristic
writing is to be found in his punningly
named blog, Think Denk—“the glam-
orous life and thoughts of a concert
pianist,” wickedly playful and shot
through with shafts of profundity and
self-revelation. He has also achieved
the seemingly impossible task of turn-
ing Rosen’s book The Classical Style
into a libretto, with gabby characters
like Tonic, Dominant, and—a late and
anxious arrival—Subdominant, who
assemble in a downtown bar under
the jaundiced gazes of Rosen, Bee-
thoven, Haydn, and Mozart. It is this
combination of musical exploration,
verbal communicativeness, and pianis-
tic excellence that led to Denk’s being
awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant
in 2013.
E very Good Boy Does Fine—the
phrase is one of the first things a piano
student learns, a mnemonic (of which
there are many variants, not all of them
printable) for the notes of the treble
clef—is wildly ambitious, far exceeding
the author’s modest description of it as
“the story of piano lessons.” It is that,
certainly, among many other things,
having its origins in Denk’s 2013 New
Yorker essay about his teachers.
The book is laid out in musical form:
three substantial sections on harmony,
melody, and rhythm, all framed by a
prelude and a coda. The prelude im-
mediately introduces one of the central
questions of the book: how to write
about music without recourse to tech-
nical analysis. At the start, Denk does
this through his twelve-year- old ears,
the age at which he bought a cassette
*The New York Review, June 19, 2014.
tape of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante
for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra:
Ah, yes, Mozart. The music was
lovely, fine, elegant: just what I ex-
pected. As you will discover, I was
the kind of kid who thought he’d al-
ready figured out Mozart but could
barely tie his shoelaces. A couple
minutes in, something odd hap-
pened: a few buzzing trills. Possi-
bly nothing, a side idea branching
off the piece’s tree, climbing a few
notes. But then there were a few
more. I was sure they must be done
now—but then, again, there were
more, louder, higher. Had Mozart
lost his mind?
Young Denk is increasingly dumb-
founded by the music’s journey. Thirty-
eight years later, he hears the same
cassette again; again he is knocked
sideways. He tries to analyze his way
out of the emotion, to understand how
Mozart achieves his effects:
And it hit me. This passage was
the perfect metaphor for the very
thing I was writing, the story of
piano lessons: obsessive repetition,
climbing toward an unknown goal
that rewrites itself, once achieved.
The truest realizations aren’t at the
peak, but are discovered almost by
surprise, and through release, by
passing back down the old, same
steps. If you forced me to sum it up,
I’d tell you that is the point of this
book: a love for the steps, the joys
of growing and outgrowing and
being outgrown.
And that, indeed, is what he describes
in the book—one of the things, because
from that point on it will be layered like
a cake, the layers (pianistic, personal,
philosophical) alternating and some-
times combining.
“But first, I’m afraid,” he tells us,
“we have to talk about my parents.”
This he does, sharply delineating all
their complexities: both on their sec-
ond marriages, his father, after the
death of his first wife, having retreated
to a monastery until he came to believe
that it was just a form of escapism; his
mother deserted by her first husband
and left with three children to bring
up. They have two more, Jeremy and
his younger brother. His father is per-
manently restless and unfulfilled, his
mother increasingly addicted to alco-
hol and physically disabled. They move
house frequently; they fight constantly;
his father has an affair. But once the
precocious Jeremy has chosen to take
piano lessons, the one thing they agree
on—even though they can barely af-
ford to pay for them and his relentless
practicing drives them mad—is that he
must commit himself to them. They are
far from the classic pushy parents, but
they keep him at it. The question that
runs through the book is: Will he ever
earn their approval?
These sections are full of pain, confu-
sion, disappointment, betrayal. When
his parents retire to an assisted-living
facility, they both write their memoirs,
a rich resource on which Denk draws,
along with other carefully preserved
records of his past— scribbled- on
childhood scores, report cards, favor-
ite images—which he reproduces in
the book. He has, moreover, seem-
ingly total recall of crucial conversa-
tions, places, smells, and colors. And
throughout, life is described in musical
terms. He comments on his mother:
A pair of vanishings: her father
from a heart attack, her husband
from a different failing of the
heart. In music, the return of a
theme is often a comfort or delight,
but in real life not so much.
Describing his father’s contradictory
instincts as a humorist—he cracks a
joke, then frowns, as if to discourage
laughter—Denk observes, “We all felt
we had to laugh, but he kept at the
frown, sustaining it like a pedal tone in
music, insisting on the truth behind the
punch line.”
H is piano teachers, each formative,
each fiercely resolute, make up the
central layer of the book, a procession
of determined educators who shape
his development, starting with homely
Mona Schneiderman—“Has a more
perfect piano teacher name ever been
invented?”—who has him play a sim-
ple tune over which cheery lyrics are
inscribed:
I’m so happy, I’m so happy,
For the world is full of things,
Birds and flowers and sunny
hours,
My heart just sings and sings!
He moves on to Lillian, an altogether
tougher cookie, in the Dr. Terwilliker
mold:
Once I brought in the “Moonlight
Sonata,” because what could be
better than that? Lillian launched

“An intelligently provocative, vital
reading experience.”—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review) „ “An ambitious
attempt to delineate nothing less than
the changing state of being female
in this country over the past four
centuries.”—Alexandra Jacobs, New
York Times
“Marc Wortman delivers a 17-gun
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who pulled a reluctant Navy into the
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and the power of the atom.”—Jonathan
W. Jordan, Wall Street Journal
„ Jewish Lives
April 21, 2022
Yale university press
“Brilliantly insightful. A fresh take on
art history as we know it.”—Katy
Hessel, host of The Great Women
Artists Podcast „ Little Histories
“A masterful history of a place that is
both reality and ideal, and central to
the modern world.”—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
yalebooks.com
“Aims to persuade America’s ‘relent-
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the existence of ‘divinity.’ . . .
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Kronman’s ambition is to repair ’the
in this sweeping narrative account of
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decades.”—General (ret.) Stanley
from Damrosch.”—Kirkus Reviews
McChrystal, former Commander of
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5
 into a tirade: the edition I was
using was bad, and I had no busi-
ness playing music like that yet, I
had to be serious and respectful.
I thought about how beautiful the
piece was, as tears streamed down
my face.
In the text, he reproduces his score
of one of Clementi’s easy sonatinas,
annotated by Lillian and himself to
such a degree that the music is almost
invisible. Lillian later remembers how
fond he was of her dog, who was always
present at lessons. Denk punctures her
golden reminiscence: he was clinging
to the animal for dear life while he
waited for his parents to pick him up:
“I always felt as if I’d barely survived.”
At times he feels as if the purpose of
classes is to kill any pleasure he might
have in music.
His parents—who had bought him a
secondhand Behning piano for $1,000,
a huge expenditure for them—enrolled
him in an advanced school program
that had its own dedicated therapist: “I
liked him more than any adult I’d ever
met. He wasn’t as judgmental as my
parents, or my piano teacher. He also
didn’t seem worried.” But young Jer-
emy is now deeply unhappy and refuses
to practice. His parents threaten to end
the lessons, which forces him to a life-
changing realization:
They did this out of love, I assume,
but it boggled my mind—how could
they be so cruel? I dreaded my les-
sons, but I never wanted them to
stop. This piano now seemed in-
separable from me, immovable as
the Behning on its blocks. I wasn’t
Congratulations to
sure how this had happened. Part
of it was my love for music, what-
ever that means, but part of it was
less selfless—piano was the only
way I’d found to express myself, a
shelter and a persona.
There is no going back once he’s ac-
knowledged that to himself. He’s eleven
and has been at it for half his lifetime;
a lifetime of lessons and practice, punc-
tuated with occasional performances,
stretches ahead of him, with a multi-
plicity of teachers, each with bafflingly
different views of how to play the piano.
The Denks move to New Mexico
and Jeremy is accepted by a much
more congenial teacher, Bill Leland,
who inscribes his scores with useful
phrases, in capitals, such as A SMOOTH
THUMB CONNECTION IS ONE OF
THE MOST IMPORTANT TECHNI-
CAL FEATS YOU CAN MASTER!
I wondered Will I ever be done
with the thumb? The answer was
No, never. The thumb is a transit
system, helping to lubricate scales,
arpeggios, passages of all kinds. It
is at once an anchor and a spring-
board. It’s the finger that often for-
gets it’s a finger.
On another occasion, Leland writes
on the score, “Mozart 3rd mvmt. prac-
tice the way we did together; listen for
the mercurial changes of touch and
phrasing (also dynamics!),” underlin-
ing “mercurial” with a squiggly line, for
special emphasis.
Nearly forty years later, that’s one
of the ideas I cherish and teach
most: that Mozart’s music is not
one voice but a shifting array of
voices; that you never know what
the character of the next moment
will be—serious or light or high
or low or some shade in between.
“Mercurial” is for me quite near
the heart of Mozart’s great gift to
us; it is also one of the most com-
mon words people use nowadays to
describe my playing. One teacher’s
comment, even one you’ve forgot-
ten, may become the essence of
you; it’s just hard to know which
one.
At music camp, at school, so it contin-
ues. Denk enters competitions, which
he generally wins, becoming ever more
fluent and confident, but there is always
a teacher to reveal to him yet another
fundamental error in his playing or to
open up new, unimagined possibilities.
And rapidly, the time for him to go
to college approaches. He is not only
brilliant musically; he has already, at
fifteen, won the Chemistry Olympics,
“with a super-precise titration,” and
has “gushing recommendations” from
his English teachers and his calculus
professor.
Money is somehow found to send him
to Oberlin, where he does a double de-
gree in chemistry and piano, with many
side classes, notably English literature;
for light relief he reads Ulysses. He
brings a piece he loves and has worked
on obsessively, the Chopin Berceuse,
to his teacher, Joseph Schwartz, who
laughs out loud and tells him that his
performance of it was “unbelievably
terrible,” that he should abandon it,
“since it didn’t suit me, like a piece of
clothing. And at that moment I began
to feel we weren’t on the same side.” He
recovers his self-respect when a fellow
student with whom he is working tells
everything first. He wanted every mu-
sical idea to have motivations, backsto-
ries, urges.” Denk spends a great deal
of his musical education oscillating be-
tween the paradoxical demands on any
interpreter: to examine the score foren-
sically and to animate it with your own
inner life. It is the encounter between
the music and the musician that consti-
tutes a performance; maintaining the
balance between the two is a lifelong
challenge. Slowly, painfully, he learns
to enter the composer’s inner world.
Like all adolescents, he is inclined to
black-and-white dismissals. Schubert’s
endless triplets he finds weak and
repetitive:
Later in life, I realized that these
flaws weren’t flaws. Schubert wants
you to feel insufficiency. . . . This
kind of moment in Schubert, sim-
ple to the point of breaking, like
a fabric stretched thin, represents
one of his most important truths—
when he connects to the actual ex-
perience of life rather than some
composed ideal. Life’s narratives
are not full; often there is no story,
or an inadequate story, not cover-
ing the gaps. . . .
Schubert sometimes finds him-
self down here with us, slumped
on a threadbare couch, staring at a
stain on the floor, unable to leave
an unproductive or tedious circu-
lar thought, not quite sure how to
go on, or why.
Denk’s growing sense of being an
artist, as opposed to merely a pianist,
is given a decisive push when he at-
tends a campus concert given by the
Hungarian pianist György SebĘk. As
an encore, SebĘk plays the Gigue from
Bach’s First Partita. “The words ‘mu-
sical’ and ‘unmusical’ did not apply,”
Denk is forced to admit.

Mia Bay, author of
Traveling Black:
A Story of Race and Resistance
✶ Denk writes feelingly on the artist’s
Winner of the 2022 Bancroft Prize
“A major intervention in
our understanding of the
civil rights movement and
the everyday life of racial
domination.”
—Bancroft Prize Jury
hup.harvard.edu
him, “‘Jeremy, you’re amazing,’ and
somehow that was the deciding vote of
confidence, the moment I decided in
my heart that I would make my living
as a musician.”
self- dramatization, the formation of
a self, sometimes manifesting as ar-
rogance, the conviction that you have
something special to contribute to the
appreciation of what you are perform-
ing, grasping whatever gives you the
audacity to present yourself before the
public. These are as much the subject
of the book as its ostensible subject,
piano lessons; these are life lessons.
And the lessons never end. Later
Denk works with the distinguished (if
halitotic) cellist Norman Fischer, who
turns his world of expression upside
down:
Norman lumbered over, stood next
to the piano bench, and stared me
right in the face. He didn’t say a
word, but put on a deranged ex-
pression, like in Munch’s The
Scream, and pointed at the begin-
ning of the passage. Oh God, his
breath again. I couldn’t help but
play the scales in a wild, manic,
satiric rush, thinking of his face,
fearless because I was desperate
for it to be over, and for Norman to
go farther away.
Increasingly, he begins to under-
stand that not all solutions are techni-
cal. Norman “wanted me to humanize
It was as if the concepts behind
the notes, playful and profound,
had come alive. As he revealed
each audacious but logical chord
change, I experienced both shock
and comprehension—surprise at
something that made perfect sense.
At SebĘk’s master class the following
day, the nervous Denk plays the first
movement of the Brahms concerto he’s
been working on and slightly botches
it: “SebĘk told me to close my eyes for
a full minute. There was silence, and
I could smell the smoke from his cig-
arette. Then he told me that I knew
the piano better than I imagined.
(This rang some bell in me.)” SebĘk
has him play the opening again, eyes
still closed. He nails the passage: “The
sound was deeper and richer, even
thunderous. A lifetime of difficulty
had been replaced with a moment of
ease.” This dazzling conjuring trick
earns SebĘk Denk’s absolute trust,
“as if finding a piano teacher were like
falling in love.”
He follows SebĘk to Indiana Uni-
versity in Bloomington, giving himself
over completely to his teaching, which
is often not directly musical at all but
expressed in external analogies—struc-
ture in the first movement of a Mozart
sonata is illuminated by reference to
a Michelangelo drawing; the second
movement is “a Don Juan serenade.”
“The presence of sex behind Mozart’s
ruffles had been mostly unknown to
me,” Denk dryly observes. Windows

6 The New York Review

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7
open onto a universe of expression and
imagination.
For all SebĘk’s genius as a pianist and
his brilliance as a teacher, it is the en-
tirety of his being that is the lesson:
With his elegant suits, and his
expression so far above the me-
diocrity of the architecture, and
that sense of sliding along the hall
guided by his middle, it felt like he
didn’t just enter your field of vision
but manifested, a minor miracle.
SebĘk begins to permeate all of Denk’s
thinking. He astonishes a fellow stu-
dent violinist, Baird Dodge, with whom
he is rehearsing Brahms’s First Violin
Sonata, by describing the last move-
ment’s rondo form: “The main theme
(A) was the melancholy gray present,
and the episodes (B, C, whatever) were
the radiant past. . . . Actually, I told
Baird, each return was a gate crashing
shut on happiness.” “Jeremy, you’re on
fire,” says Baird. “This moment of com-
munication made me maybe as happy
as I’d ever been. I realized that SebĘk
had opened this door in me to meta-
phor. He’d given me permission to use
a tool I’d always had.”
Denk is later exposed to the some-
what more acerbic tutelage of SebĘk’s
duo partner, the formidable cellist
János Starker. Here, too, the lesson is
to look behind the music, in between
the notes. The two Hungarians give a
concert:
Starker never wanted a moment of
schmaltz, and SebĘk never wanted
to show off. And so the hyper-
Romantic Franck Sonata sounded
like a shrine, a place where emo-
tions went to get purified. . . .
The Franck’s odd and beautiful
reserve brought to life what I’d
only known intellectually: all that
SebĘk and Starker had survived,
wars, Fascists, Communists, labor
camps, all the homes and home-
lands and ways of life they’d left
for boring, calm Bloomington.
Their musical ideals were what re-
mained, the few items of value that
the world had not yet managed to
take away.
He has other teachers, some brutal,
some illuminating—the metronome
fanatic Walter Levin, the foulmouthed
and drunkenly inspired Harvey Sha-
piro, Herbert Stessin, suffering from
incipient Parkinson’s disease—but it
is SebĘk whose lessons effect a funda-
mental shift in his understanding. Denk
urges him to write down his thoughts:
“No. The most important things I have
to say can’t be written down. They
won’t survive a book.” It is a pleasing
irony that in Every Good Boy Does
Fine Denk has given permanent form
to what SebĘk imagined would not
survive; in the book they stand for all
time as an example of an approach that
is neither mechanical nor doctrinaire.
Denk’s farewell to SebĘk is deeply
emotional:
“All the best for your future,” he
said at last, as he held open the
door. He didn’t mean that to be
brutal, I don’t think. I rounded
the oval out of his sight and cried
in the first empty cubicle I could
find.
8 The New York Review
Denk finally becomes a teacher him-
self, back at Bloomington, though not
for long, as his concert career beckons.
With painful honesty, he describes his
going-away party, at which his students
give him
a 24-pack of Kleenex, to have in
the studio for all the hundreds of
times I’d made and would make
them cry. . . .
The room was quiet. After all
the piano lesson suffering I’d been
through, had I come up with no
better, no more creative response
than to inflict it on the next gener-
ation? At last I said, “Oh, I’m so
sorry.”
T his is where the story of piano les-
sons, Denk’s Lehrjahre, comes to an
Katalin Fittler
György SebĘk, 1980s
end, but it is part of the larger con-
ception. Each of the three sections—
on melody, harmony, and rhythm—is
given initial shape by a Lesson One, in
which Denk grapples with conveying
its essential character, the way in which
it works. With the first, harmony, it’s a
challenge:
If you mention harmony to a non-
musician, best of luck. I’ve watched
many eyes glaze over. Maybe the
person knows there’s such a thing
as a D-minor chord, but he/she
can’t hum it. You explain: that’s be-
cause it doesn’t exist consecutively
but simultaneously, or, really, ab-
stractly—then you get flustered,
realizing everything you just said
is kind of wrong. Meanwhile they
feel you are lecturing them, and
rightly so—what does all this have
to do with the joy and raw feeling
of music?
He comes at the answer to this question
from a number of angles—including
verbal analysis, of course:
Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven,
between 1770 and 1820 or so, all
built off the same basic set of
chords, like a starter set of Legos.
There are extensions, excursions,
extenuations, but basically they
work from good old one, four, and
five, the fundamental trio. Har-
monies are a vehicle, a stage, a
backdrop. . . . For the most part,
no individual creates a harmony.
They are there for all of us, a com-
mon good, a common resource.
“Are harmony and melody friends or
enemies?” he asks, noting that for pia-
nists, their two hands are their whole
world; they have to fill everything in,
“otherwise the melody will be naked
and alone, and the piano’s weakness
as an instrument will be exposed.”
He tries another tack: “I’m not sure I
can discuss harmony without talking
about sex,” he tells a friend, elaborat-
ing that
at the heart of the art of harmony
is desire. That is, the desire for one
chord to go to another. In every
sentence of chords this desire op-
erates, to one degree or another,
sometimes playfully, other times
urgently. One of the most common
motions between chords is from
what we call the “dominant” to the
“tonic.” If you don’t know what
that means, sing “Happy Birth-
day” and then stop at the end, on
the last two notes, “to . . .you.”
He now invokes a simple diagram to
demonstrate, in this instance, Bach’s
harmonies: the lesson, he says, is
“about how you build these beautiful
stacks, with their kaleidoscopic colors,
while still accommodating the musical
equivalent of a support beam.”
But entertaining though all that is,
it is difficult to hear what it is that he’s
demonstrating without, well, hearing it.
Each chapter is headed by a playlist of
pieces alluded to, but to bring nonmu-
sicians closer to the mystery it might
have been useful to have included a CD
with commentary.
As Denk predicts, it’s much easier to
write—and to read—about melody and
rhythm, and these chapters are filled
with insights:
For my childhood teachers, free-
dom and laziness were connected.
To be disciplined was to be strict.
There was no such thing as disci-
plined departure. I was allowed
to play without the metronome
only if I promised to be good—a
musical parole. All this negativity
and policing reveals how power-
ful rhythm is, how central, and—
here’s the thing!—how connected
it is to the concept of liberty. This
is just as true for orchestra mem-
bers as for my clubbing friends
who, while dancing to the robotic,
prefabricated beat, are telling me
to “just let go.” Harmonies wan-
der; melodies develop or disinte-
grate; but only rhythms can truly
be free.
T here is one final aspect of the book
that contributes substantially to its
originality: it is a coming- out story.
Denk is openly gay—a still remark-
ably rare phenomenon in the world of
classical music. The conductor Yannick
Nézet- Séguin, the tenor Michael Fa-
biano, and the pianist Stephen Hough
are others; Denk is one of the very few
who writes about his homosexuality
in a musical setting. Flute, the autobi-
ography of the late Richard Adeney,
sometime principal flute player of the
London Philharmonic Orchestra, also
comes to mind. Even Denk writes
about his burgeoning sexuality only in
a personal capacity and has nothing to
say about changing attitudes within the
profession. But his story—of a late de-
veloper, as he puts it—is carefully, even
musically, placed throughout the book:
a long hesitation waltz, as he charts
the anxious awareness of attraction,
the evasions, the panic, the hopeless
crushes. “If you’re in a conservatory,”
he writes, “I’d advise you not to get in-
volved musically with people you have
even the remotest sense you might be
in love with, which can be filed under
Advice No One Will Ever Take.”
The funniest, most characteristic,
and most painful missed opportunity
has him obliviously straying into a
notorious cruising ground in Central
Park while being immersed in close
scrutiny of a Monteverdi madrigal
about spurned love. A man approaches
him; he freezes until the man, baf-
fled, leaves. All the while, and over
the years, he doggedly attempts sexual
relationships with women, until he is
dumped by one of them for being “an
emotional cipher.” At last, he beds a
man, but it is a fumbling disaster, after
which he goes online, hooks up with an
anonymous man, and finally engages
with his sexuality. The relief, his and
ours, is palpable; and not much later,
as if in a Puccini opera, he erupts in an
uncharacteristic burst of lyricism:
A week later, I drove up to the
Marlboro Music School, in the
rolling near-mountains of southern
Vermont, and there you were, star-
ing back at me in the dining hall
at lunch. The look was direct and
unashamed. . . .
And there you were (again) in
the coffee shop, as beautiful as
anyone I’d ever seen. We drank a
few beers, talking, as if just josh-
ing around. But then, down the hill
on the way to our dorm, a couple
hours later, we were making out. . . .
I didn’t care who saw or who knew.
I didn’t have to come out; I was al-
ready way, way out. We . . .walked
along a dark gravel road—snippets
of music, summer, nature, night. I
asked what you wanted. You said,
“Everything.”
Every Good Boy Does Fine ends
with an analysis of the rondo finale of
Mozart’s 25th Piano Concerto, with
its rapid progression from innocent
artlessness through a succession of
increasingly unsettled moods until it
arrives, refreshed, back at the begin-
ning. “Mozart prepares the return of
this theme with unprecedented inspira-
tion,” says Denk. “He goes to the ends
of the musical earth to bring us home.
And yet, after all that, it still feels like
an accident when you find yourself back
on solid ground.” As he does through-
out the book, Denk weaves invisible
threads connecting life and art into
something very close to musical form.
The book, it is by now crystal clear, has
been all about transitions, mostly ef-
fected by teachers:
Sometimes you wish you could go
back to ask your teachers again to
guide you; but up there onstage,
exactly where they always wanted
you to be, you must simply find
your way. They have given all the
help they can; the only person who
can solve the labyrinth of yourself
is you.
Q
 New from Duke University Press
GOOD
Att l a n tis, C. L. R. JAMES

an auto
NIGHT
THE Familial
PLEASURE
DAVID WAS
Undercurrents
GRUBBS OURS N K RU M A H A N D
Subversive Habits Untold THE GHANA

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R EVOL U T ION
Stories of
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Love

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a niel
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Tarn

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GILLES DELEUZE
on
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Jia Zhangke
ʾʪȃɹʲɮȃʾȮȧȟ˩

SCOTT BRANSON

michael berry

THE
SOVEREIGN
TRICKSTER

death and
p l a n e ta ry L o n g i n g s |

on laughter in the M a ry L o u i s e P r at t
Vicente L. Rafael age of duterte

Marlon B. Ross
Min Hyoung Song

Dionne Brand
V E R S O

The Blue Clerk

Todd Meyers

Sissy Insurgencies
ars poetica in 59 versos

A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness

Good night the pleasure was ours Gay Liberation after May ‘68 Sissy Insurgencies
DAVID GRUBBS GUY HOCQUENGHEM A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness
SCOTT BRANSON, translator MARLON B. ROSS
Subversive Habits With a Foreword by GILLES DELEUZE
Black Catholic Nuns in the Long Theory Q All That Was Not Her
African American Freedom Struggle TODD MEYERS
SHANNEN DEE WILLIAMS Racism, Health, and Politics Critical Global Health
JAMILA MICHENER and
Atlantis, an Autoanthropology American Game Studies
ALANA M. W. LEBRÓN, issue editors
NATHANIEL TARN An issue of Journal of Health Politics, Policy and PATRICK JAGODA and
Law (47:2) JENNIFER MALKOWSKI, issue editors
Familial Undercurrents An issue of American Literature (94:1)
Untold Stories of Love and Marriage in Modern Iran Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke
AFSANEH NAJMABADI MICHAEL BERRY Climate Lyricism
Sinotheory MIN HYOUNG SONG
Queer Fire
Liberation and Abolition The Sovereign Trickster The Blue Clerk
MARQUIS BEY and Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
JESSE A. GOLDBERG, issue editors VICENTE L. RAFAEL DIONNE BRAND
Now in Paperback
An issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (28:2)
Planetary Longings
Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution MARY LOUISE PRATT Transnational Feminist Approaches to
C. L. R. JAMES Dissident Acts Anti-Muslim Racism
LESLIE JAMES, editor ZEYNEP K. KORKMAN and SHERENE
The t4t Issue
C. L. R. James Archives HALIDA RAZACK, issue editors
CAMERON AWKWARD-RICH and An issue of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (20:2)
HIL MALATINO, issue editors
An issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (9:1)

dukeupress.edu

April 21, 2022 9


Lessons from the Edge
by Marie Yovanovitch.
Mariner, 394 pp., $30.00
Here, Right Matters:
An American Story
by Alexander S. Vindman.
Harper, 245 pp., $26.99;
$17.99 (paper; to be published in June)
There Is Nothing for You Here:
Finding Opportunity in the
Twenty- First Century
by Fiona Hill.
Mariner, 422 pp., $30.00
If you’ve ever been curious about how
America’s so- called deep state really
works, these three memoirs are a good
place to start. Their authors were, until
recently, unknown to the public, having
quietly risen to just below the surface
of the American foreign policy estab-
lishment. None of them, it’s fair to say,
would have written a memoir had they
not been catapulted to national promi-
nence as witnesses in Donald Trump’s
first impeachment hearings in the fall
of 2019.
Marie Yovanovitch ascended through
the Foreign Service to a series of am-
bassadorships, including, fatefully, to
Ukraine. Alexander S. Vindman rose to
the rank of lieutenant colonel in the US
Army, including combat experience in
Iraq, before being appointed to the staff
of the National Security Council (NSC).
His first boss there was Fiona Hill, whose
career included stints in academia (Har-
vard’s Kennedy School), think tanks
(the Brookings Institution), and the in-
telligence services (the National Intelli-
gence Council and the NSC). All three
focused on Russia and other territories
of the former Soviet Union. As civil ser-
vants in both Democratic and Republi-
can administrations, they gave the deep
state what it wanted: deep expertise,
deep loyalty to American institutions,
and fourteen-hour workdays.
That was not all. Modern bureaucra-
cies, Max Weber wrote in Politik als
Beruf (Politics as a Vocation, 1919),
have developed, in the interest of
integrity, a high sense of collective
honor, without which the danger
of terrible corruption and a vul-
gar philistinism looms over us
and threatens the purely technical
functioning of the state apparatus.
We are not accustomed to thinking of
bureaucrats as repositories of honor,
a quality more readily associated with
aristocrats. Weber, however, had a very
particular form of honor in mind. “The
honor of the civil servant,” he observed,
consists of the capacity to execute
conscientiously the command of
his superiors, precisely as if the
command corresponded to his
own conviction. This holds even if
the order appears incorrect to him.
Without this supreme moral disci-
pline and self- denial, the whole ap-
paratus would fall to pieces.
The problem in the Trump administra-
tion was that the commander in chief
was himself the apotheosis of corrup-
10
Bureaucrat’s Honor
Benjamin Nathans
Former ambassador Marie Yovanovich being sworn in to testify during the House
Intelligence Committee’s hearings on the impeachment of President Trump, who had tried
to coerce Ukraine into investigating his political rivals by withholding US military aid,
Washington, D.C., November 15, 2019
tion and philistinism. What if his or-
ders were not simply incorrect—that
is, failed to properly align ends and
means— but morally wrong or illegal?
Less than two years into his presi-
dency, one high-ranking civil servant
anonymously published an essay in
The New York Times announcing
that he and like-minded colleagues
were “working diligently from within
to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda
and his worst inclinations.” He justified
this extraordinary stance by citing the
president’s “amorality.” “Anyone who
works with him,” the official declared,
“knows he is not moored to any dis-
cernible first principles that guide his
decision making.” Thwarting certain
decisions by such a president was there-
fore not dishonorable, because those
decisions were unprincipled. As the
“adults in the room,” Anonymous and
his fellow resisters were “trying to do
what’s right even when Donald Trump
won’t.”1 While Trump, understandably
furious, embarked on a witch hunt for
disloyal civil servants, the deep state
functioned as the steady state. Not-
withstanding Weber’s warning, the ap-
paratus did not fall to pieces.
It will hardly come as news that Trump
struck many of those who worked in his
administration as poorly informed, inca-
pable of sustained attention, narcissistic,
and addicted to lying. Still, there are mo-
ments in these memoirs that make one’s
hair stand on end all over again. Accord-
ing to Yovanovitch, at his first meeting
1 earlier debates over the admission of
Anonymous, “I Am Part of the Resis-
tance Inside the Trump Administra-
tion,” The New York Times, September
5, 2018. The author was subsequently
revealed to be Miles Taylor, the chief of
staff for the Department of Homeland
Security.
plar of the strict professional integrity
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images
described by Weber. In her words, she
was “a committed rules-follower.” And
this, it turned out, is what guided her
work as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan
(2005–2008), Armenia (2008–2011),
and Ukraine (2016–2019): getting
these former Soviet republics to fol-
low rules. Rules barring nepotism and
bribery, rules requiring transparency
and genuine competition, rules against
killing or poisoning or throwing acid in
the faces of one’s political rivals. The
rules, in other words, of democracy and
regulated markets.
“I spent much of my time in the For-
eign Service,” Yovanovitch notes, “try-
ing to help reformers inside and outside
government battle against the poor
governance and corruption that were
bleeding their countries.” In such cases,
she argues, America’s values and inter-
ests are in sync: “Corrupt leaders are
inherently untrustworthy as partners,
and the loathing they engender at home
almost inevitably leads to instability
within— and sometimes beyond— their
borders.” There are times, however,
“when we have to balance our interests
against our values, because the US has
important priorities that often require
dealing with unprincipled leaders who
are stealing their country’s heritage.”
That last sentence takes for granted
with Ukrainian president Petro Poro- that the corrupt, rule-breaking leaders
shenko, in 2017, Trump turned to his na- with whom America must sometimes
tional security adviser, H. R. McMaster, deal— faute de mieux— are only to be
to ask whether there were American found abroad. Indeed, the Foreign Ser-
troops in the breakaway Donbas region vice catechism of balancing American
of eastern Ukraine. In November 2018, values and interests, in which Yovano-
when Russian forces fired on and seized vitch appears to be a fervent believer, is
Ukrainian military vessels in interna- built on such an assumption. But what
tional waters in the Black Sea, Trump if a clash between American values
fell into what Vindman describes as “de- and interests originates at home? The
cision paralysis,” unable to contemplate final third of Lessons from the Edge
any course of action that might upset tracks Yovanovitch’s dawning realiza-
Vladimir Putin. His speaking style, even tion that, as corrupt as Ukraine may
at closed-door meetings, struck Hill as have been (when she arrived in 2016,
“a word fog,” a “head-spinning, incoher- it ranked 131st out of 176 countries on
ent monologue . . . in which you stumbled Transparency International’s Corrup-
around looking for meaning.” tion Perceptions Index, tied with Rus-
Born in Canada to immigrant parents sia), the greatest threat to her effort to
whose families had fled Bolshevik Rus- promote the rule of law in Kyiv came
sia, Yovanovitch inherited their sense not from Ukrainian politicians and oli-
of displacement. Throughout her child- garchs, but from the White House.
hood in Connecticut, where her parents It’s not that Trump wanted Ukraine
worked as boarding school teachers, “I to be corrupt; he seems not to have
just wanted to fit in.” The title of her cared. What he did want, starting in
memoir, Lessons from the Edge, cap- 2018, was to tarnish the reputation of
tures the feeling of liminality. It also al- the person he correctly intuited was
ludes to the political hit job by Trump’s most likely to be the Democratic nom-
uncivil servant Rudolph Giuliani that inee for president in 2020, Joe Biden.
brought Yovanovitch to the edge of As vice-president, Biden had period-
professional ruin, as well as to the place ically stepped in to enforce the State
where it happened: Ukraine means “at Department’s anticorruption efforts
the edge” or “borderland.” It may even in Ukraine, at one point demanding
gesture toward Yovanovitch’s experi- the resignation of Ukraine’s supremely
ence as a woman in the Foreign Service, venal prosecutor general, Viktor
which she joined in 1986, when the State Shokin, as a condition for an American
Department’s upper ranks were still fa- loan guarantee. Biden’s relationship to
mously “pale, male, and Yale.” Lessons corruption in Ukraine was more com-
from the Edge portrays an American plicated than that, however. In 2014
diplomatic corps just beginning to grap- the Ukrainian energy company Bu-
ple with the implications of its relentless risma Holdings, owned by the oligarch
rhetoric of meritocracy, recapitulating Mykola Zlochevsky, appointed Hunter
Biden, the vice-president’s son, to its
women and access for ethnic and racial board of directors. Technically this
minorities to the Ivy League. may not qualify as nepotism, but it bore
It helped, of course, that Yovanovitch an uncomfortable resemblance to the
was pale and Princeton. Despite or per- Chinese practice of placing relatives of
haps because of the everyday sexism at senior leaders (so- called princelings)
Foggy Bottom, she became an exem- in lucrative business relationships with
The New York Review
 Books to look out for this Spring

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April 21, 2022 11

foreign companies. It looked a lot like
the corruption the United States was
pressuring Ukraine to eliminate.
One of the central methods of disin-
formation is to turn the truth upside
down. This has the advantage of pro-
ducing assertions that have a toehold
in the truth, because they draw on the
same data but offer the opposite inter-
pretation with maximally disorienting
effects. Trump and Giuliani are mas-
ters of this dark art. Hence their claim
that Biden had forced Shokin’s resigna-
tion because he was investigating cor-
ruption charges at Burisma Holdings
that would have implicated Biden’s
son. In truth, Shokin failed to inves-
tigate Burisma when there was ample
reason to do so, just as he avoided in-
vestigating other corrupt Ukrainian
companies. Hence their claim that
Ukraine (not Russia) had attempted to
manipulate the US election in 2016 in
order to help Hillary Clinton (not Don-
ald Trump). Hence the claim that Am-
bassador Yovanovitch had facilitated
Kyiv’s covert effort to help Clinton win
the election, that she had handed a “do
not prosecute” list to Shokin’s succes-
sor as Ukraine’s prosecutor general in
a continuing effort to protect Hunter
Biden, and—for good measure—that
she had embezzled US government
funds intended to assist Ukraine.
The narrative of Yovanovitch as a
rogue ambassador was not simply fic-
titious; it was the exact opposite of
the truth. She was a relentless rule
follower, a quality that did not endear
her to those Ukrainian politicians and
oligarchs who did not share her goal of
promoting transparent governance of
Ukraine’s state- owned companies. As
her position became more untenable,
Gordon Sondland, the real estate mag-
nate whom Trump had appointed am-
bassador to the European Union after
he donated $1 million to Trump’s inau-
guration committee, gave Yovanovitch
some advice:
You know the president, and even
if you don’t know the president
personally, you know what he’s
like and what he likes. Put out a
tweet about how much you love the
president. . . . You need to go big or
go home.
The idea of pledging fealty to an in-
dividual struck Yovanovitch as “down-
right un-American. We had disposed
of that idea in 1776.” She watched in
anguish and disbelief as Giuliani, col-
laborating with Ukrainian politicians
put off by her anticorruption efforts,
conspired—with assistance from Fox
News and the Hill journalist John
Solomon—to trash her reputation.
The ethos of nonpartisanship, or what
Weber called “moral discipline and
self- denial,” effectively inhibited civil
servant Yovanovitch both from “going
big” and from fighting back publicly.
Even more troubling, the State Depart-
ment, her employer for over three de-
cades, declined to come to her defense.
To be sure, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo had pledged the “uncompro-
mising personal and professional in-
tegrity” of the Foreign Service, vowing
“unstinting respect in word and deed
for my colleagues,” in contrast to the
contempt that his predecessor, Rex
Tillerson, had shown toward America’s
diplomatic corps. In reality, however,
12
Pompeo was content to let America’s Vindman initially flunked out of college When I asked Vindman a year later
persistent ambassador to Ukraine twist before finding his footing in the army, (well before his memoir was pub-
in the wind until the career- ending where he embarked on a career that lished) to recount to my students at
message arrived in April 2019: “The took him to South Korea, Germany, Penn how he had arrived at the mo-
president has lost confidence in you.” and Iraq. In Fallujah, he was wounded mentous decision to report misconduct
Yovanovitch went home. by a roadside bomb and received the by the president of the United States,
Giuliani had now delivered the first Purple Heart, among other honors. In his answer was disarmingly simple: he
installment of what was intended to 2008 he became a foreign area officer, just followed the rules. In the army, if
be a grand quid pro quo. He had rid serving as military attaché in the US a commanding officer issues an order
Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs of embassies in Kyiv and Moscow. that you suspect is illegal, you have not
an inconvenient American ambassa- Vindman’s memoir, Here, Right just the right but the duty to report it.
dor and thereby set the stage for them Matters, reads like a cross between a As Vindman elaborates in Here, Right
to deliver the desired payback: dirt on bildungsroman and The 7 Habits of Matters:
Joe Biden. Even as Trump was issuing Highly Effective People. It brims with
thunderous denials that Russia had in- hard- earned maxims: Don’t just start The duty to report misconduct is
terfered on his behalf in the 2016 elec- over; keep starting over. Be alert to a critical component of US Army
tion, he and his henchmen were actively both the absence of the normal and the leadership, as well as of the oath
soliciting interference by Ukraine to presence of the abnormal. Trust your I’d taken to support and defend
help him win a second term in 2020. gut. Don’t self- deter. These are lessons the US Constitution. Despite the
This quintessentially Trumpian “deal” Vindman learned in the army, but they president’s constitutional role as
climaxed with the now infamous July became life lessons too. Like Yovano- commander in chief, the head of
25, 2019, phone call between the Amer- vitch, he developed a deep loyalty to the military that I had spent de-
ican president and his recently elected the institution through which he served cades serving—in fact, because of
Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr his adoptive country— and to that insti- his role—I had an obligation to re-
Zelensky. Earlier that month, Trump tution’s rules. Like the Foreign Service, port what he’d done.
had abruptly and without explanation the US military prides itself on being
put a hold on nearly $400 million in nonpartisan, an ethos heightened by Nobody else in the room, he surmised,
security assistance earmarked by Con- the imperative of subordinating the “was going to do anything about it.”
gress for Ukraine, including $250 mil- armed forces to civilian authority. A In his book Exit, Voice, and Loy-
lion in military aid. During the call, politically partisan military might well alty (1970), the social scientist Albert
Trump told Zelensky, “I would like you cause the apparatus of governance to O. Hirschman offered a taxonomy of
to do us a favor.” He then mentioned fall to pieces. behaviors by disaffected citizens, con-
several favors, among them an investiga- On July 25, when Trump asked sumers, and members of organizations.
tion of the Bidens and their “horrible” Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, What drives some people to quit (by
activities in Ukraine. Trump also told Vindman knew that what he had just emigrating, buying goods elsewhere,
Zelensky that “the former ambassador heard was “certainly awful and pos- or resigning) and others to speak out
from the United States, the woman, was sibly unlawful.” He was all too famil- (in street protests, to the manager, to
bad news” and, channeling his inner iar with people asking for these kinds their employer)? How do feelings of
Don (the Mafia variety), “she’s going to of “favors” in places like Russia and loyalty complicate the decision to exit
go through some things.” Ukraine. Did other White House staff or speak out— or remain silent? Re-
react similarly to Trump’s words? One markably, Vindman appears to have
of them, the senior attorney at the NSC , experienced no inner struggle between
A mong the White House person- John Eisenberg, subsequently warned his loyalty to his adoptive country and
nel listening in on that phone call was Vindman “not to tell anyone else about speaking out against its leader. Rules
Alexander Vindman. Born in Soviet what the president had said on the call.” were rules. Within minutes of the tele-
Ukraine, he arrived in the United But that’s precisely what he did, report- phone conversation between Trump
States, like Yovanovitch, as a tod- ing it to the NSC’s chief ethics counsel, and Zelensky, he relayed his concern
dler, brought by his widowed father to who happened to be his twin brother, to the office of the chief ethics coun-
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aka “Little Eugene Vindman. “If what I just heard sel. It helped that army regulations
Odessa,” where signs and conversations becomes public,” Alexander Vindman mandated not just when to speak out,
in Russian (and Ukrainian) were every- told his brother, “the president will be but how: not to the press, not on so-
where. A self- confessed late bloomer, impeached.” cial media, but in-house, up the chain
of command. Which is precisely what
Vindman did.
It took six weeks for what he heard
to become public, thanks to an anon-
ymous whistleblower at the CIA who
WORK sent a damning memo to the inspector
general of the intelligence commu-
It was thus the fashion to circulate nity, Michael Atkinson, who was then
forced by a congressional subpoena to
around the room, a holding-box for owned art,
share it with the House Intelligence
in a clockwise arc
Committee. Vindman’s memoir sheds
To speak in soft tones light neither on the identity of the whis-
with the owner, the owner’s daughter, the curator tleblower nor on the manner by which
in the voluminous beige hat and gloves, the content of the July 25 phone call
the handler, the event coordinator’s assistant for lighting, reached him or her. Vindman also does
the former students not indicate what he would have done
the melancholy receptionist who writes poetry had the charge of presidential miscon-
the videographer who grins duct not gone public. There was ample
catlike reason to suspect that his in-house re-
without fault, locked behind her camera porting of Trump’s solicitation of for-
eign interference was going nowhere.
in some kind of bliss
To begin with, the transcript of the con-
They will speak of this later in the biographies
versation prepared by the White House
as the midpoint of her lakes-and-cities period (the phone call itself was not recorded)
characterized by a Dionysian attitude omitted several crucial moments, and
prone to outburst, insight when Vindman, drawing on his own
Scenes of life without European influence notes from the call, attempted to in-
sert them, he was rebuffed. Even more
While the sky turned that night on its gangrenous hind leg alarming, Eisenberg had arranged to
morose, allowed yet her star store the transcript not on the usual
server but on a special server dedicated
—Wendy Xu to covert operations and other highly
sensitive data, with tightly restricted
access even within the NSC .
It cannot be said, therefore, that
the army’s procedures for reporting
The New York Review
 Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective

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April 21, 2022 13

misconduct by a commanding officer
worked. What can be said is that Vind-
man followed those procedures to the
letter, and that it took extraordinary
courage to do so. But perhaps not only
courage. A recurring motif in Here,
Right Matters is the realization— first
by others, then gradually by Vindman
himself—that his fervent patriotism,
loyalty, and devotion to rules were ac-
companied, and perhaps in part en-
abled, by a certain political naiveté. A
senior military figure had warned him,
before he took up the position at the
NSC , “This will be the most dangerous
and challenging environment you’ve
ever worked in. Including combat
assignments.”
By his own admission, Vindman—
“an infantry officer, not a political
UPI /Alamy
Alexander Vindman being sworn in to
testify in the House impeachment inquiry,
November 19, 2019
animal”—found the minefields in
Washington, D.C., perhaps “harder
to read and respond to” than those in
Fallujah. It does not diminish his su-
preme moral discipline and self- denial
(to borrow Weber’s terms again) to
note that he appears to have been clue-
less about the likely repercussions of
reporting Trump’s behind-the-scenes
malfeasance. Others who witnessed
Trump’s misconduct— and there was
plenty to witness, from the 2016 elec-
tion campaign to January 6, 2021— but
who were mindful of their future ca-
reers remained silent.
Like the State Department during
the smear campaign against Yovano-
vitch, the army remained silent when
Vindman began to be pilloried by Re-
publicans as anti-Trump, un-American
(was he not an immigrant?), or perhaps
a tool of Ukrainian intelligence opera-
tives. When the White House blocked
his scheduled promotion to the rank
of colonel (a significant advancement
in the army’s hierarchy) and later fired
him and his brother from the NSC , only
retired military officers spoke out in
his defense. It is unclear what combi-
nation of desire to remain apart from
the political fray along with personal
and institutional self-preservation
was at work. As one retired army
officer and military historian (who
wished to remain anonymous) told me,
“The military will not be open about
this case as long as Donald Trump is
alive.”
14
Among those who sensed a certain
naiveté in Vindman was the person
who hired him at the NSC , Fiona Hill.
The coauthor of a penetrating book
on Vladimir Putin, 2 Hill is a promi-
nent analyst of Russian affairs known
for savvy judgment and independence
of mind. If the word “here” in the title
of Vindman’s memoir proudly refers
to the United States, in Hill’s There
Is Nothing for You Here it refers, dev-
astatingly, to the North of England,
where she grew up as the daughter
of a coal miner and a midwife. In her
telling, the pervasive poverty, unem-
ployment, and hopelessness of the
North not only shaped her childhood
(“There’s nothing for you here” is what
her father told her when she graduated
from high school) but go a long way
toward explaining today’s right-wing
populism, and not only in the United
Kingdom.
Hill’s book straddles, not entirely
successfully, the genres of memoir and
policy paper. The autobiographical ele-
ments are vivid: She describes growing
up with no car, no telephone, no idea
what it means to own a house or for a
parent to have a career as opposed to a
job. Her school suffered from rampant
vandalism; kids who did well on tests
got beaten up. A disastrous interview
for admission to Oxford highlighted
the barriers faced by working- class stu-
dents with the wrong accents and the
wrong clothes. Supportive parents and
mentors, however, along with an all-
important scholarship to St. Andrews,
began to open up new possibilities,
including a study-abroad year in Mos-
cow in 1987. For the first time in her
life, Hill stopped dreading being asked
where she was from and what her fa-
ther did: Russians appreciated that she
came from a world-famous coal-mining
area and that her father was a miner.
After Moscow came graduate training
at Harvard, then positions in Washing-
ton think tanks and eventually in the
US government.
Like Yovanovitch, Hill candidly de-
scribes what it’s like to be a woman in
the foreign policy establishment: the
pervasive sexism, lower salaries, and
impostor syndrome. (Along with most
male memoirists, Vindman does not
mention what it’s like to be a man.) One
of her early encounters with Trump
was in connection with a phone call
between the American and Russian
presidents. Hill was the only Russian
speaker among the advisers listening
in on the conversation, and when it
was over, she wanted to call attention
to some subtly menacing aspects of Pu-
tin’s remarks that the simul-translation
had missed. Trump, mistaking her for
a secretary, requested that she type a
copy of the press release describing
how friendly Putin was and what a good
call it had been. Hill froze, speechless,
only to hear Trump bark, “Hey, dar-
lin’, are you listening? Are you paying
attention?” Soon, though, no one was
mistaking her for a secretary, because
Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus,
gave her a new, unofficial title (unbe-
knownst to Hill): “the Russia bitch.”
To be fair, Trump treated the entire
National Security Council like a sec-
retary. “He thought we all carried out
2
Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr.
Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (new
and expanded edition, Brookings Insti-
tution, 2015).
basic administrative functions,” Hill
notes.
Coming into government from his
personally branded family enter-
prise and the world of reality tele-
vision, where he was the one and
only, exclusive boss who set his
own agenda, the whole concept of
an autonomous advisory body was
entirely alien to him. Why did he
even need this? He’d got this far
in business and in politics by fol-
lowing his own instincts. He knew
everything he needed to know.
This is not how the deep state likes to
be treated. Presidents do not always
follow the advice of experts employed
by their administration, nor could they,
Patsy Lynch/Alamy
Fiona Hill testifying in the
House impeachment inquiry,
November 21, 2019
insofar as different experts often give
conflicting advice. But not paying at-
tention to the advice of experts un-
dermines the basis of their collective
honor. It destroys the implicit contract
between the deep state of expertise and
the visible state of governance, accord-
ing to which the first delivers the fruits
of its labor and the second consumes
those fruits rather than letting them rot.
Sexism and denigration of expertise
notwithstanding, Hill regards herself as
a refugee from the British class system.
“The United States gave me opportu-
nities,” she writes, “that I would never
have had in the United Kingdom,”
while noting that in America, race per-
forms many of the same subtly exclu-
sionary functions as class and accent
in Great Britain. In fact, the leitmotif
of There Is Nothing for You Here is
the postindustrial polarization that she
sees plaguing not just the US and the
UK but Russia as well. Hill is unusual
in that she has combined a sharply
critical assessment of Putin and Rus-
sian foreign policy (long predating the
Kremlin’s latest assault on Ukraine)
with the conviction that post- Soviet
Russia’s social and economic problems
are fundamentally similar to those of
the United States and Great Britain.
All three countries substantially dis-
mantled their welfare states in the final
decades of the twentieth century. In
all three, she sees the resulting rise in
inequality, narrowing of social mobility,
and extreme concentration of opportu-
nity in large urban centers eroding the
foundations of democracy. “Unless we
figure out a way to solve [these prob-
lems],” she warns, “Russia’s fate and its
slide into authoritarianism since 2000
could well be our own.”
Hill’s comparative analysis of socio-
economic malaise, and the warning
that accompanies it, should be taken
seriously. But her interest seems to lie
exclusively (and repetitively) in cherry-
picked similarities among the three
countries. Comparative analysis is also
supposed to reveal contrasts. It’s true
that America, Great Britain, and post-
Soviet Russia all scaled back their wel-
fare systems in the name of promoting
capitalism (under the banner of deregu-
lation, free markets, small government,
privatization, and/or shock therapy).
But Russia’s economy, society, and pol-
itics profoundly differed from those of
the US and the UK before as well as
after that process played out. Russians
are not so much politically polarized,
like Brits and Americans, as politically
anemic.
Even more important, the manner in
which economic and social discontent
translates into political shifts (whether
toward authoritarianism or in other
directions) is significantly different in
Russia, where there are no visible alter-
natives to Putin— credible candidates
having been exiled, jailed, or killed—
and no genuinely competitive political
parties, apart from the Communist
Party. Trump, Putin, and Boris John-
son may share a charismatic ability
to tap populist grievances, along with
a my- country-first approach to inter-
national relations, but the way Putin
came to power, consolidated power,
and has exercised power for over two
decades suggests that the Russian
state, with no institutional checks and
balances to speak of, belongs to a dif-
ferent breed.
When Congress held impeachment
hearings in fall 2019, Trump admin-
istration officials subpoenaed by the
House Intelligence Committee came
under enormous pressure not to com-
ply. The State Department sought to
keep Yovanovitch from testifying;
the army did the same to Vindman.
They courageously defied the pres-
sure, affirming Congress’s rightful au-
thority in the face of noncompliance
by the executive branch. Hill, back at
Brookings after resigning from her
job at the NSC on July 15 (ten days
before the Trump-Zelensky phone
call), faced no such pressure from
her employer. The American pub-
lic was treated to the extraordinary
spectacle of three valiant immigrants
offering clear- eyed and damning evi-
dence of misconduct by the American
president.
It is hard to escape the conclusion
that these Americans by choice, as Yo-
vanovitch puts it, harbored a deeper de-
votion than many of their native-born
colleagues—including John Eisen-
berg and John Bolton—to American
ideals and to the moral discipline that
Weber deemed essential for effective
government. Did their testimony help
discredit Donald Trump and thereby
contribute to his defeat in November
2020? That is difficult to assess. But it
unquestionably led to the reversal of
his self-serving hold on assistance to
Ukraine, the geopolitical significance
of which is now clear to all. Q
The New York Review
 S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

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April 21, 2022 15


Customs
by Solmaz Sharif.
Graywolf, 86 pp., $16.00 (paper)
If what you want is on the other side,
a closed door might become an image
of your desire. In ancient Greek poetry,
this motif had a name: paraclausithy-
ron, “a lament beside a door.” In Latin
poetry it was called exclusus ama-
tor, “excluded lover.” “Closed doors
are useful,” complained Ovid in the
Amores, “as a defense for besieged cit-
ies, but why, in times of peace, do you
fear arms?” “Unscrew the locks from
the doors!” Whitman demanded in
“Song of Myself.” “Unscrew the doors
themselves from their jambs!” In mo-
ments like these, the closed door is not
merely a barrier; it becomes a screen
onto which longing is projected— and
thereby made plain for all to see.
Closed doors are everywhere in
Solmaz Sharif’s second collection of
poems, Customs. What can they tell us
about what this poet wants? Sometimes,
as in the examples above, the doors pre-
vent the consummation of erotic desire:
“One against whose door//I knocked,
still knock/to be let in, beloved.” But
elsewhere that desire “to be let in”
moves beyond the merely erotic and
suggests a wish (however frustrated or
ambivalent) for other kinds of inclu-
sion, reunion, and affiliation.
Ancient though the motif may be,
Sharif’s closed doors point to new
possibilities for the lyric. For at least
the last two centuries, it has been cus-
tomary to imagine the lyric poet as
solitary, as a voice speaking to itself,
whose words readers can only rehearse
in their own solitude. This is how John
Stuart Mill distinguished between po-
etry and mere eloquence: “Eloquence
is heard; poetry is overheard.” Citing a
Burns lyric (“My Heart’s in the High-
lands”) that seemed to him to epit-
omize poetry’s fundamental nature,
Mill concluded, “That song has always
seemed to us like the lament of a pris-
oner in a solitary cell, ourselves listen-
ing, unseen, in the next.” Sharif’s poet,
like Mill’s singer, is aware of her soli-
tude. But she’s also aware of the condi-
tions that have produced it.
Asked recently to comment on one
of her new poems, Sharif wrote, “Every
once in a while, I try to consider the
original thorn that begets my writing.
It shifts, this thorn, but this is one: the
hours spent waiting at international
terminals.” An airport might seem an
unlikely place to find the muse. But
what waiting in those terminals has re-
vealed, according to Sharif, is the tight
weave of biography and history, the
way the forking paths of particular lives
have had to bend to the cold demands
of the nation-state: “And how this wait
reminds you of the threat your being
together poses on a national level. How
it is to recognize then the ‘might have
otherwise been’ of your imagined life.”
Precisely because international termi-
nals are such highly regulated spaces,
they make visible the fantasies of free-
dom held by the exhausted travelers
passing through their checkpoints, the
anxious desires of those waiting, on the
other side, for a glimpse of the arrivals.
The airport, in this sense, can feel like
another closed door.
16
In Between States
Kamran Javadizadeh
Solmaz Sharif; illustration by Karen Barbour
W hat is behind that door? How might
life otherwise have been? Sharif was
born in 1983 to Iranian parents in Tur-
key and grew up, from her infancy, in
the United States. Those basic facts—
and the inevitably varied and complex
life that has unfolded from them—have
had to accommodate others: in 1953,
MI6 and the CIA , seeking to secure
Anglo-American claims to Iranian oil,
orchestrated a coup in Iran, laying the
groundwork for decades of autocratic
rule by the Shah; 1 in 1979 that same
Shah was overthrown in the Islamic
Revolution; between 1980 and 1988,
Iran and Iraq fought a bloody war in
which the US provided financial sup-
port and military hardware to Iraq;
since 1979, the US has imposed a series
of nearly constant, interlocking sanc-
tions on Iran; in 2017 Donald Trump
issued first one and then another ex-
ecutive order banning travel from Iran
to the United States. “According to
most/definitions, I have never/been at
war,” Sharif once wrote. “According to
mine,/most of my life/spent there.”
Sharif’s first book, Look (2016), in
which those defiant lines appeared, di-
agnosed the abuses of language that had
helped to make that war invisible, or in
any case palatable, to most of the Amer-
icans in whose names it was waged. She
plumbed the United States Department
of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and
Associated Terms for a lexicon of ordi-
nary English words that had been rede-
fined as military jargon. These are in
1 hand
For an account that argues that oil—
rather than cold war–era concern about
the spread of communism—was what
prompted the coup, see Ervand Abra-
hamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA , and
the Roots of Modern US- Iranian Rela-
tions (New Press, 2013).
small caps throughout Look: seemingly
benign words like SCAN, DISTANCE,
DRAFT; portentous phrases like CON-
TINUOUS STRIP IMAGERY, PER-
MANENT ECHO, CATASTROPHIC
EVENT. Often they crop up in domestic
scenes, far from any obvious battlefield,
as in this description of the poet’s father:
“his eyes// SENSITIVE when he passes
advice to me, like I’m his// SEQUEL,
like we’re all a// SERIAL caught on Ira-
nian satellite TV.” The implication is that
American imperialism has underwritten
even the domestic life of an Iranian fam-
ily living in the United States.
At its farthest reaches, Look gestures
toward another life, dimly perceived in
an imagined space and on an alternate
timeline. In “Personal Effects,” the col-
lection’s longest poem (its title alludes
to a soldier’s possessions, the local con-
sequences of global conflict, and the
literary production of private feeling),
that space is again found in the liminal
zone of an airport:
As if a film projection caught
in theater dust, I play it
out: I approach you
in the new Imam Khomeini
Airport,
fluorescent- lit linoleum, you walk
up
to meet me, both palms
behind your back
like a haji. You stoop, extend a
Hello. Do you know who I am?
The “you” whom the poet approaches
in this passage is a ghostly version of
Sharif’s paternal uncle (in Farsi, her
amoo), a draftee who died in the Iran–
Iraq War shortly before the poet was
born—and decades before the Imam
Khomeini Airport opened. The poem
is, among other things, a fantasy of rec-
ognition, the restoration of a bond that
never had a chance to form. Sharif’s
metaphor for this kind of fantasy is cin-
ema, which allows for provisional im-
mersion in collectively held fiction, but
here what makes possible that fictional
world—the uncle who returns from
death as though from pilgrimage, the
niece (at her desk, in the airport) who
answers him, “Yes, Amoo”—is not film
but the double life, the “as if,” of poetry.
S ometimes that double life can feel like
no life at all. That feeling is a recurrent
preoccupation of Sharif’s enthralling
new collection; this is, Customs seems to
say, what it has been like to exist on both
sides of a closed door. The volume’s first
poem is also printed on its back cover.
Called simply “America,” its thin strip
of lines testifies to the price of having
passed through that narrow door into this
country, without ever having resolved the
desire for what lay on its other side:
I had
to. I
learned it.
It was
if. If
was nice.
I said
sure. One
more thing.
One more
thing. Eat
it said.
It felt
good. I
was dead.
I learned
it. I
had to.
Enjambments betray the ambivalence
of these declarations. The poem’s sim-
ple first sentence—“I had/to.”— might
at first, because of the line break, imply
that this “I” is making a statement
about what, at some undefined point in
the past, she possessed: I had a home, I
had a family. But the second line, which
completes the sentence, transforms
that possibility into a statement of com-
pulsion. The rest of the poem unfolds
the implications of that dispossession:
the speaker’s learned acquiescence (“I
said/sure”), the recursive nature of the
nation’s demands (“One/more thing./
One more/thing.”), the narcotic allure
of being taken in (“It felt/good. I/was
dead.”). “America” ends with a chiastic
reversal of its first two lines, just as the
poem itself is printed first and last in the
book. These are first words that are also
last words; a poem of entry and a poem
of exit—the speech of someone who has
been reduced almost to nothing.
What is it like, that almost? What
“I” is possible under such conditions?
These are questions, for Sharif, about
the power of poetry, its limits and af-
fordances. In the poem “He, Too,” the
questions are dramatized in another air-
port scene, a conversation between the
poet “upon [her] return to the US” (a
pun that suggests the contingency of her
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18
inclusion in the American first-person
plural) and the US Customs and Border
Protection officer who interrogates her:
What do you teach?
Poetry.
I hate poetry, the officer says,
I only like writing
where you can make an argument.
Anything he asks, I must answer.
This, too, he likes.
The traveler looks powerless as she faces
this agent of the state. He is a brutish av-
atar of Marianne Moore’s ironic position
in “Poetry,” which famously begins, “I,
too, dislike it”— one source, perhaps, for
Sharif’s title (he, too, dislikes poetry).
The officer compels her speech even as
he devalues its form. But the poet holds
her own kind of power in abeyance.
What she doesn’t tell him, she shows us:
I don’t tell him
he will be in a poem
where the argument will be
anti-American.
Poetry gives Sharif the power to turn
the words of the state back onto itself;
it is, despite the distinction the officer
wants to draw, what Emerson once
called “a metre-making argument,” a
way of casting thought into being.
But if Moore is one source for the
poem’s title, then Langston Hughes
is another: “I, too, sing America.” As
Hughes’s biographer Arnold Ramper-
sad explains, Hughes wrote that poem
in 1924 after his passport had been
stolen, leaving him stranded in Genoa,
unable for a period of weeks to secure
passage on racially segregated ships
back to the US. For Hughes as for
Sharif, in other words, admission into
the American body politic is contin-
gent on the accommodations one can
make to the claims of whiteness— or
else on poetry’s capacity to imagine a
different kind of belonging.2
At the airport, the officer can hold
the traveler at his discretion, but, in her
poem, the poet can do the same to the
officer:
I place him here, puffy,
pink, ringed in plexi, pleased
with his own wit
and spittle.
This is a version of what J. L. Austin
called “performative” language—its
utterance constitutes the action that it
names. The racism that had structured
the encounter is transformed into po-
etic justice; the whiteness of the officer,
2
For a sociological account of Iranian
Americans’ fraught relation to the cate-
gory of whiteness, see Neda Maghbou-
leh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian
Americans and the Everyday Politics of
Race (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Maghbouleh devotes a chapter to a dis-
cussion of how travel between the US and
Iran draws out the racialized ambiguities
that Iranian Americans frequently navi-
gate. For more on the maritime context
of Hughes’s poetry, see Harris Feinsod,
“Vehicular Networks and the Modernist
OTHERPRESS.COM Seaways: Crane, Lorca, Novo, Hughes,”
American Literary History, Vol. 27,
No. 4 (Winter 2015).
which had formerly signified his smug
power, now, in a series of alliterative
plosives (puffy, pink, plexi, pleased),
marks his denuded state, makes him
exhibit A in the poem’s demystifying
argument. That grants Sharif, in her
poem’s last lines, a measure of freedom:
“Saving the argument/I am let in//I am
let in until.” “He, Too,” which Sharif
has said was “written in between im-
migration bans,” was first published on
the website of the Academy of Amer-
ican Poets; the traveler at the airport
and the poem she goes on to write have
both gained entry, in other words, into
respectable, national institutions. But
the poem ends without any final punc-
tuation, which suggests that both forms
of inclusion have been provisional.
Sharif faces a paradox: the language
in which she writes her poems has also
been the site of her dispossession. A
poem titled “The Master’s House”
is a relentless litany of accommoda-
tions, large and small: “To let go of the
grudge,” “To revel in face serums,” “To
disrobe when the agent asks you to.” In
its final lines, that paradox becomes a
crisis for life and for poetry:
To recall the Texan that held a
shotgun to your father’s chest,
sending him falling backward,
pleading, and the words came
to him in Farsi
To be jealous of this, his most
desperate language
To lament the fact of your lam-
entations in English, English
being your first defeat
To finally admit out loud then, I
want to go home
To stand outside your grand-
mother’s house
To know, for example, that in
Farsi the present perfect is
called the relational past, and
is used at times to describe a
historic event whose effect is
still relevant today, transcend-
ing the past
To say, for example, Shah dictator
bude-ast translates to The Shah
was a dictator, but more literally
to The Shah is-was a dictator
To have a tense of is-was, the
residue of it over the clear bulb
of your eyes
To walk cemetery after cemetery
in these States and nary a grave-
stone reading Solmaz
To know no nation will be home
until one does
To do this in order to do the other
thing, the wild thing, though
you’ve forgotten what it was
The grammatical example is telling:
English wants to relegate the Shah’s
dictatorship to the past, whereas Farsi
carries a different view of history, in
which Iran’s postrevolutionary reality
cannot be described except in light of
the autocratic rule that preceded it and
that was sponsored by the world’s two
most powerful anglophone countries.
Such grammars structure our lives. To
read the tombstones in a nation’s cem-
eteries is to contemplate the bounded-
ness of life within its borders.
“The master’s tools will never disman-
tle the master’s house”: Audre Lorde’s
dictum about the inability of white fem-
inist theory to intervene meaningfully
in the lives of Black women provides
Sharif with her poem’s title and with a
description of something like the bind
she is in. Poetry— or rather the poetry
The New York Review

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19
she can write, which is to say poetry
in English— seems, at the end of this
poem, no more than a diversionary tac-
tic. And the danger inherent in such tac-
tics is that they become our lives.
How can a poet escape this bind? One
answer might be to go home. But the
poems in Sharif’s new book acknowledge
the impossibility of satisfying diasporic
nostalgia. There is a poem in Customs
called “Learning Persian” whose every
line is simply a phonetic transliteration
of a Farsi word that is borrowed from
a European language (“deek-tah-tor,”
“fahn-te-zi”): the point, I take it, is
that those who look to a mother tongue
or a nation of origin with a longing for
“home” are likely to find that empire has
gotten there first, has always preceded
one’s own fantasy.
“No crueler word than return,”
writes Sharif in “Without Which,” one
of the extraordinary long poems that
conclude the book. “No greater lie. //
The gates may open but to return. /
More gates were built inside.” Here is
how that poem begins:
]]
I have long loved what one can
carry.
I have long left all that can be left
behind in the burning cities and
lost
even loss— not cared much
or learned to. I turned and looked
and not even salt did I become.
]]
SPRING 2022
D ISTR IB UTED B Y
PR INCETON UNIVER SITY PR ESS
O NLINE AT ZO NEB O O K S.ORG
20
Those right square brackets recur three
times per page throughout the poem’s
twenty pages, sometimes separating
one group of stanzas from another,
as though to indicate a section break,
sometimes marking an otherwise blank
page. The effect is striking and disori-
enting: the brackets suggest the kind of
editorial intervention that one sees in
modern editions of ancient texts, to in-
dicate gaps in the record, places where
something now irrecoverable once
stood. That they are only right brackets
suggests a cordoning off of the past, a
paring away of the historical self. They
show us, in other words, what it looks
like to have “lost//even loss.”
“Without Which” is a poem about liv-
ing a life organized around the aware-
ness of such loss. “Some days,” Sharif
writes, near poem’s end, “I am almost
happy having never/lived there.” Other
days bring other feelings:
Would you have knocked for me?
I ask the neighbor.
I have been, he said.
Then I felt his knocking
]]
inside my chest.
This is followed by a page and a half of
blank space, with four instances of the
doubled brackets, a replication of the
knocking pulse just described, the echo
of eros unfulfilled and retrospectively
imagined, the sound in your head after
you suddenly stop running. Desire re-
mains, in the poem, unmet; the life that
might otherwise have been recedes
from view.
T he book’s final poem, “An Other-
wise,” weaves together lyric interiority
and political demystification in a way
that feels altogether new. The bones
of narrative— a story of return and
disappointment— are still here:
When I went
I found nothing.
It died there: desire.
All fantasy
of return.
Before arriving at that story, though, the
poem begins in prose with an older his-
tory and a different figure at its center:
Downwind from a British Petro-
leum refinery, my mother is remov-
ing the books she was ordered to
remove from the school library.
Russians, mostly. Gorky’s Mother
among them. The Shah is coming
to tour the school. It is winter.
Here is the “relational past,” at a scale
both global and familial: the Western
claims to Iranian oil, the royalist anx-
iety about anti- capitalist influence,
the persistence of the maternal figure,
even in the face of attempts to expunge
that figure from the record. The po-
et’s mother and her classmates await
the Shah’s arrival and do what their
teacher tells them to do: “Wave, girls,
the teacher says. //My mother, waving.”
How, though, to read the mother’s
wave, how to respond to its recurring
gesture? On the one hand, a wave is
a gesture of accommodation, not al-
together unlike the noxious accom-
modations cataloged in “The Master’s
House.” But, on the other hand, Sharif
sees behind her mother’s wave a revo-
lutionary future: in the minds of those
waving girls, she writes, the Shah might
have seen, had he cared to look, “rifles
pointed at him.”
Early in the poem, Sharif recounts
a memory of riding in her parents’ car
and hearing a tape recording of “an
ancient poem sung and filled/with cy-
presses, their upright/windscreen for
what must be grown.” In Persian po-
etry, the cypress frequently signifies the
height and grace of the beloved, but it is
also associated with death and mourn-
ing. Both senses are present here. The
mother and daughter who have lived
these last decades in the United States
share a set of memories and a longing
for their source:
What did you leave behind?
We answered:
A pool
lined
with evergreens,
needles falling
into water,
its floor
painted milky
jade. . . .
We wanted
to be asked
of these things.
To tell of them
was to live
again.
Here is neither the articulation of a
naive desire to return home nor a self-
effacing attempt to shed one’s attach-
ment to the past. The old home is no
longer there, but in its place grief—
intimate knowledge of an irrecoverably
lost world— survives. The ancient poem
that was played during childhood car
rides intertwines with a shared memory
and marks, much later, a path to follow:
I began to write of cypresses.
And of small and sharp stone.
And I, on this path, a wooden
handle in my palm, and a blade
at the end of it.
And beyond, their windscreen,
the unseen.
I knew not the poem, only the
weather.
I knew not the listening, only this
landscape, its one clear chan-
nel.
The metal in my teeth caught its
frequency.
The iron shavings of my blood
pulled toward this otherwise.
This is a poet discovering a new
kind of power. Without knowing what
it means— or where or when or even
whether it exists— Sharif writes the
scene she has in mind. That faith in
lyric will not open the door to a lost
world, but neither does it condemn the
poet to Mill’s “solitary cell.” The poem
becomes a place where the teenage
girl whose school the Shah once vis-
ited and the daughter of that girl, the
poet we now read, can meet. A place
from which the world to come might be
found.
An untitled poem precedes “An Oth-
erwise.” It takes the form of a dialogue,
perhaps between mother and daughter,
though that isn’t specified:
Does yours have a landscape?
—Yes.
Because mine has a landscape.
— It is a path of small and sharp
stone and it is lined with cy-
presses.
And are there other paths that you
are aware of?
— One for each of us.
And are you waving?
— We will never see each other.
And are you aware of the waving?
I haven’t been able to stop thinking of
this page since I first read it. Are these
two voices each describing the life they
might otherwise have lived? Memory
puts us on solitary paths. We feel those
paths pull apart in the last three lines,
in which the voices don’t quite address
each other. But Sharif has shown that
memory isn’t merely personal, and that
imagination isn’t merely fantasy. To
read this book is to be made aware of
the waving. Q
The New York Review
 New from
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Russell Meeuf reveals how

racial resentments represented
in Obama-era horror films gave
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and the Make America Great
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Terrance MacMullan
offers a distinctive way
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to change them.

iupress.org

April 21, 2022 21

 The Imaginative Imperative
Authority and Freedom:
A Defense of the Arts
by Jed Perl.
Knopf, 161 pp., $20.00
An anecdote: it is twenty or so years
ago, and two friends, J. and M., are in
Florence, relaxedly on the trail of some
of the city’s less well known artistic trea-
sures. In a nondescript street, M. pauses
before a nondescript church, which, ac-
cording to his Royal Automobile Club
guidebook to Italy, published in 1928—
yes, he has his eccentricities—houses
a fragment of a mural by Filippo Lippi
(1406–1469) that is not to be missed.
They enter the church, deserted on
this weekday morning, and stand in the
spot where what survives of the mural
is supposedly to be found. However, on
the wall there is only an enormous and
exceedingly bad painting, in a heavy
wooden frame, done primarily in weary
shades of brown, depicting a Tuscan
landscape with dim saints and sentinel
cypresses and an unidentifiable bird on
a bough. Not a mural, certainly, and
certainly not a work by Lippi.
Disappointed, the two begin to turn
away, until J. notices, at the right-hand
side of the frame, two rusty hinges,
and, on the other side, a six-inch nail
hammered into the wall at an angle and
acting as a latch. He grasps the nail,
turns it, and, with an effort, draws open
the painting on its hinges. And there
before them on the pristine wall is the
fragment of Lippi’s mural.
It is no more than a ragged- edged
circular patch the size of a large platter.
It depicts the haloed head of John the
Evangelist, Jesus’ favorite disciple, and
behind him, in the middle distance, a
servant woman hanging out washing
on a clothesline, with a frisky little
white dog gamboling at her feet. After
a long, silent consideration of the work,
J. draws the big brown picture to the
wall, turns the nail to latch it shut, and
the two friends depart.
Years pass, and one day the pair find
themselves in Florence again. J. sug-
gests that they should stop and have
another look at Lippi’s Saint John.
The trouble is, M. has forgotten which
church they visited on that previous oc-
casion, and he no longer has his antique
RAC guidebook. So the precious frag-
ment is relost, and who can say when it
will be found again, if ever?
This raises a number of questions, the
most interesting one being: In what cat-
egory or condition of art does the Lippi
fragment now exist? Perhaps only the
two friends know it is there, and they
cannot find it. Yet undoubtedly it is still
a work of art, which in its present state
of concealment is, one might say, inac-
tive yet not inconsequential, unseen yet
vividly existent. Indeed, it can claim to
possess in an extreme and highly puri-
fied form an essential quality of all true
art, which is the quality of hiddenness.
Art, and great art especially, to an
extent always withholds itself, conceals
itself, in the plainest of plain sight; the
work of art is at once there and not there.
This withdrawnness is one of the qual-
ities, perhaps the most important one,
that contribute to the work’s inexhaust-
ibility, the attribute that compels us to
return again and again to the painting,
the poem, the sonata, the novel, as to a
22
John Banville
Yasumasa Morimura: Las Meninas renacen de noche VII: In fact,
nothing really happened, 2013
mystery we shall never solve, although
the effort, the repeated interrogation of
the work, is a source of undiminishing
interest and aesthetic pleasure.
Look at Velázquez’s Las Meninas;
read something as transparent-seeming
as Philip Larkin’s near-perfect lyric
poem “Cut Grass”; listen to almost
anything by Bach: the longer you lis-
ten, read, or look, the deeper the mys-
tery becomes. What exactly is being
said here, you ask yourself, and, more
significantly, what is not being said, or
what is being said but not to us; what is
being withheld?
In Authority and Freedom, his brief,
timely, understated, but wholly persua-
sive polemic, Jed Perl writes:
At the heart of every encounter
with a work of art—whether sacred
or secular, public or private, mass-
market or avant-garde—there’s the
enigma of the work itself, which,
even when designed to serve some
apparently cut-and- dried purpose,
only really succeeds when the art-
ist or artists involved are driven by
an imaginative imperative.
The mystery of the “imaginative im-
perative” was less apparent in the ep-
ochs in which the artistic labor that
went into the making of a work was
considered irrelevant to the purpose of
the piece, whether as an earthly sym-
bolization of the divine, as an emblem
of the power of princes, as the blazon of
a nation’s consciousness of itself, or just
as a precious object to be bought and
sold, shown off and prized.1
1
There has to be some aspect of an art-
work that sets it apart from even the
most elaborately fashioned piece of
craftsmanship. Chief among these, as
R. G. Collingwood points out in The
Principles of Art (1938), is that the
work of art consumes its materials. An
exquisitely fashioned majolica pot is
still majolica; Las Meninas is not paint
and canvas, it is Las Meninas.
Yasumasa Morimura/Luhring Augustine, New York
ture, in which he expressed alarm at
the ways in which what he unapologeti-
cally designated high culture was being
taken over by, or cravenly capitulating
to, the pop market on the one hand and
deep-pocketed speculative buyers on
the other.2 The problem, he wrote in
that essay, “is not with popular culture,
but with the wholesale imposition of its
methods and values on an alien terrain.
It is this muddling of the realms that
fuels the insane art commerce of our
day.” He then delves into the muddle
in an effort to separate its constituents:
The art in popular culture has ev-
erything to do with creating a work
that catalyzes a strain of feeling in
the mass audience. High art oper-
ates in a completely different way,
for each viewer comes to the work
with the fullest, the most intense,
the most personal awareness of the
conventions and traditions of an
artform.
In other words, if you wish to experi-
ence high art—merely to use the term
would today be a heroic and certainly
provocative gesture—you must have
been educated, or you must have ed-
A change came about with the Re- ucated yourself, in highly specialized
naissance, when artists, or some artists, forms of language, signs, and sounds.
exercising newfound powers of realistic Laissez-faire aesthetics greets any-
representation, new subtleties of nar- thing and everything with tolerance, “a
ration, new harmonies and sonorities, tolerance so bland that it really amounts
began to claim autonomy for the ob- to indifference.” High culture, on the
jects they produced. As the centuries contrary, “is always daringly, rightfully,
progressed, artists such as Josquin des triumphantly intolerant.” Imagine the
Prez, Shakespeare, or Caravaggio must cries of protest such assertions would
have given the more intellectually alert have provoked back in 2007, if the art
among their patrons at least a twinge world had not been so busy crating up
or two of serious unease. Prince Es- modern “masterpieces” and shipping
terházy could require Haydn to wear them off to the heavily guarded and
servants’ livery, but some among the air- conditioned freeports where the
nobleman’s household and the world billionaire investors store their art loot.
beyond would have known which of the Although little has changed since
two, the prince or the composer, was 2007 or 2012, except perhaps for the
the greater figure whose works would worse, Perl in his new book adopts a
live far beyond the grave. somewhat less forceful tone than he did
in the New Republic essay. It is not that
he has softened his opinions or that he
Jed Perl is one of the most perceptive, is any less concerned for the health of
most intelligent, and most vigilant art our culture. He is, as his subtitle indi-
critics writing today. He has worked cates, intent on defending the arts, but
and written for a number of magazines, such a defense in these debased times
including Vogue and The New York Re- calls for a certain amount of sweet rea-
view. His books include Paris Without soning to sugar the argument.
End: On French Art Since World War In Authority and Freedom he has
I (1988); a two-volume biography of something of what we might imagine
Alexander Calder (2017 and 2020); An- to have been the attitude of a native of
toine’s Alphabet (2008), a superb study Rome, say, in the years after the bar-
of Watteau; and New Art City (2005), an barian conquest of the city, when the
account of Manhattan as the new center, slaughter and rapine had come to an
or at least the self-proclaimed new cen- end, and the Romefied invaders were to
ter, of the art world in the mid-twentieth be seen strolling about the Forum and
century. When he was the art critic at among the cypresses on the Pincian
The New Republic, he issued a collec- Hill as if they owned the place. Where
tion of essays, Eyewitness: Reports from art today is concerned, the Visigoths
an Art World in Crisis (2000), deploring are in the citadel, and the old gods have
the increasingly voracious marketing become mere eyeless statues.
drive in the buying and selling of art.
In 2007, when the capitalist engine
worldwide was overheating, he pub- P erl sets out his case in a way that
lished a controversial essay in The New makes it look simple, or as simple as
Republic on what he perceived as a such an intricate and urgent case can
novel and deeply pernicious phenome- be, yet he is no less certain than ever
non, which he called “laissez-faire aes- of the validity of his opinions and of
thetics.” In 2012, after the economic
gaskets had blown, he reprinted it as 2
One of the leading charlatans was,
the introduction to his significantly almost inevitably, Andy Warhol, who,
titled essay collection Magicians and Perl suggests, “first saw the Promised
Charlatans: Essays on Art and Cul- Land of laissez-faire aesthetics.”
The New York Review
 “Reveals how prestigious natural
scientists once sought physi-
cal explanations, in vain, for a
social identity that continues to
carry enormous significance to
this day.”
—Nell Irvin Painter, author of
The History of White People
“Rousing and authoritative . . .
attempt[s] to recover the Con-
stitution’s pivotal role in shaping
claims of justice and equality.”
—New Republic
April 21, 2022
“This is political economy on a
grand scale, a starting point
for debate about the future of
progressive politics.”
—Michael J. Sandel, author of
The Tyranny of Merit
“Excellent . . . With a sure touch,
the authors lead the reader
through the geopolitical con-
text of the Hebrew Bible and
the setting and background
of the New Testament, finding
something to say about practi-
cally every book’s origins and
development.”
—John Barton, The Tablet
hup.harvard.edu
“An essential and immersive
look at ‘what happens when we
sideline privacy concerns in the
interest of profit motives and
police imperatives.’”
—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“A brilliant book. Olivarius’s
insightful reading of sources
and beautiful writing give us a
new and important way to think
about slavery, race, health, and
hierarchy. This transformative
work is a pivotal addition to
the scholarship on American
slavery.”
—Annette Gordon-Reed,
author of On Juneteenth
“Offers exquisitely formulated
arguments in support of robotic
exploration in space. Along the
way, Goldsmith and Rees
occasionally tell us what we
don’t want to know, but in the
end we find ourselves com-
pelled to agree with them.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson,
author of Space Chronicles
“[A] major contribution to our
knowledge of the sheer rich-
ness and importance of the
world of East Rome in its initial
headlong centuries.”
—Peter Brown, New York
Review of Books
23
his continuing duty to air them. He be-
gins as if his intention is to write not a
polemic but a primer, even if a highly
sophisticated one. His first chapter has
the innocent-sounding title “The Value
of Art,” and it is in the tone of a mod-
est, considerate, and patient persuader
that he proffers to the reader a gently
guiding hand. In his opening sentence,
he makes sure we understand that the
two terms in his title are not so much
antithetical as complementary:
Authority and freedom are the
lifeblood of the arts. Whether
reading a novel, looking at a paint-
ing, or listening to music, we are
feeling the push and pull of these
two forces as they shape the cre-
ator’s work. Authority is the order-
ing impulse. Freedom is the love of
experiment and play. They coexist.
They compete.
He quotes from a century ago the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire, a central figure
in the early years of modernism, writ-
ing about the “long quarrel between
tradition and invention”—which is
another way of saying “authority and
freedom,” of course—and notes that
without this ongoing quarrel, this “epic
debate,” there can be no art.
Following Apollinaire’s cue, he
muses on the differing approaches to,
and demands of, art, among both artists
and audiences. What is radical, what
conservative? Under which of these ru-
brics shall we place, for example, Jane
Austen? Well, a feminist might see her
as radical in her subtle portrayal of the
social and economic predicament of
women—which has not altered much
since her time—but a Black Lives Mat-
ter activist would surely condemn her
for her silence on slavery, from which
so much of the wealth of the British
Empire derived. Still others might say,
Who any longer reads Jane Austen
anyway?
These considerations quickly lead
Perl to the heart of the matter, or the
heart of what he takes to be the matter:
The idea of the work of art as an
imaginative achievement to which
the audience freely responds is
now too often replaced by the as-
sumption that a work of art should
promote a particular idea or ideol-
ogy, or perform some clearly de-
fined civic or community service.
In response to, in opposition to, such
assumptions, which in our time have
become reified to a degree that is highly
alarming for the concerned observer
and the unfashionable critic, Perl sets
out some carefully worded precepts
for the making and appreciation of au-
thentic art. The first is a form of that
ringing directive framed by Yeats in his
call upon poets to “learn your trade.”
The task of the artist, Perl insists, is to
“reshape experience.” This reshaping
is both artisanal (a matter of
mastering the tools of the trade,
whether words, colors, shapes,
sounds, or movements) and meta-
physical (a never- ending compe-
tition between the rival claims of
authority and freedom). The meta-
physical is embedded in the mate-
rial. [Emphasis added.]
The artist must bow to the demands
of the craft before he or she can claim
24
to be an artist at all—“To be an artist once ourselves and other. As Perl ob-
is to make things.” This requires work. serves, “The arts are simultaneously
A great many people imagine that they dispassionate and impassioned. If this
can achieve their artistic potential, the is a paradox, it also explains their un-
existence of which they do not for a mo- dying fascination.”
ment doubt, by an act of will; for are we This is a vital observation, a vital in-
not all artists, even if only potentially sistence. What we get in and from art is
so? Remember the snooty little girl in not feeling itself, but the feeling of what
the Peanuts cartoon who observed air- feeling feels like. Art, of even the most
ily that she would be as good a pianist intensely expressed kind, is always at
as Rubinstein if she could just play the one remove, which, even if this is a par-
notes. And of course, as a great pianist adox, increases the intensity of its ef-
she would be expressing herself and fects. We are always in pursuit of art; it
her deepest thoughts and feelings, and, is always elusive, withdrawn, withheld.
more to the point, indulging her most Such a notion runs arrantly against the
deeply held opinions. This is another popular conceptions of our time. And
popular misconception about the doing this is Perl’s chief worry:
of art: that it is wholly about the self,
that the self has things to say that it is I want us to release art from the
necessary for the world to hear, and stranglehold of relevance—from
that the saying of these things will be a the insistence that works of art,
form of radical action. whether classic or contemporary,
No doubt the self is present in the are validated (or invalidated)
making and the appreciation of art; by the extent to which they line
how could it not be? But the self-in-art up with (or fail to line up with)
is of a special kind, something like one our current social and political
of John Cage’s prepared pianos, which concerns.
can do things an unprepared piano
cannot do, but also cannot do things an
unprepared piano can—such as play a Art must have its autonomy, must
sonata by Beethoven. In art, we are at be relevant to itself first and foremost.
REVISIONARY
I’ve decided to let my inner weather out.
Even in the nerves flashing, some things
are only shadow.
What’s up with that?
My muse bruises me.
Some days I sit hours to be relieved
by a word.
Today’s word is invisible.
I got it in a text picturing myself
in this landscape.
I’m putting trouble into place, turning
toward what is.
Listening to stone translate into silence.
Here is an old rock covered with lichen
in the mossy forest inside the self.
I like it here when it’s green.
This is me evolving.
We get to meet ourselves where we are.
I’m hanging on. A whisper.
Certain prayers are tied to this ribbon.
How in hell can nature throw clay into art
into a speaking being into air.
I saw a world that was an afternoon.
This cloud in my hand.
Sky pouring into sky reflecting the absolute
of the lake.
The flock and its tangle of shadow.
Nearing the end, I could hear a lark.
Its trill fixing itself to my brain.
It seemed a thing becoming a wave.
A thing dissolving into the world
as I found it.
Illegible. Agrammatical.
To parse the velocity of trusses and stars
flowering here at the edge.
Calling me home.
—Peter Gizzi
Even works of art created with other
than purely artistic aims, such as Gul-
liver’s Travels, say, or the sermons of
John Donne, only achieve their true
stature, their full autonomy, when they
float free from the political or religious
impulses that were present at their
creation. Guernica would be a greater
work of art than it is if Picasso had not
given it the title Guernica.
The demand for art to be relevant to
its time and to be effective in combat-
ing political, social, and moral ills is not
new. The critic George Steiner repeat-
edly expressed his consternation at the
fact that some of the most brutal Nazi
officials had a genuine appreciation of
the arts, that the commandant of a con-
centration camp in which thousands
were daily murdered could go home at
the end of his working day and listen
with pleasure and discrimination to re-
cordings of Schubert lieder or the late
quartets of Beethoven. But Steiner’s
dismay sprang from a misconception.
It is not the purpose, or the aim, of art
to make human beings better behaved,
more cognizant of moral strictures, or
more sympathetic to other members of
their species. Though we may balk at
the assertion, Auden was right when he
declared that “poetry makes nothing
happen,” and was right in his wish to
change the line in “September 1, 1939”
from “We must love one another or
die” to “We must love one another and
die.”
If art has a purpose other than sim-
ply existing, then surely it is to quicken
our sense of what it is to be in the
world, thinking, feeling, rejoicing, suf-
fering. In the Russian Formalist critic
Viktor Shklovsky’s great work Theory
of Prose, he offers the neologism os-
tranenie, which his English transla-
tor, Benjamin Sher, cleverly renders
as “enstrangement,” to describe the
effect that art has on the everyday
objects about us, so that we perceive
them in a new and revealing light. As
Shklovsky writes, in his idiosyncratic
fashion:
Automatization eats away at
things, at clothes, at furniture, at
our wives, and at our fear of war. . . .
And so, in order to return sensa-
tion to our limbs, in order to make
us feel objects, to make a stone feel
stony, man has been given the tool
of art.
Authority and Freedom puts its argu-
ment quietly, and for that reason may
seem easy to ignore or dismiss. But it is
an essential tract for our time, and no
less a prescription for the health of con-
temporary culture because it eschews
stridency and cajoles rather than hec-
tors. Above all, it everywhere acknowl-
edges the challengingly weighty nature
of art:
We often find ourselves pressed
to speak about art as conservative
or radical or liberal, but these are
rough metaphors for an experi-
ence that has an indissoluble life
of its own. That is art’s ultimate
value, a value that is confound-
ingly difficult to think or speak
about, precisely because there is
no analogy. Art is simply what it
is.
And so it remains, triumphantly so,
even when hidden behind a big brown
daub. Q
The New York Review
 ‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?
When Women Ruled the World:
Making the Renaissance in Europe
by Maureen Quilligan.
Liveright, 301 pp., $29.95
Elizabeth I launched her defense
against the Spanish Armada in 1588
with an unforgettable image: “I have
the body of a weak, and feeble woman;
but I have the heart and stomach of a
king.” Only a sovereign could tran-
scend sexual difference, cloaking a
king’s power in a woman’s flesh. But
some saw this gender paradox as a kind
of monstrosity. John Knox, the Scot-
tish religious reformer and radical, had
published The First Blast of the Trum-
pet Against the Monstrous Regiment
of Women in 1558, the year of Eliza-
beth’s coronation. In it, he asked: How
is it that the weak, the foolish, and the
impotent may rule the strong? “Their
sight in civil regiment is but blindness;
their strength, weakness; their counsel,
foolishness; and judgement, frenzy.”
From his pulpit Knox preached that
female rule was an abomination in the
eyes of God.
In his time and our own, women’s
power has given rise to propaganda,
romance, intrigue, scandal, and myth.
Think of Henry VIII’s six wives and
their reputations as shrews, sexpots,
and frumps; Mary Tudor, commonly
known as Bloody Mary, burning Prot-
estants and their unborn children alive
at the stake; Mary, Queen of Scots, cor-
rupting the throne with, as her Protes-
tant opponents wrote, “her lewde lust
and sensualitie”; Catherine de’ Medici,
rumored to eat small children and as-
sassinate her enemies using gloves
scented with poison; or Marguerite de
Valois, Catherine’s daughter, carry-
ing around her dead lovers’ embalmed
hearts in her pockets.
Historians have worked hard in re-
cent decades to ground these women’s
reputations in fact rather than sensa-
tionalism. Drawing on this research,
Maureen Quilligan gives us a feminist
history of early modern queenship in
When Women Ruled the World. A spe-
cialist in English Renaissance litera-
ture, Quilligan has published widely
on allegory and gender; her coedited
volume Rewriting the Renaissance:
The Discourses of Sexual Difference in
Early Modern Europe (1986) remains
an important milestone in our under-
standing of gender and patriarchy in
early modern European culture and
society.
When Women Ruled the World fo-
cuses on four of the best known of
Europe’s many Renaissance queens:
Mary Tudor, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary
Stuart, and Catherine de’ Medici.
Many bewigged heads roll. But the
book departs from the usual blood and
gore of biographical accounts to em-
phasize instead the “shared nature” of
these queens’ sovereign power, arguing
that they were bound to one another
not only by dynastic connections and
political interest but by a feeling of sis-
terhood. “Like fellow soldiers in a so-
roral troop, they did try to protect and
aid each other, keeping each other’s
backs, as it were, asking each other to
aid any one of them who might be in
peril,” Quilligan writes, echoing recent
April 21, 2022
Erin Maglaque
The ‘Armada Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I, circa 1588
and tremendously popular histories of
queenship, most notably Sarah Grist-
wood’s Game of Queens (2016). Two
of the queens Quilligan covers were ac-
tual sisters: Mary and Elizabeth Tudor
were both daughters of Henry VIII, by
successive wives. Mary Stuart, Queen
of Scots, was their cousin. At sixteen,
Mary Stuart married Catherine de’
Medici’s son François de Valois, and
she became queen of France a year
later; Catherine remained interested in
Mary’s affairs long after François died
and she claimed the Scottish throne.
Quilligan argues that her account
of a united group of women rulers is
a feminist corrective to generations
of scholarship that has privileged the
queens’ enmities over their gestures
of solidarity, and the grotesque over
their political accomplishments. David
Hume, for example, flattened the rela-
tionship between Elizabeth and Mary
Stuart into one of “many little passions
and narrow jealousies.” Jules Michelet
called Catherine de’ Medici the “mag-
got that crawled out of Italy’s tomb.”
Popular culture has been even crueler,
playing up the trifling jealousies and
petty hatreds of silly women with too
much power and too much time on
their hands. In Quilligan’s telling, how-
ever, the sisterhood of queens was not
so much a monstrous regiment as a
“prudente Gynecocratie”—the French
poet Pierre de Ronsard’s term for Eu-
rope’s rule by female sovereigns.
T he problem with this story of sis-
terhood is that the queens did, in
fact, do some monstrous things to one
another—none more so than Eliza-
beth, who ordered the execution of
her “sister queen” and “twin sun,”
Mary, Queen of Scots. After François
died and Mary returned to Scotland,
she wed Henry Darnley, an egomani-
acal drunk who was blown up by reb-
els in 1567; she then possibly eloped
with—but was more likely kidnapped
and raped by—James Hepburn, Earl
counselor, who contrived evidence of
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Mary’s plots against her reign and sent
Mary’s death warrant to her prison
cell before Elizabeth could reconsider.
Elizabeth evidently regretted the exe-
cution, writing to James, “I would you
knew though not felt the extreme dolor
that overwhelms my mind for that mis-
erable accident which far contrary to
my meaning hath befallen.”
That “miserable accident” had grave
implications, as Elizabeth knew well.
Though Elizabeth signed the execu-
tion warrant, Mary Stuart had been
tried openly for treason. A civil court
had claimed new powers to pass judg-
ment on a reigning queen. At the
same time, Quilligan explains, the pa-
triarchal Reformation posed its own
threats to female rule— and, indeed,
to the monarchy itself. John Knox’s
criticism of the monstrous regiment of
women expanded over time to become
a radical rejection of the divine right of
kings. For Knox, a legitimate king was
not born but elected by his Protestant
subjects, who were themselves moved
by God— and so they could also “un-
elect” him, in Knox’s phrase. Elizabeth
banned him from England for saying
of Bothwell, a nobleman at her court. so and ordered a sermon to be deliv-
The following year, when Scottish no- ered that preached that “Christ taught
bles rebelled against the crown, Mary us plainly that even wicked rulers have
fled to England. Because, as a great- their power and authority from God.”
granddaughter of Henry VII, she had a But with Mary’s execution, Knox’s
legitimate claim to the English throne, radical dream that subjects could “un-
Elizabeth kept her imprisoned for eigh- elect” a monarch came closer to reality.
teen years in country houses in Derby- Queens became newly subject to
shire. In 1586, after Elizabeth was their subjects, the nature of sovereign
presented with forged evidence sug- power transformed. A sign appeared
gesting Mary’s complicity in Darnley’s briefly near Mary Stuart’s tomb:
assassination and participation in plots
against Elizabeth’s rule, Mary’s agree- By one and the same wicked sen-
able incarceration had to end. She was tence is both Mary, Queen of Scots
brought to trial for treason and sen- doomed to a natural death, and
tenced to death; Elizabeth signed her all surviving kings, being made
execution warrant. It took three swings as common people, are subject to
of the axe to behead her. a civil death. A new and unexam-
An execution may seem incontro- pled kind of tomb is here extant,
vertible evidence of Elizabeth’s enmity wherein the living are enclosed
toward Mary. Certainly past genera- with the dead: for know, that with
tions of historians (and poets, play- the sacred ashes of saint Mary here
wrights, and film directors) have seen lieth violate and prostrate the maj-
the execution as the culmination of esty of all kings and princes.
long-held jealousies and resentments.
Early in Mary’s reign, the Scottish am- Sixty-two years later Parliament voted
bassador visiting Elizabeth’s court re- to execute Mary Stuart’s grandson
corded that she enviously asked him to King Charles I. What had begun as a
describe Mary’s appearance, dancing critique of female rule had become a
abilities, and musical talents— a thorny real and future tomb for sovereignty
test of his diplomatic skills. In 1566, itself.
when Mary gave birth to a son—the fu-
ture James VI of Scotland and James
I of England— Elizabeth is reported W hen Women Ruled the World de-
to have cried in despair, “The queen parts from traditional political narra-
of Scots is this day lighter of a fair son, tives of the queens’ tangled reigns to
and I am but a barren stock!” pay special attention to the gifts they
Quilligan asks us to reconsider. Soon exchanged. Drawing on feminist an-
after deploring her own barrenness, thropology, Quilligan argues that royal
Elizabeth sent Mary a solid gold bap- gifts concentrated wealth, power, and
tismal font encrusted with jewels— an prestige privately within dynastic fam-
exorbitant gift that makes it difficult ilies, and helped women claim political
to characterize the Virgin Queen as authority in a patriarchal world. She
straightforwardly jealous of Mary’s suggests that patterns of female gift-
marriage, fertility, and assured line giving stand in stark contrast to gift-
of succession. Elizabeth gave James giving by men: men’s gifts forced the
his baptismal name, too, and seemed reciprocal return of another gift, were
to have thought of herself as a second given in public, and often took the form
mother to him, writing that he was “our of an exchange of women. Gifts thus
child, born of our own body.” Quilligan help to illuminate the bonds between
places the blame for Mary’s execution givers and recipients that, Quilligan
chiefly with William Cecil, Elizabeth’s claims, previously escaped historians’
25
notice. For example, at the age of
eleven Elizabeth Tudor made a beau-
tiful book for her stepmother, Kather-
ine Parr: she translated Marguerite de
Navarre’s poetry into English, copied
out the text in her own hand, and em-
broidered a cover on which she show-
cased Katherine’s initials. Elizabeth’s
gift, Quilligan suggests, helped her re-
join the Tudor dynasty after the tumult
of her mother’s death and her father’s
remarriage.
Textiles carried special significance
for female rulers. Mary Stuart gave
Elizabeth a red silk petticoat that she
embroidered herself with silver thread;
the French ambassador observed that
Elizabeth seemed “much softened”
toward Mary after receiving it. Cather-
ine de’ Medici commissioned a monu-
mental tapestry cycle and gave it to her
granddaughter Christina of Lorraine,
who, when she became Grand Duch-
ess of Tuscany, carried them back to
the Medici ancestral home in Florence
along with the rest of her dowry, which
included rock crystal, pearl-studded
bed hangings, and 50,000 scudi (es-
timated to be $1 million in today’s
money). Quilligan writes that Christi-
na’s opulent gifts “would have demon-
strated, as her grandmother would have
wished them to do, her wealth, lineage,
and royal dynastic connections.”
An exceptionally beautiful pear-
shaped pearl, known as La Peregrina,
“makes visible the inheritance of
blood . . . through the ages.” Found by
an enslaved African working in a Pan-
amanian fishery, it entered Philip II’s
collection in the 1560s. In a portrait
painted in 1605, Philip’s daughter-in-
law, Margaret of Austria, delicately
strokes the gem with slender fingers.
The pearl was beloved by generations
of Habsburg royal women until Napo-
leon conquered Spain in 1808 and took
La Peregrina with him when he left. (It
was eventually sold to an English fam-
ily, from whom Richard Burton bought
it for Elizabeth Taylor in 1969. La Per-
egrina went missing once in their suite
in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; Liz was
quite upset until she discovered it in
her dog’s mouth.) Elizabeth I liked the
look of La Peregrina but didn’t want to
have to marry Philip II to get it, so she
bought her own nearly identical drop
pearl, shown in the Armada portrait of
1588 (see illustration on page 25). Lest
anyone forget that she was a virgin, the
pearl dangles from a gaudy pink bow
tightly knotted over her crotch.
For a contemporary parallel, Quilli-
gan asks us to think of Kate Middleton,
who wears Diana Spencer’s ring, or of
Meghan Markle, who wears a ring set
with two of Diana’s diamonds. Gifts
of pearls and diamonds illustrate “how
deeply we seem to know that female
agency is inherited from generations of
forebears.” Maybe it’s vulgar to think
instead of Princess Michael of Kent,
lips pursed in the front seat of an SUV
on the way to lunch with Markle, a
glittering seventeenth- century black-
amoor brooch pinned to her breast.
Royal women know the communicative
power of jewels— and that bloodlines
of rule and bloodlines of race are kin-
dred. While jewels can create dynastic
webs of sisterhood, they can also be
used to mutilate them.
The centerpiece of Quilligan’s ob-
ject histories is the so- called prison
embroideries made by Mary, Queen
of Scots. While trapped in the Shrews-
bury estates, far from Scotland and far
26
from the sea, Mary designed and sewed
elaborate tapestry panels with her com-
panion, Bess of Hardwick. After see-
ing Mary and asking how she passed
the time, Elizabeth’s envoy reported,
“She said that all the day she wrought
with her needle, and that the diversity
of the colours made the work seem less
tedious, and continued so long at it till
very pain did make her to give over.”
The result was more than a hundred
tapestry panels that reworked illus-
trations from natural history books,
scenes from classical literature, and
motifs from emblem books in expertly
plied needle and thread.
This was not just the busywork of a
bored prisoner. Historians have long
seen Mary’s embroideries as a partic-
A panel embroidered by Mary, Queen of Scots, while she was imprisoned in Derbyshire,
England, circa 1569–1584; the cat and mouse are thought to represent Elizabeth I and Mary
ularly female form of defiance, remi-
niscent of Ovid’s account of Philomela,
who weaves a tapestry to tell of her
rape by Tereus, after he cut out her
tongue. In one tapestry panel, an or-
ange tabby cat wearing a crown bats at
a gray mouse. Elizabeth, of course, was
a famed redhead; when Mary was exe-
cuted, the axeman held her head aloft
before the crowd, only for the head to
slip out of her wig and tumble, reveal-
ing her gray hair. Another panel shows a
phoenix rising from its ashes, framed by
Mary’s initials, a representation of her
motto “In my end is my beginning.” In
the Noble Women of the Ancient World
series that Mary made with Bess, Mary
is depicted as the figure of Chastity,
flanked by a unicorn—a visual claim for
her purity, contrary to her scandalous
reputation. Not only were the tapestries
a distraction from her imprisonment,
Quilligan writes, but they were “inalien-
able objects of political resistance.”
But are the embroideries so transpar-
ent a window onto Mary’s intentions?
Mary and Bess created the panels in
collaboration with male and female
household servants, with visiting aris-
tocratic daughters and granddaugh-
ters, and with the professional male
embroiderers who joined the house-
hold to complete special silk appliqué
work. Similarly, the gorgeous tapestries
that Catherine de’ Medici “almost cer-
tainly” commissioned weren’t made
by her hand or in her household, but thousands of Protestants were mur-
in professional workshops in the Low dered by their Catholic neighbors—
Countries. Quilligan suggests that Catherine has been remembered as the
Catherine intended the Valois tapes- wicked Reine Mère. Quilligan follows
tries to be redemptive, to project an the more moderate modern consensus
image of tolerance and peace after the that Catherine did not strategize the
catastrophe of the Saint Bartholomew’s mass murder of French Protestants,
Day Massacre in France in 1572; they even though she did plot the bungled
showed the Catholic de Guise family assassination that helped to ignite
and the Huguenot Bourbon families the fuse of Saint Bartholomew’s Day.
peacefully reconciled. But the Prot- Particularly in the midst of religious
estant weavers in the north erased schism, early modern queenship re-
Charles IX from the design, in an act quired the use of violence.
of artistic retribution for his role in And even if women were inclined
the massacre. The textiles are not un- toward peace, was this some inherent
mediated expressions of the queens’ virtue of their sex, or a result of con-
intentions, then, but objects wrought temporary gendered expectations of
collectively and cooperatively by men royal rule? These questions are left
and women across social classes and unanswered. Certainly the queens
wanted to be perceived as peaceful;
Royal Collection Trust/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022/Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh
Elizabeth worked diligently to portray
her feminine desire for peace. In her
conclusion, Quilligan celebrates Eliza-
beth, writing that she won the loyalty
of her subjects by her “constancy . . .
by her bravery, her intelligence, and
frankly, by the beautiful delivery, the
wit, the Good Queen Bess simplicity
and honesty and soaring style of her
speeches.” It’s true that she knew how
to give an excellent speech. The same
Good Queen Bess also ordered seven
hundred commoners killed in the north
after a rebellion in 1569 by Catholic
aristocrats, the earls of Westmorland
and Northumberland, even though the
earls had received no popular support.
Queens like Elizabeth are revered
figures of feminist history and popular
culture because they possessed power,
a rare feminine asset. But power has
its own history. The agency beloved of
twenty-first- century liberal feminism is
not the same as sixteenth- century sov-
ereignty. Invested in a ruler through
an accident of birth, sovereignty was
maintained as much through state-
authorized violence as through con-
sent. Quilligan is at pains to explain
away the violence: Elizabeth’s exe-
cution of Mary, for instance, was the
lamentable consequence of the power
confessional identities— and are all the struggles of men. The queens believed
more fascinating for it. And yet these in religious toleration, except when
complexities are relegated to the foot- they didn’t, and then it was the male
notes of Quilligan’s story. figures of the patriarchal Reformation
who were responsible for upsetting the
queens’ peaceful instincts. And yet we
Q uilligan wants us to reconsider cannot explain away the killing, be-
these queens not only as affectionate cause it was fundamental to the mean-
allies but as uniquely able to bring ing of sovereignty in early modern
peace to Europe. Elizabeth and Cath- times— even when women signed the
erine de’ Medici, for example, settled warrants.
the Treaty of Troyes in 1564, achieving In a laudable effort to address gen-
a lasting peace between England and erations of misogynistic writing about
France that had eluded previous gener- these queens, Quilligan has empha-
ations of kings. The French poet Ron- sized their virtues: their sisterhood,
sard commemorated the treaty: peaceful reigns, and artistic abilities.
In her telling, the women who ruled the
For truly, that which the kings of world were highly educated; hyperliter-
France and England . . . did not ate; skilled horsewomen, dancers, and
know how to do, two queens . . . musicians; inspirational speakers; deft
not only undertook but perfected: politicians. They were at times warm
showing by such a magnanimous friends and affectionate sisters. They
act, how the female sex, previously were independent and defiant. They
denied rule, is by its generous nature were frequently tolerant. But when we
completely worthy of command. refashion queens as proto-feminists— a
kind of sorority of early modern girl-
But were these queens uniquely tol- bosses—we lose sight of the complexi-
erant rulers during a uniquely violent ties, and indeed the atrocities, involved
century? Proving this is a steeper task. in being a sovereign. This is not to deny
Bloody Mary burned nearly three hun- their accomplishments as politicians,
dred Protestants, including two infants, patrons, or artists. But without a con-
at the stake during her reign. Catherine sideration of the violence that secured
de’ Medici also poses a problem. Once their power, we are left with squeaky-
thought to have masterminded the clean stories of brave and good and vir-
Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre— a tuous queens—the queens of fairy tale,
monthlong spectacle of death in which not history. Q
The New York Review
 John Cage
Variations No. 7, 1987
Monotype on smoked paper
10.5 x 8.75 in, 26.7 x 22.2 cm
Published by Crown Point Press

info@pazdabutler.com

April 21, 2022 27

 ‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’
Very Cold People
by Sarah Manguso.
Hogarth, 191 pp., $26.00
Reviewers of Sarah Mangu-
so’s writing love to tally her
words and pages—as is often
the case for very short books
(the “slim volume”) and very
long ones (the “doorstop”),
as though such extremes are
feats beyond belief. Her work
falls into the former category:
books “brief as a breath” and
“slim as a Pop-Tart,” written in
a style that has been described
as “fragmentary” and “apho-
ristic” (terms Manguso her-
self has disavowed), “with the
precision of a miniaturist.” It is
difficult to do a lot with a little,
and Manguso, a poet as well as
an essayist and memoirist, cov-
ers quite a bit of distance with
a minimum of means.
Manguso’s prose is an un-
common mix of economy and
obsession. Her first memoir,
The Two Kinds of Decay (2008),
distills a decade of intense
treatments for chronic idio-
pathic demyelinating poly-
radiculoneuropathy, a rare
autoimmune disorder, into
brief, forthright chapters that
intimately illuminate the toll of
chronic illness. In The Guard-
ians (2012), she examines,
through a series of vignettes,
her friend Harris’s suicide, in
order to give shape to her grief.
Ongoingness (2015) remarks on the
voluminousness of Manguso’s diaries
in fewer than a hundred pages; looking
askance at the diaries’ 800,000 words,
she admits to the impossibility of com-
prehending the passage of time. Ongo-
ingness incorporates nearly as much
white space as text, a formal structure
that mirrors Manguso’s observations:
I’d write about a few moments, but
the surrounding time—there was
so much of it! So much apparent
nothing I ignored, that I treated as
empty time between the memora-
ble moments.
She deepens her use of white space in
300 Arguments (2017)—a disjointed
autobiographical meditation on big
subjects such as ambition, beauty, time,
depression, and failure—gathering
into discrete entries of usually one or
two sentences the quotable lines of an
imaginary book, with all else excised.
Despite Manguso’s often fraught
subjects, there is pleasure in following
the path she cuts, particularly in The
Guardians, in which the facts of what
happened are intensified as her lan-
guage becomes more abstract. When
she thinks about her friend losing his
life and identity at the instant of his sui-
cide, the transition reads like a reverse
miracle:
Harris met the train with his body,
offered it his body.
The train drove into his body. It
drove against his body.
It sent him from his body.
The conductor went down onto
28
Nicole Rudick
Sarah Manguso; illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion
the track and touched the body
and lifted and carried the body.
There was no need for a doctor.
The body was removed from the
track and rested for two days with-
out its name.
She tends to express thoughts as state-
ments or assertions, and this gives her
writing a feeling of tight certainty,
sometimes even arrogance. Later in
The Guardians, as she has a drink at a
bar, she observes a man enter, swallow
a shot without sitting down, and depart.
Her assessment is instant yet specula-
tive: “You know it’s a good bar when it
attracts alcoholics with that level of fa-
miliarity.” In 300 Arguments she asks,
“Am I happy? Damned if I know, but
give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you
whether you are.”
At times it seems as though Man-
guso’s linguistic constraints are a way
of keeping a firm rein on the poten-
tial sprawl of the ideas her words illu-
minate, as if fewer words mean fewer
opportunities for meaning to get out
of control. “I always believed that the
point of writing for an audience was to
rescue the suicidal and to console the
dying,” she wrote in a 2015 essay about
motherhood.1 There isn’t much room
for fallibility in that formulation.
M anguso’s first novel, Very Cold Peo-
ple, stays true to her style: in less than
two hundred pages, it favors incident
and mood over linear storytelling, with
1 pensive ones—she, too, falls for this
“The Grand Shattering,” Harper’s,
August 2015.
each individual paragraph surrounded
by white space. Set mainly in the 1980s,
it is an unsettled coming- of-age story
narrated by a girl named Ruth, who
lives in a kind of stasis, growing and
maturing in an atmosphere of little
warmth or nurturing. “I needed to
stay approximate,” Ruth says. “No one
could know what I cared about.” Her
crucial relationships—with her parents
and her female friends—surround her
like the rings of electrons orbiting the
nucleus of an atom, altering her but re-
maining apart.
Ruth is born in Waitsfield, a fictional
small town on the outskirts of Boston
and a place, we learn in the novel’s open-
ing lines, to which her family doesn’t
belong. For Ruth, an only child, it isn’t
just that her parents are of a lower class
than Waitsfield’s moneyed elite—“the
first, best people,” such as Cabots and
Lodges, whose three-hundred-year- old
houses quietly boast the “historically
correct paint color.” It’s that they are
illegitimate, pretenders who scavenge
at the dump and garage sales for cast-
offs from their affluent neighbors. Her
mother snips wedding announcements
from the newspaper and affixes them
to the refrigerator, as though the brides
and grooms, who “sat on the boards of
libraries and museums,” were friends
of the family. Though Ruth can discern
the superficiality in her parents’ behav-
ior and in the community at large—she
notices the sticky, fake snow sprayed
on a lawn in spring for an ad shoot and
recognizes the difference between the
oldest houses and the newer, more ex-
perceived importance, “swoon[ing]
over the girls and boys at
school with names like Verity
and Cornelius.”
Ruth sees that other kids
wear the same shoes and ex-
pensive windbreakers as one
another, and she envies “their
clannish sameness.” She must
make do with factory-second
clothing and a Tropicana Or-
ange Juice imitation of a Swatch
watch. Her mother shops for
groceries at the gas station and
buys overripe produce picked
from the “used food” sec-
tion of the health-food store.
Ruth enumerates these expe-
riences without commentary,
sometimes dissociated from
the narrative. When she says,
“Creditors called all day and
into the evening. I had to pick
up the phone and say that I was
home alone,” the information is
delivered in its own paragraph,
without elaboration. Such lines
recall the arrangement of 300
Arguments, as well as some
of that book’s less successful
entries: “I keep some desires
unfulfilled for fear of losing all
desire, but sometimes I need a
break from them anyway.”
Manguso’s language can be
exquisitely spartan and laconic.
She describes the “soft fuh” of
falling snow and how the light
of a winter morning “spread
like a watery broth over the
landscape.” A synesthetic pas-
sage near the start of the novel
is as florid as she gets:
Autumn brought with it the slap-
clatter of crows, fire smells, leafy
sweet-rot. New corduroys, cold air,
brown paper grocery bags folded
over schoolbooks. Writing on the
first pages of notebooks, Septem-
ber 7. September 8. September 9,
never sure how my handwriting
should look.
Manguso captures the bewilderment of
childhood in Ruth’s flat observations
about situations she doesn’t fully un-
derstand, supplemented by feral imag-
inings. When a friend suggests miming
sex between Ken and Barbie, Ruth
wonders, “Would Ken lie stacked on
top of Barbie, or would their only point
of contact be their crotches as they bal-
anced like acrobats?”
The novel is composed in the simple
past tense, which creates the impres-
sion that Ruth is narrating her story as
she moves through adolescence. After
riding her bike up a hill and back down
again, she concludes, “I knew that chil-
dren were supposed to ride bikes for
fun, and I dutifully played the part of a
child having fun.” Some passages beg-
gar belief, and seem calculated for an
effect whose significance I can’t quite
detect. It isn’t until the book’s very last
paragraph that Ruth reveals that de-
cades have passed, and she’s telling the
story “some years into raising a child of
my own.” This collapse of time often
gives her childhood self a knowing-
ness that is disproportionate to her age.
When she is still young enough to be
thrilled by the gift of a new Lite-Brite
The New York Review
 COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU
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From New Yorker Films
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DANIEL TALBOT
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TERRY WILLIAMS
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author of Low Life: Lures and
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29
toy, she thinks, “My own girlhood felt
like something from 1650 even when it
was happening. . . . I spent those days
feeling half-there, not quite committed
to that life.” Only a few pages earlier,
Ruth is playing in the garden of the
local library, digging up earthworms
and chasing beetles. She mistakes a pile
of dog shit for dirt and plunges her hand
into the “soft wet mound.” How is a
child who is this ingenuous also articu-
late enough to express such a profound
divorce from her own sense of being?
In elementary school, Ruth befriends
a trio of girls—Amber, Bee, and Char-
lie. Their families fall at varying points
on the economic spectrum: Amber’s
father is a mechanic, Bee’s works in
construction, and Charlie’s family is
wealthy enough to have a housekeeper.
Ruth remarks on Amber’s worn clothes,
poor teeth, and free school lunches but
also notes that they are both able to
live across town from the kids of the
Bannon Road projects, the lowest rung
on the socioeconomic ladder. Later,
Ruth learns from Charlie that even the
Brahmins sort themselves according to
worth, sifting out their poorer relations
into lesser-thans.
Manguso’s descriptions of girlhood
make for some of the novel’s best
moments. The lead-up to puberty is
adorned with friendship pins, heart-
shaped stickers, and scented pencils:
“Everything smelled like strawber-
ries then—stickers, lip gloss, hair.”
The girls’ easy familiarity, soon to
be lost, begets an intimacy that Man-
guso voices collectively: “We were still
young enough that our physical bound-
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30
aries were permeable; we braided each
other’s hair and knew the scents of
each other’s scalps.” Manguso is won-
derful at the slow fade of this blissful
innocence, the way it is supplanted by
dangers that infiltrate at the fringes of
awareness:
Amber’s niece went to school with
us for part of that year. When she
introduced herself to Bee she said,
I’m still thirteen. I know, I don’t
look it, and the way she said it told
us that she’d heard it so many times
from so many men that it seemed
as deeply a part of her as her own
name. I remember there were
so many horse chestnuts on the
ground when she said it.
As the girls age into middle school,
then high school, their different stand-
ings in this social order become more
pronounced, and they drift apart.
Ruth’s family moves to a better part of
town, into a house formerly owned by
Winifred Cabot Fish, a member of the
storied Cabot family. “The house was
cheap,” Ruth explains, “maybe because
Winifred had died in it, and the family
had wanted to off-load it quickly.”
In the attic, Ruth finds old pho-
tographic negatives of a man and a
woman: “In one shot, they stand in
tight embrace. It could have been Win-
ifred and her husband, or it could have
been her parents, or it could have been
anyone.” The possibility inherent in
these negatives is freeing to Ruth, and
she begins to imagine, almost greedily,
the various routes Winifred’s private
life might have taken. The restraint
that characterizes not only Ruth but
Photo: Martha Stewart
the novel in general dissipates here. She
becomes obsessed with Winifred—
wondering if she might find strands
of the woman’s hair in the house and
thinking about how Winifred would
use the sleeping porch during hot sum-
mer nights and walk along the brook in
all kinds of weather. “I imagined her
so completely that she became real,”
Ruth says. Her fascination vitalizes the
narrative, and the projection of Ruth’s
fantasies onto another woman provides
the most generous account of her inner
yearnings.
Along with the negatives, Ruth dis-
covers a pile of possibly bloodied cloth-
ing, which elicits a tangle of visions
about enduring love, freedom, and sex-
ual desire. Were the clothes Winifred’s
memento mori of her love for her hus-
band after his death? Or had she killed
him so that she could be alone, free
perhaps to pursue an unconsummated
affair with the neighboring Lowell
boy? “I wanted to believe that Win-
ifred was a murderess because I wanted
to have such power myself someday,”
Ruth thinks. Her fantasy of murder is
a desire for self- determination, and she
keeps the details of this desire secret,
“so that no one could contradict them
and take them away.”
One summer afternoon, Ruth’s
mother sprays her with the garden
hose. “I laughed so hard I thought I
might burst,” Ruth recalls.
Many times after that I asked my
mother to spray me with the hose
again, but she always said no. . . . I
thought that maybe it was wrong to
be that loudly happy, and that she
was trying to protect me.
On the next page, walking home from
elementary school on a winter after-
noon, Ruth slips on the ice and is in-
jured, but her mother refuses to come
pick her up: “She screamed at me and
said that she had never gotten a ride
home from school.” In the next para-
graph, her mother buys Ruth a fancy
slip for her birthday party, then helps
her young guests make construction-
paper crowns.
Ruth’s childhood is punctuated
by the contradictory behavior of her
mother, an overweight Jewish woman
who can’t forget the slights dealt her
by her rich Catholic Italian in-laws
and who feels patronized by her own
wealthy family members even as she
tries to curry favor with them. “She
wasn’t classy like Aunt Rose or Uncle
Roger,” Ruth says of her mother’s rel-
atives, “but she wasn’t poor enough to
be called poor. I carefully remembered
all the names and how sophisticated all
of them were, in descending order.”
According to Ruth, her mother thinks
of herself as “the protagonist of every-
thing.” She spies on people making
out in cars, pointing them out to Ruth,
and masturbates at the movie theater
and while watching TV with her family,
“making little sticky sounds with her
mouth.” She sexualizes her daughter,
too, begging her to wear a bikini instead
of a one-piece swimsuit and respond-
ing approvingly when a cashier openly
ogles Ruth’s body. Ruth guesses that
her mother wants her to seem “already
grown up,” though it’s unclear why.
A few pages earlier, Ruth is babysit-
ting two boys. She spanks them after
they barge in on her in the bathroom,
and later soothes one who gets a nose-
bleed—she can’t locate herself on the
spectrum of punisher and comforter
and asks, “If I wasn’t their mother, was
I my mother?” This cryptic line seems
to suggest the process of becoming re-
sponsible for oneself, and it reminded
me of a similar sentence from Kate
Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011), a novel
about another girl named Ruth and the
fog of young womanhood. “Perhaps
without a mother one can no longer be
young,” Zambreno’s Ruth thinks. Both
observations circle not only the thorny
relationship of mothers and daughters
but also the process of a girl becoming
the primary subject of her own story.
When, about halfway through Very
Cold People, an eleven-year- old Ruth
thinks of herself as a child “whose ca-
pacity to receive love had been dimin-
ished,” I thought of Manguso’s concept
of “extreme love,” from her 2015 essay
on motherhood. Looking back on her
pre-motherhood self, she wrote:
It seems obvious to me that my
refusal to have a child was a way
to avoid the challenges of extreme
love, to avoid participating in dis-
mantling the stereotypes that had
brainwashed me.
The meaning of “extreme love” is
fuzzy—is it a measure of trust or commit-
ment, or that you’re willing to die for an-
other person?—but two of its results, in
Manguso’s conception, are a disposition
“often mischaracterized as selflessness”
(she describes the feeling of needing to
care for her son as “an itch, an urge”) and
a more developed sense of humanity. Not
only that, but by “weathering trauma,
practicing patience, being seasoned by
love,” she has become, she says, a better
writer and resolves to celebrate these
newfound qualities in literature:
I want to read books that were
written in desperation, by people
who are disturbed and overtaxed,
who balance on the extreme edge
of experience. I want to read books
by people who are acutely aware
that death is coming and that abid-
ing love is our last resort. And I
want to write those books.
How does motherhood constitute
“the extreme edge of experience”? The
only answer I can find in Manguso’s
essay is that motherhood requires self-
effacement, perhaps total. “The point
of having a child is to be rent asunder,
torn in two,” she writes. “It is a shat-
tering, a disintegration of the self, after
which the original form is quite gone.
Still, it is a breakage that we are, as a
species if not as individuals, meant to
survive.”
Men appear in Very Cold People
as fathers, uncles, brothers, teachers,
classmates, doctors, and police officers,
but their actions are largely suspect, re-
gardless of their roles:
We’d been told that Officer Hill
was an odd person. Sensitive. We
thought that the tennis coach was
odd, the volleyball coach was odd,
Bee’s father was odd, Amber’s
brother was a little odd . . .
Ruth’s father, an accountant, makes far
fewer appearances than her mother,
though he is no less perplexing and
harmful. A scornful shadow, he
screams, crows, sneers, and rages at
The New York Review
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32
Ruth. The best he can muster is drop-
ping her at school forty minutes early
before zipping away in his used road-
ster. Manguso doesn’t let men off the
hook for their actions—which include
sexual abuse—but that reckoning isn’t
a major part of the novel. Her focus
is the way mothers allow shame to
perpetuate.
The argument Manguso seems to be
making is that if Ruth can’t receive love,
it’s because it hasn’t been given to her
by the person most capable of doing so,
her mother. Ruth internalizes each new
humiliation her mother doles out; she
calls that shame “my birthright.” This
argument extends to the book’s other
mothers, including those of Amber,
Bee, and Charlie, with the negligence
stretching back generationally. Ruth
learns that her “mother’s mother hadn’t
wanted to hold her babies and was
sent to a home to get better, and that
when she came back, she was never the
same.” Her aunt Rose tells Ruth that
Roger, Rose’s husband, was separated
from his parents as a child when he was
sent to a sanatorium to recover from
scarlet fever. These tales of familial
fragmentation send Ruth into a panic.
“I thought of all the questions I wanted
to ask Aunt Rose,” she thinks. “What
had happened to my grandmother?
To Roger? To my mother? And what
would happen to me?”
Ruth tells herself that her mother’s
lack of care for her is meant as a form
of protection. When she pretends to
forget the color of Ruth’s eyes or rid-
icules the way her mouth looks with
braces, Ruth reasons that “it was only
because my mother’s love was so much
greater than all the other loves. It was
that much more dangerous, so she had
to love me in secret, absolutely unob-
served by anyone, especially me.” But
this talismanic love doesn’t suffice
to ward off danger, for Ruth or any
girl.
I n a recent essay on trauma’s “totaliz-
ing identity” in contemporary culture,
Parul Sehgal writes, “Trauma trumps
all other identities, evacuates personal-
ity, remakes it in its own image.”2 Seh-
gal is describing Hanya Yanagihara’s
novel A Little Life (2015), but the sen-
tence could also characterize the last
stretch of Very Cold People. Amber,
Bee, and Charlie are all victims of sex-
ual abuse, and as the predations inten-
sify, Manguso expels each girl from the
narrative, one by one; they move, they
die, they disappear.
I won’t divulge the details, to avoid
giving away too much of the plot—and
in any case the specifics turn out not
to matter so much. She casts not just
Ruth’s friends in the traumatic role but
all of the town’s girls and women, and
the earlier collective of friendship pins
and strawberry lip gloss becomes an in-
discriminate legion of abuse survivors,
voiced no longer in the first person but
in the third:
2
“The Case Against the Trauma Plot,”
The New Yorker, December 27, 2021.
J. H. ELLIOTT
(1930–2022)
We mourn the death of J. H. Elliott,
a long-standing contributor and friend.
All of these Waitsfield girls to-
gether, with their burdens. Imagine
twenty of them in a room, all day,
thinking about each other. Think-
ing about what was still going to
happen to them. They could see
the future, a little. They so nobly
faced it, patiently waiting.
Every girl becomes a victim, as if it
were unavoidable, and they grow up
to be mothers who are complicit in the
perpetuation of that trauma, partly
through their silence:
All the girls in town thought they
were unusual, that they were the
only ones, the only weird, un-
lucky little ones. Some of them
died of that bad luck, that termi-
nal uniqueness. Some of them
got pregnant and had babies and
stopped being girls. And after that
happened, those mothers took up
the story they had been told, the
big lie that had almost done them
in, dusted it off and told it to their
sons and daughters as if their lives
depended on it. That was just one
time. It won’t happen to you.
Ruth comes to regard her own mother’s
unspoken experience of abuse as nor-
mal, not rare: “It was too common even
to register as a story. It wasn’t even a
story at all.”
Manguso’s evocation of this assem-
blage of women suggests a desire to
share pain, to recognize one another’s
suffering, and perhaps to find a way out,
but by couching it in a tradition of lies
that extends on and on, without resolu-
tion or relief, the trauma seems to erase
any distinction between individuals
and forgoes any recognition of distinct
inner lives, to say nothing of afterlives.
Claims of uniqueness are often used
to help conceal and perpetuate sexual
abuse; relegating girls and women to an
indistinct mass can be equally damag-
ing. Manguso illustrates this paradox,
but she does so at the expense of her
characters, who are dispensed with
when they no longer serve a purpose
and replaced by an anonymous group
of “all the Waitsfield girls.”
The very forms of Manguso’s
books—fragmentary, aphoristic, dis-
crete, or however one chooses to char-
acterize them—resist clear narrative
paths, and in doing so they can invite
new possibilities. However, for Ruth,
whose future we just glimpse at nov-
el’s end, there is only a hint of what it
means to live beyond the damage of her
childhood, and Very Cold People stag-
nates—a story of trauma that does not
move beyond its own crisis. I thought
of all the “apparent nothing” between
memorable moments that Manguso
found missing from her diaries. So
much of childhood and adolescence is
lived in that insignificant time, wait-
ing to be able to make one’s own de-
cisions. Throughout the novel, Ruth is
waiting to be in charge of her own life.
She is waiting, as Manguso writes of all
the Waitsfield girls, for her future to
begin. Q
The New York Review

Don Carlos
an opera by Giuseppe Verdi,
at the Metropolitan Opera,
New York City, February 28–
March 26, 2022
The first act of Verdi’s Don Carlos is
almost an opera in itself: in a matter
of minutes the prospect of a happy
destiny is born, blooms, and dissolves.
The elements of its setting—a forest in
winter, a fire kindled in the wilderness,
a starry sky—have a poetic openness
not to be found in the sterner scenes
toward which the story is headed. Per-
haps that separateness accounts for its
being so frequently omitted as inessen-
tial, although the loss seems drastic:
in the Met’s persuasive and powerful
new production, this prelude seems the
indispensable glimpse of a world else-
where, whose possibilities are never to
be revisited. In retrospect it makes the
setting of the four remaining acts—the
Spain of Philip II in 1560—an even more
hermetically sealed place of detention.
Two strangers encounter each other
in the woods of Fontainebleau. They
have never met, although they are
engaged to be married. Don Carlos
(Matthew Polenzani) has come from
Madrid surreptitiously, braving his
royal father’s anger, and, having merely
glimpsed his promised bride, Elisabeth
de Valois (Sonya Yoncheva), has fallen
in love. She, lost in the woods and not
yet aware of his identity, “afraid of the
unknown,” is about to be married off
as part of a diplomatic settlement to a
drawn- out conflict between Spain and
France—a war trophy exiled to a for-
eign court. Within moments, once the
situation has been suitably clarified,
they surrender to the elation of an in-
stantly discovered mutual love. Their
celebration has an almost frantic haste,
appropriately since this is the first and
last glimpse of happiness or freedom
that will be afforded them.
It is shattered immediately by news
that the peace agreement stipulates
that Elisabeth marry not Carlos but
his father, Philip II (Eric Owens). A
chorus rejoices while the shocked pair
sing of death and the abyss. There is
only one formality: Philip has sent word
he will only marry her if she assents.
She has at least in theory the oppor-
tunity to say no, and there is a pause
before—surrounded by Frenchwomen
pleading for an end to the war—she
answers with a faint Oui. The pause—
punctuated by three widely separated
pizzicato chords—feels like a chasm.
It clears an area of silence around the
syllable forced out “with a dying voice”
(according to the score’s specification),
a tone caught perfectly by Yoncheva at
this early pivotal moment. As Elisabeth
affirms, under pressure, the opposite
of what she feels, wispy possibilities re-
verse into implacable realities. A con-
tradiction is made audible in the clash
of chorus against solo voices: what for
the chorus marks the return of peace for
Elisabeth and Carlos is the end of hope.
Their story thus is essentially over
from the start; whatever they were
looking for in each other will not be
found or even properly defined. They
will be thrown back on their original
sorrows: he on an anguished relation-
ship with his father now made even
April 21, 2022
Verdi’s Decentered Epic
Geoffrey O’Brien
Eric Owens, center, as Philip II; Sonya Yoncheva, wearing a crown at left,
as Elisabeth; and Etienne Dupuis, third from right, as the Marquis of Posa,
in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Don Carlos
more torturous, she on her inconsol-
able grief at separation from her na-
tive land and the world of childhood.
Involuntarily uprooted, Elisabeth is no
longer at home in the world, while Carlos
never was at home. Their story, though,
is not precisely the story of the opera,
just as Don Carlos is far from being its
hero, far even from being an indepen-
dent agent, but then who is? It is a decen-
tered epic, or at any rate an epic whose
ostensible hero has no fixed center.
T he unconsummated passion of Car-
los and Elisabeth will in the course
of the opera figure merely as one ele-
ment to be shunted about in a com-
plex of political struggles: the Dutch
revolt against Spanish oppression, the
attempt by a liberal faction to achieve
some degree of religious tolerance,
the uneasy relations between Philip’s
autocracy and the ecclesiastical power
represented by the Grand Inquisitor.
Each principal character will grasp at
quite separate ends, by means extend-
ing from moral exhortation to espio-
nage and blackmail, attempting to align
their wishes with outer circumstances
but never quite achieving the desired
connection. Nothing is finally to be at-
tained, everything will be postponed
to an afterlife in an opera that, as de-
scribed by Eugenio Montale, “develops
and unfolds by successive additions
and expansions, giving the impression
that it can never reach a conclusion.”
Montale’s description mirrors the
decades-long process of Don Carlos’s
creation. Written in five-act form for
the Paris Opera, it opened there in 1867
in a version already significantly cut.
What Verdi initially composed on the
basis of Joseph Méry and Camille du
Locle’s libretto (largely but not exclu-
sively derived from Friedrich Schiller’s
drama) exceeded even the allowable
limits of French grand opera. Its more
than five-hour running time failed to
accommodate the audience’s dining
and commuting convenience, and thus
significant dramatic sequences were
set a wider perspective on the political
Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
and psychological turmoil to come.
T he opera is a historical fresco hav-
ing, as Verdi well knew, very little to
do with history. In her study The Don
Carlos Enigma, Maria- Cristina Necula
charts the disparity between the actual
life of Don Carlos, the Spanish crown
prince who died mysteriously in 1568 at
the age of twenty-three, and its trans-
mutation over centuries, through an
influential seventeenth- century novel,
Schiller’s eighteenth- century drama,
and Verdi’s opera, into a myth of ro-
mantic rebellion more expressive than
the murky facts that prompted it.
The “real” Don Carlos, to the extent
that he can be known at all, appears to
have been an erratic young man, “much
given” (according to a foreign diplomat)
“to violence to the point of cruelty.”
He was said to be fond of torturing
animals and abusing servingwomen,
and he cracked his skull while chasing
a woman downstairs, an accident that
exacerbated his mental difficulties. As
in the opera, Carlos did involve him-
self in the cause of Philip II’s Flemish
sacrificed while still allowing room for subjects, but he was foiled in his efforts
the lengthy ballet considered manda- and, judged insane, placed in confine-
tory by Parisian operagoers (and now ment by Philip until his death soon
routinely omitted). after. As Necula sifts the historical evi-
Over the next two decades Verdi re- dence, she speculates on how much the
turned sporadically to Don Carlos, re- surviving accounts may themselves be
vising music, adding new text, cutting, politically calculated fictions and con-
replacing, reinstating. He expressed cludes that Verdi’s opera “refuses to
quite different opinions at different give us a closed- ended, definitive Don
moments about the various elements— Carlos. But then so does history.”2
cutting the first act entirely in 1883, for Don Carlos is at once intimate and
instance, to make the opera “more con- immense, a series of chamber operas
cise and vigorous,” and then restoring punctuated by crowded epic intervals
it two years later in his final published (the announcement of the peace treaty,
version. As Verdi wrote to a friend be- the auto- da-fé, the uprising against
fore the Paris opening: “See what a big Philip). The immensity is laid out in
heap this opera is! We’re never done the Met production’s set design, with
with it!”1 its high, oppressive walls and stony
No version has become definitive; spaces, modified from scene to scene to
Don Carlos continues to be performed serve as monastery interior, nocturnal
in countless variants, often in four acts, palace garden, candlelit royal study, or
usually in Italian translation (as Don dungeon. Sometimes a bit of sun is al-
Carlo), but in recent years increas- lowed to peep through, as in the long
ingly in French as well and with res- and crucial scene in the convent garden,
torations of previously omitted music, before darkness resumes. From time to
including the cuts made for the Paris time a gigantic swinging censer and an
premiere that were reconstructed only even more gigantic figure of the cru-
in the 1970s. It is a mysterious mas- cified Christ reinforce the sepulchral
terpiece that refuses to settle down, religiosity of Philip’s era, an impres-
as if continuing on its own to prompt sion extended by predominantly black
new shapes and aspects into being. costuming. The motif of immuring
The Met is staging the French version has been established at the outset by a
for the first time in its history, or more curtain depicting prison bars emerging
precisely one possible French version, from a murky blue background.
restoring some early material while ac- David McVicar’s staging is likewise
cepting many late revisions. I regret the suggestive of constraint. Characters
decision to omit (perhaps, again, for are often spaced widely apart in al-
reasons of length, though the Met has most statue-like isolation, even when
included it in some previous produc- addressing one another, their gazes
tions) the very strong original opening, averted; and when they do come into
cut before the Paris premiere, in which contact there is the effect of separate
woodcutters and their families lament spheres colliding. The embraces of
the privations of war, a scene that, as Carlos and Elisabeth seem to require
many have noted, sets up a compassion- tremendous effort and are hard to
ate motive for Elisabeth’s acceptance of
marriage to Philip. Aside from its great
beauty, it also establishes from the out- 2
Maria- Cristina Necula, The Don Car-
los Enigma: Variations of Historical
1
Letter to Count Opprandino Arri- Fictions (Academica, 2020), p. 124. The
vabene, December 10, 1866; quoted by novel that substantially created the leg-
Harvey Sachs in his illuminating dis- end on which Schiller and Verdi drew
cussion of Don Carlos in Ten Master- is César Vichard de Saint-Réal’s Dom
pieces of Music (Liveright, 2021). Carlos, nouvelle historique (1672).
33
sustain, as if invisible magnetic poles
repelled every attempt at uniting. The
most fervent embraces are those
between Carlos and his friend and
liberalizing political mentor the Mar-
quis of Posa (magnificently sung by
Etienne Dupuis); but these have their
own tension. Carlos clings to Posa as if
to draw a renewing energy out of him,
desperate to persuade himself that
he has succeeded; Posa, on the other
hand, since Carlos is incapable of find-
ing his own way, will direct him toward
his own idealistic political purposes.
But it is after all a drama whose flare-
ups of action and spectacle—fainting
fits, drawn swords, public executions,
assassination, riots—only underscore
how much it is about inaction, frus-
trated action, action belated, action
misfired. Grand though it is, Don Car-
los does not depend on luxuries of dec-
oration or eye-popping deployment of
multitudes; the music would be mise-
en-scène enough, and the music is at
its most powerful when action is sus-
pended. Accepting a core of unknow-
ability in his characters, Verdi creates
a durable psychological realism embed-
ded not in words but in the relation be-
tween words and music. The notes are
far more precisely calibrated than the
words to which they impart precision.
Rhythmic and tonal shifts continuously
interpret the intimate impulses and pres-
sures that cannot be fully articulated.
Verdi here does not so much set
words to music as put the words to the
test, probing the distance between what
people say and what they mean by what
they say and pinpointing the moments
when feeling, frustrated in finding an
outlet, overwhelms the limits of lan-
guage. In the extraordinary dialogues
between Philip and Posa, and later be-
tween Philip and the Grand Inquisitor
(John Relyea), the feints of ostensibly
intellectual discussion acquire a sonic
dimension that exposes their unspo-
ken threats and hidden force fields. All
these nuances seem even more strik-
ing in the French text—at many points
more concise and pointed than the
Italian translation—to which the music
was originally set.
Within its vast frame, Don Carlos
records with delicacy the moment-to-
moment instability of emotions, loy-
alties, and intentions. It is at times so
compressed that a single exchange or a
handful of notes stand in for what could
have been extended scenes. The monu-
mentality of scale suggests the weight
oppressing each character—the forces
of circumstance, temperament, auto-
cratic rigor, or superstitious faith that
baffle every attempt to resist them or
get around them. Resistance, however
bewildered or insufficient, is the heart
of the opera. It is not so much about
the great themes of which its characters
so often sing—peace, death, love, lib-
erty, justice, law, the divine—as about
humans bedeviled by systems they are
unable to control and large historical
patterns they cannot navigate.
That entrapment is distilled in the
fourth act quartet in which Elisabeth,
her unfaithful friend the Princess
Eboli, Posa, and Philip simultaneously
pour out their entirely incompatible
motives and worldviews. The voices of
the intimately estranged blend into a
music none is capable of hearing. No
one can break free of the roles and
fates to which they feel condemned,
and power crushes even those who
wield it. Philip finally must tremble be-
34
fore the Grand Inquisitor, and even the in the second act: oscillating between
blind Inquisitor is consumed with the love scene and pitched battle, Carlos
gnawing sense that the world is escap- pleading, Elisabeth finally acknowl-
ing his grasp. (His loss of balance, just edging that to live with him would
after he has successfully intimidated have been paradise, Carlos fainting
Philip in their basso-to-basso confron- away, Elisabeth reviving him with her
tation, was a nice directorial touch.) pitying voice only to fiercely reject his
embrace, evoking an image of bloody
parricide. The staple “love” of operatic
At the Met the cast—and the orches- tradition is broken down into compo-
tra, directed by Yannick Nézet-Séguin— nents of unappeasable longing, self-
rose repeatedly to those moments of pity, compassion, and deep anxiety
tremulous uncertainty and simmering and loneliness. The scene can only be
conflict that the music invites. As Carlos, ended by an abrupt separation—Car-
Polenzani embodied the prince’s un- los running off cursing his fate (“Ah!
stable turbulence, his cascades of emo- Fils maudit!”)—never resolved.
tional clarity diverted by mood swings, We come to know the characters in
his tenderness curdling into neediness. the ways they change, signaled by whip-
Yoncheva, by contrast, made clear the lash lurches of trust and perception. No
deep-rooted self- control with which relation or identity is secure from sus-
Elisabeth keeps Carlos’s and her own picion or a sudden change of heart. As
passion at bay, as well as the exhausted Princess Eboli, whose misconstruing
resignation in her great fifth-act aria at of Carlos’s feelings for her helps spur a
the tomb of Emperor Charles V. disastrous outcome, Jamie Barton bril-
Together they brought out the over- liantly suggested layers of contradic-
whelming, jagged intensity of their duet tion. The self- confident show- off who
POTATOES AND
POMEGRANATES
Winter had come to Nicosia
and as the last daylight went
braziers flared on the sidewalk.
In some language of Crimea
—or Medea—the men’s heads bent
toward an ancient clock.
Was it a dream? I ate potatoes
“fluffy as a buttered cloud,”
and sensed the red earth as “read,”
like Aphrodite’s lips in the throes
of love: she mouthed aloud
the tale of grave Adonis’s bed.
Earth-apples, so-called, gather
the soil’s nutriment into flesh
pale as moon rocks. They keep
in cellars, huddling together
in cool dampness to stay fresh.
Resistance in them runs deep.
(Just ask the knife that tries to
cleave them raw.) Age nine,
my orphaned grandmother was sent
to pick them in the fields and grew
into a figure unrelentingly benign
in a world that proved malevolent.
She was forgotten and trapped there,
in the potato cellar, for hours,
till someone discovered the error.
Entombed, then freed, she had a share
in rebirth, and now all bowers
had a whiff of pomme de terror.
Indeed, indeed, the seed I was
found itself inside her like a spud
the hour my mother’s embryo
developed ova: by nature’s laws,
dipped in the vitamins of blood
and coming to light like a memory.
—Ange Mlinko
sings the “Veil Song” (a solitary oasis
of light music) to entertain the queen’s
ladies in waiting swivels with her venge-
ful outbursts in the third act. These
transformations prepared the way for
the resounding force with which she
tore into the aria “O don fatale,” shed-
ding earlier selves to let out the anguish
under her cultivated courtly persona.
As Philip—whose contradictions are
the most consequential, since they are
the contradictions of power itself—
Eric Owens made a somewhat opaque
impression. He expressed the king’s
loneliness and fatigue more vividly
than his capacity, despite any residual
regrets, to murder for reasons of state.
That someone who philosophically ac-
cepts the morality of killing his own
son can still elicit sympathy is a mark of
Verdi’s refusal to reduce his characters
to types or symbols. He finds out who
they are and lets them become that.
At most they are compelled by circum-
stance to perform, however anxiously or
imperfectly, symbolic roles; thoroughly
human, they lend themselves to reinven-
tion by each singer who performs them.
Posa, for example, the stalwart freedom
fighter who finally achieves martyrdom,
could easily be a stick figure. But Du-
puis, aside from the sheer beauty of his
singing, was able to suggest at every turn
Posa’s Machiavellian skills, possessed in
full even if he chooses to apply them to
virtuous ends.
The circumstances under which the
performance I saw took place deci-
sively shaped its effect. A few nights
earlier, at the premiere, the Ukrainian
national anthem had been sung at the
outset. Such explicit acknowledgment
was not required as Posa and Philip
launched into their fraught second-
act duet, Posa confronting the king
with the Spanish oppression of Flan-
ders—“a place of horror, a tomb . . .
the air is filled with the cries of widows
for their slaughtered husbands”—and
Philip responding, “Only with blood
can there be peace in the world.” With
the orchestra’s discordant clamor and
Posa’s interjection—“Terrible peace!
The peace of cemeteries!”—the out-
side world broke into the theater.
The “peace” so constantly evoked is
the most slippery of terms. It denotes in
the beginning an end to the sufferings
of war; in Philip’s mind it is something
bought with slaughter; by the last act
Elisabeth declares, “My heart has only
one wish, the peace of death.” Yet the
opera itself does not settle resignedly
into the “sweet and profound peace”
of the tomb, and there is little sense of
consolation in the monks’ chanting of
dust and ashes: the memory of Span-
ish heretics being marched to the stake
onstage is a little too fresh. The op-
era’s conclusion is notoriously sudden
and ambiguous: Carlos and Elisabeth,
discovered together by Philip and the
Inquisitor, are threatened with death;
Carlos draws his sword; a monk (who
may or may not be Charles V, who may
or not be a ghost) pulls him into the
depths of the convent (which may or
may not be a symbolic representation of
his death). In this production, Carlos is
apparently welcomed into the afterlife
by the martyred Posa, yet it would take
more than that image to wrap this “big
heap” neatly up. Perhaps it is an opera
that simply cannot end. It wants to go
on; too many questions remain unan-
swered. There is a promise of freedom
in that very capacity to leave things so
far from settled. Q
The New York Review
 The Act of Persuasion
A Splendid Intelligence:
The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 388 pp., $35.00
The Uncollected Essays
of Elizabeth Hardwick
edited and with an introduction
by Alex Andriesse.
New York Review Books,
283 pp., $18.95 (paper;
to be published in May)
1.
It is unfair to begin an essay on Eliz-
abeth Hardwick with an instance of
her cruelty; she was one of the fairest
literary critics of her time, as well as
the most elegant and humane. Yet the
faintest hint of certain themes, over-
heard in a novel or play or the chatter
of a cocktail party, could provoke her
to astonishing acts of savagery. These
themes included academics, politi-
cians, youth cults playing at revolu-
tion, biographers, diarists, and, above
all, marriage, with its unremitting and
awful capacity to turn a woman into
a wife. Consider the letter she sent to
her friend Mary McCarthy in 1973, de-
scribing the husbands and wives at a
writers’ residency in Italy:
Strangely torpid, aging academics
from at home and [the] UK; sly,
dead eyes, darting away from an
idea; envious sighs, and as much
intellectual vivacity as a wood-
chuck. And the wives, of all sizes,
yet somehow one size in their
heads! They mutter about typing
His manuscripts, and they have
not made one single demand upon
themselves, whether of mind or
body, and go forth without any ef-
fort or artifice as if they were dogs
adopted by their professore. They
are mostly kindly, but there is this
thorough acceptance of their na-
ture and they seem to have lived in
a world without mirrors.
“It is a perturbation—the laziness of
wives,” Hardwick pronounces, and her
judgment, however unjust, makes vis-
ible, audible, and dramatic the figure
of the wife. Like Frankenstein’s mon-
ster, she is a composite creature, “of
all sizes, yet somehow one size.” Un-
like him, she is sluggish, weak-willed;
destined to travel from one side of the
earth to the other and learn no more,
live no more, than had she stayed at
home. Her resignation, her obtuseness,
her simple, secretarial concern for her
husband’s manuscript—they represent
the essence of all that is undesirable in
intellectual and erotic life. But she is
not without her powers. She wields the
force appropriate to her tyrannized cir-
cumstances, the manipulations of “the
dominant-dependent woman ruling by
disguises and distortions, always on the
alert to restrain the freedom of others,
to create guilt,” Hardwick wrote. She
called it “the revenge of wives.”
The letter to McCarthy is spiteful,
petty, and vain. It is so shocking that
it prompts a question that tends to
arise when reading novels, not letters.
April 21, 2022
Merve Emre
Elizabeth Hardwick; illustration by Yann Kebbi
Who is speaking here? No one would
dispute that the letter was written by
Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Lex-
ington, Kentucky, in 1916; fifty-seven
years old; a recent and embittered di-
vorcée; the author of two novels and
dozens of reviews and essays in The
New York Review of Books, which she
had cofounded with Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, among others,
in 1963. Yet the voice that narrates it
is the voice of another, tuned to some
notion of “the ideal self,” as Hardwick
described the distant and fantastic ap-
parition who speaks from within a let-
ter. Here the ideal self is everything the
wife is not, all the qualities summoned,
via negation, by her brutal dismissal.
She is independent, disciplined, self-
assertive, and mirthful; attentive to the
pleasures of artifice yet penetrating in
thought and feeling; passionate about
collective life and its moral responsi-
bilities; suspicious of power and those
who covet it; persuasive in speech, and,
when the occasion demands it, merci-
less in judgment. She is—as Hardwick
was, until her death in 2007—the con-
summate critic.
It is the critic whose outrage courses
through the letter, sneering and jeering
from behind the wives’ backs, whis-
tling at the professors’ scruffy, stubby-
legged dogs to step lively now, to pick
up the pace of their own lives. It is the
critic who holds the mirror up, not just
to the unseeing wives—may the scales
fall from their eyes one day—but to
the larger and more luminous world of
literature. The mirror was the meta-
phor Hardwick reached for most often,
though she never imagined the reflec-
tive quality of criticism, or any other
genre of writing, as symmetrical or
strictly mimetic. It was subversive. The
critic made up her objects anew, drew
lines and cast shadows over brightened
surfaces, revealed the great patterns
submerged below the petty details.
Her eyes and ears, her mind, her heart,
were pledged to the written word, more
interesting in its variety and complexity
than any single person could hope to
be. Here, at last, was a union capable of
withstanding boredom, triviality, fear,
and constraint, in life as in the making
of art.
Push the conceit a little further, and
the responsibilities of the critic are
clear. Her obligation is to her materi-
als—to apprehend them faithfully, to
represent them honestly, and to coax
from fiction’s acting, speaking, and
thinking beings those half-glimpsed
truths of the human condition. Her
resolve is strengthened by a stubborn,
if short-lived, fidelity. Hardwick’s best
essays attend with considerable en-
ergy to a single author, sensing that
other critics paid for breadth, and for
the grand pronouncements about the
state of fiction that often accompanied
it, with a certain shabbiness of thought.
The “we”—invoked by couples and crit-
ics alike, and never more pointedly than
in moments of insecurity—troubled
her with its falseness, its unscrupulous
and overbearing insistence on a single,
shared vision. “I am not a law-giver,” she
liked to assure people. She knew that the
last thing anyone needed was more laws
or people eager to enforce them.
W hether through intuition or ex-
perience or the acuteness of her
sympathetic imagination, Hardwick
understood that the expression of judg-
ment was an act of persuasion, not co-
ercion. The art of criticism turned on
convincing readers that one’s judgment
was not merely a permissible opinion
but a universal truth. The best critics
do not order or whine or throw long,
baffling tantrums. They reason and
qualify and defend. Occasionally, they
do it with such a thoroughly integrated
array of tactics—a splendid particu-
larity of description, metaphor, and
paraphrase; a casual fluency in the
language of genre and form; a knowl-
edge of literary theory, psychoanalysis,
sociology, and history; an ear for irony;
a gift for compassion—and with such
unusual refinement that the reader may
confuse the brisk and polished exercise
of critical reason for the eccentricities
of style or the operations of sensibil-
ity. This has been Hardwick’s fate so
far, to be worshiped as a stylist. It is an
unfortunate fate, in its way, but a fate
she tempted for four decades in The
New York Review, where she glided be-
tween her comically impertinent judg-
ments—“Carlos Baker’s biography of
Ernest Hemingway is bad news,” “Al-
most every idea or opinion in this book
is a banality”—and her very precise
justifications of them.
And her justifications, it must
be stressed, were always historical,
grounding the singular shape of a novel
in the actualities and possibilities that
gave rise to it. Hardwick wrote about
history on various scales—the life of
an author; the decades of the 1940s,
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; the pre-war
and postwar periods; the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries—“as if history
were a concert program, some long and
some short selections, a few modern
and the steady traditional,” she wrote.
Whatever the length of the selection,
she traced the same Yeatsian arc. A
bourgeois social world that had once
seemed so pleasantly and progressively
arranged, with a logic and a purpose
and a center that could hold, had dis-
sipated into something “formless”: “A
fearful gap, not only in generations,
but in common sense, in ordinary un-
derstanding of the world about us,
has opened up. And how can we face
this, except with dread?” Unpredict-
ability ruled the day. Suffering could
no longer be treated as an obstacle to
be overcome—the painful but well-
proportioned middle of a story—but
the yearly cost of living in a world with-
out accountability. The injured and the
insulted waited, first at the windows of
their dirty lodgings, then in the streets,
for a redemption that refused to come.
This is registered in her criticism
by a split in the history of the novel.
The nineteenth-century realist novel
clutched at the moral and aesthetic
powers of destiny, “the orderly se-
quence whereby the seed brings forth
a crop of its kind,” as Hardwick liked
to quote Silas Marner. Certain acts—
auctioning off your wife and daughter,
sheltering an escaped convict, sleep-
ing with the local pastor, marrying a
mole-speckled pedant with a sexually
magnetic nephew, or, really, marrying
anyone at all—were fateful, marking
a character as profoundly and irrevo-
cably as Odysseus’s scar. These acts
transformed people into the protag-
onists of novels and set the wheels of
plot turning. Mysteries were solved;
misdeeds were punished; honesty and
generosity were rewarded. As she ex-
plained in “Reflections on Fiction”:
Through a natural determinism,
character and action came together,
35
 the intermingling of stories and
destinies, of cause and effect, of
crime and punishment, gave us
most of the great novels of the En-
glish and European tradition. En-
vironment, moral choice, defects
of character, defaults of luck; these
could be depended upon to lead to
some plausible resolution.
Modern fiction did not simply break
this promise; it flaunted its betrayal
of the pact between history and nar-
rative. Its protagonists—exiles, ref-
ugees, paranoiacs, picaros, queers,
“divorcées, models, whores”—violated
the pledge to be faithful to their for-
mer selves. The unsettling dramas of
Henrik Ibsen and the “clear, chilly”
monuments of Henry James, her two
perpetually difficult, perpetually in-
teresting loves, laid bare what the re-
alist novel had repressed: the fractured
nature of the self and its capacity for
reinvention; the anxiety, fatigue, and
loneliness compelled by the absence
of origins and endings; the irony that
made the fragility and the emptiness
of the world bearable; and the realiza-
tion, expressed with beautiful melan-
choly by Georg Lukács, that the soul
was “wider and larger than the desti-
nies which life has to offer it.” Or as
Hardwick summed it up in one of her
essays, “The self is insatiable.”
The novelist could valorize this in-
satiability as freedom or lament it as
homelessness. Whichever way she
chose to take it, it was how life was lived
today, beyond the reach of a strange or
unique destiny. The modern novel had
to display “the mirror-image of a world
gone out of joint,” Lukács wrote. Its
art was an art of bewildering and irre-
deemable loss; an art of incongruity,
pieced together from the innumerable
shards and fragments of consciousness.
In the novel’s once-silvered and now
blistering glass, the act of thinking—
merely thinking—about the past and
its shattered relation to the present was
both its event and its mystery. “It was
June,” announces the narrator of Vir-
ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, before
showing us Clarissa Dalloway in her
room, searching the mirror for “her
self” and finding a false, glittering idol,
a reflection whose life belongs only to
the present, to this fleeting moment,
“pointed; dart-like; definite.” The lines
chime through the opening sentences
of Hardwick’s final novel, her master-
piece, Sleepless Nights (1979): “It is
June. This is what I have decided to do
with my life just now. I will do this work
of transformed and even distorted
memory and lead this life, the one I am
leading today.”
2.
What about her past? Her revisions
and reinventions? Cathy Curtis’s new
biography, A Splendid Intelligence:
The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick, be-
gins with an eyebrow-raising author’s
note. “This biography of Elizabeth
Hardwick includes only as much in-
formation about her famous hus-
band,” Curtis writes, “as is necessary
to tell the story of her life.” This is an
exhilarating promise, carrying with
it a whiff of naughtiness, of feminist
insubordination. Perhaps he will be
glimpsed aslant, in cutting asides and
parentheticals, or better yet, in the
footnotes. “The famous carry about
36
with them a great weight of patriar-
chal baggage—the footnotes of their
lives,” begins Hardwick’s essay “Wives
and Mistresses.” Imagine a biographer
wily enough to insist on misreading
this statement, treating the famous
one as the wife, and her husband as her
weighty patriarchal baggage!
Yet Curtis disappoints immediately,
with the appearance on the next page
of a kind of thesis statement, blunt, ear-
nest, and dutiful:
In this first biography of Elizabeth
Hardwick, I seek to go beyond the
glimpses that a famously private
person revealed in her published
writing to present a portrait of an
exceptional woman who emerged
from a long, troubled marriage
with the clarity and wisdom that il-
luminate her brilliant novel Sleep-
less Nights.
The book that follows arranges the
names, dates, and places of Hard-
wick’s life with a listless and clumsy
workmanship; quotes her writing only
to measure its likeness to her life; and
is overwhelmingly, even slavishly, de-
voted to the vexatious, humiliating,
and pitiable behavior of her famous
husband. One wonders why Curtis
chose a subject whose favorite topic
was the myriad failures of biogra-
phy. Why show such indifference to
an essayist who hands reviewers the
most lacerating sentences with which
to flog biographers for their sins? For
instance: “Biographies inevitably re-
cord the demeaning moments of mal-
ice and decline and have the effect
of imprinting them upon the ninety
years.” Or: “There is no doubt that
this is ‘the material.’ But it is not an
existence.”
T he life, the existence, is best gleaned
by reading her work and listening to
the six extraordinary interviews Hard-
wick gave to David Farrell at the
University of Kentucky from 1977 to
1980.1 Here is the ghost of the woman
herself: the rich and disarming drawl,
the frank bursts of laughter, the rev-
erence with which she speaks of Eliot,
Hardy, James, and Mann. Her voice is
arresting, in part because the style of
speech does not and could not match
the style of her writing. Yet this is
what Farrell wants from her—a per-
formance whose poetry and romance
rival those of the page, with plots and
subplots and characters splashed with
local color—and she amuses herself at
his expense, with irony and forbear-
ance. Confronting his questions, at
times intelligent, at times obtuse, she
creates and withholds herself. Could
she describe what her parents looked
like? “They looked just like other peo-
ple.” What kind of clothes did they
wear? “They wore ordinary clothes.”
She thinks a moment and adds that her
father “wore those kind of shoes that
lace up.”
He retreats, chastened. Now it will
cost her nothing to be courteous and
to describe her childhood in Lexing-
ton with a little flair. She tells him that
her father, Eugene, was a spirited man,
handsome, gregarious, and exception-
1
The interviews can be found at the web-
site of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral
History at the University of Kentucky
Libraries, kentuckyoralhistory.org.
ally musical, a fine baritone-tenor who
sang parlor songs when he walked to
the fire station to play pinochle. Her
weary, industrious mother, Mary, pre-
ferred the simple beauty of hymns,
and on Sundays, if there weren’t floors
that needed sweeping or windows
that needed washing or children who
needed tending, she would take all
eleven of them to sing in the Presbyte-
rian choir.
“Lizzie,” as they called her, was the
eighth. She was raised to be thrifty
and self-sufficient, it being her moth-
er’s opinion that the two worst things
a woman could do were go into debt
and get married. The Hardwick girls
were supposed to wear patched dresses
and wait for the July sales on Main
Street to buy new things. They were
supposed to go to college and become
schoolteachers. A poor, pragmatic up-
bringing is not ideal for the biographer
who wants to put her young subject in
touch with “glamour, fantasy, and illicit
pleasure”—Curtis’s description of fin-
de-siècle downtown Lexington—but
in the case of Hardwick, the drama
seemed to emanate from within, from
an elemental restlessness, a vigor, and a
desire for sovereignty over her intellect
and emotion, over money and every-
thing it determined.
She was still living at home when
she enrolled at the University of Ken-
tucky in 1934. There was something as
pure as water and utterly unabashed in
her love of literature; she recalls, over
forty years later, “the thrill of fresh-
man English.” And it was, indeed, a
thrilling moment in literary studies in
America. New Criticism had diffused
a strange, excitable air into Kentucky’s
English Department. “T. S. Eliot had
just made the seventeenth century sort
of the thing,” she twangs. John Crowe
Ransom, “a very elegant, refined, very
complex man,” had come to Lexing-
ton to teach summer classes to high
school English teachers. The writers
she adored, the left-wing, anti- Stalinist
critics of the Partisan Review, were
leading the revival of interest in James
and introducing readers to Kafka, res-
cuing American literary culture from
the clutches of a feeble and decaying
regionalism. The first play she remem-
bered seeing, the “first knockout blow”
delivered by art, was Ibsen’s Ghosts
on a trip to Cincinnati during college.
In this southern landscape, a seed was
planted whose shoots would be “flow-
ering to their fate,” she wrote of her
adolescence. Looking back, she could
see the beginnings of her disdain for
provinciality, her fascination with “the
history of now,” and her sense that lit-
erature was, in some oblique way, part
of that history, but also a liberation
from it.
In her essays on Kentucky these
years have a sort of lost and squalid
beauty to them, the sadness that comes
from measuring the distance between
now and then. What does it mean to
be from Kentucky? What part of her
has endured? “What can I answer ex-
cept to say that I have been, according
to my limits, always skeptical,” she
writes, in a piece included in Uncol-
lected Essays, a new volume of her
criticism. Kentucky was horse races
and tobacco farms and unblended
whiskey:
It was Gratz Park and the Pub-
lic Library, Morrison Chapel at
Transylvania College, the John
Hunt Morgan House, Dr. Buck-
ner’s house, called Rose Hill, and
surviving amidst the rusty oilcans
of a filling station, backed by the
peeling frames of poor people, a
fine old garden facing an adjoin-
ing rectangle of old pipes, broken
clothesline, Coke bottles, and the
debris of hope—those unchurning
washing machines, discarded toilet
bowls, rusting tire rims.
The avarice with which the sentence
hoards these details is heightened by
their uselessness; they are worth noth-
ing to anyone, now. This salvage yard
of dreams—above all, the dream of a
comfortable life for the poor people
of the South—holds the clutter of her
past, the autobiography of her people.
But she is no longer the teenage girl
who stopped at the filling station on her
walk home. That girl can only be seen
across a great distance, in the lovely
decrepitude of her people’s old things.
“The possessor must at last come to
an end,” she wrote, “while the things
live on in the mute, appealing obdu-
racy of the inanimate. The decline of
one and the endurance of the other
is plot.”
T he plot of her life would shift the
story from the deprivations of many—
this, after all, is only backdrop—to the
fortunes of one. In college, she prided
herself on the distance she kept from
group life and its clannish sentiments.
She hated sororities, loathed student
journalism, found the very idea of ath-
letics ludicrous. “What did you do?”
Farrell pleads, sounding irritated and
demoralized by her contempt for extra-
curricular activities. “I talked. I drank,”
she cackles. “I drank a lot of whis-
key.” When the war began, she rode
the Greyhound to New York to start a
graduate degree in English literature
at Columbia. She found the professors
appallingly “conventional”—dried lit-
tle sticks of men who wouldn’t lift a fin-
ger to help place a woman in a tolerable
professorship in a tolerable city. “There
wasn’t much point in getting a Ph.D.,”
she says, “because women did not get
very good jobs.” Twice she left the city
to go back to Lexington for the sum-
mer, and on her second visit she was so
determined to avoid studying for her
general exams that she wrote a novel
instead. She threw it away—“It wasn’t
very good,” she says—then wrote an-
other, The Ghostly Lover, which was
published in 1945.
The Ghostly Lover is artful and un-
pleasant, claustrophobic, and more
gratifying to think about than pleasur-
able to read. It marks the beginning of
Hardwick’s talent as an intimate, nearly
metaphysical portraitist. Here, for in-
stance, is sixteen-year-old Marian Cole-
man by her porch in Kentucky—“Of
course that’s me,” Hardwick tells Far-
rell—looking at the older man who will
seduce her:
She looked squarely at his face.
It was relaxed and had fallen into
its purest shape. The face was like
that of a baby who had grown into
full manhood with a beard and
lines, but still retained the child’s
lack of pain and indecision. It was
a face of the present, a startling
face that seemed to have reached
some ultimate static stage. It was
remotely arrogant and cruel.
The New York Review
It is a curiously incorporeal descrip-
tion—no eye or hair color, only meta-
phor and atmosphere—worthless for
the sketch artist but ideal for the judge of
character. Already, the man’s sins have
risen to the surface of his flesh. The be-
ginning and the end of his relationship
with Marian—her vulnerability, his be-
trayal of her, his callousness—flash like
“white lightning, a flash that spread,
and spread again, and stayed,” as James
would have it.
The chilly, abstracted nature of the
description raises the same question
as the letter to McCarthy did. Who is
speaking here? For while Marian is the
one looking, her perception is filtered
through layer after layer of reflection
by the narrator, whose foreknowledge
seals Marian’s fate as tightly as the
tomb of some unfortunate fairy-tale
princess. So effaced, the narrator lin-
gers everywhere, passing judgment:
behind the “alert, trigger-set, dry and
scorched eyes” of Hattie, Marian’s
maid, for whom “the people of the
world were perpetually in a state of
indecent exposure”; behind the mask-
like face of Marian’s brother Albert,
“sharp, lithe, and curious as a glisten-
ing dagger” among the “slow-eyed peo-
ple” at a cockfight; beneath the harsh
glare of Marian’s mother, Lucy, who
belonged to that “special category: a
wife.”
The compression of story through
point of view is useful for a certain
kind of critic, who, short on space
and patience, must assess a writer’s
life and work in three or four pierc-
ing sentences. But this tactic lends
The Ghostly Lover the same airless,
frozen, and cruel quality as the man’s
face. It is as if the characters, modeled
to perfection and glazed by the narra-
tor’s moral judgments, have nowhere
to go and nothing left to do. Here is
a novel that is not only bereft of plot
but fatal to its characters’ vitality.
There is no life in it; no voice, save the
all-knowing voice of the critic, strain-
ing to free herself from the constraints
of fiction.
3.
Was it this voice that compelled Philip
Rahv, the editor of Partisan Review, to
believe that Hardwick would make a
good reviewer? The letter he wrote to
her after reading The Ghostly Lover
most likely reached her at the Hotel
Schuyler on West 45th Street, where
she and a friend had rented an apart-
ment after she left Columbia. They
worked odd jobs, scraping together
enough money to live in sleazy glam-
our, surrounded by
a nettling thicket of drunks, actors,
gamblers, waiters, people who slept
all day in their graying underwear
and gave off a far from fresh odor
when they dressed in their brown
suits and brown snap-brim hats for
the evening’s inchoate activities.
She wrote short stories for little maga-
zines and copy for a “crummy publish-
ing company,” whose books left not a
single mark on her memory. She taught
literature to cloistered debutantes at
a “horrible Southern academy” in a
“gray stone house” on Riverside Drive,
its stately beauty diminished by its
dull, frivolous inhabitants. “But it was
history, wasn’t it?” she wondered, re-
April 21, 2022
calling how she “worried a great deal
about ‘disgrace’: about pregnancy, pro-
miscuity, gossip, mistakes.”
“The Family”—the name that Rahv
and his fellow New York intellectuals
gave themselves—took her in. They as-
Spr ing Boo ks
signed her Partisan Review’s monthly
Fiction Chronicle and published her
famous and scathing review of Simone
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. They
to Chang e Minds
saved her from the tepid ooze of mid-
dlebrow publishing and the indignities
of teaching high school, waved away
her quaint notions of disgrace and
About Justice from
downfall and fate. From the beginning,
her role in the Family was defined by
what they believed she was destined
never to be: a wife. “There weren’t
many women in it,” she tells Farrell,
who points out that wives did not seem
to be considered part of the Family. In
a voice edged with pride and uncom-
mon prejudice, she recalls the lordly
parties that Rahv threw for the critics
to discuss art and politics. “You didn’t
do anything,” she qualifies. “You just
talked all the time. It was all ideas.
But nobody ever addressed a word to NEW YORK TIMES
a wife. They just sat there like stuffed
B ESTSE LLE R
dummies.”
Farrell wonders why they bothered
coming at all. “Well, you can’t leave “This fiery takedown
your wife at home,” Hardwick replies,
shocked. “Unless you just get so fed up hits the mark.”
she must stay.” And the literary critic
Diana Trilling? “Did you consider her —Publishers Weekly
a wife?” “I still do,” she laughs, a mali-
cious laugh.
There is a deep, almost punitive irony
in the fact that she met her famous hus-
band in the Rahvs’ living room in 1947.
Later, he wrote a poem titled “Man and
Wife,” which seemed at once to com-
memorate and to mourn the occasion. “Slaves for Peanuts
Farrell recites part of it to her:
is a revelation.”
You were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass —Imani Perry
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at
your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the
traditional South.
“This should be required
“He wasn’t fainting at my feet. That
was hyperbole,” she remarks, very dry reading among Democrats
and a little wistful. She encountered
him casually here and there, then more in Washington and
fatefully at Yaddo in early 1949, where
he, “handsome, magnetic, rich, wild across the country.”
with excitement about his powers,” had
deigned to consort with lesser beings.
—Heather McGhee
“What were you doing there?” Farrell
asks, rather stupidly. “Just what we
were all doing up there—just writing!”
she exclaims. But the man was not
doing what they were all doing. He was
helping to whip up an FBI investigation
into Yaddo’s subversive director in-
stead of writing poems. Later, he drove N OW I N PA P E RBAC K
across the country to harangue friends
and assault policemen outside movie
theaters. She kept him company during “A gripping,
what she calls his “flights”—a word she
utters with muffled tenderness—and eye-opening story.”
what his psychiatrists would diagnose
as “his struggle with bipolarity.” They —Smithsonian
were married that summer, after he
was released from Baldpate Hospital, a
name so absurd even Dickens could not
have dreamed it up.
“My husband,” she calls him. “My
own husband.” It comes as a shock
w w w.t h e n ew p r e s s .c o m / @ t h e n ew p r e s s
to realize that, at the time of the first
37
interview, her husband, the poet Rob-
ert Lowell, had been dead for only
a month, and that at the time of his
death, he had not been her husband
for five years. Meekly, Farrell tells her
he thinks she was very brave to “take
on Lowell” after he had been released
from the hospital. Her words are per-
fectly deflating. “Well, he got over it,”
she says. Farrell does not seem to have
the courage to contradict her. “A lot
of other people have been willing to
forbear also,” she laughs, trying to res-
cue herself from the humiliation of his
compliment by crushing it with the hu-
miliation of her husband’s affairs.
H ad Hardwick derailed the plot of
her life by becoming a wife? Well, not
exactly; she merely had diverted it onto
another track, a rickety and unfinished
one. She and Lowell spent the first
three years of their marriage wheeling
around Europe, seeking a reason for
their self-imposed exile. The essays in
Partisan Review that bear the marks
of these years preserve the fears and
the possibilities of tearing away from
one’s place of origin—the freedom of
solitude, the guilt of indolence, the in-
tense, irreconcilable pull of both the
new and the familiar. “The expatriate
sometimes suffers painfully from the
dread of losing touch with the world
he has left but towards which he looks
back . . .with all the tart ambivalence of
the injured lover,” she wrote in “Liv-
ing in Italy.” “It is, after all, the fickle,
abandoned country for which the exile
writes his books.” And the sense of his-
tory in Europe was deeper, more sober-
ing, than what America had to offer. In
Vienna, the opera house rose like a
jewel box amid the rubble of the war. In
Amsterdam, the air was cold and sor-
rowful, but the life they lived, with little
money and endless conversation about
the Old Masters, was “marvelous.” (In
the background—his flights.)
When they returned to America in
1953, it was without settling into it.
Boston, where they lived on and off
until 1960, “isn’t particularly good
for women,” she informs Farrell, who
suggests that her description of the
city (in her 1959 essay “Boston”) as
“wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of
nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous
oils, provincial, self-esteeming” may
have offended Bostonians. “Only fools
identify themselves with a place,” she
laughs. “Who cares?” They spent a
year in Iowa City, where her husband
taught at the esteemed writing work-
shop. Of the essays she started drafting
there, it is “George Eliot’s Husband”
that contains the most optimistic hints
of the connubial life she imagined.
Eliot and her husband were
inconceivable as anything except
what they were, two writers, bril-
liant and utterly literary. They
led the literary life from morning
to midnight, working, reading,
correcting proofs, traveling, en-
tertaining, receiving and writing
letters, planning literary projects,
worrying, doubting their pow-
ers, experiencing a delicious hy-
pochondria. The Brownings, the
Webbs, the Garnetts, the Carlyles,
Leonard and Virginia Woolf,
Middleton Murray and Kather-
ine Mansfield—the literary cou-
ple is a peculiar English domestic
manufacture, useful no doubt in
38
a country with difficult winters.
Before the bright fire at tea-time,
we can see these high-strung men
and women clinging together, their
inky fingers touching.
Might the list of couples end one day
with “the Lowells”? The university
made this fantasy hard to sustain, de-
spite its difficult winters and her bad
nerves. “I was present as the wife of a
teacher,” she recalled in the bitter af-
terword to her second novel, The Sim-
ple Truth (1955), which she wrote when
she could not get a job teaching because
the university refused to hire wives,
she claimed. (In the background—his
flights. A return to Boston. A move to
New York.)
The Simple Truth prolonged the
Jamesian spell that had gripped her
since her college years, but in a pop-
ular genre: the true- crime novel, a
useful vessel for a twentieth-century
writer thirsting for the eventfulness of
nineteenth-century sensational fiction.
“There is beauty to be torn out of the
event, the suicide, the murder case, the
prize fight,” she later wrote in “Grub
Street: New York.” “Real life is pre-
sented as if it were fiction. The con-
creteness of fact is made suggestive,
shadowy, symbolical.” While the writ-
ers attracted to true crime—Norman
Mailer, Truman Capote, William Sty-
ron—planted themselves at the center
of the excitement, as an obstinate and
“vividly experiencing ‘I,’” she stayed in
the shadows of the third person in The
Simple Truth.
The book’s murder trial was based
on one she followed closely during
her time in Iowa. It comes into focus
through the affable eyes of Joseph
Parks, a writer who haunts the court-
house while his wife, Doris, bleaches
the kitchen, puzzling “over the way
to be both a housewife and a ‘free
person.’” With the impressionability
and the heartlessness of youth, they
create a fiction out of the unrequited
love the murderer, Rudy Peck, nursed
for his victim, Betty Jane Henderson.
But when Joseph meets Anita, a shy,
middle-aged, professor’s wife, spouting
a “loose and generalized Freudianism”
in the visitor’s gallery, she becomes
his confidante and the analyst of his
fictions.
Fiction and its interpretation tempt
Joe away from the uncertainty, the
poverty, and the banality of his life into
snobbish speculations about intention
and consciousness, about psychological
and sociological explanations for why
human beings hurt one another. Doris,
hearing her husband on the phone to
Anita, chooses simply to ignore it all:
she “put another cigarette in her black-
and-white holder. A single cool tear
clung pleasantly to her eyelashes.” This
single cool tear is a sphere of beau-
tiful unfeeling. In its reflection lurks
the danger of transforming real people
into fictional characters and putting
them through the paces of scandal. It
makes them easy to weep over and easy
to forget.
In her essays, Hardwick reproved
and indulged the temptation to fiction-
alize. How could she help it? Between
the person and the page lies the prism
of fiction, always. No genre can avoid
it. Even criticism, if it is to speak of
the lives and works of the dead, must
bring the dead to life—the words of the
past distilled in the words of the pres-
ent. The only reprieve comes from re-
treating into generalities, speaking of
archetypes and myths rather than indi-
viduals. Through the 1950s and 1960s,
she wrote of “the American woman as
snow-queen” and “the Turks, with their
scarecrows in colored rags doing all the
work in the fields.” Dylan Thomas was
not a person but “the charming young
man of great gifts, wilfully going down
to ruin. He was Hart Crane, Poe, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, the stuff of which his-
tory is made.” Robert Frost “was his
own stereotype.”
The current ran in the opposite
direction too; writing about fiction
presented her with a repository of char-
acters and tropes to help make sense of
reality, to yoke the past to the present.
Her pieces on the obliterated hopes of
the civil rights movement, dispatches
from Selma and Memphis, from Chi-
cago and Los Angeles, remain in thrall
to novels. This gives them a distant, un-
real quality, a sense that they have been
observed by a presence hovering high
above the action rather than a reporter
with her feet on the ground. Martin
Luther King Jr.’s solitary evangelism
recalls Adam Bede, when “Dinah
preaches that Jesus came down from
Heaven to tell the good news about
God to the poor.” The scorched south-
ern countryside
inevitably brings to mind flamboy-
ant adjectives and images from
Faulkner. Immemorial, doomed
streets, policed by the Snopeses
and Peter Grimms, alleys worn
thin in the sleepless pursuit of a
thousand Joe Christmases.
Neither “the Southern Negroes” nor
“the white people” are made of flesh
and blood, but ideas and symbols; it
is startling to realize that not a single
proper name, except for those of the
heroes and the villains, appears in
these essays.
(In the background—a daughter,
Harriet, born in 1957, whose “smiles
were, in Sylvia Plath’s phrase, ‘found
money,’” and whose privacy Hardwick
guarded with ferocious love. A summer
home in Castine, Maine, “where man
and nature are one, or seem to be,” she
wrote, perplexed by the state’s immu-
nity to change. And his flights, leaving
her to raise the child by herself for long
stretches of time.)
4.
How does marriage matter for criti-
cism? This is an embarrassing question.
It is, however, the correct one to ask
of Hardwick’s writing in the 1970s.
What does it mean to be married for a
long time, for twenty or thirty or forty
years? Nothing, perhaps. “You’re never
really a married person,” she informs
Farrell. Anyone who claims to be one
is pretending, for if marriage teaches
you anything, it is how “alone one al-
ways is,” she says. “This is just common
experience.” A person, a wife, does not
need to suffer what Hardwick suffered
to know it.
But betrayal added injury to injury.
She is reticent when Farrell brings up
the end of her marriage. The record of
it is already public, in the poems her
husband wrote about leaving her for a
woman he met while on a fellowship at
Oxford, altering and embedding snip-
pets from the letters she sent him while
he was having the affair.2 The letters
trace a too-familiar plot: the decep-
tion and devastation of the wife. He
praises the loveliness of the country-
side, pretending that he is tucked away
among the dreaming spires, when he
plays house with his mistress in some
charming London square. Hardwick is
his housekeeper, his bookkeeper, his
child-minder, his archivist, his frantic
and destitute secretary. “I have been
absolutely overwhelmed with all this,”
she writes, “the taxes, insurances,
houses, studies, papers, schools orga-
nized, mail answered, things turned
down.” Over her side of the correspon-
dence, which, in her husband’s words,
“veers from frantic affection to frantic
abuse,” there hangs a blackened cloud
of dramatic irony. The reader of the
letters is forced into the wrenching po-
sition of the friend who knows before
the wife does.
But the plot has a twist, or maybe
another change of track: the appear-
ance of the critic, the possessor of an
achieved, enjoyed, and triumphant life.
Until that point, “I wasn’t very con-
scious of Elizabeth Hardwick,” she
tells Farrell. “It’s been a kind of an
accumulation of a little bit of reputa-
tion”; “I didn’t write so terribly much.”
Everyone is vulnerable to projection,
and I cannot help thinking that, in her
letter to McCarthy, she unleashed the
voice of the critic in all its severity on
the wife she had been. In doing so, she
revealed the strange structural corre-
spondence between the critic and the
mistress; to their great relief, they are
both not the wife. They gain their daz-
zle from her blindness, their verve from
her complacency.
Most of all, the freedom they repre-
sent—the freedom to create anew, to
judge without obligation—is sweetened
by the debt the wife extracts. “This is
the unspoken contract of a wife and her
works,” Hardwick wrote. “In the long
run wives are to be paid in a peculiar
coin—consideration for their feelings.”
Yet the true tragedy of the wife was not
her betrayal by her husband but her
failure to create for herself an endur-
ing structure, a form, that assisted and
protected her. “In the end what strikes
one as the greatest personal loss,” she
observed of the life of Jane Carlyle,
among others, “is that the work could
not truly build for the women a bul-
wark against the sufferings of neglect
and the humiliations of lovelessness.”
If, in marriage, there is a triangle that
matters for criticism, it is the shifting
allegiances among the wife, the critic,
and the mistress. This is the immanent
logic (and sometimes the theme) of
much of the criticism Hardwick wrote
in the 1970s: “Sue and Arabella,”
“Sense of the Present,” “Domestic
Manners,” “Wives and Mistresses,” the
essays gathered in Seduction and Be-
trayal, the occasional pieces on women
for Mademoiselle and Vogue. They are
not personal essays. She never strayed
from her anti-confessional ethic, never
abandoned her belief in reticence or
her contempt for writers who made art
by betraying the secrets of those they
had loved.
2
For more on that correspondence,
see Langdon Hammer’s review in
these pages of The Dolphin Letters,
1970 –1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Rob-
ert Lowell, and Their Circle, edited
by Saskia Hamilton, December 19,
2019.
The New York Review
 Yet the mist of impersonality occa-
sionally parts, and never more dramat-
ically than when she passes judgment
on characters. There is a hint of her
in Jude the Obscure’s Sue, who is as
original in her “intellectual alien-
ation”—“Sue thinks,” she insists—as
Arabella, “the hard, needy, shackling”
wife, is conventional. She reveals her-
self more openly in her discussion of
The Kreutzer Sonata. Her description
of Countess Sonya Tolstoy, destroyed
by her husband’s portrait of her in his
novella, lurches into free-floating gen-
eralities: “An adjutant, wracked by
drama, brilliant in her arias; and then
awakening to uncertainty, shame.”
B ut Hardwick must have tired of hid-
ing behind the third person, hitching
her love and her anger to remote figures
and veiled judgments. Sleepless Nights
is often described as an autobiograph-
ical novel, a memoir, or only “half fic-
tion,” a mongrel breed. It is easy to
dwell on the signs of real life—Ken-
tucky, the Hotel Schuyler, the letters to
friends the narrator signs “Elizabeth,”
the intimation of a recent divorce. “I
was then a ‘we,’” the narrator recalls.
“Husband-wife: not a new move to be
discovered in that strong classical tradi-
tion.” “Can it be that I am the subject?”
she asks, contemplating the pose of a
then-typical female protagonist: the
middle-aged divorcée, the newly sin-
gle woman in New York City. Or could
it be that the subject is not a singular
person, a self whose interior life broad-
ens and deepens over the course of a
predestined plot? What if the subject
is a pattern, a structure? The pattern is
easy to recognize in Sleepless Nights—
this is a novel of the unwived, seeking
and receiving acknowledgment, assis-
tance, and a sense of dignity. To tell the
story of the unwived is a new move in
the tradition that also moved Hardwick
away from it.
The unwived are not only women.
They are bachelors and queers and ut-
terly unmarriageable Marxists. They
are widowers, unwived in a sadder
sense of the term. They are the poor,
the immolated, the estranged; charac-
ters who belong to no one, who have no
families and no novels to call home. Yet
those who have read Sleepless Nights
recognize the women as afflicted old
friends, visitors from the narrator’s
childhood and adolescence, showing
up unexpectedly at her doorstep. Here
are Judith, Marie, Juanita, Simone, and
Billie Holiday, “because never was any
woman less a wife.” Without protest,
they submit to the narrator’s gaze, to
the cool tenderness of her style. Age
and care do not fall away. They are
exalted. Here is Miss Cramer, her old
neighbor, roaming the street on a bitter
December morning:
Miss Cramer in winter in a dress of
printed silk, soiled here and there
with a new pattern of damage. She
is wearing torn canvas shoes and
no stockings to cover her bruised,
discolored legs, nothing to help the
poor naked ankles caked with bar-
nacles of dirt.
She meets another solitary traveler:
She approaches an appalling
wreck of great individuality, a
black woman who wanders in and
out of the neighborhood, covers
April 21, 2022
the streets with purposeful speed.
No one has ever seen the black
woman’s mouth, since the whole
lower part of her face is always
bound tight with a sort of turban
of woolen cloth. Fear of germs, dis- “Nostalgia, desire,
figurement, or symbol of silence?
and the treachery of
From these wrecks of individuality
rises a collective subject, grotesque
almost to grandeur. “They are gladia-
long-held secrets collide
tors, creatures of the trenches,” Hard- in this absorbing psychological mystery set amid
wick writes. They do not speak to one
another, do not disclose anything of the casual cruelties of privilege and youth.”
themselves. Their mouths remain shut —Julia Glass, National Book Award–winning
and bound. But the novel recognizes
and reflects them both, as it does all author of Three Junes and Vigil Harbor
the unwived. It honors their terrible,
decadent freedom. “Beauty formed out
of negatives,” the narrator thinks. A
whole formed out of the scattered and
shattered selves of history.
Gathering and arranging and scru-
tinizing the unwived with a “prying
sympathy,” the narrator reveals herself
obliquely in the pattern she creates.
“I love to be known by those I care
for,” she thinks in the novel’s final sen-
tences. “Public assistance, beautiful
phrase.” The phrase appeared around
twenty years earlier, in Hardwick’s
essay “The Insulted and Injured:
Books About Poverty”: “I think I
read recently that before many years
have passed it is expected that nearly
half the residents of Manhattan will
be living on public assistance.” But
by the time Hardwick started writing
Sleepless Nights, social welfare was as
much a thing of the past as the prom-
ise of happily ever after. The ruins of
marriage smolder in the ruins of the
welfare state. In the middle stands
the critic turned novelist, though it
should be clear that the distance be-
tween these identities has, by now,
dwindled. She does not patronize. She
does not prophesy. She does not look
down at her subjects from her perch
of omniscience. She shares in their
defacement. In her hands, the novel
emerges as a form of public assistance,
dispersed without expectation of rec-
“Beautifully conceived
ompense, without judgment of “sloth
and recurrent mistakes.”
and written”
When Sleepless Nights was pub- —Booklist (starred review)
lished, McCarthy sent a letter to
Hardwick praising her achievement.
She went on to explain that she had
not anticipated how Hardwick would
deal with the huge fact of her famous
“Sink your teeth into
husband:
something salacious
It didn’t occur to me that you could
do it simply by leaving him out.
That’s a brilliant technical stroke
and meaningful
but proves to be much more than
that: he becomes a sort of black
with this novel.”
hole in outer space, to be filled in —Nylon
ad lib, which is poetic justice; he’s
condemned by the form to non-
existence—you couldn’t do that in a
conventional autobiography.
“Brilliant, wise, and wistful.
A look at a private school in the 1960s,
The poor, unwived beauties of Sleep-
less Nights are ringed around this black a world of privilege and erudition on the
hole—call it the husband, call it the cusp of upheaval, School Days is a novel
state—like mirrors placed on opposite
walls. In their reflections flash the eyes of change, loss, and liberation.”
of the critic, who has retrieved from the —Jennifer Finney Boylan,
darkness the miracle of pure style and
the model of communal history. Mc- author of She’s Not There and Good Boy
Carthy was right to conclude that the
husband had been condemned to non-
existence. But she had failed to grasp
the full force of her observation. Where OTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM
he went, the wife was sure to follow,
nipping at the heel. Q
39
 The Forgotten Crime of War Itself
US military pilots operating Predator drones from the ground control station at Balad Air Base, Iraq, May 2008
Humane: How the United States
Abandoned Peace and
Reinvented War
by Samuel Moyn.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
400 pp., $30.00
For weeks after the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, Vice Presi-
dent Dick Cheney remained closeted
away in various undisclosed locations
while Bush administration officials
announced the start of a global war
on terror. Cheney, the chief architect
of that war, finally resurfaced in his
office in the West Wing of the White
House, where Bob Woodward of The
Washington Post asked him how long
the war might last. Cheney was forth-
right: “It may never end. At least, not
in our lifetime.” It was the closest any
public figure has come to predicting
endless war—the dream of every mil-
itarist from Clausewitz and Moltke to
Cheney and his fellow Vulcans in the
Bush White House.
Cheney’s confident expectations have
been borne out by events. Despite the
recent pullout from Afghanistan, the
war on terror has only spread in new
technological and political forms. At-
tempts at regime change in Iraq, Libya,
and Syria (as well as Afghanistan) have
leveled ancient cities, destroyed hun-
dreds of thousands of innocent lives,
provoked resistance from multiplying
jihadist organizations, and unleashed
conflict across the Middle East and
into South Asia and Africa. The infla-
tion of a diffuse but permanent threat
has created a vast new revenue stream
for vendors of military hardware and a
new industry of “counterterrorism con-
sultants” whose offices line the highway
from Washington to Dulles Airport.
Ostensibly constrained by rules that
ensure humane conduct, the war on
terror is unrelenting and everywhere,
40
Jackson Lears
thanks in part to the embrace of drone
warfare by Barack Obama, the consti-
tutional lawyer who some of us thought
was going to deliver us from the Bush
administration’s violation of the Eighth
Amendment along with other assaults
on the Constitution. Instead, Obama
became the assassin in chief while
his lawyers made the war look a little
cleaner. They also expanded the con-
cept of self- defense to justify violating
the sovereignty of any nation whenever
it could be alleged to harbor terror-
ists. After September 11 no politician
asked whether the proper response
to a terrorist attack should be a US
war or an international police action.
Alternatives to war have remained
unarticulated.
The war on terror seduced some of
its critics, including Donald Trump,
who like Obama had posed as an anti-
war candidate. Trump, too, found the
role of chief assassin impossible to re-
sist. Yet even that clownish bungler
so traumatized the national security
establishment by hinting at a less ag-
gressive posture that neoconservative
Republicans and neoliberal Democrats
came together to reassert their com-
mon interventionist commitments. De-
spite small dissensions, these abide in
the current Congress.
Our public discourse, where not
hopelessly fractured, has been focused
on urgent and immediate issues of do-
mestic politics and climate change.
Intelligent discussion of foreign policy
is increasingly unlikely, especially the
issue of when and why the US should
go to war.
T he roots of this failure are entwined
with Americans’ sense of themselves
and their relations with the world, as
Samuel Moyn shows in Humane, his
brilliant new book. Moyn concentrates
and the permanent state of emergency
Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos
that followed.
Moyn probes the legal and ethical is-
sues surrounding the war on terror, but
he also assays the century and a half of
US history that preceded it. The notion
of humane war would have been alien
and baffling to most Americans for
much of that period. “America’s default
way of war— honed in the imperial en-
counter with native peoples and lasting
into the twentieth century across the
globe—recognized no limits,” Moyn
writes. He records the consequences
in sobering detail, ranging from the ex-
termination of Native American tribes
to the torching of Vietnamese villages.
During the Pax Americana following
World War II the whole world, in effect,
became “Indian country” (as many GIs
referred to Vietnam).
But his most original and incisive
contribution to historical understand-
ing is taking seriously the possibility
of peace— or at least the avoidance
of war—as a primary goal of foreign
policy. This leads him to dispute, for
instance, the frequent dismissal of iso-
lationists as shortsighted or xenophobic
rather than people of good faith with
an attachment to traditional Ameri-
can ideas of neutrality and a principled
aversion to war. Moyn is neither a pac-
ifist nor an isolationist, but he believes
on the campaigns in Europe and the war must always be the genuine last re-
United States to make war more hu- sort, not merely the rhetorical one.
mane, from the creation of an inter- That perspective has been absent
national brigade (later known as the from foreign policy debates in recent
Red Cross) to care for the wounded decades. In Moyn’s view the reason is
in the Franco-Austrian War in 1859, straightforward. Debating torture or
to the legal constraints gradually im- other abuses, while indisputably valu-
posed on the war on terror in our own able, has diverted Americans from
time, when, as he writes, “swords have “deliberating on the deeper choice they
not been beaten into plowshares. They were making to ignore constraints on
have been melted down for drones.” starting war in the first place.” Prohibit-
Moyn’s central insight is that the ing torture and preventing war are both
quest for humane war, whether by de- moral necessities, but war itself causes
ploying smarter weaponry or making far more suffering than violations of its
new rules, has obscured the more basic rules. It is a fatal mistake, says Moyn,
task of opposing war itself: “Increas- to give up on the possibility of stopping
ingly we live without antiwar law. We wars before or even after they start.
fight war crimes but have forgotten the
crime of war.” In tracing the efforts to
humanize war, Moyn casts new light T he case is forceful, but Moyn some-
on much of the surrounding historical times suggests that we must choose
landscape—not only peace movements between making war more humane
and the divisions within them but also and opposing it altogether. Though he
the assumptions of the warmakers denies that stark duality, he does not
themselves. repudiate it consistently or explicitly
Humane provides a powerful intel- enough. He occasionally implies that
lectual history of the American way certain individuals made the wrong
of war. It is a bold departure from de- choice— people like Michael Ratner of
cades of historiography dominated by the Center for Constitutional Rights,
interventionist bromides. A vainglori- for example, who eventually shifted
ous narrative of modern US diplomatic his attention from opposing the war on
and military history is embedded in terror to reforming its abuses. There
our conventional wisdom: a struggle is a misplaced precision in Moyn’s
between prescient “internationalists” critique that may be unfair to Rat-
and ostrichlike “isolationists,” until the ner and other people in public life by
shock of Pearl Harbor awakens the re- exaggerating the choices available to
luctant giant to the responsibilities of them.
global leadership, first in World War Moyn convincingly documents how
II, then in the cold war. (The Soviet the disappearance of peace as a topic
Union’s crucial role in defeating Hit- for public debate correlates with the
ler is omitted.) US ascendancy is com- rise of arguments for humane war.
plete, in this view, with the collapse of But he doesn’t show specifically how
Soviet communism and the rise of a one development relates to the other.
unipolar world order in the 1990s. But We indeed need to talk more about
there the upbeat story ends: even the whether we should go to war as well as
most committed triumphalist finds it how to stop it, but the shift toward hu-
difficult to assimilate the troubling de- manizing is not the only reason we have
nouement of the September 11 attacks failed to have that discussion.
The New York Review
 The national reluctance to scruti-
nize the aims of war reflects the aura
of sanctity surrounding them. For well
over a century American warmakers
tried to hallow military ambition with
moral significance. With the fall of the
Soviet Union, policymakers’ realiza-
tion that the US was “the world’s only
superpower” encouraged them to make
even more grandiose assertions of righ-
teousness. Humanitarianism became
the default justification for US mili-
tary action abroad—including the war
on terror, which was billed in part as
a crusade to save Muslim women and
democratize the Middle East. To live
up to their moral pretenses, military
interventions had to be conducted hu-
manely as well, reinforcing claims for
the humanitarian purpose of the con-
flict and drawing public attention away
from other motives.
A major one, often exposed by
muckrakers but rarely mentioned by
policymakers, is economic. Wars make
a lot of people very rich. Moyn men-
tions this issue just once in passing,
but it is difficult to overestimate its im-
portance. When the cold war ended in
1991, an army of lobbyists remained in
Washington to urge the continuation of
enormous defense budgets. The claim
that the new military goal was to res-
cue innocent victims abroad provided
a moral gloss for sustaining spending
at cold war levels. Humanitarian war
could be good business, as has long
been evident in the balance sheets of
weapons vendors as well as the bank
accounts of military contractors and
counterterrorism consultants. It also
resonated with the exceptionalist faith
that America was “the indispensable
nation,” as Madeleine Albright, Bill
Clinton’s secretary of state, announced;
we were destined to have a redemptive
part in global history.
While Moyn scants the economic
question, he does recognize that the
hubris of the world-savers deserves to
be confronted. And that, he believes,
is not going happen as long as political
conversation remains fixed on abuses
of war rather than how to avoid or end
it. Rebranding the war on terror as hu-
mane has buried the essential question:
Why are we waging it at all?
Moyn’s historical account begins
with Henry Dunant, the Swiss gentle-
man who founded the Red Cross. Like
most people in the 1860s, Dunant ac-
cepted war as an inevitable feature of
the human condition, but he wanted
the wounded to be cared for humanely.
He won the first Nobel Peace Prize in
1901. At that point he was an old man,
and his handlers did their best to blur
the boundaries between his advocacy
of humane war and outright pacifism,
which by then had become by far the
more popular view.
Perhaps the chief force for legitimat-
ing pacifism was Bertha von Suttner’s
novel of 1889, Lay Down Your Arms,
which became the Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of the antiwar movement. Suddenly
the dead and wounded were no lon-
ger faraway, faceless figures but “the
husbands, sons, and brothers of mod-
ern women no longer resigned to their
losses,” as Moyn writes. The book sold
more than 200,000 copies in German,
was translated into sixteen languages,
and changed how people reflected on
war and peace (Suttner herself won
the Peace Prize in 1905). “For the first
April 21, 2022
time,” Moyn observes, “the inevita-
bility of war in human affairs was not
taken for granted.”
Yet both the peace movement and
the push to regulate war were mostly
confined to hostilities among “civi-
lized” white Christian nations. What
few restrictions there were on whether
and how wars were fought remained
profoundly racialized. There were
no prohibitions against mass murder
of “uncivilized” people and no legal
ways to constrain colonial wars, which
took place within empires and there-
fore constituted internal, not inter-
national conflict— counterinsurgency
combat against rebellious subjects.
For the United States, that meant
killing and kidnapping the indigenous
inhabitants of North America. The
Civil War was an exception; the colo-
nizers fought white people like them-
selves. The Union Army rules of war
were based on the code of conduct
devised by Francis Lieber, a Prussian
émigré to America. Following Clause-
witz’s dictum that brutal wars were
best, the Lieber Code allowed anyone
deemed a partisan to be shot on sight.
Moyn might also have mentioned that
the Civil War left 50,000 civilians
dead, most of them Southern victims
of the Union’s scorched- earth cam-
paigns that laid waste to wide swaths
of the countryside—Philip Sheridan’s
Shenandoah Valley campaign, Wil-
liam Tecumseh Sherman’s march from
Atlanta to the sea. After the Southern
surrender, such tactics were broadened
and intensified in the mop-up opera-
tion against the Plains Indians. In 1873,
when the Modoc leader Kintpuash, in
California, tricked General Edward
Canby into a meeting, then killed him,
Sherman sanctioned the “utter exter-
mination” of the Modoc tribe.
Exterminationist tactics worked well
in imperial wars when one side possessed
technological supremacy and the other
was deemed less than human. When
Adna Chaffee arrived in the Philippine
Islands in 1901, fresh from putting down
the Boxer Rebellion against “foreign
devils” in China, he announced, “Mur-
der is almost a natural instinct with the
Asiatic, who respects only the power of
might. . . . Human life all over the East
is cheap.” This racism animated the sup-
pression of Asian insurgencies from the
Filipino uprising of the early 1900s to
the Vietnam War.
The Great War brought new horrors
to the fore— not only the spectacle of
soldiers slaughtering one another at
close range with modern weapons but
new ways of inflicting pain on civilian
populations. The “most gross moral
wrongdoing” of the World War I era,
Moyn believes, was not the German
atrocities in Belgium but the British
blockade of the Continent. It was en-
tirely legal under international law and
left half a million civilians dead from
starvation, without arousing wide-
spread humanitarian protest. This
history needs to be remembered amid
the current American obsession with
economic sanctions as the humane al-
ternative to military force. After the
Versailles Treaty, the postwar peace
movement flourished as never before;
antiwar activists like the US politi-
cal scientist Quincy Wright sought
enduring structures of international
arbitration, and others sought sim-
ply to outlaw war, as in the Kellogg-
Briand Pact of 1928. Mere dreams, it
turned out.
Militarists’ aspirations fared better. postwar world. Peacemakers, they ar-
Among the most fantastic were those gued, had to create the means for iden-
involving air war, which became a tifying and punishing aggressors. This
go-to gambit for pacifying anticolonial was the background to the Nuremberg
resistance across the globe. Gas bombs, trials—they put perpetrators on trial
a particular favorite of Winston Chur- for starting an aggressive war, not for
chill, promised to perform “an almost committing war crimes. War was the
bloodless surgery,” a British interna- crime. There were attempts to protect
tional lawyer said. The fantasy of sur- civilians and prohibit torture in Com-
gical precision has survived down to the mon Article 3 of the Geneva Con-
present, but not everyone cared about ventions of 1949, but after the atomic
it. In 1927 the strategist Elbridge Colby, bomb, as one international lawyer said,
whose son William became director of “the humanitarian Conventions read
the CIA, predicted a new age of total war like hypocritical nonsense.”
where “there were no non-combatants.” Meanwhile the high purpose of the
That war arrived soon enough. After United Nations was redefined away
Pearl Harbor the American pursuit from enforcing international law to im-
of global military supremacy “dealt as plicitly ratifying the domination of the
humbling a defeat to internationalist world by two rivalrous superpowers. If
visions of peace through law, especially you were a permanent member of the
the dream of arbitration, as to ‘isola- Security Council, as both the US and
USSR were (and the US and Russia of
Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy
course are), you you could veto any res-
olution that labeled you an aggressor. If
you were a country that made the rules,
then you could make a rules-based order
work for you, as the US demonstrated
by repeatedly violating the sovereignty
of other nations—Iran, Guatemala,
Congo, Chile . . . —throughout the cold
war without ever being held to account.
One brief exception to this narrative
of acquiescence was what Moyn calls
“a period of clarity in the early 1970s,
when many people, far more than ever
since, were prepared to see government
officials and US citizens themselves as
potential and actual evildoers.” People
were not uniquely virtuous, in other
words, merely because they were Amer-
icans. In “that crystalline moment of
insight,” doubts about how US soldiers
conducted themselves in Vietnam were
linked to larger disagreements about
Henry Dunant, circa 1859 whether they should be there at all, as
well as an even larger skepticism about
tion,’” Moyn writes. From World War whether and when (if ever) foreign wars
II forward, in much public discourse, served US interests. Peace was briefly
“internationalism” became little more seen as a legitimate policy goal.
than a euphemism for a commitment to This became apparent when the
maintaining the Pax Americana. uncovering of the My Lai massacre
intensified demands to end the US
presence in Vietnam and not merely to
On September 1, 1939, when the reform military practice. Critics of the
Germans began bombing unarmed ci- war saw the incident as a natural con-
vilians in Warsaw, they “shocked the sequence of the joint US–South Viet-
conscience of humanity,” according namese military strategy that included
to Franklin Roosevelt. By 1944 the bombing the North Vietnamese “back
Americans and the British were ignit- to the Stone Age,” as General Curtis
ing firestorms in cities across Germany. LeMay recommended; torturing and
One US officer worried that it would killing prisoners; imprisoning political
“convince the Germans that we are the opponents of the South Vietnamese
barbarians they say we are.” The war in government in “tiger cages”; and as-
the Pacific was a race war for the Amer- sassinating civilians suspected of Viet
icans as the war in Europe was for the Cong sympathies. Invoking rules of
Germans. Even before the incineration war or international law amid such sys-
of Japanese cities began, the GI skull tematic violations seemed grotesquely
collections and the nonchalant execu- inadequate. For antiwar activists, from
tions of civilians including women and the legal scholar Richard Falk to Mar-
children made it clear that the Pacific tin Luther King Jr., the war itself, as
theater “was ‘Indian country’ all over Falk put it, was “an all- embracing war
again,” as Moyn observes. There were crime.”
plenty of good reasons for The New But that “crystalline moment” soon
York Times to conclude, in 1944, that ended. After the Vietnam debacle,
war could not be made humane—“it antiwar sentiments softened and slid to-
can only be abolished.” The task was ward civilizing the methods of fighting.
to end the dirty business in a way that Telford Taylor, counsel for the prosecu-
ensured “no city shall ever be bombed tion at Nuremberg, provided historical
again.” legitimacy in Nuremberg and Vietnam
What was astonishing was that any- (1970) by framing the trials as a judg-
one still thought that goal was reach- ment against atrocities, not aggression.
able. During the run-up to the war, This was a fallacious reinterpretation,
pacifism had been tarred with the brush in Moyn’s view, but it created a heroic
of “appeasement” and almost vanished lineage for humane war. At about the
altogether during the fighting. Wright same time, the Swiss jurist Jean Pictet
and other champions of arbitration nev- was conjuring what he called “inter-
ertheless labored to keep international national humanitarian law” by draft-
law involved in creating a peaceful ing two additional protocols to the
41
 Geneva Conventions— militaries were
prohibited from targeting civilians and
indeed anything that risked excessive
collateral damage. (The US has signed
and ratified the conventions but failed
to ratify the protocols.)
During the 1980s, as Reagan em-
barked on imperial adventures in
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Honduras, various human rights
groups were formed in response. Hel-
sinki Watch created Americas Watch,
which later became Human Rights
Watch, led by Kenneth Roth. “We
weren’t against war per se,” Roth re-
called. It was, says Moyn, a “reason-
able position,” but he wonders “what
was the effect of demanding humane
war if there were fewer and fewer left
demanding no war?”
The answer would come shortly. In
1991, after the brisk and painless (for
Americans) victory in the first Gulf
War, the Washington establishment
was euphoric. As President Bush the
first said, “The specter of Vietnam
has been buried forever in the desert
sands.” Prior talk of a “peace dividend”
from the conclusion of the cold war sub-
sided. Overseas military actions multi-
plied. As Moyn reports, “More than 80
percent of all US military interventions
abroad since 1946 came after 1989.”
In seeking to understand this ex-
traordinary statistic, he poses a series of
questions. Were the multiplying inter-
ventions due to “the accumulating dan-
gers of a globalizing world?” Or was it
the illusion of quick entrances and exits
in the Middle East created by the ap-
parent ease of victory in the Gulf? Sub-
sequent experience suggests the latter
surmise is closer to the truth. To which
Moyn adds a third, equally provoca-
tive: “Or was it perhaps the pressure of
a ‘military-industrial’ complex that in-
sisted on fighting enemies (albeit more
humanely now) to justify its perpetua-
tion?” This is the only place where he
mentions the ever-present influence of
the civilian army that exists in symbi-
osis with the military one—the swarm
of lobbyists, corporate profiteers, con-
tractors, and consultants who help to
sustain endless war. His neglect of the
subject is puzzling: the billions of dol-
lars to be made should inform any for-
eign policy debate. But try to find any
sustained discussion of it in The New
York Times or The Washington Post.
B ill Clinton came to the presidency
at the unipolar moment, just after the
Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.
It was a propitious time for imperial
expansion in the name of universal
values. Even as the Warsaw Pact dis-
banded and the justification for NATO
collapsed, Clinton began the policy
that Bush the second continued—the
eastward advance of NATO, which sea-
soned observers from George Kennan
to Henry Kissinger to William Burns
all warned would provoke Russian se-
curity concerns.* (Recent events have
demonstrated their prescience.) While
Albright and her colleagues itched to
put their “superb military” to work,
proponents of putatively benign inter-
vention abroad offered opportunities.
Post–cold war humanitarian thought
put the Holocaust at the moral center
of World War II, a move reinforced by
*See Fred Kaplan, “‘A Bridge Too
Far,’” The New York Review, April 7,
2022.
42
the recasting of Nuremberg as anti-
atrocity rather than anti-aggression.
“The result was not a demand for peace
but for interventionist justice,” Moyn
observes. The justice could even be
preemptive, if catastrophe seemed to
loom for a victimized population. As
conflict in the Balkans raised the pros-
pect of ethnic cleansing and potential
genocide, interventionists summoned
Holocaust memories to prod Clinton
into action. Eventually the US led the
NATO bombing of Serbia to prevent
threatened mass killings in Kosovo. The
absence of UN Security Council autho-
rization made the incursion illegal, but
Clinton defended it as a “just and nec-
essary war.” By and large, the press and
the intelligentsia agreed. It is not clear
whether Moyn thinks the intervention
actually prevented genocide—which
remains a matter for conjecture. For
him, the Balkan wars reinforced a new
consensus that later encouraged accep-
tance of a war on terror and reserved
criticism only for its cruelties.
Not everyone was so accepting.
When George W. Bush announced his
intent to use military commissions to
try suspected terrorists, Michael Rat-
ner pronounced the policy “the death
knell for democracy in this country.”
Ultimately his critique was upheld by
the Supreme Court, which ruled that
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Con-
ventions forbade Bush’s military com-
missions and that federal courts could
issue writs of habeas corpus to end pre-
ventive detention.
Yet according to Moyn, Ratner and
other shrewd critics of the war on terror
were led into the “misguided strategy”
of amending rather than ending war,
as if the two positions were mutually
exclusive. Why mightn’t Ratner simply
have been trying to play the bad hand
he had been dealt, adjusting to the
ideological straitjacket that opponents
of the war on terror had to wear during
its early years? Ultimately his career
seemed to show that a desire to amelio-
rate the effects of war can coexist with
a consistently antiwar perspective.
The Center for Constitutional
Rights, which Ratner led for much of
his career, was, unlike Human Rights
Watch and Amnesty International,
opposed to the first Gulf War and the
war in Serbia, not merely the conduct
of them. Ratner and his colleague Jules
Lobel attacked the malleability of hu-
manitarian arguments for intervention
head- on, observing that even Hitler
insisted he had intervened “militarily
in a sovereign state because of claimed
human rights abuses.” The worst sort
of war was likely to occur “when war-
makers claimed uplifting reasons for
embarking on it,” Moyn writes.
After the invasion of Afghanistan,
however, Ratner redirected his ener-
gies, now dealing exclusively with those
sometimes innocent people who were
swept up in the conflict, imprisoned, and
tortured. With the revelations surround-
ing Abu Ghraib, objections to prisoner
abuse began to seem more persuasive
than abstract debates about the rights
and wrongs of intervention. Restoring
the taboo against torture, according
to Moyn, meant that “no taboo was
constructed containing the war itself.”
But he does not explain why one taboo
should necessarily supplant the other.
Obama accelerated the move toward
“humane” war. Mistaken for a man of
peace, he used his oratorical gifts to en-
courage his audiences to see whatever
they hoped to see in him and ultimately
saved the war on terror by sanitizing it.
His lawyers built on the Bush adminis-
tration’s legal sophistries, claiming the
authority to extend war indefinitely,
while he turned to battle plans that left
no footprints (drones) or only light ones
(special forces) and began “a spree of
humane killing on which the sun might
never set in space or end in time,” Moyn
writes. This clean war on terror was as
illegal as the dirty one had been.
However decorous the new tactics
were perceived to be, they continued
to violate international laws requiring
both an imminent threat of armed at-
tack and the consent of states where
terrorists were allegedly located. CIA
director John Brennan insisted there
was no need to make a case for self-
defense every time we struck at al-
Qaeda. This presumed “an astonishing
license to kill”—whether families or
whole neighborhoods— and often to
kill people who had never been near al-
Qaeda and who had never attacked the
US or posed a serious threat. The con-
stant menace of drone strikes created a
world of permanent dread.
At home, Obama succeeded in mak-
ing war seem remote and detached
from the messy business of body bags
and bitterly contested occupation,
largely by reasserting America’s singu-
lar virtue, underwritten by a renewed
commitment to humane warmak-
ing. “We” had “tortured some folks,”
Obama allowed in a moment of tele-
vision contrition, but, as Moyn puts it,
we were “not the kind of people who
would ever do so again.”
Until the current crisis in Ukraine,
the most striking omission from foreign
policy discourse has been the increasing
risk of nuclear war—the kind that can
never be made humane. Though few in
the media seem to know it except The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the
likelihood of nuclear war has risen to
cold war heights, perhaps higher, for a
variety of reasons, beginning with the
ever-present possibility of accidental
missile launch but also including the
accelerated modernization of nuclear
weapons (begun by Obama, continued
by Trump) and the renewal of cold war–
style confrontation with Russia, the
world’s only other nuclear superpower—
now escalating with terrifying speed in
Ukraine, fueled by ignorant and irre-
sponsible calls for a no-fly zone.
Moyn insists that preventing and end-
ing war should be our primary foreign
policy goals. Yet the US has failed to
put a cease-fire and a neutral Ukraine
at the forefront of its policy agenda
there. Quite the contrary: it has dra-
matically increased the flow of weapons
to Ukraine, which had already been de-
ployed for eight years to suppress the
separatist uprising in the Donbas. US
policy prolongs the war and creates the
likelihood of a protracted insurgency
after a Russian victory, which seems
probable at this writing. Meanwhile,
the Biden administration has refused
to address Russia’s fear of NATO encir-
clement. Sometimes we must conduct
diplomacy with nations whose actions
we deplore. How does one negotiate
with any potential diplomatic partner
while ignoring its security concerns?
The answer, of course, is that one does
not. Without serious American diplo-
macy, the Ukraine war, too, may well
become endless. Q
The New York Review
 Why Biology Is Not Destiny
The Genetic Lottery:
Why DNA Matters
for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden.
Princeton University Press,
300 pp., $29.95
You must know the parable about the
frog that sits in a pot of water being
gradually heated, allowing itself to
be boiled alive: because the change
happens gradually, it never realizes
it should leap out. Reading Kathryn
Paige Harden’s book The Genetic
Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social
Equality is a similar experience, as the
author ingenuously points out. “Like
a frog being slowly boiled alive,” she
observes, readers follow her argument
“from an uncontroversial premise to
a highly controversial one.” Harden’s
“uncontroversial premise” in this case
is that siblings raised in the same fam-
ily share a childhood environment and
50 percent of their DNA randomly as-
signed at conception, and are therefore
like subjects in a controlled study of
genetic differences. Ask anyone with
a sibling whether their own childhood
environment was the same as their
sibling’s and you’ll quickly disprove
Harden’s claim that her premise is
uncontroversial. But putting that ob-
jection aside and sitting patiently as
Harden increases the heat, we’ll arrive
at her “highly controversial” assertion
that “if siblings who differ genetically
also have corresponding differences in
their health or well-being or education,
this is evidence that genes are causing
these social inequalities.”
Harden is a dedicated frog boiler.
She introduces many comfortably
room-temperature premises: measure-
ment is essential to science; people dif-
fer genetically; genes cause conditions
such as deafness; a recipe for lemon
chicken produces variable results but
never leads to chocolate- chip cookies.
Lulled to complacency by such ano-
dyne and often homey observations, we
soon find ourselves in a rolling boil of
controversial claims: genes make you
more or less intelligent, wealthier or
poorer; every kind of inequality has a
genetic basis.
Harden is right that such assertions
are controversial, but they’re nothing
new. The idea of a biological hierar-
chy of intelligence arose alongside the
first theories of human evolution. It
never goes away when discredited, just
changes forms. In 1810, a year after the
publication of the first modern evolu-
tionary theory, two German doctors,
Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Kaspar
Spurzheim, inaugurated the science of
phrenology by asserting that the parts
of a person’s brain reflected, by their
sizes, the degrees of the person’s men-
tal powers, and that one could evaluate
these by examining the shape of the
skull.
That idea persisted through the nine-
teenth century. In 1869 Charles Dar-
win’s cousin Francis Galton grumbled
that he had “no patience” with the
empty platitude that “babies are born
pretty much alike.” Rejecting “preten-
sions of natural equality” as morality
tales for children, Galton asserted that
measurements of the “head, size of
brain, weight of grey matter, number of
April 21, 2022
M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin
Illustration by Vivienne Flesher
brain fibres, &c.” followed “the law of
deviation from an average” and so did
innate “mental capacity.” Galton was
a founder of modern statistics, which
he developed in conjunction with his
new science of eugenics. Meanwhile,
in 1876, Herbert Spencer, the English
popular science writer and evolutionist,
told the members of the Anthropolog-
ical Institute that humans differed in
the volume, complexity, and plasticity
of “mental mass,” and accordingly in
“quality of thought.”
Eventually, the idea of correlating
the physical characteristics of the brain
and skull with mental capacity or qual-
ity of thought went out of fashion, ap-
pearing naive as people turned to more
modern methods. In the early twenti-
eth century, psychologists in France,
Germany, and America began devel-
oping cognitive tests. This approach
became most influential in America,
principally through developments at
Stanford University (where we teach).
In 1916 the Stanford education profes-
sor Lewis Terman published his version
of an intelligence test, which quickly
pervaded the worlds of education, pub-
lic policy, and the professions. Terman
said his test reflected not learning or
culture but innate intelligence. “The
common opinion that the child from
a cultured home does better in tests
solely by reason of his superior home
advantages” was, he declared, “en-
tirely gratuitous”: these children tested
higher “for the simple reason that their
heredity is better.”
By “heredity,” Terman meant biolog-
ical inheritance, though he didn’t know
what it was or how it worked. Five years
earlier, the Danish botanist Wilhelm
Johannsen had coined the term “gene”
to designate a still-hypothetical “ele-
ment of inheritance.” Genes soon be-
came central to biological theories of
intelligence, especially after the identi-
fication of the structure of DNA in 1953.
Following the mapping of the human
genome around the turn of the twenty-
first century, these theories focused
upon individual genes, or sequences of
nucleotides in the DNA molecule. But
two decades later, attempts to correlate
mental traits with so- called candidate
genes have gone the way of skull bumps
and brain fibers.
H arden, a professor of psychology
at the University of Texas at Austin,
admits this. “OK,” she confides cheer-
fully, “so the candidate gene thing
didn’t work.” No matter! Biological
essentialism, aimed at demonstrating
an innate hierarchy of intelligence,
is going strong after more than two
centuries of empirical failure. There’s
always a new approach waiting in the
wings. This time it’s “genome-wide as-
sociation studies” of people’s “single-
nucleotide polymorphisms.”
A single-nucleotide polymorphism
(SNP) is a spot on the genome where
people can have different variants:
alternative nucleotides in their DNA.
An average human has about 3.2 bil-
lion nucleotides and four million to
five million single-nucleotide poly-
morphisms in their genome, and the
genomes of any two people are about
99.9 percent the same. A genome-wide
association study (GWAS) calculates a
statistical correlation between patterns
of DNA variants and a particular phe-
notype, or observable characteristic,
among the sampled people. In one of
the first genome-wide association stud-
ies, from 2005, researchers compared
the genomes of people suffering from
macular degeneration (a disease of the
retina) with a control group of people
who had healthy vision. They found
two sets of single-nucleotide polymor-
phisms where the groups differed sig-
nificantly. For complex diseases such
as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,
however, genome studies haven’t re-
vealed any spots showing statistically
important differences between the
focus and control groups; but there are
thousands of spots showing statistically
tiny differences. In 2007, three genet-
icists proposed that for such diseases
one could add up the statistical effects
of all such spots in a given person’s ge-
nome to produce an overall risk score
for the disease.
So far, these so- called polygenic
indices haven’t indicated any thera-
peutic interventions, and their value
is a matter of debate. But meanwhile,
a growing number of social scientists,
primarily in economics, psychology,
and sociology, have seized upon the
technique as a way of studying their
own subjects. Social scientists engag-
ing in “sociogenomic” research exploit
existing genetic databases, which have
recently become cheap to produce and
readily accessible, to conduct genome-
wide association studies for “social-
science-relevant outcomes” such as the
one Harden features most prominently
in her book, “educational attainment.”
For a given life outcome—dropping
out of high school, earning a Ph.D.,
having a teen pregnancy, becoming
wealthy, going bankrupt—these writ-
ers claim they can use a genome-wide
association study to generate a “poly-
genic index,” or overall genetic score
revealing a person’s likelihood of hav-
ing that outcome.
Among other phenotypes associ-
ated with “educational attainment”
for which Harden cites genome studies
are “grit,” “growth mindset,” “intellec-
tual curiosity,” “mastery orientation,”
“self- concept,” “test motivation,” and
especially “a trait called Openness
to Experience, which captures being
curious, eager to learn, and open to
novel experiences.” Harden doesn’t re-
veal just who calls this important trait
“Openness to Experience” or how they
measure it. Surely, there must be dis-
agreement among researchers about
what constitutes this phenotype or oth-
ers in the list, such as “grit.” More so,
at any rate, than about what constitutes
macular degeneration.
Explaining how social scientists
make genome-wide association studies
and polygenic scores, Harden writes:
Correlations between individual
SNPs and a phenotype are esti-
mated in a “Discovery GWAS”
with a large sample size. . . . Then,
a new person’s DNA is measured.
The number of minor alleles (0, 1,
or 2) in this individual’s genome
is counted for each SNP, and this
number is weighted by the GWAS
estimate of the correlation be-
tween the SNP and the phenotype,
yielding a polygenic index.
This alphabet soup in the passive voice
implies that no one actively does all
this estimating, measuring, count-
ing, weighting, correlating—or that
these are such technical processes
that any human presence in them is
irrelevant. But people are making in-
terpretive decisions at every stage:
how to define a phenotype and select
people to represent it, how to count
these people, which single-nucleotide
43

Written and illustrated by
Marie Dorléans
Translated from the French by Alyson Waters
Published with the support of Villa Albertine,
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ciousness, while her story reminds us of the simple joy of being with friends and sharing
a great adventure.
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THREE RINGS a veiled critique of the Sun King, resulted in
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44
polymorphisms to consider, how to
weight and aggregate them. Interpre-
tive decisions are of course essential to
all science, but here there are a great
many opinions dressed up in facts’
clothing. “This polygenic index will be
normally distributed,” Harden contin-
ues, now disguising an assumption—
that there are intrinsic cognitive and
personality traits whose distribution
in a population follows a bell-shaped
curve, a founding axiom of eugenics—
as an objective fact. Harden then tells
us that “a polygenic index created from
the educational attainment GWAS
typically captures about 10–15 per-
cent of the variance in outcomes.” All
these trappings of scientific objectiv-
ity notwithstanding, a polygenic index
“captures” differences in educational
outcomes the way Jackson Pollock’s
Summertime painting captures the sea-
son: as a reflection of its creator’s rad-
ically subjective view of things (which
is just fine for abstract expressionism).
If you find a magical hammer that,
whenever you swing it, rewards you with
funding and professional advancement,
you look at your research area and see
nothing but nails. Genome-wide asso-
ciation studies are the social sciences’
new magical hammer. Macular degen-
eration seems plausibly to be a nail:
genomic analysis revealed two sets of
single-nucleotide polymorphisms that
were importantly associated with hav-
ing the disease. Schizophrenia appears
not to be a nail, though it might have
some structural features a hammer
could help with. The things social sci-
entists have been swinging at aren’t just
non-nails. They are to nails as ships to
sealing wax, as cabbages to kings. To
suggest that macular degeneration has
genetic causes is to make an empiri-
cally testable proposal; to suggest that
“grit” or “openness to experience” has
genetic causes is to make a category
mistake. These are interpretive de-
scriptions, made of ideas, opinions, and
practices, not molecules.
If we’re to have genome-wide as-
sociation studies for “growth mind-
set” and “mastery orientation,” the
possibilities are legion. How about a
genome-wide association study for a
trait called “corporate-speak suscep-
tibility,” which captures the tendency
to adopt terms often found in motiva-
tional pamphlets on leadership? Or
one for “bogus scientism,” which cap-
tures the tendency to present inter-
pretive opinions as objective facts? Or
one for “spurious reductionism,” which
captures the tendency to assume that
all phenomena are reducible to nucle-
otides? Reducing complex phenomena
to simple parts can be enlightening, but
it can also be spurious. This is not to
say that genes are inessential to social
life. It was essential for Shakespeare to
derive energy from respiration to write
his plays, but a diagram of the Krebs
cycle sheds no light on King Lear.
Before there were genome-wide as-
sociation studies, people arguing for
the genetic basis of social differences
conducted studies comparing frater-
nal and identical twins raised together
and apart. Harden continues in this
tradition: she codirects the Twin Proj-
ect at the University of Texas and
invokes analyses of twin data as evi-
dence that “genes cause differences
in educational outcomes.” She cites a
notorious 1969 paper by the Ameri-
can psychologist Arthur Jensen, who
maintained that races differed in IQ
and who used twin studies to argue
that social interventions couldn’t over-
come genetic deficiencies in scholastic
achievement.
Harden condemns Jensen’s racism
and rejects his assertion that social in-
terventions are futile, but she doesn’t
question his basic claim that genetic
differences produce an innate hierar-
chy of scholastic achievement. She also
doesn’t acknowledge his dependence
on fraudulent data from a 1966 paper
by the English psychologist and ge-
neticist Cyril Burt purporting to com-
pare identical twins raised together
and apart. And nowhere does she
cite the Princeton psychologist Leon
Kamin’s 1974 devastating debunking
of Jensen and Burt or engage with the
critical problems Kamin raised there
regarding twin studies in general, be-
cause of the impossibility of isolating
genetic factors from environmental
ones. While Harden, who describes
herself as a political progressive, re-
pudiates Jensen’s overt racism, she
resurrects the misconceived science
underlying it.
H arden’s purpose in The Genetic
Lottery is to popularize the claim that
social inequalities have genetic causes,
and to argue that if progressives want
to address inequality, they’d better con-
front this fact. In presenting her case,
Harden revives central features of the
earlier, now- discredited biological the-
ories of intelligence: the presentation
of interpretive opinions as objective
facts, as we’ve seen; spurious reduction
to a biological mechanism that is not
only hypothetical but unspecified; and
a claim to be writing in the interest of
social progress.
Regarding spurious reduction to
an unspecified mechanism: although
Harden pays lip service to the princi-
ple that correlation is not causation, she
both implies and explicitly argues that
correlations of genetic differences with
social ones indicate genetic causes of
social differences. When merely imply-
ing causation, she uses weasel words:
genes are “relevant” for educational
attainment; they are “associated with”
first having sex at an earlier age; they
“matter” for aggression and violence;
social and economic inequalities “stem
from” genetics. Harden also says it
directly: genes “cause” differences in
educational outcomes; genetic differ-
ences “cause” differences in social and
behavioral outcomes; a “causal chain”
links a genotype with the social behav-
ior of going to school, and another such
chain joins genetics to performance on
intelligence tests.
The confusion between correlation
and causation in fact first arose in con-
nection with arguments for the biolog-
ical, hereditary basis of intelligence.
The mathematical concept of correla-
tion—a measure of the degree to which
two variables are associated—came
into existence as a linchpin of the con-
joined sciences of statistics and eu-
genics in the 1880s. Galton developed
fundamental concepts of statistics, in-
cluding correlation, deviation, and re-
gression, to provide the mathematical
basis for a new “science of improving
stock,” for which he coined the term
“eugenics.” This mathematics of he-
redity, Galton believed, revealed evo-
lutionary patterns in “human qualities
The New York Review
and faculties”—for example that they
naturally followed a “normal distribu-
tion,” or bell-shaped curve.
Galton’s younger colleague Karl
Pearson, another pioneer of statis-
tics and eugenics, further developed
the mathematics of correlation. Oc-
casionally, Pearson emphasized the
distinction between correlation and
causation, but more often he blurred
it, for example by arguing that causes
were unknowable other than through
correlations. Pearson’s eugenic argu-
ments in fact worked precisely by ob-
scuring this distinction, as when he
argued that a good home environment
had “practically no influence on the
intelligence of boys” whereas “parent-
age”—heredity—did. By correlating
intelligence with “parentage,” Pearson
continued, “you realise at once how
great is the importance of the heredi-
tary as compared with the environmen-
tal factor!” Numerical correlations,
Pearson claimed, revealed the “first
fundamental principle of practical Eu-
genics”: “It is five to ten times as ad-
vantageous to improve the condition of
the race through parentage as through
change of environment.”
Almost a century and a half later, it’s
déjà vu all over again. Harden acknowl-
edges and disavows the eugenic origins
of statistics and concludes her book
with a chapter advocating what she
calls “anti- eugenic science and policy,”
meaning policies to counter natural in-
equalities. Yet she also reproduces the
old statistical illogic of eugenics, with
the correlation/causation confusion at
its core. She devotes a whole chapter
to blowing smoke over the question
“What does it mean to be a cause?”
Here Harden, like Pearson, implies
that causes are essentially unknowable
other than through correlations.
She describes the Bucharest Early In-
tervention Project, an experiment that
began in 2000 following revelations of
the terrible neglect of children in Ro-
manian orphanages. During the dicta-
torship of Nicolae Ceau‫܈‬escu, from the
1960s through the 1980s, contraception
and abortion were mostly illegal. The
increasingly crowded orphanages be-
came sites of misery where children
lay unattended in metal cribs. After
the fall of Ceau‫܈‬escu’s regime, visitors
to the orphanages found hundreds of
silent, listless children. American psy-
chologists and psychiatrists selected
a group of the children and randomly
assigned half of them to foster care,
leaving the other half institutional-
ized, then compared the two groups.
Leaving children in such conditions
in the name of rational inquiry seems
a good example of the miscarriage of
science. Unsurprisingly, the research-
ers discovered that it was better to be
in foster care, where children showed
an increase in IQ over those who re-
mained institutionalized.
Harden tells this story to illustrate
the fundamentally mysterious nature
of causation: we don’t know the mecha-
nism, she says, by which the foster chil-
dren’s IQ increased. It may have been a
reduction in “physiological reactivity”
in a caring environment, “preventing
glucocorticoids from interfering with
the development of synaptic connec-
tions,” or increased iodine in the diet,
or a “proliferation of synapses” due
to greater language exposure. Never-
theless, Harden writes, the research-
ers weren’t just “claiming that foster
care was associated with higher IQ or
April 21, 2022
correlated with higher IQ” but that it
C
“caused an increase in IQ.” People ac-
cepted that “being moved out of insti-
tutional care causes an increase in IQ,
but how? No one really knows.”
O
Well, of course we know why it was N W
N O
better to be in foster care. Any or all
the mechanisms Harden lists may have
R
been involved, but the essential ex-
planation is simple: care causes chil-
dren to thrive; neglect causes them to E
languish. Harden’s insistence that no
one really knows how it worked repro- C L
duces some important steps in the old
eugenic circular logic: first, the claim T D
I S
that social situations can be reduced
to extremely technical, deeply hidden
natural causes; and second, the asser-
tion that these causes are fundamen-
tally unknowable, so the best we can N
do is to consider their effects statisti-
cally. These prepare the third step, in
which statistical analysis confirms that
G
the social world derives its hierarchical CONNECTING WORLDS
configuration from innate differences St. John’s College seminars in poetry and philosophy, fiction and nonfiction,
in biology. math and science, and the cinematic and performing arts offer programs
“In the course of ordinary social sci- where you can connect with fellow lifelong learners, share ideas and examine
ence and medicine,” Harden writes, what it means to be a human in the world.
we are quite comfortable calling
something a cause, even when (a)
“intellectually stimulating, horizon-expanding, fun week !”
we don’t understand the mecha- GREAT DISCUSSIONS ON GREAT BOOKS
nisms by which the cause exerts its Weeklong in-depth seminars, JULY 2022
effects, (b) the cause is probabi-
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE ONLINE
listically but not deterministically
July 4–8 | July 11–15
associated with effects, and (c)
the cause is of uncertain portabil- IN PERSON AT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, SANTA FE, NM
ity across time and space. . . . I’m July 11–15 | July 18–22 | July 25–29
going to call this a “thin” model of To claim your own seat at a seminar table, visit our website
causation. sjc.edu/SummerClassic
Harden’s and her colleagues’ com-
fort level notwithstanding, her “thin
R ARITAN
causation” is really correlation, and
barely even that, given the “uncertain
portability” of item (c), meaning that
results obtained in one setting might
not be reproducible in another.
Ultimately, Harden offers no expla- Edited by Jackson Lears
nation for how, say, an adenine rather
than a guanine in a certain spot in a
person’s genome makes them likelier to In recent and forthcoming issues
get an 800 on their SAT, any more than
George Hutchinson, “Remembering the Peace Corps:
Gall and Spurzheim could specify how
a bulging skull gave a person cognitive Haute Volta, 1975–1977”
powers, or Galton could show how more Lore Segal, “Lying to Mother”
“brain fibres” made for enhanced men-
tal capacity, or Spencer could describe Christopher Benfey, “Stephen Crane’s War on Poverty”
the connection between “mental mass”
and “quality of thought,” or Terman Ben Miller, “Field Notes from a Pandemic”
could specify what he meant by “better Ann Fabian, “The Travails of a ‘Lady Scientist’”
heredity.” Harden moreover writes that
each single-nucleotide polymorphism Robert Westbrook, “Sally Mann and the Burdens
makes a minuscule difference, amount- of Southern History”
ing to at most “a few extra weeks of
schooling,” and in some cases—as Victoria Nelson, “Remembering Adam Zagajewski”
with “a SNP named rs11584700”—only
Tom Sleigh, “Gargle and Spit”
“an extra two days.” What sort of dif-
ference could help someone to stay in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Vermeer and the Language of Poetry”
school an extra two days?
Of course, these measures represent Marsha Pomerantz, “Espionage”
statistical averages, not individuals.
Carlo Rotella, “A Stance, an Attitude”
Still, if we’re to believe the statistics
reflect meaningful differences among Art by Thornton Dial Sr.
people, we must accept not only the
idea of a genetic profile for remaining Fiction by Felix Amerasinghe, John Kinsella, and Tami Schuyler
in school, but also the idea that this
Poetry by Sylvie Baumgartel, Boris Dralyuk,
genetic profile is composed of hun-
dreds or thousands of infinitesimal Ishion Hutchinson, and Gerald Maa
advantages whose specific natures
and mechanisms are unknown—in-
deed, are so tiny as to be unknow-
NYRB readers enjoy a special 25% discount at
able other than statistically. With no raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/discount
causal explanation for how tiny fluc- Follow us on Twitter @RaritanQR
tuations in the genome might produce
percentages of variance in years of
45
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
PRINSSI

No, eihän tämä nyt vielä mitään merkitse. Imandra, mitä hän teki!

IMANDRA

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kuinka…

PRINSSI

Voi, minun ymmärrykseni, sano pian!

IMANDRA

… Kuinka hän sai minut tunnustamaan.

PRINSSI

Minä aavistan. Mitä sinä tunnustit?

IMANDRA

Että minä kerran kokemattomuudesta annoin sinun… tuota noin…

PRINSSI

Mitä, mitä!

IMANDRA

Kunhan saisin sen sanotuksi. Mutta älä naura.

PRINSSI

Olen vakava kuin pappi haudalla.

IMANDRA

Annoin sinun kerran suudella. Ja silloin —

PRINSSI

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IMANDRA

Aikoi hän väkisin…

PRINSSI (kavahtaa pystyyn)

Kirottu, kavala prinssi, hän uskalsi…

IMANDRA

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potkin ja pääsin pakoon.

PRINSSI

Mikä taivaan onni! Minä huokaan taas helpoituksesta.

IMANDRA

Minä huusin, huusin niin — sinua avukseni, mutta vain oma

ääneni ilkkui minulle metsästä. — Minä tunnen vieläkin ruumiissani
lämmön, kun hän puristi minua rintaansa vasten.

PRINSSI

Kyllä minä olisin puristanut hänet maahan madoksi.

IMANDRA

Olisitpa tullut tuulispäänä! Olisitte iskeneet yhteen kuin kaksi

karhua kalliolla niin, että kivet olisivat kipenöineet ja sammaleet
sinkoneet! Olisit ryöstänyt minut ryöstäjältä, niinkuin sadun sankari
pahan peikon vuoresta, josta olen satukirjoissani lukenut. Mutta
sinun täytyy kostaa.

PRINSSI

Ihmeellinen Imandra, mikä ihmeellinen seikkailu! Mutta minä en

uskalla.
Minä olen prinssin palvelija, hän voi häätää minut pois
metsämökistäni.

IMANDRA

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PRINSSI

Järven tuolla puolen, prinssin huvilinnan lähellä. Mutta metsä

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lattianluukusta salaiseen komeroon.
IMANDRA

Tästä tulee hauskaa! Sinne on varmaankin vielä pitkä matka. Minä

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PRINSSI

Mutta onhan minulla huiluni, minä olen ennenkin loihtinut sillä

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IMANDRA

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PRINSSI

Mistä sinä olet jäniksen saanut?

IMANDRA

Hoviherra sen antoi.

PRINSSI

Etkä sitä heti sanonut. Siitähän saamme paistin, se täytyy

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kierii laatikko.)

IMANDRA
 Mitä kummaa! Katsos tätä laatikkoa!

PRINSSI

Aukaise!

IMANDRA (taputtaen käsiään ja tanssien)

Voi, ihme! Hanhenpaisti, viinirypäleitä, omenaleivoksia, pähkinöitä!

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PRINSSI

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IMANDRA

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niihin kyllästyin, sillä siellä minulla ei koskaan ollut nälkä.

PRINSSI

Nyt tiedät nälän ja unen arvon.

IMANDRA

Oh, minä olen niin suloisen kylläinen ja hiljaisen uninen.

PRINSSI

Väsyttääkö sinua, sinä minun metsäkyyhkyni?

IMANDRA
 Miksi sinä sanot samoin kuin prinssikin?

PRINSSI

Tulimmaista, mitä minä sanoin! Älkäämme nyt muistelko prinssiä!

IMANDRA

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IMANDRA

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PRINSSI

Minä vien sinut pehmeälle sammalvuoteelle. Käy lepäämään!

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järven takaa mökintuli, joka pitkänä juovana heijastuu järvenpintaan.
Mökin takaa häämöittää metsäisellä kukkulalla seisova huvilinnan
torni.)

IMANDRA

Mikä tuli tuolla tuikkii?

PRINSSI

Uuden kotimme viihtyisä valkea. Hyvä haltija sen sytytti.

IMANDRA

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minä olen?

PRINSSI

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IMANDRA

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(Unettaret tulevat sipsuttaen ja tanssivat Imandran ja

prinssin ympärillä.)
NÄYTÖS III

Mökin tupa. Vasemmalla kaksikerroksinen sänky, oikealla

kangaspuut, keskellä lattiaa luukku. Perällä ja oikealla ovi, seinällä
vanha kaappikello. Ikkunalaudalla kukkia, veripisara, "Kodin ilo."

PRINSSI (heräten yläsängyssä)

Imandra!

IMANDRA (herää haukotellen alasängyssä)

Hoo-oo!

PRINSSI

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IMANDRA

En voi nukkua, tämä olkipatja on niin kova.

PRINSSI

Minulla ei ole pehmeitä silkkipatjoja.

IMANDRA

Hovissa minä tunsin herneen seitsemänkin patjan alta.

PRINSSI

Niinkuin sadussa sanotaan. Nousehan jo!

IMANDRA

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PRINSSI

Kukko kiekui jo.

IMANDRA

Kiekukoon vaan!

PRINSSI

Kyllä jo olisi aika, kukko kiekui jo toisen kerran.

IMANDRA

Mutta nouseehan aurinko kukottakin.

PRINSSI

Kukko arvelee kuitenkin, että auringonnousu riippuu hänestä.

IMANDRA
 Mutta minun nousuni ei riipu kukosta.

PRINSSI

Aina sinä sanot ja teet päinvastoin, niinkuin se akka sadussa.

IMANDRA

Mitä se akka teki?

PRINSSI

Kerran sai toivoakseen kaksi asiaa. Kiukuissaan toivoi mökin

kääntyvän ylösalasin, ja ennenkuin kukko kolmasti lauloi, toivoi sen
taas kääntyvän paikoilleen.

IMANDRA

Sillä sinä tahdot minua taas opettaa, minunpa paimenkirjassani on

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PRINSSI

Älähän nyt taas ala lueskella sitä unikirjaasi, sitten sinua taas
unettaa.

IMANDRA

Arvaas minä näin unta, että sinä et ollutkaan metsänvartija vaan

Kaukovallan prinssi.

PRINSSI
 Sinä näet päinvastaisia uniakin.

IMANDRA

Oh, minä olen väsynyt!

PRINSSI

Jo olisi aika ruokkia kanat, laasta lattia, kastaa kukat, tehdä

taikinaa.

IMANDRA

Jauhot ovat lopussa.

PRINSSI

Köyhyys ei ole iloksi.

IMANDRA

Olisipa edes uni iloksi.

PRINSSI

Liika uni köyhdyttää.

IMANDRA

Minä menen saman tien kuin tulinkin.

PRINSSI
 Sinä et löydä enään kotiin.

IMANDRA

Ei kysyvä tieltä eksy.

PRINSSI

No minä käskenkin sinua nukkumaan iltaan saakka.

IMANDRA

Kylläpä sinä käsket. Mutta minäpä nousenkin, mutta älä katso.

(Vetää verhon sängyn eteen.)

PRINSSI (laskeutuu lattialle)

En katso kiusallakaan.

IMANDRA

Vai et tahdo katsellakaan. Tällaista on ollut elämä tänne tulostani

asti. Enkä kertaakaan ole saanut tanssia, etkä sinä ole tahtonut
soitella moneen aikaan.

PRINSSI

Minulla on yllinkyllin työtä metsässä — ja kotonakin.

IMANDRA

Missä sinä aina viivyt niin kauvan poissa?

PRINSSI

Minun täytyy vartioida kuninkaallisia hirviä ja muuta metsänriistaa.

Viime aikoina on siellä käynyt metsänvarkaita.

IMANDRA

Ja sentähden varastat sinä itsellesi minulta unen. Vetelehdit

päivälläkin ja unohdat halonhakkuun. Menehän sinäkin jo halkoja
hakkaamaan!

PRINSSI

Eilen tuli käsky hovista.

IMANDRA

Mikä käsky?

PRINSSI

Sinun pitää taas mennä ompelemaan hääpukua sille vieraan

valtakunnan prinsessalle. Prinssi kuuluu jo valmistavan häitä.

IMANDRA

Joko taas! Minun jalkani on väsynyt polkemisesta ja sormeni

sairaat. Ihme kun en ole nähnyt sitä prinsessaa, mutta prinssin minä
näin linnan pihalla, mutta hän ei tuntenut minua kotikutoisissani.

PRINSSI
 Hyvä olet kutoja, ei muut hovin kutojattaret vedä sinulle vertoja.
Missäkö se prinsessa? Kuuluu istuvan eräässä tornikamarissa,
häntä ei saa nähdä ennenkuin hääiltana ensi viikolla.

IMANDRA

Ensi viikolla? Ja tiedäthän, että minä voisin nyt olla prinssin

morsian, jos olisin tahtonut. Tuntuu kuin kutoisin omaa hääpukuani.

PRINSSI

Minuakin on käsketty soittamaan huilua häissä. Kuuluu jo tulleen

vieraita, Suvikunnan hovirouva, hoviherra ja kamarineiti. Kamarineiti
lupasi käydä sinua katsomassa.

IMANDRA

Kamarineitikö? Sepä hauskaa! Me luimme aina ennen suloisia

satuja.

PRINSSI

Hän opettaa sinua sitomaan morsiusseppelettä.

IMANDRA

Pitääkö minun niitäkin tehdä?

PRINSSI

Pitänee, tokko osaat?

IMANDRA

Ettenkö osaisi, minä osaan, mitä minä vain tahdon.

PRINSSI

Mutta et aina tahdo.

IMANDRA

Tahdon, mutta en silloin, kun muut tahtovat minun tahtovan.

PRINSSI

Prinssi on kai sinut jo unohtanut.

IMANDRA

Minutko unohtanut?

PRINSSI

Eipä enään huoli sinua kuningattarekseen. Nyt saat viettää häitä

prinssin halvan metsänvartijan kanssa.

IMANDRA

Häitä? Hahhaa! En ole vielä sellaisia ajatellut. Minä en voi sitä

unohtaa, että prinssi unohti minut niin pian.

PRINSSI

Ei kukaan ole korvaamaton.

IMANDRA

Mutta minäpä keksin keinon, minä liehittelen sitä prinssiä niin, että
hän unohtaa prinsessan. Sanoihan hän kerran rakastavansa minua,
silloin kun tarjosi minulle sitä taikapeiliä. Ehkä minä peilin avulla
saan hänet taas pauloihini. Sinullahan on pala peilistä.

PRINSSI

Tässä on peilinsiru, mutta käytä sitä varovasti, minä hirmustuisin

jos unohtaisit minutkin.

IMANDRA (katsoo peiliin)

Mutta mitä! Eihän nenäni enään veny ja silmäni ovat selkeät.

PRINSSI

Katsos peilissä on kaksi puolta.

IMANDRA

Ah, siksikö minä niin suutuin prinssiin! Se prinssin seuralainen

käänsi kasvojeni eteen peilin pahan puolen.

PRINSSI

Siksi, että näytit itsestäsi vain pahoja puolia.

IMANDRA

Eikö minulla ole hyviäkin puolia? Minua sanottiin hovissa aina

häijyksi.
PRINSSI

Sinä voit olla hyväkin, kun vain tahdot.

IMANDRA

Mutta minä tahdon olla hyvä vain omasta tahdostani. Pakosta

minä vain paadun. Kyllä minä kostan prinssille sen, että hän aikoi
ryöstää minut metsässä.

PRINSSI

Mutta taikapeili on vaarallinen, voit eksyä ryöstämään jotain

itseltäsi. Ehket voi eroittaa minua prinssistä.

IMANDRA (peilaillen)

Tänään tahdon olla kaunis ja keveä kuin unetar.

PRINSSI

Älähän vain rakastu prinssiin! Silloin minä kuolisin, mutta silloin ei

prinssikään enään eläisi.

IMANDRA

Oh, sinä kuolisit! Mihin minä silloin joutuisin!

PRINSSI

Minä voisin surmata oman kuvani.

IMANDRA
 Prinssinkö? Voisitko sinä surmata hänet minun tähteni? Mutta
silloinhan pyöveli sinut teloittaisi. Oh!

PRINSSI

Kuule ja muista! Älä vain erehdy minun ja prinssin suhteen.

IMANDRA (Katsoen peiliin)

Tämä peili lumoo silmät, minä en ymmärrä… Etten vain erehtyisi

sinun ja prinssin suhteen!

PRINSSI

Mitä jos prinssin päähän pälkähtäisi pukeutua toiseksi?

IMANDRA

Oh, minä pelkään! Tämä peili sekoittaa selvimmät ajatukset. Ei, ei,
en erehtyisi sittenkään! Mutta nyt minä menen peseytymään kaivolle.
(Menee, Otro tulee toisesta ovesta.)

OTRO

Iloista huomenta, teidän korkeutenne!

PRINSSI

Metsänvartija! Olen nyt oma vartijani.

OTRO
 Hovissa nauretaan tälle sukkelalle seikkailullenne. Kuinka korkea
vartijattarenne edistyy?

PRINSSI

Hoviherra ja hovirouva ovat kasvattaneet hänet aivan

nurinkurisesti.

OTRO

Hänen pohjimmainen, hieno vaistonsa opettaa hänet lopulta

oikealle teidän ohjauksellanne.

PRINSSI

Toivon niin, mutta minä olen toisinaan niin piintynyt hänen hulluihin
päähänpistoihinsa, että olen unohtaa oman opetukseni.

OTRO

Mutta hän taipuu jo tapoihinne?

PRINSSI

Minun täytyy usein taipua hänen tapoihinsa. Minun täytyy nousta

yhtä varhain kuin hänenkin, tehdä työtä niinkuin hänenkin.

OTRO

Prinsessa on siis vielä penseä?

PRINSSI
 Oh, mutta minä iloitsen aamun raikkaudesta, iloitsen onnestani,
kasvavista voimistani. Ymmärrän nyt työn arvon paremmin kuin
ennen.

OTRO

Te näytätte terveeltä kuin metsämies.

PRINSSI

Mutta vielä enemmän iloitsen minä prinsessan kasvavasta

kauneudesta ja hänen sielunsa salaisesta suloudesta.

OTRO

Hän on kuin luonnon lapsi, viehkeä vikoineenkin. Te ohjaatte häntä

näkymättömällä kädellä.

PRINSSI

Hän ei saa huomata, että häntä ohjataan.

OTRO

Tässä on oma viittanne, kruununne ja kullatut kenkänne, kuten

käskitte.

PRINSSI (pukeutuen)

Nyt panemme hänet koetukselle!

OTRO