The New York Review of Books - vol 02

- Feb 10, 2022 Various Authors

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 Darryl Pinckney on Joan Didion

February 10, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 2

Colm Tóibín: Fighting Over Picasso

Yiyun Li: Jon McGregor’s Aftermaths
Adam Kirsch: German Song and the Color Line
Anne Diebel: Peter Thiel’s Power
Vivian Gornick: Tess Slesinger’s Thinking Couples
Gavin Francis: Demystifying the Prostate
Laura Marsh: The World According to le Carré
 HOLBEIN
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Contents
4 Darryl Pinckney Our Lady of Deadpan
8
12
13
Yiyun Li
Jacek Dehnel
Michael Tomasky
Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor
Poem
Can He Build Back Better?
DAYS OF
16

19
Colm Tóibín

Laura Marsh
A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943 by John Richardson,
with the collaboration of Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga
Silverview by John le Carré
INFAMY
22 Adam Kirsch Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms
by Kira Thurman
24 Hermione Lee On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times by Michael Ignatieff
26 David Shulman The State of Israel vs. the Jews by Sylvain Cypel, translated from the French
by William Rodarmor
28 Joyce Carol Oates Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from the Portuguese
by Margaret Jull Costa, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno
29 Jessica Greenbaum Poem
30 Gavin Francis A Cultural Biography of the Prostate by Ericka Johnson
Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 by Fred D’Aguiar
32 Michael Hofmann Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky
34 Peter Brown New Rome: The Empire in the East by Paul Stephenson
The Rich and the Pure: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society
in Early Byzantium by Daniel Caner
The Last Great War of Antiquity by James Howard-Johnston
The Formation of Christendom by Judith Herrin
38 Vivian Gornick Hearts vs. Minds
BR E ND A N S IM M S A ND
40 Jonathan Mingle This Is Chance!: The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered CH A R L IE L A DE R M A N
City She Held Together by Jon Mooallem

43 Anne Diebel
The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh Raffles
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin HITLER’S
46
CONTRIBUTORS
Letters from Nina Howe, Robert Zaretsky, Fabian Krautwald, and Joshua Hammer
AMERICAN
PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor
of History Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augus-
tine of Hippo: A Biography and, most recently, Treasure in
HERMIONE LEE’s latest book, a biography of Tom Stop-
pard, will be published in paperback in March. GAMBLE
YIYUN LI is the author of six books of fiction and two books
Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity.
of nonfiction, including, most recently, Tolstoy Together. She Pearl Harbor and Germany’s
JACEK DEHNEL is a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and teaches at Princeton. March to Global War
painter. His latest books published in English are Aperture,
LAURA MARSH is the Literary Editor of The New Republic.
a selection of poetry, and the novel Mrs. Mohr Goes Miss-
ing, cowritten with his husband, Piotr Tarczy Ĕ ski. ANN JONATHAN MINGLE is the author of Fire and Ice: Soot,
FRENKEL and GWIDO ZLATKES’s recent translations Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World. He is
from the Polish include the autobiography Riding History to working on a book about the construction of new fossil fuel “An absorbing new book. . . . It
Death by Karol Modzelewski and Against the Devil in His- infrastructure.
tory: Poems, Short Stories, Essays, Fragments by Aleksander
reminds us how contingent
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author, most recently, of
Wat.
Breathe, a novel, and Night, Neon: Tales of Suspense and even the most significant
ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator with QRI in Mystery. She is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the English historical events can be, how
New York City. Department at Rutgers in the spring of 2022 and the 2020
GAVIN FRANCIS is a primary care physician in Edinburgh. recipient of the Cino del Duca World Prize. many other possibilities lurked
His latest book, Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence, DARRYL PINCKNEY’s latest book is Busted in New York beyond the familiar ones that
was just published in the UK. and Other Essays. A new edition of Blackballed: The Black
VIVIAN GORNICK is the author, most recently, of Unfin- Vote and US Democracy was published in 2020. actually happened.”
ished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader. DAVID SHULMAN is the author of Freedom and Despair: — NE W YOR K T IME S
JESSICA GREENBAUM’s third book of poems, Spilled and Notes from the South Hebron Hills, among other books. He is
Gone, was named a best book of 2021 by The Boston Globe. a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem BOOK R E V IE W
and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016.
MICHAEL HOFMANN is a poet and translator from the
German. His latest book of poems is One Lark, One Horse, COLM TÓIBÍN is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Profes-
and his Clarendon Lectures, Messing About in Boats, were sor of the Humanities at Columbia. Vinegar Hill, a poetry col-
published last year. He teaches at the University of Florida. lection, will be published in April. “A gripping tale, expertly told.”
ADAM KIRSCH is an Editor at The Wall Street Journal’s MICHAEL TOMASKY is the Editor of The New Republic — F R E DR IK L O GE VA L L ,
weekend Review section and the author of The Blessing and the and of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is working on a
Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the 20th Century. book about politics and economics. author of Embers of War
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On the cover: Una Ursprung, Avalanche, landscape #26, 2020. © Una Ursprung. The paintings on pages 17 and 18 are © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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3

Let sadness tell you what to read. “We
tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Joan Didion begins her essay “The
White Album” by recalling a time
when, she says, she had mislaid the
script of life. She who had reread all
of George Orwell on the beach of the
Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu is
talking about her loss of faith in the
intelligibility of narrative: “I suppose
this period began in 1966 and contin-
ued until 1971.” Her evocation of what
the late Sixties were like in her feckless
part of Los Angeles displays the gifts
of her style, starting with a Califor-
nia Old Settler dryness. She may have
had an attack of “vertigo and nausea”
in the early summer of 1968, and she
may have been an outpatient at the
psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospi-
tal in Santa Monica, and the long ex-
cerpt from her psychiatric report that
she inserts into her story may, indeed,
have said that she was suffering from
a depressive view of the world, but her
passivity is a front, her dangerous ob-
server’s disguise.
Didion remembers that an acquain-
tance referred to her large, peeling
house on Franklin Avenue in Holly-
wood as being in a “senseless-killing
neighborhood.” On October 30, 1968,
not too far away, Ramon Novarro, a
silent film–era actor, was murdered by
two hustler brothers; and for many peo-
ple Didion knew, she says, the Sixties
ended on August 9, 1969, when word
spread through her neighborhood that
Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s preg-
nant wife, and four other people at a
house on Cielo Drive had been mur-
dered the night before. It was on July
27, 1970, that Didion found herself
choosing a dress for Linda Kasabian, a
member of the Manson family (whom
she’d interviewed, presumably), to wear
as a witness for the prosecution in the
Manson trial. It was 11:20 when she de-
livered the dress to Kasabian’s attorney
outside his office on Rodeo Drive. He
was wearing a porkpie hat. “‘Dig it,’
Gary Fleischman was always saying.”
Didion’s precision of detail is structure,
balance of tone.
The White Album was published
in 1979 and was the first collection of
nonfiction by Didion that I read. A few
of the essays in it I had maybe come
across before in The New York Review,
but it enlarged the idea of her that I’d
gotten from the women protagonists in
the two of her three early novels that
I’d read, Play It as It Lays (1970) and A
Book of Common Prayer (1977). Did-
ion was not shy about killing off a her-
oine at the end of the story if she had
to. Joan “Bad Vibes” Didion, someone
called her after reading her first non-
fiction collection, Slouching Towards
Bethlehem (1968). In those days, peo-
ple said that a magazine needed only to
report the news and trends from New
York City to succeed nationally, and
part of the mystique of Didion for me
was that she reversed the formula and
told us what was happening or had hap-
pened out there.
She was sitting on the floor in a Sunset
Boulevard studio, counting the seventy-
six control knobs on an electronic panel
and watching the Doors wait and wait
for Jim Morrison. In her Los Ange-
les, dinner was at nine, unless it was at
4 The New York Review
Our Lady of Deadpan
Darryl Pinckney
Joan Didion, 1987; photographs by Dominique Nabokov
11:30, twenty for sushi, or a table some-
where else for fourteen. Desires, rather
than plans, could change in a moment,
because David Hockney might stop
by, because somebody had the where-
abouts of Ultra Violet that night. The
Living Theater would have to wait until
cigarettes were finished. People she had
not much relation to came and went in
her house. Janis Joplin wanted brandy
and Benedictine in a water tumbler.
She kept in a drawer a list of the license
numbers she’d written down of panel
trucks she’d seen circling the block. “In
another sense the Sixties did not truly
end for me until January of 1971, when
I left the house on Franklin Avenue and
moved to a house on the sea.”
D idion is one of two women included
in Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson’s land-
mark anthology, The New Journalism
(1973). Her husband, John Gregory
Dunne, is among the volume’s several
showmen of subjectivity. In the 1970s
you couldn’t catch the subway at the
72nd and Broadway station without
someone in your group pointing to
branches in a triangular patch of dark
across the street and saying that that
was Needle Park and that Joan Didion
and John Gregory Dunne had written
the screenplay for The Panic in Needle
Park (1971). It was known that they had
an East Coast life and a West Coast life,
a book world and a film world, which
seemed to make them exceptions in
both. She wasn’t an outsider so much as
she managed to remain unclaimed by
the worlds she moved in.
In the Seventies, we kept comparing
ourselves to the Sixties, wanting either
to fulfill the decade’s promises or to get
over it, stop tripping. The chapter in
which Eldridge Cleaver accuses James
Baldwin of wanting to have a baby by
a white man was all I’d read of Soul on
Ice (1968). Cleaver published Soul on
Dominique Nabokov
Fire, his hustle of the Christian conver-
sion narrative, in 1978, and the rumor
was that the Black Panther fugitive had
come back from exile and surrendered
in order to get the royalties from Soul
on Ice held in escrow. After so much
unquestioning support for the Pan-
thers, including Baldwin’s, The White
Album’s title essay, composed, Did-
ion tells us, between 1968 and 1978, is
striking in its sobriety of mind about
black revolution.
She summarizes the origins of the
Black Panther Party in Oakland in
1966 and the early-morning confron-
tation in Oakland a year later between
Huey P. Newton and John Frey, a
white police officer, that led to Frey’s
death. Newton and another police of-
ficer were wounded in the gunfire. In
the spring of 1968, when Newton was
awaiting trial for murder, Didion was
allowed to see him:
I am telling you neither that Huey
Newton killed John Frey nor that
Huey Newton did not kill John
Frey, for in the context of revolu-
tionary politics Huey Newton’s
guilt or innocence was irrelevant.
I am telling you only how Huey
Newton happened to be in the Al-
ameda County Jail, and why rallies
were held in his name, demonstra-
tions organized whenever he ap-
peared in court.
She isn’t sure the likable Newton un-
derstood that he was of more use to the
revolution behind bars than he was on
the street.
Cleaver has press credentials, like
Didion, and the two other journalists
present in the hot room of fluorescent
light. What Cleaver wants from Newton
are statements, messages to the outside,
prophecy to be interpreted as
needed. . . . “There are a lot of
people interested in the Executive
Mandate Number Three you’ve
issued to the Black Panther Party,
Huey. Care to comment?” And
Huey Newton would comment.
“Yes, Mandate Number Three is
this demand . . .”
Everything sounded like quotation or
pronouncement, Didion says. Newton
would not talk about himself. The per-
sonal was to be avoided, “even at the
cost of coherence.” Safety lay in gen-
eralization, she notes. Yet she appre-
ciated the Panther proposition “that
political power began at the end of the
barrel of a gun,” and even more that
Newton in an early memorandum had
been specific: “Army .45; carbine; 12-
gauge Magnum shotgun with 18” barrel,
preferably the brand of High Standard;
M-16; .357 Magnum pistols; P-38.”
She couldn’t scale that cinder block
wall of Panther rhetoric; there hadn’t
been anywhere on the surface to get
hold of. Newton’s repetitive Marxist
phrases were an autodidact’s recita-
tion, and after she gives examples of
how conformist that was, she provides
an excerpt from the testimony before
the Alameda County grand jury of the
nurse who was in charge of the emer-
gency room at the Oakland hospital
where Newton sought help after getting
shot by one of the police officers that
October morning in 1967. The nurse
wouldn’t let “this Negro fellow” see a
doctor until he’d registered and shown
her his insurance card. He shouted that
he’d been shot and was bleeding, but
she insisted. The nurse’s testimony il-
lustrated a “collision of cultures” for
Didion, and she pinned a copy of the
testimony above her desk, until she
learned that Newton did have an insur-
ance card for that hospital system.
One morning in 1968 she went to see
Cleaver in his San Francisco apartment.
She had to ring the bell and step into the
street where she could be scrutinized
from the apartment and then buzzed in.
Kathleen Cleaver was in the kitchen fry-
ing sausages; he was in the living room
listening to Coltrane; and there were
people everywhere, in the hallways, on
the telephone, standing in doorways.
Soul on Ice was being published that
day. Didion says they talked of Cleaver’s
advance, the size of his first printing, the
advertising budget, in what bookstores
copies were available:
It was a not unusual discussion
between writers, with the differ-
ence that one of the writers had his
parole officer there and the other
had stood out on Oak Street and
been visually frisked before com-
ing inside.
Just as liberal Hollywood was “a kind
of dictatorship of good intentions,”
so Didion viewed the disorder of the
student strike at San Francisco State
College in the fall of 1968 as an “ami-
able evasion of routine” for everyone
except the black militants, who at least
were dictating the rules. She’d been to
meetings and debates in Los Angeles
in 1968, her house had been a meet-
ing place for Communist screenwrit-
ers in the 1930s and 1950s, and she is
 Exploring Black Experiences

February 10, 2022 5

put off by the vanity and irrelevance of
goodwill in these Hollywood experi-
ences and Hollywood histories. In the
postscript-like essay “On the Morning
After the Sixties,” Didion concludes
that if she thought going to the barri-
cades would affect man’s fate she’d go
to the barricades, “but it would be less
than honest to say that I expect to hap-
pen upon such a happy ending.”
Murray Kempton liked to say that
Didion was not one of nature’s liber-
als. He pointed out that it was William
F. Buckley Jr. who first published her,
in the pages of his National Review. It
is hard to stay on your feet in a pull-
ing tide. Susan Sontag never reprinted
that essay on her trip to Cuba in 1970.
I doubt that Didion has little Caster-
bridges like that. For one thing, she
didn’t get ideological enthusiasms; in-
stead she got phone calls from former
neighbors into Scientology. To think
about the Sixties, Didion returns to the
Fifties, to Berkeley and the humanism
and skepticism that were her genera-
tion’s points of intellectual reference.
She reviews the “litany of trivia” about
the domestic in the literature of second-
wave feminism, recognizing that it was
“a key technique in the politicizing of
women who had perhaps been condi-
tioned to obscure their resentments
even from themselves.” The personal
may be social, but individuals cannot
be the solutions to social problems that
we want them to be. The fault is in our-
selves. People will let people down.
The Sixties had Didion define what
she called her commitment to the ex-
ploration of moral distinctions and
ambiguities. She once described how
she liked to look first at the small items
at the bottom of the newspaper page,
to read the page from the bottom up,
and to read the newspaper from back
to front. The reflections she proposed
came together from patient, impartial-
seeming scrutiny of the language peo-
ple expressed themselves in, of what we,
noisome society, meant, consciously
and otherwise. The detachment of the
observer guarded against the kind of
disillusion that brings writer’s block,
modest expectations of human behav-
ior being self-protective as well as phil-
osophical. But for a writer associated
with control, manipulation, coolness of
voice, Didion’s work is full of feeling.
An essay that exemplifies her in-
dependence as an interrogator of the
American scene is “New York: Senti-
mental Journeys,” which first appeared
in the January 17, 1991, issue of The
New York Review and was then in-
cluded in her collection After Henry
(1992). It is an extraordinary examina-
tion of a miscarriage of justice in New
York City.
On April 20, 1989, a woman was
found unconscious in Central Park near
the connecting road at 102nd Street:
Her skull had been crushed, her
left eyeball pushed back through its
socket, the characteristic surface
wrinkles of her brain flattened.
Dirt and twigs were found in her
vagina, suggesting rape. By May 2,
when she first woke from coma, six
black and Hispanic teenagers, four
of whom had made videotaped
statements concerning their roles
in the attack and another of whom
had described his role in an un-
signed verbal statement, had been
charged with her assault and rape
and she had become, unwilling and
6 The New York Review
unwitting, a sacrificial player in the
sentimental narrative that is New
York public life.
The public outcry against the de-
fendants was intense, the presumption
of their guilt vehemently asserted by
politicians and press: “Teen Wolfpack
Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec on
Jogging Path.” Two trials in 1990 re-
sulted in their convictions. Crimes are
news to the extent that they offer “a
story, a lesson, a high concept,” Did-
ion says. The trial, the Daily News an-
nounced, was about “the rape and the
brutalization of a city.” For Didion, it
was about a city “rapidly vanishing into
the chasm between its actual life and its
preferred narratives.” She concentrates
on how the accused were presented in
the news as opposed to the images of
the victim, “a young woman of conven-
tional middle- class privilege and prom-
ise whose situation was such that many
people tended to overlook the fact that
the state’s case against the accused was
not invulnerable.” None of the defen-
dants had police records, which, Di-
dion observes ruefully, was somehow
seen as an achievement. There were
confessions, but no forensic evidence.
T here are competing, conflicting
narratives in her analysis. For black
people, the case could be read as a
confirmation of their victimization and
of the white conspiracy at the heart
of that victimization. The Amsterdam
News called the trial “a legal lynch-
ing.” Black people when asked said
they believed the confessions had been
wrenched from the accused. The crim-
inal justice system could not function
equitably when a black man was ac-
cused of raping a white woman. Didion
is conscious of the “emotional under-
tow” derived from the taboos in black
American history associated with the
idea of the rape of a white woman. For
blacks, rape was at “the very core of
their victimization.” She discusses the
differences in the handling of assault
cases involving white women and black
women, the vulnerability of women to
the well-meaning official procedures in
rape cases, the recent deaths of other
white girls by misadventure in the city,
and why the case of the Central Park
jogger set off such public anger.
Didion argues that the case allowed
the white middle class, unnerved by drug
culture and violent crime, to express its
rage against thugs without guilt: “It was
precisely in this conflation of victim and
city, this confusion of personal woe with
public distress, that the crime’s ‘story’
would be found, its lesson, its encour-
aging promise of narrative resolution.”
The attack on the jogger passes into a
narrative about confrontation and Gov-
ernor Mario Cuomo’s characterization
of the crime as “the ultimate shriek of
alarm.” The narrative was about what
was wrong with the city and the solu-
tion to the problem. What was wrong
with the city, in the press and TV re-
ports, were the accused. The solution
was to partake of the symbolic body
and blood of the jogger: “The imposi-
tion of a sentimental, or false, narrative
on the disparate and often random ex-
perience that constitutes the life of a
city” means that much of what happens
will be lost in a “sentimental reading of
class differences and human suffering.”
“New York: Sentimental Journeys”
is one of the bleakest portraits of New
York City in the age of crack and AIDS
and “wildings” and its first black mayor.
The real problems of the city could go
on being ignored: the adverse effects of
the financial crisis of 1987 on the city’s
psyche; the city’s underlying criminal
ethic; its undermining customs of pa-
tronage, like in a third world city; and
a bureaucracy reduced to voodoo. Yet
Didion concedes that “a New York
come to grief on the sentimental stories
told in defense of its own lazy crim-
inality” will nevertheless go on, not
learn, because “the city’s inevitability
remained the given, the heart, the first
and last word on which all the stories
rested.” “New York: Sentimental Jour-
neys” was a dramatic dissenting opin-
ion at the time. The victim’s injuries
had been life-threatening, but the righ-
teousness of the rage alerted Didion’s
suspicion that a troubled city was being
driven by a lust for the cathartic. She
kept her balance and was not pulled by
the tide. The five black youths were ex-
onerated in 2002, when an inmate in a
state prison suddenly confessed to the
rape, and the confession was then cor-
roborated by DNA evidence.
Robert Silvers, coeditor of The New
York Review, was particularly proud
of this essay. In The Fifty-Year Argu-
ment, Martin Scorsese’s documentary
about the Review, Didion laughs that
the more trouble she had with it, the
longer he wanted it, trusting every turn
and digression she would make. It has
a novel’s scope and is about New York
City rather than race, which unsettled
me at the time. I was used to the racial
aspect being the primary focus of the
Central Park Five story and was im-
pressed that she cast as cold an eye on
the black activist Al Sharpton as she
did on District Attorney Robert Mor-
genthau, pulling back to a wide view of
the “grave and disruptive problems” of
the city: “problems of not having, prob-
lems of not making it, problems that
demonstrably existed, among the mad
and the ill and the under-equipped and
the overwhelmed, with decreasing ref-
erence to color.”
B ob adored her and she brought out
the best in him as an editor. Didion’s
pieces on El Salvador in the early 1980s
helped to relieve his and his coeditor
Barbara Epstein’s problem of whom to
trust on Central America (in the days
before the brilliant Alma Guillermo-
prieto). They’d been determined not
to get duped over Nicaragua; they had
some regrets over some of the pieces
about Vietnam that they’d published.
Barbara compared Didion’s political
reportage to Mary McCarthy going to
Hanoi and meeting with dismay and
distaste the language of the North
Vietnamese government. She and Bob
treasured Didion for the way she lined
up and then knocked down what some-
one was saying, or trying to get away
with saying.
In “Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of
History,” her critique of the war on ter-
ror, published in these pages in 2003,
Didion is contemptuous of the easy,
galling ironies that the Bush admin-
istration’s deadly policies supply her
with. In this essay, she is alive to “a dis-
connect between the government and
the citizens.” And as eager as Bob had
been to get Didion to cover, say, a Re-
publican National Convention, her not
being one to be taken in maybe came
from an Old Settler ambivalence about
electoral politics. It was people at their
worst. Politics were power relations;
the rest was a mug’s game. (“Now, Dar-
ryl. Shut up!” she said way back there
as I defended a pre–welfare reform,
pre-Monica Bill Clinton early in his
first term.)
The seriousness of her reportage ad-
justed for me the light on her early fic-
tions and confirmed that she had been
up to something in them. Everything
was deception, a strategy, and behind
those fictional portraits of diffidence,
fragility, the sensitivities of women who
lived too well and thought too hard,
stood an authorial ruthlessness. She
was not afflicted with the disease that
hindered some contemporary women
novelists on a mission—that of liking
their heroines too much. “Writers are
always selling somebody out,” Did-
ion said. We were used to writers who
employed techniques of fiction in their
nonfiction, whereas the reportorial or
the clinical—what to call it?—became
an ever more pronounced element in
her later novels. The writer admits
to being the narrator of Democracy
(1984), her novel set largely in South-
east Asia at the end of the Vietnam
War. The narrator rather talks into her
own frame, into the story of a senator’s
wife’s long romance with a CIA guy
capable of love. The allusion to Henry
Adams’s novel of Washington political
intrigue, Democracy: An American
Novel (1880), is to the point, but Did-
ion’s woman, unlike Adams’s widow
who is too useful to men, doesn’t have
to ask herself whether America is right
or wrong.
The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)
is about Didion’s hatred of the all-
conquering male. It is a novel about pol-
itics, Florida/Cuban/contra-style. The
authorial voice is blunt about what it
doesn’t want to waste time on, but this
very thing in the narrator’s voice—“not
quite omniscient,” it says of itself—is
what leaves you somewhat puzzled.
Like sitting before a box so wonder-
fully wrapped that you just assume that
what’s inside is something you really
want, and you open it to find a gift more
in the giver’s taste than in yours, but it’s
not one of those times when the giver’s
taste is in question. In the case of The
Last Thing He Wanted, the giver’s taste
is better than yours.
E lizabeth Hardwick called Didion a
poet of “the airplane and the airport.”
In an essay in Slouching Towards Beth-
lehem about coming to New York for
the first time, Didion can name the
model of aircraft she deplaned from.
Hardwick was fascinated by the aes-
thetic challenges Didion’s sensibility
set before her in the novel form, how
to devise a structure for “the fadings
and erasures of experience” that were
her subject: “This author is a martyr of
facticity, and indeed such has its place
in the fearless architecture of her fic-
tions. You have a dogged concreteness
of detail in an often capricious mode of
presentation.” And yet it reassures the
reader, is a part of the muscular confi-
dence of the narrator. Hardwick used
to speak of what she called Didion’s
“masculine knowledge,” an interest
in systems and how things are put to-
gether, an asset in composition that she
believed Didion shared with George
Eliot.
I see her in black at Barbara’s round
dining-room table in low light and the
February 10, 2022 7
slow white cigarette smoke of the pe-
riod. John Gregory Dunne and Murray
Kempton are booming at each other,
West Hartford, Connecticut, and Balti-
more, Maryland, North and South, fir-
ing their cannons. Lizzie and Barbara
are in that mood where one refuses to
give ground to the other, and so they
are talking at each other, at the same
time, getting louder. I look across to
Joan and mentally wag my tail, wait for
a sign, a shared gesture of Get a load
of this. Her elbows are on the table and
her chin on crossed hands. Nothing,
not an eyebrow.
Our lady of deadpan: “During the
years when I found it necessary to re-
vise the circuitry of my mind I discov-
ered . . .” Her genius was at exploring the
paradoxes and contradictions in the sto-
ries we tell ourselves, and then the sort
of double tragedy that would befall a
Didion character happened to her, and
storytelling became something else.
Blue Nights (2011) is a lamentation for
her troubled daughter, an indictment
of herself for somehow failing her as
a mother. The memoir is anguished
about what she does not say, cannot
yet say, in that earlier memoir about
the death of her husband, The Year
of Magical Thinking (2005). Dunne
and Didion came home one night and
he suffered a heart attack as he was
about to make them drinks. It does not
say: We came home from the hospital
where our daughter lay in a coma, and
he suffered a heart attack. Didion said
in Griffin Dunne’s documentary Joan
Didion: The Center Will Not Hold that
she was trying to cope, that to write
had been her trying to cope with it.
She throws out an arm, almost involun-
tarily, as she explains.
Barbara used to say that Joan was
completely dependent on John, that he
protected her, took care of her, was not
competitive with her, made her writing
possible, but as frail as Joan appeared,
she was tough as iron. Work, like gin,
dims pain, Didion said. Those kinds
of women were fine if something hap-
pened to the husband, Barbara said.
That turned out not at all to be her
fate. I think of her friends, especially
those New York women, who banded
together after his death and set up for
her a life in which she was tenderly
looked after.
Katherine Anne Porter wrote of
Katherine Mansfield, “I see no sign that
she ever adjusted herself to anything or
anybody, except at an angle where she
could get exactly the slant and the light
she needed for the spectacle.” In this
pandemic, certain deaths have added
weight: this is the passing of, this is the
end of, she was the last of . . . Q

Lean Fall Stand
by Jon McGregor.
Catapult, 278 pp., $26.00
Jon McGregor published his first novel,
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable
Things (2002), at the age of twenty-
six. Set on an urban street in northern
England, much of the book takes place
over the course of a single day, at the
end of which a fatal accident happens.
Life—in the mundane manners of tea
drinking, house painting, ball playing,
bed making, lovemaking, telephoning,
eavesdropping, looking and watching,
not looking and not seeing—is spilled
into public view, while mysterious joys
and secretive pains remain out of sight,
like precious organs tucked inside a
body.
There is a familiar narrative formula
in fiction: something dramatic, tragic,
or otherwise life- changing happens
and the novel explores the aftermath,
showing how the characters’ lives
are affected by the event. In If No-
body Speaks of Remarkable Things,
McGregor changes this formula, plac-
ing that event in the last few pages.
This leaves little space for its after-
math to be explored in a conventional
way, and with good reason: even
though we often use the word “un-
imaginable” to describe the pain and
suffering that might follow a tragedy,
they are not necessarily that difficult
to picture.
In fiction as well as in life, oftentimes
we attempt to reach backward from the
aftermath of an event to the time be-
fore it, searching for clues and patterns.
These attempts are not entirely trust-
worthy: they highlight some things,
omit others, and risk rewriting the past.
McGregor counters such a revisiting
gesture, devoting almost the entire
novel to describing in minute detail
the ordinary actions of each of the res-
idents of the street—including a World
War II veteran and his wife, a man who
lost his wife to a fire and is bringing up
their daughter by himself, a group of
club-goers whose reveling ends after
daybreak, a university student and her
roommates, immigrant families with
three generations living under the same
roof, children playing cricket and a lit-
tle boy on a tricycle, a lone young man
who collects junk and attempts to make
In the Beforemath
Yiyun Li
Jon McGregor; illustration by Ciara Quilty-Harper
art out of it—as they move through the
day, just as they would any other day,
in and out of one another’s sight. These
ordinary moments, rendered in poetic
prose, are nothing but extraordinary.
Tightly coiled, McGregor’s sentences
often seem to be on the cusp of spring-
ing into a paragraph, a chapter—and
yet each retains an untrespassing
efficiency:
The buses in the depot, waiting for
a new day, they are quiet, their met-
alwork easing and shrinking into
place, settling and cooling after
eighteen hours of heat and noise,
eighteen hours of criss- crossing
the city like wool on a loom. . . .
The night-fishers strung out along
the canal, feeling the sing of their
lines in the water, although they
are within yards of each other they
are saying nothing, watching lumi-
nous floats hang in the night like
bottled fireflies . . .
To attune to the sensitivity of Mc-
Gregor’s words—each sentence, each
clause, each punctuation mark (or lack
thereof)—a reader has to slow down
to a near stillness, almost as if holding
one’s breath in and one’s finger out to
be touched by a hummingbird’s beak.
At one point the veteran and his wife
board a bus while a young girl watches
them, unobserved:
And if either of them were to look
over their shoulder now they would
see the young girl standing on the
corner, watching the bus grind its
way up the long hill out of town,
lifting an imaginary hat from her
head and trying to wink. But nei-
ther of them are watching, they’re
too busy settling themselves in
their seats, she straightening her
dress, he removing his hat and
smoothing his thick white hair,
both of them shuffling into a com-
fortable position.
And behind them, on the cor-
ner of her street, the young girl
tries again, two winks coming out
at once, and she frowns and holds
one eye open with a finger and a
thumb while she lifts an imaginary
hat from her head.
In this passage, framed by the two lift-
ings of an imaginary hat, no more than
ten seconds pass; the entire sequence
of the girl’s actions is seen by no one.
One of her brothers, at the end of the
novel, will be hit by a car—witnessed
by many people in the street—but that
event haunts me less than this one. Mo-
ments like this, rescued by McGregor’s
attention, require reciprocating atten-
tion from the reader. To read slowly is
to read with imagination and memory.
Are we not all living with the recollec-
tion of being a child, with the desire to
be seen in our kindest and most expres-
sive moments, and yet fated not to be
seen?
In the aftermath of the accident,
perhaps the girl herself will forget this
earlier moment on the street corner,
a small loss overshadowed by a mon-
strous one. What a comfort that Mc-
Gregor has not let incidents such as
this one, which do not have a position
in the chain of cause and effect, slip
into oblivion.
My only quibble with the novel is
that the accident—though placed at the
end—is alluded to periodically through-
out, giving the narrative a slight flavor
of artificial urgency: we are reminded,
with each allusion, that we are reading
about a time when the world is still in-
nocent of one senseless tragedy. But
life itself, at any given moment, is al-
ways innocent of some senseless trage-
dies, dooms small and large.

8 The New York Review

D ooms are never far off in McGregor’s
novels. Even the Dogs (2010) opens
with a man found dead in an unheated
flat in an unnamed industrial English
city; within the first few sentences of
Reservoir 13 (2017), it is revealed that
a thirteen-year- old girl has gone miss-
ing from an English village where she
and her parents have been on a winter
holiday. Both of these books could be
described as explorations of the after-
math of an event of the kind that one
reads about in the newspaper—local
rather than national—before moving
on to the next column: a gallery opened
in town, three hundred cassette tapes
of oral history recordings were discov-
ered in the basement of the municipal
historical society, a cyclist was injured
by a car at an intersection and died in
the hospital.
The word “aftermath” derives from
aftermowth, and originally referred to
a second crop of grass that grows after
the first has been mown or harvested.
If there is aftermath, there should
be beforemath, too. But what does
beforemath mean? A time like the one
explored in McGregor’s first novel, per-
haps, when what is growing cannot be
called first growth or old growth yet,
because no mowing has taken place to
mark it. But how dependent is a narra-
tive on that potentially artificial or ar-
bitrary moment of mowing?
In each of the thirteen chapters of
Reservoir 13, another year passes since
the disappearance of the teenage girl,
with seasons unfolding reliably, na-
ture writing a cyclic narrative on the
meadow, by the river, and in the woods.
The villagers hold the mystery of her
disappearance in their collective con-
February 10, 2022
sciousness, but it’s not at the center of
their lives. Children grow up; people
fall in and out of love, commit petty
crimes and cruelties against one an-
other, and mask their affection and
kindness to one another with the non-
chalance of the accidental. A woman
cares for an elderly neighbor’s dog
while trying to cause as little pain or
humiliation as possible:
[Cathy] knocked on Mr. Wilson’s
door and asked whether Nelson
needed a walk. He said that would
be a great help, and asked whether
she’d have a cup of tea first. A rou-
tine of theirs, this, to make the ar-
rangement seem temporary, when
in fact Cathy had been walking
Nelson most days for years.
A butcher’s shop is foreclosed on,
a yoga center opens, a potter’s cre-
ations—unappreciated and unsold—
are shattered on the ground during
an outburst of despair. New lambs are
born, some with more difficulty than
others. The thirteen years after the
girl’s disappearance are not that dif-
ferent from the thirteen years before
it. The girl is never found; the mystery
remains unresolved.
Reservoir 13 begins with a pair of
lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
McGregor’s novel, circular and dif-
fused like Stevens’s poem, is unusual
in showing that aftermath is not nec-
essarily very different from before-
math: they are both times people live
through, separated by an arbitrary mo-
ment. It’s a novel about the many des-
tinies of multiple characters, none of
them elevated with endowed purpose
or meaning, but each described atten-
tively. Its tapestrying effect brings to
mind Middlemarch, and also the fiction
of contemporary writers such as Eliza-
beth McCracken and Tom Drury.
Lean Fall Stand has a more linear
structure than McGregor’s earlier
novels. It consists of three parts, each
named for a verb, the part of speech
that is most time- conscious. At the
start of “Lean,” a three-man surveying
team is separated by a sudden, blinding
storm while out taking photographs of
some cliffs near Lopez Sound, not far
from their isolated research station in
Antarctica. But there is a circular ele-
ment to the narration as the chapters in
this section alternate among the three
characters: Thomas and Luke, both
young researchers on their first Antarc-
tic expedition, and Doc, a veteran with
thirty years’ experience as a technical
assistant or guide.
That the men are thousands of miles
away from home and several hours
from the main base, where help would
come from, does not change the fact
that people and what they represent—a
past made into memory, and a future
when this day’s memory will be shared
as a story of adventure—are the natu-
ral reference points of the characters’
thoughts. Solitude is perhaps more of
a physical state; our minds are rarely
void of people. As Thomas tries to get
his bearings, unable to see anything
through the wind and snow, he lies flat
on the ice and listens to the sound of
the storm:
He had heard this described as
like being inside a jet engine. As
though people knew what being
inside a jet engine was like. Peo-
ple said these things, but the words
didn’t always fit.
Luke, alone with the snowmobile and
also unable to see anything, tries un-
successfully to make radio contact with
Thomas and Doc. He ponders:
People were going to ask him a
lot of questions about Antarc-
tica, when he got home, and one
thing he wouldn’t be able to tell
them was that a lot of time it was
pure boring. Beautiful, yes. Awe-
inspiring and majestic or humbling
or whatever else you wanted to call
it, but once you were done looking,
the actual experience of being here
day after day was kind of long.
We are, in these chapters, close to the
researchers’ consciousnesses, which
creates a false hope: surely the novel
will let us see all of them return home
safely and share this adventure with
their families and friends.
Doc, meanwhile, is having a stroke
without knowing it. After a near fall
from an ice cliff, he has trouble moving,
is confused, and even in his thoughts
his language starts to break down, los-
ing grammar, vocabulary, continuity:
All slow and now the engine loud.
All slow and now press face jacket
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Nobel Novelist Knut Hamsun
during the Nazi Occupation:
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Autobiographical Narration
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in the Soviet Union
by Vladmir Shlapentokh
Life History of an Ethiopian
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A Poet’s Son Recalls
His Father, Robinson Jeffers
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crease squash face, fall, fall, snow. ous landscapes, has to relearn how to go through a day without a full-time
Weight. White. White. Heavy. belt his trousers and put food into his caretaker.
White. Was up, was down. Heavy. mouth. He also has to regain basic lan- McGregor’s depiction of speechless-
White. Muffle. Muffle. Slow, slow. guage skills. In extended passages of ness, both metaphorical and physical,
Tink. Skidoo hit rock, turned over. dialogue, McGregor demonstrates with makes the novel much more interesting
Luke. Feeling gone right side face painstaking attention how difficult than if he had provided a page-turner
all down body. Falling. Weight. it is for Robert to communicate with about a botched expedition in Antarc-
Silence. White. Mouth full. Snow the rest of the world, as when a speech tica. Though most of us might not have
pack tight. Wait. Up. Down. Float- therapist shows him a picture of a ship: firsthand experience of that continent,
ing. Low thing. Snow sling. Heart we are familiar with its often majestic
beat slow snow low light gone. “Is this a shoe? A shoe, Robert?” stock images: the ocean, the sky, the
Footsteps little far. Footsteps big “Ssh. Yes. Sshh.” ubiquitous ice, penguins, humans with
near. Shout. Pull. Fight. Shout. Pull “This is something that floats special equipment that grants them
over, turn over. Breath. Big breath. on the water, Robert. Does a shoe access to the landscape. Such a place
Mouth open, cold air. Lungs burst. float?” might prompt a cliché—at a loss for
Breath, breath, breath. Stand. “Shhh.” words—as might tragedies of all kinds
Lean. Fall. “Is this a ship?” (and perhaps blisses of all kinds).
“Yes!” But anyone tempted to speak that
For a few pages we are trapped in this
language. What’s going on? We don’t
understand, just as Doc does not. Per-
haps he is dying, perhaps we are listen-
ing to the ravings of a man at death’s
door. When will clarity return to an-
chor us?
Yet even in our wish for lucidity
we are also reeling from a chapter in
which the clear and logical language
used by Thomas as he floats away on a
piece of ice is a drastic contrast to the
whirlpool of words in Doc’s thoughts.
When Thomas refers to the training
he received before the trip, we sense
the succinctness of the bullet points:
“The phrase floe- hop came to mind. . . .
If he could find an adjacent floe, and
move across to it, he could keep mov-
ing that way to the land.” Further and
further adrift, he still finds the precise
words to describe his surroundings, re-
ferring to a nearby leopard seal: “Cir-
cling would be too strong a word. It
was maintaining a presence.” Thomas’s
language sounds so reasonable that we
are nearly convinced he could swim in
the icy ocean to shore and trek the gla-
cier to safety.
In interviews, McGregor has said that
he wanted to write about a trip to Ant-
arctica in 2004 but didn’t figure out
how until now. To recreate the world
of an Antarctic expedition—the spec-
ificity of equipment, protocols, and
procedures; the varieties of landscape, William Dreser: Psaracolius curaeus (Molina), 1855
weather, flora, and fauna; the natural
history of the continent and the human “Ship. Good. Ssh—ship.” She phrase carelessly, as though it could
history of exploration and exploitation; made more notes. She turned to convey something substantial, would
all the different ways a day could go Anna, suddenly, and smiled. She perhaps reconsider after reading
wrong; and the aloneness and lone- held up a picture of an aeroplane. Lean Fall Stand. What does it mean
liness a person might feel when such “Puh—puh—puh.” for someone to be truly at a loss for
a life, so near nature, is also the most “You can say this already?” words? During the immediate period
artificial and tedious—might require “Pay-lane. Red. Red pay-lane.” after Robert’s return to England, his
a novel with the length and breadth of most consistent answer to any query
Moby-Dick. McGregor opted out of There is an abysmal gap between is a combination of “yes,” “of course,”
writing that book. those who take language for granted “obviously,” and “Christ”:
In Antarctica, Doc may have been and those who have lost that ability.
representing humankind facing ex- When Anna first learns about Robert’s He pulled at the collar of his shirt.
traordinary nature. But in the second stroke, she turns to her close friend Anna asked if it was uncomfortable.
part of McGregor’s novel, “Fall,” the Bridget, whose husband—a colleague “Yes! Yes! Obviously, Christ!”
narrative swiftly shifts to England, of Robert’s—died in an earlier acci- “Okay. I was only asking.”
where Doc, known to his family and dent in Antarctica. Grief for the dead “Of course, of course, yes,
friends as Robert, has returned to re- is nonnegotiable, but it also offers a yes.”. . .
cover from his stroke. Here the novel graspable reality, a certainty, that is not “Nice pants, Dad.”
becomes the story of Robert and Anna, available to Anna. Anna confesses to “Yes, obviously, obviously.”
his wife—a scientist who has centered Bridget, “I don’t know if I want him to
her entire marriage to Robert around come home.” Nothing is obvious, nothing can be
his absences and brought up their two This is not selfishness or lack of taken for granted, and a brain that has
children mostly on her own. They are love. Any funeral director or grief many reasons to scream “no” to life can
waging a different war against nature, counselor may use such language with only manage a “yes.” This especially
this time within Robert’s brain: against the bereaved: I want you to remember complicates matters when the research
aphasia, the loss of a person’s ability to him as when he was alive, not how he institute has to investigate and decide
understand language or express oneself died. Such words would be of little use if it was Robert’s error that contributed
in speech. to Anna. The nearly speechless and to the death of his colleague:
Coming back from a near death can immobile Robert is still filled with
be a humiliating process. Robert, the life. He dreams of going on the next “And the medical team said they
experienced navigator of treacher- season’s expedition, yet he cannot found you in this area, towards
The New York Review
 The Robert B. Silvers Foundation
is ppleased to announce
The Recipients of the 2021 Silvers-Dudley Prizes for
Literary Criticism, Arts Writing, and Journalism.
The Robert B. Silvers Prize The Grace Dudley Prize The Robert B. Silvers Prize
for Literary Criticism for Arts Writing for Journalism

Elaine Blair Vinson Cunningham Alma Guillermoprieto

Los Angeles, CA
“Whether unraveling the sexual myths of
contemporary literature or praising
authors who have otherwise generally
been misunderstood, Blair’s long-form
essays on writers and writing are lucid
and elegant dissections of style.”
Brooklyn, NY
“Cunningham’s incisive, bold and witty
style, and his combination of authority
and generosity in his reviews of plays
both old and new, make his a
particularly welcome voice today.”
Bogotá, Colombia
“Fearless, bold and compassionate,
Guillermoprieto has documented
violence and crime across Latin America
with tenacity and grace over the past
four decades, setting the highest
possible benchmark for reporting of
this kind.”

Merve Emre Jason Farago Nesrine Malik

Oxford, England
“At once a spirited critic and a devoted
scholar, Emre’s writing on authors both
contemporary and past combines intense
attention to the text and an impressively
wide frame of reference, always revealing
unexpected layers of literary meaning.”
New York, NY
“Farago’s spry and incisive criticism
takes on the art world at eye level,
ignoring the noise and combing out
the fluff to look, carefully, at the
work itself.”
London, England
“Malik’s voice—pointed, vigorous,
uncompromising—speaking out on
vital humanitarian and political
issues, makes her one of the most
distinctive journalists at work today.”

Becca Rothfeld Ingrid Rowland Thomas Meaney

Cambridge, MA
“Rothfeld’s writings on a wide range
of books shows an impressive
independence of mind—and great
wit. Whether reviewing Bohumil
Hrabal, Jonathan Franzen, Paul
Celan, or Sally Rooney, she is at once
knowing and subtle, always
rewarding the reader with fresh and
vigorous insights.”
Rome, Italy
“Illuminating history and deflating
myths, Rowland’s learned, sly criticism
brings encyclopedic knowledge and
keenly uncompromising perception to
bear on works ranging across several
millennia—from ancient Rome to
contemporary architecture.”
Berlin, Germany
“Meaney’s authoritative writing on
Germany and Continental politics and
culture melds an impressive intellect,
wide historical knowledge, and a fresh
reporting style to explain the densely
entwined currents of contemporary
politics in Europe and beyond.”

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established by a bequest of the late Robert B. Silvers, a founding editor
of The New York Review of Books, with the aim of supporting writers working in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, the
intellectual essay, political analysis, and social reportage. Such support takes the form of the annual Silvers Grants for Work in
Progress, given since 2019, and the Silvers-Dudley Prizes, bestowed annually beginning in 2021.

Rea Hederman, President Daniel Mendelsohn, Director

February 10, 2022 11

 Priestley Head, within sight of the “Well, obviously.” “Can you see, Doc? Over here?” “Yes, yes. Ha! Yes.”
skiway?” “Right. And Luke was found a “Obviously, yes.” “I think, Doc, we’re interested
“Yes. Yes.” few hundred yards beyond Priest- “It’s a long way from the field to know what they were doing over
“A tent was located here, beyond ley Head, disorientated but other- hut. It’s a long way short of where there. What Thomas was doing
Priestley Head, along with a dam- wise well.” Thomas was eventually recovered, on the ice in the first place, and
aged skidoo.” “Yes, yes.” at the far end of Lopez Sound.” why they were travelling without
satphones.”
“Yes.”
“Had there been any planning
regarding the access onto the sea-
IN RESPONSE TO THE LADY AT A READING ice? Any risk assessment?”
Robert widened his eyes sud-
WHO ASKED WHAT THE JOB OF A POET IS denly and made a puffing sound.
He turned his hand in the air. The
The job of a poet is to sit in the morning at a desk gesture could have meant: I don’t
and sift through the news that crackles with other peoples’ lives. know. Or: What can I tell you? Or
even: These reckless young peo-
The job of a poet is to imagine entering those lives ple! It was impossible to know.
like putting on someone else’s clothes.
The clothes pinch. The clothes are pinched for food they are pinched for drink they hope.
M cGregor’s carefully composed di-
alogue, filled with the repetition of so
The job of a poet is to imagine a control line
few words, had an eerie effect on me:
with deciduous or coniferous trees trampled grass a face behind a burdock leaf
for several days my own inner dialogue
some eyes some chinks on the body of the border a poet must imagine the sound was often composed of the same words,
of wet shoes and the feel of wet socks on both the left and the right ice-cold foot. as though I, too, was discovering how
they could express drastically different
The job of a poet is to examine words and phrases distrustfully and poets ask themselves emotions yet remain unreadable to the
because who else can they ask what does the body of a woman with non-Slavic features mean world. I wanted to put the right words
a poet must try out these words and wonder if the poet’s own body was found into Robert’s mouth, to speak for him,
near the control line would the handwritten report describe the poet’s features as Slavic to expedite his thinking process, and I
or non-Slavic. was conscious that in those moments I
was in the same predicament as Anna.
“He always had to reach for the
The job of a poet is to try these words like the slipper on the weary Cinderella
words,” McGregor writes, describing
on people whom the poet loves and whose features are sometimes completely Slavic
how Robert feels. “As though they’d
or somewhat non-Slavic or not Slavic at all; a poet must try these words out been put on a high shelf in the stores.”
on the poet’s own mother who also has certain features a poet must try these words on her hair (The word he searches for at that mo-
eyes nose against that dead body with its dead look try them against her living body and alive look ment is “cold.”) The last part of the novel,
and this makes the poet go cold at the desk. “Stand,” follows Robert and Anna into
a larger setting: they join a support
The job of a poet is to discern in the words visible traces of a corpse being dragged from Poland group for people suffering from aphasia.
to Belarus not just the contours of a map but also broken twigs torn Robert and the other patients, all reach-
blades of grass a silver snail trail next to a sole its entrails smeared ing for words on various high shelves,
on a brown leaf; a poet must visualize a beetle that momentarily stopped clash with one another, skirt around one
another, create encounters both tragic
on its six legs seeing a corpse being dragged from Poland to Belarus and then turned
and comic. Readers impatient with the
back swaying slightly; a poet must feel and smell the wet meadow rotting bark
slowness of the group’s progress won’t
and the touch of metal because be alone: Anna and other caretakers in
the room feel the same. By not creating
the job of a poet is to read that next to the body were three children between 7 a shortcut either for the characters or for
and 15 years of age as well as a man and an older woman and a poet cannot stop readers, McGregor makes us experience
reading but must continue stumbling through these wet and muddy lines their confusion, frustration, and shifting
and a poet must try being ages 7 and 15 and all the ages in between moods between despair and hope.
in that place in the woods that place of darkness place of dampness that place Caretaking—in the broad sense of
where the corpse was dragged a corpse that is the corpse of the poet’s own mother offering a helping hand to a friend, a
about whom it is hard to say if her features are Slavic or non-Slavic a poet must try being seven neighbor, a family member, or even a
stranger—is a recurrent theme in Mc-
years old standing next to the mother’s body as it looked then a poet must try this.
Gregor’s writing. Anna, as the sole
caretaker for Robert (and seeing her
The job of a poet cannot stop here so a poet reads on that own career eroded and halted), pon-
they were forced to walk on foot to the border and then to cross the Polish- ders the naming of her role when she
Belarusian border at gunpoint that is the metal; a poet must think about how joins Robert for the group meeting:
a corpse is dragged is it pulled by the armpits or the ankles is it pulled “Supporters. This was a new one to
with gloves or bare hands do the hands lose their grip along with the wet and muddy shoes Anna. It was usually carers, or occa-
in that place of darkness in the woods; a poet must think about whether the shoes the blackberry brambles sionally partners. Supporter was more
the burdock the eyes of the children between 7 and 15 years of age the eyes neutral, perhaps.” And perhaps it’s a
of the man and the older woman are in the way whether the holster or the walkie-talkie presses more realistic definition for what one
into the ribs whether any discomfort is felt whether the uniform pinches is soiled or dishonored. human being can do for another.
In the end it is the other aphasia pa-
tients, with the help of the supporters,
All this is the job of a poet and it goes on all day and then the poet goes to sleep and
who begin to gain access to Robert’s
dreams about escorting children between 7 and 15 years of age at gunpoint and escorting mind. Together they put on a theatrical
a man and an older woman at gunpoint and dreams of trying on contaminated clothes and production—limited by their physical
dreams of trying on a uniform and trying that cold thing that terrifies one in bed and linguistic capacities—recounting
and dreams of returning home after a night’s work in a car with a bobblehead dog on how Robert’s last day in Antarctica
the dashboard and taking off his pinching uniform having food and drink and watching the children went wrong. It is a different kind of
who in the dream are his children they are the children of the uniform and they are between 7 storytelling, imagined from the cen-
and 15 years of age and he watches his wife with her Slavic features and armpits by which ter of the storm, with Robert and the
her body could be dragged and ankles by which her body could be dragged shoes sliding off other patients all trying to achieve the
and the poet never wakes up from that cold that mud those woods. near impossible in the aftermath of
near-fatal events. Inside their damaged
brains and hampered bodies they can
—Jacek Dehnel
sense, as a memory so vividly relived,
(translated from the Polish by Ann Frenkel and Gwido Zlatkes) their healthy and eloquent selves. The
beauty of their minds, like that of the
girl waving at the bus at a street corner
without being seen, is preserved. Q
12 The New York Review
 Can He Build Back Better?
How to assess the Joe Biden presidency
one year in? The economy is booming
as it hasn’t in decades: between Janu-
ary and October 2021, real GDP grew
at an annualized rate of 7.8 percent and
disposable income grew 3 percent after
inflation. The unemployment rate,
6.3 percent when Biden took office,
was just 3.9 percent in December. Fi-
nally—and I could go on—6.1 million
jobs have been created since Biden’s
first day. That’s four million more than
under Donald Trump and both Bushes
combined.
Yet these economic facts—and they
are facts—hardly inform the popular
view of how Biden is doing. Since late
August, when the president’s approval
rating flipped from positive to negative,
the media coverage has been relent-
lessly pessimistic. This is not entirely
without justification. Biden’s troubles
started with the botched Afghanistan
withdrawal. He then encountered a se-
ries of setbacks. Politically, congressio-
nal infighting and indecision have left
important voting rights and domestic
spending bills stalled, culminating in
a mid-December announcement from
West Virginia senator Joe Manchin (a
veritable copresident all last year) that
he opposed the current form of Biden’s
most important piece of domestic leg-
islation, Build Back Better, the large
public investment bill that would fund
many new or expanded programs.
The defeat of Terry McAuliffe in
the governor’s race in Virginia—which
Biden carried by 10 percent a year
earlier—was an ominous indication of
eroding support for Democrats in states
they had considered safely in their col-
umn. And the global coronavirus pan-
demic rages on, despite the glimmer of
hope last summer that we were moving
beyond it. It has created supply- chain
delays, an ongoing inflation spiral, and,
with the Omicron variant, grave dis-
ruptions in travel and education.
These are the realities that have
dragged Biden down. Rarely have a
president’s approval numbers dropped
so precipitously in his first year. Biden
had a hefty 52–42 approval rating
six months into his term. Six months
later, those numbers have essentially
reversed. Donald Trump was never in
positive territory. Barack Obama lost
more ground than Biden—incredibly,
he had just a 22 percent disapproval rat-
ing when he took office—but as he fin-
ished his first year, he was still narrowly
above 50 percent approval. George W.
Bush’s approval shot up after the Sep-
tember 11 attacks, nine months into
his first year in office. Bill Clinton lost
around 20 points through mid-1993 but
made much of it up by year’s end. If we
go back before that, we’re in a different
era—before polarization, before cable
news became so omnipresent. So in the
age of modern politics, Biden has set a
record for having gone so quickly from
enjoying the confidence of the majority
of Americans to having, for the mo-
ment at least, lost it.
But this is not just a question of num-
bers. The sense among many liberals
is that the Democrats, and the broader
project of bringing to life a new era
of Keynesian public investment, are
doomed. The high expectations that
February 10, 2022
Michael Tomasky
Joe Biden promoting his Build Back Better legislation at a facility run by the
International Union of Operating Engineers, Howell, Michigan, October 2021
resulted from Biden’s win and the par-
ty’s recapture of the Senate and that
surrounded the administration’s early
days—when Biden was making those
(mostly) terrific appointments; issu-
ing the executive orders that left even
Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez marveling;
passing the Covid relief bill, also known
as the American Rescue Plan (ARP),
which helped people get through the
pandemic and greatly expanded the
child tax credit; distributing vaccines
with competence; talking about chang-
ing the “economic paradigm” with an
explicit vow to transfer wealth from the
rich to the middle class—have crashed
to earth. Governing is not easy, espe-
cially with such narrow majorities.
I think this despair is an overreac-
tion. I also think it only helps the other
side. We are confronting dangers that
are without precedent in this country,
dangers that Democrats and demo-
crats, if I may put it that way, must be
alert to. But being alert to danger and
wallowing in despair are very different
things.
T his discouraging situation is, in part,
Biden’s own fault. He badly misjudged
the Afghanistan withdrawal. His ad-
ministration sent mixed signals from
the Centers for Disease Control on the
necessity of masks as the Delta variant
hit, and the CDC offered guidance on
booster shots that many found confus-
ing. The administration has been slow
to get vaccines to the developing world.
But most of Biden’s problems em-
anate from outside the White House.
Congress is in part to blame—specif-
ically, a few members of Biden’s own
party. Passing the president’s legisla-
tive agenda was not supposed to be this
hard. We got a hint of the difficulty to
come in March, as Congress crafted
the ARP and Manchin almost stopped
the bill dead over the size of its unem-
ployment payments and the length of
time they would last. His West Vir-
ginia Senate counterpart, Republican
Shelley Moore Capito, told reporters,
“I have no idea what he’s doing, to be
quite frank. Maybe you can tell me.”
He ended up compromising.
not all of them agree with me on
Nicholas Kamm/AFP /Getty Images
everything.”
So the leftmost senator was on board.
But from the beginning there were
numerous questions about the most
fiscally conservative Democrats, Man-
chin and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona.
They were certainly cagey. Then Au-
gust 11 brought a crucial and encour-
aging development: the Senate passed,
50–49, a budget resolution laying out a
$3.5 trillion spending framework over
ten years. Manchin and Sinema sup-
ported it. No one thought this necessar-
ily committed them to $3.5 trillion, but
most insiders took it as a sign that they,
and some House moderates, would
whittle the package down by perhaps
a half-trillion to a trillion dollars, be
content to call that a win for moderate
common sense, and vote yes. It would
be done in September or October, I re-
member thinking.
Here we are, weeks into 2022. Build
Later that month, in Pittsburgh, Back Better has not passed and, as I
Biden delivered the most important write, might not pass. At best, it will
address of his young presidency, rolling pass in a deeply shrunken form, fund-
out a two-part plan, which he called ing far fewer priorities than Biden had
the American Jobs Plan and the Amer- envisioned (although probably fund-
ican Families Plan. In the meat grinder ing a few of them for a longer time
of Congress, these mutated into the period). Why wasn’t Biden able to get
“hard” infrastructure bill—which will this through his own party? I see three
fund road, bridge, and rail construction culprits.
along with many green energy initia- First, there are the maddening losses
tives—and the “human” infrastructure by Democratic Senate candidates who
bill, known as Build Back Better. But were defeated in 2020 despite raising
in his Pittsburgh speech Biden sounded barely conceivable amounts of money
as populist as a Democratic president and vastly outspending their Republi-
has sounded in a very long time: can opponents. In Maine, Sara Gideon
outspent GOP incumbent Susan Col-
Today, I’m proposing a plan for lins $63 million to just under $30 mil-
the nation that rewards work, not lion—and lost by 9 points. Gideon took
just rewards wealth. It builds a fair in more than she could even spend,
economy that gives everybody a ending the campaign with a $15 mil-
chance to succeed, and it’s going lion surplus. In North Carolina, Cal
to create the strongest, most re- Cunningham outspent GOP incumbent
silient, innovative economy in the Thom Tillis $51 million to $25 million.
world. It’s not a plan that tinkers He lost narrowly, by under 2 points,
around the edges. It’s a once-in- but he lost all the same. In South Car-
a-generation investment in Amer- olina, Jaime Harrison spent a stagger-
ica, unlike anything we’ve seen or ing $130 million to Republican Lindsey
done since we built the Interstate Graham’s $97 million and still lost by
Highway System and the Space double digits. Amy McGrath outspent
Race decades ago. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. The-
resa Greenfield outspent Joni Ernst in
The ARP, passed in March, cost $1.9 Iowa. Both lost badly.
trillion. Biden’s new plan didn’t have a Something is very wrong with the
price tag that month, but everyone ex- way these campaigns are run if they can
pected a number that would far exceed raise that much money, mostly from
that of the ARP. small donors, and not even come close
The progressive wing of the Demo- to winning. Raising tens of millions
cratic Party was flush with optimism. and spending three quarters of it on TV
“We think there is ample room to get ads, which is customary, is clearly dead
the number up,” Representative Pra- as an electoral model, at least for Dem-
mila Jayapal, chair of the Congressio- ocrats in purple or red states. Someone
nal Progressive Caucus, said. In June needs to invent a new version of how to
Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the campaign in those places. What it has
Senate Budget Committee who lost to do with Build Back Better is this: if
the Democratic nomination to Biden just two of those five had won, Manchin
but worked with him to create “unity and Sinema wouldn’t have mattered—
task forces” to lay out policy prior- Go vote no, Chuck Schumer could have
ities, floated the idea of a $6 trillion said to them; I have my fifty votes.1 Two
plan. By mid-July, Biden and congres- more Democratic senators would also
sional Democrats settled on $3.5 tril-
lion. Sanders initially denounced that 1
This is assuming Gideon, Cunning-
figure and then, within twenty-four ham, et al., as first-year senators, would
hours, endorsed it. “It’s not that I’m have been better team players than
more pragmatic,” he said. “It’s that Manchin and Sinema. Vice President
there are fifty members of the Dem- Kamala Harris, in this scenario, would
ocratic caucus. And unfortunately, cast the tie-breaking fifty-first vote.
13
have increased the chance of filibuster
reform, which would have made it pos-
sible to pass voting rights legislation.
Culprit 2 is the structure of the Sen-
ate, in two senses. First, in the outsize
power it gives to those last couple of
senators whose votes a president needs
in order to pass his program and who
can therefore exact a high price for
their support. And second, because of
the filibuster requirement of sixty votes
to clear “cloture” and proceed to a final
vote. In Biden’s first year, the filibuster
has been discussed mainly with respect
to voting rights. But it blocks any ambi-
tious legislative agenda—meaning that
it affects only the Democrats, since the
Republicans have no legislative agenda
to speak of.2
The most persuasive way for Biden
to have presented his program to the
American people would have been in
a series of targeted pieces of legisla-
tion that were easily comprehensible
to the average voter. This is how the
New Deal was passed. First up was
emergency banking legislation, then a
law establishing what became the Ci-
vilian Conservation Corps, then the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Na-
tional Industrial Recovery Act, and
so on. Imagine if Biden had been able
to move from the Covid relief bill to a
green jobs act, a rural broadband act, a
universal prekindergarten act, a subsi-
dized childcare act, a Medicare expan-
sion act, a prescription drug act, and
more. Each of these would have been
2
See my review of Kill Switch by former
Senate Democratic aide Adam Jentle-
son, The New York Review, April 8,
2021.
“We love love love our Vitsœ system.
The build quality and easiness of
assembly is amazing, but it was
your service that made the whole
process such a joy.”
‘Love’ is a word we hear a lot at
Vitsœ. Other verbs just don’t seem to
cut it. Like in this heartfelt message
from Melvin in Sydney, Australia to
his personal Vitsœ planner Sophie in
London, England.
As with any customer, Sophie ensured
that every detail was considered so
that Melvin’s shelving was perfect for
his needs.
Like everybody at Vitsœ, she’s
passionate about good service, and
communicates with all her customers
14
wildly popular, readily understand-
able, and easy to sell, and this would
have created a sense of momentum and
accomplishment.
But because of the filibuster and im-
placable Republican opposition, this
was impossible. None of these bills
presented individually could have
passed the cloture threshold. So Dem-
ocrats had to stuff everything they
could under the opaque and uninspir-
ing rubric of “reconciliation,” which
focused attention on the overall price
tag and made the bill easy to mock as
big-spending socialism. After Manchin
withdrew his support for Build Back
Better in December, some observers
spoke of breaking the legislation into
smaller pieces, but such discussion ig-
nored the reality that each bill would
need sixty votes. Furthermore, Senate
rules limit the use of reconciliation to
one or at the very most three bills a
year.
Culprits 3a and 3b are Manchin and
Sinema, but especially Manchin, as
Sinema has muted her criticisms of
Build Back Better in recent weeks. As
the year ended, Manchin remained the
sole obstructionist. Why? There are
many possibilities. That Trump won
his state by 39 points. That Manchin
founded a coal brokerage company
that has made him a wealthy man,
which some say explains his opposition
to the climate change measures in the
bill. That he faces little resistance from
Democrats in West Virginia, who are
mostly afraid of him and whose num-
bers have dwindled. That he takes in a
significant amount of corporate cash,
Photo by
Melvin T
directly, wherever they are in the world.
Whether in-person, or on the other side
of the globe, our planners hold your
hand throughout the whole process.
Time and again we prove that long-
distance relationships really do work.
Be it planning your first system, moving
it to a new home or adding an extra
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with love, from Vitsœ…
Design Dieter Rams
Founded 1959
vitsoe.com
including from the oil and gas indus-
tries. That he is out of touch with the
concerns of poor West Virginians (he
drives a Maserati Levante, which costs
upwards of $80,000).
There may be something to each of
those reasons, although after Manchin
announced his opposition to Build
Back Better, he did get a rebuke from
the president of the United Mine Work-
ers, who pointed out several provisions
in the bill that would benefit West Vir-
ginians and asked him to reconsider his
position. But I think Manchin’s actions
are best explained by his background.
His family owned a large carpet busi-
ness in Fairmont, West Virginia, and he
retains the mentality of the small busi-
nessman. He is a Democrat because he
was born in 1947 in West Virginia—a
time and place where nearly everyone
was a Democrat because of the prog-
ress Roosevelt’s New Deal had brought
to the state. I know; I was born there
in 1960, and my father, a prominent
trial lawyer, knew Manchin’s uncle, a
flamboyant secretary of state whose
two chief missions, until a corruption
scandal ended his career, were to visit
senior centers to kiss nonagenarian
ladies and to defend the state’s honor
whenever some outlander made a joke
about it.
Manchin has remained a Democrat,
but his mindset is that of the frugal and
flinty employer suspicious of his em-
ployees. He revealed this very clearly
on September 30, when he told report-
ers that work requirements were, to his
way of thinking, essential for his sup-
port: “I cannot accept our economy, or
basically our society, moving towards
an entitlement mentality.”
The Democratic Party as a whole
has, since the Great Recession, come
to embrace a more social- democratic
vision of the welfare state, approaching
a consensus that free-market economic
policies have ravaged much of Amer-
ica and it’s finally time to build a so-
cial safety net that includes paid family
leave and other policies that have long
been in place around the world, 3 a pro-
cess that Build Back Better is intended
to begin. Few states have had it worse
than West Virginia, where many small
coal towns that once had bustling main
streets are now destitute and consumed
by the opioid crisis. Residents of these
towns desperately need assistance and
investment, especially as the market for
coal dwindles.
Manchin is not a Republican—for
example, he has said he supports roll-
ing back the Trump tax cuts of 2017.
And he did vote twice to convict
Trump of high crimes and misdemean-
ors. But his September remarks, and
his comments to colleagues that he
believes many parents are using their
child tax credit payments to buy drugs,
reveal a worldview that emphasizes
scrutinizing personal morality over
ending corporate exploitation of vul-
nerable populations. This is a pretty
conservative way of seeing poor peo-
ple’s struggles.
T he next source of trouble for Biden
has been the Republican Party. Yes,
3 assaulted democracy, and Trump and
Not just Europe, by the way. Mater-
nal and paternal leave to care for a
newborn are offered in nations such
as Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Chad,
and numerous others in the developing
world.
there was a surprise show of bipartisan-
ship on the “hard” infrastructure bill,
which even Senate Minority Leader
McConnell supported (as did the
chamber of commerce in Louisville,
Kentucky). That was a tremendous
accomplishment—the largest such bill
since Eisenhower created the Inter-
state Highway System—and proof that
some Republicans still value highway
improvements more than they want to
destroy Democrats.
But the Republican Party of our
time revolves around one man. Trump
may have lost the presidency and been
chiefly responsible for his party losing
control of the House of Representatives
in 2018 and the Senate in 2020. But
since his defeat, Republicans remain in
thrall to him, as he sits in Mar-a-Lago
and stews about the 2020 election being
“stolen.” As of Christmas, he had en-
dorsed eighty-three candidates in the
2022 Republican primaries, many of
them either personal bootlickers or the
opponents of candidates he perceives
as insufficiently loyal. Most of his en-
dorsees boast about having his support,
and it helps most of them in the polls.
As such, the Republican Party is
largely dedicated to restoring Trump to
the White House in 2024. This trans-
lates to opposing and undermining
Biden however possible (except on in-
frastructure like roads and bridges),
first and foremost on the matter of
Covid vaccination. In the United
States, party identification is the chief
indicator of whether someone gets the
vaccine. Republicans may refuse the
shots in the name of “freedom,” but
they also know very well that fewer vac-
cines equals more virus equals more
trouble for Biden. That Biden, who has
implored Americans to get vaccinated
many, many times since taking office,
is paying the political price for the anti-
social behavior of those who want to
lay him low is a bleak irony.
President Obama, too, got little co-
operation from congressional Repub-
licans. But the pre-Trump Republican
Party was still somewhat committed
to basic principles of democratic prac-
tice and process. No one questioned the
results of either the 2008 or the 2012
presidential election, for example, and
from 2011 until the end of Obama’s
second term, Republicans controlled
the House but made no effort to open
impeachment proceedings against him,
despite some loud clamoring over vari-
ous “scandals” in the right-wing press.
I say “somewhat” because the party did
engage in antidemocratic practices—ag-
gressive gerrymandering, McConnell’s
denial of even a hearing for Supreme
Court nominee Merrick Garland, and
more. But the congressional Repub-
lican Party, with a few crazy-uncle
exceptions, did accept Obama’s legiti-
macy as president.
That has changed. From rank-and-
file voters to state-level officials to
the House of Representatives, most
Republicans claim that Biden’s pres-
idency is the illegitimate product of a
rigged election. In their world, democ-
racy is an inconvenience. Or rather, in
the parallel-fact universe these people
inhabit, it is Biden and the Democrats
and the mainstream media that have
his loyalists who are defending and
saving it. The most shocking poll result
I’ve seen in some time was delivered
last October by Marist College, which
found that, by 42 to 41 percent, Ameri-
The New York Review
can adults see the Democratic Party as
a greater threat to democracy than the
GOP.
It’s hard to know how many elected
Republicans really believe that Trump
was the rightful 2020 winner or that
voter fraud is a rampant problem in
America. It’s shocking to see Trump’s
associates openly flouting the subpoe-
nas issued by the Select Committee to
Investigate the January 6th Attack on
the United States Capitol, and to think
that we’ve reached the point at which a
committee of Congress may issue sub-
poenas to a few of its own members—
and that those members, too, will
disobey the body in which they serve.
And it’s next to impossible to believe
that Republicans writing bills like the
one in Arizona, which shifted author-
ity to defend election-related lawsuits
from the secretary of state (currently
a Democrat) to the attorney general
(currently a Republican), really think
they are behaving democratically.
Their actions speak quite clearly.
Unfortunately, the offensive against
Biden and democracy is likely to grow
far more intense. If the Republicans re-
capture the House in the midterm elec-
tions, as seems likely, they will do all
they can to discredit Biden. They may
begin with oversight hearings that seem
justified—on the Afghanistan pullout,
for example. But they’ll move quickly
to subpoenaing West Wing and Cabinet
officials in search of pseudo-scandals,
and they’ll almost certainly move to
impeach Biden over something—pos-
sibly involving his son Hunter’s past
business dealings or the current hand-
some prices his paintings fetch through
his New York gallery. (Georges Bergès
BLACK VOICES BLACK FUTURES
AMERICAN HISTORIES AND FUTURES OF RESISTANCE
“A righteous indictment of
racism and misogyny.”
—Publishers Weekly
“We are better because of
this book.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, author of
Stamped from the Beginning and
How to Be an Antiracist
www.ucpress.edu
February 10, 2022
had better prepare himself to be prob-
ably the first art gallery owner in the
history of the republic to be handed a
congressional subpoena.) The chair-
man of the House Judiciary Commit-
tee—which decides whether to open
impeachment proceedings against a
president—is likely to be Jim Jordan
of Ohio, one of the two or three most
aggressive Trump lickspittles in the
House. And Republicans will instantly
shut down the select committee inves-
tigating the January 6 insurrection. It
will be an ugly two years.
After Congress and Trump-devotion,
the third source of Biden’s woes is the
media, or our two medias, the right-
wing one and the mainstream one. This
is about far more than Biden. It’s not
clear to me that the media as presently
constituted can defend democracy.
It’s now apparent that the avowedly
right-wing media has more power to
set the national agenda than the main-
stream press. The Marist poll results I
cited above provide one of many avail-
able examples that support this con-
tention. The idea that the party that’s
trying to protect and expand voting
rights is wrecking democracy isn’t just
a misconception—it’s the result of an
orchestrated assault on reality. And
yet nearly half of Americans believe
it. This is the power of the right-wing
media at work: Fox News, of course,
but also Newsmax, One America News
Network, Breitbart News, The Blaze,
The Federalist, The Daily Caller, The
Washington Free Beacon, right-wing
talk-radio hosts, Christian radio, and
the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which
“A legend in the making!”
—DJ Kool Herc, The Father of Hip Hop
pushes pro-Trump, right-wing views
across the television and radio stations
it owns in dozens of markets.
All these outlets are agenda- driven
in a way the mainstream media are not.
The mainstream media certainly lean
liberal but regularly run tough stories
on Biden and Democrats; the right-
wing, pro-Trump media will basically
never say a bad word about Trump or
any Republican, except of course Liz
Cheney and other apostates, and are
constantly feeding their readers and
viewers stories about alleged liberal
duplicity, lack of patriotism, and so on.
And now Trump is starting his own
media company, to be run by retir-
ing representative Devin Nunes, who
earned the job by defending Trump and
attacking his critics when he chaired
the House Intelligence Committee.4
How will it cover the 2024 campaign?
I don’t know that the mainstream
media have the power to counter all
this, or even the will. In early Decem-
ber, the Washington Post columnist
Dana Milbank wrote a much- discussed
column in which he asked a data ana-
lytics company to examine more than
200,000 mainstream news articles
about both the Trump and Biden presi-
dencies, analyzing the tenor and place-
ment of adjectives in the stories. The
findings, Milbank wrote, “confirmed
my fear: My colleagues in the media
are serving as accessories to the mur-
4 next three years will show us which side
For a thorough discussion of Nunes’s
success at raising millions of dollars by
peddling various deep-state conspir-
acy theories, see Jake Bernstein, “The
Fundraising Pulpit,” The New York
Review, April 23, 2020.
“This essential collection of
Lawson’s visionary teaching
is more necessary today than
ever.”
—Marian Wright Edelman, founder
and president emerita,
Children’s Defense Fund
der of democracy.” During 2020, when
the Trump administration’s response
to and dishonesty about the pandemic
led to hundreds of thousands of deaths,
when he refused to denounce white
supremacists at a debate and launched
serial assaults on democracy, he got
slightly more favorable coverage in the
mainstream media than Biden has re-
ceived since August. Something is seri-
ously wrong with our definition of what
constitutes “news” if the media can’t
be, in Milbank’s phrase, “partisans for
democracy.”
I still think Biden can rebound. Three
developments could dramatically shift
the political winds: the passage of some
version of Build Back Better, an easing
of inflation, and a return to something
like normal on the virus front. If these
happen, Biden could well be riding a
comeback wave by next fall. Certainly,
even a diminished Build Back Better
bill, combined with the Covid relief
and hard infrastructure bills, would le-
gitimately rank him with FDR and LBJ
as having overseen major expansions
of the social safety net. Voters tend to
like these things once they’re passed
and implemented. (Obamacare is now
viewed favorably by nearly 60 percent
of Americans.) It’s also important to
remember that millions of citizens
strongly oppose Trump and Trumpism
and broadly support Democratic pol-
icy priorities—even if this America is
outshouted by Trumpist America. The
has the greater resolve—or whether, in
a battle in which only one side is play-
ing by the traditionally understood
rules, resolve is what matters. Q
—January 13, 2022
“An indispensable addition to
the canon of work on Black
masculinity.”
—William Jelani Cobb, author of The
Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and
the Paradox of Progress
15

A Life of Picasso:
The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943
by John Richardson,
with the collaboration of Ross
Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga.
Knopf, 308 pp., $40.00
In the 1920s and 1930s several groups
and individuals sought Pablo Picas-
so’s loyalty. Among them, John Rich-
ardson writes in A Life of Picasso: The
Minotaur Years, 1933–1943, was André
Breton, whose “blandishments, in the
form of public statements, private let-
ters, and published essays, began even
before the official founding of surreal-
ism” in 1924. In “Painting and Surreal-
ism” (1925), an essay illustrated solely
with works by Picasso, he wrote, “If sur-
realism must chart itself a moral line of
conduct, it needs only find where Picasso
has gone and where he will pass again.”
In 1929, when Breton excommuni-
cated dissidents, including Georges
Bataille, from the Surrealist movement,
the two sides fought for the soul of Pi-
casso. Michel Leiris, one of the anti-
Breton faction, wrote that Picasso’s
work was too down to earth, “never
emanating from the foggy world of
dreams, nor does it lend itself to sym-
bolic exploitation—in other words, it is
in no sense surrealist.” In 1930 Bataille
dedicated an entire issue of his maga-
zine Documents to Picasso. Richard-
son writes that in 1936, when Breton
began to have differences with the poet
Paul Éluard, “competition for Picasso’s
friendship probably contributed to their
feud. In a March 16 letter, Breton con-
fessed to feeling ‘jealous of the evenings
[Picasso] spent with Paul Éluard.’”
In Spain, the right wing also had its
eye on Picasso. In 1934, while he was in
San Sebastián on the last visit he would
ever make to the country, Picasso en-
countered the writer and editor Er-
nesto Giménez Caballero, who was,
according to Richardson, “formerly
one of the most progressive intellectu-
als in Spain” but had “experienced a
radical epiphany and reinvented him-
self as a fascist ideologue. . . . He had
tried and failed to entice Lorca into
his net, and in August 1934 he would
try winning Picasso over to the fascist
side.”
Giménez Caballero met him again
the next day in the company of José
Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of
the fascist Falange movement, to whom
Picasso complained about the failure of
the Republican government to come up
with the funds to insure a retrospective
of his work in Spain. Primo de Rivera
assured him that he supported the ret-
rospective, and Picasso later accepted
an invitation from these men to the
inaugural dinner of a club called GU
without realizing that it “was the pro-
pagandist arm of the Falange.” Later
he said, “I knew the people wining and
dining me that night were very danger-
ous and as I remember I boarded the
train for France that same evening.
And that was my last day in Spain.”
Part of the value of Richardson’s work
on Picasso—this final volume, pub-
lished two years after his death in 2019,
is the fourth in his biography of the
artist—is his painstaking examination
16
Picasso’s Obsessions
Colm Tóibín
Illustration by Hugo Guinness
of evidence, taking no one, least of
all Picasso, at their word. Richardson
writes about his claim that he left for
France “that same evening”: “This was
not true. Far from returning by train to
Paris, Picasso had stayed on to be feted
by these ‘very dangerous’ people.” Soon
he was attending bullfights in Barce-
lona in the company of Leiris, and he
did not return to Paris until September.
In these years, Picasso was seeking
to separate from his wife, Olga Khokh-
lova, and hoping to spend more time
with Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom
he had a daughter in 1935. Richard-
son quotes him telling the painter Ja-
cint Salvadó, “You see, Olga likes tea,
caviar, pastries, and so on; me, I like
sausage and beans.” He also quotes
Françoise Gilot, who was Picasso’s
lover for a decade beginning in 1943:
Olga’s social ambitions made in-
creasingly greater demands on his
time. In 1921 their son Paulo was
born and then began his period
of what the French call le high-
life, with nurse, chambermaid,
cook, chauffeur and all the rest,
expensive and at the same time
distracting.
Some of Picasso’s early portraits
of Olga—such as Olga in a Mantilla
(1917), Olga in an Armchair (1917), and
Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1923)—
offer her a distant and formidable dig-
nity; they suggest that she is someone
who commands respect rather than a
woman with whom the artist is in love.
Part of this may arise from Picasso’s
lack of interest in psychology as he
sought to move from Cubism toward a
neoclassical style. “Picasso’s portrayal
of Olga may seem unflattering,” the art
historian Michael FitzGerald writes in
his essay “The Modernists’ Dilemma:
Neoclassicism and the Portrayal of
Olga Khokhlova,” but this harshness
stems from his attention to style, not
personality.* Richardson, on the other
hand, connects the tone of Olga in a
Mantilla with Picasso’s later depictions
of her:
Despite its iconic importance as the
first portrait of her, it is not particu-
larly affectionate. Olga’s reproach-
ful eyes and pursed lips look ahead
to the cruel, exorcistic portraits
Picasso would paint of her fifteen
years later, when the marriage had
soured. With hindsight, one can
discern a certain inevitability.
In 1929, when Picasso painted Large
Nude in a Red Armchair, there was no
trace of the serenity apparent in the
earlier portraits. Instead, Olga appears
as a set of elongated shapes, her mouth
facing the sky in an ungainly howl. The
armchair, Richardson writes, “looks
about as protective as an electric chair.”
Two years earlier, Picasso had begun
his relationship with the seventeen-
year- old Marie-Thérèse. His portraits
of her are filled with tenderness and
passion. Picasso dramatized the gap
between his visions of the two women.
For example, in a painting based on the
death of Marat that was done in July
1934, he has a woman—Olga—with
a viciously contorted face brandish a
knife over the body of a possible ver-
sion of Marie-Thérèse.
In October 1935 Picasso wrote a
note to himself about how to make an
image of Olga looking in a mirror more
grotesque: “In the picture of April
30 . . . put on the floor a comb contain-
ing between its teeth some hairs and
some lice on her hair too . . . and if pos-
sible on her hair some crabs (pleasant
idea to add to the lot).” In 1938 he had
*Picasso and Portraiture: Representa-
tion and Transformation (Museum of
Modern Art, 1996), p. 306.
Olga appear “in a surreal crucifixion
scene . . . in which she drinks the blood
of the impaled figure.”
T here are times in Richardson’s book
when he is too anxious to join Picasso
in his view of the women in his life,
referring, for example, to Olga on the
very first page as “a termagant” and in-
sisting on the very last page that Dora
Maar, a later lover, “thrived on pun-
ishment.” Still, one of the reasons why
Richardson’s life of Picasso is essential
is that he is always willing to seek bi-
ographical sources for Picasso’s images.
He leaves it to the reader to conclude
that many of the paintings that are
filled with hatred are not among Pi-
casso’s best, that the tensions and high
emotions that poisoned his personal life
are sometimes too graphically apparent
in them, with no room for mystery, or
indeed subtlety. He also leaves it to the
reader to face the uncomfortable fact
that other such paintings have a star-
tling energy, a rich and dynamic power.
Toward the end of 1935, Picasso met
Dora Maar. In her memoir of her life
with Picasso, Gilot recalled:
Pablo told me that one of the first
times he saw Dora she was sitting at
the Deux Magots. She was wearing
black gloves with little pink flowers
appliquéed on them. She took off
the gloves and picked up a long,
pointed knife, which she began to
drive into the table between her
outstretched fingers to see how
close she could come to each finger
without actually cutting herself.
“Picasso’s intense fascination with
Dora’s face,” Richardson writes, “a face
that would soon become a major motif
in his work—is first seen in the small
portrait drawings” done near Cannes
in the summer of 1936. “The charcoal,
india ink, and crayon drawing from
September 5 of Dora being ravished
by Picasso in the guise of a minotaur is
one his most viscerally erotic images of
her.” But there are also drawings that
are bloated and quite ludicrous, such as
one from August 1936, in which Dora,
wearing a headscarf, is opening a door
with a key. On the other side is Picasso
as a Greek god carrying a dog.
Picasso, having been forced to give
his country house to Olga, found an-
other house outside Paris for Marie-
Thérèse and their daughter, Maya.
Later, in an interview, Marie-Thérèse
said, “Picasso would come from Fri-
day to Sunday evening. He worked and
worked, like an angel. We lived this
way for years.” During the week, he
was in Paris with Dora.
In January 1937, during the Spanish
Civil War, Picasso was asked by repre-
sentatives of the Republican govern-
ment to paint a mural in the Spanish
Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. He
eventually agreed, thinking at first
that he would create a large image of
a painter’s studio. But he made little
progress in March and April of that
year, producing just twelve preliminary
sketches of a painter and his model.
On April 26, a market day, the town
of Guernica in the Basque country was
bombed by German planes. The attack
The New York Review
was designed to kill as many civilians
as possible and to destroy a place that
was sacred to the Basques. On April
29 Picasso, who had already been told
about the bombing, read an account of
it in the Communist Party newspaper
L’Humanité by the journalist George
Steer: “When I entered Guernica after
midnight houses were crashing on ei-
ther side, and it was utterly impossible
even for firemen to enter the centre of
the town.”
Soon Picasso ordered a huge canvas.
The young Catalan painter who deliv-
ered it at ten o’clock in the morning
remembered:
Picasso was already up and overex-
cited, asking me why I was arriv-
ing so late and shouting at me. We
unrolled the canvas and stretched
it, then nailed it to a frame. On the
floor lay a dozen drawings. I barely
had time to fix the first half of the
canvas when Picasso climbed on
a ladder and started drawing with
charcoal.
Dora Maar photographed the painting
at each stage of its development, her pic-
tures becoming, Richardson writes, “the
first photographic record of the creation
of a modern artwork from start to finish.”
Picasso, who had made his first sketches
on May 1, finished the work on June 4.
I n his analysis of the imagery in Guer-
nica, Richardson is convincing when
he asserts that it is “pervaded with Pi-
casso’s own problems and preoccupa-
tions,” rather than depicting aspects of
the bombing or the town. His interpre-
tation of the figure of the woman hold-
ing the lamp in the painting is new and
involves several other works. In the pre-
vious volume, he identified the woman
in Picasso’s 1933 sculpture Woman with
a Lamp, also known as Woman with
Vase—which the painter later chose to
be on his grave—as Marie-Thérèse. In
this new volume, he proposes “a new
identification of the girl who presides
over the artist’s grave. It is no less than
his long- dead sister, Conchita.” Con-
chita, aged seven, died of diphtheria in
1895, when Picasso was thirteen. As she
lay ill, according to Richardson,
Pablo had vowed to God that he
would never paint again if his sis-
ter’s life was spared. He did paint
again. . . . The beloved child’s early
death would cast an inescapable
shadow over virtually all of Picas-
so’s relationships with women. . . .
According to [his wife] Jacqueline
Roque, half a century later, the se-
cret of the broken vow had never
been divulged to anyone else but
the women in his life.
Richardson acknowledges that
the figure in Woman with a Lamp
“does not represent a seven-year- old;
[Picasso] preferred to immortalize
her as a grown woman.” He does not
give a source for this. In the engraving
Minotauromachie (1935), he sees the
young girl holding the light as repre-
senting “Conchita, and her presence
is central to the meaning of the com-
position. . . . The flame represents the
art Picasso had vowed to abandon if
Conchita lived.” This interpretation is
certainly possible, but since he offers
no evidence for it either, it remains in
the realm of conjecture.
February 10, 2022
In Guernica: The Biography of
a Twentieth- Century Icon (2005),
Gijs van Hensbergen writes, “Marie-
Thérèse’s Grecian profile was instantly
recognisable in the woman holding the
lamp.” Richardson, on the other hand,
writes:
Understanding the artist’s votive
obsession and the significance of
his broken vow, we can now iden-
tify the image of his long- dead
sister Conchita. . . . Conchita no
longer figures as a child, as she
does in Minotauromachie, but has
been transformed into an adult
who thrusts out the sacred lamp
clutched in her hand in order to
have it lit by the Mithraic sun.
Pablo Picasso: Woman at the Sideboard, 1936
In the weeks when Picasso worked
feverishly on the painting, he continued
to spend the weekends in the country-
side with Marie-Thérèse. Thirty years
later he remembered:
Every chance I got to take a break,
I would go out into the country
for a breather. But I would begin
to draw and paint from the mo-
ment I got there. And what did I
paint, coming fresh from the work
on Guernica? Flowers and fruit—
never anything else.
Although Picasso would return to
painting the women who obsessed him
in the aftermath of Guernica, Rich-
ardson reads other paintings, such as
Woman with a Cockerel (1938; see il-
lustration on page 18), as evoking “the
atmosphere of helplessness and hyste-
ria soon to become reality not only in
Spain but throughout Europe.”
Just as Picasso had made an image
that included both Olga and Marie-
Thérèse, he did a portrait of Dora
that slowly merged with an image of
Marie-Thérèse. The figure in it, Rich-
ardson writes, is “black-haired and (2011). It, too, was the fourth volume in a
big chinned” like Dora, “but in most study of Picasso’s work and was published
other respects it is a portrait of Marie- after the author’s death. Like Richard-
Thérèse. Her breasts bulge out and her son, Palau had been a friend of Picas-
expression is bland and cheerful, the so’s. His approach tended to be more
antithesis of Dora’s usual demeanor.” intuitive and less analytical than Rich-
Picasso began the Weeping Woman ardson’s. Because, unlike Richardson,
series of portraits of Dora while he was he could use color illustrations on every
still at work on Guernica. He later said, page, his books offer a more concrete,
“For me she’s the weeping woman. For graphic account of Picasso’s progress.
years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, We see more vividly in Palau’s book
not through sadism, and not with plea- Picasso’s obsessive engagement with
sure either; just obeying a vision that Marie-Thérèse. What is strange is
forced itself on me.” Dora, it seems, did that on the very day that he created
indeed weep. In April 1937, for exam- his Dream and Lie of Franco, a sort
ple, she asked Picasso to forgive her for of antifascist cartoon, he also painted,
in tender tones, an oval portrait of
those scenes, do not take them her. What is strange too is that cer-
seriously, you have to take them tain paintings that seem distant from
each other in style and texture, such as
Musée national Picasso, Paris/ RMN -Grand Palais/Adrien Didierjean/Art Resource
Marie-Thérèse with Garland of Flow-
ers and Portrait of a Woman with Beret,
were actually done on the same day.
Both these paintings dramatize the
sitter’s eyes and pale skin, but the first
one is all naive suggestion, soft colors,
the mild face encased by a single black
line from left eye to right ear, while in
the second, with a red background and
a red beret, her gaze is more worldly
and sophisticated, like the painting it-
self. The two could have been made de-
cades apart or by different artists.
There are other times in these years
when we can further observe Picasso’s
interest, repetitive and restless, in the
pictorial possibilities offered by Marie-
Thérèse. Between April 9 and April
30, 1936, for example, he worked obses-
sively on images of her, beginning with
a painting of her at a dressing table on
April 9, with another version two days
later, then the following day the same
scene recreated, but this time Marie-
Thérèse is in the form of a primitive
piece of sculpture against the realistic
table. The following day, Picasso worked
on two further portraits of her, and
then two days later painted an exciting,
amorphous set of shapes that he called
Woman and also a beautifully painted
double head, with an eye in each head,
called Head of a Woman. Five days later,
he painted a portrait of Marie-Thérèse
reading, and two days after that a poin-
tillist version of her writing a letter.
It might be easy to read these paint-
ings against the background of the
news from Spain and the threats from
lightly, as a joke. I will try to cor- Germany, and to suggest that they were
rect myself. Behave with me as you painted in so many styles and with such
have behaved with me before, that speed because the time for that would
is, if I haven’t already ruined ev- soon be scarce. But there is something
erything; come find me whenever too direct and natural about the way
you want, I will wait for you as long each choice of image and pictorial sys-
as you want me to, years if you so tem was made, each variation worked
desire . . . I will not cry, I will not out. There was no evidence that Pi-
scream, that is over now. casso was thinking about war or the
news of the day at all as he made these
Picasso had allowed Olga to be “iden- paintings. Instead he was gazing bus-
tified with the monstrous, horselike ily, greedily at Marie-Thérèse’s face as
women that appeared in his paint- though nothing else would ever matter.
ing since the 1920s”; now, Richardson When war broke out in Europe, Pi-
writes, as he fell out of love with Dora, casso was in Antibes with Dora, work-
he “fixated on the pictorial deformation ing on Night Fishing at Antibes. The
of her face, both on canvas and in the artist and writer Roland Penrose, who
series of newspaper paintings and draw- was with him, wrote:
ings executed between 1941 and 1943.”
He was particularly irritated to
have been interrupted just as he had
Although the first three magisterial begun to see more clearly the path
volumes of Richardson’s biography su- his new work was to take. Joking
persede any other version of the painter’s with us he said they must be mak-
life in the years leading up to 1933, this ing a war just to annoy him when he
last volume, roughly half the size of the was starting on a good line.
others, can be most usefully read along-
side Josep Palau i Fabre’s Picasso 1927– Jaime Sabartés, his secretary, said,
1939: From the Minotaur to Guernica “What he dreaded in war was its
17
menace to his work; as though peace
were indispensable to this being who
cannot live without mental strife.”
In July 1939 Picasso had installed
Marie-Thérèse, their daughter, Maya,
and Marie-Thérèse’s mother and sister
in Royan on the French Atlantic coast.
On September 1 his chauffeur drove
the painter, Dora, his dog Kazbek,
and Sabartés and his wife to the same
town, where they lodged in a dingy
hotel. Picasso at first had his studio in
the comfortable house he rented for
Marie-Thérèse, and thus he saw her
every day. “Dora remembered Royan
as hell,” Richardson writes. “Letters to
her mother indicate that she was miser-
able from nearly the moment they ar-
rived.” Although the two entourages,
which soon included Breton’s wife and
daughter, gradually got to know one
another, Dora and Marie-Thérèse kept
apart.
That November, a Picasso retrospec-
tive, which included Guernica, opened
at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. Alfred Barr, the director, cabled
Picasso: “COLOSSAL SUCCESS. IT
ATTRACTS ENORMOUS CROWDS,
60,000 VISITORS, SURPASSING [1935]
VAN GOGH EXHIBITION.” Picasso,
in the meantime, was, as a Spanish
citizen, concerned about his safety in
France and set about obtaining French
citizenship. “His application,” accord-
ing to Richardson, “was denied on the
basis of a trumped-up report . . . claim-
ing that Picasso, at a Saint- Germain
café, had been overheard criticizing
French institutions and openly sup-
porting the Soviet Union.” In his po-
lice file it was also noted that “he had
failed to fight for France in World War
I; he supported the Republicans in the
Spanish Civil War.” Richardson adds:
“Without French citizenship, the fear
of extradition would continue to hang
over the artist’s head.”
In June 1940 Nazi troops arrived in
Royan and established themselves in
the hotel next to a studio that Picasso
was renting. Much of his work was in
storage in a Paris bank vault; he was
warned that his absence from the city
meant that it could be easily seized.
Others had gone back to Paris, such as
Éluard and his wife Nusch, who were
Picasso’s close friends, as well as Lei-
ris. On August 25 Picasso decided to
return, moving into the large studio
where he had painted Guernica and
making it his living quarters. Dora
traveled with him. In December Marie-
Thérèse and her family moved from
Royan to a Paris suburb.
When Picasso arrived in Paris, he
found notices posted on the door of
his studio and his apartment “claiming
authority to confiscate his works in lieu
of unpaid Spanish taxes.” Although he
had received American offers of asy-
lum and the promise of a Mexican visa,
he decided not to leave France. Later in
the war, he told Gilot:
I’m not looking for risks to take,
but in a sort of passive way I don’t
care to yield to either force or ter-
ror. I want to stay here because I’m
here. The only kind of force that
could make me leave would be
the desire to leave. Staying on isn’t
really a manifestation of courage;
it’s just a form of inertia. I suppose
it’s simply that I prefer to be here.
So I’ll stay whatever the cost.
18
Paris in late 1940 was, the photogra-
pher Brassaï recalled, a city
of queues and ration tickets, of
curfews and jammed radios, of
propaganda newspapers and films,
a Paris of German patrols, of yel-
low stars, of alerts and searches, of
arrests and bulletins of executions.
But according to Richardson:
Prewar social routines would
never entirely disappear from the
Saint- Germain- des-Prés neighbor-
hood. . . . Picasso was back at his
old haunts. . . . At lunchtime, he
was often spotted at the Catalan
beside Dora, Éluard, and Cocteau.
Pablo Picasso: Woman with a Cockerel, 1938
That November, a friend wrote to
Matisse, “Picasso is just as he always
was—a true Bohemian, taking his
meals here, there and everywhere.”
J ust as Picasso had enjoyed the atten-
tion of both factions of the Surrealists,
just as he had enjoyed the rivalry be-
tween Olga and Marie-Thérèse and
the even more intense rivalry between
Marie-Thérèse and Dora, he now drew
energy from the divisions between Élu-
ard, who had joined the Resistance,
and Jean Cocteau, who, Richardson
writes, “was reinventing himself as a
social superstar.” Cocteau “had sided
with the sophisticated collaborationist
JONATHAN D. SPENCE
(1936–2021)
We mourn the death of Jonathan D. Spence,
a long-standing contributor and friend.
gang of chic socialites and celebrities. telephone access to him, in case of
Éluard, on the other hand, belonged to any emergency that might befall Pi-
the left-wing circle of surrealist writers casso.” One day, when he received a
and clandestine Resistance activities.” call, he made his way to the studio and
Although Picasso accepted hos- found two Nazi officers, who quickly
pitality from pro- German hosts and departed as soon as they saw his papers:
hostesses, he was careful to avoid fig-
ures such as Coco Chanel, who began Dubois found Picasso’s studio in
a romance with a Nazi intelligence disarray, paintings ripped and
officer, and the socialite Marie-Laure roughed up. The artist remained
Noailles, who took up with an Austrian impassive, smoking a cigarette as
officer. (“She wasn’t at all pro-Nazi,” he told Dubois: “They have in-
Claude Arnaud writes of Noailles in sulted me as a degenerate, a Com-
his biography of Cocteau, “or even in munist, a Jew. They kicked in my
favor of collaboration; she just wanted canvases and said to me, ‘We’re
to be fashionable.”) coming back. That’s all for now.’”
Picasso enjoyed mocking Cocteau.
He told Brassaï, “For as long as I have Dubois wrote that the Nazis did not
known him, his pleats have always return after that visit, but Gilot, in her
memoir, wrote that they came “every
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart/bpk Bildagentur/Art Resource
week or two” on the pretext that the
studio belonged to a Jewish artist. One
of these visits gave rise to a story, possi-
bly apocryphal, that when an intruding
Nazi found a photograph of Guernica,
he asked Picasso, “Did you do that?”
Picasso, it is claimed, replied, “No, you
did.”
Officially Picasso was not allowed to
show his work during the Nazi occupa-
tion of Paris, but according to Arnaud,
the censors had been able to order
that one of his paintings be taken
down from its place in the Galerie
Charpentier. At the same time
they could be found everywhere
at the Galerie Louise Leiris [for-
merly owned by Picasso’s dealer
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who, as
a Jew, had to go into hiding]; cer-
tain German officers . . . even came
to admire them in Picasso’s studio.
Picasso never stopped working
during the war years. He was careful;
he was often silent. Cocteau, on the
other hand, repaid his debt to Breker
by attending the opening of an exhibi-
tion of his nudes at the Jeu de Paume
in April 1942 and publishing a “Salute
to Breker” in a literary paper, causing
Éluard to write, “Freud, Kafka, and
Chaplin have been banned by the same
people who honor Breker. You were be-
lieved to be among those forbidden. . . .
The best of those who admire you and
love you have had a painful surprise.”
“Picasso paints more and more like
God or the Devil,” Éluard wrote to
Penrose after the liberation of Paris.
been perfect . . . Cocteau was born . . . “He has been one of the rare painters
ironed.” In 1957, when Richardson who have behaved well and he contin-
and his partner Douglas Cooper were ues to do so.” Picasso accepted no sup-
invited to lunch by Picasso, with Coc- port from the Nazis, and a few times he
teau coming for coffee, Picasso warned performed small acts of bravery, such
his guests, “Don’t, for God’s sake, let as attending the memorial service for
him embrace you. He’s suffering from a his old friend Max Jacob, who died in
nasty skin disease that he caught from a concentration camp in the spring of
the Germans during the war.” 1944. But he did not speak out or do
Both Cocteau and Picasso had pow- anything to assist Jacob, who was born
erful protectors during the occupation, Jewish, when he was arrested.
including Arno Breker, Hitler’s favor- By this time, Dora was out of his
ite sculptor, and André-Louis Dubois, life. He began his affair with Gilot in
a former assistant director of the Na- the second half of 1943, when she was
tional Police who was now “working twenty-two. “Her arrival on the scene,”
undercover for the police force.” Du- Richardson writes, “brought about the
bois, Richardson writes, “arranged for long denouement of Dora Maar’s reign
Dora and Sabartés to have permanent as maîtress- en- titre and self-sacrificial
victim. . . . He had destroyed Dora,
beaten her to bits, and cut her up in
paint.” With the help of the psychoan-
alyst Jacques Lacan, she began to heal
herself. Eventually, she became a fer-
vent Catholic. Richardson gives her the
last word, but it is unclear whether she
was joking or not when she said, “After
Picasso, there is only God.” Q
The New York Review

Silverview
by John le Carré.
Viking, 215 pp., $28.00
In the classic espionage novel, there
are certain day jobs that make an ideal
cover for spies: foreign correspondent,
trade delegate, cultural attaché. But the
star intelligence officer in John le Car-
ré’s recent, posthumous novel, Silver-
view, has a more fitting job for her times.
At the height of the “war on terror,”
Deborah Avon is the jingoistic head of
a foreign-policy think tank—a quango,
in British technocrat parlance—whose
sole aim seems to be outdoing its more
influential American counterparts in
sheer bloodlust. Her neighbor, Julian,
buys her story. So he’s surprised, when
she dies, to see shadowy men removing
computers and a safe from her house.
These are “the people she worked for,”
Deborah’s daughter explains.
“In her quango?”
“Yeah, right, got it. Her quango.
The Men from the Quango. Title
of my next book.”
The joke captures a fact that must
have troubled le Carré in his later years:
British government intrigue by the 2010s
was no longer particularly subtle. Brit-
ain since Blairism has abounded with
public-private partnerships and awk-
ward acronyms (“quango” is an ac-
ronym built on an acronym, short for
“quasi-autonomous-NGO”); it has not
exactly lent itself to the kind of closely
observed, atmospheric spy novel for
which le Carré was so beloved. Just
imagine: The Spy Who Came In from
the Quango; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Technocrat.
Starting with Call for the Dead in
1961, le Carré built his reputation on
an intellectually enticing vision of the
cold war, in works that presented the
conflict as a chess-like game played as
if in the realm of abstraction by dour
gentlemen. Perhaps no other writer
enriched the popular imagination of
intelligence work as much as le Carré,
who gave the public a colorful vocab-
ulary with which to talk about it. His
novels contain the first recorded uses
of the terms “honey trap,” “lamplight-
ers,” and “scalphunters”—coinages so
apt that real spies began to use them
to describe their work. He popularized
the terms “tradecraft” (specialized spy
techniques) and “mole,” meaning—as
the soulful informant Irina puts it in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)—“a
deep-penetration agent so called be-
cause he burrows deep into the fabric
of Western imperialism.”
With a flair for slowly revealing the
workings of a detailed conspiracy, le
Carré brought his genre to a cerebral
new level; the elegance of his plots may
even have suggested that spying re-
quired more sophistication than it did.
The double agent Kim Philby reported,
in a letter to Graham Greene in 1982,
that he found Le Carré’s plots “more
complicated than anything within my
own experience,” though “they were
good reading after all that James Bond
nonsense.” The books draw their imag-
inative power from the nondescript, ex-
hausted ambience of cold war secrecy,
personified by characters with decep-
February 10, 2022
The Nonconformist
Laura Marsh
John le Carré; illustration by Carson Ellis
tively complacent names: Roy Bland,
George Smiley. The grayness on the
surface invites the notion of intricate
goings- on just beneath.
The end of the cold war did not leave
le Carré without a subject, as critics
so often worried. His novels of the
1990s and 2000s survey a world run at
the behest of arms dealers (The Night
Manager), murderous pharmaceutical
companies (The Constant Gardener),
and money launderers (Single and Sin-
gle, Our Kind of Traitor) as it slid into
endless war (Silverview). The crisis le
Carré had to confront was the altered
mood of the times. Gone was the softly
fading, somberly governed Britain of
his novels and in its place was a slick,
alienating new order—a shift that le
Carré had long seen coming, and fer-
vently disliked. Because more than
spying, more than secret life itself, in
le Carré’s most enduring novels—espe-
cially Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—the
dreaded prospect of change is the cen-
tral tension.
Le Carré learned early not to take
stability for granted. Born in Dorset in
1931, the young David Cornwell (John
le Carré was a pen name) appeared to
enjoy a typical British upper- class up-
bringing, passing from prep school to
boarding school to Oxford, with skiing
holidays in St. Moritz along the way.
His father, Ronnie, owned racehorses
and threw lavish parties at the family
home, a mansion named “Tunmers”
in Buckinghamshire. In fact, Ronnie
was not a hedonistic aristocrat but a
prolific con artist, who never lost traces
of his West Country accent despite his
attempts to mimic the clipped tones
of the ruling class. He went to jail for
fraud in the 1930s. Soon after Ronnie’s
release le Carré’s mother left. He was
five; he didn’t see her again for sixteen
years. Meanwhile, he and his brother
were raised by a succession of “love-
lies,” the women Ronnie serially ro-
manced and swindled.
It’s little surprise that le Carré never
developed a taste for the kind of spy
novel that came dressed in evening
wear and brandishing a cocktail; he
had lived the world of Casino Royale
as a child, traipsing through Europe
after a father who risked perilous sums
on the roulette boards of Monte Carlo
and being enjoined to lie for him when
creditors came knocking. Instead, he
made virtues of restraint and even
dreariness. The two institutions that
seem to have had the greatest influence
on his sensibility—school and the Brit-
ish secret services—were both some-
what straitened when he entered them.
When he arrived at St. Andrew’s prep
school at the age of seven, the teach-
ers were largely “older men called out
of retirement,” Adam Sisman reports
in his 2015 biography, John le Carré.
The younger teachers had all been
sent away to war. Though le Carré was
miserable at St. Andrew’s and later
at Sherborne—between the regime
of corporal punishment and games
of rugby fought “almost literally to
death”—school and its upper- class rit-
uals offered stability and a place where
he could hide in plain sight.
Wealthy, educated boys of the pe-
riod were trained to express themselves
in a strangely evasive, upbeat manner
(barking “Super!” and “Fine!” no mat-
ter how dire the situation they faced,
and professing to find things “extraor-
dinary” that did not interest them at
all); le Carré, who had more to con-
ceal than most, copied their behavior
exactly—“even to the extent of pre-
tending I had a settled home life with
real parents and ponies,” he wrote in
his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel.* The
stiff upper lip gave him a way to de-
flect awkward questions about his real
background. It was the first time that,
like a spy, he affected a completely
conventional appearance while in fact
picking his way through a tumultuous
reality.
Le Carré became a junior officer in
MI5 in 1956, when he was twenty-five—
though he had worked for the agency
informally since the age of sixteen,
including by keeping tabs on his left-
leaning peers when he was at Oxford.
Like St. Andrew’s, MI5 felt like a place
out of time, its upper echelons “staffed
by ageing survivors of the glory days
of 1939–45” and its middle ranks filled
with “former colonial police and dis-
trict officers left over from Britain’s
dwindling empire.” Living for a van-
ished past, his colleagues took little
interest in their jobs; one of his near
contemporaries, the future MI5 chief
Stella Rimington, remembered older
colleagues being drunk all day and
heading home in the early afternoons.
It was, in other words, an archetypal
midcentury bureaucracy: big and lum-
bering enough to harbor plenty of in-
competence; old and battle-scarred
enough to appear ageless and inde-
structible. In truth, the service as it
then existed was on the brink of col-
lapse and would be reformed after a
series of breaches, but in the moments
before its transformation, it appeared
comfortingly immovable to le Carré.
At twenty-five, he was attempting to
put down roots—he had tried being
a schoolteacher, was trying to write,
and was newly married—and he felt
“rather relieved” to be working for
MI5 again, “as one might be return-
ing to a crotchety wife after prolonged
absence.” And again, he saw a deeper
appeal in the dullness of the organiza-
tion. “I relished the notion of appear-
ing to be someone dull, while all the
time I was someone terribly exciting,”
he recalled in 1986.
It’s the dull characters in le Carré
who give the novels their finely tuned
emotional range. There is George Smi-
ley on his way to work in the middle of
the night in Call for the Dead. In the
back of the taxi, he folds his coat tightly
around himself—an unremarkable act
but full of feeling that only he is aware
of: “The warmth was contraband, smug-
gled from his bed and hoarded against
the wet January night.” Or there is the
schoolboy Jumbo Roach, at the begin-
ning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
who has been deemed “dull, if not ac-
tually deficient” by those around him
*See Neal Ascherson’s review in these
pages, “Which le Carré Do You
Want?,” October 13, 2016.
19

!%!%
*
./)
 &


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Dr. James Hung’s life story echoes others
that will probably never be written, and
offers a fascinating perspective on Hong
Kong’s recent past that deserves to be widely
read. — [4 stars out of 5] South China
Morning Post, Jason Wordie, historian,
Hong Kong.
#)&
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Hung has written an absorbing and witty
book. Dramatic, nuanced vignettes and
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create a rich tapestry that shows the medical
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Hung is an endearing mix of benevolence,
wryness, and curiosity. . . there is an
appealing Marco Polo‐ishness to his project:
a boundless wonder for a society unlike
his own, not for its differences but for the
infinitely recognizable humanity at its
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Will be accessible to novices and a rich
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An engaging tale about a singular friendship
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— Kirkus Reviews (featured article 2/15)

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With great tenderness, he recounts the
beautiful simplicity of that stretch of his
youth. — Kirkus Reviews
#))
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Hung’s prose is clean and leisurely. The
book is valuable for the portrait it paints of
Hong Kong in the 1960s—a melting pot of
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— Kirkus Reviews
All books are available at Amazon
in paper back and Kindle e-book.
E-book also available through
Barnes & Noble
20
but who can immediately sense, in his
teacher, a wounded spy, “a great at-
tachment that had failed him and that
he longed to replace.” It’s hard to think
of another spy novelist so attentive to
intuitions like these, which do not di-
rectly serve the plot but show flickers of
the characters’ individuality and create
the impression—so central to the aura
of mystery he builds up in the books—
that most of the time the essence of a
person, their small satisfactions and
unexplained sadnesses, is hidden.
F rom his first novel, le Carré’s spies
are wary of modernizers who want
to remove any room for individuality
from working life and strip away ev-
erything that makes them distinctive.
When George Smiley makes his first
appearance, in Call for the Dead, he is
already something of a throwback—a
quiet, physically unremarkable man
who has “entered middle age without
ever being young.” Like le Carré’s real-
life colleagues, Smiley has seen better
days: his World War II adventures are
behind him and he is not “material for
promotion.” He cannot stand his new
boss, an expensively dressed “career
man.” Only a few pages into the novel,
Smiley is mourning the passing of a
more solid era:
Gone for ever were the days of
Steed-Asprey, when as like as not
you took your orders over a glass of
port in his rooms at Magdalen; the
inspired amateurism of a handful
of highly qualified, under-paid men
had given way to the efficiency, bu-
reaucracy, and intrigue of a large
Government department.
This early version of Smiley is rueful.
Alec Leamas, the agent who poses as a
defector to East Germany in The Spy
Who Came In from the Cold (1963),
is more angry than sad. As he walks
into the secret service headquarters at
Cambridge Circus, a personnel officer
asks him to show a pass, and tells him
to “fill out a slip.”
“Since when have we had passes?
McCall knows me as well as his
own mother.”
“Just a new routine. Circus is
growing, you know.”
Leamas said nothing, nodded at
McCall, and got into the lift with-
out a pass.
There’s a sense in both books that
Britain had emerged just about intact
from World War II, only to become an
outpost of the United States. Smiley
blames the new obsession with effi-
ciency on “the NATO alliance, and the
desperate measures contemplated by
the Americans” in their prosecution of
the cold war. Leamas, too, resents the
American influence over British state
business. At one point an East Ger-
man handler asks him if he was “one of
the mysterious cold warriors,” and he
replies, “savagely,” that he was really
only an “office boy for the bloody
Yanks, like the rest of us.”
It took several years for le Carré’s
publishers to understand why his spies
had to be so unhappy, their manner so
grim. The discussion of his pen name
showed their desire to shape him into a
faster-paced thriller writer. (He could
not write under his real name because
he was still working as a spy when he
published his first three books.) As
Sisman recounts in his biography, the
young writer liked “John le Carré”—
simple, elegant, a little French. But his
publishers urged him to try a name
that sounded more hard-hitting, with
an American flavor: “Hank Brown”
or “Chunk Smith.” Even after the suc-
cess of The Spy Who Came In from the
Cold, some reviewers found his writing
“overpoweringly literary.” When he
submitted the manuscript for his fourth
novel, The Looking Glass War (1965),
his editor asked for what Sisman calls
“more action and less gloom” in the
rewrites.
But the gloom was the point, more
than the action. Le Carré’s most mel-
ancholy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Spy, is bathed in anxiety about the
fading of the old ruling class as power
passes to a cadre of untrustworthy ca-
reerists. There are few novels in which
so many people are so frustrated about
the way they are being told to do their
jobs. When Smiley, now retired, meets
his old colleague Roddy Martindale
for dinner in the book’s second chap-
ter, it’s easy to forget that their adver-
sary was, supposedly, the Soviet Union.
All Martindale can talk about is office
politics. The service has yet another
disingenuous upstart boss—Percy Al-
leline, a smooth-talking nonentity who
takes all the credit and does none of the
work. “Living off the wits of his subor-
dinates,” Martindale laments, “well,
maybe that’s leadership these days.”
Smiley’s former deputy Peter Guillam
is unhappy too. Under Alleline’s re-
organization, he tells Smiley later in
the book, “our autonomy is cut to the
bone.”
Though each of these novels drew
flattering comparisons to Graham
Greene, who also wrote elevated spy
fiction, they share with midcentury
works of social criticism such as The
Organization Man and The Lonely
Crowd a sharp distaste for conformity.
As much as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
is an espionage novel, it is an office
novel, centered on disgruntled employ-
ees. Le Carré’s characters are doubly
affronted because, in order to play the
game and ascend the ranks, they have
to relinquish not only their individu-
ality but also their sense of national
identity. (For Bill Haydon, the traitor
in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this is
a bridge too far—once he realizes that
whatever the outcome of the cold war,
Britain will no longer be a major power,
he loses his allegiance to the West; he is
not interested in working on behalf of
the United States.)
Le Carré paints Smiley’s Ameri-
can counterparts in The Honourable
Schoolboy (1977) as humorless military
tough guys with crew cuts and monosyl-
labic names (“Sol,” “Cy,” “Ed”). Mag-
nus Pym’s earnest American neighbor,
Grant Lederer III, in A Perfect Spy
is an “unlovable” striver from South
Bend, Indiana, for whom intelligence
work means sifting through data on a
computer, rather than the practice of
tradecraft. Anyone who wants to be
successful has to court the Americans,
chatting with them over dry martinis
and acting like it’s an honor to be in-
volved at all.
By contrast, le Carré’s heroes in the
Smiley novels take pride in being out-
sidery—a scattering of former insiders
who keep up the old ways. At the start
of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smi-
ley is preparing for retirement in the
Cotswolds, content to be “out of date,
but loyal to his own time.” His most
talented officer is another retiree, the
veteran Russia watcher Connie Sachs.
When he looks her up, she’s living in a
poky apartment heated by a dirty coke
fire, with a mangy spaniel at her feet.
Half drunk, she gives a teary speech
about the loss of the British Empire:
“All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye,
world.” Jerry Westerby, the agent Smi-
ley sends into the field in The Honour-
able Schoolboy, is another holdover.
The second son of a lord, he is the
cheery, vacuous sort of Englishman
who might have been a colonial admin-
istrator in an earlier period; instead
he’s a journalist and occasional spy in
East Asia. Though well into middle
age, he talks the way le Carré did as a
school child, with automatic exclama-
tions of “Gosh, super” and “Terrific”
that suggest an unnameable loss.
These downwardly mobile public
servants were plausible heroes for a
waning imperial power that was rap-
idly reining in its ambitions. Smiley and
Guillam do not pretend to have the au-
thority that their pre-war predecessors
did—as Guillam comments, in the old
days “control sat in heaven and held the
strings. Remember?” The most le Car-
ré’s spies can hope for is to be called out
of retirement for a last mission. They
step in not to save the world but to sal-
vage their own credibility. The books
don’t pretend that Britain is important
for anything it does anymore but seek
refuge in a fuzzier idea of what Britain
is: a place where the past is glorious, no
one thinks too hard about the harms
the British Empire inflicted, and any-
thing that represents tradition is con-
soling, no matter how dilapidated. The
dust and abandoned tea bags that Peter
Guillam disturbs when hunting for old
files. The “disgusting breakfast of un-
dercooked sausage and overcooked
tomato” that Smiley eats at a bed-and-
breakfast. The plate of smoked salmon
he later produces from a tiny refriger-
ator. The smell of Connie Sachs’s dog
by the fire.
Silverview has many of the elements
of those classic books, though it is set
closer to the present. Its main charac-
ter, Julian Lawndsley, is a well-to- do,
slightly lost young man who, like Jerry
Westerby, resorts to outbursts of po-
liteness when he feels uncomfortable.
Julian is a sort of retiree himself: hav-
ing quickly made enough money for
a lifetime, he quits his job in finance
and opens a tiny, ailing bookstore in a
seaside village. There he meets a man
named Edward Avon, who claims to
have been friends with his (now de-
ceased) father at school and wants to
inveigle himself into Julian’s bookstore
business. It’s almost comically obvious
that he is a spy: he appears for the first
time in a homburg hat and dripping
raincoat, as if costumed rather than
dressed.
Julian and Edward’s entanglement
unfolds in parallel with the story of
an intelligence officer named Stewart
Proctor, who is investigating Edward
and his wife, Deborah. “A stalky, be-
spectacled man in his mid-fifties” with
“a long beakish head,” Proctor is Sil-
verview’s version of George Smiley.
Like Smiley, he has an unassuming
manner but is renowned among his
peers for being able to identify leaks
from inside the service. Like Smiley,
The New York Review
he has seen his less talented but more
ingratiating colleagues rise above him
in the hierarchy while he does all the
work. Like Smiley, he has an unfaithful
wife. It isn’t hard to guess how the two
strands of the plot will come together,
or that Edward is just as untrustworthy
as he seems.
The closest the book comes to vin-
tage le Carré is when Proctor drops in
on a pair of old spies, a married couple
named Philip and Joan, in a replay of
Smiley’s visit to Connie Sachs. Under
the pretext that he’s gathering notes for
a training exercise, Proctor asks them
to take him through their memories
of Edward: where he came from, who
recruited him, where he might have
gone wrong. More revealing than their
stories, though, are the retirees them-
selves. Proctor had imagined them
living in “a charming Somerset cot-
tage covered in clematis.” Instead, the
house, a “lurid, green-tiled bungalow,”
is an eyesore. And his old comrades,
once “the golden couple” of the Brit-
ish intelligence services, have changed.
Philip is “bowed over a stick” and Joan
has become “a horsy woman in elastic-
topped slacks and a t-shirt with a wide-
angle print of Old Vienna across her
expansive bosom.” (Connie is also
wearing “trousers with elastic at the
waist” when Smiley summons her.)
This couple and this house could be
in almost any of le Carré’s early nov-
els. Yet Joan and Philip, like the other
characters in Silverview, have a habit
of immediately supplying the informa-
tion needed to further the plot. Though
there are hints that they realize that
Proctor, the service’s “chief sniffer-
dog,” has an ulterior motive, they don’t
think twice about giving him a com-
plete biography of Edward: from the
childhood that made him a “fanatic”
to the mid- career trauma that turned
him against his country and prompted
him to start stealing state secrets from
the hawkish Deborah and passing
them to a terrorist organization. Case
solved.
Philip and Joan don’t just make the
logic of the plot more explicit; they also
articulate the underlying attitudes of
many of le Carré’s books more clearly
than his characters generally do. On
the rising tide of bureaucracy, Joan
opines, “They’ve got a whole new lan-
guage. And line managers. And bloody
Human Resources instead of a per-
fectly decent Personnel Department.”
Joan elaborates an antiwar stance, with
her rather glib take on the Yugoslav
wars of the 1990s: “Six tiny nations
squabbling over Big Daddy Tito’s Will.
All fighting for God, all wanting to be
top dog, and nobody to like.” Philip
confesses that the work of the British
intelligence services in his lifetime did
not, in the end, amount to much: “We
didn’t do much to alter the course of
human history, did we?. . . I reckon I’d
have been more use running a boys’
club.”
It all concludes a little too neatly,
the characters each a little too eager
to drop the pretense of intrigue. The
mood of Silverview is brisk and know-
ing compared with the melancholic,
regretful tone of many of the Smiley
books. The pace never really lets up.
Everyone speaks and thinks in the
same short, irritated sentences. Deb-
orah’s daughter, Lily, on her mother’s
secrets: “Mum said she didn’t want me
to tell a living soul, so I didn’t. Plus I’m
indoctrinated. By your lot. I’m signed
up.” Julian on his former career in fi-
nance: “I came, I stole, I conquered, I
got out. End of story.” One character
anticipates “an enormous and enduring
stink.” Later, a different character pre-
dicts “an unparalleled, five-star cluster-
fuck.” The layers of abused loyalty, of
mounting disappointment, are missing.
Everyone has had enough.
I t isn’t really le Carré’s fault if Silver-
view is a less enigmatic novel than we
might expect. For one thing, le Carré,
who died in 2020 at the age of eighty-
nine, never decided to publish the
book. He wrote the novel sometime in
the mid-2010s—after A Delicate Truth
(2013) and before The Pigeon Tunnel
(2016)—but kept it in a drawer. In an
afterword, le Carré’s son Nick Corn-
well, who writes as Nick Harkaway, ex-
plains that he found it after his father’s
death. He implies that the book was
a completed work that his father had
redrafted several times. He thought it
was worth publishing, even if there’s no
indication that le Carré himself ever
considered it a finished work.
Given the state of Britain, too, in
recent years, it makes sense that the
goings- on in Silverview have a brit-
tle quality. Everything Smiley and his
author disliked had become the domi-
nant culture. The contest that had been
going on in the background between
old and new was over. Le Carré lived
to see his country run by management
consultants and PR gurus, many of
them the bullish sons of the aristoc-
racy—a class that has consolidated its
power once more in recent decades.
The clearest indication of the range of
years in which Silverview could be set is
a shopkeeper’s assumption, on hearing
Julian’s plummy accent, that he “went
to Eton . . . same as the government”;
in 2010 David Cameron became the
first Old Etonian in nearly fifty years
to serve as prime minister (nine years
later Boris Johnson became the sec-
ond). Another revelation that emerged
after le Carré’s death, also courtesy of
Nick, is that, alienated by Brexit and
enraged by Britain’s entry into the Iraq
War, he took Irish citizenship in his
final year. (His maternal grandmother
had been Irish.) One of the last photos
of him shows him sitting at a table and
grinning, wrapped in the broad green,
white, and orange stripes of a large
Irish flag.
It was an earlier version of Britain
that spurred le Carré’s imagination;
he was at his best when his characters
didn’t know quite what to make of their
moment or one another. By the end of
Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, George
Smiley has still not quite explained Bill
Haydon’s betrayal, a messier business
than Edward Avon’s. As Smiley takes
the train home, he has “a wistful no-
tion of liking Haydon and respecting
him: Bill was a man, after all, who had
had something to say and had said it.
But his mental system rejected this
convenient simplification.” Is it Bill he
will never fully know, or himself? Fin-
ished, at least for now, with the busi-
ness of spying, Smiley is left with the
smaller intrigues of ordinary life: the
insoluble problems of his wife, his mar-
riage, and what he is supposed to do
next. Q

“Whoever would have thought that William Shakespeare could help us prevent
murder in the twenty-first century? In this extraordinary book, James Gilligan and
Holding a Mirror David Richards shepherd their readers through a riveting and brilliantly written
journey, explaining how the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon can offer unique insights

up to Nature into the origins of violence. I simply could not put this down!”
Professor Estela V. Welldon, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists,
Honorary Member, American Psychoanalytic Association, UK
Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare
“Were I able to persuade my political colleagues to imbibe the wisdom of one book,
this is it. What Girard did with the novel, Gilligan and Richards do for Shakespeare,
making him accessible and essential for understanding and responding to personal
Holding a Mirror up to Nature

and political violence. It is both brilliant and transformational.”

John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych, House of Lords, Westminster, UK

JAMES GILLIGAN, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, NYU, wrote Violence

(1996), Preventing Violence (2001), Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than
Others (2011), a Times Literary Supplement ‘Book of the Year’, and co-authored
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2016), a New York Times best-seller. His
advice has been sought by President Clinton, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, the World
Health Organization, and the World Court.

DAVID A.J. RICHARDS is Professor of Law at New York University. He

is the author of over 20 books including: Free Speech and the Politics of Identity
(1999), Disarming Manhood: Roots of Ethical Resistance (2005), The Deepening
Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (Cambridge University Press,
2009, with Carol Gilligan),Why Love Leads to Justice: Love Across the Boundaries
(Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Image credit: © National Portrait Gallery, London

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February 10, 2022 21

 Black Voices, German Song
Singing Like Germans:
Black Musicians in the Land of
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms
by Kira Thurman.
Cornell University Press, 351 pp., $32.95
In his book Wagnerism (2020), Alex
Ross writes about what he calls “Wag-
ner scenes” in literature—episodes
in which a young concertgoer is spir-
itually transformed by an encounter
with Richard Wagner’s music. One of
Ross’s most fascinating examples is
“Of the Coming of John,” a chapter in
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black
Folk (1903), in which Du Bois turns
to fiction to describe the intellectual
awakening of a young Black man from
a small town in Georgia. John Jones’s
epiphany comes when he attends a per-
formance of Lohengrin in New York
and feels a new world opening up: “The
infinite beauty of the wail lingered
and swept through every muscle of his
frame, and put it all a-tune.” In his ec-
stasy, he inadvertently touches the arm
of the white woman next to him, where-
upon her male companion complains
and Jones is ejected from the hall.
The bitter moral of Du Bois’s tale is
that for a Black American of his time,
high culture is a trap. Studying Greek
and geometry at college gives Jones a
“dignity” and “thoughtfulness” that
are visible in his appearance. But it
also makes him “feel almost for the
first time the Veil that lay between
him and the white world,” Du Bois
writes, as Jim Crow America prevents
him from using or enjoying his knowl-
edge. “Does it make every one—un-
happy when they study and learn lots
of things?” asks Jones’s sister when he
returns home. “I am afraid it does,” he
says. To which she replies, “I wish I was
unhappy”—conveying Du Bois’s sense
that the life of the mind is worth suf-
fering for.
“Of the Coming of John” helps make
sense of Du Bois’s puzzling decision to
attend the Bayreuth Festival in 1936,
when it was closely associated with the
Nazi regime. Writing about the experi-
ence in his essay “What of the Color-
Line?,” Du Bois acknowledged the
moral complications involved, noting
that on his daily walk he passed the for-
mer home of Houston Stewart Cham-
berlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, who “did
more perhaps than any one to establish
in Germany the theory of Nordic su-
periority.” Chamberlain’s racist, anti-
Semitic opus The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century was an important
influence on Hitler, and Cosima Wag-
ner, the composer’s widow, had been
one of the führer’s crucial early sup-
porters. Yet Du Bois writes admiringly
about her and describes Bayreuth as a
shrine to “the spirit of Beauty,” com-
paring it to Chartres Cathedral. As
for Wagner’s operas, he has no doubt
about their humanity and universality:
“No human being, white or black, can
afford not to know them, if he would
know life.”
If Du Bois wasn’t deterred by Nazi
Bayreuth, it was partly because he had
a lifetime of experience separating the
treasures of the human spirit from the
institutions that administered them.
For John Jones, the fact that a racist
opera house was the only place to hear
22
Adam Kirsch
Marian Anderson studying a musical score with the pianist Kurt Johnen, Berlin, 1931
Lohengrin didn’t mean that the opera
itself was tainted. On the contrary, the
music was the best critique of the bar-
barism that surrounded it.
Du Bois found that for an African
American, Nazi Germany was actu-
ally more welcoming than the United
States. After five months visiting the
country, he observed, “It would have
been impossible for me to have spent
a similarly long time in any part of the
United States, without some, if not fre-
quent cases of personal insult or dis-
crimination. I cannot record a single
instance here.” “What of the Color-
Line?” originally appeared in Du
Bois’s column in an African American
newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and
he details for his readers the terrifying
anti- Semitism that was visible every-
where in Germany in 1936, calling it
“an attack on civilization” comparable
to the Spanish Inquisition and the Af-
rican slave trade. He insists, however,
that on his travels there, “I have been
treated with uniform courtesy and
consideration.”
T he idea that Black artists and intel-
lectuals could escape American racism
by moving to Europe is familiar from
literary history: Richard Wright and
James Baldwin, for example, spent
their later lives in France. In Sing-
ing Like Germans, the historian Kira
Thurman adds a new dimension to the
story by focusing on African American
classical musicians who studied, per-
formed, or settled in German-speaking
Europe. Many of them made avowals
just like Du Bois’s. “In Europe there is
Marian Anderson Papers, University of Pennsylvania
of it, a cause for delighted surprise or
violent condemnation, but it always re-
quired some kind of interpretation.
When African American artists
began to appear on European stages
in the late nineteenth century, con-
cert promoters used their race as a
selling point. Sissieretta Jones may
have claimed that in Europe no one
cared about the color of her skin, but
when she came to Berlin in 1895 she
was billed as “the Black Patti,” after
the popular Italian diva Adelina Patti.
Thurman discovers that a singer named
Jenny Bishop was using the same nick-
name in Berlin at the time, a source of
amusement for the local press. “They
both appear to be right,” one journalist
wrote, “because the one is as Black as
the other, and the one sings [as] beauti-
fully as the other.”
Part of what these artists were sell-
ing was their story. Thurman quotes a
profile of Jones in a Berlin newspaper
that explained how a “simple Negro
maiden” was discovered by Thomas
Edison, recorded on his newly invented
wax cylinder, and then taken under the
wing of First Lady Frances Cleveland,
who hired a music teacher for her and
arranged for her debut concert in the
White House.
Thurman describes this account as
“wildly fabricated and sensational.” In
fact, Jones, who was raised in Provi-
dence, Rhode Island, was trained at the
New England Conservatory of Music.
But if it tells us nothing of value about
the singer, it’s quite informative about
German expectations and fantasies.
Thurman dwells particularly on the
no prejudice against my race,” said the detail that Mrs. Cleveland challenged
soprano Sissieretta Jones, who toured Jones’s music teacher to see if proper
Germany in the 1890s. “It is the ar- training could “overcome the unpleas-
tist[’s] soul they look at there, not the ant, strange, and unmelodic guttural
color of his skin.” sound” of her speaking voice. Here was
Josephine Harreld studied piano a perfect colonialist fable of European
and conducting in Salzburg in 1935, culture overcoming African nature.
when Austria was under fascist rule, German critics implicitly affirmed
but “the only experience of racism she that binary when they insisted, intend-
shared came from white Americans,” ing it as a compliment, that Jones wasn’t
Thurman writes. One fellow student, a really Black. “The only thing ‘Black’
Smith graduate, refused to sit with her about her is the beautiful shining hair,”
at meals because, Harreld related in a one reviewer said, while another pro-
letter to her parents, “her family has tested that the “adjective ‘Black’ seems
Negro servants. So for that reason she to us unnecessarily impolite.” To insist
cannot overcome her prejudices.” on the singer’s race would be to sug-
Many Black musicians felt elated and gest that she hadn’t transcended it, as
liberated to be living for the first time any Black person would have to do in
in a country without a history of slavery order to participate in German musical
and segregation. But the reality of the culture. German audiences were also
German musical world was more com- simply unfamiliar with how African
plicated, as Thurman shows in this im- Americans looked and often expressed
pressively and thoughtfully researched surprise at how the category “Black”
book. Singing Like Germans covers was defined. “A twist: Miss Jenny
roughly a century starting in the 1870s, Bishop actually has a chocolate-brown
a period when Germany underwent coloring, and the epithet ‘Black Patti’ is
repeated cataclysmic changes, and the therefore out of place,” one critic wrote
experiences of Black musicians varied about Jones’s rival.
greatly by time and place. Marian An-
derson’s lieder evenings in Vienna be-
fore the Anschluss belonged to a world M ore significant than the appear-
different from that of Ella Lee’s debut ance of performers was whether the
as Tosca in Communist East Berlin in music they made “sounded” Black. In
1961. the chapter “Singing Lieder, Hearing
What remained constant was the Race,” Thurman shows that German
ideology of German music—the belief writers habitually, perhaps uncon-
that the works of Bach and Mozart, sciously, described Black voices as
Beethoven and Brahms, were the prod- sounding “black, purple, or blue—all
uct of a unique national genius. For dark hues.” A review of a Marian An-
an African American to perform that derson concert in 1930 described the
music could be interpreted as a tribute contralto as having “a dark, blue-black
to the German spirit or a desecration voice” that “sounds somewhat unusual
The New York Review
to our ears, exotic.” Roland Hayes, a
tenor renowned in the early twentieth
century for his interpretations of lieder,
was described by a Viennese critic in
1923 as “somewhat guttural.”
It’s possible that German listeners
really were hearing something new and
distinctive in these performances. For
audiences used to singers who were
native German speakers, Anderson
and Hayes might well have sounded
“exotic” in ways that were hard to
specify. Still, it’s clear that, as Thur-
man writes, “audiences often relied on
biological notions of racial difference
to understand a performance of clas-
sical music.” In one of the book’s rare
passages of direct musical description,
Thurman—a classically trained pia-
nist who grew up in Vienna—analyzes
Hayes’s recording of Schubert’s song
“Du bist die Ruh,” which was made late
in his life and “does not represent the
African American tenor in his prime.”
Even so, anyone who listens to it can
hear that “guttural” is the last word
that describes Hayes’s singing; Thur-
man notes its “feathery soft smooth-
ness.” This is one of many examples in
Singing Like Germans of how difficult
it is to simply hear music, without dis-
torting preconceptions.
Before World War I, German reac-
tions to Black musicians were some-
times condescending or disdainful,
but in the interwar period they turned
menacing. After the Treaty of Ver-
sailles, German resentment crystal-
lized around the presence of soldiers
from Algeria and Senegal in the French
forces occupying the Rhineland. Giv-
ing Black troops authority over white
Europeans was thought of in Germany
as a crime against nature, a “Black
Horror.”
When Hayes came to Berlin to per-
form in 1924, he became a focus for this
anger. A Black man singing Schubert in
a hall named after Beethoven seemed
to some Germans like a cultural re-
prise of the occupation, and the Amer-
ican consul warned Hayes not to come.
He did anyway, taking the stage to “the
sounds of booing and jeering,” Thur-
man writes. But according to press
reports, when he began by singing the
gentle “Du bist die Ruh,” his perfor-
mance immediately disarmed the audi-
ence, and by the end of the night he was
loudly cheered. Here was a story to feel
good about, showing that music could
be a universal language, transcending
the illusory differences of race.
The Nazis, however, weren’t inter-
ested in such happy endings, and as they
gained power, protests against Black
musicians became more aggressive.
Thurman contrasts Hayes’s concert
with one given by the Pittsburgh-born
singer Aubrey Pankey in Salzburg in
1932. Local Nazis posted flyers urging
people “not to enable a Negro to take
the daily bread of German artists,” and
while Pankey performed, a crowd out-
side sang nationalist songs and “tried
repeatedly to storm the building but
were blocked by the police.”
Thurman quotes a review of the con-
cert published in a right-wing newspa-
per the next day: “Whenever you see a
Negro, you get the feeling that he has a
quiet longing for his grasslands. . . . You
believe him right away that he—in the
true sense of the word—feels utterly
out of place in Europe.” It’s hard to rec-
oncile such abuse with Du Bois’s testi-
mony that he experienced no racism in
Nazi Germany.
February 10, 2022
After the Allied victory in World
War II, Black performance in Ger-
many took on new political meanings.
One of the most interesting episodes
Thurman writes about came in Sep-
tember 1945, when the Berlin Philhar-
monic performed under the baton of a
Black conductor for the first time. (The
pianist Hazel Harrison had become the
first Black woman to perform with the
orchestra in 1904, but this milestone
was forgotten.) Rudolph Dunbar, a na-
tive of British Guiana who studied at
Juilliard and made his career in Lon-
don, was invited with the approval of
the occupying Americans as a pointed
rejection of Nazi racism and the cult
of German music. Thurman quotes
an American official who called Black
A poster of the soprano Sissieretta Jones, also known as ‘the Black Patti,’ 1899
musicians “the best assets in the reori-
entation of Germans.” To make the
message even clearer, Dunbar con-
ducted in uniform—he had been a
war correspondent for the Associated
Negro Press—and the program in-
cluded the Afro-American Symphony
by the Black composer William Grant
Still.
The concerts were a success, but
Dunbar was skeptical about the audi-
ence. “They flock to my concerts not
because they want to hear my music,
but because they want to hear how a
Negro makes music,” he observed to
the writer Ruth Andreas-Friedrich,
who recorded their conversation in
her diary. She wrote that Dunbar was
“beautiful like a panther,” another
example of language inadvertently be-
traying German assumptions about
Africa and Europe, nature and culture.
But the most glaring irony was
that Dunbar had opportunities in
American- occupied Berlin that he
would never have found in America
itself. (The Metropolitan Opera didn’t
perform under a Black conductor until
1972, when Henry Lewis led a per-
formance of La Bohème.) During the
cold war, Communist East Germany
embraced Black musicians to rebuke
American racism, much as the Ameri-
cans embraced Dunbar to rebuke Ger-
man racism.
Paul Robeson, an outspoken Com-
munist sympathizer, performed a lieder
concert in East Berlin in 1960, with
“Ol’ Man River” on the program
alongside Bach and Bartók. The East
German press played up the event as
proof of Communist antiracism, but
Thurman writes that this strategy had
Library of Congress
its own pitfalls. A staged press photo-
graph showed Robeson talking to an
eight-year- old girl named Anka, who
supposedly asked him to stay in the
GDR; it was published in one East Ber-
lin newspaper with the caption “Paul
Robeson, Your Big Black Friend,” con-
descending absurdly to both Robeson
and the reader.
T his points to the central, unan-
swered question in Singing Like Ger-
mans. Thurman has uncovered a great
variety of German responses to Black
musicians, and she interprets almost all
of them as expressions of racism. This
includes not just the explicit hatred of
Nazis and the prejudice of provincial
nineteenth- century critics, but also
responses that were intended to be af-
firmative and enthusiastic. Thus, after
condemning German listeners who
thought that singers like Anderson
and Hayes sounded Black, Thurman
also condemns those who thought they
didn’t sound Black, such as one Vien-
nese critic who praised Hayes: “Not as
a Negro, but as a great artist, he cap-
tured and moved the audience.”
Thurman argues that such a com-
pliment assumes “that whatever was
Black could not also be universal.” Yet
when another Viennese critic writes
that Anderson’s singing showed “how
the human heart speaks intelligibly to
everybody,” Thurman criticizes the
comment’s “universalizing tones” as
predicated on a belief in the “supposed
foreignness of [Anderson’s] musician-
ship.” As in many current discussions of
race and cultural appropriation, there is
a vicious circle at work here: insisting
on difference is a problem, but so is in-
sisting on the absence of difference.
Part of the problem is that Singing
Like Germans is mostly about how
Germans thought about Black musi-
cians, not the other way around. This
may simply be due to the nature of the
available evidence: musicians generally
don’t theorize about their calling, so
there will always be more written about
them than by them. What Thurman
does quote from letters, diaries, and
memoirs, however, suggests that many
African American musicians shared
the belief that German art music repre-
sented a higher spiritual realm. About
his alma mater, Fisk University, the
historically Black college in Tennessee,
Du Bois wrote that “no student ever
left Fisk without a deep and abiding ap-
preciation of real music.” “Real music,
of course, meant classical music, and
usually the music of German compos-
ers,” Thurman notes.
Indeed, the Black classical musicians
we meet in Singing Like Germans were
at pains to distinguish themselves from
popular and folk musicians. Thurman
shows that in the 1920s, Anderson’s
public image was formed in opposition
to that of Josephine Baker. Both sing-
ers became famous in Europe at the
same time, but the latter represented
“erotic primitivism,” while the former
was “pious, modest, respectable.” The
difference had to do not just with their
personalities but with their genres: clas-
sical music was refined, bourgeois, and
European, holding itself aloof from the
vulgar American energy of jazz.
A more interesting contrast, perhaps,
would be between Anderson and Bes-
sie Smith. The two singers were con-
temporaries—Anderson was born in
1897, Smith in 1894—and both made
their first recordings in 1923. But while
success for Anderson meant perform-
ing Brahms and Wolf for an audience of
a few hundred Viennese connoisseurs,
Smith’s blues records sold by the hun-
dreds of thousands, and she became the
highest-paid Black entertainer in Amer-
ica. In the process, she helped redefine
American music as African American
music, as it would remain through the
twentieth century with blues, jazz, rock
and roll, R&B, soul, and hip-hop.
By comparison, Anderson, Hayes,
and other classical musicians in Sing-
ing Like Germans look a little like the
neo-Latin writers of the Renaissance,
who staked their fame on a tradition-
ally prestigious language at just the mo-
ment when almost everyone stopped
reading it. Thurman offers valuable in-
sights into how Germans viewed these
Black artists, but it would be still more
interesting to know how they viewed
themselves. Q
23
 Regarding the Solace of Others
On Consolation:
Finding Solace in Dark Times
by Michael Ignatieff.
Metropolitan, 284 pp., $26.99
In 1793 the French mathematician,
intellectual, and moderate revolution-
ary the Marquis de Condorcet, who
had hoped that the Revolution could
bring about a peaceful era of equality,
justice, and human rights, and who for
denouncing the bloodthirsty despo-
tism of Robespierre and the Jacobins
had been banished and threatened
with death, was in hiding in a house in
Paris. He had been taken in by a cou-
rageous landlady, Mme Vernet. On
the day Condorcet learned that thirty
of his moderate colleagues had been
guillotined, he broke down and wept,
lamenting his outlawed state. Mme
Vernet told him that the Jacobins
could make him an outlaw, but that “no
one could expel him from the human
race.”
To be a member of the human race is
to undergo loss, anguish, bereavement,
betrayal, failure, aloneness, and the
fear of death, and Michael Ignatieff’s
remarkable and moving new book, On
Consolation, written out of the dark
times of a world pandemic, tells some
dramatic stories of the worst that can
happen to human beings and the worst
they can do to one another. But to be
human is also to look for meaning, joy,
and consolation. As Ignatieff noted in
his earlier book The Needs of Strang-
ers, where some of these thoughts had
a first outing, “We are the only spe-
cies with needs that exceed our grasp,”
needs for “metaphysical consolation
and explanation.”
To be human is also, in some cases,
to possess extraordinary courage, en-
durance, intellectual power, imagina-
tion, and capacity for hope. Condorcet,
an admirable specimen of the human
race in spite of the wretched failure of
all his hopes and ideals, continued to
the end to express a belief in progress
and in a future time when
science, industry, and political
economy would make plenty avail-
able to all. Emancipated by knowl-
edge, human beings would live in
freedom and peace; and war, the
scourge of civilization, would die
away.
Condorcet’s illusory rational utopi-
anism is one of many possible “con-
solations” under examination here.
Ignatieff doesn’t want to prescribe
one over another but to understand
how consolation has been configured
at different times, in different eras of
thought, and to suggest what we might
learn, or what consolation we might
derive, from these examples of “the
human experience.”
The consolation business is a
crowded market. There are many books
out there, presumably of help to many
readers, on how to come to terms with
suffering and bereavement and how to
bear grief, with titles like It’s OK That
You’re Not OK and I Wasn’t Ready to
Say Goodbye and I’m Grieving as Fast
as I Can. Out of the pandemic have
come timely aids like This Too Shall
24
Hermione Lee
El Greco: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586 –1588
Pass and Alone Together: Love, Grief,
and Comfort in the Time of COVID -19.
There are books on how to understand
your emotions, such as David Whyte’s
Consolations: The Solace, Nourish-
ment and Underlying Meaning of Ev-
eryday Words (2015). There are books
of intellectual advice, like Alain de
Botton’s personal take on “how to be-
come wise through philosophy,” with
encouraging thoughts on Epicurus,
Montaigne, et al., in The Consolations
of Philosophy (2000).
And there are some notable books
by writers who have brought the pow-
ers of their imagination and language
to bear on the experience of bereave-
ment, among them C. S. Lewis’s A
Grief Observed (1961), Joan Didion’s
The Year of Magical Thinking (2005),
Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013),
and Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing
with Feathers (2016). Readers respond
intensely to such books because they
often find their own lives reflected in
them, but told in ways that they couldn’t
have imagined and that provide their
own form of consolation.
Ignatieff’s approach to consolation is
not quite like any of these. He is du-
bious about the therapeutic mode that
treats suffering “as an illness from
which we need to recover” rather than
a condition that may deepen our under-
standing of the meaning of life. Late
in the book he quotes the view of the
great, implacable Emily Dickinson on
what is often called “the healing power
of time”:
of ideas of consolation, whether these be
Stoic, Hebrew, Catholic, or Protestant,
Enlightenment or rationalist, Marxist,
liberal, or secular. So the book is his-
torical, proceeding in great jumps from
the book of Job to European writers of
the twentieth century (and giving sharp
and succinct accounts of the collapse of
the Roman Empire, or the French Rev-
olution, or the American Civil War).
It is also conceptual, analyzing the
main words that are associated with
consolation. Consolation can mean
faith (though there are plenty of people
in this book for whom faith is a false
Church of St. Thomas, Toledo
consolation). It can be a demand for di-
vine validation, or a counter to a sense
of meaninglessness, or the ability to
write a narrative of self-realization. It
can be the bearing of witness, or the re-
sult of steadfastness, or a commitment
to living in truth. Above all it is linked
to hope and to solidarity.
But On Consolation is more about
individuals than abstract definitions.
This is a book of life stories, some more
consoling than others. Ignatieff begins
with the Old and New Testaments at
their most alarming. The appalling
story of Job and his God-sent tribu-
lations is described, as hopefully as
possible, as “a demand for divine vali-
dation,” a refusal of false consolations,
and a protest against being condemned
to “meaninglessness.” The Psalms,
so full of lamentation and anguish at
God’s inscrutability, teach us, Ignatieff
says, the relationship between despair
and hope. Saint Paul, with his traumatic
conversion and his relentless mission
to turn an obscure sect into a universal
They say that “Time assuages”— faith, a mission fraught with persecu-
Time never did assuage— tion and bitter disappointments, finds
An actual suffering strengthens consolation, according to Ignatieff, in
As Sinews do, with age— the love and fellowship of the faithful.
From the Bible we turn to some se-
Time is a Test of Trouble— vere classical examples. Here is Cice-
But not a Remedy— ro’s masculine code of Stoicism—men
If such it prove, it prove too mustn’t cry or show weakness—which
There was no Malady— provided consolation by showing
off your capacity for “manly . . . self-
The book starts on a personal note control” for the admiration of your
with Ignatieff’s attendance at a choral male peers, but which didn’t prevent
festival in Utrecht in 2017, where he him from falling into inconsolable de-
was giving a talk on “justice and poli- pression when his daughter died. Here
tics” in the Psalms, which were being is Marcus Aurelius writing his confes-
sung in different musical settings. He sions in “fear and loneliness” after a
was overcome by the emotional effect life of successfully running an empire
they had on him, a nonbeliever, and on and subduing barbarians. Here is Boe-
others like him. How do religious texts thius, at the terminal point of that em-
and religious music still provide con- pire’s decay, drawing on Greek, Roman,
solation and “tears of recognition” in Hebrew, and Christian traditions from
what he thinks of (though others might “the memory palace of his erudition,”
disagree) as a largely secular era? The putting his faith in “philosophical rea-
book took shape out of that question, soning” while awaiting a horrible death,
which begged to be asked all the more and finding consolation in “the writing
intensely during the pandemic. itself.” Ignatieff notes that any consola-
But on the whole he is not autobi- tion these writers provide others comes
ographical, though the dismal hospital from their “candor” about
deaths of his own parents, decades ago,
lie behind the book’s affecting final the loneliness, discouragement,
chapter on Cicely Saunders, founder of fear, and loss that make us seek
the palliative care movement. Nor does consolation in the first place. For it
he tell us where and how we should find is consoling to know that not even
solace. His own working life—as a his- an emperor can get through the
torian of ideas; as the biographer of Isa- night, alone with his thoughts. That
iah Berlin; as a broadcaster, memoirist, is something we can share with him.
essayist, and novelist; as an unsuccess-
ful Liberal politician in Canada; and There’s more pleasure to be had from
as rector, in turbulent times, of Central Montaigne’s humane, worldly enjoy-
European University in Hungary—has ment of the physical experiences of the
fed his interest in the intellectual context everyday, his attention to “the demands
The New York Review
of ordinary life and the people around
us,” and his holding on, in the face of
mortality, to the consolations of “diver-
sion” and hedonism, of simply “living
and creating.” And Ignatieff admires
the philosopher David Hume’s matter-
of-fact acceptance of his mortality,
which, in the late eighteenth century,
ushered in “a new way of dying.”
Hume also figured in The Needs of
Strangers as a revolutionary thinker who
“waved away the blindfolds of Christian
consolation.” Ignatieff doesn’t accept
his view that we have no natural need
of “metaphysical consolation,” but he
respects it. In both books, he tells the
story of Hume on his deathbed, joking
with Adam Smith about his imminent
journey across the River Styx. Hume
imagines asking Charon for just a bit
more time—to “correct the editions of
his works,” or to wait and see “man-
kind delivered from superstition.” “But
he could guess Charon’s answer: ‘That
won’t happen these two hundred years.
Into the boat this instant, you lazy loi-
tering rogue.’”
H ume’s resolute atheism (which hor-
rified some of his death-fearing friends,
like Johnson and Boswell) provides one
kind of consolation even while reject-
ing dependence on it. Though Ignatieff
chose not to write about Isaiah Berlin
in On Consolation, Hume’s deathbed
equanimity echoes Ignatieff’s account
of Berlin in old age, briskly dismissing
the consolations of philosophy:
As for the meaning of life, I do
not believe that it has any. I do not
at all ask what it is, but I suspect
it has none and this is a source of
great comfort to me. We make of it
what we can and that is all there is
about it.
But the search for the meaning of life
is hard for human beings to relinquish,
as much in the public as in the private
sphere. Ignatieff’s chosen philosophers,
revolutionaries, politicians, and think-
ers of the modern world—Condorcet,
Marx, Lincoln, Max Weber, Camus—
construct their testimonies not only out
of personal needs but in relation to the
condition of the world and their desire
for social change. Marx hoped for a new
age of freedom and reason emerging
from “the revolutionary rise of the pro-
letariat,” while he was able to call only
on “stoic endurance” in his own trou-
bles, like his wife’s death from cancer.
Lincoln encouraged opposing sides to
“join together” and “find some com-
mon understanding,” to embark on rec-
onciliation and not vengeance, after the
nation’s tragically divisive war. Weber
urged the next generation, during and
after Germany’s defeat in World War
I, to shoulder “the responsibilities of
politics.” Camus discovered, through
his contacts with the Resistance during
the German occupation of France (for
which his “plague” became a metaphor),
that our only resource is “our reliance
upon and our need for each other.”
These are all, in their extremely differ-
ent ways, positions carved painfully out
of dark times of conflict and despair.
The book doesn’t eschew tragedy.
To show us consolation as something
struggled toward, not easily arrived at,
it gives us unsparing scenes of grief,
death, torture, and cruelty, of which
the most shocking, perhaps, is the story
told by Camus in 1943 of the German
February 10, 2022
prison chaplain on a train with French
prisoners, one of them a teenage boy,
going to their execution. The priest
consoles the boy (“I will be with you
and so will God too”), but when he
manages to escape, the priest alerts the
guards so they can recapture the boy
and take him on to his death. Camus’s
rage at such “false consolation” is chan-
neled into The Plague, a book “about
resistance in the face of evil.” Ignatieff
takes his own strong line about the les-
sons in resistance we might draw from
these examples, for instance from Lin-
coln’s attempts to “bind up the nation’s
wounds”: “He struggled with exactly
what we struggle with: the tidal force
of political malice that recurrently rises
New York Public Library
Francesco Pozzi: Cyparissus, circa 1878
and threatens the hard-won civility on
which a democracy depends.”
I gnatieff’s strongest emotions, and
some of his most tragic examples, are
found in the stories of his twentieth-
century European and Russian he-
roes, Primo Levi, Anna Akhmatova,
Miklós Radnóti, Václav Havel, Czesław
Miłosz. Their endurance under duress,
in Nazi concentration camps or under
Stalin, as political prisoners or exiles, is
at the heart of the book’s message:
It is not doctrines that console us
in the end, but people: their exam-
ple, their singularity, their courage
and steadfastness . . . people [who]
show us what it means to go on, to
keep going, despite everything.
This sense of “solidarity,” of a human
“chain of meaning” or “fellowship
of witness,” tells people—sometimes
wordlessly—that “they are not alone,”
but part of “a common world of feeling.”
That recognition of the “human
chain” (the title of Seamus Heaney’s
last and profoundly consolatory book
of poems, though not mentioned by
Ignatieff) can be brought home by the
smallest, most mundane of encounters.
Ignatieff uses three nameless women
among his examples. Camus, inspired
by his illiterate Algerian mother to cre-
ate the silent, watchful old woman who
sits patiently by a ghastly deathbed in
The Plague; Havel, moved to a sense
of kinship with strangers by seeing,
when he was in prison, the banal plight
of a hapless TV weather presenter un-
able to be heard on air and plunged
into panic-struck embarrassment; and
Cicely Saunders taking the words of a
working- class woman about her pain
(“all of me is wrong”) as the basis for a
holistic program of care for the dying—
all are links in that “chain of meaning.”
The chain can connect us through
time, as when Levi, in Auschwitz in
1944, recites Ulysses’ lines in Dante’s
Inferno (“You were not born to live
your life as brutes”), written in the
fourteenth century under the influence
of Boethius’s The Consolation of Phi-
losophy, composed eight hundred years
before that. For the chain to be forged,
people must bear witness, poems and
letters and memoirs must be circulated,
texts must be preserved and edited and
translated.
Ignatieff is eloquent on the crucial
importance of these textual survivals,
whether he’s writing about the Psalms
or about Radnóti. The Jewish Hungar-
ian poet, who had survived months of
hard labor in a copper mine in Serbia,
was being force-marched across Hun-
gary in the autumn of 1944. Whenever
he could, he kept on writing short, la-
conic poems, which he called his “Pic-
ture Postcards,” on bits of cardboard
picked up on the road. He was shot
in the head and his body thrown into
a shallow grave, from which, after the
war, his papers were exhumed, kept
safe by a local Jewish butcher, handed
back to his wife, and published in time
for her to see him recognized “as one
of the greatest poets of Hungary and
Europe.” Ignatieff, in some anguish,
suggests that those inspiring and cou-
rageous writers are now being betrayed
and forgotten, at a time when “what
they witnessed and suffered is disbe-
lieved.” We owe it to those heroic fig-
ures to remember them, and this book
makes a good job of it. “History has no
consolation to offer,” he concludes som-
berly, “but it does leave us with duties.”
It’s a high-minded, even solemn tone.
As I read On Consolation, often much
moved, I couldn’t help calling to mind
some more caustic approaches to the
subject. Ignatieff’s thoughtful attempt
to understand Saint Paul could be con-
trasted with Virginia Woolf’s savage
excoriation of him in her 1938 essay
Three Guineas as a prototype for Na-
zism (“He was of the virile or dominant
type, so familiar at present in Germany,
for whose gratification a subject race or
sex is essential”). Ignatieff’s account of
Job pales beside Anita Brookner’s lac-
erating commentary:
Job is not only wronged, he is
duped. . . .
God chooses to come in the shape
of a whirlwind, either because He is
enraged by the banality of the dia-
logue to which presumably He has
been listening, or to divert atten-
tion from His previous absence. . . .
God demands an unconditional
worship, beyond causality, beyond
reward, beyond understanding.
Job, by this reasoning, is con-
demned to go uncomforted.
It’s intriguing, too, to set Ignatieff’s
book alongside Julian Barnes’s witty,
skeptical, forensic explorations of the
consolations offered for death in Noth-
ing to Be Frightened Of (2008), in which
he follows Flaubert’s grimly unflinch-
ing recommendation that “by dint of
saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gaz-
ing down into the black pit at one’s feet,
one remains calm.” Barnes opts, more
often than not, for “disconsolation.”
I gnatieff might have chosen other ex-
amples. His book is almost entirely
in and about the European tradition,
apart from the chapter on Lincoln.
As he says, “Another book could have
been written about what Europeans
learned from Asian, African, or Mus-
lim sources of consolation.” It is light on
women, though there are some strong
historical heroines—like that landlady
of Condorcet’s or Marx’s devoted and
long-suffering wife, Jenny—in the mar-
gins. It’s not especially interested in the
consolations of nature. It is aimed at an
audience with a wide range of cultural
references and an interest in the history
of ideas. And it concentrates on writ-
ers, though there’s a fine chapter on El
Greco’s 1580s painting The Burial of
the Count of Orgaz, which speaks to the
thousands of people who come to see
it every year of “the human longing to
escape, to be taken up into heaven, and
to enjoy the blessing of timelessness.”
There is also one chapter on music.
Writing about music and consolation is
a risky business, as there is such a vast
literature on the way music affects our
emotions, and we all know that one
person’s musical consolation is another
person’s anathema. But music does
provide Ignatieff with the best exam-
ple of how works created in a religious
context can still have their effect on a
secular audience by reminding them of
traditions of thought that “situate indi-
vidual suffering within a wider frame,”
and by providing them with “great lan-
guages of consolation” that can “hold
out a promise of hope that makes our
unbelief somehow irrelevant” and help
us to feel, in our grief, “that we are not
marooned in the present.”
It allows him to write, too, about
those forms of consolation that take
us into silence and aloneness. Ignatieff
chooses Mahler as his example because
of Mahler’s conviction (like Wagner’s)
that “music should attempt nothing
less than to provide meaning for men
and women living after the death of the
gods.” He gives a tender account of the
Kindertotenlieder, Mahler’s song cycle
on the death of children that so tragi-
cally anticipated the death of his own
daughter. And he uses Mahler to go
beyond the idea of the human chain to
the more difficult idea of our ultimate
solitariness. Ignatieff is much consoled
by solidarity, but he also recognizes
the inevitable necessity of aloneness.
I’m reminded of the verse in Edward
Thomas’s “Lights Out” (1917), one of
my own “consolation” poems:
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.
Ignatieff describes how at the end-
ings of Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied
von der Erde, Mahler takes us into the
space beyond notes and words, where
we’re each of us alone, as we will be in
our dying: “Mahler brings the listener
and the music to the very edge of si-
lence, as if to mark the place where mu-
sic’s consoling work has to end, and the
listener must go on to find meaning on
his own.” Q
25

The State of Israel vs. the Jews
by Sylvain Cypel, translated from
the French by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 360 pp., $27.99
November 10, 2021: Twenty Israeli
settlers, armed with guns and clubs,
their faces masked, descend upon the
hamlet of Halat al-Dab’ in the South
Hebron hills. They attack the Pales-
tinians who live there, smash windows,
cars, and whatever else they find. Six
Palestinians are wounded, at least one
from gunshots. There are Israeli sol-
diers nearby who make no attempt to
interfere and who leave the area while
the pogrom is going on. I use the word
deliberately. What happened that day
in Halat al-Dab’ is not different in
kind from the pogrom in Nikolayev, in
Ukraine, in the early years of the twen-
tieth century, when my grandmother’s
brother was killed by Cossacks.
September 28, 2021, Simchat Torah,
the end of the Sukkot holiday: Dozens
of masked settlers storm the tiny Pal-
estinian encampment of Mufagara,
also in the South Hebron hills, wreak-
ing havoc. Basil al-Adraa, an activist
from the nearby village of at-Tuwani,
reported that the settlers
went from house to house, and
broke windows, smashed cars with
knives and hammers. A large stone
they threw hit a 3-year-old boy,
Mohammed, in the head, who is
now in the hospital. The soldiers
supported them with tear gas. The
residents fled. I can’t forget how the
villagers left their houses, terrified,
the children screaming, the women
crying, while the settlers entered
their living rooms, like they were
possessed with violence and wrath.
September 17, 2021: A convoy of ac-
tivists from the Israeli-Palestinian NGO
Combatants for Peace and other orga-
nizations is bringing a water tanker to
a village near at-Tuwani, which has no
access to running water. The army vio-
lently attacks the convoy with tear gas
and stun grenades. Six activists and a
journalist are wounded; one of the ac-
tivists is thrown to the rocky ground by
the senior officer in command and has
to undergo surgery on his eye. Seven
Palestinians are arrested.
No one should think that these
events—a random selection—are aber-
rations or exceptions to the rule. They
are now the norm in the occupied Pal-
estinian territories. Settler violence,
backed up by Israeli soldiers, happens
every day. Government ministers and
high-ranking officers, including the
army chief of staff, Lieutenant General
Aviv Kochavi, make bland statements
condemning the violence but do noth-
ing to stop it. Some of them actively
support it. The goal, by no means a
secret, is to expel Palestinians from
their homes and lands and, eventually,
to annex as much of the West Bank as
possible to Israel.
Any means to achieve this goal is
acceptable. The minister of defense,
Benny Gantz, has recently outlawed six
Palestinian human rights organizations
on the pretext that they are connected
26
Lost Illusions
David Shulman
Israeli settlers in the illegal outpost of Evyatar, near the Palestinian village of Beita,
West Bank, June 2021
to Hamas.* The vehemence with which
the government and the security goons
have defended this pretext is evidence
that they know it is false—yet another
attempt to stamp out Palestinian pro-
test and dissent. Some readers might
be reminded of the days when the
ACLU was attacked by Joseph McCar-
thy as an alleged Communist front
organization.
All of this is Israel in 2021. So what
is a onetime liberal Zionist like Sylvain
Cypel supposed to make of it? His fa-
ther, Jacques Cypel, was an outstand-
ing leader of labor Zionism in France
and also the editor of the world’s last
Yiddish-language daily newspaper,
Unzer Wort. (It closed down in 1996.)
The young Sylvain, bilingual in French
and Yiddish, grew up in Bordeaux
and Paris, where he was a member of
a labor Zionist youth group. He went
to Israel after high school, served as
a paratrooper in the Israeli army, and
studied at the Hebrew University of Je-
rusalem. After living in Israel on and
off for twelve years, he returned to
France, where he eventually became a
senior editor at Le Monde and then ed-
itor in chief of Courrier International.
In The State of Israel vs. the Jews,
Cypel describes the change that came
over him in the years following the
1967 war:
I had always thought that when Is-
rael was founded as a refuge for the
persecuted Jews of the world, jus-
tice had been on the Israeli side. . . .
But I was gradually discovering
that the expulsion of the Palestin-
ians and the seizing of their land
had been deliberately brutal.
By the time he left Israel, he was an
anti-Zionist, hence ostracized by some
former friends. He clearly couldn’t tol-
erate the cognitive dissonance that so
many of us in the Israeli peace move-
ment have to live with. As he puts it,
“Israel was evolving into something no
idealist could stomach: a racist, bul-
lying little superpower.” The raison
d’être of his book lies in documenting
and substantiating this thesis.
*See Raja Shehadeh, “What Does Is-
rael Fear from This ‘Terrorist’?,” The
New York Review, December 2, 2021.
only seven years after Algeria achieved
Amit Elkayam/The New York Times/Redux
independence—he was shocked to
hear Israeli students who “talked about
the Palestinians exactly the same way
French settlers there [in Algeria] used
to talk about the Arabs.” French Jews
on the left had mostly, sometimes pas-
sionately, opposed the French colonial
war in Algeria. Now it was all happening
again in Palestine, even if the historical
parallel was inexact. (The French colo-
nists in Algeria had, at least in theory, a
home country they could return to, un-
like nearly all Israeli Jews.)
For Cypel, just out of the Israeli
army and haunted by recent memory,
the result was the discovery of the
“yawning gap between the promise and
the reality of Zionism.” But for people
like me, who still remember the late
1960s and early 1970s in Israel, before
the settler movement began, those years
call up memories of the old, moderately
humanistic, mildly socialist Israel. Make
Cypel’s trajectory is not unusual. no mistake: the underlying project of
I know quite a few originally left- dispossession, or “thinning out” the
oriented, idealistic Zionists who have Palestinian population, as it was then eu-
been similarly disillusioned and who phemistically called, was very much un-
have given up on the Jewish state. Some derway. And the occupation had clearly
of them think that from the very begin- taken root. Israel was no utopia, yet it
ning, the Zionist movement was caught was utterly unlike the shameless hyper-
up in, indeed defined by, a teleology of nationalist state we have today. Cypel
increasingly violent crime against the shows us, in strident but truthful tones,
Palestinian “other” who inhabits the the dystopian world of an ethnocratic
same small chunk of land on the Med- polity immersed in systemic repression,
iterranean coast. I don’t subscribe to institutionalized hatred toward Palestin-
this overdetermined view. ians, and quotidian criminal acts in the
But Cypel’s story has a particularly occupied territories, where a colonial
French, or rather French Jewish, di- settler regime is firmly in place.
mension, spelled out in a chapter of He also gives us chapters on other
his book subtitled “The Blindness kinds of transgressions, like the sale
of French Jews.” France was the first of sophisticated Israeli spyware to the
European country to emancipate the world’s most cruel and despotic states,
Jews (in 1791; their rights were con- among them South Sudan, Saudi Ara-
firmed and expanded in the following bia, and Myanmar, for use against their
decades), and the Jews of France had own citizens—a business, he writes,
good reason to identify with the liberté, that earns “Israeli companies an
fraternité, and égalité of the French amount estimated by various sources
Revolution, even if these slogans were at between $1 billion and $3.4 billion
often honored in the breach. But with a year.” He describes the increasing at-
the influx of more than 300,000 French- tacks on Israeli human rights activists
speaking Jews from Algeria and else- by the state security forces; the rehabil-
where in the Maghreb during and after itation and relegitimation of Kach, the
the Algerian War of Independence of overtly racist party of thugs founded
1954–1962, the French Jewish com- by Meir Kahane, now once again rep-
munity underwent significant changes. resented in the Knesset by the Otzma
Many of the new immigrants to France Yehudit (Jewish Power) party; and the
carried with them bitter memories of antidemocratic legislation initiated by
their formal status as dhimmis, a tol- the Israeli right, such as the “nation-state
erated but humiliated minority, under law” that enshrines inequality among
Islam. They took vicarious pride in the Jews and non-Jews within the state.
rise of Israel and even felt a slight taste Jewish privilege—and the concomitant
of revenge on their Arab oppressors. discrimination against Israeli Arab citi-
And while French Jews are by no zens—are now no longer a latent, though
means uniformly “Israelized”—the term widespread, Israeli dream but a legal
used by the historian Pierre Birnbaum reality. All of this leads Cypel to quote
to refer to an unthinking commitment to with approbation—as the book’s epi-
the ethnonationalist program of the Is- graph—the late Tony Judt’s statement
raeli right—Cypel has only harsh words in 2003 that “the depressing truth
for the community and especially for the today is that Israel is bad for the Jews.”
organization that claims to speak for it, This seems a lot like saying that Italy
the Representative Council of Jewish is bad for the Italians, which may well
Institutions in France. He also mocks have been true, in some sense, from
French Jewish intellectuals for their pub- the 1920s through the early 1940s but
lic silence when it comes to Israel. can hardly be an enduring theorem; or
that the United States under Trump was
bad for the Americans. Most states, es-
T here is another element in the trans- pecially ethno-nation-states, are quite
formation of this former Zionist into a fe- often bad for their citizens, and it
rocious critic of Israel. Cypel remembers sometimes, indeed often, seems that a
from his childhood the war the French self- destructive telos is built into the
fought to maintain their colony in Alge- very notion of an ethnocratic nation-
ria. As a student in Jerusalem in 1969— alist polity. But Judt’s statement, and
The New York Review
Cypel’s citation of it, smack of Jewish
exceptionalism. For centuries the Jews,
with good reasons to habitually fear the
worst, have viewed any event in light of
the question “Is it good or bad for the
Jews?” Now they have a state of their
own, and the question is still there. It
might be better to ask if Israeli policies
are good for Israeli citizens and for the
Palestinians who share with them the
land west of the Jordan River. To the ex-
tent that Jewish communities through-
out the world support current Israeli
policies, they, too, bear some responsi-
bility for the evils of the occupation. On
a good day, I sometimes manage to be-
lieve that a time will come when Israel
will revert to its roots in the humane
side of the Jewish tradition and the uni-
versal values articulated by the Hebrew
prophets. That day seems far away.
T here is not much point in rehears-
ing here the well-known litany of state
terror and abuse that define the Israeli
occupation. The information is there
for all to see, in Cypel’s eloquent J’ac-
cuse and elsewhere (the website of
the Israeli human rights organization
B’tselem, for example). The disjunc-
tion between the ethical vision of the
biblical prophets and the reality of life
in the West Bank and Gaza has already
opened up a fissure between Israel and
some progressive Jewish communities
in the Western world, especially in
America (not yet, perhaps, in France,
if Cypel is right). That gap, I believe,
will widen. It also exists in the liberal,
younger wing of the Democratic Party
in the US. That doesn’t mean that the
Judt- Cypel axiom is acceptable to
these critics of Israeli policy. It does
mean that new and perhaps more ef-
fective forms of pressure on Israel are
beginning to take practical form.
It is important to note, however, from
an internal Israeli perspective, that the
days are over when presenting the crimes
in the occupied territories to the Israeli
media, and thus to the wider public,
might have some positive, constraining
effect. Put simply, no one really cares.
More precisely, judging by the results of
the four recent elections, something like
a third to half of the population ardently
support the policy of repression, expul-
sion, and escalating violence directed
at Palestinians. Many among the other
two thirds or so are unhappy with this
policy, but only a tiny minority are pre-
pared to do anything to stop it.
That passivity and/or indifference
constitute the heart of the problem.
They are far worse and infinitely more
consequential than anything the settlers
or soldiers can do. Without the com-
pliance of the vast majority of Israe-
lis, state-sponsored terror on the West
Bank could not continue to run wild.
One can sometimes hear the clucking
of tongues—not much more than that.
Perhaps the great defender of human
rights Michael Sfard is right when he
says that someday, when the occupation
has finally ended, nearly everyone in
Israel will claim retroactively that they
were against it from the beginning.
A form of mass protest did develop
in Israel over the last two years with
the aim of removing Benjamin Net-
anyahu from office—certainly a wor-
thy goal. For months, many thousands,
sometimes tens of thousands, came
to Jerusalem every Saturday night to
demonstrate outside the prime minis-
ter’s residence. Ultimately, they suc-
February 10, 2022
ceeded, at least for now. But Netanyahu
was an easy target. How much men-
dacity, venality, and sheer selfishness
on the part of a leading politician does
it take to get a decent citizen into the
streets? However, it was not the occu-
pation that moved many of these pro-
testers. They wanted to rid themselves
of a prime minister who, in order to
remain in power, was undermining the
entire fabric of state institutions, in-
cluding the courts, and who had culti-
vated a culture of rabid hatred for any
opponent, from within or from without,
along with a personality cult such as
one sees in authoritarian regimes.
Urgent ethical quandaries remain to
torment those of us who live in Israel.
What about the minimal moral basis
of statehood, and the social contract
rooted in some notion of decency, that
political theorists from Locke to Rawls
and Walzer have posited? What hap-
pens to a state in which moral abomina-
tions serving utilitarian considerations
become routine? Does such a state for-
feit its legitimacy? Can it redeem itself,
and if so, how? Or is sheer force, in the
end, immune to ethical considerations?
Cypel quotes Netanyahu:
In the Middle East, and in many
parts of the world, there is a sim-
ple truth—there is no place for
the weak. The weak crumble, are
slaughtered, and are erased from
history while the strong, for good
or for ill, survive. The strong are
respected, and alliances are made
with the strong, and in the end
peace is made with the strong.
I ’d like to bring such questions down
to a concrete, more personal perspec-
tive. There is, unfortunately, no lack of
instances we could examine. Here is one
not atypical of the Israeli-Palestinian sit-
uation—the case of Harun Abu Aram,
twenty-four years old, from the village
of al-Rakiz in the South Hebron hills.
On January 1, 2021, Harun’s neigh-
bor Ashraf was fixing a roof over his
sheep pen. Five soldiers, apparently
summoned by the settlers of the nearby
illegal outposts of Avigail or Chavat
Maon, came to the village, invaded
Ashraf’s house, and discovered there,
horror of horrors, a small electric gen-
erator. (Al-Rakiz is not attached to the
electrical grid.) The soldiers seized the
generator. Ashraf protested. A scuf-
fle developed. Harun’s father, Rasmi,
came running to help his friend and,
like Ashraf, was beaten and kicked
by the soldiers. Harun, hearing what
was happening, rushed to the scene.
For a few minutes, there was a tug- of-
war between the soldiers and the Pal-
estinians, and the generator changed
hands several times. Then one of the
soldiers, standing to the side and in
no danger, shot Harun at point-blank
range, hitting him in the neck. He fell
to the ground, his spinal cord severed
between vertebrae six and seven.
The soldiers, now the proud owners
of the generator, set up a roadblock at
the main road in and out of the village.
Here comes the worst part of the story.
Rasmi and Ashraf managed to get
Harun into a car in order to drive him
to a hospital, but the soldiers, including
the one who shot Harun, stopped the
vehicle and shot at its tires, punctur-
ing one of them. Miraculously, Ashraf
managed to drive the car on three
wheels past the roadblock and into
the village of at-Tuwani, where Harun
was transferred to another car, which,
after running into another military
roadblock, finally got him to a hospital.
The doctors said that if they’d come ten
minutes later, Harun would have died.
Harun is paralyzed from the neck The Calvin & Rose G Hoffman
down. After many months in hospital, Prize for a Distinguished
he can again breathe without assistance. Scholarly Essay on
He is now in a specially equipped house
in the town of Yata and requires twenty- Christopher Marlowe
four-hour care. His life is ruined. Before
Entries are now invited for the thirty-second
the incident, he was about to be mar-
Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Prize to be
ried. The army demolished the house
awarded in December 2022.
his father had built for the young cou-
ple, one of many recurrent demolitions The closing date for entries to be received is
1st September 2022.
in al-Rakiz. The soldier who shot Harun
has not been punished, and the State of If you wish to enter the competition, an
Israel has refused to take any responsi- application form and further details must
bility for Harun’s fate or to cover any of first be obtained from:
the enormous costs of his hospital stay. The Hoffman Administrator
This is a single instance among thou- The King’s School
sands. The essential point is that what-
ever the soldier who shot Harun was
25 The Precincts
Canterbury
thinking—maybe he panicked, maybe
he was taught to hate Palestinians—the Kent CT1 2ES
incident illuminates the inner logic of England
the Israeli occupation as a whole. A
Email: bursar@kings-bursary.co.uk
Palestinian should not have a genera-
tor, nor should he fix his fence or sheep The Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Marlowe Memorial
pen. A Palestinian must never protest Trust is a charity dedicated to research into the life
or disobey a soldier. A Palestinian can and work of Christopher Marlowe (no. 289971)
be killed by settlers or soldiers with im-
punity. A Palestinian will never receive
justice in the military courts that oper-
ate in the territories. And so on. Given
that logic, what happened to Harun,
and to countless other Palestinians
over the past decades, was natural, in
fact inevitable. It is wrong to class it as
a tragic mistake. Once the soldiers en-
tered the village on their ugly mission,
all the rest unfolded along familiar
lines. The ultimate malice, no doubt a
decision on the part of those same sol-
diers, took place at the two roadblocks.
Charles de Gaulle, reelected pres- SHAKESPEARE SONNET 116
ident in 1958 to keep Algeria French, MÖBIUS BRACELET
came to realize that the very survival Several lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet
of France as a civilization among the 116 are engraved on this sterling silver
nations of the world required that it möbius bracelet: “Let me not to the mar-
extricate itself from Algeria. Israel has riage of true minds admit impediments.
yet to achieve a similar understanding Love is not love which alters when it al-
about the occupied Palestinian territo- teration finds, or bends with the remover
ries. Even one Harun vitiates the state’s to remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
claim to common decency and indeli- that looks on tempests and is never shak-
bly stains its ethical core. And Harun is en; it is the star to every wand’ring bark,
by no means alone. whose worth’s unknown, although his
I don’t believe in a statistical calcu- height be taken.” Bracelet is approximately
lus of morals. Any evil act has its own 2½" wide. Made in the U.S.A.
intrinsic horror, its own lurid integrity. #05-LS02B • $125
We will never be able to tally up the
number of crimes committed by Is-
raelis against Palestinians and weigh
them against the crimes committed by
Palestinians against Jews, as if one side
could “win” in the giant sweepstakes of
victimhood. Ultimately, the two sides
will either lose everything together or
win together, despite their shared be-
lief that the conflict is a zero-sum game.
What we can say is that the Israeli
side is still, after fifty-five years, main- EDWARD GOREY STERLING
taining in the Palestinian territories a HEART CAT PIN
system that ruthlessly causes the death This gently romantic 1⅞"wide x 1½"long
or wounding of innocents in large num- sterling silver pin is a perfect gift for
bers, just as it continues to steal more Valentine’s Day or an anniversary, or any
and more Palestinian land with the occasion when one wants to express affec-
backing of the Israeli courts. It would tion, or something stronger. Edward Gorey’s
also be fair to say that the situation is signature is on the back of the heart. The
deteriorating from day to day. Those image is from an unpublished series of
who know that situation firsthand also drawings by Edward Gorey.
know that there is no possible way to
#05-EGHCP • $86
justify it or to make sense of it without
resorting to a claim that eternal Israeli Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
supremacy over all Palestinians is a TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
worthy and attainable aim. Q 646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
—January 12, 2022
27

Empty Wardrobes
by Maria Judite de Carvalho,
translated from the Portuguese
by Margaret Jull Costa,
with an introduction
by Kate Zambreno.
Two Lines, 183 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Empty Wardrobes is an appropriate if
brutally reductive title for this unspar-
ing depiction of the lives of women in
mid-twentieth- century Lisbon, exe-
cuted by the Portuguese writer Maria
Judite de Carvalho (1921–1998) as pre-
cisely and without sentiment as an au-
topsy. Originally published in 1966, it
is the first work by Carvalho to appear
in English, in what seems an excellent
translation by Margaret Jull Costa.
Deftly and cunningly written, narrated
by an observer who glides in and out of
the text with the patrician disdain of a
Nabokov character, Empty Wardrobes
is gradually revealed to be a double
portrait: at its core are two middle-
aged Portuguese women—two “empty
wardrobes”—ironically linked by their
relationship to a preening cad who
treats both of them badly and walks
away blithely untouched by either.
Though in her impassioned introduc-
tion Kate Zambreno describes Empty
Wardrobes as “a hilarious and devastat-
ing novel of a traditional Catholic wid-
ow’s consciousness,” there is not much
that is even mildly amusing in Carval-
ho’s steely, unadorned prose; certainly
there is little Catholic consciousness in
the incurious Dora Rosário and virtu-
ally nothing of the familiar domestic
impedimenta of Catholicism. Dora
doesn’t observe the sacraments, even
confession and communion; we never
see her attending mass; if she is con-
cerned with the condition of her soul,
we are not made aware of it; her “re-
ligion” is the observation of unvary-
ing routine performed with “eyes . . . as
dull as an empty house or unnaturally
bright when she became excited.”
Zambreno also describes the novel,
for all its domestic interiority and appar-
ent indifference to history, as a “deeply
political” work of fiction reflecting “the
ambient cruelty of patriarchy, an op-
pression even more severe in the God,
Fatherland, and Family authoritarian-
ism of the Salazar regime [1932–1968]
in Portugal.” Indeed, a stifling sort of
ether wafts from the cramped interi-
ors of Empty Wardrobes: Dora is first
the manager of an antiques shop with
few customers, then a saleswoman in
a cheap furniture store selling “basic
pinewood furniture, mattresses, sofas.”
Yet it’s difficult to see how her con-
genital dullness can be attributed to
the reign of a patriarchal dictator, for
surely an adult so lacking in autonomy
is a special case; her daughter, who is
determined to live a very different sort
of life, tells her, “You married a man
who was poor and lazy. . . . I’m going to
marry a rich, energetic man who loves
me.”
Maddeningly naive, passive, and
unquestioning in her continued de-
votion to the deceased husband who
left her penniless and with a child to
raise, Dora is, at thirty- six, already
“ageless and hopeless,” in her daugh-
ter’s words. She is dissected by Manu-
ela, the cold- eyed and unsentimental
28
Left Behind in Lisbon
Joyce Carol Oates
Paula Rego: In the Comfort of the Bonnet, 2001–2002
narrator, as if she were a laboratory
specimen:
She was always a woman of few
words. She never said more than
was strictly necessary—the bare
indispensable minimum. . . . She
would sit quite still then, her face a
blank, like someone poised on the
edge of an ellipsis or standing hes-
itantly at the sea’s edge in winter,
and at such moments, all the light
would go out of her eyes as if ab-
sorbed by a piece of blotting paper;
for all I know, she may still be like
that, because I never saw her again.
And later:
She had neat, regular features, but
had never done anything to help
nature. Never. She seemed, rather,
to be unconsciously intent on ham-
pering it. You could describe her
face as lackluster: matte skin, pale
lips, dull, straight brown hair tied
back. . . . She took so little trouble
over how she dressed that even her
body went unnoticed.
Not sympathy but a detached sort of
cruelty characterizes Manuela’s in-
terest in Dora, which invariably turns
upon Dora’s flaws and her defeated
prospects; canny, icily detached, and
near- omniscient, Manuela’s perspec-
tive seems identical with the author’s,
ings for one another and remain hos-
Paula Rego/Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
tile and estranged. Manuela thinks,
with characteristic disdain, “I thought
that perhaps what [Dora] needed was
a good shake or, better still, an X-ray,
so we could see if she did actually have
more inside her than just lungs and a
digestive system.”
I n her premature but life- defining wid-
owhood, Dora is a Portuguese equiva-
lent of those pathetic persons “outcast
from life’s feast,” in James Joyce’s poi-
gnant phrase. She is emotionally and
sexually bereft; her “threadbare coat,
with runs in her stockings, [and] un-
tidy hair” unsex her as mercilessly as
her need for money deprives her wid-
owhood of romantic nostalgia. Dora
reminds us of those lonely, left-behind
Dubliners inhabiting the penumbra
of Joyce’s richly peopled Irish world,
involuntarily celibate casualties of a
repressive Roman Catholicism that
provided no meaningful occupation
for unmarried women apart from the
convent.
We may also think of Brian Moore’s
most “painful case”: the luckless her-
oine of Judith Hearne, for whom vir-
ginity has become a kind of curse and
episodes of drunken forgetfulness her
only solace. With a kindred subtlety
and sympathy Colm Tóibín has written
of more contemporary Irish outcasts
from life’s feast, notably the widowed
Nora of Nora Webster in her similarly
claustrophobic, tight-knit, and con-
scribed small-town Irish world; and
there are the achingly lonely unmar-
ried Englishwomen in the novels of
Anita Brookner, wraithlike figures
scarcely distinguishable from one an-
other in their yearning for a love that
might provide them with some measure
for we never see Dora behaving in a of self- definition in a man’s world.
way that refutes Manuela’s judgment. Such figures of female pathos are
Indeed, the narrative “I” in Empty virtually the only inhabitants of Car-
Wardrobes is paradoxical: as a voyeur valho’s Lisbon, as sparely presented
in Dora’s life Manuela is both nowhere as a landscape by de Chirico, but they
and everywhere, only briefly in Dora’s lack the inner lyricism of Tóibín’s and
presence and the rest of the time imag- Brookner’s women. They certainly
ining scenes that (presumably) take lack the ferocious resentments and
place beyond her scrutiny. Disarmingly strategies of self- determination found
Manuela says of herself: in the female characters of Carvalho’s
contemporary Doris Lessing. Apart
I’m not part of this story—if you from Dora there are two other wid-
can call it that—I’m a mere bit- ows—empty wardrobes—as well as
part player of the kind that has not Manuela; these are women whom life
even a generic name, and never has also left behind, without men and
will have, not even in any subse- without meaningful employment or
quent stories, because we simply interests. “When single women reach
lack all dramatic vocation. a certain age, they’re so . . . frightening.
They wither away, don’t they?” Dora’s
She calls herself, not apologetically daughter, Lisa, asks tactlessly. Dora’s
but with a kind of pride, a “sterile mother-in-law, Ana, at least has money,
woman”—a woman who hasn’t wanted which gives her empty life a measure
children. of freedom. Dora’s Aunt Júlia, another
In a more conventional novel, cer- widow—“a small, serene, pleasant
tainly in one exploring feminist bonds woman, slightly stooped. . . . A hiero-
of sisterhood within a stultifying patri- glyph that was more like a meaningless
archal culture, as in the fiction of Elena doodle”—takes refuge in hallucinatory
Ferrante, we would likely see Manuela, memories and silly dreams of flying
abandoned by her longtime lover for saucers, which Dora professes to envy:
a younger woman, joining forces with “At least she believes in something.”
Dora; and each woman, victimized by (Aunt Júlia is characterized as an el-
men, would become stronger as a con- derly, senile woman, so it’s something
sequence. But Carvalho is not inter- of a shock when we learn that she is
ested in feminist romance, any more only in her late forties!) And Lisa,
than she is interested in traditional advantaged by a heedless youth and
romance: rivals within the patriarchy, beauty, impetuously marries the very
women have no instinctive sisterly feel- man, more than twenty years her se-
The New York Review
nior, who has ruined what remained of
her mother’s atrophied life.
Few scenes in Empty Wardrobes
are dramatized, as if Manuela, recall-
ing the banality of her subject, can
scarcely be troubled to evoke them.
She resorts instead to desultory sum-
maries: “And so it was. [Dora] got the
job, bought the books, and she did
learn, earning enough money over the
subsequent years to send her daugh-
ter to a school for rich kids.” Mired
in a mourning for her husband that
seems a consequence more of an inad-
equacy of imagination than of genu-
ine feeling for him, Dora is incapable
of initiating change in her life: things
are done for her, and to her. A kindly
friend arranges for her to have the
undemanding but (improbably) well-
paying job in the antiques store, which
spares her the ignominy of having to
beg for favors and money from her
late husband’s friends. In this position
she drifts like a sleepwalker, in an
unvarying routine; no time seems to
pass in her stultified life except for her
daughter growing out of childhood
and into an independent adolescence.
After a decade of widowhood Dora’s
sole expression of autonomy is to have
her hair styled and to purchase some
new clothes, provoking a male acquain-
tance to inquire, “What the hell has
happened to her?” As in Tóibín’s Nora
Webster, a still-youthful widow seems
to be about to reenter the world after a
prolonged emotional stasis, surprising
everyone who knows her; but Carvalho
has another, more humiliating fate in
mind for Dora.
Empty Wardrobes is a short novel
that seems longer than it is, for it moves
with glacial slowness, as if in the grip of
inertia. Years pass in Dora’s life in the
space of a paragraph, yet she remains
unchanged, a cipher. New clothes, a
new hairstyle, will not infuse life into
so shallow an individual. Cynically
Manuela observes:
In the olden days, some women
would shut themselves away in
their houses for good when their
husbands died. Some didn’t even
let the sun in, perhaps because
they would find its cheerful face
too shocking. Dora Rosário went
to work . . . but when she returned
home at the end of the day, it was
as if she had never left.
D ora’s deceased husband, Duarte,
whom she had absurdly idolized, had
prided himself on his very lack of
ambition:
I’m not the kind of man who wants
to rise in the world at the expense
of others, or indeed of myself.
That smacks too much of wheeling
and dealing. . . . Nor am I going to
stand up in the marketplace list-
ing my many qualities and putting
a price on them. I just let myself
drift, that’s all I can do and all I
want to do.
Here at least is the very antithesis of
machismo, one thinks, until it becomes
clear that swaggering male vanity can
take many forms.
There is no spiritual or religious
quality to Duarte’s indifference to the
marketplace; he isn’t an ascetic who
has repudiated a materialistic life, only
the coddled son of a well-to- do mother
February 10, 2022
who has indulged and enabled his nar-
cissism. Dora understands this but
lacks the courage to object: “Had she
said anything . . . it would have spoiled
everything”—that is, the folie à deux
of a marriage in which the husband
is placed on a pedestal for the wife to
admire regardless of his flaws. Though
it’s stated repeatedly that Dora loves
Duarte very much, we see little evi-
dence of any physical or emotional at-
traction between them; Duarte seems
as lackluster and sexless as Dora, an
underimagined character in an under-
imagined narrative. When he becomes
ill he is dispatched within a paragraph,
leaving Dora stunned:
When Duarte died, and Dora real-
ized that he was lost forever, it was
as if the earth around her shook,
and only the tiny scrap of earth be-
neath her feet remained still. Her
world, already sparsely and rather
poorly populated, was suddenly
deserted.
Dora wants her grief to remain “uncon-
taminated,” but with only a small pen-
sion from Duarte’s employer to support
herself and her daughter, “thus began
her calvary, her daily round”—search-
ing newspaper ads for jobs, begging for
small sums of money from everyone
she knows, who soon come to resent
her even as they pity her.
This collision of the widow’s private
grief with the public fact of her dimin-
ished financial state, as a catalyst for
Dora’s quasi awakening, comes as a
ODE TO FEBRUARY
IN NEW YORK
Even in week
one you show up
scuffed and muddy
it’s just your nature
and no one
likes you
but we drive
through your town
of boot and
bouillon factories
into March with
its shoe store
and soup restaurant.
Forty-five years
ago a friend
advised I dress
up for you or
be an emotional
goner—so true!
From within the
walled city of your
calendar month
the special editions
sail back over
unread because
being more experienced
than us who look down
our noses at you
you take
the high ground
and cultivate compassion
grant us permission
to not look
welcome development in the novel. It
is bluntly completed by her mother-
in-law’s decision to apply a “fixation
abscess” to her: “You need such an
abscess, and I’m the cruel doctor
who’s going to create it and make you
suffer.” In the novel’s most dramatic
scene, Ana tells Dora that Duarte
had been thinking of leaving her be-
fore he became ill, to live with another
woman:
A work colleague of his, I think,
although I can’t remember her
name anymore. He’d made up his
mind. For once in his life, he was
going to take the initiative, a real
novelty. . . . I didn’t try to dissuade
him. I thought perhaps that other
woman might make something of
him. But then he fell ill. . . . She
was a small, nervous woman, like
a very intelligent mouse.
Following this revelation, which
comes a decade after her husband’s
death, Dora is catapulted into an al-
tered consciousness that inspires Car-
valho to her most precise and poetic
language, suggesting the novel’s latent
possibilities, largely unexplored:
She wanted to sleep, to escape
herself, to escape the new life she
would now be obliged to live, but
the paths into sleep were more dif-
ficult, more complicated than ever.
Cul- de-sacs, long rivers with no
tributaries and no sea, no sources
either, rocky mountains that she
yet again at
the photos or relive
the country’s
close call;
having been doled
the fewest days
you know enough
is enough of
the year before
so I vote you as
officially starting
the year
and resolve to see
your strengths. Even
your two r’s
analogy for
the way we stub
our toes getting
through time—
how like real life
you are. We are
hopeful creatures;
what covers up
the mess also
feeds the bulbs
and we need that
to elevate our
self-image which
can be terribly low
just now, so
thank you.
—Jessica Greenbaum
would have to scale in order to see
over to the other side, to another
landscape.
Is Dora really courageous enough
to venture into this foreign landscape?
Can she transform the deep hurt of
her husband’s infidelity into a repu-
diation of him, and of her prescribed
role as his widow? Carvalho leads the
reader to expect liberation when, in an
ironic reversal, Dora’s trust in a male
acquaintance, Ernesto, by chance the
longtime lover of Manuela, leads to a
near-fatal car crash that leaves Ernesto,
the driver, untouched but Dora physi-
cally disfigured, with a scar that runs
“diagonally from her forehead to half-
way down her cheek.” Her humiliation
is complete.
E mpty Wardrobes is a bleak, embit-
tered novel holding little possibility of
happiness except through delusion; not
even a sisterhood of outcasts is possible
for the women scorned by men. Man-
uela observes with chilling detachment
as Dora falters in her attempt to estab-
lish a rapport with her:
[Dora] couldn’t find quite what it
was she meant, and I didn’t help
her in the search. . . . It was raining,
and she was a gray woman, slightly
bent, lost in a plundered city de-
serted after the plague. I noticed
that she walked uncertainly, hes-
itantly, teetering slightly, as if she
were a little drunk or had not quite
woken up from a long nap.
Shrewd and coolly distanced from life
as she imagines herself, Manuela is
nonetheless “absolutely flabbergasted”
and “lost for words” when Ernesto
informs her bluntly that he is leaving
her to marry the seventeen-year- old
Lisa.
As Manuela has observed earlier,
“The calm waters of an apparently
stagnant river can, at a certain point,
form a torrent but then, later, continue
serenely on their way.” So, too, the
trancelike stasis of Empty Wardrobes
is interrupted by a flurry of drama—a
belated revelation of an infidelity, a
devastating car crash—and the final-
ity of despair, which will then subside
into the banal and everyday. At the
novel’s end one waits in vain for Man-
uela to at least embrace the scarred
Dora in recognition of their common
loss; but Manuela, too wounded to
give solace to another, stands stiffly
apart as Dora leaves her apartment.
Pride dooms Manuela to solitude as
rain continues to fall, “passively, from
an old and ailing sky, bleary- eyed
and weary with life. Now that I lived
alone, it was a day like so many oth-
ers. Another number to be subtracted
from my account.”
Since relatively little Portuguese
fiction is translated and published in
the US, Empty Wardrobes is of par-
ticular interest to American readers.
One might wish for more nuanced
characters and a more capacious rep-
resentation of Portuguese life, which is
surely more varied and engaging than
suggested here, but there is no doubt-
ing the authenticity of Carvalho’s vi-
sion and the originality and severity
of her voice, as scathing and pitiless
in her depiction of “empty” women as
in her depiction of oafish swaggering
machismo. Q
29
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 XIII.
SPECIFICATIONS.

Specifications should cover three principal points:

Physical properties: Elastic limit; ultimate tensile strength;
elongation; reduction of area.
Chemical constituents: Limiting silicon, phosphorus, sulphur,
manganese, and copper; all other elements to be absent or mere
traces in quantity, except carbon.
Finish and general condition: Fixing limit of variation in size from
a given standard; conditions as to pipes, seams, laps, uniformity of
grain, and other defects; no red-shortness.

PHYSICAL PROPERTIES.
It has been shown in Chap. V that tensile strength may be had
from 46,800 lbs. per square inch to 248,700 lbs. per square inch.
There are published in many transactions and technical
periodicals thousands of tests giving elastic and ultimate strength,
ductility, etc., so that every engineer can find easily what has been
done to guide him as to what he can get.
In almost every case the engineer must be the judge as to the
requirements in each; therefore it would be useless to attempt to lay
down any fixed rules or limits.
Many engineers adhere to low tenacity and high ductility in the
belief that they are securing that material which will be safest against
sudden shocks and violent accidental strains.
Theoretically this appears to be correct, but if the statements
made in the preceding chapters are credible it is plain that the limit to
such safety can be passed, and that in insisting upon too low
tenacity and high ductility the engineer may be getting simply a
rotten, microscopically unsound material, through no fault of the
manufacturer, who has been compelled to overmelt or overblow his
steel to meet the requirements, and so reducing the quality of
otherwise good material at no saving in cost to himself, and at a
considerable cost in quality to the consumer.
Any manufacturer would rather check his melt between 10 and
15 carbon, or stop his blow so as to be sure not to overblow, if he
were asked to do so, because it would save him time and expense,
and it would yield sounder, better, and easier working steel.
It may not be wise yet for an engineer to fix limits as to blowing or
melting, for the reason that neither he nor his assistants would know
how to insure compliance, and in attempting to do it they might
interfere too far with manufacturing operations and so involve
themselves in responsibilities which they ought not to assume.
On the other hand, if they will let the carbon and tensile strength
run up a little and reduce ductility slightly, it is safe to say that any
manufacturer will be glad of the chance to help them to get the best
results, which involve no extra cost.
Boiler-steel and rivet-steel usually suffer the most in this respect.
A boiler should be tough, yet it is the belief of the author that boilers
made of the 46,800-lb. steel of which the analysis is given in Chap. V
would not last half as long as boilers made of 65,000-lb. to 70,000-lb.
steel when the increased strength was gained by added carbon and
no overmelting was allowed.
In the same table the “Crucible-sheet” column gives a mean of 24
tests, and a mean analysis, of boiler-steel which has been in use in
12 boilers for nearly 16 years. The boilers are in perfectly good
condition; they have been subjected to severe and very irregular
usage, and they have been in every way satisfactory. Only one test-
piece of the 24 was mild enough to stand the ordinary bending test
after quenching.
 That 46,800-lb. steel is remarkably pure chemically; it is
unusually red-short. It would appear to some to be an ideal rivet-
steel; it would stand a very high heat, it would head well and finish
beautifully under a button-set. There is every probability that the
majority of rivets driven of that steel would be cracked on the under
side of the head, where the cracks would never be discovered until
in service the heads flew off.
Rails are usually made of 40 to 45 carbon, tires from .65 up to 80
carbon, crank-pins as high as 70 carbon, with 85,000 lbs. to 95,000
lbs. tensile strength and 12% to 15% elongation.
It is difficult to see how a bridge or a boiler is to be subjected to
any such violent usage as these receive daily; and while it is not
advised that even 40 carbon should be used in boilers or bridges,
although it would be perfectly safe, it does seem to be unreasonable
to run to the other extreme to the injury of the material.
For steel for springs, and for all sorts of tools that are to be
tempered, there is no need of a specification of physical properties
as they are indicated by testing-machines.
The requirement that they shall harden safely and do good work
afterwards involves necessarily, high steel of suitable quality.

CHEMICAL CONSTITUENTS.
No engineer should, unless he be an expert steel-maker, attempt
to specify an exact chemical formula and a corresponding physical
requirement; in doing so he would probably make two requirements
which could not be obtained in one piece of steel, and so subject
himself to a back down or to ridicule, or both.
On the other hand, he may properly, and he should fix, a limit
beyond which the hurtful elements would not be tolerated.
Notwithstanding satisfactory machine tests, successful shop-work,
and a liberal margin of safety, no steel can be relied upon that is
overloaded with phosphorus, sulphur, manganese, oxygen,
antimony, arsenic, or nitrogen.
 In regard to silicon, it is common to have as much as 20 to 25
points in tires, with 55 to 80 carbon; such tires are made by the best
manufacturers, and they endure well. But it is certain that good,
sound steel can be made for any purpose with silicon not exceeding
10.
Structural steel can be made cheaply within the following limits:

Silicon < .10

Phosphorus < .05
Sulphur < .02
Manganese < .50 or even < .30
Copper < .03
Carbon to meet the physical requirements.
Steel made within these limits and not overblown or overmelted
must be better in every way than steel of

Silicon > .20

Phosphorus > .08
Sulphur > .05
Manganese > .60
Carbon to meet the same requirements
A steel of the latter composition, or with no fixed limits, may be
made cheaper than the first by a dollar or two a ton; but for any large
lot it is believed that the first specification would be bid to at as low a
price as if there were no specification; competition among
manufacturers would fix that. At any rate there is no reason why an
engineer should refuse to demand fairly pure material when he can
do so at little or no extra cost.
Arsenic, antimony, or any other elements should be absent, or <
.005.
 FINISH AND GENERAL CONDITIONS.
As there can be no such thing as exact work done, there must be
some tolerance as to variation in size. In standard sections, sheets,
and plates this is usually covered by a percentage of weight; in
forgings or any pieces that are to be machined the consumer should
allow enough to insure a clean, sound surface. But it would be
unwise to lay down any rule here, because conditions vary; a rolled
round bar may finish nicely by a cut of from ¹/₃₂ to ¹/₁₆ of an inch, and
so also a neatly dropped forging; an ordinary hammered forging
might require a cut of ¼ or ⅜ of an inch; such a forging might be
made closer to size at a cost for extra time at the hammer far
exceeding the saving of cost in the lathe. These are cases where
common-sense and good judgment must govern.
Pipes should not be tolerated if they can be discovered; because
a pipe appears small in the end of a bar it is no evidence that it is not
larger farther in.
Seams should not be allowed in any steel that is to be hardened;
they should be a minimum in any steel, as they are of no possible
use; small seams when not too numerous may do no harm in
structural or machinery steel, and consumers should be reasonable
in regard to them, or else they may have too high prices put upon
their work, or too high heat used in efforts to close the last few
harmless seams.
Burns, rough, ragged holes in the faces or on the corners, are
inexcusable and should be rejected; the steel has been abused, or it
is red-short; in either case the ragged breaks are good starting-
points for final rupture.
Laps should not be permitted; they are evidences of
carelessness; there can be no excuse for them.
Fins are sometimes unavoidable in a difficult shape; for instance,
if a trapezoid is wanted, it may be rolled in this form:
or in this:

The consumer must decide which; if he wants sharp angles he

must accept the fin and cut it off, or have it cut off by the
manufacturer.
Rivet-steel should be tested rigidly for red-shortness, because
red-short steel may crack under the head as the steel cools.
Emphasis is laid upon this because engineers will insist upon
excessive ductility in rivet-steel, not realizing that they may be
requiring the manufacturer to overdose his steel with oxygen to its
serious injury.
No sharp re-entrant angles should be allowed under any
circumstances where there is a possibility of vibrations running
through the mass. All re-entrant angles should be filleted neatly.
No deep tool-marks should be allowed; a fine line scored around
a piece by a lathe-tool, or a sharp line cut in a surface by a planing-
tool will fix a line of fracture as neatly as a diamond-scratch will do it
on a piece of glass.
Indentations by hammers or sledges should be avoided; they
may not be as dangerous as lathe-cuts, but they can do no good,
and therefore they are of no use.
 XIV.
HUMBUGS.

Steel is of such universal use and interest in all of the arts that it
attracts the attention of would-be inventors perhaps more than any
other one material.
Half-informed, or wholly uninformed, men get a smattering of
knowledge of some one or more of the well-known properties of
steel, make an experiment which produces a result that is new and
startling to them, and at once imagine that they have made a
discovery; this they proceed to patent and then offer it to the world
with a great flourish of trumpets.
Many steel-workers, even men of skill, who know something of
the difficulties that follow irregular work, or who are not quite fully
informed as to the properties of steel, seize upon these discoveries
in the hope that they have found a royal road to success where all
old pitfalls are removed and their path is made easy.
Not wishing to discourage pioneers in legitimate efforts to
improve, it is the object of this chapter to warn them against being
too ready to spend their money because of flaming circulars or glib
tongues. It is the duty and the interest of a steel-maker to examine
and test every apparently new suggestion, for the reason that there
is still room for improvement, and he should let no opportunity for a
betterment slip past him.
As a rule the steel-maker does test every claim that is laid before
him, unless it be a repetition of some old plan long since tried and
found worthless. This is the bane of the steel-maker’s life, and yet he
must keep at this work so that he may know for himself whether
anything of value has been discovered, and also that he may advise
his clientage properly.
 Inventions relating to the manufacture of steel have no interest
for steel-users except as lively manufacturers may adopt the
mistaken plan of flourishing trumpets to attract trade, not always
giving a corresponding benefit to the consumer.
Examples of this sort of thing may be illustrated by so-called
phosphorus steel, silicon steel, and aluminum steel; also the case
mentioned before of parties recommending seams as evidences of
excellence in high steel. Such efforts are sometimes costly to
consumers until active competitive manufacturers expose the
humbug.
Among the most absurd of such claims are those where a
nostrum is used to convert ordinary Bessemer or open-hearth steel
into the finest of tool-steel, equal to the best crucible-steel; for
example, a patent to convert mild Bessemer steel into the finest tool-
steel by merely carbonizing it by the old cementation process; this
takes no account of the silicon, manganese, oxygen, and nitrogen in
the mild Bessemer, makes no provision for their removal, and
involves a costly method of putting carbon into poor stock in face of
the fact that a Bessemer steel maker can put the same amount of
carbon there at practically no cost, and so produce a better material.
Among the humbugs that do not involve the manufacturer, the pet
one is a nostrum for restoring burnt steel; these have been evolved
by the dozen, in face of the fact that burned steel cannot be restored
except by smelting, and that overheated steel, coarse-grained steel,
can be restored by merely heating it to the right temperature, a
process which has been explained fully in Chapter VI.
Another pet is some greasy compound for toughening high steel
so as to make it do more work. This is done by heating the steel to
about recalescence and plunging it into the grease, perhaps once, or
possibly two or three times; then working it into a tool and
proceeding in the ordinary way. This will make a good tool; it is the
partial annealing plan explained in a previous chapter. Now take a
similar piece of steel, heat it the same way, lay it down in a warm,
dry place alongside the forge-fire, and let it cool; then heat it and
work it into a tool and it will beat the greased tool.
 When all of these operations of restoring, partial annealing,
annealing, etc., depend merely upon temperature and rate of
cooling, why spend money for nostrums that add no possible
benefit?
There is room for improvement in steel, great room for great
improvements; they will come in time as science and knowledge
advance, and great benefits to the consumers will come with them.
This chapter is not written to place difficulties in the way of
legitimate improvement, but to warn unsuspecting people against
quackery. Some of the humbugs are honest productions of well-
meaning ignorance, and some that come from designing
manufacturers are not entitled to such charitable designation. A
knowledge of the simplest properties of steel will enable a thoughtful
man to judge as to whether a proposed improvement is likely to be of
any value or not, and the warnings given are intended as a
protection to the unsuspecting and credulous.
 XV.
CONCLUSIONS.

After perusal of the preceding chapters the reader may form a

hasty conclusion that if steel be so sensitive as it is stated to be its
use may be difficult and precarious, and that it must be handled in
fear and trembling, lest the result should be a dangerous structure,
and the builder must be in doubt as to its safety.
The conveyance of any such impressions is not intended at all;
emphasis has been laid upon practices that are hurtful in order that
every steel-user may know what to avoid, solely that he may then be
sure that he has the best, the most reliable, and most useful material
that is known to man.

WHAT TO AVOID.
He should avoid uneven heat, excessive heat, or too low heat.
The range between orange red and the heat that will granulate is so
great that no one who is not a bungler or indifferent need ever get
outside of it.
The uniformity of temperature that is insisted upon is so easily
seen that any person who is not color-blind should have no trouble in
securing it by the simplest manipulations of the furnace.
Practical uniformity of the work put on a piece is readily secured
by any mechanic of ordinary skill.
Red-short, cold-short, or honeycombed steel are easily detected,
and, under reasonable specifications, the steel-makers can as easily
avoid them.
Steel a little higher than most engineers favor in their
specifications is certainly as safe as, and likely to be sounder than,
extremely ductile steel.
Wild steel, resulting almost certainly in micro-honeycombs, if not
worse, can only be avoided by the co-operation of the manufacturer,
and engineers should impress this point with energy.
Such micro-unsoundness as is shown in Mr. Andrews’s report
upon a broken rail and propeller-shaft can be reduced to a minimum
by insisting upon reasonably pure steel.
If sulphur, phosphorus, silicon, and oxygen are kept at a
reasonable minimum, sulphides, phosphides, silicides or silicates,
and oxides must be at a corresponding minimum.
That there is much room for improvement in the manufacture of
steel is evident, and when means of getting rid of oxygen, nitrogen,
and all other undesirable elements have been found the steel of the
future will be very different in kindliness of working and in endurance
of strains than that with which we are familiar.
It is believed, however, that no matter how perfect the
manufacture may become, nor what the final theories of hardening,
etc., may be, the properties stated in these pages will remain the
same as long as steel continues to be essentially a union of iron and
carbon.
Some other alloy or compound may displace carbon steel, and
present an entirely new set of properties, but there is nothing of the
kind in sight now, and engineers need have no fear of having a new
art to learn very soon.
To one who has spent an ordinary business lifetime in making
steel, studying it, and working with it it becomes a subject of
absorbing interest, if not of love; and steel when handled reasonably
is so true that “true as steel” ceases to be a metaphor, it is then a
fact which fills him with the most entire confidence.
Once more, steel highly charged with sulphur, phosphorus,
arsenic, oxygen, and nitrogen is certainly highly charged with so
many elements of disintegration; it takes more serious harm from
ordinary deviations from good practice, such little irregularities as
occur inevitably in daily working, than steel does which is more free
from these elements.
Reasonably pure, sound, reliable steel can be had at moderate
cost, and all consumers should insist upon having it.
Regular, uniform, reliable working can be had where it is
required, and there should be no excuse for irregular grain,
overheated work, uneven work, or any other bungling. Where skill is
required and reasonable discipline is enforced, good work will not
cost any more than bad work.
Many people still hold to the idea that there are many mysteries
connected with steel, and that many unaccountable breaks occur
which make it an unreliable material. It is hoped that what has been
set down in these pages will go far to dissipate these supposed
mysteries, and to give confidence to steel-users.
Many breaks are unaccounted for, but it is not within the author’s
experience that any fracture ever occurred that could not have been
explained if it had been examined thoroughly in the light of what we
know now. There is much to be learned, but there are no mysteries.
 GLOSSARY.
There are many shop terms used in this book which may not be
familiar to all steel-users.
They are in common use in steel-manufactories, and definitions
of them will enable a steel-user to understand more clearly the
common talk he will hear in the shops.
Blow-holes.—Blow-holes are the small cavities, usually
spherical, which are formed in ingots as the steel congeals by
bubbles of gas which cannot escape through the already frozen
surface.
Burned.—Burned steel is steel that is reduced to oxide in part by
excessive heating.
Check.—A check is a small rupture caused by water; it may run
in any direction; it is usually not visible until steel is ruptured.
Chemical Numeration.—Chemical quantities are almost
universally expressed in hundredths of one per cent, as explained in
the body of the work. It is a very convenient numeration; any steel-
worker, melter, hammerman, etc., will talk of 20, or 50, or 130
carbon; or 8 phosphorus; or 10, 15, or 25 silicon, etc.; and will talk
intelligently, although he may not know the exact mathematical value
of these points.
Dead-melting; synonym, killing.—Dead-melting—killing—
means melting steel in the crucible or open hearth until it ceases to
boil or evolve gases; it is then dead, it lies quiet in the furnace, and
killed properly it will set in the moulds without rising or boiling.
Dry.—Steel is called dry when its fracture is sandy-looking,
without lustre or sheen, and without a proper blue cast. There is
more of a shade of yellowish sandstone. It is an evidence of impurity
and weakness.
 Fiery.—Fiery steel has a brilliant lustre; it is an evidence of high
heat.
If the grain be fairly fine and of bluish cast, it is not
necessarily bad in mild steel; in high steel or in tool-
steel it should not be tolerated.
If the grain be large and of brassy cast, it is sure
evidence of bad condition; the grain should be restored
before the steel is used.
In hardened steel it is always bad, except in dies to
be used under the impact of drop-hammers; in this
case steel must be so hard as to be slightly fiery.
Grade.—Grade applies to quality, as crucible, Bessemer, or
open-hearth grade. Or in the crucible, common, spring, machinery,
tool, special tool, etc., etc. It does not indicate temper or relative
hardness.
Honeycombed.—Unsound from many blow-holes. Usually
applied to ingots. It is a bad condition.
Lap.—A lap is caused by careless hammering, or by badly
proportioned grooves in rolls, or by careless rolling. A portion of the
steel is folded over on itself, the walls are oxidized and cannot unite.
A lap generally runs clear along a bar, practically parallel with its
axis; it may be seen by a novice. Lapped steel should be rejected
always.
Overblown.—Steel that has been blown in a Bessemer
converter after the carbon is all burned; then there is nothing but
steel to burn, and the result is bad.
Overheated.—Steel that has been heated too hot, and not quite
burned; its fiery fracture exposes it. The grain of overheated steel
may be restored, but restored steel is never as reliable as steel that
has not been overheated. Overheating is a disintegrating operation.
Overmelted.—Steel that has been kept too long in fusion. The
finest material may be ruined in a crucible by being kept in the
furnace any considerable time after it has been killed. Open-hearth
steel may be injured seriously in the same way. Prompt teeming after
killing should be the rule.
Pipe.—A pipe is the cavity formed in an ingot when it cools; the
walls chill first and nearly to the full size of the mould, then the
shrinking mass separates in the middle, forming a pipe. A pipe
should be at the top of the ingot; it may occur anywhere by bad
teeming.
Point.—One hundredth of one per cent of any element. You have
say 10 points of carbon, or 10 carbon; you want it raised a few points
to 15 or 18 carbon.
Recalescence.—When a piece of steel is heated above medium
orange color and cools slowly, at about medium orange—1100° to
1200° F.—the change of color ceases, then the color rises
sometimes to bright orange, and afterwards the cooling goes on; this
phenomenon is called recalescence. This is not yet a common shop
term.
Restoring.—When a piece of overheated steel is re-heated to
recalescence, kept there a few minutes, and then cooled slowly, its
grain becomes fine and its fiery lustre disappears; this is called
restoring. No nostrums are necessary.
Sappy.—Well-worked, good steel has a bluish cast, a fine grain,
and a silky sheen. It is sappy; it is as good as it can be made.
Seam.—A seam is a longer or shorter defect, caused by a blow-
hole which working has brought out to the surface and not
eliminated. It usually, or always, runs in the direction of working.
Seams are distinguished from laps by not being continuous; they are
usually only an inch or two in length.
Short (Cold, Red, Hot).—Cold-short steel is weak and brittle
when cold.
Red-short steel is brittle at dark orange or medium
orange heat or at the common cherry red heat. It may
forge well at a lemon heat, and be reasonably tough
when cold.
 Hot-short steel is brittle and friable above a medium
orange color; it may forge well from medium orange
down to black heat.
Star.—A brilliant spot in mid-section showing that the pipe is not
all cut away. It should be removed from tool-steel especially, as it
may have considerable depth. It is of no use in any steel.
Temper.—Used by the steel-maker it means the quantity of
carbon present. It is low temper, medium, or high; or number so and
so by his shop numbers.
Used by the steel-user or the temperer it means the
color to which hardened steel is drawn: straw, brown,
pigeon-wing, blue, etc., etc.
Or, it is the steel-maker’s measure of initial
hardness; and it is the steel-user’s measure of final
hardness.
Water-crack.—A crack caused in hardening; it may run in any
direction governed by lines of stress in the mass. It is distinguished
from a check by being larger, and usually plainly visible.
Wild Steel.—Steel in fusion that boils violently, and acts in the
moulds like lively soda-water or beer does when poured into a glass.
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