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Contents September 22, 2022

“MAGISTERIAL.”
6 Wyatt Mason Outdoing Reality — PA UL K RUGM A N
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai
10 Martin Filler Xanadu’s Architect
Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect
by Victoria Kastner, with photography by Alexander Vertikoff
Julia Morgan: The Road to San Simeon: Visionary Architect of
the California Renaissance by Gordon L. Fuglie, Jeffrey Tilman, Karen McNeill,
Johanna Kahn, Elizabeth McMillian, Kirby William Brown, and Victoria Kastner
16 Sophie Pinkham Immune to Despair
The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian
by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
20 Fintan O’Toole Boris Johnson: The Party’s Over
26 Clair Wills Family Lore
Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir by Marina Warner, with vignettes
by Sophie Herxheimer
32 Eric Foner The Complicity of the Textbooks
Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging
of Our National Identity by Donald Yacovone
38 Deborah Eisenberg Their Glorious Façades
The Goodby People by Gavin Lambert J. BR A DF OR D D E L ONG
41 Anthony Grafton How to Cast a Metal Lizard
From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge
in the Early Modern World by Pamela H. Smith SLOUCHING
44 Elaine Blair Questioning Desire
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan TOWARDS UTOPIA
48 Tim Flannery It’s Not Easy Being Green
Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot An Economic History of the
50 Wendy Xu Poem
Twentieth Century
51 Steven Simon and These Disunited States
Jonathan Stevenson
54 Nicole Rudick Where Does the Buck Stop?
Trust by Hernan Diaz “J. Bradford DeLong learnedly
58 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor ‘Hell, Yes, We Are Subversive’ and grippingly tells the
Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Y. Davis
Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing story of how all the economic
edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean
63 David Motadel My Husband the War Criminal
growth since 1870 has
The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich
by Nancy Dougherty, edited and with a foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
created a global economy
66 Dan Chiasson Rococo Risks that today satisfies
Venice by Ange Mlinko
no one’s ideas of fairness.”
68 Michael D. Gordin Our Toxic Nuclear Present
Blown to Hell: America’s Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders by Walter Pincus —T H O M A S P IK E T T Y,
Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb by Togzhan Kassenova
Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters by Serhii Plokhy #1 New York Times–bestselling
Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global
Environmental Crisis by Toshihiro Higuchi author of Capital in
70 Geoffrey Nutter Poem the Twenty-First Century
71 Joyce Carol Oates Disaster Was Her Element
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour
73 Joshua Hammer Promise and Disillusion in South Africa “Engaging, important,
These Are Not Gentle People: Two Dead Men. Forty Suspects. The Trial That Broke
a Small South African Town by Andrew Harding and awe-inspiring.”
Prisoners of the Past: South African Democracy and the Legacy of Minority Rule
by Steven Friedman — C HR I S T IN A R O ME R ,
The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning
by Eve Fairbanks
University of California, Berkeley
79 Adrian Nathan West Brick, Mortar, and Rot
Cremation by Rafael Chirbes, translated from the Spanish by Valerie Miles
81 Laurence H. Tribe Deconstructing Dobbs “Slouching Towards Utopia
85 Letters from Robert Shapiro, Robert Kuttner, Harry C. Merritt, Gordon F. Sander, should be required
and Kathleen Parthé
reading for anybody who
cares about the future
of the global system, and that
should be everyone.”
— L AW R E N C E H . S UM M E R S ,
Joshua Leifer: The Road to the Israeli Elections
nybooks.com Lucy Scholes: Maeve Gilmore’s Private Paintings Harvard University
Lola Seaton: Scorched London
Phoebe Chen: Apichatpong’s Soundscapes basicbooks.com
Omar G. Encarnación: Spain’s Emptying Heartland

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3
 Big ideas at
the intersection of
visual culture,
science, technology,
and society

In the Black Fantastic

Ekow Eshun
“Visually stunning, intellectually cohesive.
Ekow Eshun’s exhilarating exhibition shows
black art on the move and creating fresh
idioms.”
—Financial Times

How to Stay Smart
in a Smart World
Why Human Intelligence
Still Beats Algorithms
Gerd Gigerenzer
“Gigerenzer explains why
technology is so addictive
and offers tips for fostering
digital self-control. A
seriously compelling,
eye-opening, and well-
researched investigation.”
—Library Journal
Long Days, Short
Years
A Cultural History
of Modern Parenting
Andrew Bomback
“Empathy and frankness
shine through on each
page. This book is enjoyable
to read and likely to be
validating for many parents
of young children.”
—Library Journal
Methuselah’s Zoo
What Nature Can Teach
Us about Living Longer,
Healthier Lives
Steven N. Austad
“Not only fun to read—it is
the best book written on
the lives and lifespans of our
long-lived relatives, teachers
of what’s possible for our
own species and for our
individual lives.”
—David Sinclair,
bestselling author
of Lifespan
Tornado of Life
A Doctor’s Journey through
Constraints and Creativity
in the ER
Jay Baruch
“An homage to the people
Baruch has treated,
failed, and helped. Tender,
thoughtful and, at times,
hard to read. Beautifully
written with a different take
on life.”
—Library Journal
Curious Minds
The Power of Connection
Perry Zurn
and Dani S. Bassett
“A brilliantly original
exploration of curiosity.
Reading this ambitious and
joyful book is a marvelous
experience in expanding
the mind and the heart—in
connecting all the dots to
envision a better world.”
—Barbara M. Benedict,
author of Curiosity

mitpress.mit.edu

4 The New York Review

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ideas from
Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. She is an inaugural
winner of the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism.
Editor
Emily Greenhouse the MIT Press
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September 22, 2022 5


The Haunting of Hajji Hotak
and Other Stories
by Jamil Jan Kochai.
Viking, 270 pp., $26.00
The Lockheed Martin Hellfire 114 R9X ,
nicknamed the “ninja bomb” or the
“flying Ginsu,” is an air-to-surface,
drone-launched missile, approximately
five feet long and seven inches in di-
ameter, weighing roughly one hundred
pounds, with a top speed of 995 miles
per hour. Most members of the Hellfire
family are designed to carry different
types of warheads depending on the
objective, from bunkers to buildings
and “soft-skinned targets”—human
beings to be taken out in groups. Car-
rying no explosives, the R9X is unique.
To avoid collateral damage, the R9X is
designed to kill a single human being
with what is called a kinetic or hit-to-
kill design. As The Guardian reported
in September 2020, “The weapon uses
a combination of the force of 100lb of
dense material flying at high speed
and six attached blades which deploy
before impact to crush and slice its
victims.”
At 6:18 AM on Sunday, July 31, two
R9X missiles were launched from a
General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone,
striking and killing the former sur-
geon and leader of al-Qaeda Ayman
al-Zawahri, one of the planners of
the September 11 attacks. The CIA
had been trying to find al-Zawahri for
more than twenty years. After Amer-
ica’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in
the summer of 2021, intelligence led
the agency to a Taliban safe house in
Kabul where al-Zawahri and his wife,
his daughter, and her children had
come to live. He was never observed
leaving the house, but every morning,
the CIA determined, he could be seen
reading alone on the balcony.
On the morning in question, al-
Zawahri was said to have been stand-
ing on the balcony when the missiles
found him. The US Department of De-
fense has not specified whether one
or both of the missiles struck him, but
regardless, one of the heads of an R9X
would have passed through him before
the six spinning eighteen-inch-long
blades, mounted to the missile’s mid-
section, reached his body and sliced
whatever was left of him apart.
T here are many aspects to this
gruesome story of contemporary
Afghanistan—points of foreign pol-
icy and human rights, philosophical
questions about vengeance and the
state—that go well beyond my pur-
poses here. Suffice it to say that cer-
tain words (“hellfire,” “ninja,” “Ginsu,”
“reaper”) and images (an invisible bird
of prey soon to strike, an evil man on
a balcony serenely alone) and capabili-
ties (a first-person-shooter game made
flesh, firing a horrifying weapon that is
the definition of overkill) make it read
like clumsy fantasy, something on the
order of Thomas Pynchon, were Grav-
ity’s Rainbow rewritten by a moron.
This is a problem quite different from
Philip Roth’s undyingly quoted (and
here I am, quoting it) “Actuality is con-
tinually outdoing our talents.” That is
6 The New York Review
Outdoing Reality
Wyatt Mason
Jamil Jan Kochai; illustration by Leanne Shapton
not, I don’t think, the issue. Rather,
actuality has become so ceaselessly
stupid that fiction is having a hard
time remaking it.
The absurd incursions of the real
into the intelligent life of the imagi-
nation are central to the Afghan Amer-
ican writer Jamil Jan Kochai’s fiction,
a small body of work that has been
charting a path not merely to how one
might write about his native country,
but also to how fiction might perform
a reckoning with the idiotic now. A
fine first novel, 99 Nights in Logar,
appeared in 2019; Kochai’s new book,
better still, is a collection of twelve
stories, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.
Born in 1992 in a refugee camp in
Peshawar, Pakistan, to Afghan Pash-
tun parents, Kochai has set his twelve
stories in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Al-
abama, and the Bay Area—locations
that track, like his novel, close to his
family history. His father left his na-
tive country in 1982 during the Soviet
occupation, made his way to Alabama
to start a new life, then returned home
to Logar province in the late 1980s in
hopes of finding a wife. Once married,
the couple fled to Pakistan. While they
waited for visas in the refugee camp,
their son was born. Eighteen months
passed before they made it to North-
ern California, where Kochai grew up.
Pashto was the only language spo-
ken at home, and when Kochai entered
kindergarten, he had no English. He
spent the year struggling. The family
briefly moved back to Logar when he
was six. When they returned to Sac-
ramento for Kochai to enter second
grade, he had forgotten what little
English he’d learned. He credits his
teacher that year, a Mrs. Lung, who sat
with him every day after school, with
teaching him the language. By the time
he entered third grade, he was winning
awards for reading, his parents aston-
ished that a boy who hadn’t known the
alphabet a year earlier would now sit
in a corner of the living room with
massive English books.
Kochai says that the Harry Potter
novels introduced him to fiction as
an art form. Less than the characters
themselves, it was the setting of Hog-
warts, as place and institution—the
children’s movements from classroom
to classroom, the sleeping chambers,
the rules—that enthralled him. Khaled
Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, published
when Kochai was eleven, was also
meaningful. Although his mother and
father and grandmother and aunts all
told stories compulsively and well—
Afghan folktales, stories of genera-
tions of life in Afghanistan, chronicles
of flight and diaspora—the appear-
ance of Hosseini’s novel and its great
success was, for Kochai, a revelation:
it was the first time he imagined that
people outside his family could have
any interest in Afghan stories. Kochai
read the book straightaway but with
a profound sense of disappointment.
He felt its depiction of Afghanistan
and Afghans was odd; he had issues
with its characterization (and, later,
its political and ideological details),
but mostly he felt that Hosseini’s de-
piction of the country wasn’t beautiful
enough.
Kochai’s fiction has a spoken flair,
and part of the beauty of his vision of
Afghanistan is the essentiality of its
language. Scores of words from Pashto
and other languages—unmolested by
italics—populate the collection, and
their accumulation deepens one’s
sense of the strangeness, and beauty,
of the real: pakol, suhoor, patus,
toshak, Fajr adhan, chinar, attan, patki,
khala, zina, deen, fard, sunna, nafl,
Qari, dhikr, janaza, istinja, wudhu. . . .
These words in no way impede the
movement of the stories, which unfold
with terrific momentum. Kochai has a
gift for knowing what makes the en-
gine of a story turn over and go, what
formal choices might deliver a narra-
tive in such a way as to coax a reader
to endure a set of experiences that,
whatever their frequent delights—
and the stories are uncommonly full
of them—are rooted in sorrow, loss,
and rage.
T he first of Kochai’s stories I came
upon—“Occupational Hazards”—
appeared in The New Yorker this past
spring. It struck me as the most ex-
citing piece of short fiction I’d read in
a very long time (I sent it to a dozen
friends). The four-thousand-word story
is broken into nineteen parts, each of
them one sentence long, each begin-
ning with a header offering a date
range and a place: “1977–1979, Mujahid
Recruit, Deh-Naw, Logar”; “1982, Ref-
ugee, Peshawar, Pakistan.” Consider
the story’s first section in full:
1966–1980: Shepherd, Deh-Naw,
Logar*
Duties included: leading sheep to
the pastures near the Black Moun-
tains; counting the length between
the shadows of chinar trees cast on
dirt roads; naming each sheep after
a prophet from the Quran, who,
*The version of the story that appears in
The New Yorker differs from that in the fin-
ished book—clauses tweaked, amended,
weakened or refined.
 Yale university press

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September 22, 2022 7

 according to Maulana Nabi, were
all herders of sheep at one point
in their lives; reciting verses from
the Quran to dispel djinn; stealing
fruit from neighbors’ orchards for
no reason at all; watching sheep;
counting sheep; loving sheep; un-
derstanding the nature of sheep;
protecting sheep from bandits,
witches, wolves, rapists, demons,
and half-brothers: the Captain and
the King; taking younger brother,
Watak, along on journeys to the
pastures; swimming in a stream
with Watak instead of watching
sheep; losing two sheep, Dawud
and Ismael; getting beaten by the
Captain for losing sheep; leaving
Watak at home; never taking eyes
off the sheep again.
Leading, measuring, naming, reciting:
the clauses, sixteen in all, each detail-
ing another activity, conspire to a por-
trait of place and act and consequence.
The reader does not know it yet, but
the shepherd is a little boy, and as the
story progresses, as the sentences,
freighted with duties, accumulate, it
becomes clear that we are reading a
life presented as a CV . I concede that
this could feel gimmicky: Hey, look
at this cool new form! And yet as the
hundreds of clauses build, initiated
uniformly by gerunds, the little waves
of speech carry the reader into emo-
tional deep water that the story’s sur-
face usefully obscures.
In the section “1982, Reaper, Deh-
Naw, Logar”—the date reminds us
that the Soviets have invaded—the
unnamed person whose life story we
are reading is, with his brother, Watak,
“dodging Communist patrols and So-
viet helicopters,” hiding and huddling
and seeing a searchlight bearing down.
They split up, taking different routes
to safety, the protagonist “making
it home just in time to find out that
Watak was caught by a patrol and ex-
ecuted at the bank of a canal in the
shade of a mulberry tree.” He finds
out more:
Learning that six other family
members had also been murdered;
spending the entire night digging
graves and collecting limbs; seeing
blood; seeking death; seeking the
solitude of gunfire; watching little
sisters, twelve and three, search
for roots in the dead garden; de-
ciding to live, to leave.
Not quite halfway into the story,
the life in question has begun to col-
lapse, the curriculum vitae—which
literally means “course of life”—
moving us through many deaths to
the ultimate injuries this man will
suffer in the freedom of the United
States, calamities that will see him,
by the end, “waiting for the pain to
ebb.” The story’s turnkey repetitions,
by that conclusion, have taken on a
scriptural quality (think Genesis 1’s
“And God called. . . . And God said. . . .
And God called. . . . And God said”). Ko-
chai adapts that mode, movingly, to a
form that embodies the two species of
hazard that can arise in, and under,
occupations.
A lthough “Occupational Hazards”
makes use of the most conspicu-
ous form of the twelve stories, most
take similar risks. “Playing Metal Gear
8 The New York Review
Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” which
opens the collection, is narrated in
the second person, with each section
of the story again a single sentence,
and details a heavy young Afghan
émigré man’s quest (“You’re hauling
your two-hundred-and-sixty-pound ass
on a bicycle you haven’t touched since
middle school, regretting all the Taco
Bell you’ve eaten over the past two
years”) to obtain the latest iteration
of the Metal Gear Solid video game se-
ries, which is set in 1980s Afghanistan
(a real, 2015 video game, my youthful
sources inform me). Game obtained,
the story’s “you” returns home, speaks
briefly to his father, and then be-
gins to play the game, slaughtering
Soviet soldiers, all very predictable,
before something narratively weird
happens:
Sneaking along dirt roads, past
golden fields and apple orchards
and mazes of clay compounds,
you come upon the house where
your father used to reside, and it
is there—on the road in front of
your father’s home—that you spot
Watak, your father’s sixteen-year-
old brother, whom you recognize
only because his picture (unsmil-
ing, head shaved, handsome, and
sixteen forever) hangs on the wall
of the room in your home where
your parents pray.
And suddenly the game becomes a res-
cue mission in Afghanistan, in which
the son is trying, through the game,
to save the real Uncle Watak who, in
“Occupational Hazards,” could not be
saved but now, through this fantasy
of escape, is redeemed.
The ghost of Watak haunts five of
the stories in the collection, stories
that connect in different, tangential
ways, but many of the others are dis-
crete. In “Return to Sender,” married
Afghan doctors who were living in the
US return with their son to Kabul for a
year, out of guilt, to serve their people.
The mother, a pediatrician, works the
night shift, the father the day, the fam-
ily never fully together. And halfway
into their year of service, their eight-
year-old son disappears. Horrifically,
the parents begin to receive packages
at their door containing one severed
part of their son’s body after another.
It is a grotesque tale of abduction,
one that, as it progresses, grows
stranger. The mother begins, with
each new piece returned, to sew her
son back together on his bed, until all
but a finger has been reconstituted.
Once that final trace is found by the
father, the boy’s body suddenly shud-
ders as the finger is brought near: “To-
gether, piercing and threading, tearing
and binding, flesh to flesh, Amina and
Yusuf both realized that they would
never leave Kabul again, that they
were home.” Not merely the family
but the body politic, the rent flesh of
the people of Afghanistan is, through
diaspora in reverse, made whole. It is
a fantastic idea in every sense, made
all the stranger by how emotionally
complete it feels, without a wink or a
shred of whimsy.
T wo other stories involve explic-
itly fantastic transformations of
an Ovidian kind. In “The Parable of
the Goats,” a US Marine pilot, Billy
Casteel, is shot down over Afghani-
stan, captured, and put in a pit, where
he will be punished by local Afghans.
Kochai does a fine job of sketching
Casteel’s life just enough to animate
him, pushing him past caricature with
memorable details:
Minutes earlier, as he circled above
his targets, Second Lieutenant
Billy Casteel made the mistake
of peering down and glancing
upon a flock of baby goats led by
two tiny shepherds who couldn’t
have been more than six years
old. Briefly, Second Lieutenant
Billy Casteel was reminded of his
own childhood on a goat farm in
Davis, California, where he once
cared for his father’s flock along-
side his older brother, David, who
died one night falling off a horse
on a ride through the dark woods
near their farm, a ride Casteel had
suggested despite the darkness
and the cold and his brother’s frail
heart. In the years after his broth-
er’s death, Billy had abandoned his
father’s goats and taken refuge in
computer-generated pornography,
online social simulations, catfish
accounts on Instagram, the phi-
losophy of Jean Baudrillard, the
writings of Philip K. Dick, and
the Modern Warfare franchise,
through which he had carried
out his first virtual drone strike
on little blips of Afghan enemies.
Well, those boys could be me and
Davey, Second Lieutenant Billy
Casteel thought to himself before
his desensitization training kicked
in and he turned the blips on his
screen into blossoms of light.
Eventually, though, Casteel was
struck by what he thought was a
terrible pang of guilt.
But what actually strikes the young
American isn’t guilt. Rather, a sword
swung by a giant—hellfire from a
reaper—knocks Billy’s jet from the
sky and puts him in the pit to be pun-
ished. Scores of the giant’s townsfolk
line up, but before any of them can
begin, a 123-year-old woman, Bubugul,
asks to go first. Her request is granted
by her people, who love and fear her
“because none of the villagers could
recall a time before their love and their
fear of Bubugul.” So she goes away for
a few minutes, returns with a goat, and
with the giant’s permission leads it
down into the pit. What follows? One
goat becomes two; two, four; eight,
sixteen—no explanation given, no
coupling, simply accumulating, mag-
ically, and yet somehow convincingly—
the soldier’s body rubbing against the
goats and the soldier, slowly, trans-
forming into a goat himself, one whose
final fate is to be slaughtered by his
former platoonmates, American liber-
ators who feel no guilt at all.
The longest, most complex of the
stories in the collection is “The Tale
of Dully’s Reversion.” In the story’s
first sentence, as a mother is pray-
ing Fajr, the first of the five daily
Islamic prayers, “Dully Abdul Ka-
reem, her second-born son, crossed
the path of her janamaz [prayer mat]
and promptly transformed into a
small monkey.” Echoes of the first
sentence of Kafka’s “The Metamor-
phosis” are clear, as is the tonal al-
legiance to that long story’s tender,
poignant pursuit of Gregor Samsa’s
doom.
Dully, too, will meet his, but not be-
fore this mild-mannered Ph.D. student
becomes a revolutionary mujahid, one
leading apes and men against a war-
lord allied with the US-backed gov-
ernment in Kabul. It is, in thumbnail
outline, utterly ridiculous; and yet
Kochai manages to wring from such
conceptually crude nonsense another
parable of family and war that serves
as a way of addressing the funda-
mentally absurd—and horrific, and
tragic—way in which Afghanistan has
been passed from the English to the
Soviets to the Taliban and onward to
“the thousandth bombing of a benev-
olent American invasion.”
K ochai’s collection is without sanc-
timony. It is also without any sort
of soft-focus cuteness or exoticism. It
begins and ends with stories in the
second person, the collection subtly
framed by two distinct characters who
embrace the many people and modes
that flow between them.
The final story’s “you” is very differ-
ent from the first. It is the perspec-
tive of a surveillance operative who
has been tasked with spying on the
doings of a Sacramento family of Af-
ghan refugees, listening in for signs
of radicalization. When the father sus-
pects a wiretap, he becomes obsessed
with finding out how they are being
observed. Rather like Gene Hackman
at the end of The Conversation, Hajji,
the father, looks for you:
He searches for you on the phone,
in the streets, in unmarked white
vans, in the faces of policemen, de-
tectives in street clothes, military
personnel, and his own neighbors.
He searches for you at the hospital,
at the bank, on his computer, his
sons’ laptops, in webcams, phone
cameras, and on the television. He
searches for you in the curtains
and in the drawers of the kitchen
and in the trees in his backyard,
in the electrical sockets, in the
locks of the door handles, and in
the filaments of the light bulbs.
And, even as his family protests,
Hajji searches for you in shattered
glass, in broken tile, in the strips
of his wallpaper, the splinters of
his doors, his tattered flesh, his
warped nerves, and in his own
beating heart, where, through it
all, the voice whispering that he
is loved is yours.
You: the eyes of the occupier whose
country the refugee now, under sus-
picion, occupies. How will you look at
such a refugee? And how might such
.
a refugee escaping hellfire hold on
to the idea that, despite it all, you
might love him no less than you do
yourself?
 Cy Twombly
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills

GAGOSIAN

September 22, 2022 9

 Xanadu’s Architect
The Neptune pool, San Simeon, San Luis Obispo County, California; designed by Julia Morgan, 1924–1936
Julia Morgan:
An Intimate Biography
of the Trailblazing Architect
by Victoria Kastner, with
photography by Alexander Vertikoff.
Chronicle, 240 pp., $32.50
Julia Morgan:
The Road to San Simeon:
Visionary Architect
of the California Renaissance
by Gordon L. Fuglie, Jeffrey Tilman,
Karen McNeill, Johanna Kahn,
Elizabeth McMillian, Kirby
William Brown, and Victoria Kastner.
Laguna Art Museum/Rizzoli Electa,
303 pp., $75.00
1.
Half a century ago, second-wave femi-
nism swelled into a social tsunami that
wrought profound changes in Ameri-
can life. Among them was a concerted
effort to correct the underrepresen-
tation of women in occupations that
had systematically excluded them, in-
cluding architecture. As the history of
women in the building art began to
be charted for the first time, the pro-
fession’s earliest female practitioners
were also rediscovered and became the
subject of serious study.
The mother of them all was Julia
Morgan, the prolific San Francisco
Bay Area architect who completed
more than seven hundred buildings.
Her impressive output—which in
addition to many private residences
(some four dozen in Berkeley alone)
included many university and school
buildings, several churches, and a host
of commissions from the Young Wom-
en’s Christian Association (YWCA )—
spanned a broad stylistic spectrum,
from the distinctive Bay Area variant
of the Arts and Crafts Movement to
the Spanish Colonial Revival that be-
came the favored architectural mode
10
Martin Filler
of early-twentieth-century California,
and from Beaux-Arts Classicism to the
regional Neoclassical subgenre now
known as Hollywood Regency.
In an even more transcultural vein,
Morgan designed several buildings for
San Francisco’s Chinese American
community in which she eschewed
stereotypical chinoiserie and instead
drew on her research into traditional
Sinitic motifs. While her San Francisco
Chinese YWCA of 1930–1932 (now the
Chinese Historical Society Museum)
incorporates several examples of fei
yan (flying eaves)—the upcurved roof
corners that are the most recogniz-
able feature of indigenous Chinese
construction—they are hardly its
most dominant feature. The stolid
redbrick exterior (an American vari-
ation on the characteristic blue-gray
brick once commonly used in China)
is pierced with cast-stone grilled win-
dows and surmounted with crenellated
cast-stone parapets based on ancient
patterns. This dignified landmark of
struggle, aspiration, assimilation,
and ethnic pride is a quintessentially
American monument to the immigrant
experience.
Morgan’s wide aesthetic range some-
times makes it difficult to identify
individual works as hers, unlike the
inimitably detailed Japanesque bunga-
lows of the California-based brothers
Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Ma-
ther Greene, her close contemporar-
ies. After you’ve seen a fair amount of
her work, however, you recognize that
certain buildings could only have been
designed by her. Yet despite everything
else that this tireless workaholic built,
she is now best known for a single,
extremely eccentric commission: the
buildings of San Simeon, the 250,000-
acre estate of the legendary newspaper
proprietor William Randolph Hearst
on the Pacific coast in San Luis Obispo
County, halfway between Los Angeles
and San Francisco. Erected from 1919
to 1947, this eclectic complex blithely
juxtaposes several discordant his-
torical styles—mainly Spanish Colo-
nial and Imperial Roman, though the
client first asked for “a Jappo-Swiss
bungalow”—with the equanimity of
a Hollywood back lot where multiple
productions are shot side by side, a
western here, a biblical epic there. (For
two decades the long-married Hearst
financed a movie studio, Cosmopoli-
tan Productions, which made forty-
six films that featured his lover, the
actress Marion Davies.)
San Simeon’s principal feature
is a Spanish Baroque pile formally
named La Cuesta Encantada (The En-
chanted Hill) but familiarly known as
Hearst Castle. Perched on an eminence
with panoramic views of the ocean,
this cathedral-like twin-spired mega-
mansion encompasses 68,500 square
feet, with thirty-eight bedrooms and
forty-one bathrooms. (Although the
castle is enormous by any standard,
eleven other American residences at
the time surpassed it. The biggest was
Richard Morris Hunt’s Biltmore House
of 1889–1895 in Asheville, North Caro-
lina, created for George W. Vanderbilt
II and almost triple the size.) Yet the
publisher’s grandiose scheme—which
included numerous outbuildings and
a zoo also designed by Morgan, with
bear and lion pits as well as giraffe and
elephant houses—was still incomplete
when his fortunes waned during the
Great Depression.
Work at San Simeon halted and in
1933 Hearst was forced to mortgage
the estate for $600,000 (about $13 mil-
lion today) to a rival newspaperman,
the Los Angeles Times owner Harry
Chandler, who sportingly extended
the loan in 1941 when Hearst couldn’t
pay up because he didn’t want to be
saddled with this money-devouring
white elephant. But the Hearst Com-
pany bounced back during the pros-
perity spurred by World War II, and its
founder resumed living at La Cuesta
Encantada in 1945. Over the next two
years he put the finishing touches on
his quixotic dream realm.
A lthough there exists no accurate
accounting of how much San Sim-
eon cost Hearst—who had a way of
offloading personal expenditures onto
his corporate entities—estimates vary
widely, from around $80 million to $1
billion in current value. In comparison
to more recent mogul mansions, during
the 1990s the junk-bond billionaire Ira
Rennert reportedly spent $110 mil-
lion on his Versailles-esque Hamptons
beach house, which Vanity Fair dubbed
“Sand Simeon.” But skilled labor was
much cheaper during the Depression,
when Hearst Castle was by far the larg-
est private residential construction
job in the US.
Hearst’s stupendous showplace had
been familiar to movie audiences since
the 1920s through newsreels of the
Hollywood and international glitterati
whom he and Davies collected for
house parties there. Less admiringly,
his folie de bâtir was satirized as a
grotesquerie called Xanadu in Citi-
zen Kane (1941), Orson Welles’s barely
fictionalized biopic of the controversial
press baron. Its opening and closing
sequences depict the mountaintop
redoubt in sinister silhouette like
some vampire’s castle in a German
Expressionist horror film, while other
scenes evoke its elaborate but eerily
cavernous and echoing interiors as a
metaphor for the overreaching pro-
tagonist’s hollow inner life.
Morgan also designed several other
houses for Hearst and Davies in and
around Los Angeles during their many
decades together, including her Span-
ish Colonial movie studio dressing
room–bungalow of 1924–1937, long
since demolished. One survivor is the
Marion Davies Guest House of 1929
in Santa Monica, a white-clapboard
Hollywood Regency structure with a
pedimented and columned portico, the
last remnant of her once-sprawling
oceanfront estate. It has been re-
stored and is now open to the public
as part of the Annenberg Commu-
nity Beach House, a neighborhood
recreational center funded through a
family foundation established by the
mid-twentieth-century press tycoon
Walter Annenberg.
2.
In 1957—the year Morgan died at age
eighty-five and six years after Hearst
died at eighty-eight in a house she de-
signed for him and Davies in Beverly
Hills—the publisher’s family signed
over San Simeon to the California
State Parks system, which runs it as
a popular tourist attraction. (His many
descendants— he had five sons—
retain private use of some of the es-
RICHARD BARN ES
tate’s buildings on a limited basis.)
Among those who visited Hearst Castle
after it opened to the public was Sara
Holmes Boutelle, a Mount Holyoke–
educated art history teacher at New
The New York Review
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September 22, 2022 11

York City’s Brearley School, who was
intrigued to learn from a tour guide
that a woman architect was responsi-
ble for this vast undertaking.
When Boutelle retired in the early
1970s, she moved to Santa Cruz, north
of the Hearst estate on the California
coast, and began a second career as an
architectural historian. Thereafter she
devoted herself to gaining recognition
for Morgan, the first female graduate
of the University of California’s School
of Engineering at Berkeley to prac-
tice professionally; the first woman
accepted into the architecture section
of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris,
from which she received her diploma in
1902, another first; and the first woman
to receive an architecture license in
California. Boutelle’s preliminary bi-
ographical sketch of Morgan appeared
in Women in American Architecture: A
Historic and Contemporary Perspec-
tive, the catalog of an influential exhi-
bition organized by the Architectural
League of New York and curated by the
architect Susana Torre, which opened
at the Brooklyn Museum in 1977 and
then traveled to Los Angeles.
This introduction to Morgan’s career
convinced her executor, her nephew
Morgan North, to grant Boutelle exclu-
sive access to his aunt’s papers, but he
died soon afterward and research was
further delayed. In 1988 Boutelle’s Julia
Morgan, Architect was finally published,
and that pathbreaking monograph,
though sporadically flawed, remains
the basic reference on the forgotten
pioneer whom she single-handedly
rescued from historical oblivion.
It is now joined by two new books:
Victoria Kastner’s Julia Morgan: An
Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing
Architect and Julia Morgan: The Road
to San Simeon: Visionary Architect of
the California Renaissance, a lavishly
illustrated survey in a coffee-table
format with essays by seven contrib-
utors, including Kastner. The best of
this book’s contributions—too many
of which emphasize the convention-
bound Beaux-Arts style—is the ar-
chitectural historian Karen McNeill’s
definitive account of Morgan’s edu-
cation at the École des Beaux-Arts.
It might have been more profitably
supplemented by wider-ranging in-
vestigations of many other aspects of
Morgan’s career, especially the social
and reformist implications of her long-
sustained patronage by the YWCA .
T he subtitle of Kastner’s biography
somewhat oversells the likelihood
that any writer, no matter how diligent,
could divine the inner life of this ex-
ceptionally private woman. Kastner
quotes copiously from Morgan’s per-
sonal correspondence, cited here more
extensively than ever before, but she
was not the self-revelatory sort. None-
theless, the book is a good example of
how to present historical architecture
to a lay readership—with an engross-
ing personal story, a conversational
narrative voice, lack of jargon, and
a great many excellent illustrations
both period and contemporary. Above
all, it conveys a convincing sense of
Morgan’s quiet but persistent rejec-
tion of the ingrained prejudice and
long-unchallenged convention that
kept women out of her chosen calling.
Why architecture was regarded from
time immemorial as an impenetrable
men’s preserve is arguably a question
12
as much for psychologists as sociolo-
gists. Whatever the answer, the sheer
physicality of erecting structures far
larger than any individual was thought
to require a strong driving force, bodily
as well as psychic, that women were
believed to lack. The age-old secrets of
the building trade in Europe were jeal-
ously guarded by masons’ guilds that
kept architectural knowledge within
systems of male kinship, a monopoly
that vigilantly excluded outsiders.
During the eighteenth century this
closed-shop craft served as the model
for Freemasonry, the Enlightenment
confraternity that sought to become
a force for social cohesion through
nonsectarian ethical values affirmed
with arcane rituals based on the stone
layer’s methodology. The fact that
women were not welcomed into this
association, either, further reinforced
the baseless notion that they were un-
equal to the task of building.
It was only during the second half
of the nineteenth century, which
saw unprecedented advancement of
women in higher education, that fe-
male aspirants dared to go beyond
undergraduate degrees and stormed
the stronghold of the architectural
profession. In the United States, with
its sense of social mobility, the idea
of women architects perhaps did not
seem as improbable as it might have in
Europe, and the first American women
began to study the building art in the
very few schools that would have them.
3.
Julia Morgan was born in San Fran-
cisco in 1872 to an unsuccessful
businessman and the daughter of a
millionaire New York cotton trader
who habitually subsidized the fam-
ily. After the beneficent patriarch’s
death, his widow joined the Morgans
in Oakland, where Julia’s parents had
moved when she was two. As the old-
est girl among five siblings, she saw
her grandmother and mother as role
models of female assertiveness made
possible by their inherited wealth. (Her
younger sister Emma received a law
degree, also uncommon at the time.
However, she soon married, had chil-
dren, and never practiced profession-
ally.) An older cousin of the Morgans
was married to the New York architect
Pierre LeBrun—the designer of the
city’s Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company tower of 1905–1909, briefly
the world’s tallest building—and he
encouraged Julia’s early interest in
the profession.
Morgan’s bold determination to be-
come a master builder was unquestion-
ably enabled by her maternal family’s
financial backing. But such support
was not to be taken for granted in an
era when even heiresses could be de-
terred from seeking higher education
by relatives who believed it would hin-
der their marriage prospects or was a
needless diversion for future wives and
mothers. Not that Morgan was immune
from familial pressures to marry and
multiply. When she was twenty-eight
her mother wrote to admonish her with
homey directness, “You be looking out
for a nice young man for yourself. I
don’t want all my children old maids.”
Because the University of California
in nearby Berkeley did not yet have
an architecture school, at the age of
eighteen Morgan enrolled in its civil
engineering program and received her
degree in 1894. She then took advanced
design courses with Bernard Maybeck,
the leading architect of the Bay Area’s
burgeoning Arts and Crafts Movement,
who became her mentor. Maybeck is
celebrated for his idiosyncratic ap-
proach to both the Northern California
vernacular (epitomized by his woodsy
First Church of Christ, Scientist of
1909–1910 in Berkeley) as well as his
playful way with the Classical tradition
(most conspicuously the majestic Pal-
ace of Fine Arts of 1914–1915 in San
Francisco). His most important early
client was Phoebe Apperson Hearst—
the formidable widow of the fabulously
rich mining prospector George Hearst
and mother of William Randolph, her
overindulged only child—for whom
Maybeck designed several of the build-
ings she endowed on the Berkeley cam-
pus. That connection would eventually
lead Morgan to Mrs. Hearst and then
her son, the architect’s most enduring
patron.
Maybeck, an alumnus of the École
des Beaux-Arts, felt that Morgan would
benefit greatly if she also studied there.
Because opinion in France had begun
to favor women being admitted to that
state-sponsored school’s painting and
sculpture programs for the first time
since its founding in 1648, he saw no
reason why she should not be allowed
into its architecture department. She
finally prevailed, but thereafter en-
dured hazing from her classmates,
though her male compatriots also
faced hostility from French students
who felt that too many Americans were
being let in. However, Morgan proved
herself more than equal to the chal-
lenge, and in 1901 one of the École’s
professors sang her praises to a Stock-
ton, California, newspaper, though not
without some residual sexism:
I would have no hesitation in
confiding to her the erection of a
building, as in the science of the
profession she is far superior to
half of her male comrades. It is
true that an objection can be made
that a woman cannot climb scaf-
folds to oversee the work or come
in contact with the laborers and
mechanics, but an architect’s func-
tions do not consist exclusively of
these disagreeable duties. His of-
fice work, such as preparing plans
and sketches, is more important,
and for this women are well suited.
U pon returning to the Bay Area
the following year, Morgan, who
was not yet accredited to practice
architecture independently, went to
work in the San Francisco office of
the architect John Galen Howard,
the master planner for the Berkeley
campus expansion underwritten by
Phoebe Hearst. When Morgan received
her California architect’s license in
1904, she set up her own office. Her
first independent commission was El
Campanil of 1904, a steel-reinforced
concrete, red-tile-roofed Mission Style
bell tower at Mills College for Women
in adjacent Oakland. It was so well con-
structed that it withstood the cata-
strophic 1906 earthquake and stands to
this day. She also made alterations and
additions to Phoebe Hearst’s country
house of 1895–1898 by A. C. Schwein-
furth in Pleasanton, California, and
garnered a good deal of other work in
the aftermath of the earthquake, which
necessitated the wholesale rebuilding
of the entire region. Several of those
referrals she received via the so-called
Women’s Network, an informal but
highly effective word-of-mouth rec-
ommendation system through which
feminist patrons sought to support
women professionals and succeeded
with remarkable frequency in a pe-
riod when there was still so much
ingrained gender bias surrounding
male-dominated occupations.
This preferment was most evident
in Morgan’s repeated commissions
from the YWCA , the worldwide benev-
olent society that became especially
influential during the decades when
she designed a remarkable series of
residential-and-recreational facilities
for its members in California and Ha-
waii. The first of these was Asilomar,
the YWCA ’s national convocation fa-
cility in Pacific Grove on California’s
Monterey Peninsula, a thirty- acre
spread where between 1913 and 1929
she erected sixteen rustic structures
in harmony with the unspoiled site.
Taken over by the California Depart-
ment of Natural Resources in 1956, it
is now run as a hotel and conference
center. The only one of Morgan’s YWCA
buildings still owned and operated by
the group is the beautifully preserved
Honolulu branch—a sign of this once-
omnipresent organization’s declining
role in American community life.
T he undisputed masterpiece of
Morgan’s early career is St. John’s
Presbyterian Church of 1910 in Berke-
ley (known since its deconsecration in
1974 as the Berkeley Playhouse’s Julia
Morgan Theater). This tour de force of
vigorous vernacular wood craftsman-
ship offered a radical alternative to the
routine plaster-vaulted Gothic Revival
church interiors of the period. Instead,
it celebrates the unadorned beauty of
its exposed beams and trusses, which
create a vibrant overhead pattern of
inverted and extended V forms that
repeat down the entire length of the
sanctuary.
So unusual was this informal look
for a house of worship at that time—
and “house” is the operative word here
because of the structure’s inviting
domestic intimacy—that the archi-
tect’s young nephew and future exec-
utor thought it might be a barn and
wondered, “But Aunt Julia, where’s the
hay?” St. John’s was completed in the
same year as Maybeck’s nearby, rather
similar, though somewhat fussier
Christian Science church. Whether or
not he and his former pupil compared
notes on their respective projects, Mor-
gan’s scheme is a work of extraordinary
inventiveness, and it established her
beyond doubt as a talent equal to any
of her male peers in the Bay Area.
In a profession where personal
presentation counts for so much in
making a favorable impression on
potential clients—ambitious male
architects from Frank Lloyd Wright
to Philip Johnson put much effort
into perfecting their dressing-for-
success—Morgan’s conservative out-
fits were no less carefully calibrated.
With her primly tailored suits, white-
collared shirts, horn-rimmed glasses,
and no-nonsense hairdo, she might
have been mistaken for a librarian or
girls’ dormitory matron. And though
her severe appearance recalls 1930s
character actresses who specialized in
The New York Review
 New from Princeton University Press
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13
 cliché spinster roles, that protective
coloration was shared by many other
working women who conformed with
exaggerated precision to male norms
of attire in the business world.
Unsurprisingly, Morgan’s mannish
appearance and the fact that she never
married have given rise to speculation
that she was a lesbian. Kastner, the
author of three books on Hearst Castle,
wastes no time in delivering a verdict:
on the second page of the introduction
to her new biography she reassures
us that “abundant historical evidence
confirms that she had no romantic
relationships of any kind. . . . Julia’s
lifelong love affair was with archi-
tecture.” Since one cannot know with
any certainty what the inner feelings
of someone as emotionally opaque as
Morgan may have been, it might have
been wiser to say that we simply do
not know what her exact sexuality (or
asexuality) was.
4.
Despite repeat clients like the YWCA ,
the greatest constant in Morgan’s pro-
fessional life was William Randolph
Hearst. Although on the surface they
seemed an ill-assorted pair—he was
six-foot-three, she just a bit more than
five feet tall; he was flamboyant and
loquacious, she reticent and taciturn—
they quickly established a rapport that
helped the architect interpret her em-
ployer’s wishes almost telegraphically.
Hearst was a compulsive, omnivorous,
and not terribly astute collector, es-
pecially when compared with his older
contemporaries J. Pierpont Morgan,
Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon,
who consulted art experts rather than
relying on their gut reactions. As Nel-
son W. Aldrich Jr. writes in Old Money:
The Mythology of America’s Upper Class
(1988), the credulous Hearst was
conned on virtually every pur-
chase. . . . He is supposed to have
put together “collections” in 504
different categories of arts and
crafts, but when half of them were
sold at auction—the trinkets cov-
ering two full acres of Gimbel’s
floor space—they brought in half
of what he had paid for them.
What could not be auctioned off
easily during this Great Depression
distress sale were the antique archi-
tectural elements that Hearst bought
on his European travels and shipped
to San Simeon to be incorporated into
Morgan’s ever-evolving plans. In doing
so he followed American magnates
of the Gilded Age who commissioned
structures in various historical revival
styles but still craved the authentic-
ity of genuine components that pre-
dated America’s founding. That fad
for transatlantic cultural cannibalism
culminated most successfully in the
Cloisters, the charmingly assembled
miscellany of Romanesque and Gothic
courtyards, apses, and carved detail-
ing removed from disused French and
Spanish churches and monasteries,
conjoined into a reasonable facsimile
of a medieval citadel in Upper Man-
hattan’s Fort Tryon Park, and given
to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by
John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1931. Hearst
proposed an equivalent to be built by
Morgan in San Francisco’s Golden
Gate Park—her unexecuted Medieval
Museum of 1941–1945.
14
L ike her fellow Californian Paul Re-
vere Williams, who a generation
later broke barriers for Black archi-
tects akin to her earlier advances for
women, she had no ideological agenda
apart from a determination to prac-
tice architecture against prevailing
restrictions.* Thus she was more than
happy, as Williams would be later, to
give her clients whatever they wanted.
In her case that included fantasies as
divergent as the imposing Neptune
pool of 1924–1936 at San Simeon, with
its pergola resembling a Hollywood
Roman temple (see illustration on
page 10), and the Bavarian Neo-Gothic
guesthouses of 1933–1941 at Hearst’s
Wyntoon hunting-and-fishing lodge in
Northern California, their exteriors
painted with fairy-tale murals by the
Hungarian children’s-book illustrator
Willy Pogány.
Morgan’s willing stylistic expan-
siveness surely contributed to her
half-century career’s longevity and
productivity. A number of other archi-
tects who also started out as exponents
of the Arts and Crafts Movement—
particularly Greene and Greene, but
also the British architects Charles
Robert Ashbee and C. F. A. Voysey—
found their careers in tatters when
the style they had championed on phil-
osophical grounds suddenly became
passé. Trend-conscious clients sought
other, more fashionable alternatives,
especially the Classical Revival of the
1910s, through which the adaptable
Maybeck extended his job prospects
during his fifties, though he lived to be
ninety-five and was largely idle during
his last decades.
Unlike Williams, who was more than
twenty years Morgan’s junior, the one
imaginative realm she did not enter
was Modernism. She was in her sixties
when the new architecture began to
win favor in this country during the
1930s, and her revivalist outlook was
antithetical to its revolutionary ethos.
Furthermore, the degree to which
Hearst became almost her exclusive
client in a period of extreme economic
distress was a mixed blessing. On the
one hand, he kept her practice solvent
for nearly three decades, one of which
coincided with the Great Depres-
sion, which wrecked countless other
architectural careers. On the other
hand, Hearst, who hoarded not only
objects but people, monopolized Mor-
gan during her professional maturity
when, under other circumstances, she
might have been able to achieve things
greater than a wildly anachronistic van-
ity project of pharaonic proportions.
Yet this was neither the first nor
the last time in architectural history
that a plutocratic form of indentured
servitude sidetracked a major practi-
tioner, as seen in our own time with
Richard Meier’s long immurement in
his Getty Center of 1984–1997 in Los
Angeles, a supposed dream commis-
sion that turned out to have an unfor-
tunate effect as his creative presence
dimmed during that long and singu-
larly absorbing preoccupation. Happily,
Julia Morgan’s posthumous reputation
continues to grow ever more luminous
.
thanks to the legions of admirers who
find inspiration in this relentlessly de-
termined and undeterrable American
pioneer.
*For more on Paul Revere Williams, see my
“Hollywood’s Master Builder,” The New York
Review, October 21, 2021.
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15
 Immune to Despair
The Orphanage
by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the
Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes
and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler.
Yale University Press,
324 pp., $18.00 (paper)
When I visited Ukraine in July 2016,
only one way remained across the
Siverskyi Donets River to the sep-
aratist Luhansk People’s Republic:
a bridge half destroyed by shelling,
passable only on foot. From Stanytsia
Luhanska, a Don Cossack settlement,
elderly people and mothers with young
children traversed the bridge, hauling
carts of tomatoes and cucumbers to
sell on the other side. Those moving
in the opposite direction were arriving
to collect their government pensions.
The wait at the border was a minimum
of five hours, and there was no shade.
We had to leave Stanytsia by 3:00 PM ,
when the shooting was scheduled to
start again.
Serhiy Zhadan’s 2017 novel The
Orphanage is a product of that first
phase of the war, when the fighting
was confined to the Donbas. It is full
of bombed bridges, ruined towns, and
residential buildings shelled so that
“furniture spills outside, like some-
one’s guts after they’ve been cut open.”
This year Russian missiles have spread
these scenes far beyond the Donbas, to
Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Kherson, Myko-
laiv. As the Ukrainian military fought
to defend Kyiv from Russian invaders,
it blew up the bridges into the capital.
When the Kyiv suburb of Irpin came
under Russian attack, residents fled on
foot, crossing the river under a broken
bridge; the photos were seen around
the world, in all their symbolic as well
as documentary power.1 In July, as Rus-
sia claimed the entirety of Luhansk
province, a news report about the anni-
hilating conquest was illustrated with
a photo of a bridge blown in two: all
ties have been severed, and the break
with the old ways is complete.
The Orphanage tells the story of
Pasha, a teacher of Ukrainian in the
Luhansk region (his fictional home-
town is called “the Station”), as he
traverses the contested land between
Ukrainian-held territory and regions
captured by Russian-backed separat-
ists. He is on a mission to retrieve
his chronically ill thirteen-year-old
nephew, Sasha, who was placed in
an orphanage by his mother. Pasha’s
sister works as a train conductor and
can’t be bothered to take care of her
child. (The eponymous “orphanage”
is called an internat in Ukrainian,
and it’s a boarding school that’s not
just for orphans. In Soviet times, the
internat was a place where children
could be left indefinitely and free of
charge—though in dismal and even
life-threatening conditions—while
their parents were busy building
communism.)
This is a gray, marginal world in
which life is punctuated by bursting
shells and the ebb and flow of soldiers
from either side. The border shifts so
often that it’s hard to keep track of
1
See Tim Judah’s “Holding On in Irpin” in
these pages, April 7, 2022.
16
Sophie Pinkham
Serhiy Zhadan, Chernivtsi, Ukraine, September 2021
who’s in power. Ambient dread gives
the novel a dystopian flavor (some have
compared it to Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road), but Zhadan is writing about real
life. While school is still in session,
Pasha’s classroom is made into a hos-
pital for separatist soldiers:
The wounded are placed right on
the floor, in between the desks.
Shortly thereafter, Pasha sprints
in after them and dismisses the
class. The scared kids step over
fresh blood and then jostle in the
hallway. . . .
The classroom smells of mud
and blood, snow and earth.
The landscape is full of sad absur-
dities that Zhadan captures with his
signature jocularity: “You’d see some
old-timer hiking all the way into town
in the middle of a mortar attack to file
some paperwork for his pension. Well,
if it comes down to death or bureau-
cracy, sometimes death is the right
call.” Out for drinks, an absent-minded
soldier leaves a live grenade on the bar
as he digs through his pockets, looking
for money to pay his tab.
B orn in 1974 in Starobilsk, part of
the first generation to come of
age after the end of the Soviet Union,
Zhadan became famous as a poet in
the 1990s. He upholds the tradition,
now extinguished in the West, of the
poet as both rebellious celebrity and
national hero; he wrote his university
thesis on the Ukrainian Futurists of
the 1920s, whose avant-garde antics
might be called proto-punk and who
were core members of a distinctly
Ukrainian modernism centered in
Kharkiv and quickly strangled by So-
viet purges of Ukrainian artists and
scholars. (The university building
where he studied was recently hit by
Russian missiles.) Zhadan even has a
rock band, Zhadan and the Dogs. He
recites his poems to packed audito-
riums. After a performance in War-
saw, Marci Shore reported in The New
Yorker, “a Polish journalist commented
that he had never seen so many young
women in the city wearing short skirts
in March.” Shore described Zhadan as
“racy in a James Dean sort of way.”
He has often been called an enfant
terrible, though he’s long outgrown the
title, and his signature leather jacket is
more John Travolta than James Dean.
When he heard news of the Russian
invasion in February, he was on a train
westward to a concert; he and his band-
mates turned around and went back
home to Kharkiv. He has remained
there throughout the conflict, appar-
ently unconcerned for his own safety
and working tirelessly to support the
war effort and help civilians. In re-
sponse to the first phase of the war he
created the Serhiy Zhadan Charitable
Foundation, which held contests to
encourage literary expression among
children in the Donbas. Now on his
social media accounts he poses,
smiling in his leather jacket, with
soldiers, pensioners, schoolchildren,
and bandmates, announcing charitable
donations, concerts to boost morale,
readings to raise money for the army.
He seems immune to despair.
Zhadan has avoided popular rhet-
oric about Russian “orcs” or eastern
“hordes,” though he supports a re-
cently proposed law to restrict Rus-
sian cultural imports, arguing that “our
statehood today is found not only in
the weapons we fight with, but in the
books we read.” A poem published in
Poetry in 2019 (in a translation by John
Hennessy and Ostap Kin) shows char-
acteristic compassion for a soldier who
made a mistake:
They buried their son last winter.
Strange weather for winter—rain,
thunder.
They buried him quietly—
everybody’s busy.
Who did he fight for? I asked. We
don’t know, they say.
He fought for someone, they say,
but who—who knows?
Will it change anything, they say,
what’s the point now?
I would have asked him myself,
but now—there’s no need.
And he wouldn’t reply—he was
buried without his head.
Z hadan’s essential subject, his great
love, is eastern Ukraine. In The
Orphanage, as in his other works of
fiction, he sings of the bleak splen-
dor of the industrial post-Soviet land-
scape, still recognizable despite the
damage done by war. The sky resem-
bles “molten metal that would soon
be poured into a mold and made into
something useful.” A shrapnel-riddled
satellite dish “looks like a sunflower
in the morning.” In his 2014 novel-in-
stories Mesopotamia,2 one character
captures the coexistence of despair
and surprising beauty in a place that
seems left behind by history:
There was nothing to do in my
town except pound beers all day
and fuck your brains out all night
in the park by the jungle gym,
the factories’ white smoke, the
workers’ black eyes, and duplici-
tous raspberry bushes behind the
brackish nighttime delta.
Mesopotamia shows the dark sides of
post-Soviet life in Kharkiv—addiction,
tuberculosis, violent death, rampant
crime and corruption—but it also cel-
ebrates the reckless joy of young, inde-
pendent Ukraine. Cognac and lemon,
absurd nicknames like Alla the Alliga-
tor and Vadyk Salmonella, hedonistic
summers at bohemian dachas, love and
death rolled into one, a booze-soaked
multiethnic picaresque:
I went to a bunch of shady places,
stopped by all the basements and
burrows . . . , paid the Arabs a visit,
stuck my head into the Vietnam-
ese joint, became best buddies
J UL IA WE BE R
2
Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes,
Wanda Phipps, Virlana Tkacz, and Isaac
Stackhouse Wheeler (Yale University Press,
2018).
The New York Review
 Donald Sultan
THE NATURE OF THINGS
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 with the guys that worked at the
McDonald’s, strolled into the TB
clinic and drank, arms intertwined,
with the patients, ordered cham-
pagne at Health, the local sauna,
lost consciousness in a dark base-
ment across from the synagogue,
regained it at a family restau-
rant . . . by chasing milkshakes with
herbal liqueur, asked for directions
at the pizzeria, died from cognac
fumes in a bar run by some Geor-
gian dudes, and resurrected myself
with some Madeira in an empty
supermarket.
But that was before the war. The Or-
phanage is a journey through the un-
derworld, recalling Dante and the Greek
classics. Pasha, exhausted and terri-
fied, thinks that “it’s as though some-
body’s pumping souls out of the city.
And those souls are black and bitter,
snagging on trees and taking root in
basements.” Zhadan borrows Homer’s
trick of making martial death into sim-
iles of natural bounty: “Soldiers drop
to the ground like ripe apples onto wet
grass.” At a checkpoint, a man howls
“like he’s berating the gods for their
bad behavior.” He laments, “Olezha,
my pal Olezha . . . I didn’t even have
time to throw some dirt on his body
or drag him into the snow. He’s still
lying there, all burnt up.”
D espite being a teacher of Ukrainian
in a largely Russian-speaking re-
gion, Pasha is no hot-blooded patriot.
At the beginning of The Orphanage he
is timid, indecisive, unwilling to take a
side, even if, as the political situation
gets worse, he feels that “something
had broken in his language, cracked,
like ice on a reservoir in March, and
it was on the verge of splitting into
countless heavy, prickly shards.” His
girlfriend, Maryna, left him because
he wouldn’t get her away from the
war zone. He doesn’t watch TV and
he doesn’t like politics. (To be fair,
the news has always been unreliable
at best, and elections corrupt.) But
his problems with Maryna were about
more than the war: he’s so averse to
conflict that he couldn’t even have a
proper argument with her. His nephew
asks him “whose side he was on, what
he was going to do, who he was going to
shoot at,” deriding him for his lack of
patriotism. But Zhadan has sympathy
for Pasha. He still has time to make
the right choice.
In a 2020 interview with openDemo-
cracy, responding to a question about
the national identity of people in the
Donbas, Zhadan set forth his idea
of civic identity as a pluralistic and
dynamic process, a matter of choice
and action:
I don’t think there is such a thing
as a typical Ukrainian identity.
The identity of someone born in
Zakarpattya is a little different
from someone born in the Pol-
tava area. Historically, culturally
and linguistically it is a matter of
slightly different experiences and
roads. I think that our identity is
still in the process of formation
and development. It’s clear that it
consists, in the first place, of the
question of whether you recognise
the existence of an entity called
Ukraine and attach yourself to its
Ukrainianness, or reject it and go
18
down some other road. There’s a
very clear dividing line, lying on
the surface.
In 2014, he recollected, his native re-
gion of northern Luhansk chose the
Ukrainian side, supporting the army
and volunteers against the separatists.
As for the inhabitants of the occupied
regions, he had compassion for them
as well: “Those cities were deprived
of choice—the choice was made for
them, and unfortunately some of us
have shifted the responsibility for this
onto the people who live there.” The
Russian invasion has further proved
his point: while a significant number of
eastern and southern Ukrainians chose
the pro-Russian camp in 2014, this time
opposition to Russian aggression is far
more unified. No one likes to see their
home reduced to rubble.
A sandbagged convenience store, Kharkiv, Ukraine, April 2022
With his writing and his social ac-
tivism and charitable work, Zhadan
has long been a builder of bridges, an
essential figure in a bitterly divided
political landscape. In an interview
with the magazine Apofenie, he de-
fended the importance of dialogue,
which had “acquired negative con-
notations in Ukraine” since 2014. A
failure to establish dialogue within
Ukraine, he argued, would be “fatal”
to the country’s development and even
its survival. He is for a Ukraine that
embraces diversity, and he rejects
ethnonationalism—sometimes im-
plicitly, sometimes with his charac-
teristic gentle mockery. Mesopotamia
revolves around a group of old Kharkiv
friends about his own age whose ranks
include Marat, a Chechen boxer; Bob
Koshkin, who is Jewish; and Sasha
Tsoy, the “son of a Korean student
who washed up in Kharkiv in the
early eighties.” Zhadan himself grew
up speaking a mixture of Russian and
Ukrainian, but is now one of the lead-
ing writers working in Ukrainian.
R eading Reilly Costigan-Humes
and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler’s
impeccably idiomatic translation of
The Orphanage, the Anglophone reader
may wonder about the language of
the original. We learn that although
Pasha is a Ukrainian teacher, he always
speaks Russian outside of class—even
in the hallway of his school. One soldier
is described as “speaking Russian; his
accent comes through in the interroga-
tive.” Another soldier has “a Caucasian
accent”; he is presumably a Chechen
sent by Russia. He doesn’t recognize
the pantheon of Ukrainian poets on
Pasha’s classroom wall, laughingly say-
ing, “The only good poet’s a dead poet.”
When Pasha panics at a checkpoint, he
“can’t seem to figure out what language
he’s speaking. The words are bursting
out of him, choppy and broken—no
intonation, no detectable accent—he’s
just hollering, like he’s trying to cough
up mucus.” He encounters Ukrainian
soldiers from more firmly Ukrainian-
speaking regions further west, and
they laugh at him “for sliding back
and forth between languages.” When
another soldier is “mixing the two lan-
guages,” Pasha responds in kind. This
blend of Russian and Ukrainian, some-
times called Surzhyk after the name
for a mix of grains, appears throughout
Ukraine but is especially common in
the east of the country.
The choice of language, the mix-
ture of Russian and Ukrainian, the
accent and the confidence with which
Ukrainian and Russian are spoken—
these are all essential aspects of the
story. But Zhadan tells us about these
distinctions rather than showing them,
even in the original: The Orphanage
is monolingual, written entirely in
Ukrainian. In spite of the dystopian
landscape, the highly textured, polit-
icized, contested surface of language
in Ukraine is smoothed into an almost
utopian homogeneity, even as Zhadan
recognizes the significance of language
choice in the politics of Ukraine, es-
pecially in the embattled eastern
regions.3 It’s a political-linguistic
soft-focus lens, blurring away strife
even as it contributes to the project of
building the Ukrainian literary canon.
Zhadan achieves another pointed
effect by choosing not to name the
two sides. There are checkpoints ev-
erywhere, but the reader must piece
together who’s in charge. We encoun-
ter “frayed national flags” that change
with the occupying army, but we aren’t
told which country they belong to.
Pasha remembers a time “last spring,
right after it’d all started, right after
they’d come to the city, started taking
over police stations and tearing flags
off public buildings. Most of the locals
didn’t know what to make of them, what
to expect of them.” Some of the armed
3
The translators Costigan-Humes and
Stackhouse Wheeler discuss Zhadan’s
use of language at length in a podcast
from the New Books Network, available at
newbooksnetwork.com/the-orphanage.
men have “come in from out of town.”
They’re clearly separatists, but are
they from other regions of Ukraine or
from Russia? Instead of clear answers,
we have sentences like this: “People
coming from the south [i.e., occupied
territory] give off a burnt smell, like
they’ve been sitting by a campfire.”
Though this vagueness may confuse
some readers, and though it can de-
mand narrative circumlocutions that
sometimes feel awkward, it allows Zha-
dan to avoid patriotic rhetoric and the
casting of blame, in keeping with his
peacemaking project. He transcends
the murky details of politics, prefer-
ring to evoke a more universal human
predicament.
In her 2018 collection Lucky Breaks,
recently published in a translation by
Eugene Ostashevsky, the Ukrainian
writer and photographer Yevgenia
Belorusets takes a similar approach
in her stories of women from the
Donbas, leaving the two sides of the
conflict unnamed. We see the haziness
and confusion of the Donbas war as
it was experienced by people on the
ground, who were sometimes shelled
from both sides and who were engulfed
by propaganda, rumor, fear, and rancor.
Here, as in The Orphanage, this device
reflects the veiled nature of Russia’s
involvement in the war before this year;
it never openly acknowledged its par-
ticipation in the separatist uprisings,
though its decisive interventions were
well known. There is no such ambigu-
ity now: Russia has made explicit its
desire to erase Ukrainian statehood.
While The Orphanage is gentle to-
ward those who are torn or indecisive,
its final position is clear. The orphan-
age’s director, Nina, is a brave pro-
tector of the children under her care,
and the novel’s moral compass. Like
Zhadan, she has a strong, serene con-
viction of the value of the Ukrainian
national project. She criticizes the gym
teacher, Valera, for his nostalgia for
Soviet times and his failure to vote.
She chastises Pasha for not talking to
his students about the war—for not
taking sides. She’s the only one who
resists when the separatists want to
tear down the Ukrainian flag at the
orphanage. Everyone else just stands
and watches.
Pasha’s journey ends as you might
expect. He realizes that when you love
someone or something—your nephew,
your girlfriend, your country—you
have to fight for it. His urge to with-
draw is understandable, but in the end
he has to pick a side. His nephew will
be marked forever by his time in the
orphanage, as Ukraine will be marked
by the war that has cut it into pieces.
Pasha’s job as a Ukrainian teacher, his
effort to protect his students—these
works mattered. “Checkpoints get
taken down,” he reflects, “but gram-
mar rules remain.”
In the first months of the war,
Zhadan reported that he found him-
self unable to write poetry or fiction,
though he still made music. Now it
seems that his muse has returned. His
social media dispatches from summer-
time Kharkiv—still under fire, still
RICARD O MOR AES / RE UT ER S
surviving—have the flavor of poetry.
He chronicles the flight of shells,
studying the wartime weather: “In
summer’s tradition the sky is cloudy,
.
as if in doubt.” On July 5 he published
a poem on Facebook. It begins, “And
something is bound to be given back/
when so much is taken away.”
The New York Review
 NEW & FORTHCOMING
Egypt and the Classical World
Cross-Cultural Encounters
in Antiquity
Edited by Jeffrey Spier and Sara E. Cole
Presenting dynamic research, this
publication explores two millennia of
cultural exchanges between Egypt,
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Eye Dreaming
Photographs by Anthony Barboza
Anthony Barboza, Aaron Bryant,
and Mazie M. Harris, with an
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This richly illustrated monograph is the
first on the celebrated photographer
who has made thousands of iconic
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Balthazar
Getty A Black African King in
Medieval and Renaissance Art
Publications Edited by Kristen Collins and
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getty.edu/publications by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Experts in the fields of Ethiopian, West
African, Nubian, and Western European
art explore why and how Balthazar
came to be represented as a Black
African king.
September 22, 2022
Franz Kline
The Artist’s Materials
Corina E. Rogge with
Zahira Véliz Bomford
This volume provides an in-depth
analysis of the life, materials, and
techniques of influential American
Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline.
Cultural Heritage
and Mass Atrocities
Edited by James Cuno and
Thomas G. Weiss
A pathbreaking call to halt the
intertwined crises of cultural heritage
attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize
international efforts to protect people
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Henry van de Velde
Selected Essays, 1889–1914
Henry van de Velde
Edited by Katherine M. Kuenzli,
translated by Elizabeth Tucker
The first English collection of writings
by Henry van de Velde, one of the most
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The Fantasy of the Middle Ages
An Epic Journey through
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Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene
This abundantly illustrated volume is an
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Códice Maya de México
Understanding the Oldest
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The Absolute Realist
Collected Writings of Albert
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Edited and translated by
Daniel H. Magilow
© 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust
This volume presents, for the first time
in English, the German photographer’s
collected writings on the defining visual
medium of modernity.
19

Boris Johnson leaving 10 Downing Street six days after his resignation, London, July 13, 2022
In 1991 Margaret Thatcher accepted
an invitation to speak in the city that
had just ceased to be Leningrad and
was now St. Petersburg again. As a
demonstration of the ruthlessness
that has made it so good at holding
on to power, her own Conservative
Party had deposed her the previous
year as prime minister of the United
Kingdom. She was, however, still a
figure to whom Russians might look
for advice on how to create a democ-
racy. In her speech, she twice quoted
Edmund Burke, the Irish thinker she
called “the acknowledged father of
conservatism,” invoking in particular
his reverence for “ancient traditions,
venerable institutions, and old iden-
tities.” She also warned her Russian
audience that as they went about the
business of creating political parties,
they should remember the importance
of personal character: “Politics always
reflects the character and caliber of
those who practice it—and of those
who choose them.” If any of the bud-
ding Russian democrats who listened
to Thatcher back then are still around,
they may find some consolation in the
knowledge that this warning has, of
late, been as little heeded in her own
country as in theirs.
At the end of July another recently
deposed Tory prime minister, Boris
Johnson, held a belated party to cel-
ebrate his marriage last year to his
third wife, Carrie. Invitations to the
event at the prime minister’s country
house, Chequers, had already gone out,
but a series of unfortunate events in-
tervened. As Johnson’s hold on power
became ever weaker, Angela Rayner,
the deputy leader of the opposition
Labour Party, alleged that he was only
20
The Party’s Over
Fintan O’Toole
staying on at 10 Downing Street be-
cause he wanted “a party at Chequers
for his wedding.” To prove otherwise,
a new, but suitably grand, venue was
required. As has happened throughout
Johnson’s career, a vastly wealthy pa-
tron came to the rescue.
The man who saved the day was Lord
Anthony Bamford, whose company
manufactures the JCB line of heavy
construction vehicles. Bamford’s pen-
chant for digging very big holes ex-
tends to politics. He is a major donor
to the Conservative Party and was an
important booster for and funder of the
successful Vote Leave campaign that
Johnson led in 2016. According to
the Daily Mail, Bamford’s wife, Lady
Carole, had her butler make regular
deliveries of organic food from their
country estate, Daylesford, to the
Johnsons in Downing Street during
the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and
2021.
Noblesse oblige: the Bamfords again
took pity on Johnson and hosted his
wedding party at Daylesford. The
mood, reportedly, was one of “cheerful
bewilderment,” lightened perhaps by
Johnson’s joke that his ouster as prime
minister was “the greatest stitch-up
since the Bayeux Tapestry.” No one
seemed to notice a far more poignant
echo of the English past. Daylesford
was the family residence of another
once-powerful figure driven from office
by allegations of lawlessness and venal-
ity: Warren Hastings, governor-general
of India. In 1786 and 1787 Hastings was
impeached by the House of Commons
because, by his conduct in India, “the
honour of the crown, and the character
of this nation [had been] wantonly and
wickedly degraded.” Johnson’s political
epitaph could hardly have been more
eloquently written.
Connoisseurs of historical irony
may relish the identity of the man
who drove the campaign to have Has-
tings put on trial for “publick corrup-
tion”: Edmund Burke. Burke himself
regarded this as the achievement by
which he wished to be remembered:
Let my endeavours to save the Na-
tion from that shame and guilt,
be my monument; The only one
I ever will have. Let every thing
I have done, said, or written, be
forgotten but this. . . . Remember!
Remember! Remember!
Or, as those who claim Burke’s man-
tle in today’s Tory Party would have it:
Forget! Forget! Forget! It is not just
that no one saw the joke in Johnson’s
celebrating at the seat of a man the
“father of conservatism” regarded as
a disgrace to his country. It is that the
Conservatives have become positively
anti-Burkean in their embrace of am-
nesia. They forget Burke’s dictum in
Reflections on the Revolution in France
that “good order is the foundation of
all good things.” They show contempt
for “venerable institutions,” especially
the rule of law and adherence to in-
ternational treaties. Even more rad-
ically, they now base their claim to
rule on the demand that the recent
past—twelve years of Tory govern-
ment and the glorious promises of
Brexit—be forgotten. As they elect
their fourth leader in six years, they
have come to like a fresh start so
much that they have made it almost
an annual event. Burke, and indeed
Thatcher, would find it hard to rec-
ognize those who claim to be their
descendants.
Johnson’s elevation to 10 Downing
Street in July 2019 was itself an exer-
cise in willed oblivion. To pretend that
he was fit for high office, his party had
to forget everything it knew about him:
his incorrigible mendacity, his lack of
convictions or ideas, his notable in-
competence as both mayor of London
and foreign secretary, his personal and
political disloyalty, his crass venality.
The Tories bartered the Burkean val-
ues of good order and institutional
propriety for the short-term popular
appeal of the Boris brand. In return,
they got a spectacular election victory
in December 2019, and the extremist
version of Brexit that the most zealous
of them desired.
Y et one thing that can be said for
Johnson is that he seems always
to have had some idea that nothing in
his political career was built to last.
In his public mode of bumptiousness
and boosterism, he insisted as recently
as June, after 148 of his own MP s had
voted no confidence in him, that he
would rule until “the mid-2030s.” There
are, however, in his nonpolitical writ-
ings, hints that he learned enough
from his studies of classical Greece
to know that hubris and nemesis are
the closest of companions.
In 2007, when he was still a back-
bench MP , Johnson tried his hand at
a children’s book. The Perils of the
Pushy Parents: A Cautionary Tale is
a weak imitation of Hilaire Belloc’s
Cautionary Tales for Children (1907).
In Johnson’s version the eponymous
parents lament the casting of the child,
for whom they have grand ambitions,
as the hind end of a horse in a school
pantomime:
We rather hoped the BBC
Would hire you as a news trainee,
And after that it’s our intent
To shove you into parliament,
Up the greasy pole and then
Propel you into Number 10!
But as it is, your school, God rot ’em,
Portrays you as some dobbin’s
bottom.
Things do not go well for the par-
ents. They end up rolling together off
a cliff: “The voices of command are
hushed./The pushy have become the
pushed.” This last line may not quite
have the majesty of Burke’s rhetoric,
but it is a fine, and impressively pre-
scient, summation of what happens
when a horse’s ass is propelled up the
greasy pole to Number 10.
In his bad but interesting novel
of 2004, Seventy-Two Virgins, John-
son identifies himself with another,
TI M IR EL AND/ X IN HUA/G E TTY IM AGE S
slightly more elevated pantomime
character. His fictional alter ego, Roger
Barlow, is quite sure that his political
career is about to meet an abrupt and
inglorious end on account of a scandal.
He imagines his future:
By this time next week, he thought,
there would be nothing left for
him to do but go on daytime TV
shows. Perhaps in ten years’ time
The New York Review
 “Too many companies don’t
know how to walk the walk of
diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Getting to Diversity shows
them how.”
—Lori George Billingsley,
former Global Chief DEI
Officer, Coca-Cola Company
Finalist for the Cundill Prize
Now in Paperback
“The Horde flourished, in
Favereau’s fresh, persuasive
telling, precisely because it
was not the one-trick homicidal
rabble of legend.”
—Wall Street Journal
September 22, 2022
“Conversations with cab drivers
lead to discussions about
space exploration in this fun
outing from astrobiologist
Cockell . . . He does a great job
blending cutting-edge science
with philosophical consider-
ations. This is a joy to read.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Here, at last, is a book about
what happiness really means,
and why it often eludes us in our
stressed-out, always-on lives.”
—Arianna Huffington, Founder
and CEO, Thrive
hup.harvard.edu
“Bucar’s sharp insights, shot
through with humor and
self-awareness, are exactly
what we need the next time
we reach over to borrow from
someone else’s religion for our
own therapeutic, political, or
educational needs.”
—Gene Demby, cohost and
correspondent for NPR’s
Code Switch
“Belongs in the hands of any ed-
ucator—regardless of academic
discipline—truly interested in
changing students’ lives with
effective teaching.”
—Beverly Daniel Tatum,
author of Why Are All the
Black Kids Sitting Together
in the Cafeteria?
“This is a book about how the
past lives in us, even as we
resist it or are unaware of it.
Rabinowitz is a storyteller of
rare verve and insight, offering
us delight, discovery, and an
honest account of joy and pain.”
—David W. Blight, Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of
Frederick Douglass
The Presidential Committee
on the Legacy of Slavery
Preface by Lawrence S. Bacow
Harvard’s searing and sobering
indictment of its own long-
standing relationship with
chattel slavery and anti-Black
discrimination.
21
 he might be sufficiently rehabil-
itated to be offered the part of
Widow Twanky at the Salvation
Army hall in Horsham.
Rediscover
Widow Twankey (as the name is more
usually spelled) is the archetypal pan-
tomime dame and appears in burlesque
versions of the Aladdin story. She is
usually played by a cross-dressed
man. When Sir Ian McKellen played
her most recently in London, she com-
plained of “my horrible ex-husband
Donald J. Twankey.” It is not a bad
name for Johnson himself, since the
political persona he invented for him-
self was half Trump, half pantomime
performer.
T he thing about the panto, though,
is that it is strictly seasonal. It is,
for performers and audiences alike,
a carnivalesque diversion from the
routine and the serious. Johnson’s
great triumph, the Brexit campaign
of 2016, succeeded because he, more
than anyone else, could make the act
of leaving the European Union into a
time of festivity. He made what was
a decision of immense practical im-
port appear to exist outside the time
frame of the workaday British world.
Philip Larkin once asked, “Where can
we live but days?” Johnson succeeded,
for a season, in giving an attractive
answer: the British could live not in
days or months or years but in epochs.
In his first speech as prime minister,
in 2019, he informed his people that
they were now at the “beginning of a
new golden age.”
For Johnson, Brexit meant that the
previous fifty years of British politics,
economics, and social change were,
as he put it, “receding in the past be-
hind us.” The country was “re-emerging
after decades of hibernation,” or, to
mix his animal metaphors, “leaving
its chrysalis.” This was a holiday from
history—not least, of course, from
this century’s miserable years of Tory
rule: the cruel and misplaced zeal for
austerity under David Cameron; the
challenges to the very existence of
the United Kingdom from Scottish,
Irish, and English nationalism; the
fact that typical incomes in the UK
are 19 percent lower than those in Ger-
many, 10 percent lower than in France,
and 6 percent lower than in Ireland.
The notion that Britain had been in
hibernation for decades before it was
then awoken by the rising sun of Brexit
was a way of putting that awkward re-
cent past to bed. It is easy to see why
this dreamtime is attractive to a party
that has been in power for so long:
the butterfly is not responsible for the
misdeeds of the chrysalis.
This panto season of British politics
could not last and neither, therefore,
could Johnson’s premiership. His act
ceased to be funny when ordinary peo-
Distributed by Penguin Random House, Inc.
ple discovered that the joke was on
them. Festivity turned sour when their
real suffering during the pandemic was
mocked by their prime minister’s egre-
gious refusal to apply the restrictions
they endured to himself, his family, or
his staff, for whom Downing Street
seemed to become a frat house where
the party never stopped. Promises by
his political enablers that a chastened
Johnson would become a reformed
Library of America
character were undone (again with
loa.org that strange honesty that he can some-
times summon from the mists of his
22
mendacity) by Johnson himself, who
told BBC radio in June that “if you’re
saying you want me to undergo some
sort of psychological transformation,
I think that our listeners would know
that is not going to happen.”
In this, at least, he was as good as
his word. The proximate cause of his
fall was his decision, when faced with
accurate allegations that he had pro-
moted a party ally whom he knew to
be a serial sexual harasser, simply to
lie about it. The deeper problem for
the Tory Party, though, was not that
he does not tell the truth—which they
had always known—but that his dis-
honesty was becoming so petty and
purposeless. Being so relentlessly un-
truthful about lockdown parties, or the
redecoration of his Downing Street
flat, or the sordid behavior of a minor
political ally devalued the big lie of
Brexit. For the Brexiteers, the proper
use of Johnson’s talent for falsehood
was in turning the leaden realities of
leaving the EU into a golden fantasia.
As a man for whom nothing ever had
any consequence, he was the perfect
medium for the message that Brexit,
too, would be consequence-free. Yet
now he was wasting his gift for ex-
travagant fabrication on grubby lit-
tle fibs—and making it clear that he
would go on doing so.
I n Johnson’s defense, it ought to be
conceded that he might as well lie
about the small things, because the big
one is running out of road. For a hard
core of English nationalists, Brexit
will always be worth whatever pain it
causes other people. For many of those
who voted for it, a large part of its
appeal was that it seemed so exciting.
It is a genuinely historic thing to have
done, a departure that will shape the
lives of generations to come. But it has
become tedious. On the political level,
the argument has crystallized into a
row with Brussels over the protocol on
Northern Ireland that Johnson nego-
tiated, claimed as a great victory, and
then effectively repudiated.
Yet it has long been obvious that
most English voters have very little
interest in Northern Ireland. Putting
its name together with that legalistic
term “protocol” is quite the passion
killer. And going to war with Brussels
over a provision in the Brexit deal that
Johnson assured voters was “done”
does not cohere with the assurance
that all difficulties would “recede in
the past behind us.” Johnson prom-
ised a sweet amnesia, but his voters
have been fed a dreary diet of leftover
grievances.
At the more personal level, Brexit
translates for most ordinary British
people into the dull anxiety of declin-
ing living standards. In early August
the Bank of England forecast a decline
in real UK household incomes of 5 per-
cent by 2024—the biggest fall since
records began more than half a century
ago. Some of the causes are common
to other countries: the pandemic and
the inflationary effects of the war in
Ukraine. For the UK, however, these
problems are exacerbated by Brexit,
which, as the government’s Office
for Budget Responsibility estimates,
“will reduce long-run productivity by
four per cent relative to remaining in
the EU.” According to the Resolution
Foundation, a nonpartisan British
think tank, “a less-open UK will mean
The New York Review
 John Kelly (I), 1981

PETER HUJAR CURATED BY ELTON JOHN

FRÆNKEL
SEPTEMBER—OCTOBER 2022 SAN FRANCISCO
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a poorer and less productive one by
the end of the decade, with real wages
expected to fall by 1.8 per cent, a loss
of £470 per worker a year.”
The Brexit carnival is over, but its
tents cannot be folded. This is a show
that must go on. Historically, the ge-
nius of the Conservative Party is, as
the political historian Tim Bale puts
it, that it has “always been protean—
shifting its shape, changing its colours
like a chameleon to best suit the con-
ditions in which it finds itself.” John-
son leaves it in a condition where
it cannot change its colors because
Brexit is written in indelible ink. The
former Labour Party politician Denis
McShane coined the term Brexter-
nity, and it captures the paradox of
Johnson’s legacy—his is a very short
and flippant dalliance with power
that will have very long and serious
consequences.
W here can British conservatism go
when it has rid itself of Johnson
but cannot move out of the twilight
monotony he created? Conventional
wisdom last year was that the Tories
would seek to reshape themselves
around the young, sleek, photogenic,
very rich Rishi Sunak, whom Johnson
plucked from relative obscurity and
elevated to the grand office of chan-
cellor of the exchequer. Sunak seemed
to have the right balance of ingredi-
ents. On the one hand, he was a true
believer in Brexit and its mission to
“remove the burden of Brussels bu-
reaucracy.” On the other, his origins as
the grandson of immigrants from India
seem to soften the English national-
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ism that drove that whole project. He
was loyal to Johnson through a series
of embarrassments and outrages but
jumped ship at apparently the right
moment, when all but the most de-
luded could see that his time was up.
Sunak exudes an earnestness and a
technocratic competence that might,
at other times, have seemed to offer
both an antidote to Johnson’s feckless-
ness and a reassuring calm in the face
of approaching economic recession.
Yet the membership of the Conser-
vative Party (around 180,000 people,
who are much older, wealthier, whiter,
more male, more right-wing, and more
likely to live in the prosperous south
of England than the general popu-
lation) will not choose Sunak. There
are two big reasons for this and both
are rooted in the mentality of Brexit.
Sunak himself may have genuinely be-
lieved that the decision to leave the
EU was all about the achievement of a
standard conservative goal, economic
deregulation. But Theresa May sang
the real tune at the first post-Brexit
Tory Party conference, in October 2016,
when she railed against “international
elites”: “If you believe you’re a citizen
of the world, you’re a citizen of no-
where. You don’t understand what the
very word ‘citizenship’ means.”
Sunak naively believed that this
did not apply to him, even though he
embodies the international elite. He
moved (after an acceptably elite ed-
ucation at an English private school
and Oxford) to Goldman Sachs, to
Stanford, to hedge-fund manage-
ment. His vast family fortune comes
mostly from shares that his wife,
Akshata Murty, holds in Infosys, her
TIYA MILES
SANDRA NEWMAN
ANDREW MOTION
JULIE ORRINGER
IMANI PERRY
BETSY PRIOLEAU
JYOT TI THOTAM
FRANS DE WAAL
JOHN TAYLOR WILLIAMS
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON
father’s India-based IT multinational.
Until earlier this year, Murty claimed
“non-domiciled” status in the UK,
saving her an estimated £2.1 million
a year in British taxes even while her
husband was in charge of the UK’s
national finances. National-populist
denunciations of footloose globalist
elites may be intended, in contempo-
rary conservatism, purely as fodder for
the base. But the base’s appetite for
this rhetoric is real and unsatisfied.
When Secretary of State for Culture
Nadine Dorries, a strong supporter
of Sunak’s rival Liz Truss, tweeted
about his “Prada shoes worth £450”
and “£3,500 bespoke suit,” her meaning
could hardly be called coded. Sunak has
been burned by the fires of reactionary
populism he helped to light.
Sunak’s second problem is contained
in the most pointed sentence in the
resignation letter he sent to Johnson
on July 5: “Our people know that if
something is too good to be true then
it’s not true.” This was the elevator
pitch for the Sunak succession: The
British people are fed up with John-
son’s lies and crave an honest truth-
teller like me. The difficulty is that
what is most obviously “too good to
be true” is the fool’s gold of Brexit. It
is all very well, and undoubtedly wel-
come, to stop lying about wallpaper
and sexual sleaze, but the promise to
tell the truth is rather blunted when
there is a far larger deception that
must not be confronted. When the
big lie remains compulsory, Sunak’s
new era of honest Toryism could not
but be stillborn.
T he alternative to “too good to be
true” is the strategy outlined to
Katy Balls, the deputy political editor
of the pro-Tory weekly The Spectator,
by an unnamed MP who is supporting
Truss, the woman who is almost certain
to be the next British prime minister:
“If people think there is an imaginary
river, you don’t tell them there isn’t,
you build them an imaginary bridge.”
This imagery could hardly be more apt
as an indication of Truss’s intention to
carry on where Johnson has unwillingly
left off. Building imaginary bridges—
across the Thames, across the English
Channel, even across the Irish Sea—
was his signature fantasy of untram-
meled power. But the quote in fact
repeats advice given by one soon-to-
be-deposed leader to another: Nikita
Khrushchev said it to Richard Nixon.
That Truss seems happy to take her
cues from such sources is an indication
of what might be expected from her
premiership.
One way to think of Truss is to recall
Larkin’s bleak lines about how your
parents “fill you with the faults they
had/And add some extra, just for you.”
Politically speaking, Truss’s parents
are the last two Tory leaders, May and
Johnson, and she has inherited many
of the faults of both and few of the
strengths of either. She lacks May’s
integrity but has her strangely robotic
persona—Truss speaks in the manner
of an actor who has entirely forgotten
her lines and is being fed them through
an invisible earpiece. And though she
is not, like Johnson, lazy (she is, if any-
thing, manic), and lacks his charisma,
she has his unprincipled opportunism,
carelessness about truth, and habit of
blaming everyone else for his own mis-
takes. Truss was a wild liberal before
she became a reactionary. She strongly
supported Remain in the Brexit ref-
erendum of 2016, before she became
an arch-Brexiteer. In her leadership
campaign, she suggested cutting the
salaries of public servants who live
outside of London, then flatly denied
doing so and blamed the media for
quoting her own press release. Ideas
and truths matter to her only as ser-
vants to her ambition.
Truss will take the Tories further
down the only path that is open to them,
that of anarcho-authoritarianism. Like
Johnson, she projects herself as a rebel
against authority: “I hated being told
what to do and that has driven my po-
litical philosophy.” She put forward the
legislation that allows British govern-
ment ministers to break international
law by tearing up the Northern Ire-
land protocol. She has indicated her
willingness to withdraw the UK from
the European Convention on Human
Rights.
This outlawry is underpinned by the
language of piracy. A chapter in Britan-
nia Unchained, a 2012 book cowritten
by Truss and other rising Conservative
politicians, is titled “Buccaneers” and
quotes Steve Jobs approvingly: “It’s
more fun to be a pirate than to join the
navy.” It concedes, with evident reluc-
tance, that “law and order” are “on the
whole beneficial.” But it hankers after
an ideal of “capitalism as chaos,” the
magic that happens “when nearly all
society’s strictures are relaxed.” Hence
the claim by Truss’s supporter David
Frost, who led negotiations of the
Brexit deal with the EU and is widely
expected to have an important role in a
Truss administration, that “what needs
to be done [by the new prime minister]
will be turbulent and disruptive.”
This promise of disruption is all
that remains of Brexit. It can function
now only as a fantasy of liberation, not
from Brussels but from all restraint
on the making of money. Truss’s lan-
guage evokes a Britain whose only real
problem is that its natural exuberance
has been constrained by regulation.
Hence the recurrence in her rhetoric of
“unchain,” “unleash,” “unshackle.” But,
as in current US conservatism, these
images of freedom must go hand in
hand with their opposite. When she is
not talking of unshackling everything,
Truss is promising to “crack down”
on everything. The chains that are to
be taken off the moneymakers will be
clamped on much of civil society.
In her speeches, and in the way
they are reported by her fans in the
Tory press, she has promised, so far,
to “crack down” on “militant” trade
unions, on civil servants who are work-
ing from home, on Chinese companies
like TikTok, on onshore renewable
energy projects, on “unfair protests”
by climate activists, on “antisocial”
behavior, on illegal migration, and on
the “excessive caution” of financial
regulators. She is even promising to
repress criticism of the dire condi-
tion of post-Brexit Britain, warning
the democratically elected first min-
ister of the devolved administration in
Wales that “I will crack down on his
negativity about Wales and about the
United Kingdom.” In the pantomimes,
it is customary for the audience to cry
out against certain assertions made by
.
the characters: “Oh, no, it isn’t.” In this
next version of the show, those who
dare to make that call will be ejected
from the theater.
The New York Review

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September 22, 2022
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What the Fragile X Gene Reveals
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and Scientif ic Discovery
ANNE SKOMOROWSKY
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Earthlings
Imaginative Encounters
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ADRIAN PARR
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Atrocities, War, and the Failure of
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25

Marina Warner; illustration by Vivienne Flesher
Esmond and Ilia:
An Unreliable Memoir
by Marina Warner, with
vignettes by Sophie Herxheimer.
New York Review Books,
416 pp., $19.95 (paper)
For fifty years the historian and novel-
ist Marina Warner has been teaching us
how to see the histories that lie behind
myths and symbols, and especially how
to interpret the meanings secreted in
images projected by, and onto, women.
Her first book, published in 1972, was
a biography of “a wicked woman in
power,” the nineteenth-century Man-
chu empress dowager Cixi. Nine years
later she brought out a study of Joan
of Arc, an icon of “female independent-
mindedness and courage and adven-
turousness” but also a martyr, and
therefore, as the young Warner was
taught at her convent schools, “the
ideal expression of female virtue.”
But it was a book she wrote in be-
tween, published in 1976, that really
made her name. Alone of All Her Sex
is an account of the myth and cult
of the Virgin Mary, across centuries
and across nations. It is also rooted in
Warner’s early experience of a Cath-
olic upbringing, which she looks back
on from her late twenties, having lost
her faith:
Invocations to the Virgin Mary
marked out the days of my child-
26
Family Lore
Clair Wills
hood in bells; her feastdays gave
a rhythm to the year; an eternal
ideal of mortal beauty was fixed by
the lineaments of her face, which
gazed from every wall and niche.
Beginning with the question “What
was it I had worshipped?” Warner
tracked the development of popular
beliefs, images, stories, and official
Catholic doctrine about the Virgin
across a dizzying array of texts and
sources—not as an inquiry into faith
or religion but rather treating the
myth of the Virgin as “a central theme
in the history of western attitudes
towards women.” A secular analysis
of a religious icon, Warner’s hugely
influential (and, among conservative
Catholics, controversial) book took
its cues from anthropologists such
as Bronisław Malinowski, Margaret
Mead, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well
as from contemporary feminism—she
cites both Simone de Beauvoir and
Germaine Greer as influences.
Alone of All Her Sex is still, for me,
Warner’s most brilliant work, but she
is probably better known for her series
of books on classical tales, folklore,
and fairy stories, and what they can
tell us about the cultures that gave
rise to them. Taking a stand against
the idea that the characters in fairy
tales (such as the wicked stepmother,
the orphaned child, or the fairy god-
mother) express cultural archetypes
deeply rooted in the psyche, or even
in a Jungian collective unconscious,
Warner’s accounts focus on the teller
of the tale as much as on the figures
within them. She is interested in how
ideology gets embedded in stories.
Wicked stepmothers tell us less
about our psychic need to split the fig-
ure of the mother into a good (usually
dead) one and an evil one, so that we
don’t feel so guilty about our feelings
of rage, than about a social system in
which women rarely held property or
had jurisdiction over their children,
about cultures in which death in child-
birth was common, and therefore too
about the remarriage of widowers to
women who became stepmothers to
the father’s Cinderella child. Warner
is fascinated by the way tales change
their meanings as they get retold in
different social settings, and by the
networks of tellers that carry stories
into new cultures. Tale-tellers are
like authors of books, in that they
give life to the stories they tell. But
they are also a bit like bookshops and
libraries—storehouses of knowledge,
repositories of lore and learning.
A s it turns out, Warner grew up in
a bookshop. Her father, Esmond
Warner, was a bookseller, first in Cairo,
then in Brussels, and finally in Cam-
bridge, England. Her new book, Es-
mond and Ilia, began, Warner explains,
as the story of the Cairo bookshop,
opened by her father as an overseas
branch of the British high-street chain
W. H. Smith in 1947 (when Marina was
six months old) and burned down by
anti-British rioters in the Cairo fire
of 1952 (when Marina was nearly six).
Subtitled “An Unreliable Memoir,” the
book began as a novel before Warner
changed her mind and wrote it as a
mix of genres.
She splices together imagined
scenes from her parents’ lives with
her own fragmented memories of her
first years and historical accounts of
postwar Italy, where Esmond, then a
lieutenant colonel in the Eighth Army,
met and married Emilia Terzulli in
1944—after at most four encounters;
postwar Britain, where Esmond and
Ilia lived for the first year of their
marriage; and the last years of King
Farouk’s reign in Egypt, where the
Warner family (now with two daugh-
ters, Marina and her younger sister,
Laura) lived until the coup in 1952. It’s
an extraordinarily rich set of coordi-
nates, transformed in Warner’s hands
into a storied landscape, offering vi-
gnettes of the social and cultural life
of postwar Europe among the upper-
middle classes, and insight into the
inner lives of her parents.
It can’t be an accident that both
Warner’s mother and father left her
copious sets of documents—a whole
garageful of papers. They must have
known what she was likely to do with
them. She has combed through stacks
of photographs and steamer trunks full
of memorabilia, and read both Ilia’s
diaries (written in increasingly spidery
Italian as her eyesight failed) and Es-
mond’s voluminous correspondence.
Esmond, who was born in 1907, was
the product of a typical upper-class
Edwardian upbringing (sent away to
school at seven), and he dutifully wrote
to his parents two or three times a
week for most of their lives.
Warner has had access to a stack of
letters unfolding the details of his ex-
periences in the army and the family’s
life in Cairo. He also wrote regularly
to many other people, including his
bosses at Smith’s, his Eton housemas-
ter, and old friends from Oxford such
as Frank Pakenham, the Earl of Long-
ford and a Labour peer who became
Marina’s godfather. Esmond comes
across in these letters as a man’s man.
Or perhaps, rather, a boy’s boy. One of
Warner’s more melancholy verdicts
on her father sees him trapped in
the romances of Eton and Peckwater
Quad (at Christ Church, Oxford), the
Bullingdon Club, horse trials, motoring
through Europe, and “the adventure
yarns of the empire.” “What, what?” he
says, like a caricature of himself. “The
melodies my father heard as a boy kept
him humming happily along, long after
the instruments were no longer tuned
according to current temperament and
the playing style was changing.”
And then there are all the things
Warner inherited: her mother’s di-
amond rings, her exquisitely hand-
stitched clothes, the books she brought
with her from Italy to England, a box
Brownie camera, rolls of film nega-
tives, the rotted silk house colors won
The New York Review
September 22, 2022 27
by Esmond at Eton, a looted piece of
the stone entablature from the temple
at Leptis Magna that now acts as a
doorstop in Warner’s North London
home. You’re the historian, say her
parents from beyond the grave, make
sense of this. Warner describes the
responsibility she has been handed by
her parents as akin to that of a shabti,
the figurines buried with pharaohs and
other powerful ancient Egyptians:
“They are the labourers of the other
world, who work on behalf of the de-
ceased to meet their needs and provide
for their comforts during eternity.”
As she unpacks the trunks stored
in the garage she gathers shards to
piece together the story of a wartime
European romance and its postwar
aftermath. She also becomes more and
more aware of her parents’ unhappi-
ness, and particularly of her mother’s
sense of grief and isolation in the mar-
riage. The book she has written is an
account of the first years of her par-
ents’ union set against the backdrop of
a fading British ideal of colonial rule.
But it is also an attempt to protect her
mother from her disappointment, all
these years later, and provide comfort:
“I am trying to be her shabti and an-
swer to her ever-present ghost.”
A ll Warner’s skills as a mythogra-
pher are brought to bear on her
parents’ story as she investigates the
history behind a series of familiar ob-
jects: the pair of leather brogues that
were a wedding gift from Esmond to
Ilia and that signified the “country-
gentry camouflage” that she was going
to have to learn to inhabit in her new
“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
28
life; a silver photograph frame that
became a symbol of Esmond’s uncon-
trollable anger, after he threw it out
of the window of their Cairo flat onto
the street below in protest against
what he considered to be Ilia’s prof-
ligacy; a pocket Italian-French dic-
tionary, bought by Ilia in downtown
Cairo, which opens a window onto the
“dandyish macaronic” spoken by
her parents in the snobbish, class-
freighted world of the international
elite in postwar Cairo. As though
they were images of the Madonna,
Warner unpacks the meanings that
live inside these objects, teasing out
the clues they give to the social and
personal histories in which they were
once embedded, and tracing the ways
in which her understanding of them
has changed over time.
And perhaps they are, in fact, images
of the Madonna. Warner’s mother is re-
peatedly described—not only by War-
ner but by Esmond and others who met
her—as a paragon of beauty and oth-
erworldliness, a poor, southern-Italian
Catholic girl who captures the heart
of a stiff Englishman fifteen years her
senior and transforms not only her life
but his. Warner writes of her mother as
though she were possessed of a kind
of mystical aura, or as a figure in a
legend—sometimes, when she wore
her Dior perfume and dresses with full
swirling skirts of taffeta and silk, a
Hollywood legend. The book jacket
advertises the story as a fairy tale of
the marriage of a “beautiful, penniless”
young Italian bride to an upper-class
English colonel, and this seems to have
been a story line shared by the family
as a whole. But as Warner knows very
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-
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Be it planning your first system, moving
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well, fairy stories take different forms
in different places, and when told by
different tellers. All the members of
Warner’s family turn out to have been
tellers of tales, or weavers of fantasies,
and those fantasies rarely matched.
Esmond, for example, knew he had
bagged fine young stock. “What a plea-
sure to look at,” he wrote to his parents
in March 1944, “like a 2-yr-old filly now,
‘rangy’ NOT quite filled out! She has
Lrd Birkenhead’s qualifications of true
breeding, apart from all else, beautiful
hands, small feet and ankles, tall 5.8
and a half and a long slim neck!,” and
he goes on to compare her character
to that of the family dog. But he liked
best the part of the fairy tale where
he, son of Sir Pelham “Plum” Warner,
the well-known English cricketer, got
to refine her good looks with his so-
cial class. A few weeks later Esmond
wrote to his parents telling them not
to worry about the fact that Ilia was
a Catholic:
I will tell you more of her family. . . I
have often been to their flat in
Bari—and they have nice friends
of “the professional classes” type.
Ilia however (you know she is only
21) belongs to the new world, and
her life will be mine, NOT her
circle’s.
Warner writes that the gift of the
brogues “marked a rite of passage,
a kind of initiation into a class, into
a tribe, into a new place of belong-
ing, just as Cinderella’s foot uniquely
matched the glass slipper which would
transform her fate.” All of which makes
Esmond the prince.
This was the fantasy Esmond told
himself, and to a certain extent it over-
lapped with Ilia’s fantasy of herself
as a “penniless and fatherless waif”
rescued by romance. Bari in the spring
of 1944 was not at all an easy place
to live—the harbor had been badly
bombed in December 1943, and after
four years of war, rations were scarce,
and made scarcer by a corrupt local
administration and a vicious black
market that thrived in the after-
math of Mussolini’s fall. But while
“fatherless” was a statement of fact,
“penniless” and “waif” were embel-
lishments. Ilia was the youngest of
four daughters. Her family had tried
to make a go of it in Chicago in the
1910s, but returned to Bari shortly be-
fore Ilia was born in 1922. Nine years
later her father died, and the family
moved out of the palazzo owned by
their uncle, where they had occupied
one floor, to an apartment in the cen-
ter of the city, where the girls and their
widowed mother made money as best
they could, mostly through secretarial
work.
The arrival of the Allies was a god-
send. The sisters did typing and trans-
lation work for them, and provided
hospitality:
Several of the family’s visitors
wrote over the years to my mother
recalling those days and the hos-
pitality and miraculous beauty of
the four Terzulli girls; one or two
of them have also written to me,
after piecing together that my
mother must be the Ilia they had
known. “It was a haven . . . a home
from home,” one remembered in
a letter. “We played records on
the gramophone and your mother
sang to the numbers; sometimes,
we danced.”
A lthough Warner does not state this
explicitly, the girls were looking
for protectors—someone to rescue
them. Ilia suggested herself to Es-
mond, not the other way around. One
of Warner’s correspondents remem-
bered that, sometime after Esmond
and Ilia were married, another sister,
Bice, tried (unsuccessfully) to repeat
the trick:
Actually I think someone was on
the lookout for a husband for young
Beachi [sic]—for at least once I
found myself alone with her at
night on the little balcony—and I
remember her saying softly, “. . . but
let us talk of loff, Bruce.” She pro-
nounced my name “Broooch.”
Such initiative in the circumstances
is surely to be lauded, but the mar-
riage story wasn’t told by either of
the participants as the outcome of
pragmatism and hardheadedness, and
Warner doesn’t quite tell it that way
either. The Cinderella formula is too
strong. Ilia played her part as far as
she understood it—and she seems to
have enjoyed playing it, at least to start
with—but the story Warner unfolds is
alert to the ways in which her mother
became trapped by her role.
Ilia learned to masquerade. She
learned to wear the brogues and the
country tweed and to toast crumpets
over the fire, to know the difference
between pre- and post-dinner drinks
and how to serve them, to love the
British monarchy, and to reproduce
the finer gradations of class snob-
bery among postwar Egypt’s colonial
elite. (Scarlett O’Hara, Warner tells us,
“figured vividly in my mother’s my-
thology.”) She mastered the codes and
manners and customs of her adopted
class, and became especially adept at
wearing its clothes. As Warner details
the scent bottles and cosmetic jars,
the nail polish, the careful attention
to style from underwear to waistcoat
and scarf, we get a strong idea of her
mother’s own sense of herself as an
image—she knew her beauty was her
capital.
The marriage was what she had
wanted, what she had bid for, but
something wasn’t working, and War-
ner can’t quite bring herself to tell us
what that was. It is true that a child
can never fully know the intimate
world of her parents. But there is an
added layer of reticence to Warner’s
account. She describes Esmond’s vio-
lent rages and his subsequent remorse,
but glancingly; she learns from Ilia’s
diaries that she felt she had “always
been the active partner in the sexual
act” and she speculates about her
mother’s desire; she intimates that
Ilia continued to look for a protector,
or something more, in other lovers.
She explains that she knows more than
she can tell:
Coming across her diaries of this
period, all in Italian, the writing
agitated and sometimes desperate,
filled me with rage on her behalf
against him. The scenes aren’t to
be repeated here: her ghost would
shudder at the memory of those
times of deep unhappiness. Yet
she didn’t destroy these notebooks,
The New York Review
 POWER IN THE BALLOT
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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
generates the necessary gas pressure to force the bullet through the
barrel, the initial muzzle velocity being about 800 ft. per second. The
pressure exerted to the rear against the face of the slide carries the
latter and the barrel to the rear together. But due to the link
attachment, the barrel is almost immediately swung down and
unlocked from the slide, leaving the slide to continue its movement to
the rear, thus opening the breech, cocking the hammer, extracting
and ejecting the empty cartridge and compressing the recoil spring.
When the slide reaches its rearmost position the magazine follower
raises another cartridge into the path of the slide. This cartridge is
then forced into the barrel by the forward movement of the slide as
before described.
Although it might be supposed that the downward swinging of the
barrel would affect the accuracy of the fire, this is not the case. The
bullet has gained its maximum velocity and passed out of the muzzle
before the unlocking movement between the barrel and slide
commences.
When the magazine has been emptied the magazine follower is
free to press against the projection on the slide stop, thus forcing the
slide stop into the front recess of the slide, thereby locking the slide
in the open position and reminding the person firing that the empty
magazine must be replaced before firing can be continued.

Interesting Facts about the Pistol.

(a) Weight 2½ pounds. Trigger pull, about 7 pounds.
(b) Rifling, 6 grooves with left-hand twist. The drift due to the rifling
is therefore to the left, but this is more than neutralized by the pull of
the trigger when the pistol is fired from the right hand.
(c) For ranges up to 75 yards the trajectory is very flat and the drift
slight, giving the pistol great accuracy.
COMPONENT PARTS.
 COMPONENT PARTS.
1. Receiver.
2. Barrel.
3. Slide.
4. Plunger Tube.
5. Slide Stop Plunger.
6. Plunger Spring.
7. Safety-lock Plunger.
8. Slide Stop.
9. Rear Sight.
10. Front Sight.
11. Link.
12. Link Pin.
13. Barrel Bushing.
14. Recoil Spring.
15. Recoil Spring Guide.
16. Plug.
17. Extractor.
18. Ejector.
19. Ejector Pin.
20. Firing Pin.
21. Firing Pin Spring.
22. Firing Pin Stop.
23. Hammer.
24. Hammer Pin.
25. Hammer Strut.
26. Hammer Strut Pin.
27. Mainspring.
28. Mainspring Cap.
29. Mainspring Cap Pin.
30. Sear.
31. Sear Spring.
32. Sear Pin.
33. Disconnector.
34. Trigger.
35. Grip Safety.
36. Safety Lock.
37. Mainspring Housing.
38. Housing Pin.
39. Housing Pin Retainer.
40. Lanyard Loop.
41. Lanyard Loop Pin.
42. Magazine Tube. }
43. Magazine Base. }
44. Magazine Pins (2). }
45. Magazine Loop. } Magazine
46. Magazine Spring. }
47. Magazine Follower. }
48. Magazine Catch.
49. Magazine Catch Spring.
50. Magazine Catch Lock.
51. Stocks, Right and Left.
52. Stock Screws (4).
53. Screws Bushings (4).

(d) Beyond 250 yards the trajectory is very curved and the drift
becomes considerable. Firing is therefore very inaccurate.
(e) To hit a target at ranges over 75 yards it will be necessary to
lay on a displaced point above and to the right of target for ranges
approximately as follows:
Vertical Lateral
 Range, Yards. Displacement. Displacement, right.
100 ½ yard ½ yard
150 1½ yards ¼ yard
200 3 yards 1 yard
250 5 yards 2 yards
(f) The striking energy of the bullet is sufficiently great to surely
disable a man by causing a dangerous wound at all ranges up to 500
yards.
(g) The pistol has been fired by experts at 25 yards, aimed fire, at
the rate of 21 shots (3 magazines) in 30 seconds. Such rapidity is,
however, not necessary or desirable in service firing. Accuracy is
always the first consideration.

Precautions.
1. Whenever the pistol is taken out of or returned to the arm rack,
also both before and after drill or other exercises with the pistol,
remove the magazine and see that it is empty. Then draw back the
slide which will eject any cartridge in the chamber. Finally look
through the bore to see that the pistol is unloaded and the bore not
obstructed by a plug or wad. Replace all parts, come to raise pistol
and lower hammer.
2. Never place the trigger finger within the trigger guard until it is
intended to fire and the pistol pointed toward the target.
3. Do not carry the pistol in the holster with the hammer cocked
and the safety lock on, except in an emergency.
4. Always press the trigger with the forefinger.
5. After each shot relieve the pressure on the trigger so that the
sear may re-engage.
6. When inserting the magazine be sure that it engages the
magazine catch. Never insert the magazine by striking it smartly;
always apply a continuous push.
7. The pistol must be kept clean, free from rust and properly oiled.
8. Never disassemble the receiver except by permission of a
officer.
9. In disassembling the receiver be sure that (a) the disconnector
and sear are properly assembled; (b) that the hammer is not
snapped when the pistol is partially assembled; (c) that the stocks
are not removed; (d) that no hammer is used in either assembling or
disassembling.

Care and Cleaning of the Automatic Pistol.

In cleaning the barrel of the automatic pistol after firing proceed
as follows: Swab out the bore with soda solution to remove powder
fouling. Remove and dry with a couple of patches. Examine to see
that no patches of metal fouling are in evidence, then swab out with
the swabbing solution—a dilute metal-fouling solution. The amount
of swabbing required with the swabbing solution can be determined
only by experience assisted by the color of the flannel patches.
Normally a couple of minutes’ work is sufficient. Dry thoroughly and
oil with sperm oil.
The proper method of oiling a barrel is as follows: Wipe the
cleaning rod dry; select a clean patch and thoroughly saturate it with
sperm or light slushing oil, being sure that the oil has penetrated the
patch; scrub the bore with the patch, finally drawing the patch
smoothly from the muzzle to the breech, allowing the cleaning rod to
turn with the rifling. The bore will be found now to be smooth and
bright so that any subsequent rust or sweating can be easily
detected by inspection.
The principles as outlined above apply equally well for the care of
the barrel of the sub-calibre cartridge.
 MACHINE GUNS AND AUTOMATIC RIFLES AS
EMPLOYED BY THE ARTILLERY.
The field artillery employs machine guns and automatic rifles only
defensively, either against hostile aircraft, or against enemy infantry
in case of a break-through. For this reason the tactical use of these
weapons by the artillery is considerably different from that by the
infantry, and the dispositions that must be made are adapted to
particular needs.
The field artillery must defend itself:
(a) On the march.
(b) In position.
(c) At the echelon (horse-lines).

Defense on the March.

1. Machine Gun.
Machine guns may be used on the march in case of surprise
attack or against low-flying aeroplanes. Fire on roads and convoys
from low-flying aeroplanes has been developed to such an extent
that it is imperative at all times for a column to be prepared to defend
itself against such attacks.
1. When a battery is in the advanced zone, one machine gun is
mounted on a special mount on the second caisson of the fifth
section. This gun is kept ready for fire at all times, the loaded belt if it
is a Browning, being kept in the loaded position. About 500 rounds
Cal. 30 ammunition are carried on the caisson. The machine gunner
in charge of the gun marches with the 5th section.
A mechanic can very easily modify the special mount for the
Browning, for use against aircraft, so that it also will be adaptable for
use on the caisson.
One gun is attached to the fifth section, so that on subdivision of
the battery for action, the other gun will be with the Combat Train or
echelon, being carried in the battery wagon or the park wagon.
The second gun may be carried stored in the battery wagon or on
escort wagon. In position warfare the firing battery goes into position
usually at night. The escort wagon then goes up with tools, officers’
rolls, etc. and the machine gun with its special mount, the regular
tripod, and about 2000 rounds of ammunition. If not carried as
stated, provision must be made for carrying the gun with the firing
battery.
2. Automatic Rifles.
The automatic rifles are assigned one to each section.
All eight automatic rifles should be in readiness for instant use
when on the march. They should be evenly distributed throughout
the battery, and handled by men who have had special training. At
least two magazines per gun (40 rounds) should be instantly
available. While it is difficult to bring down a plane with a machine
gun or rifle, a well directed fire will limit the action of hostile planes.
It should be borne in mind that often when in the advanced zone
friendly aeroplanes are detailed to guard a battery on the march.
Great care must be taken to make no mistakes in identifying
aeroplanes. Never shoot at a ship unless the distinctive markings on
the wings are clearly distinguished and identified. Upon subdivision
for action, the automatic rifles go with the section to which assigned.
This, of course, may be varied according to the situation.

(B.) Defense of the Position.

The machine gun emplacement should be carefully selected and
constructed. The first consideration is a good field of fire; the second
is good concealment.
Usually it is placed on a flank of the battery. Situated on the flank
of the battery, a greater field of fire is obtained for the gun. Moreover
when firing against hostile airplanes, the position of the battery will
not necessarily be disclosed. In case the battery is shelled, the
position of the machine gun on the flank renders it less liable to be
hit.
The emplacement for a machine gun at a battery position differs
from those generally built by the infantry in that it is designed
primarily for anti-aircraft shooting.
There can be no overhead cover, all protection being provided by
well constructed concealment. Camouflage must be arranged for
and so placed that it can be instantly thrown aside for firing.
The plans for close defense of the battery should include the
assignment of positions and sectors of fire for the automatic rifles.
The methods of fire and the technical points involved, in firing
against hostile airplanes, will be considered elsewhere. A sentinel
equipped with a pair of field glasses must be on duty in the
emplacement at all times. The members of the machine gun squad
are detailed for this duty by roster.

Types of Anti-Aircraft Mounts.

The Ordnance Department furnishes no anti-aircraft mount, but
improvised mounts can be easily made.

BROWNING MACHINE GUN—MODEL 1917.

The Browning Machine Gun, Model 1917, is water-cooled and is
chambered for caliber .30 U. S. Standard Rifle Ammunition. The gun
is classed as a heavy water-cooled gun, recoil operative and belt
fed.
The water jacket holds about 7 pints of water and is perfectly
smooth on its interior. The steam escape tube is in the top of the
water jacket, and is made up of two tubes. They slide one upon the
other, the outer one being a little shorter than the inner one. This
allows the outer tube to slide toward either end and uncover the
highest steam escape hole. The force of recoil is utilized to perform
the various mechanical operations of feeding in the cartridges,
loading, cocking, firing the gun and ejecting the empty shells through
the bottom.
The several cams of the gun make each moving part of the gun
have a positive motion.
The feed belt is made of woven fabric and has no metal parts to
cause feed jams and to add extra weight to the piece. Also the
metallic disintegrating links are used with the aeroplane gun. The
fibre belt usually contains from 250 to 500 rounds. The metallic belts
can be made to contain any number of rounds desired.
The gun has very few screws and springs. It is composed of about
forty parts which may be taken down in the field. There are a few
parts which can be assembled incorrectly and it cannot be
determined that they are so assembled until the gun is ready to be
put into action. At this point the gunner will find that the gun will not
operate, therefore great care should and must be used in the study
of a quick and positive assembling.
The weight of this gun is about 30 pounds without water. This
weight makes it necessary to use the gun on a tripod or other
suitable mount.
General Data.
Weight of the gun—no water 30 lbs.
Weight of the gun filled 36.75 lbs.
Weight of the belt, 250 rounds 15.25 lbs.
Length of the barrel 24 in.
Weight of the belt, empty 7.5 oz.
Sight graduated to 2800 meters.
Rate of fire (shots per minute) 400-525.
Aimed shots per minute 120.
Calibre of bore .30 in.
Weight of bullet 150 grs.
Weight of cartridge 394 grs.
Chamber pressure lbs. per sq. in. 47,000-50,000.
Muzzle velocity (ft. per sec., theoretical) 2700.
 THE BROWNING AUTOMATIC RIFLE.

General Description.

The Browning Automatic Rifle, Model of 1918, is chambered for

the United States standard ammunition. This rifle is classified as a
light automatic rifle commonly referred to as the “Light Browning.” It
has been fired 148 shots per minute, semi-automatic, while
marching, and 110 shots per minute, semi-automatic, from the
shoulder while in prone position. The rates of fire, which give the
best results are from 80 to 100 rounds per minute, semi-automatic
marching fire and 50 to 60 shots per minute, semi-automatic aimed
fire.

Operation.
Expanding powder gases furnish the energy for the operation of
the gun. After the gun is fired and the bullet has passed the gas port
in the barrel, the live powder gases expand through the gas port into
the gas cylinder and impinge against the head of the piston. This
sudden blow forces the piston to the rear, compressing the recoil
spring and storing up energy for the return movement. The various
lugs and cams actuate the feeding, firing, extraction and ejection,
and also control the operation of the gun. The feeding is
accomplished through a magazine holding 20 or 40 rounds in double
rows. It is held between the sides of the receiver, in front of the
trigger guard. This magazine is composed of a rectangular tube and
a round wire spring wound to fit the tube. Also there is a bottom plate
which slide in the bottom and forms the rest for the spring. On top of
the spring is a follower, which forces the cartridge up against the lips
of the magazine tube and which holds it in place until stripped out by
the lug on the bottom of the bolt. The automatic action of this gun is
not disturbed by holding it in any position whatever. The magazine
can be inserted while the mechanism of the gun is in either the
cocked or forward position.
 All parts of the gun are designed so as to impose a minimum of
shock and strain upon them. They are also made strong enough to
hold up under the maximum amount of work that they can be made
to perform. There are few parts that can be assembled incorrectly
but the gun will not function unless these parts are assembled
correctly. The dismounting and assembling of the rifle can be
accomplished without the aid of a single tool unless the barrel and
gas cylinder are removed which necessitates the use of a special
spanner wrench provided in the kit.
General Data.
Weight of gun 15 lbs. 8 oz.
Weight of Magazine, empty (20 rounds) 7 oz.
Weight of Magazine, filled (20 rounds) 1 lb. 7 oz.
Length of barrel 24 inches.
Sights graduated up to 1,600 yards.
Calibre bore 0.30 inch.
Gas port form muzzle 6 inches.
Rate of fire 500 shots p’m.
Aimed shots per minute, semi-automatic 60 shots p’m.
Weight of bullet 150 grains.
Weight of Powder 47 grains.
Weight of Cartridge (total) 395.5 grains.
Chamber pressure, pounds per square inch 47,000 to 50,000.
Muzzle velocity 2,682 ft. p’s.
Habitual type of fire semi-automatic.

Cooling System.
It has no special cooling system or device, the barrel merely being
exposed to the air and the hand of the firer being protected on the
under side of the barrel by a large wooden forearm. Since the barrel
soon becomes very hot, care must be taken to avoid touching it
during firing or for five or ten minutes thereafter.
 CHAPTER XVII.
MOTORS.

RECONNAISSANCE CAR.
The reconnaissance car as supplied to regiments of 155-mm
howitzers, motorized, consists of two units: Reconnaissance body,
model 1918; 1-ton truck chassis, White, T E B-0.
Further information concerning these units will be found in
Ordnance Handbooks “Reconnaissance Body, Model 1918;” “1-Ton
Truck Chassis White, T E B-0” (No. 1972).
Weights and Dimensions.
Rated load capacity (body allowance plus normal load) 1 ton—1,040 kg.
Body weight allowance 1,500 lb.—862 kg.
Chassis only 3,850 lb.—1,750 kg.
Oil, water and gasoline 190 lb.—86.5 kg.
Chains 69 lb.—31.5 kg.
Tool kit 37 lb.—16.8 kg.
Chassis weight on front tires (without load) 54%.
Chassis weight on rear tires (without load) 46%.
Gross weight (capacity load) 7,150 lb.—3,250 kg.
Load weight on front tires 0.78%.
Load weight on rear tires 99.22%.
Gross weight on front tires 27%.
Gross weight on rear tires 73%.
Overall length of chassis (without body) 205 in.—5,220-mm.
Overall width of chassis (at widest part) 61 in.—1,550-mm.
Chassis wheel base 140 in.—3,560-mm.
Permissible loading space back of driver’s seat 97 in.—2,470-mm.
Width of frame (outside dimension, widest part) 34 in.—865-mm.
Height of rear end of frame from ground (empty) 33.75 in.—856-mm.
Diameter of turning circle (right) 60 ft.—18.3 meters
 (left) 45 ft.—13.7 meters.
Tread of wheels 56 in.—1,422-mm.
Road clearance under front axle (lowest point) 10.75 in.—273-mm.
Road clearance under rear axle (lowest point) 10 in.—254-mm.
Length of reconnaissance body, overall 160 in.—4,072-mm.
Width of body 59.875 in.—1,522-mm.
Height of body, overall (including top) 62.125 in.—1,580-mm.
Weight of body (without equipment) 1,180 lbs.—536 kg.

Brief Description.
The reconnaissance car is provided with a special steel body,
mounted on a 1-ton truck chassis, White Model T E B-0. Four seats
are built into the body. The two front seats are placed back to back.
The two rear seats have a space between them of about 2 feet and
are also placed back to back. There is a compartment between the
two pairs of seats. The floor boards at the back end are extended to
form a foot rest for the rear seat. The car is protected by a canopy
top and roll curtains. A full set of tools is carried on the car. Also five
chests are provided in which are carried all the special equipment
assigned to the car. One chest slides into the body compartment
under the rear front seat, one into the compartment between the rear
seats, and the other three under the rear seat.
The chassis used is similar to that used with the Staff Observation
car on page 95. A complete description and directions for care,
operation, and maintenance are contained in the “Handbook of the
Reconnaissance Car, Model of 1918.” Ordnance pamphlet No. 1972.

ARTILLERY TRACTOR, 5-TON MODEL OF 1917.

Weights and Dimensions.
Overall length (armored) 133.5 in.—3,400-mm.
Overall width 63 in.—1,605-mm.
Height (armored, to top of muffler) 72.5 in.—1,845-mm.
Length of ground contact 91 in.—2,315-mm.
Ground clearance 11 in.—280-mm.
Weight (complete with full equipment) 9,200 lbs.—4,180 kg.
5.6-4.5 per sq. in.—0.394-0.316 kg.
Ground pressure (9 and 11 inch treads)
per sqcm.
Weight of each track 545 lbs.—548 kg.
Weight of each track shoe (9-in.) 12 lbs.—5.45 kg.
Width of track shoes 9-11 in.—299-280-mm.
Tread of tracks (center to center of tracks) 48.875 in.—1,243-mm.
Diameter of turning circle (overall clearance) 176 in.—4,425-mm.
Engine, number of cylinders 4
Bore 4.75 in.—220.8-mm.
Stroke 6 in.—152.5-mm.
Horsepower at 1,200 revolutions per-
56.
min
Oil reservoir capacity 3.25 U. S. Gal—12.22 liters.
Road speed-gear used (per hour)
Low speed at 1,200 rev. per minute of
1.94 miles—3.12 kilos.
engine
Direct speed at 1,200 rev. per minute of
3.92 miles—6.31 kilos.
engine
High speed at 1,200 rev. per minute of
7.37 miles—11.85 kilos.
engine
Reverse speed at 1,200 rev. per minute
1.41 miles—2.27 kilos.
of engine
Capacity of main gasoline tanks (two)
24 U. S. Gal.—90.5 liters.
combined
Capacity of auxiliary tank under armor 10 U. S. Gal.—37.85 liters.
Capacity of transmission case 3 U. S. Gal.—11.3 liters.
Capacity of track oiler tank 2.5 U. S. Gal.—9.43 liters.

Brief Description.
The 5-ton artillery tractor, Model 1917, is a self-propelled road
vehicle of the “Track laying” type; that is, the power is transmitted to
the ground through a flexible endless chain which acts as a track
and is composed of steel links and shoes cast integral and
connected by hardened steelpins. The advantage of this type of
tractor as compared with the usual type of wheel tractor or truck, is
its ability, due to very low unit ground pressure, to negotiate very soft
and uneven surfaces, impassable to the usual type of self-propelled
vehicle except under the most extreme difficulties.
The general design and construction of the 5-ton tractor does not
differ materially from that of the modern truck except in the method
of transmitting the power from the transmission unit to the ground. It
is used solely as a power vehicle for hauling howitzers carriages and
caissons. Each carriage and carriage limber are drawn by one
tractor and each pair of caissons are drawn by one tractor.
A complete description and instructions for care, maintenance,
and operation are contained in the “Handbook of 5-Ton Artillery
Tractor, Model of 1917.” (No. 1996).

Outline Specifications.
Engine.—Four cylinder, four cycle, valve-in-the-head type. Bore
4.74”. Stroke, 6”. Cylinder case in pairs. Horsepower 56 at 1,200
revolutions per minute.
Radiator.—Honey-comb tubular type. Eight separate headers.
Ignition.—Eisemann, Model G-4, high tension magneto with
automatic impulse starter.
Carburetor.—Model A Schebler carburetor with Stewart vacuum
feed system; 1.5”.
Governor.—Centrifugal flyball type mounted on special shaft and
driven off camshaft gear.
Master Clutch.—Dry plate multiple disk type.
Transmission.—Selective sliding gear type. Three speeds
forward, one reverse. Direct drive on second. Stepped up on high.
Drive.—From transmission through bevel gears to steering clutch
shaft through steering clutches to spur pinions, which mesh with
intermediate spur gears, thence through outside gears, encased, to
sprocket drive sleeve and drive sprockets.
Steering Clutches.—Two used of dry plate multiple disk type.
Steering.—By means of steering clutches operated from hand
steering device and brake bands operated by foot pedals, which act
on outside of steering clutch drums.
Control.—Steering gear located on the right hand side. Change
gear, master clutch operating lever, and brake lever, left of steering
gear, left to right respectively. Spark and throttle levers operate on
sector clamped to steering column. Steering clutch pedals right and
left at bottom of, and in front of steering column.
Brakes.—One set. External contracting type. Raybestos, or equal,
lined. Operate on steering clutch housings.
Gasoline Tank.—Terneplate tanks. Two independent duplicate
tanks each of 12 gallon capacity. Auxiliary terneplate tank under
armor, 10-gallon capacity.
Main Frame.—Cast in one piece-open hearth steel.
Roller Frames.—Four frames steel channel, joined by oscillating
shaft. Two frames right and left front. Two frames right and left rear.
Truck Rollers.—Six on each side of tractor, fitted with roller
bearings, turned on steel gudgeons, flanked to follow track rail.
Track.—Made up of malleable iron track shoes with track links.
Integral, fitted with space blocks, and 1.25” pins.
Track Drive Sprockets.—Two. Teeth mesh with opening in tracks.
Blank Sprockets.—Two. Fitted with roller bearings which turn on
steel gudgeons. Used to adjust track tension.
Track Supporting Rollers.—Four on each side of tractor, two
mounted on brackets attached to front roller frame channel, and two
in the rear mounted on spring bracket which is bolted to main frame.
Springs.—Four double coil springs at rear, two on each side
between rear roller frame and bracket on main frame and four—two
on each side of equalizing bar at front.
Equalizing Bar.—Spring supported on front roller frame sections.

AMMUNITION TRUCK.
The ammunition truck supplied to regiments of 155-mm howitzers,
model of 1918, motorized, consists of two units: Ammunition truck
body, model of 1918; 2-ton truck chassis, Nash model 4017-A and
4017-L.
Further information concerning those units will be found in the
Ordnance Handbooks. “Ammunition truck body, model of 1918” (No.
2002); “2-ton truck chassis, Nash model 4017-A and 4017-L.”

Weights and Dimensions.

Weight of body 1,200 pounds.

Overall length of body 120 inches.
Overall width of body 56 inches.
Overall height of body 54 inches.
Width of floor (inside) 43 inches.
Length of floor (inside) 114 inches.
Height of sides (inside) 36 inches.

Brief Description of Ammunition Truck Body.

The ammunition truck body, model of 1918, consists of a box-type
steel body opening only at its rear end. The body is designed to
accommodate original packing cases of any type of ammunition.
When this vehicle is used near the front lines all four sides and its
floor are lined with detachable heavy cocoa matting to prevent undue
noise. A tarpaulin cover attaches to the body, and so protects its
contents.
 AMMUNITION TRUCK.

In addition to the designation of “ammunition truck,” as explained

the ammunition body with various loads is designated when mounted
on chassis models as follows: “Wireless,” “Telephone,” “Tanks,”
“Personnel,” “Baggage,” and “Ration.”
The chassis and bodies for the above are identical for all
purposes. The differences in chassis and body equipment and the
load carried when the truck is used for different purposes are noted
under tables of equipment on page 161. All of the above bodies are
mounted on a 2-ton Nash truck chassis.

Outline Specifications of all 2-Ton Chassis, Nash

Models
Rated load capacity 4,000 lb.—1,820 kg.
Body weight allowance 1,200 lb.—546 kg.
Weight of chassis only 6,700 lb.—3,030 kg.
Maximum gross weight (including chassis,
11,900 lb.—5,420 kg.
body and load)
Percentage of chassis weight on front tires 66.66%