The Magazines & Newspapers are in the Black Mirror. Stephen Greenblatt: Scenes from a Mystery June 11, 2020 / Volume LXVII, Number 10 AN AMERICAN PLAGUE MARILYNNE ROBINSON: WHAT GOT US HERE MICHAEL POLLAN: THE ROT IN OUR FOOD SUPPLY FRANCESCA MARI: BAILOUTS AND VULTURES Deborah Eisenberg on Jessica Hagedorn Sigrid Nunez on Garth Greenwell Gregory Hays on Horace Telegram: @WorldAndNews The Magazines & Newspapers are in the Black Mirror. Telegram: @WorldAndNews Contents 4 Michael Pollan 8 Sigrid Nunez 10 Francesca Mari 14 The Sickness in Our Food Supply Cleanness by Garth Greenwell What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell Mitko by Garth Greenwell Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream by Aaron Glantz BASIC BOOKS Adam Shatz The Newest Sound Around an album by Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake The Newest Sound You Never Heard: European Studio Recordings 1966/1967 an album by Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake Free Standards: Stockholm 1966 an album by Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake 18 Stephen Greenblatt Witness to a Mystery 23 Deborah Eisenberg Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn 25 Christopher de Bellaigue The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor 27 francine j. harris Poem 28 Gregory Hays 30 Rachel Polonsky Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse by Ethan Pollock 32 Peter E. Gordon Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by Max Weber, edited and with an introduction by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, and translated from the German by Damion Searls 37 Colm Tóibín 40 R. J. W. Evans 42 NE W IN PAPERBACK FROM Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica’: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living by Jennifer Ferriss-Hill The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar “Dying of Whiteness brilliantly demonstrates the tremendous impediment that white racism and backlash politics pose to our society’s wellbeing.” — D O R O T H Y R O B E R T S, author of Killing the Black Body Emperor: A New Life of Charles V by Geoffrey Parker Emily Berry Poem 43 Marilynne Robinson 46 Letters from What Kind of Country Do We Want? Mitchell Abidor, Jed Perl, and Luc Sante CONTRIBUTORS CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE’s latest book is The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. EMILY BERRY is the Editor of The Poetry Review. She is the author of the poetry collections Stranger, Baby and Dear Boy. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s latest collection of short stories is Your Duck Is My Duck. She is also the author of a play, Pastorale. R. J. W. EVANS is a Fellow of Oriel College and Regius Professor of History Emeritus at Oxford. He is the author of Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, c. 1683–1867, among other books. PETER E. GORDON is the Amabel B. James Professor of History and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. His books include Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization, which will be published in the fall. STEPHEN GREENBLATT is the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us and Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, among other books. francine j. harris’s third collection of poetry, Here Is the Sweet Hand, will be published in August. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. GREGORY HAYS is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. FRANCESCA MARI has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Cut, and Texas Monthly. SIGRID NUNEZ’s most recent book, The Friend, received the 2018 National Book Award for fiction. Her eighth novel, What Are You Going Through, will be published in September. MICHAEL POLLAN is the author of several books about food and agriculture, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. His most recent book is How to Change Your Mind. He teaches writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley, where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism. RACHEL POLONSKY teaches Slavonic Studies at Cambridge. Her latest book is Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History. MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the author, most recently, of the essay collection What Are We Doing Here? A novel, Jack, will be published this fall. ADAM SHATZ is a Contributing Editor at the London Review of Books. COLM TÓIBÍN is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia. His latest book is Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce. Editors: Emily Greenhouse, Gabriel Winslow-Yost Deputy Editor: Michael Shae Senior Editors: Eve Bowen, Prudence Crowther, Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein Senior Editor, Poetry: Jana Prikryl Editor-at-Large: Daniel Mendelsohn Founding Editors: Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) Publisher: Rea S. Hederman Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen Maya Chung and Nawal Arjini, Editorial Assistants; Willa Glickman, Editorial Intern; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher; Katie Jefferis, Daniel Drake, and Will Simpson, Type Production; Kazue Soma Jensen, Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Michael King, Technical Director; Sharmaine Ong, Advertising Associate; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice Fellegara, Director of Marketing and Planning; Janis Harden, Fulfillment Director; Andrea Moore, Assistant Circulation Manager; Matthew Howard, Editorial Director, Digital; Angela Hederman, Special Projects; Diane R. Seltzer, Office Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights; Margarette Devlin, Comptroller; Pearl Williams, Assistant Comptroller; Teddy Wright, Receptionist; Microfilm and Microcard Services: NAPC , 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106. NYRDaily Matt Seaton, Editor; Lucy McKeon, Associate Editor. CREATIVITY IN CONFINEMENT nybooks.com/daily “This fierce, capacious, and startlingly intelligent defense of a whole political, social, and moral order is essential reading for our time.” — S T E P H E N G R E E N B L AT T, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern “A work of deep scholarship and powerful storytelling.” » Pamela Druckerman: Pandemic Marriage & Me » Sayed Kashua: The Perils of Lockdown Living — V I C T O R S E B E S T Y E N, » Daphne Merkin: All Made-Up, Nowhere to Go » Åsne Seierstad: A Virus in the Neighborhood Sunday Times (London) Plus: Nicole R. Fleetwood on art and incarceration, Tamar Avishai on the paintings of Edo Japan, and more… basicbooks.com On the cover: Fallow tomato fields, Corcoran, California, 2014; detail of a photograph by Matt Black (Magnum Photos). The illustration on page 8 is by Hope Gangloff. The drawing on page 32 is by David Levine. The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, June, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April, May, July, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001 and at additional offices. Canada Post Corp. Sales Agreement #40031306. Postmaster: Send address changes to The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big Sandy, TX 75755-9310. Subscription services: www.nybooks.com/customer-service, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info, or call 800-354-0050 in the US, 903-636-1101 elsewhere. 3 The Sickness in Our Food Supply Michael Pollan “Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19. The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed. How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”— the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.) 1 The 1 This history is recounted in Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2011), pp. 135–138. 4 new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers. 5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or by a shortage of meat. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations. Within days of Tyson’s ad, President Trump obliged the meatpackers by invoking the Defense Production Act. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive. The president and America’s Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets. On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry. 3 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 2 See Claire Kelloway, “Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?,” Washington Monthly, April 28, 2020. 3 See “In America, the Virus Threatens a Meat Industry That Is Too Concentrated,” The Economist, April 30, 2020. she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection. When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded 4 See Leah Douglas, “Mapping Covid-19 in Meat and Food Processing Plants,” Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN), April 22, 2020. FERN has covered this story extensively and compiled statistics. Also see Esther Honig and Ted Genoways, “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” FERN, May 1, 2020. Civil Eats and FERN have both done an excellent job of covering the outbreaks in the meat industry. 5 See Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded. Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there’s not much else you can do with them. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.6 Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of 6 See Tyler Whitley, “Don’t Blame Farmers Who Have to Euthanize Their Animals. Blame the Companies They Work For,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. The New York Review New from Rotman-UTP Publishing Tackle Today’s Business Challenges ISBN: 9781487505158 “Graham Lowe is a national treasure. His insights challenge us to both understand the importance of improving the world of work and guide us towards the solutions.” – Cam Mustard, Institute for Work & Health ISBN: 9781487504823 “Wendy Dobson is one of the few analysts with the vision and experience to provide an informed blueprint for the future.” – Laura Dawson, Director, Canada Institute at the Wilson Center ISBN: 9781487503734 ISBN: 9781487503789 “Kossek and Lee have thoughtfully – and finally – elevated the discussion on gender equality and inclusion.” “A straight-forward and simple approach to the illusive art of execution with what barriers may be getting in the way.” “This book is a must-read if you want to compete and win in the markets of today and tomorrow.” – Barbara Soria, Human Resources Executive – Nick Chan, Senior Director, Industrial Services and Support, Molson Coors – Ravi Dhar, Director, Yale Center for Customer Insights ISBN: 9781487500825 “Persuasively makes the case for a transformation in the way companies think about age and work.” – Benjamin Nadler, Chief Operating Officer at Sensei Labs ISBN: 9781487501709 “David Dunne tells remarkable stories of how leaders of innovation use design to plan their products, services, and even their organizations. ” – Patrick Whitney, Illinois Institute of Technology ISBN: 9781487501655 ISBN: 9781487500962 “Brian Gunia is an expert on how we can get better at bargaining through bartering, and the studies and stories he shares in this engaging read are well worth your time.” – Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg @utpress | utorontopress.com June 11, 2020 5 brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal.7 Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price. Imagine how different the story would be if there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the 7 It’s worth remembering that the federal government actively promotes meat consumption in myriad ways, from USDA advertising campaigns—“Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner”—to exempting feedlots from provisions of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, to the dietary guidelines it issues and the heavy subsidies it gives for animal feed. Faithful Our 606 Universal Shelving System was designed in 1960 to help you to live better, with less, that lasts longer. Start small. Add to it. Rearrange it. Contact an expert planner at vitsoe.com vitsoe.com 6 consumer, which it did. It also gave us an industry so powerful it can enlist the president of the United States in its efforts to bring local health authorities to heel and force reluctant and frightened workers back onto the line. Another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notion of “essential” workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable. It is the men and women who debone chicken carcasses flying down a line at 175 birds a minute, or pick salad greens under the desert sun, or drive refrigerated produce trucks across the country who are keeping us fed and keeping the wheels of our society from flying off. Our utter dependence on them has never been more clear. This should give food and agricultural workers a rare degree of political leverage at the very moment they are being disproportionately infected. Scattered job actions and wildcat strikes are beginning to pop up around the country—at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, and some meat plants—as these workers begin to flex their muscle. 8 This is probably just the beginning. Perhaps their new leverage will allow them to win the kinds of wages, protections, and benefits that would more accurately reflect their importance to society. 8 See, for example, Daniel A. Medina, “As Amazon, Walmart, and Others Profit Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Their Essential Workers Plan Unprecedented Strike,” The Intercept, April 28, 2020. So far, the produce sections of our supermarkets remain comparatively well stocked, but what happens this summer and next fall, if the outbreaks that have crippled the meat industry hit the farm fields? Farmworkers, too, live and work in close proximity, many of them undocumented immigrants crammed into temporary quarters on farms. Lacking benefits like sick pay, not to mention health insurance, they often have no choice but to work even when infected. Many growers depend on guest workers from Mexico to pick their crops; what happens if the pandemic— or the Trump administration, which is using the pandemic to justify even more restrictions on immigration—prevents them from coming north this year? The food chain is buckling. But it’s worth pointing out that there are parts of it that are adapting and doing relatively well. Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets; the popularity of communitysupported agriculture (CSA) is taking off, as people who are cooking at home sign up for weekly boxes of produce from regional growers. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) In many places, farmer’s markets have quickly adjusted to pandemic conditions, instituting socialdistancing rules and touchless payment systems. The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy. The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well. It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves. Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit— the so- called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predic- tors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9 Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) One way that Covid-19 kills is by sending the victim’s immune system into hyperdrive, igniting a “cytokine storm” that eventually destroys the lungs and other organs. A new Chinese study conducted in hospitals in Wuhan found that elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation that has been linked to poor diet, “correlated with disease severity and tended to be a good predictor of adverse outcomes.”10 A momentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant. But to be comprehensive, this postpandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform. Q —May 12, 2020 9 See Shikha Garg et al., “Hospitalization Rates and Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with LaboratoryConfirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-NET, 14 States, March 1–30, 2020,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 69, No. 15 (April 17, 2020). 10 See Xiaomin Luo et al., “Prognostic Value of C-Reactive Protein in Patients with COVID -19,” medRxiv, March 23, 2020. The study has not yet been peerreviewed. The New York Review ALL EPISODES STREAMING THIRTEEN.ORG/PASSPORT June 11, 2020 7 Sex and Sincerity Sigrid Nunez Cleanness by Garth Greenwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 223 pp., $26.00 is always scrupulously controlled. A walk in a park one early spring day inspires feelings of freedom and elation, of being “struck somehow stupidly good for a moment at the extravagant beauty of the world,” and thoughts about lines from Whitman, whose poetry he has been teaching, Garth Greenwell What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell. Picador, 194 pp., $17.00 (paper) Mitko by Garth Greenwell. Miami University Press, 96 pp. $15.00 (paper) When, in 1993, the editor in chief of Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, together with the critic Rhoda Koenig established the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, their declared goal was to expose what they saw as the deplorable ubiquity of “crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” Extracts by the shortlisted and winning novelists in the many years since might well leave a reader thinking there really is nothing harder to write about than fucking. (Without a doubt they will leave the reader rolling on the floor.) Back in the days before most MFA students had become too fearful of being called out for politically “problematic” content to include sex scenes in the fiction they submit to workshop, a teacher knew what three pitfalls to expect: either the description would be too clinical or it would be too coy or it would be too smutty. Bad sex writing happens even to seriously good writers (John Updike, famed for his bravura powers of description and the meticulous elegance of his style, was also the winner of a Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award), giving strength to the idea that describing this particular human behavior, however important a part of life it may be, is so fraught, so likely to break the spell every novelist strives to cast and maintain over the course of a book, that the best thing might indeed be just to avoid it. Jonathan Franzen, in an essay on books about sex, described the unpleasant feeling he experiences as a reader at the signs of a looming sex scene: Often the sentences begin to lengthen Joyceanly. My own anxiety rises sympathetically with the author’s, and soon enough the fragile bubble of the imaginative world is pricked by the hard exigencies of naming body parts and movements—the sameness of it all. The sameness of it all: one of the hallmarks of pornography. “When the sex is persuasively rendered,” his complaint went on, “it tends to read autobiographically.” True, and, if not off-putting to everyone, this surely risks making many other readers besides Franzen cringe. But the greatest challenge, the one that even the most gifted writers almost never transcend, remains the limits of our erotic vocabulary, now and forever “hopelessly contaminated through its previous use by writers whose aim is simply to turn the reader on.” Having thus hit the nail on the head, Franzen himself went on to be shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fic8 lines in which the whole world stands sharpened to an erotic point, aimed at the poet lain bare before it. They had always mildly embarrassed me . . . and yet it was these lines that came to me on the path in Blagoevgrad watching seeds come down like snow, that determined and defined and enriched that moment, language as always interposing itself between ourselves and what we see. What were they, these seeds, if not the wind’s soft-tickling genitals, the world’s procreant urge; and finally it felt plausible to me, his desire to be bare before that urge, his madness, as he says, to be in contact with it. tion Award, for a passage in his fourth novel, Freedom. So what happens when someone sets out to write fiction that is “100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art”? According to Garth Greenwell, that was one of his goals in writing Cleanness, a collection of stories so connected they can be read as a novel (he himself has called the book a lieder cycle) and which includes several graphic descriptions of sex, some loving and tender, some brutally S&M, and all tending to read autobiographically. (Like his fictional unnamed firstperson narrator, Greenwell is gay, was raised in a southern Republican state, and has lived and taught in Bulgaria. A recent profile in The New York Times suggested that, despite these parallels, readers who assume Greenwell is writing about himself are mistaken. However, when I asked him if it would be appropriate for me to include his work in a course I taught on autobiographical fiction, and if I had his approval to do so, he said yes.) Greenwell, who before turning to fiction wrote poetry and who has also been a dedicated student of music, published his first book in 2011. Mitko, which won the Miami University Novella Prize, is set in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, where the book’s narrator, a young American writer, lives alone and works as a teacher in an American high school. Beneath a government building in a public bathroom frequented by men seeking anonymous sex, he pays for the services of a young hustler—Mitko—thus initiating what will become an increasingly intense and complicated affair. Handsome and alluring, Mitko turns out to have other charms as well, displaying at times an appealingly childlike side, affectionate and marked by the kind of innocence that is owing not merely to his youth but to the severely restricted life that has been available to him. Without money, without education, and, like so many of his countrymen, without prospects for decent employment, Mitko is basically homeless. Unsurprisingly, he has a dark side too. A heavy drinker, habitually dishonest, he can also be coldly manipulative, bullying, and worse. The narrator’s attraction to Mitko does not blind him to the considerable risk their relationship involves. To keep seeing him means to live constantly on edge (not that the element of danger, like the risks the narrator is aware anyone runs by cruising, doesn’t also feed his excitement). For narrator and reader alike, there is the gut-clenching knowledge that this story cannot possibly end well. The narrator’s complex sexual and emotional entanglement with Mitko, his awareness of Mitko’s bleak future, his own guilt over the inequality that exists between them, the shame he feels for his desire for Mitko and the tormenting hunger that draws him to the toilets where they first found each other—all this is examined with insight, delicacy, and skill. Here, in this short but rich debut, Greenwell’s talent is already plain. He writes beautiful sentences. There is no superfluous or perfunctory language, and no matter how turbulent or overwrought the content of what he is describing, the prose To paraphrase Isaac Babel, a writer’s story is finished not when no sentence can be added but when none can be taken away. This occurred to me when I read Mitko, for me a satisfyingly complete work, needing nothing added or taken away. The author, however, had other ideas. He turned Mitko into the first section of a new book, to which he added a second and a third part. The result, What Belongs to You, is a superb novel, wholly deserving the wide praise it received when it was published in 2016. The expansion gave Greenwell a chance to provide, in part two, material about the narrator’s earlier life, specifically his coming of age in a broken family, before taking up the thread of the Mitko story again and bringing it to its poignant and fated conclusion in part three. From recollections prompted by the news from home that his dangerously ill, possibly dying father wishes to see him, we learn about the narrator’s relationship with that chronically adulterous, psychotically homophobic man, from whom he has long been estranged, and about a generational family history of violence and cruelty. There is also a description of his first romantic encounter with another boy, an experience that begins in pleasure only to descend into pained bewilderment before culminating in an especially twisted and heartbreaking betrayal. But however painful, this episode is nothing in comparison with what he suffers at the hands of his father and stepmother, an account of parental abuse and rejection so harrowing that, years after I first read it, the memory can still chill me. All the same preoccupations found in What Belongs to You—love, desire, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, self-disgust, disease, shame—reappear in Cleanness, which, if not exactly a sequel, is, Greenwell has acknowledged, part of the same literary project. Some of the stories have been published before, and I have to say that the ones I read at the time they appeared left me somewhat disappointed to see how similar the new work was to the old The New York Review (according to what I’ve read about the book, I am not the only one to have had such a response). But reading the collection—or lieder cycle—as a whole offers a much different and deeper experience and has dispelled what qualms I might have had, even if I did not find Cleanness as a novel quite the equal of What Belongs to You. Once again in the ardent, brooding consciousness of Greenwell’s narrator—the same unnamed American writer leading the same life as the protagonist of Mitko and What Belongs to You: teaching high school in Sofia, cruising the same parks and bathrooms, yearning for the love that will save him from cruising—the reader is treated to his unfailingly intelligent observations, his acute ability to describe what he sees and thinks and feels. At the heart of these stories lies a desire for radical, even ruthless self- disclosure (“the whole bent of my nature is toward confession,” confesses the narrator), and the degree of intimate detail, both physical and emotional, may at times shock readers and leave some repulsed. (Again, the thing about writing pornographically, above all when the writer appears to be talking about himself, is that there is as much chance of turning readers off as there is of turning them on.) “His only demand was to be fucked bare,” we are told about a sexual partner the narrator hooks up with through an Internet chat room, and for the narrator, you could say, this book is the literary equivalent of just that. In any case, his willingness to go to extremes in his self-exposure and self-flagellation can make it seem as though he has not only stripped himself naked for our scrutiny but flayed a layer of skin. Like What Belongs to You, Cleanness is divided into three parts. Each contains three stories. Only the second part is given a title, “Loving R.,” and here we find Greenwell’s attempt to fulfill another of his goals for the composition of this book, which was to write about happiness, or, as he has said in an interview, to give some joy to his characters who elsewhere are made to suffer so much. R. the beloved is a young Portuguese man who has come to Bulgaria as part of a program for European college students and with whom the narrator has a two-year affair. In the middle story, “The Frog King,” the men go on vacation to Italy, where, among other joys, there is the freedom of behaving openly like the loving couple they are. For all his moving and wholly convincing depictions of giddy new romance and blissful, near-religious lovemaking in “Loving R.,” the men’s happiness does not last. “I had accepted that passionate feeling faded, all my earlier experience had confirmed it, when love that seemed certain simply dissolved, on one side or both, for no particular reason, leaving little trace,” says the narrator. “But what I felt for R. was different.” As readers we are made to believe in that difference, but, in spite of it, what happens in the end is what always happens. “I love you, I said, we love each other, it should be enough, though even as I said this I knew it was unfair.” When, in our complicated relationships, is love ever enough? In a story called “Gospodar,” the sex the narrator has—endures might be a June 11, 2020 better word—with a sadistic older man with whom he has chatted online is of a whole other kind. Set in the cheap, ugly apartment of this man, whom the narrator is meeting for the first time, it is one long, excruciatingly detailed S&M scene. Sentences lengthen Joyceanly, body parts and movements are named, but the spell does not break: He returned his hand to my head and gripped me firmly again, still not moving, having grown very still; even his cock had softened just slightly, it was large but more giving in my mouth. And then he repeated the word I didn’t know but that I thought meant steady and suddenly my mouth was filled with warmth, bright and bitter, his urine, which I took as I had taken everything else, it was a kind of pride in me to take it. Kuchko [bitch], he said as I drank, speaking softly and soothingly, addressing me again, mnogo si dobra, you’re very good, and he said this a second time and a third before he was done. As the second story in the collection, “Gospodar” introduces the reader early to one of Greenwell’s deepest concerns: the struggle between a person’s craving for painful, dehumanizing sex and the mortification, self-loathing, and self-despair that are its inescapable consequences. As a counterpart to “Gospodar” there is “The Little Saint.” Symmetrically placed as the second-to-last story in the book, it too consists of one long explicit sex scene between strangers, but this time it’s the narrator who takes the punisher’s role, in obedience to the other man’s request to be made to suffer, to be fucked bare, “to be nothing but a hole.” The middle of “The Little Saint” was the only time reading Greenwell that I ever got bored. Many years ago I worked for a (mercifully brief) time as a proofreader for a publisher of pornography—oh, excuse me, erotica—and “The Little Saint” carried me back. Able to predict more or less accurately what would be said and what would be done next (and hadn’t I just read “Gospodar”?), I could not help wishing—unfairly and even absurdly, I admit—that the narrator were doing something else. A friend of mine once told a story about a boy he knew as a child who, having learned exactly what was involved when two people engaged in sexual intercourse, asked, How do they keep from laughing? At the beginning of “Gospodar,” the narrator mentions two moments when he might have laughed, the first being when the Bulgarian announces how he must be addressed—as Gospodar, which, in English (master, lord), strikes the narrator as somewhat ridiculous—and again when the man opens the door to his apartment “naked except for a series of leather straps that crossed his chest, serving no particular function.” In “The Little Saint,” the narrator describes the words he uses with his partner as “the language of porn that’s so ridiculous unless you’re lit up with a longing that makes it the most beautiful language in the world, full of meaning, profound.” A mere reader, though, might find it, if not necessarily ridiculous, just the usual coarse, limited, banal language of porn. If the reader is a woman, she is likely to find confirmation of what makes so many of her gender wary of men and sex: the violence. The recklessness. The whoring. The addiction to risk. The difficulty drawing the line between consensual sex and assault, and how, when one man wants another man to feel totally humiliated and debased, to feel like the worst thing, like dirt, like less than dirt, like nothing but a hole, he calls that man she. Ah, the sameness of it all. “There’s no fathoming pleasure,” the narrator tells us, “the forms it takes or their sources, nothing we can imagine is beyond it; however far beyond the pale of our own desires, for someone it is the intensest desire, the key to the latch of the self.” I wouldn’t argue against such well-said wisdom. What I’ve always been highly unsure of, though, is just how much a person’s sex life defines who that person is, and how much it can really tell us—or even the person themselves—about the rest of their being. I will never be convinced, as some people apparently are, that we are most ourselves when we are in bed (indeed, it seems to me that the number of people for whom this might be true must be quite small), or that all that much can be known about a person from the way they perform, or fail to perform, the sexual act, or by their individual erotic tastes. Maybe this is partly because I have never noticed big—if any—changes in the personalities and behavior of people I know during the times when I happened to be aware they were having lots of sex and the times when I was aware they were having little or none. Nor have I seen significant differences, in other areas of their lives, between people I know who are wildly promiscuous and those who are celibate. For Greenwell, the kinds of sexual encounters he writes about, in which sadomasochism plays an essential part, offer strong possibilities for selfdiscovery and self-understanding, for liberation and even salvation. His narrator, raised to believe that his desires make him worthless, foul—“a faggot,” according to his father, “which remained his word for me when for all his efforts I found myself as I am”—yearns for that moment of sexual union that will leave him “scrubbed of shame.” And not in vain: writing about his first time in bed with R., he describes how all the familiar “shame and anxiety and fear” that is almost all he has ever known of sex “simply vanished” at the sight of R.’s smile, which “poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.” None of this would work so well were Greenwell not entirely sincere. (Something I observed when I was working for the erotica publisher: most of the writing about gay men contained an element of sincerity, which was not true of the rest.) There is no irony in Greenwell’s writing, and—for me, regrettably—no comic touch. But one of the things I most admire is the quality of intense earnestness that marks every page. Laying himself bare, putting himself so mercilessly on the line, subjects the protagonist to the risk of appearing self-absorbed, shameful, exhibitionistic, and, of course, ridiculous. But that risk is surely part of the point: it is what makes writing like this worth doing. Resemblances to W. G. Sebald, not just in the prose style and the tendency toward meditative reflection but in a corresponding brooding temperament, have not gone unremarked by readers of Greenwell, but I was reminded too of the enchanting, cadenced prose of V. S. Naipaul and in particular of his autofictional novel, The Enigma of Arrival. A kinship with Virginia Woolf has also been suggested, though Greenwell doesn’t revel in language the way Woolf does; he has nothing of her playfulness, and compared with her dense, luxuriantly poetic style, his own lyricism seems almost spare. Something said by Elizabeth Hardwick, however, about reading Woolf’s The Waves—“I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful. . . . You can merely say over and over that it is very good, very beautiful, that when you were reading it you were happy”—captures my own similar experience reading Greenwell. S ome of the most affecting and beautiful scenes in his books have nothing to do with sexual identity or gay desire but involve exquisite observations about others whose vulnerability has touched the narrator’s heart. What Belongs to You includes a chapter describing his encounter with a charming Bulgarian boy who happens to be traveling in the same train compartment. Reflecting on his fascination with this child, the narrator says, “I felt I was watching Mitko as a boy, before he had become what he was now.” This in turn prompts the mournful observation that “any future I could imagine for him gave me something to grieve.” For if it is far too easy to imagine for the boy a life as bleak as Mitko’s—at least if he remains in “dying” Bulgaria, “where there is no future, my students tell me again and again,” and “only criminals survive”— to imagine him escaping into a better world with happier prospects gives rise to “the thought, unbearable to me, of what Mitko might have been.” Elsewhere in the novel, while riding a crowded bus, the narrator experiences mounting concern for the fate of a trapped housefly in danger of being crushed: “It was ridiculous to care so much, I knew, it was just a fly, why should it matter; but it did matter,” for after all, he asks himself, “why should it be a question of scale?” Among the inhabitants of Sofia are many sad, neglected street dogs, and in the marvelous story that closes Cleanness, “An Evening Out”—a story as surprising in where it takes us as the pornographic stories are predictable—the narrator, unsettled by his own behavior while out drinking earlier with some former students, shares a moment of tender communion and mutual comfort with a scruffy old female stray to whom he offers shelter for the night. Each of these scenes is radiant with kindness, and, for me, reading them was like a balm. Compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell’s power. What kind of fiction will do for us now? In a time of unending global crises and rising despair, of climate grief and democracy grief, of Trumpschmerz and pandemic attack, a time when the overwhelming fear seems to be setting in: there where the future should be, in place of enlightened progress lie chaos 9 and darkness—what stories do we want to write, and what do we want to read? Karl Ove Knausgaard, another writer obsessed with shame and bent on radical confession, has described reaching a point when the only kinds of literature that seemed to be meaningful were those that “just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?” I was happy reading Greenwell. The carefully constructed sentences, the authenticity of the voice, the clarity and deep humaneness of the gaze—all this had a soothing and uplifting effect on me, the usual effect of good literature. Coming to the end of Cleanness, I was already thinking about Greenwell’s next book, knowing that I would read anything he wrote. But when I looked up, Donald Trump was still the president of the United States. Q The Housing Vultures Francesca Mari David McNew/Getty Images Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream by Aaron Glantz. Custom House, 398 pp., $27.99 “They control the people through the people’s own money.” —Louis Brandeis 1. In an alternate reality, the one progressives wanted, the government wouldn’t have bailed out the banks during the 2008 crash. When mortgage-backed securities began catching flame like newspaper under logs, the government would have prioritized struggling homeowners instead. It would have created a corporation to buy back the distressed mortgages and then worked to refinance those mortgages—lowering monthly payments to reflect the real underlying values of the homes or adding years to the mortgages to make the monthly payments more manageable. If a homeowner missed mortgage payments, rather than initiating a foreclosure after two months, as was done by many banks during the recession, the government would have held off for an entire year, maybe more. In the event the homeowner still couldn’t keep up, the government would have acquired the home, fixed it up, and rented it out until another person bought it. Who could ever dream up such wild ideas? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for one. To stanch foreclosures during the Great Depression, FDR created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which bought more than a million distressed mortgages from banks and modified them. When modification didn’t work, it sold the foreclosed homes—200,000 of them—to individuals. While the program was costly, in the end it pretty much paid for itself: because homes weren’t dumped on the market all at once, they almost always sold for close to the amount of the original loan. The New Deal—which also created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), to guarantee mortgages with banks, and the US Housing Authority, to build public housing—inaugurated the golden era of homeownership and middle- class prosperity. It wasn’t without significant problems—the HOLC invented redlining, only providing FHAbacked loans to white people purchasing in white neighborhoods—but if you were white, this was a stabilizing and egalitarian response that held speculators at bay. 10 A deteriorating bank-owned house, Moreno Valley, California, August 2008 Homewreckers, Aaron Glantz’s recent book about the investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis, is essential reading as we plunge headlong into a new financial catastrophe. Glantz, a senior reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting’s public radio show, Reveal, has written books on the mishandling of the Iraq War (How America Lost Iraq) and the neglect of veterans that followed (The War Comes Home). He observes that there are two ways a government can respond to a crisis caused by reckless speculation: by stepping in or by stepping aside. Roosevelt stepped in; Ronald Reagan, dealing with the savings-and-loan crisis, stepped aside. Starting in 1986, as a result of Reagan’s deregulation, countless savingsand-loan associations had run amok with other people’s money, taking risky bets; 747 of them imploded.1 But rather than restructuring the toxic debt, the Reagan administration sold it to “vulture investors,” those who profit off disaster by swooping in to gobble up the cheapest, most troubled assets from failing entities. The government sold at firesale prices with lucrative loss-share agreements: whatever money an investor recovered on the debt was its to keep, but losses would be guaranteed by the government. The deals cost the US government more than $124 billion in subsidies. 1 Savings and loans, or “thrifts,” like the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan Association featured in It’s a Wonderful Life, are geared to consumers rather than businesses and by law must have 65 percent of their lending portfolio tied up in consumer loans. They generally focus on checking and savings accounts as well as home loans. The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, alas, hewed closer to Reagan’s example, spending $700 billion on the Wall Street bailout and frantically trying to attract investors to the collapsed housing market by auctioning off delinquent mortgages at low prices and with loss-share agreements that essentially guaranteed that the investors wouldn’t lose money. These policies not only provided firms with financial incentives to pursue foreclosures but also enabled an enormous and permanent transfer of wealth from homeowners to private equity firms, as thousands of homes were flipped or converted to single-family rental homes and rented at above-market prices. Glantz’s book is an unabashedly partisan tale of how some extremely wealthy investors—many of them now Trump’s cronies—preyed on panic at the expense of middle- class homeowners. Homewreckers opens with two such victims in 2005: Dick and Patricia Hickerson, seventy-nine and seventy-seven, with liver cancer and Alzheimer’s. After seeing a television ad for a reverse mortgage, a financial product that allowed seniors to borrow cash against their homes without repayment during their lifetimes, the couple called the number on the screen and were pressured into signing by a pushy salesmen working on commission. They didn’t understand the price their daughter Sandy, who had quit her job and moved home to take care of them, would pay. The interest rates and fees were so high that by the time they died, in 2011, their $80,000 loan had ballooned to a debt of $300,000. Their $500,000 home went to foreclosure auction, where it was bought by a private equity–backed real estate investment trust. The Hickerson’s mortgage had been $600 per month. Now the private equity company was offering to rent the home back to Sandy for $2,400, a rent 30 percent higher than that of other properties in the area. Too overwhelmed to move, she signed the lease. It included a variety of fees (such as a $141 monthly fee to rent the house month to month) and left her responsible for typical landlord duties, like landscaping. In return, the company shirked maintenance, at one point declining to fix a broken water pipe, sticking Sandy with a $586 water bill and a $450 repair. (As I’ve noted in The New York Times Magazine, minimizing maintenance costs and maximizing service fees are integral to single-family rental companies’ business models because private equity generally seeks double- digit returns within ten years.2) This exploitation of a regular family may seem like a minor story. But as Glantz shows, it happened over and over in similar ways across the country, systematically turning middle- class homeownership into immiseration and corporate profits, facilitated at every stage by the federal government. 2. By February 2008 the subprime mortgage problem was evident—housing prices were plummeting—but Bear Stearns was still a month away from collapse. Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder were calling for a revival of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to lend homeowners between $200 billion and $400 billion. “I was laughed out of court,” Blinder told Glantz. Instead, eight months later, Congress approved a $700 billion bailout of the banks. The first FDIC -insured bank to fail had been IndyMac, on July 11, 2008, after an eleven- day bank run resulting in $1.3 billion in withdrawals. The day it failed, FDIC employees reluctantly boarded a flight from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles. They seized control of the Pasadena-based bank, a notorious generator of reverse mortgages (including the one the Hickersons signed) and Alt-A mortgages (riskier than prime but less risky than subprime), and sought a buyer. They hoped it would take days; it took nearly nine months, the value of the bank decreasing with every passing week. 3 2 “A $60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street,” March 4, 2020. 3 During this time, the FDIC worked with 8,500 borrowers on loan modifications—but they could only help The New York Review That’s when a band of billionaires stepped in. Exploiting the Fed’s angst about continuing to manage IndyMac, the group, which included George Soros, Michael Dell, John Paulson, J. C. Flowers, and Steve Mnuchin (the only nonbillionaire of the bunch), offered to invest $1.6 billion in the bank in exchange for all of its assets—its branches, real estate deposits, and loans, which were valued at more than $20 billion. Concerned about the appearance of a prolonged federal takeover and thus anxious to close the deal, the government also agreed to extend a generous loss-share agreement: If, for instance, a homeowner owed $300,000 on an FHA-insured mortgage, but the home only sold at foreclosure auction for $100,000, the government agreed to reimburse the rest, all $200,000. While the sale technically required the company to continue the FDIC’s limited loan modification, as Glantz writes, the loss-share agreement “effectively removed economic incentives that would have otherwise caused Mnuchin’s group to think twice about foreclosing on homeowners.” Upon acquiring IndyMac, Mnuchin and his group renamed it OneWest and proceeded to foreclose on more than 77,000 households, including those of 35,000 Californians. The California attorney general’s office put together a robust report against the bank, detailing widespread misconduct, which included backdating false documents, performing foreclosure actions without legal authority, and violating proper foreclosure notification practices. “If the state of California found that OneWest violated those rules,” Glantz writes, the loss-share payments could stop—saving both homeowners, since the bank would have much less incentive to foreclose if it wasn’t being paid when it did so, and government money. But the attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris, did nothing. With its loads of recovered debt, OneWest—which newly billed itself as a “community” bank—could begin to offer loans. But rather than financing community initiatives or middle- class mortgages (it denied both in great numbers), it lent vast sums to the investors’ friends, like Thomas Barrack, the private equity titan, Trump megadonor, and founder of Colony Capital.4 Barrack, in turn, used the money to pursue a new idea. Starting in 2012, he began to buy foreclosed homes in bulk—to turn them into rental properties and keep them forever, or for as long as he retained interest. He targeted heavily discounted houses in areas with high employment, good transportation, and strong school districts. His hometown of Los Angeles certainly fit the bill. He scooped up more than three thousand houses there, including the Hick- the lucky borrowers whose mortgages hadn’t been carved up into mortgagebacked securities and sold on the bond market. 4 Colony Capital was in fact the first vulture firm created during the savings-and-loan crisis. Barrack’s acquisition of American Savings and Loan turned out to be one of the most expensive bailouts at the time, costing at least $4.8 billion in government subsidies. He then sold the bad loans back to their original investors for a $400 million profit. June 11, 2020 ersons’, which would eventually be managed under a Colony subsidiary, Colony American Homes. As Eileen Appelbaum, the codirector for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me: This industry of rental homes at this kind of scale is a product of government policy. I know that the private sector says they don’t like government interfering, but in fact they love the government in their business. Or, as Barrack has said, “Anytime the government is intervening in our business, if you buy, you will be successful.” Overdue and panicked government intervention is the vulture investor’s best friend. 3. Barrack wasn’t the only one. Across the Sunbelt—from California to Florida—investors had the same idea. In Las Vegas, Phoenix, and California’s Inland Empire, the prices of millions of starter homes (those under two thousand square feet) had dropped by more than half since their 2006 peak. Private equity firms snapped them up. Barry Sternlicht, the founder and CEO of Starwood Capital Group and a veteran of the savings-and-loan crisis, amassed thousands. B. Wayne Hughes, the multibillionaire founder of Public Storage, the country’s largest self-storage company, started American Homes 4 Rent, which now operates 54,000 houses. But the biggest buyer was Blackstone, the nation’s largest private equity firm, which funded a subsidiary called Invitation Homes whose representatives traveled with cases full of cashier’s checks to auctions around the country, spending as much as $100 million per week. In 2017 Invitation Homes merged with Waypoint, which had bought Colony two years before, creating the largest single-family rental company in the country, with more than 80,000 houses. No longer were these homes a way for the middle class to accrue savings— now they were lucrative investments for the very rich. The Obama administration facilitated the transfer of wealth from homeowners to private equity firms in two ways. A house that goes to foreclosure auction but doesn’t sell is repossessed by the bank that holds its mortgage, becoming what is bewilderingly referred The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers bids fond farewell to the Class of 2019–2020 Andrés Barba Susan Bernofsky Ken Chen Bill Goldstein Hua Hsu Mitchell S. Jackson Gilbert King Carol Kino Sana Krasikov Ben Marcus Josephine Quinn Sally Rooney Eric W. Sanderson Elizabeth Sears Justin E.H. Smith ͽ …and welcomes with pleasure the Class of 2020–2021 Burkhard Bilger Barbara Demick Hernán Díaz Steven Hahn Jonas Hassen Khemiri Peter Kuper Jennifer Mittelstadt Nina Munk Togara Muzanenhamo Gregory Pardlo Hanna Pylväinen Sophia Roosth Namwali Serpell Caroline Weber Mason Williams The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows. 11 to as a real estate owned home, or REO. By August 2011, the federal government owned 248,000 repossessed and unsold properties, nearly a third of the nation’s REOs. In 2012 the HUD launched the Real Estate Owned-to-Rental pilot program, encouraging investors to buy bundles of the government-owned REOs if they agreed to maintain them as rental units. The pilot put 2,500 homes in Chicago, Riverside, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and various cities in Florida up for auction in batches. Meg Burns, senior associate director of housing and regulatory policy for the Federal Housing and Finance Authority, said the program was intended to “gauge investor appetite” for single-family housing and to “stimulate” the housing market by “attracting large, well- capitalized investors.” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, meanwhile, argued that creating new options for selling foreclosed properties would “expand access to affordable rental housing”; this turned out to be gravely mistaken. In a congressional hearing on the program, Michigan congressman Bill Huizenga asked, “How are we going to do this in a way that makes sense and doesn’t do further harm?” But some, like Congressman David Schweikert, who represented hard-hit Maricopa County in Arizona and identified himself as “the largest buyer of singlefamily homes in the southwest,” balked because only a tiny fraction of homes were made available to investors. “I can take you through neighborhoods that have been devastated by foreclosures and look better today than they have in 30 years,” he said. “Because one, two, three, four, foreclosure, investor bought it, new roof; one, two, three, four, foreclosure, new family, new landscaping. It has become almost an urban renewal.” Barrack’s Colony Capital was one of the biggest winners in the HUD auction, outbidding five other investors to acquire the largest bundles—970 houses. (According to the Paradise Papers, financing came from a Japanese bank and investors ranged from South Korea’s National Pension Service to an investment company in Qatar, and a plethora of shell companies in California, the Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands.) While the pilot program didn’t originate the idea of the single-family rental, it gave the government’s imprimatur to the concept and signaled that the government wouldn’t intercede. The second way in which the Obama administration facilitated the rise of the single-family rental industry is more complicated. The government took on $5 trillion worth of bad FHAinsured mortgages when it assumed ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008, then auctioned that debt off through the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program (DASP) with almost no safeguards. Notably, the investors were not required to offer the floundering homeowner a principal reduction to reflect the decreased value of the home, or to work out any other reasonable loan modification, or to offer the homeowner first dibs on the property if it went to sale. The next act is, by now, familiar, a mirror of what happened at OneWest. By the end of 2016, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had auctioned more than 176,760 delinquent mortgages at fire-sale prices, as much as 95 12 percent of them to Wall Street investors; the mortgage terms these investors subsequently offered homeowners were terrible, because pushing homes through foreclosure was the most expedient way to cash in on the investment. How many of these mortgaged homes ended up in foreclosure auctions, where they were then scooped up by private equity? Glantz doesn’t have the figures (they are nearly impossible to get), but he draws our attention to the larger, underlying problem: how the one percent has managed to monopolize credit. 4. “The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly,” Woodrow Wilson said in 1911, while campaigning for the presidency. “So long as that exists, our old variety and freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.” Glantz quotes this not once but twice, for obvious reasons. In 2013 Blackstone’s Invitation Homes created a new financial tool to unleash even more credit: the singlefamily rental securitization. It was a mix between commercial real estate– backed securities, which are backed by expected rental income, and residential mortgage–backed securities (the ones we most commonly hear about), which are backed by the home value. The single-family rental securitization was backed by both. Colony American and other single-family rental home companies followed suit. More than ten companies have entered into the market, together owning some 260,000 single-family homes and generating seventy securitizations totaling $35.6 billion. Mortgage-backed securities aren’t inherently bad. In fact, they are a government invention, born out of the New Deal. Prior to that, banks only offered loans for three to five years with 50 percent down, limiting property ownership to the rich. By enabling banks to sell mortgage debt as bonds, the government allowed banks to distribute risk among investors, making long-term, low-interest loans possible. The result was the thirty-year mortgage, a distinctly American product (to this day, Denmark is the only other country where it’s available; other countries typically offer five-to-tenyear loans with balloon payments due at the end of the term, which can then be refinanced.) With the thirty-year mortgage, middle- class families could slowly build wealth and secure housing stability. But there needs to be oversight, and the incentives ought to align with the interests of the public. Like the subprime mortgage–backed securities that precipitated the 2008 crash, single-family-rental-backed securities are effectively unregulated. And until now, they’ve been extremely stable: a company isn’t apt to default on a mortgage, especially when rental demand is so strong that rental income can easily cover the mortgage, maintenance, and interest—and still leave a solid profit. Moreover, if a renter defaults, it’s somewhat easier to address than if a homeowner defaults. Eviction takes an average of thirty to sixty days. Foreclosure takes six months to a year. Since 2013, single-family-rentalbacked securities have reliably created large sums of credit for the predatory investors who needed it least, enabling them to extract as liquid funds the appreciation from their properties. “Their level of risk is very low. It would take something really cataclysmic to cause a loss,” Jade Rahmani, one of the first analysts to follow the singlefamily rental market, told me last fall. (That something may be Covid-19, which has driven record-breaking unemployment, a decrease in the share of people able to pay rent, and rent strikes in some high- cost cities, like New York and Los Angeles. Commercial real estate securities will fare even worse, and vulture investors have already raised vast sums of money to snatch up distressed malls and office buildings.) The chilling power of Homewreckers is the way in which Glantz shows that credit is, in the end, all about connections. Remember the arrangement between OneWest Bank and Colony American Homes? “This line of credit created a financial revolving door, as Colony bought OneWest’s foreclosures using a loan from OneWest,” Glantz writes. “By the end of 2014, OneWest’s commitment to Colony had grown to $45 million—more than all the money it made available to African American and Latino home buyers over five years.” When those with access to credit fail, they fail up. Meanwhile, nearly 10 million Amer- icans were foreclosed on between 2006 and 2014. Some bought more than they could afford. Some were targeted by predatory products, subprime loans, or reverse mortgages. Others fell victim to predatory ideas (“There’s been a lot of talk about a real estate bubble,” Trump told students of Trump University in an audio recording in October 2006, Glantz notes. “That kind of talk could scare you off real estate and cut you out of some great opportunities.”) The Obama administration’s response to the foreclosure crisis was its greatest failing. It could have mandated principal reduction on mortgages and reformed bankruptcy law so that it would protect a person’s primary residence. The government had a chance to convert the FHA-insured homes that had gone through foreclosure into something that served the public good, like public housing, or to sell them to individuals, as with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. At the very least, the government could have wiped clean people’s credit scores, absolving victims of predatory mortgage products from the accompanying scarlet letter that compounded their misfortune. Instead, the administration put forth an insufficient program to modify mortgages in 2009; it was implemented after those who were dealt the worst subprime products—many of them black and Latino—had already lost their houses. The Home Affordable Modification Program set aside $28 billion, meant to aid four million homeowners, but the program was overly complicated; 70 percent of those who applied were rejected, and only 1.6 million were assisted, a third of whom defaulted anyway because the average monthly mortgage reduction was only $500. Meanwhile, banks frequently claimed to have lost homeowners’ paperwork or wrongly told homeowners they didn’t qualify, and the Treasury didn’t force banks to abide by the rules quickly enough. Wall Street was too big to fail (and executive compensation wasn’t limited, because Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson feared banks wouldn’t accept government aid if it came with such a stipulation), but individuals who made poor home investments had their credit docked for the next ten years. With wages stagnant since 1971, the nation’s homeownership has hit its lowest rate in fifty- one years. Renters now outnumber homeowners in nearly half of all major cities, up from only 21 percent a decade earlier. Some of those renters sign checks to one of the singlefamily rental companies. Though these companies own less than 1 percent of the rental housing available in the country, they have saturated many of the country’s most desirable cities. The major single-family rental companies own 11.3 percent of single-family rental homes in Charlotte, 9.6 percent in Tampa, and 8.4 percent in Atlanta. The “explosive growth of the singlefamily rental market has been a defining characteristic of the housing bust and recovery,” wrote Patrick Simmons, Fannie Mae’s director of strategic planning. “Starter-home shortage . . . appears to be slowing the return of first-time buyers to the housing market.” So long as competition for housing remains fierce in these cities, companies have no incentive to invest in their products or cater to their customers. The Better Business Bureau has received hundreds of complaints about these companies, and Glantz notes their higher-than-market rents and rampant maintenance issues. The Atlanta Federal Reserve found that a third of all Atlanta tenants of Colony American Homes received eviction notices, and that one of the greatest predictors of eviction was the percentage of black people in a community. “The data tell a damning story,” Glantz writes. During the boom years, IndyMac charged high interest rates (defined by the government as more than 3 percentage points above prime) to 24 percent of its white borrowers, but 36 percent of Hispanics and 43 percent of African Americans. This discrimination was repeated at banks across the country. When the recession hit, people of color saddled with higher interest rates on their monthly mortgages were more vulnerable to foreclosure. Communities of color suffered the greatest rates of foreclosure, and now they’re experiencing the greatest rates of single-family rental saturation and the greatest rates of ruthless corporate eviction. 5. Last April I spent several afternoons driving around low-slung neighborhoods on the outskirts of Los Angeles County, knocking on doors to see if the stories I had heard about single-family rental companies were the exception or the norm. These were communities that had been hit hard during the foreclosure crisis—East Pasadena, Woodland Hills, Van Nuys—communities that outsiders would seldom have reason to drive through. Thanks to Meredith Abood, who analyzed Los Angeles County assessment records while reThe New York Review searching the rise of the single-family rental industry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I had a spreadsheet with more than four hundred addresses of Invitation Homes properties, a mere 5 percent of the company’s eight thousand homes in Southern California and less than half a percent of the company’s 80,000 homes across the United States. I plugged them into my phone at random. I passed lawns and driveways and the cerulean-white sparkles of pools flickering through the slats of a fence. Of the dozen tenants who opened the door, all were people of color save for a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses I interrupted one night during prayer. And almost everyone had had serious trouble with Invitation Homes. (No one felt safe having his or her name in print, fearing retribution.) A Latina paralegal told me she called the company every time she submitted rent to make sure it was received, having once come home to an eviction notice posted to her door when her rent was in fact sitting unopened in the Invitation Homes office’s mailbox. After disputing the fees on a pool that had been broken and drained for months without any response, a Filipino-American tenant and her foreign husband e-mailed to notify the company that if they continued to be charged, they would sue. Invitation Homes employee Chris Warren allegedly told them, “I go to court all the time, and I always win.” (Warren could not be reached for comment, but several other tenants shared similar stories.) A Samoan woman I met who was raising her grandchildren had filled two journals documenting her home’s roof and plumbing problems, the mold that blossomed on her walls and ceilings, the endless service calls she’d made to try to resolve the problems. For the mold on the ceiling alone, she had had to stay home to receive four different servicemen who had inspected her roof without fixing it; the fourth explained that the roof needed to be replaced, but Invitation Homes was only allowing $600 worth of repairs, so he would only be able to patch it. (The other servicemen, he suspected, had left because they refused to do the work for that paltry amount.) While living in the home, the Samoan woman’s husband developed a lung infection and died. Throughout his visitation, which the woman held in her living room and for which his relatives had traveled from Fiji to attend, water poured out of a leak that had sprung from her ceiling into a bucket she’d set on the floor. The only couple to say they were generally happy with Invitation Homes, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, also said that they would be moving to Oregon as soon as their youngest son graduated from high school. They felt that the management company made repairs easier, and they appreciated being able to pay online. But they hated the automatic annual rent increases. The wife had successfully negotiated them down by as much as half, but even so, their rent went from $1,700 to $2,860 per month over six years. The company made no improvements, however, and refused to fix the peeling paint. Just across the street, another Invitation Homes property was being rented out to a family that had recently immigrated from Sinaloa. In the driveway, an old gray Honda was stuffed to the June 11, 2020 roof with plastic recycling, which they would trade in for nickels and dimes to put toward their rent. This is what the recovery from the 2008 crash looks like. People scrambling to pay rent for decrepit houses, houses that let everyone cash in except the occupants: the company that bought the home, the investors that financed that company, the bank that securitized the home’s debt, the bondholders who bought those securities, and the speculators who make bets on whether the bonds will pay out or not. Glantz juxtaposes the investors’ way of life with his own. He knows he’s been lucky. During the recession, he and his wife bought a foreclosed home in San Francisco that had previously been owned by hucksters who were flipping houses among one another to profit from the appreciation. His parents helped him with the down payment, as did his wife’s parents. Now he can afford to live in the least affordable place in the country. Though he doesn’t plan to move anytime soon, he knows that in the event of an emergency, he could always cash out his home. It’s an insurance policy that enables him and his wife to work as journalists. Homewreckers amounts to a sort of middle-class manifesto. To his credit, Glantz doesn’t just tally inequities and abuses. He also suggests some solutions. The government needs to “change economic incentives so that the profits come more easily when [companies] provide home ownership opportunities to middle-class families,” he writes. This, he notes, has proven successful with even the most exploitative businessmen in the past—even Donald Trump’s father, Fred. When the National Housing Act unleashed lots of credit for the FHA-backed purchase of high- quality construction, high- quality construction is what Fred Trump produced. When the government switched to supporting apartment complexes, so too did Fred Trump. One good thing about amoral money hounds is that they welcome manipulation so long as there’s money to be made. There’s no question that the financial system needs resetting. Unfortunately another financial crisis has arrived first. And what’s terrifying, as Glantz’s damning book demonstrates, is that the vultures who exploited the last crisis are dictating the bailout of this one. Q FRESH READS TREE STORY The History of the World Written in Rings THE POLITICAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH MALIGNANT How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer Valerie Trouet Daniel E. Dawes “Drawing from a diversity of tree-ring research and interdisciplinary collaborations, Trouet chronicles fascinating examples of how dendrochronology helps to answer questions about past environments and human history.”—Science foreword by David R. Williams Vinayak K. Prasad, MD, MPH How do policy and politics influence the social conditions that generate health outcomes? How hype, money, and bias can mislead the public into thinking that many worthless or unproven treatments are effective. $32.95 hc/eb $27.00 hc/eb DEEP GOSSIP New and Selected Poems Sidney Wade “With short lines and sly, syncopated rhymes, Wade’s nature poems contain bliss and terror all at once.” —New York Times $19.95 pb/eb $29.95 pb/eb ALL THE HORRORS OF WAR A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen press.jhu.edu 1-800-537-5487 Bernice Lerner “This meticulously researched story is nourishment for the soul.”—Robert G. Kegan, author of In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life $27.00 hc/eb 13 An Invitation from Jeanne Lee Adam Shatz The Newest Sound You Never Heard: European Studio Recordings 1966/1967 an album by Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake. A- Side Records, 2 CDs, $25.00 Free Standards: Stockholm 1966 an album by Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake. Barcelona: Fresh Sound Records, $10.91 Twenty years ago, I fell in love with a jazz singer. Jeanne Lee had died earlier in 2000 of cancer, but she couldn’t have been more alive to me. A hip woman I knew had given me BMG’s reissue of The Newest Sound Around, Lee’s 1962 debut album with the pianist Ran Blake. You’ve never heard anything like it, my friend promised, and I hadn’t, until I realized I’d heard that soft, warm, and inviting contralto before (don’t all infatuations begin with a sense of déjà vu?). But since I’d lost track of her name, she was “only a dream,” as Lee sings in her haunting rendition of Johnny Mercer’s “Laura.” Now the dream had a name; now she was real; now she was mine. I was hardly alone in these feelings of possessive adoration. Lee, who would have been eighty-one this January, was the ultimate singer’s singer. And she’s still something of a secret—an artist you want everyone to know about, but also to keep for yourself. Her voice had the timbre and range of a cello and a cloud-like beauty; it enveloped you like the shawls she wore on stage. “Jeanne could say good morning and it sounded right,” the bassist William Parker, who performed with her, told me. “Like a coat with reverse lining, that was Jeanne Lee’s voice.” Her sense of time was unusually elastic, as if she lived on a planet of eternal rubato, but her singing was always buoyed by a feeling of dance—and of wonder at the fact of being alive. A poet and composer as well as an interpreter of other people’s songs, she loved words and seemed to caress as much as sing them. She carried herself with unfailing grace and swayed on stage to the slow, languorous rhythms of her voice. L ee’s best-known record is still probably The Newest Sound Around, which, in its mélange of youthful effervescence and noir fatalism, captured the sensibility of New York bohemia as much as John Cassavetes’s Shadows or James Baldwin’s Another Country. On that album, and in the dazzling recordings the duo made in Europe in 1966 and 1967—released last year for the first time under the title The Newest Sound You Never Heard—Lee and Blake approached each other not as singer and accompanist but as highly interactive improvisers, taking apart standards like “Summertime” and “Night and Day” and rearranging them like a pair of musical Cubists. Full of whimsical, often violent contrasts in color and dynamics, Blake’s playing was an ec14 centric, fractured collage of twentiethcentury modernism, Thelonious Monk, gospel, and film music. His spiky, unresolved style found a perfect foil in the serenity and poise of Lee’s singing and in her precise, sensuous diction. “I know of no other singers who can project the introspective, often somber mood that is generated by Jeanne’s dark-rich voice, at the same time improvising far- out vocal lines and feeling at home in the even further- out accompaniments of Ran Blake,” Gunther Schuller wrote in his liner notes to The Newest Sound Around. The path Lee chose next, however, was even more perilous. Widely music. “We were trying to figure out what else the voice could do,” Clayton, a friend and occasional collaborator of Lee’s, told me. Lee shared this desire but also stood apart from her peers. For all her fascination with (in her words) “what the voice is in itself,” hers was steeped in the blues vernacular, which she honored even in her wildest vocal experiments. The black musical tradition, she said, gave her “a ground to stand on and move from”; it enriched and enlivened her work. But it also exacted a toll: like the black minimalist composer Julius Eastman (born a year after her), she vanished from histories of avant-garde music, which was her classmates was Ran Blake, a white student from Springfield, Massachusetts. “You sound like Art Tatum,” she said when she first heard him playing the piano. He didn’t agree, but he appreciated the compliment. “I’d never met a musician so open, so tolerant,” Blake told me at his home in Boston, and he loved her “timbre, her low tone, the way she could move up to soprano. Her voice had a gut, a majesty. She could follow me intuitively.” In the autumn of 1961 they performed at Amateur Night at the Apollo. They cut a striking profile: a nerdy, introverted white pianist and a supremely elegant black woman in conversation, making a new kind of chamber music. They won first prize, and George Avakian of RCA signed them to make a record. The Newest Sound Around didn’t sell many copies, but it attracted the attention of Germany’s “jazz pope,” the critic and impresario Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who organized a European tour for the duo in the spring of 1963. Audiences in Germany, France, and Italy were spellbound. “They called her a new Billie Holiday, but when we came back to New York we had no work,” Blake told me. “One club owner said he’d hire her if she’d hire a different pianist, but she was so loyal.” Her loyalty to Blake was also faithfulness to her own search for musical freedom. At the time of The Newest Sound Around, the freejazz revolution launched by Ornette Coleman, which had emancipated improvisation from chord structures and other traditional forms, was only a few years old. The question for singers, Lee said, was “how to take advantage of the freedom offered by these innovations.” To her, the choices looked narrow: you could “scat, thus imitating the jazz instrumental sounds” or “set words to instrumental solos,” and “neither of these options allowed space for the natural rhythms or sonorities or the emotional content of words.” Lee’s interest in this “space” led her to Berkeley, where she spent a few years after her European tour. She sang in performances by the Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, took part in happenings at the Open Theater with slideshows and nude dancers, and married the sound-poet David Hazelton, with whom she had a daughter, Naima. Berkeley was “very, very far- out,” and it freed her from “the conventional idea of music,” she recalled. “I could take music out of musicality, add space and silence.” You can hear the impact of her Berkeley experience in the recordings she made in Europe with Blake in 1966 and 1967. The dreamy, nocturnal cabaret of The Newest Sound Around is entering the Age of Aquarius, with covers of the Beatles and Dylan, and Lee is beginning to exhibit her fascination with wordplay, in an inspired setting of Gertrude Stein’s verse to Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso.” Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos The Newest Sound Around an album by Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake. RCA Victor (1962) Jeanne Lee performing at the Banlieues Bleues Festival, Seine-Saint-Denis, France, 1997 praised as an heir to Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln, she seemed destined to follow in their footsteps. But Lee didn’t see herself as strictly a jazz singer, or even merely as a singer. She came to think of herself as a “voice environmentalist,” and gravitated to the most adventurous musical environments, from the Fluxus movement to the freejazz avant-garde, which recognized her not simply as a kindred spirit but as an environment in her own right. Lee fearlessly explored the continent of her own voice—vocalise, breathing, sighs, cries and whispers, giggles and laughter, even saliva—and revealed a new, enchanting, and profoundly corporeal world of sound. “Her body is song,” the playwright and poet Ntozake Shange wrote of her. “We got a woman among us who isn’t afraid of the sound of her own voice.” In her embrace of the body, and her own body’s natural music, Lee took part in a movement in vocal art that arose in the early 1960s with the work of the mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, the wife and muse of the Italian composer Luciano Berio, and that soon attracted singers such as Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Jay Clayton. Most were women who felt that Western classical music had barely scratched the surface of what La Barbara called “the original instrument,” and they were keen to investigate their instrument’s untapped resources, including “unmusical” noises—groans, grunts, screams, wails—that male composers had all but banished from vocal depicted as if it were an entirely formalist and exclusively white movement.* Today those histories are being rewritten, and Lee, like Eastman and other hidden figures of the black avant-garde, is reemerging from oblivion. She’s even fashionable: revered by younger singers, celebrated by Afro-futurists, worshipfully discussed by musicologists and black feminist scholars. B orn in 1939, Lee grew up in the Bronx, an only child. Alonzo Lee, her father, was an opera singer who practiced lieder and spirituals at home; her mother, Madeline, was an accomplished tap dancer. The Lees weren’t wealthy, but they were culturally rich, and raised their daughter with a deep sense of her heritage. Lee took piano and voice lessons, went to see Marion Anderson and Paul Robeson perform in Harlem, and attended a progressive, largely white private school based on Thoreau’s teachings where she read Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Blake. She hid her interest in jazz from her father, who considered it “low-life music.” In 1956, she enrolled at Bard, where she majored in psychology, befriended Hannah Arendt, and helped resettle Hungarian refugees. She read French and Russian novels, and choreographed dances set to Bartók and other twentieth- century composers. One of *See my article on Eastman, “Bad Boy from Buffalo,” The New York Review, May 10, 2018. None of this music, however, prepares you for the work that Lee began making in the late 1960s, when she discovered the power and dimensions of her own voice. She was now a widow: in The New York Review 1967 Hazelton’s body was discovered in New York harbor, an apparent suicide. Not long after, Lee began a relationship with Gunter Hampel, who would become her second husband. A vibraphonist from Göttingen who’d first seen Lee on German television, Hampel was a pioneer of Europe’s free-jazz scene. Lee roamed around Europe with him for the next few years, making music in France, Holland, and Germany. On July 8, 1969, they made an improvised trio album in Paris with the multi-reed player Anthony Braxton and called it The 8th of July. Here, for the first time, Lee’s voice becomes pure sound; here she introduces her inimitable style of scatting: soulful yet abstracted, at once earthy and celestial. A month later in Paris, Lee made the recording that led to her crowning as the queen of the “new thing”: the title track of the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp’s album Blasé. In this slow, brooding song, set to a series of chilling ostinatos on the piano, a black woman addresses her wayward man, a militant who’s done her wrong. Shepp, the author, thought he’d written a story of the couple’s reconciliation, but Lee transformed his lyrics into a bitter, harrowing indictment—and a precocious expression of the black feminism that would soon erupt out of exasperation with the Black Power movement’s patriarchal politics. “Blasé/ain’t you daddy?” she sneers, her voice emboldened by contempt. “You/who shot your sperm into me/but never set me free.” Her cry that “all of Ethiopia awaits you/my prodigal son” is laced with mocking, accusatory irony. Equally stunning—and as calming as “Blasé” is incendiary—was her rendition, on the same album, of the spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” where her voice virtually becomes that balm, offering to make the wounded whole. After Blasé, Lee lent her voice to some of the landmark recordings of the jazz avant-garde: Marion Brown’s pastoral tone poem Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Carla Bley’s opera Escalator Over the Hill, and Braxton’s 1972 Town Hall concert. Whenever she sang, the music would suddenly grow larger, as if her presence imbued it with an electrifying sense of occasion. For all the liberties she took in her improvisations, she never forgot the melodic line of a song or descended into the kind of screaming that became a cliché of freejazz vocals. Her singing—often in the form of vocalise or Sprechgesang—was as modest as it was majestic: she’s always in the music, never on top of it. In the spring of 1974 Lee made her first album under her own name, Conspiracy, with a group of free-jazz musicians including Hampel, the reedmen Mark Whitcage and Sam Rivers, the clarinetist Perry Robinson, and the drummer Steve McCall. She wrote most of the music and coproduced the album. By then Lee was back in New York, living on Second Avenue and 12th Street. The city’s jittery energy infuses her poem “Subway Couple,” in which she describes a “very black” man “leaning his long, young self” into his “slim, tawny, silent girl /with eyes like Aretha,” while Rivers, like a train arriving in the station, nearly drowns out her stentorian recitation with his frenetic improvisation on tenor saxophone. “Subway Couple” taps into the mood of a new, defiant cultural nationalism, and Lee resembles a young Black Arts poet on the cover of Conspiracy, where she appears in contemplative close-up against a yellow background, her eyes half shut, her lips pursed, beneath a towering, Angela Davis–style Afro. But Lee, a left-wing pacifist wary of nationalism of any kind, wasn’t drawn to gestures of rhetorical militancy: art was her revolution, not a weapon in service of the revolution. (In this she was very different from, say, Nina Simone.) “Jeanne was an African-American who was psychologically free, for whom racism was an inconvenience,” the choreographer Mickey Davidson, Lee’s friend and collaborator, told me. “She didn’t see the ugliness of life— she saw only beauty.” Conspiracy was a work of celebration: of the voice, of aesthetic and natural wonder, of fertility and motherhood. Lee was pregnant with her son Ruomi, the first of her two children with Hampel—Cavana, their daughter, was born a few years later—and the album trembles with the anticipation of birth. Its open, expansive mood is immediately set by a poem called “Sundance”: No words Only a feeling No questions Only a light No sequence Only a being No journey Only a dance Lee recites the poem, written by her late husband David Hazelton, without accompaniment, leaving ample space between each line. After a pause, we hear a bass line, flute, soprano saxophone, and drums, and her joyful scatting in conversation with the horns; later, she returns to the poem, this time singing each syllable in a sweet, melismatic trance. Lee had a linguist’s fascination with the sonic properties of words, with the way that sounds create meaning. In one of the most inventive tracks on Conspiracy, a solo performance called “Angel Chile,” Lee’s laughter slowly turns into syllables, which eventually form the word “Naima,” her daughter’s name. The name splits apart, then forms again, in a gripping sequence of sonic effects and textures that seem to evoke the kaleidoscope of feelings that a child conjures in a mother’s imagination. The stark, mournful “Yeh Come T’be,” a kind of latter- day medieval motet, goes still further in its exploration of Lee’s voice, layering three tracks of it in an intricate harmonization of sighs, moans, hiccups, and throat sounds. The sounds we hear on pieces like “Angel Chile” and “Yeh Come T’be” aren’t in themselves unusual, but we’re not accustomed to their being incorporated into the fabric of musical compositions. Why, then, does Conspiracy sound so uncontrived, so natural, unlike so much of the era’s vocal experimentation? The beauty and control of Lee’s voice are part of the reason: she can turn a hiccup into an infectious rhythm, and her laughter is seduction itself. But I think what makes Lee’s most extreme work so alluring, and so gentle, is the way she speaks to her audience, teaching us how to COMPLEX CONTROVERSIAL RELEVANT This vibrant, richly illustrated book accompanies the first fullscale retrospective exhibition in a generation of the groundbreaking modern artist. Forty years after Guston’s death, his work remains distinctly contemporary. National Gallery of Art in association with D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. Hardcover $60 Watch for new exhibition dates at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Tate Modern, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. MAJOR SUPPORT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL TOUR OF THE EXHIBITION AND THE CATALOG IS PROVIDED BY THE TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART. #PhilipGustonNow www.nga.gov June 11, 2020 15 politybooks.com Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World Slavoj Žižek “An impressive feat... [Žižek] at his most powerful.” The Guardian Paper | 140 pages | 978-1-5095-4611-4 | $14.95 How Everything Can Collapse A Manual for our Times Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens “This is an important book.” Martin Rees, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge Paper | 250 pages | 978-1-5095-4139-3 | $19.95 Grief The Price of Love Svend Brinkmann “masterful” Leeat Granek, York University Paper | 208 pages | 978-1-5095-4124-9 | $19.95 Resolutely Black Conversations with Françoise Vergès Aimé Césaire “A ‘must’ for all who study power, diaspora, culture, identity and belonging.” Michelle Wright, Emory University Paper | 120 pages | 978-1-5095-3715-0 | $19.95 The Black Register Tendayi Sithole “Essential reading for anyone concerned about our future.” Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA Paper | 300 pages | 978-1-5095-4207-9 | $24.95 Enrichment A Critique of Commodities Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre “A foundation stone in a sociology of dystopia for our times.” Charles Sabel, Columbia Law School Cloth | 600 pages | 978-1-5095-2872-1 | $45.00 @politybooks 16 facebook.com/politybooks listen, inviting us to join her conspiracy. “Take a breath,” she exclaims over a gust of wind-like sounds on reeds and bass. “Let it go . . . don’t get scared . . . That sound you heard /ain’t nuthin / but nature /an’ her children /breathin / toGETHer.” As Thulani Davis wrote of Lee’s black female novelist contemporaries, her poetry was an “ecstatic,” “body- centered” language, full of “hallucinations, magic, recipes, potions, song, fire, and flight.” Lee was ubiquitous on the Lower East Side free-jazz scene of the 1970s, where women weren’t especially welcome except as muses or groupies, but her talent was too exceptional to be ignored. The drummer Andrew Cyrille, whose 1979 trio album Nuba featured Lee and the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, told me, “Jeanne would not back down or back off from anything any of us did.” She performed in lofts, mentored young female singers, taught music in public schools, and performed with the pianist Cecil Taylor in a production of Adrienne Kennedy’s play A Rat’s Mass. She was one of four singers in John Cage’s Renga and Apartment Building 1776, composed for the bicentennial, and wrote an operatic song cycle of her own inspired by the Sufi poet Farid ud- din Attar’s Conference of Birds. She integrated dance and movement into her work, and at one performance covered herself in blue paint and sang in front of an enormous blue monochrome canvas. She would sometimes appear on stage with a microphone in one hand and one of her young children in her other arm: a deeply inspiring image for women on the scene. “Jeanne lived a very clean truth,” Mickey Davidson told me. “Her existence was the living manifestation of what Ntozake [Shange] wrote about. Art was what she lived.” But you couldn’t make much of a living on art—certainly not Lee’s kind of noncommercial art—and she was barely getting by. Hampel, who was mostly with men, lived in a separate apartment a block away and was often in Europe, leaving her to raise their children as the neighborhood fell prey to drugs, prostitution, and street crime. (They eventually separated.) Her poem “In These Last Days,” which she sings to lacerating effect on Nuba, evokes a period of “total disintegration /where every day/ is a struggle /against becoming/an object in /someone else’s /nightmare.” In that song, Lee finds “great joy” and “unassailable strength” in motherhood. Ruomi, her son, remembers her as a “walking empath” who exposed him to literature and art and took him to Quaker meetings so he could learn how to become a conscientious objector in case the draft was restored. But Lee sometimes buckled under the demands of parenting and depended on a wide network of other women to pitch in—her “sister friends,” she called them. “Jeanne was a princess,” one of them told me. “She expected other people to take care of things. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her kids. But her work came first, and she assumed everyone else would pick up the slack when things fell apart.” In financial emergencies she called upon her mother, who, in Ruomi’s recollection, “was often the difference between another challenging moment and heartbreak.” Lee’s academic ad- mirers have celebrated her as a radical black feminist, but the life of a black woman artist in the avant-garde could feel like another kind of bondage. As the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins wrote in Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019), “I believe in liberation, but I do not believe it is at all the thing we think it is.” By the mid-1980s, Lee had fallen into a slump. She hadn’t made an album as a leader since Conspiracy, and nearly all of her recorded work in that decade appeared on obscure albums by her former husband. She took solace in the occasional European tour, only to find herself unable to pay her rent back home. In her last decade, Lee experienced a new surge of creative energy after moving to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where a younger generation of black artists and musicians had settled. She joined forces with two of her sister friends, Davidson and Shange, on a piece for the Whitney Museum, A Sense of Breath. And she reemerged as a recording artist. Returning to her roots as a jazz singer, she made a luminous duet with her old partner Ran Blake, You Stepped Out of a Cloud, in 1989. A sequence of midand slow-tempo standards and originals, it’s as lusciously atmospheric an album as The Newest Sound Around, but it’s a more sedate, ruminative affair, the work of two masters in middle age. Blake’s playing is spare and impressionistic, Lee’s voice now almost operatic in its voluptuousness. She performs a cappella on several tracks, notably her setting of Blake’s composition “Vanguard,” in which she sings lyrics based on “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” turning Dostoyevsky’s short story into a fable of colonial despoliation and delusion. Lee was equally imaginative in her setting of text on Natural Affinities (1992), her second and final album as a leader. She created a collage out of excerpts from Charles Mingus’s memoir Beneath the Underdog, and sang it in a slow, stately duet with the bassist Dave Holland. In “Journey to Edaneres,” she evoked a marketplace where a bird flies over a caravan as a “dancing girl” dreams of a “city at night/alight with the glow of many lamps,” her voice forming an exquisite arabesque with the singer Amina Claudine Myers. Natural Affinities is an aesthetically more conservative work than Conspiracy— there’s no overdubbing, no hiccupping, and Lee even gives us an old-fashioned rendition of “I Thought About You.” But her voice had never sounded more beautiful or more supple, especially in the final track, “Ambrosia Mama,” a samba set to a short poem in praise of motherhood that Shange had written for their Whitney performance. It opens with an aching duet between Lee and the guitarist Jerome Harris; they’re soon joined by Lisle Atkinson on bass and Newman Baker on drums, and in the closing moments, Lee’s scatting snakes around Harris and her rhythm section, effortlessly shifting registers, hitting falsetto notes with a pillowy grace. With Atkinson and Baker, Lee had a working band of her own for the first time. It expanded on tour to include other musicians, such as the trumpeter Lester Bowie of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett of the World SaxThe New York Review rumbling, propulsive ostinatos. Waldron, who struck Lee as a “natural mystic,” shared her love of birds, her fascination with East Asian culture, and her sense of humor: as Ruomi remembers, “they made each other laugh like they were standup comedians.” In an interview about her work with Waldron, Lee said, “He really transcends this understanding of accompaniment. He’s not feeding you something, he’s talking.” They talked to each other brilliantly in their album After Hours (1994), performing compositions by Mingus, Ellington, and Waldron himself. As marvelous as her duets with Blake are, her chemistry with Waldron, a fellow bluesman in European exile, is more organic: they finish each other’s sentences like an old couple still in love. Lee joined Waldron in Japan for A heartbreaking tale and uplifting love story based on the sinking of the Struma, a ship carrying eight hundred Jewish refugees fleeing Europe at the height of World War II. Stefan Roloff ophone Quartet. Sometimes her sidemen took advantage of her laissezfaire attitude on stage, and Atkinson, the band’s director, had to remind them that it was Lee’s band. “Lester said that for a woman to be on the bandstand, she has to have her titties strapped on tight,” Davidson told me. “Lisle helped tighten up her bra for her. With her faith in people’s creativity, she could leave space open to a fault. She had difficulty doing forty-minute sets. She’d explore that moment as long as it could go, and just like with Cecil or Sun Ra, it could go on forever with Jeanne.” European audiences didn’t mind those longueurs, however, and in the mid-1990s, Lee moved to Holland, after being hired to teach at the conservatory in The Hague. She found an apartment with a terrace and plenty of “COMPELLING… Zülfü Livanelli’s attacks on Turkish censorship are fearless and eloquent.” —Wall Street Journal Jeanne Lee in Kinetic Colors—Blue, a performance created by Stefan Roloff and Christina Jones, New York City, 1985 light, filled it with plants, and began writing a children’s book about the history of jazz, Jam!, published in 1999, a year before her death. Susanne Abbuehl, one of her students, remembers reading Gertrude Stein, Shange, and haiku in her class: “She taught us the musicality of words, the dancing and the movement of words, the unity of words, music and dance.” Singers should be guided by “occurrence and cessation,” not “time or meter”; above all, they should model their singing on nature. Abbuehl told me Lee would point to the window and tell her to “sing with the light.” She was happy to be living outside the United States, where, she said in a 1997 documentary, “the government is turning the young against the old, the men against the women, the blacks against the whites, the whites against the blacks. . . . If you’re an artist of any kind, you’re an object of suspicion there right now.” In Europe, Lee forged her last great artistic partnership, with Mal Waldron, a pianist as iconoclastic and as Monkobsessed as Blake. As a young man, Waldron had played in bands led by Mingus and Eric Dolphy; he had also accompanied two of Lee’s idols, Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln. After escaping to Europe in the mid-1960s, he had created one of the most hypnotic styles in post-bop pianism, based on a series of concerts commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The album that came out of those concerts, Travellin’ in Soul-Time, with the flutist Toru Tenda, was a stirring suite of Waldron compositions, some set to lyrics that drew powerfully upon the poetry of the hibakusha, the survivors. Lee summoned an extraordinary gravitas as she described the “black rain” of atomic destruction. But her most moving performance was on a song about birds, Waldron’s “The Seagulls of Kristiansund.” “They know from the past,” she sings in her low, rich voice, “a life cannot last/so they live /for today/for tomorrow/they may not/be able /to dive /from the sky.” Over Waldron’s dark, rippling chords, she cries, wails, and ululates. It was one of her last flights on record: Lee had recently been diagnosed with cancer; five years later she would be dead. She never complained of her illness. “She was losing weight, but she was laughing and singing her can off,” according to Cyrille. “The music kept her alive. She loved the music, and the music loved her.” In an early poem, Lee wrote, “the miracle is/that the layers/ continue to be stripped away/each time/ uncovering a center/more brilliant/and more revealing/than the one/before.” The poem is addressed to a lover, but it’s a perfect description of the miracle that was Jeanne Lee’s voice. Q “A POIGNANT HISTORICAL NOVEL is one to get lost in....Ultimately the love story says much about the beauty and perseverance of the human spirit; loyalty, love and facing up to loss.” —NB Magazine New York Review Books (including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics) Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom, Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights; Yongsun Bark, Distribution. June 11, 2020 OTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM 17 Witness to a Mystery Stephen Greenblatt I returned to Spain last summer to see it for myself. With a population of more than a quarter of a million, Elche is not notably quaint. The surrounding highways are lined with shoe factories. The brutalist architecture of the 1950s and 1960s has left its telltale footprint up to the edge of the historic center. Some remarkable finds from the nearby ruins of ancient Iberian settlements are displayed in the fine archaeological museum housed in an old fortress, but the greatest of these finds, a haunting fourth-century BCE stone bust known as the Lady of Elche, was taken away to 1 In a history of the city written in the early seventeenth century, Cristobal Sanz claimed that the play originated in the thirteenth century, perhaps to commemorate the conquest of the city from the Moors in 1265. Another account, from the early eighteenth century, added a miraculous event: the arrival on the beaches of Elche of a mysterious ark in May 1266, containing the script and perhaps the music of the play. Most modern scholars date the Misteri d’Elx to the first half of the fifteenth century. The text, for the most part in octosyllabic couplets, is in a dialect of Occitan with a strong influence from Catalan. I am indebted to José Manuel González Fernández de Sevilla for making my visit to Elche possible. 18 the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. Elche’s most beautiful physical feature is an enormous grove of date palms, a legacy of the Moorish inhabitants who were driven out in 1238 by Jaume I of Aragon. It is the annual performance of the mystery play that makes Elche unique. Performed over the course of two days, the Misteri d’Elx is a celebration of the Dormition and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary—the belief that the immaculate mother of God passed from earthly life without suffering, her corpse miraculously spared the decay a life-sized wooden statue of the Virgin of the Assumption, richly dressed and crowned, the eyes in her masklike face closed and her bejeweled fingers pressed together in a gesture of calm piety. The substitution of the statue for the boy does not break the theatrical illusion: there is no illusion to break. The performers have all along behaved less like characters in a play than like figures in a medieval or Renaissance altarpiece. The first part of the Misteri ends with an angel clad in white descending from the ceiling surrounded by four iment. The painted ceiling opens once again to lower sweetly singing angels who have come to transport Mary to her son. The holy statue is slowly lifted toward heaven, and a mystical apparition of the Holy Trinity descends, amid a shower of golden confetti, and gently lowers a golden crown onto the Virgin’s head. The apostles and the converted Jews together sing their beautiful polyphonic choral refrains, the massive organ sounds its triumphant chords, fireworks explode outside, and the crowd filling the nave, balconies, and tribunes weeps and applauds and shouts the praises of Mary, Mother of God and protectress of Elche. The Misteri d’Elx is unusual not only because it has survived the vast political, aesthetic, and ideological mood swings of many centuries—including the Council of Trent’s restrictions on popular religious drama, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, radical anticlericalism, civil war, the attempted suppression of Catalan nationalism, globalization, and the rise of digital media—but also because it is set entirely to music. It has managed to retain this setting, along with two remarkable aerial stage devices, dating in their current form from as early as the sixteenth century, that transport singing angels (and ultimately the statue of the Virgin herself) between the marble floor of the basilica and the ceiling of the dome high above. The more spectacular of these devices is known popularly as the pomegranate (in Catalan, magrana). A flap cut into the frescoed ceiling of the basilica’s dome opens and a glittering red machine slowly emerges and unfolds to reveal the angel who bears the message to Mary that she will soon rejoin her son. The second device, known as the recèlica or araceli, is lowered to reveal the group of guitar-strumming, harp-playing angels. The devices are charmingly archaic—men operating a winch in the attic space behind the painted canvas flap are clearly visible—but their enduring effectiveness was apparent in the ecstatic cries of excitement and the rapt, tear-stained faces of the crowd. When the ceiling opened, the spectators’ frenzy of fanning—this was Spain in August, after all, and the church was like an oven—gave way to bursts of passionate applause. In an enclosed gallery high above the cadafal, even the nuns, who must have been roasting in their wimples and heavy black tunics, clapped their hands in wonder and delight. Though the available online videos are substantial, they can only gesture toward the actual experience of the mystery play in its entirety. That experience includes not only the two-day liturgical drama itself but also tryouts, first to select the best singers and then to determine if any of those who might sing the part of the angels are afraid of heights; neighborhood feasts; the making of elaborate costumes; multiPatronat Del Misteri d’Elx A few years ago I received an honorary degree from the University of Alicante, in Spain’s Valencia province. At the end of my visit, my host, presenting me with a lavishly illustrated book in Catalan entitled La Festa o Misteri d’Elx, urged me to return someday in midAugust to the nearby town of Elche (or Elx, in the Catalan spelling) to witness the elaborate religious drama of the book’s title, which has been performed annually since the fifteenth century and may have roots even earlier.1 This event—recognized by UNESCO as “a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity”—is, like the Oberammergau passion play in Bavaria, one of the few living relics of collective celebrations that were once widespread in medieval Europe. These celebrations, known as mystery or miracle plays, did not have a single set form, but they shared a focus on sacred themes drawn from the Bible and from the legends that had gradually accumulated around biblical stories. They have left very few living traces: mystery plays were actively suppressed in the sixteenth century, both by Protestant authorities who felt they were indelibly stained with Catholicism and by CounterReformation Catholic authorities who were anxious, after the Reformation, to exercise more doctrinal control over popular religious enthusiasm. The survival of the Misteri d’Elx, more or less intact, is something of a miracle (more prosaically, its continuance required a papal dispensation, granted in the seventeenth century by Pope Urban VIII). The festival of the Misteri d’Elx in the Basilica de Santa María, Elche, Spain, 2015 that befalls all other mortals, and that her body as well as her soul ascended to heaven to be reunited with her son Jesus. On the first day of the festival, accompanied by musicians and civic officials, the Virgin, played by a young boy arrayed in a white tunic and blue hooded cape surmounted by a gilded diadem, walks in a procession through the streets of the town. With an entourage, including several blond-wigged angels, she then solemnly approaches Elche’s baroque Basilica de Santa María. The basilica, which stands on the site of an ancient mosque, was gutted in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, but, lovingly restored, it is packed with spectators who have been waiting for hours for this moment. The Virgin sings plaintively as she proceeds up a specially built walkway (known as the andador) to a raised platform (the cadafal) erected at the crossing of the nave and the transept. There, informed by an angel that her end is near, she expresses the wish to see the apostles once more before she departs from this life of sorrow. After an exquisitely sung choral reunion with Saint John, Saint Peter, and the others, she lies down upon a bier. While the apostles surround her and lament her passing, a cleverly constructed trapdoor in the cadafal opens, allowing the boy playing the Virgin to disappear below. In his place appears more angels, one playing a harp, the others strumming guitars, and all singing sweetly. On the cadafal, the central angel receives a small doll—a miniature version of the recumbent statue lying on the bier—and carries it back up to the heavens. Mary’s soul—an icon of an icon of a boy doing his best to resemble an icon—is thus glorified. The next morning there is a second solemn procession: the recumbent statue of the Virgin, accompanied by costumed penitents, is carried through the streets of Elche, which are lined with the faithful holding candles, and then back to the platform in the church. When in the late afternoon the large crowd has once again gathered in the basilica, the mystery play’s most dramatic event occurs: led by a gaunt, elderly man with long braided hair and beard, a crowd of Jews, wearing prayer shawls and skullcaps and singing Oh Déu Adonai, rushes into the church and up the walkway in an attempt to reach the Virgin’s corpse. The apostles valiantly try to repel the onslaught, but the ferocity of the malevolent Jews, stirred up by their chief rabbi, is overwhelming. Suddenly, just as the attackers are about to reach the body—presumably for some nefarious purpose—there is a miracle: the rabbi’s hands are paralyzed. The Jews fall to their knees, convert, and are baptized. The remainder of the sacred event then proceeds without further imped- The New York Review ple rehearsals; a succession of parades, mock battles, and unbelievably noisy daylight pyrotechnic events (mascletás) to celebrate the reconquest of Valencia from the Moors; solemn candlelit processions in honor of the Virgin; masses starting at 4 AM ; and spectacular fireworks filling the night sky with shimmering light and the acrid smell of gunpowder. My kind host in Alicante was per- fectly right in thinking that I would find Elche’s mystery play fascinating. But my fascination was interwoven with perplexity. What exactly are we meant to do with these artistic traces of a past in which a dark history of religious hostility is twisted together with popular faith, and in which we can glimpse the sources of some of our most intractable contemporary problems? The strictly formalist literary training that I received, at Yale in the 1960s, dismissed almost all historical and cultural considerations, past and present, as irrelevant. I was taught to analyze the internal structure of a work of art, rather the way an engineer might analyze the machine that raises and lowers the angels from the ceiling: How exactly do the cog wheels and pulleys function, and what are the weight limits of those slender ropes? But though it is a powerful tool for understanding how certain aesthetic effects are produced, such formalism deliberately keeps its distance from the ethical questions raised by works like the Misteri d’Elx. It has little to say about the intense, potentially dangerous energies that make those ethical questions pressing. In a printed text, works like mystery cycles and miracle plays can be treated as if they were abstract puzzles, narrative problems solved either cleverly or imperfectly. But the power of medieval art lies in its insistence on larger frames of reference, which extend to the community of the living and the dead, to the hidden powers of nature, and, above all, to the numinous beings who reside in heaven and hell and preside over our salvation or damnation. This is an art that makes explicit what is often hidden in the works of later periods: the inculcation of the shared values and collective beliefs that define the corpus Christianorum, the entire body of Christendom. Hence the vivid effect of what I witnessed on those summer days in Valencia: “This is who we are and what we believe,” the whole city seems to declare in unison. “This performance marks the boundary between those who belong and those who must be excluded; it manifests our faith and makes clear who are our brothers and who are the others.” The enormous civic involvement in the array of events in Elche is one of the central features of medieval drama: on their own, the surviving texts—the fifteenth-century Wakefield mystery plays from England, for example, or Les Actes des Apôtres from France— provide only a small clue to a cultural form whose vitality depends upon communal participation. Understanding the nature and meaning of that participation lies at the center of much recent scholarship, whose primary inspiration was a brilliant book written almost twenty years ago by Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. June 11, 2020 Beckwith’s insights were based in part on attempts in the contemporary theater to recover something of the spirit of the original performances. In Tony Harrison’s celebrated adaptation of The Mysteries, which I saw in London in the early 1980s and which is based on the Wakefield cycle, the director, Bill Bryden, had the audience move around the huge open acting space and lend a hand to actors dressed as workmen from different trades. At one moment we were all milling about as if among the angels witnessing the creation of the world; at another we were part of the crowd watching the Crucifixion with mingled curiosity and horror. What I remember most vividly was holding onto a large piece of blue plastic and shaking it up and down to create the vast, seething ocean on which Noah’s ark was bobbing. It was all homely and more than a bit absurd, but I distinctly felt I had ceased to be a mere spectator and was actively participating in something important. Affirming their collective faith, the performers in medieval mystery plays generally came, as they do in Elche, from the lay populace. The sense of civic solidarity was heightened in many performances by the role of craft guilds, each of which assumed responsibility for a particular segment of the narrative. (The term “mystery” has its origin not in enigma but, more mundanely, in the Latin ministerium, that is, métier or trade.) In the mystery cycle performed in Chester, in northwest England, for example, the tanners were responsible for the Fall of Lucifer, the drapers for the Creation of the World, the “waterleaders and drawers” (water carriers) for the Flood, and so on, all the way through to the ironmongers for the Passion, the cooks and innkeepers for the Descent into Hell, and the skinners for the Resurrection. Sometimes, as in Elche, most of the event took place in the sacred precincts of the church, but often much of it unfolded outside, on wagons in the streets, and in squares and marketplaces. We are now accustomed to situating performances in specially demarcated spaces: theaters, opera houses, concert halls, arenas. (The dominant model in the English-speaking world was laid out in 1576 when an entrepreneurial builder, James Burbage, constructed the first free-standing public theater in England since the fall of the Roman Empire.) But for much medieval drama, there was no sharp distinction between theatrical spaces and the spaces of ordinary life, while the boundary between the sacred and the profane was remarkably porous. All the world was a stage. If in the Middle Ages the performance of a mystery moved as it does in Elche from the streets into the basilica, the sense of the sacred would have been heightened, but the principal performers continued to be lay, rather than clergy, and the events depicted remained at some distance from the liturgical rituals and hieratic solemnity of the church. Reverence was often seasoned by a certain playful raucousness or a lingering tang of theatricality. The most delightful of the surviving English mysteries, the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play, features a comedy about a stolen sheep that the thief’s wife attempts to conceal by swaddling it as a newborn baby and hiding it in a cradle. Only Met Anywhere 5,000 Years of Art C Artist Interviews 360° Virtual Gallery Tours Behind the Scenes C Talks & Performances Visit metmuseum.org C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (detail), 1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1949. 19 after the shepherds discover the ruse and punish the thief does the play turn its attention to the real newborn, the Christ child, in the manger. The thief, a boisterous rogue, is one of many figures in the mysteries who leaven the liturgical sobriety with histrionics and, like the Jews in the Misteri d’Elx, inject an anarchic energy that flourishes briefly before it is contained. Such figures take many forms. There are lively allegorical sinners like Mischief, Avarice, and Lust alongside an array of scolds, skeptical neighbors, peddlers, and soldiers. Herod and Pilate both throw their weight around, as do various noisy devils and demons. Judas, of course, plays his sinister role, and on occasion, as in the Misteri d’Elx, there are other, less infamous troublemakers identified as Jews. Take, for example, the fifteenthcentury Play of the Sacrament from the village of Croxton, in Cambridgeshire. This miracle play depicts an immensely rich Jew, Jonathas, who pays the corruptible Christian merchant Aristorius to steal a Eucharist wafer and then, in the company of four fellow Jews, subjects the consecrated host to a series of attacks. Their ostensible motive is to demonstrate, as Jonathas puts it, that “the belief of these Christian men is false . . . for they believe in a cake.” Of course, if the Jews thought the wafer was only a cake, they would hardly have paid a fortune for it and set about stabbing it with their daggers and driving nails into it. As so often in the long history of violent iconoclasm, the ostensible skeptics are the ones who are most in the grip of magical conviction. “Now, by Muhammad”—as Jews in this and other medieval plays repeatedly swear, conflating Christianity’s two great enemies—“with our strokes we shall fray [assault] him as he was on the rood [the cross].” They are unwittingly reenacting the Crucifixion, depicted here as the work of the Jews, without the distraction of the pagan Romans. But the perfidious Jews are in for an unpleasant surprise, for when Jonathas strikes the host, it begins to bleed, and when in dismay he tries to cast the bleeding wafer into a cauldron of boiling oil, it clings to his hand. His fellow Jews try desperately to pull it away, but they manage only to pull his hand off as well. In horror-movie style, the shocks keep coming. Plucking out the nails that they had driven into the consecrated host, they wrap the hand and wafer in a cloth and, hoping they have seen the last of them, throw the hideous packet into the cauldron. The oil, however, bubbles up into a mass of seething blood. To staunch it, they fire up an oven with straw and thorns, and then, gingerly lifting the “cake” and what remains of the hand out of the oil, they cast them both into the flames. But the Jews cannot contain the mysterious power they have inadvertently released. A stage direction in the original manuscript calls for a spectacular coup de théâtre: “Here the oven must rive asunder and bleed out at the crannies, and an image appear out with wounds bleeding.” The “image” is none other than the suffering Jesus, who addresses his tormentors directly: “Oh ye marvelous Jews,/Why are ye to your king unkind?” The Jews precipitously fall to their knees, repent, and convert. T here were no Jews in England in the fifteenth century when The Croxton Play of the Sacrament originated. As with all the other depictions of Jews, from the medieval mystery plays through Elizabethan masterpieces like The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, this play was performed in a conspicuously Jew-free environment. The entire Jewish community had been expelled in 1290, the first such ethnic cleansing in Europe. By the late sixteenth century, as James Shapiro has persuasively argued in Shakespeare and the Jews (1992), there were probably in London a handful of marranos, that is, nominal Christians of Spanish and Portuguese origin who in secret observed certain Jewish rituals. But Jews—that is, people who openly professed and practiced Judaism—were not admitted back into the country until the late seventeenth century. Christian society, however, has never had to rely altogether on the presence of “real Jews”; it has always been able, in Marx’s wry formulation, to “produce Judaism from its own entrails.”2 As the historian David Nirenberg amply shows in his magisterial Anti-Judaism, Jews, at least imaginary Jews, pervade Western habits of thought. 3 Their presence is necessary, and not only because they cannot be erased from the historical origins of Christianity. In medieval drama, Jews, along with a variety of devils and pagans, emperors and sultans, repeatedly act out the doubts that even pious Christians occasionally experience. Hence in Croxton, at the end everyone files into the church, where not only do all the Jewish characters become Christian but also the penitent Christian merchant Aristorius confesses that he has acted like Judas: “I sold our Lord’s body for lucre.” The plaintive figure of Jesus having resumed the form of bread, the entire community, cleansed of its Jews, can now take communion. Moving the whole performance into the church has the virtue of highlighting the authority of the institution and its ordained representatives, but it also runs the risk of labeling those representatives as actors and exposing the high altar as a theatrical stage on which fraudulent illusions are produced. Indeed, in place of the altar the Misteri d’Elx requires the construction of an actual stage, complete with trapdoor, from which Mary ascends into a painted heaven by means of an altogether visible rope and pulley. To be sure, the Jews’ skepticism—their conviction that Mary is simply mortal or that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is hocus pocus—is soundly defeated. This defeat presumably signifies the hoped-for vanquishing of the quiet skepticism that evidently lurked in the rational minds of ordinary Christians and found dangerous expression in those whom the church called heretics and tried to silence. The problem is that the triumphant demonstration of the Assumption of the Virgin or the miracle of the Eucharist is ineradicably tinged with theatricality. “The host, the little biscuit,” as Beckwith observes Helen Frankenthaler The Red Sea, 1978 Lithograph on pink handmade paper 23 1/4 x 27 7/8 inches, Edition 58 hirambutler.com 20 2 Karl Marx, “Zur Judenfrage,” quoted in David Nirenberg, “Shakespeare’s Jewish Questions,” Renaissance Drama, Vol. 38 (2010), p. 78. 3 David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2013). of the Croxton Play, “is a mere stage prop.”4 If this is proof, what would disproof look like? The best that mystery plays can do is to deflect the skepticism they unleash—the little, nagging voice that says that the wafer is only bread or that Mary must die and putrefy like everyone else—onto public enemies and to make these enemies conspicuously theatrical, as if they belonged to a different medium from that of the virtuous Christians in their icon-like stillness. 5 As in Croxton, at the end of the Misteri d’Elx the Jews are compelled to quiet their skepticism and their noisy histrionics and to enter the world of Christian mystery. One by one, as they are touched by Saint John’s palm frond, they bend down to adore the statue that they would in their former Jewish lives have regarded with contempt. Then they rise and solemnly follow one of the apostles, who is holding up a crucifix. Their conversion is complete, or rather as complete as it can be, since the Jews remain separate as a group and distinct in dress. Set apart from Mary and the apostles, who seem never to have had anything at all to do with Judaism, these figures, still in tallises and yarmulkes, are in effect marked as conversos, New Christians, who have not yet fully merged with the true faithful. I n Spain, such a spectacle of conversion inevitably brings to mind 1492, when the entire Jewish population of the kingdom, newly united under Ferdinand and Isabella, was forced to choose between baptism and exile. But the Misteri d’Elx is not a depiction of that event or of the lamentable history of inquisitorial suspicion and persecution that both preceded and followed the forced conversions. In the early fifteenth century, when the performance originated, the Jews were already largely gone from Elche and its region. The substantial Jewish population of late-medieval Valencia had been the special obsession of Saint Vincent Ferrer, a charismatic Dominican preacher. Ferrer, born in 1350 and tirelessly active until his death in 1419, believed that the continued existence of the Jews was a scandal and an impediment to the Second Coming of Christ. Accompanied by a retinue of some three hundred flagellants, the peripatetic Ferrer launched a succession of spectacular anti-Jewish campaigns whose combination of economic sanctions, political pressure, rhetorical fervor, and sheer menace led a significant number of Jews, including some highly influential rabbis, to embrace Christianity. 4 Sarah Beckwith, “Ritual, Church, and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body,” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, edited by David Aers (Wayne State University Press, 1992), p. 68. 5 This logic continues well beyond the Middle Ages. Shakespeare’s Shylock also voices subversive, skeptical thoughts, before being forced to his knees and compelled to convert. But The Merchant of Venice, written for a secular theater in a Protestant country, does not end in a religious ritual. Shylock simply disappears from the play, and the last act depicts a set of decidedly worldly couples squabbling and reconciling. The New York Review “W ular celebration to honor the death and assumption of Mary.” If Elche is indeed free from religious conflict—and free from the presence of Jews—why should Jews figure at all in its fervent celebration of Mary? The answer is that virtually from its inception the cult of Mary was closely bound up with a current of vehement anti-Judaism.8 The vehemence may have intensified in angry responses to skeptical denials of Mary’s virginity, denials most notoriously summed up and circulated in a Jewish alternative biography of Jesus known as the Toledot Yeshu. But the anti-Jewish strain long outlasted any direct polemical contact between the two faiths and seems to have become focused, somewhat surprisingly, not only on Mary’s miraculous pregnancy but also on representations of her bodily ascent to heaven. British Library One outcome of the public zeal Ferrer’s preaching tapped into was a large-scale massacre in 1391 of Jews in Valencia and elsewhere. Though the royal authorities, taken by surprise, punished a few of the ringleaders of the violence—the Jews were technically royal property and therefore under protection—the event marked the beginning of the end of Spanish Convivencia, the time-honored mutual toleration of the three monotheistic faiths. The Jewish survivors of the slaughter got the message: some fled; others begged to be baptized. So many would-be converts lined up outside churches that the priests worried that their supply of holy chrism, the mixture of oil and balsam used in baptisms, would be exhausted.6 Almost immediately after the massacre in Valencia, stories began to circulate about wondrous occurrences that Men desecrating the host; from the Lovell Lectionary, illustrated by John Siferwas, circa 1400 seemed to validate or justify what had happened. According to reports sent to the king, chrism was suddenly filling the empty vessels of the churches. Such events, the local witnesses averred, could not have occurred through human ingenuity but must have been the work of divine intervention.7 It is a relatively modest distance from such stories to the fantasies that seem to be motivating the Misteri d’Elx. Instead of guilt and shame, there is vindication. Instead of a murderous attack on the Jews, there is a providentially averted attack by the Jews upon the Holy Mother of God. Instead of robbery, bloodshed, and compulsion, there is the spectacle of penitent Jews, down on their knees before the image of Mary, gratefully acknowledging the revealed truth: “Nosaltres tots creen,” they sing, “que és la Mare del Fill de Déu. Batejau-nos tots en breu, que en tal fe viure volem”—“We all believe that the mother of the son of God will soon baptize us all in that faith in which we want to live.” Vincent Ferrer—canonized in 1455—could not have hoped for more. Today there are almost no Jews in Elche, and very few in all of Valencia. As a Spanish colleague wrote to me when I delicately asked if there had ever been any discussion of the interfaith issues in the Misteri d’Elx, “I must tell you that Elche is a town free from religious conflict or racist hatred and violence. Those prejudices against Jews are only in the play which is just a pop6 See Henry Charles Lea, “Ferrand Martinez and the Massacres of 1391,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1895), pp. 217–18. 7 See Philippe Wolff, “The 1391 Pogrom in Spain: Social Crisis or Not?,” Past and Present, No. 50 (1971), pp. 9–10. June 11, 2020 In the Misteri d’Elx, as the Jews enter the basilica and rush up the andador, they do not say why they want to seize Mary’s body or what they would do with it if they got their hands on it. But legends, many dating back to the year 500, supply the missing explanation: the earliest texts tell a tale in which the Jews, fearing that Mary’s bodily relics will work wonders and will therefore win converts to the Christian faith, conspire to burn her corpse. All but one of the conspirators are struck blind, but that one, named Jephonias, runs in a rage toward the apostles who are carrying Mary’s body and attempts to overturn her bier.9 In defense of the Mother of God, an angel with a flaming sword cuts off Jephonias’s hands, which remain clinging to the bier. When the mutilated Jew begs the apostles to heal him, they reply that he must pray to the Virgin. In doing so, he is miraculously healed and immediately converts. With a palm branch from the Tree of Life, he then touches those of his fellow Jews who are willing to be cured of their blindness and join him in embracing the true faith. 8 See Miri Rubin, “The Passion of Mary: The Virgin and the Jews in Medieval Culture,” in The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, edited by Marcia Ann Kupfer (Penn State University Press, 2008); Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale University Press, 2009); and Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Dormition and Assumption Apocrypha (Leuven: Peeters, 2018), pp. 83– 136. 9 See, for example, the earliest Greek Dormition narrative, in Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford University Press, 2003). ell, what did you think of it?” my Spanish host asked, as the crowd, their cries of exaltation still ringing in my ears, filed out of the basilica. I replied that I found it compelling and beautiful; the music was splendid, the spectacle unforgettable, and the collective energy almost overwhelming. I was very glad to have seen it. But, I added after a pause, it also made me extremely uncomfortable. He looked baffled, so I asked him as a thought experiment to imagine himself in Baghdad watching a powerful, moving, ancient performance of a ritual drama that celebrated the miraculous awakening of a pack of angry Christians to the luminous truth of Islam. Would that make him uncomfortable? He hesitated for a moment and said that, yes, it would. Why go out of one’s way to engage with an experience like the Misteri d’Elx? One needn’t, after all. But refusing to look will not make the annual spectacle go away. It is, as UNESCO assures us, part of the heritage of humanity, one with considerable antiquity, beauty, and allure. Moreover, it is a living link to innumerable other texts and performances that over many generations fashioned the consciousness of the Christian West, and helped to shape its history. If we want to understand that history—if we want, for that matter, to understand the passions of the present—we must not simply turn our eyes away from unnerving, alienating, or offensive works of art in the hope of constructing a sanitized, reassuring canon. Such a canon does not exist, or if it did, it would have to exclude for one reason or another many of the most precious works of the human imagination, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Dickens’s Oliver Twist, from The Tale of Genji to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Where would we stop—and how could we ever understand how we got here? But even as I write these words, I glance nervously at the newspaper to see if there has been yet another violent outburst of Jew-hatred somewhere in the world. The August celebration in Elche is certainly not responsible for these attacks, but it is not entirely innocent either, any more than Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, or Pound’s Pisan Cantos are entirely innocent. Should artistic beauty confer a special privilege for the spreading of lies? Isn’t cultural prestige precisely one of the ways in which vicious stereotypes are freely reproduced and passed from generation to generation? Surely it is important to speak out, to object, and to articulate one’s own ethical principles. Some years ago, as the editor of the Norton Shakespeare, I was pilloried for my alleged political correctness—Harold Bloom dubbed me “the chief of the School of Resentment”—for calling attention to an antiblack slur in Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing. Would it actually have been better to let the slur pass unglossed? I think, on the contrary, that registering the presence of the racist stereotype illuminates the character who speaks the words, supplies contextual information about the period’s dominant assumptions, and gives needed expression to our own values. Exploring the ethical dilemmas found in the “intangible heritage of humanity” is hardly the only available option, either in the public sphere (there was no trace of that exploration at all, “Books enable readers to broaden their lives, and this one—in which Marie Mutsuki Mockett joins a crew harvesting wheat—is a doozy, as Studs Terkel’s were. . . . I never knew a person on a wheat-harvesting crew, and now I do, thanks to Mockett’s vivid and true account.” —ANNIE DILLARD AMERICAN HARVEST GOD, COUNTRY, AND FARMING IN THE HEARTLAND B Y M A RI E MU TS U KI MO C KE TT “An extraordinary feat of empathy set against a land of reds, whites, and blues, American Harvest doesn’t just speak to the great divide— it dares to bridge it.” —MARLON JAMES “Mockett, writing with a gentle self-consciousness, offers a compassionate portrait of conservative evangelicals, along with lucid musings on agricultural science, Native American history, and the quiet majesty of the Great Plains.” —THE NEW YORKER “Mockett describes the American plains as having ‘a subtle gradation in topography that suits a ruminating mind,’ and the same can be said of her stunning new book. . . . Her insights are ones we could all stand to learn from right about now.” —JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN GRAYWOLF PRESS graywolfpress.org 21 DIALOGUES: The David Zwirner Podcast Artists on the creative process Vija Celmins Karon Davis Kahlil Joseph Tyler Mitchell Helen Molesworth Rachel Rose Antwaun Sargent Diana Thater Luc Tuymans Doug Wheeler #DZDialogues @davidzwirner Listen now at davidzwirner.com/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts David Zwirner 22 of course, in Elche) or in the academy (where it is sometimes thought to be pervasive). Often the aspects of this heritage that one might expect to be most vehemently challenged are quietly ignored, winked at, or even actively championed. “What’s wrong, exactly, with euro-centrism?” asks Milo Yiannopoulos, a former editor at Breitbart News, reflecting on the Crusades. “And aren’t we glad the Christians won?” After all, he cheerfully says of fanatics who slaughtered innumerable Jews and Muslims, “the Christians were the good guys.”10 One need not go to this extreme to defend and appreciate an event like the one performed in Elche. The annual festival, it is possible to argue, is a time-honored civic ritual that has nothing to do with old histories of persecution and hatred. Those histories belong to a past as distant as the pagan rites that were no doubt once practiced on the site that gave way to a Christian church and then to a mosque and then to the current basilica. Moreover, what is depicted in the miracle of conversion is in effect the conferral of a form of citizenship—not quite our form, since we no longer insist upon a single faith as a condition of full membership in our civic community, but, for its time, the late Middle Ages, a reasonably decent one. It is also possible with a work like the Misteri d’Elx to treat the disagreeable aspects as irrelevant and to focus more or less entirely on those elements that give aesthetic pleasure. It may help if you are a connoisseur whose interest is almost entirely formal. Hence the old joke about the German Jewish art historian on his deathbed visited by a priest who holds a crucifix before his fading eyes and urges him to look up. The dying man whispers, “Netherlandish, late seventeenth century, around 1670.” Alternatively, it may help if the performance is in a language you do not understand or if you know virtually nothing about the history of its reception. But such responses risk underestimating the vitality that characterizes the greatest cultural achievements. Living works of art are never fixed and closed. They are subject to revising and reimagining in the light of shifting values, historical scholarship, and newly awakened sensitivities. With a work still performed in public—as the Misteri d’Elx decidedly is—it is possible to encourage frank discussion and to hope for transformation. There have been such transformations in the past. In the late eighteenth century a bishop, finding the whole business of the Judiada inappropriate, ordered it cut from the performance. The bishop was not concerned with religious tolerance. He simply thought the spectacle of the eruption of the Jews into the basilica and the melee with the apostles was unseemly and dangerous. (Evidently the actors playing both the Jews and the apostles bore swords, and on occasion there had been bloodshed.) For more than a century Elche observed its communal celebration of the Assumption without Jews, and it turned out that the town managed perfectly successfully to express its identity, reinforce its 10 Milo Yiannopoulos, Middle Rages: Why the Battle for Medieval Studies Matters to America (Dangerous Books, 2019). solidarity, and celebrate its faith. The Jews only returned to the Misteri d’Elx in the 1920s.11 Even as the play is currently performed, its director has innumerable choices to make in dress, gesture, facial features, and vocal expression that shape the experience and subtly alter it from year to year. The coming iteration of the Misteri d’Elx, which would ordinarily take place in mid-August, has been postponed because of Covid-19 and provisionally planned instead for autumn. So here is a modest proposal for whenever the next performance occurs: change the costumes. If there are to be tallises and yarmulkes, have all the men wear them. A director who decided through costuming to acknowledge the simple historical fact that the apostles (along, of course, with Mary) were themselves Jews would, without altering a word, change the meaning of the whole. The strict boundary between Christians and Jews, insiders and outsiders, natives and others, would be blurred. The spectacle would no longer conjure up the distinction, responsible for centuries of suspicion and persecution in Spain, between Old and New Christians. It might even lead some of the people of Elche to reflect on their own mixed ethnic origins. The sublime music and the startling scenic effects would remain the same, but they would arise from less poisoned ground. It is through such reinvention— awakening implications that are only latent—that artistic masterpieces stay truly alive. Transformations of this kind rarely resolve in any completely satisfying way the issues raised by ethically problematical works that are deeply rooted in tradition. (The costume changes I have just proposed would hardly eliminate the struggle over Mary’s body or the miraculous conversion of the attackers.) The experience of such works, for some of us at least, will always remain uncomfortable, even on the page and still more so in live performance. This queasiness is the price of a voyage to another time and place, the voyage that is the core experience of the humanities. The Misteri d’Elx is probably as close as it is possible to come to a living encounter with medieval drama. Buried in its origins is an ancient faith, along with an ancient hatred, to which the poets and composers gave a powerful expression that has miraculously endured into the present. To witness it now is to shuttle back and forth for several days between proximity and distance, engagement and detachment, attraction and revulsion. Its music, its stage magic, and its collective ardor provoke wonder, but if my days in Elche are any indication, the wonder is not unmixed with pain, pain that is a measure of the distance between the world conjured up in the celebrated work of art and the world in which we live, or at least hope to live. Q 11 The revival of the Judiada seems to have been largely the work of the gifted composer Óscar Esplá, whose long, complicated, and politically ambiguous career took him from Spain to antiFranco exile in Brussels, to writing for the Nazi-sympathizing newspaper Le Soir during World War II, and finally back to Spain. See Eva Moreda Rodriguez, Music and Exile in Francoist Spain (Routledge, 2015). The New York Review Tyrannical Days Deborah Eisenberg Some good news is that Penguin is bringing greater attention to Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters with its celebration of the novel’s thirtieth anniversary, and it turns out that the book is every bit as spectacular as it was on its initial appearance. Although by the standards of both the serial-publication and the word-processor-enabled decades it’s a brief book, it is a mighty one; open it up, and a universe erupts from its modest 250 pages. The story begins innocently enough: from an unspecified distance in the future, Rio, the book’s main narrator, looks back at an afternoon outing in 1956 with her cousin Pucha to see All That Heaven Allows, playing in Cinemascope and Technicolor at Manila’s Avenue Theater. Rio is ten and Pucha is fourteen, and they are chaperoned by Lorenza, Rio’s yaya, the family servant who looks after her. After the movie, the three go to the Cafe España, where the girls, enraptured by midcentury Hollywood’s benign glossy dream clichés of love, America, and beauty, discuss the movie’s finer points over TruColas. To Rio’s distress, a group of boys at a table nearby start to flirt coarsely with the overdeveloped and somewhat under-brained Pucha. Worse, Pucha, obviously thrilled by the attention, cannot be budged from the café either by Lorenza or by Rio. The leader of the onslaught presses his advantage and Pucha “smiles back, blushing prettily”: “Pucha,” I say with some desperation. . . . “What are you going to do—give him your phone number? You mustn’t give him your phone number. Your parents will kill you! Your parents will kill me. . . . He’s only a boy. A homely, fat boy . . . He looks like he smells bad.” Pucha gives me a withering look. “Prima, shut up. Don’t be so tanga! Remember, Rio—I’m older than you. . . . I don’t care if he’s a little gordito, or pangit, or smells like a dead goat. That’s Boomboom Alacran, stupid. He’s cute enough for me.” And with this blithely efficient introduction to the potency of the Alacran family name, we begin our descent into the maelstrom that doesn’t release us until the book ends. As we soon discover, the loutish Boomboom is the crude face of the Alacran family—the flip side of his sleek, charismatic uncle, Severo Alacran, from whom the cachet of the Alacran name derives. And why is Severo so powerful? BECAUSE , they would say. Simply because. Because he tells the President what to do. Because he dances well. Because he tells the First Lady off. Because he dances well and collects art. Because he calls the GenJune 11, 2020 eral Nicky. . . . Because he employs a private army of mercenaries. Because he collects primitive art, renaissance art, and modern art. Because he owns silver madonnas, rotting statues of unknown saints, and jeweled altars lifted intact from the bowels of bombed-out churches. Because his house is not a home but a museum. Because he smokes cigars. Because he flies his International Coconut Investments. Rio describes her father as a “privileged member and stockholder” of Alacran’s huge Monte Vista country club, “where the magnificent greens are rumored to be infested with cobras, and the highbeamed ceilings of the open-air dining pavilions are a nesting place for bats”: Part of my father’s job includes playing golf from dawn until dusk every Saturday, and Sundays after Mass, gambling for high stakes with his boss Severo Alacran, the nearsighted Judge Peter Ramos, Congressman Diosdado “Cyanide” Abad, Dr. Ernesto Katigbak, and occasionally even General Nicasio Ledesma. Anthony Barboza/Getty Images Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn. Penguin, 251 pp., $17.00 (paper) Jessica Hagedorn, 1980s own yellow helicopter. Because he plays golf with a five handicap. Because he plays polo and breeds horses. Because he breeds horses for fun and profit. Because he is a greedy man, a generous man. Because his wealth is self-made, not inherited. Because he owns everything we need, including a munitions factory. Because he dances well: the boogie, the fox-trot, the waltz, the cha-cha, the mambo, the hustle, the bump. Because he dances a competent tango. Because he owns The Metro Manila Daily, Celebrity Pinoy Weekly, Radiomanila, TruCola Soft Drinks, plus controlling interests in Mabuhay Movie Studios, Apollo Records, and the Monte Vista Golf and Country Club. Because he conceived and constructed SPORTEX, a futuristic department store in the suburb of Makati. Because he was once nominated for president and declined to run. Because he plays poker and wins. Because he is short, and smells like expensive citrus. Because he has elegant silver hair, big ears, slanted Japanese eyes, and the aquiline nose of a Spanish mestizo. Because his skin is dark and leathery from too much sun. Because he is married to a stunning, selfish beauty with a caustic tongue. Rio’s father, Freddie Gonzaga, is vice-president in charge of acquisitions at Alacran’s conglomerate, Intercoco— Rio’s greatest pleasure is to listen to a radio soap opera, Love Letters—readers are treated to delicious excerpts—along with her sweetly addled grandmother and the servants who congregate in the grandmother’s room for that purpose. She’s well aware of the class stratifications on display all around her, but like most fairly privileged children, she takes for granted her family’s degree of prestige and their position with respect to the levers of power. For the most part, those we meet early in the book—habitués of the Monte Vista such as the Alacrans, the socialite physician couple the Katigbaks, and General Ledesma—are, along with Rio’s family and the family servants, the figures in her world. They are also the people who constitute, along with the unnamed president and his outlandish wife, the nearly invincible, mutually fortifying triad—the government, the wealthy, and the military—that is the gravitational center of power of the entire nation portrayed in the book. But the narration soon billows out beyond Rio’s consciousness. A resourceful, tormented street boy and a hovering omniscient viewer each take their turns with the story, and a richly informative current of gossip is overheard now and again. And soon we meet people who travel in various orbits around that center of power, people whom the child Rio would not have encountered: the General’s ambitious and murderous lieutenant; a number of actors, including a complicated, heroinaddicted movie star; a distinguished liberal/reformer senator, the public face of the political opposition; a rather mysterious Englishman with a penchant for Filipinas; the owner and patrons of a gay bar/disco; the “Barbara Walters of the Philippines”; an arty German filmmaker; a self-deceiving, desperate, and extremely unlucky young man from a small village—and plenty more from across the range of classes and the many, often reciprocally disdainful ethnicities. As the book whirls along, the lives of these people intersect and sometimes collide. The web between them appears slowly and with an ominous clarity as we come to understand that we’re being acquainted not only with individual trajectories and the ways they fit together, but simultaneously with a map of social relations that expresses the inner logic of the president’s regime and the vast, stinging reach of authoritarianism. Hagedorn’s stylistic flexibility—which moves gracefully between fast-paced storytelling, dreamy contemplation, satire, elegy, and visionary delirium— and her occasional inclusion of short texts that function more or less as chapter headings contribute to the book’s sweeping dimensionality. Some of these quotations are entirely fictional, such as clippings from the Metro Manila Daily, an invention of Hagedorn’s, but others are real. There are several from Jean Mallat’s 1846 volume The Philippines: History, Geography, Customs, Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce of the Spanish Colonies in Oceania, and there is one, a real jaw-dropper, from President William McKinley. McKinley, perhaps best remembered for having been assassinated, was arguably the initiator of the United States’s imperial project; in 1898 he sent the US Navy on a roundabout course aimed at delivering Cuba from Spanish rule (into the hands of his own country), and on the way the convoy almost inadvertently took control of the Philippines. Initially, McKinley had planned only to set up a base in Manila, but apparently decided that while he was at it, he might as well claim sovereignty over the entire archipelago— all seven thousand islands and seven million inhabitants. Over the course of this blood-drenched but strangely casual exploit, many atrocities were committed, which the American press—formulating disclaimers that have rung ever more loudly in our ears throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first—declared to be the work of a few bad apples, an aberrant departure from American values. The capture of the Philippines, ratified by the dubious Treaty of Paris in December 1898, marked the first US acquisition of foreign territory. And read from our vantage, the section Hagedorn quotes from McKinley’s address in 1898 to a delegation of Methodist churchmen provides a classic lesson in the sorrowful, ludicrous ironies of hindsight: I thought first we would take only Manila; then Luzon; then other islands, perhaps, also. I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night . . . And one night it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came; one, that we could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; two, that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be 23 bad business and discreditable; three, that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and four, that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly. Of course, the well-known intractability of the future rarely troubles the sleep of those who have the firm upper hand. And to be fair to the memory of McKinley, the Philippines achieved independence in 1946; the United States did not actually install Ferdinand Marcos. The United States did, however, involve itself deeply with Marcos, who was, regrettably, president of the Philippines from 1965 until 1986. In fact, Marcos was highly distasteful to the American presidents who supported him—except for a starry-eyed Ronald Reagan, who adored him—and increasingly galling to the US businessmen with interests in the Philippines whose own (possibly themselves questionable) profits he siphoned off. But the strategic value of the Clark and Subic Bay military bases was such that the US compensated Marcos lavishly for his compliance, and he was guaranteed a long, rollicking joyride no matter how distasteful and galling he might have been. The money the US poured into his hands, supplemented by what he squeezed from his own nation, he used partly to nourish his military and partly for some flashy monuments and infrastructure initiatives. Mainly, though, Marcos used American aid, along with the yield of Philippine resources, to stuff his own pockets. But in time, the very rapacity, looting, and brutality that stripped his country and rendered his people increasingly vulnerable to his repressions engendered a correspondingly determined insurgency. Inevitably, the cycle intensified, and in 1972 a series of bombings in Manila furnished Marcos with the opportunity to declare martial law. T he noxiously distinctive excesses of Marcos and his wife, Imelda, have secured them an enduring place in the public imagination’s gallery of ghoulish dictators, and Hagedorn pointedly models her president and wife on them. (It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that Hagedorn’s first lady is nicknamed the Iron Butterfly, as Imelda was.) Like their fictional counterparts, the flamboyant First Couple of real life were free-spenders and party animals on a grand scale, and, predictably, various international socialites and celebrities piled onto the heap of people social-climbing all over one another. Van Cliburn, George Hamilton, and Cristina Ford, for example, were intimates of the Marcos’s, and they make cameo appearances in Dogeaters. One pet project of Imelda’s was an astoundingly costly cultural center established in 1966, and its fictional mirror image in Dogeaters is harrowing: 24 The workers are busy day and night, trying to finish the complex for the film festival’s opening night, which is scheduled in a few weeks. Toward the end, one of the structures collapses and lots of workers are buried in the rubble. Big news. Cora Camacho even goes out there with a camera crew. “Manila’s Worst Disaster!” A special mass is held right there in Rizal Park, with everyone weeping and wailing over the rubble. The Archbishop gives his blessing, the First Lady blows her nose. She orders the survivors to continue building; more cement is poured over dead bodies; they finish exactly three hours before the first foreign film is scheduled to be shown. Imelda Marcos was a great gift to American journalists, who never got a chance to interview Marie Antoinette. And Hagedorn devotes an entire dizzying chapter to a fictional American reporter’s efforts to gingerly extract from the fictional president’s wife a statement concerning the arrest and disappearance of an obviously innocent, ridiculously harmless, and utterly expendable young man who has been accused of the murder of a pivotal opposition figure: Madame uses her favorite American expression as many times and as randomly as possible throughout her interview. “Okay! Okay! Okay lang, so they don’t like my face. They’re all jealous, okay? My beauty has been used against me . . . I’ve been made to suffer—I can’t help it, okay! I was born this way. I never asked God—” she sighs again. “Can you beat that, puwede ba? I am cursed by my own beauty.” She pauses. “Do you like my face?” The reporter tries not to look astonished. . . . She appraises and dismisses him swiftly, noting his hairy arms, cheap tie, limp white shirt, and dreary wing tips. . . . The reporter keeps his voice steady. “What about the young man arrested by Ledesma’s men earlier this week?. . . Are any formal charges being made?” Madame shakes her head slowly. She affects a look of sadness, which she does well. “You should interview General Ledesma and Lieutenant Carreon about that. These are terrible times for my country, Steve. Do you mind if I call you Steve? Good.” She pauses. “Ay! So much tragedy in such a short time! It’s unfortunate, all this violence. Thanks be to God for our Special Squadron, a brutal assassin has been apprehended . . .” Marcos murdered and tortured swaths of dissidents, from far-leftist guerrillas to peaceful protesters, including moderates, Muslims, members of church groups, and students. And this he did with near impunity. It was only after his assassination of Senator Benigno Aquino in 1983 that Marcos’s excesses were judged too great an embarrassment and liability to his American protectors. By the time the United States cut off his support, billions in US dollars had simply vanished. Before it became an occasion for Shock and Horror, the first lady’s astounding extravagance was, of course, no more of a secret than were her husband’s exhibitions of greed and cruelty. But when a despot has exhausted his utility to the United States and must be whisked away or allowed to be toppled, it has been the prudent practice to provide a justification, some “newly discovered” outrage that makes his overthrow palatable to the American public. And in the case of Marcos, there was an outrage ready to hand, as vivid, graspable, and unforgettable as an advertising jingle: his wife’s three thousand plus pairs of shoes! In 1990, when Dogeaters was first pub- lished, however riveting as a work of fiction, the book would have seemed to address a fairly restricted political phenomenon; the whole category of “tyrant” seemed to be receding into the past. In 2020 we watch aghast at its resurgence. Apparently it’s not so hard to destroy a democracy or to prevent one from developing. These days we’re seeing foolproof techniques deployed all over the place, including, again, in the Philippines: the dismantling of protections, the levying of viciously punitive measures, the curtailing or corrupting of the press, the sowing of confusion and discord, the folding of the justice system protectively around the upward consolidation of wealth, the criminalization and disenfranchisement of the already marginalized, the politicized use of the police, and so on. And if the enterprise should run into difficulty, an aspiring tyrant can always declare an emergency that calls for the suspension of laws and the imposition of extreme measures. An occasion can always be found—a virus, for example, might turn out to be as useful as some bombings or a fire in a government building. In fact, it’s looking more and more—to more and more of us—as if we in the US have installed over ourselves our own mad tyrant. But a tyrant must stay alertly poised between those whom he rewards and those whom he bleeds, and at a certain point, Marcos lost his balance and went down at the hands of both. Hagedorn portrays with great verve the few who thrive under the rule of her president, and she portrays with delicacy and conviction the transfiguration of several characters who for one reason or another exchange the life they’ve known for a more difficult, more dangerous, and no doubt more gratifying life devoted to loosening his lethal grip. What is harder to understand when a repressive regime has taken over is the behavior of those who carry on with their lives more or less as before—an entrenched middle that’s decreasing in size, to be sure, in our part of the world and in many others, but one that is still large enough to provide a significant buffer around those who call the shots. Many of us in my generation grew up bewildered by the apparent passivity of an astonishing number of ordinary Europeans during the years of Adolf Hitler’s triumphs: Were people terrified into submission, willfully blind, profoundly obtuse, befuddled by propaganda, enthusiastic about the policies of the Third Reich, clinging to fragile comforts, or what? In what ways and by what means were so many people paralyzed or bought off into inaction? What did these people say to themselves— how did they describe to themselves what looks from a distance like nothing other than pure complicity? And, most mystifyingly and significantly, how is it possible not to know something that’s right in front of your eyes? What preconceived model is interposed between reality and what one perceives? That is to say, what does “not knowing” something mean? In bad times, such questions are as urgent as answers, and Hagedorn is adept at portraying this middle zone of passive, everyday involvement, too. Here’s a little bit from a family gathering in which Rio’s family chats about a rumor that the whiskey that General Ledesma supplies to his troops is counterfeit: “Papi,” Mikey says to his father, “they say the soldiers don’t know the difference, and they’re grateful!… The putok is so terrible, their guts rot and burn, and they wake up with killer hangovers. They say that’s why Ledesma’s men stay mean-spirited and ready to kill—” My cousin Mikey says all this with admiration. My brother looks impressed. Pucha leans over to whisper in my ear. “This is so boring. I think I’m going to vomit.” “The General is from a good family,” Tito Agustin says to my mother. “Do you remember the Ledesmas from Tarlac?”. . . “What about those camps?” my brother Raul suddenly asks. “What camps?” My father is annoyed. Tita Florence and my mother seem perplexed, while Pucha looks bored. Uncle Agustin keeps drinking. “The camps,” Raul repeats… . “You know—for subversives. Senator Avila’s always denouncing them—he calls them torture camps.” “Senator Avila,” Uncle Agustin groans. “Por favor, Freddie—how about another drink?” “Senator Avila has no proof. It’s those foreign newspapers again—” “American sensationalism,” Uncle Agustin agrees. “Does anyone want more coffee?” my mother wants to know. “How about you, Agustin?” Tita Florence gives my uncle a meaningful look. Uncle Agustin ignores her. “Boomboom Alacran went to the main camp, just to see for himself. . . .” “Boomboom’s full of shit,” Uncle Agustin says, smiling. He lights a fresh cigar. “AGUSTIN! ” Tita Florence’s hand flies to her watermelon breasts in a gesture of dismay. “Your language—the children!” A friend once characterized Ivan Turgenev’s marvelous First Love as something beautiful made out of ugly things, and it has subsequently struck me that most really good works of fiction might be described in that same way. Hagedorn unwaveringly paints a menacing world, one that should sound an urgent alarm to us now—but the book is so beautiful! It’s painted in the shimmering, fierce, lush colors of memory and longing; it has the radiant evanescence of a dream—and it leaves behind the lingering authority of a dream’s veiled warning. Q The New York Review The Pillage of India Christopher de Bellaigue © Victoria and Albert Museum, London The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury, 522 pp., $35.00 Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor. Melbourne: Scribe, 294 pp., $17.95 (paper) In the eighteenth century a career with the East India Company was a throw of the dice for unattached young British men. Arriving in India wan and scurvy after a year at sea, many quickly succumbed to disease, madness, or one of the innumerable little wars that the company fought in order to embed itself on the subcontinent. The salary was hardly an incentive. In the 1720s junior clerks, or “writers,” received just £5 per year, not enough to live on in Bengal or Madras and a pittance when set against the handsome 8 percent annual dividend the company’s shareholders awarded themselves back in London. Such drawbacks tended to put off all but those whom circumstances had already disfavored: second sons, members of the down-at-heel AngloIrish gentry, dispossessed Scottish landowners who had backed the losing side in a rebellion against the crown. Being on the company payroll was rather a means to an end; moonlighting was where the money lay in one of the richest places on earth. In 1700 India is estimated to have accounted for 27 percent of the world economy and a quarter of the global textile trade. A considerable number of company employees who survived the shock of arrival went on to make fortunes from off-books trading in textiles, saltpeter, indigo, opium, salt, tobacco, betel, rice, and sugar; sidelines also included selling Mughal-issued tax exemptions and lending money to distressed Indian grandees. The wills of company officials in the early 1780s show that one in three left their wealth to Indian wives, or as one put it, “the excellent and respectable Mother of my two children for whom I feel unbounded love and affection and esteem.” Others went home. Newly enriched returnees elbowed their way into high society and were rewarded with a moniker, “nabob,” which derived from an Indian word for prince, nawab, and signified an Indian-made plutocrat of boundless amorality. Neither the directors in Leadenhall Street, the company’s headquarters in the City of London, nor the Mughal authorities who had granted the company its trading privileges in return for “presents” and taxes, approved of the nabobs’ freelancing. But the directors didn’t particularly mind, provided that the thirty- odd ships that sailed east every year from England’s south coast returned laden with luxury imports, along with a share of the taxes collected from the Indian enclaves that the company controlled. All the while the authority of the emperor, the unwarlike Shah Alam, was crumbling under the pressure of repeated Maratha, Afghan, and Iranian incursions into the MuJune 11, 2020 An East India Company official, probably the Scottish surgeon William Fullerton of Rosemount, with attendants; painting by Dip Chand, circa 1760–1764 ghal heartland of the Gangetic Plain. These and the foragings of another group of armed Europeans, the French Compagnie des Indes, turned what the Mughal chronicler Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi called “the once peaceful abode of India” into “the abode of Anarchy.” Through adroit use of its welltrained, disciplined armies, over the course of the eighteenth century the company expanded its influence inland from the three littoral “Presidencies” of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. By the 1750s, William Dalrymple tells us in The Anarchy, his new account of the rise of the company, it accounted for almost an eighth of Britain’s total imports of £8 million and contributed nearly a third of a million pounds to the home exchequer in annual customs duties. A well-known historian both in his native Britain and his adoptive India, where he cofounded what may be the world’s biggest literary festival, at Jaipur, Dalrymple has influenced the scholarly as well as the popular understanding of South Asian history through his use of both European and Indian sources, thus uniting the halves of a previously bisected whole. (To pick just two examples from the extensive company literature, both John Keay’s 1993 book, The Honourable Company, which also deals with its extensive involvement in Southeast Asia, and Nick Robins’s commercial history, The Corporation That Changed the World, from 2012, are entirely reliant on British sources.) Dalrymple’s ability to present events from an Indian as well as a European perspective owes much to his mining of the National Archives in Delhi and his collaboration with the late Bruce Wannell, a waspish global flaneur and gifted linguist who lived in a tent on Dalrymple’s lawn in South Delhi while translating Mughal- era texts for him. The company was transformed into an instrument of imperialism under Robert Clive, a terse, pugnacious delinquent from Shropshire. After arriving in Madras as a writer in 1744, Clive distinguished himself on the battlefield, making up in daring what he lacked in experience. In 1752 he and a fellow officer led a company force that took prisoner almost three thousand troops from the Compagnie des Indes, for which he was rewarded with a lucrative sinecure. In 1756, after a spell back home, Clive’s taste for conquest and treasure took him to Bengal, whose production of silks and muslins made it the biggest supplier of Asian goods to Europe. In 1757 Clive led the company’s forces to victory against both the French and the uncooperative local nawab; from defeating the latter the company received what Dalrymple calls “one of the largest corporate windfalls in history”—in modern terms around £232 million. Clive himself pocketed an astronomical £22 million, with which he went on to acquire a string of desirable British properties, including an estate outside Limerick to go with his Irish peerage, while Lady Clive, as the Salisbury Journal informed its readers, gar- landed her pet ferret with a diamond necklace worth more than £2,500. Besides his military exploits Clive was admired by the directors for his administrative vigor, and he ended his Indian career as governor of Bengal. In 1765—two years before he returned to Britain for good—he secured his most substantive legacy when he forced Shah Alam to recognize the company’s financial authority over three of his richest provinces, Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. A Mughal chronicler lamented that the British “have appointed their own district officers, they make assessments and collections of revenue, administer justice, appoint and dismiss collectors . . . heaven knows what will be the eventual upshot of this state of things.” The baneful consequences of a commercial concern enjoying political power but answering only to its shareholders became apparent during the Bengal famine of 1770–1771. Company officers exacted dues from a dying populace as diligently as they had from a healthy one. Tax evaders were publicly hanged. The following year Calcutta informed Leadenhall Street that “notwithstanding the great severity of the late famine . . . some increase [in revenue] has been made.” While at least one million Bengalis were dying of the famine and its effects, some company employees enriched themselves by hoarding rice. According to one anonymous whistleblower whose account was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine back in London: Our Gentlemen in many places purchased the rice at 120 and 140 seers a rupee [a seer was about two pounds], which they afterwards sold for 15 seers a rupee, to the Black [Indian] merchants, so that the persons principally concerned have made great fortunes by it; and one of our writers . . . not esteemed to be worth 1,000 rupees last year, has sent down it is said £60,000 to be remitted home this year. In Calcutta, the same source went on, “one could not pass the streets without seeing multitudes in their last agonies,” while “numbers of dead were seen with dogs, jackalls, hogs, vultures and other birds and beasts of prey feeding on their carcases.” Back home, denunciations of the company’s conduct equaled in vehemence anything that would be uttered by nationalist Indians in the later stages of British rule. One satire attacked the directors of the company, among them “Sir Janus Blubber,” “Caliban Clodpate,” “Sir Judas Venom,” and “Lord Vulture,” as a “scandalous confederacy to plunder and strip.” But when Clive was investigated by Parliament on charges of amassing a fortune illegally, his achievements in defeating the French and increasing company revenues counted for more than the regime of plunder he had overseen—and Parliament included company shareholders and men who owed their seats to his largesse. Clive was exonerated in May 1773. The following year he committed suicide. He had, Samuel Johnson 25 The company was now a permanent subject of controversy in Britain, which was, in strenuous, unemphatic fits, moving from absolutism to accountability. But only rarely in the course of the Indian debates, trials, polemics, and reports that punctuated British politics in the last third of the eighteenth century did the company’s critics suggest that its abuses might be so grave as to warrant a full withdrawal from India. In 1783 George Dempster, a penitent former company director and MP, told Parliament, “I for my part lament that the navigation to India had ever been discovered. . . . It would be wiser to make someone of the native princes king of the country, and leave India to itself.” But many more MPs believed that the answer to the recent abuses was to bring the company and its Indian possessions under state control. The company’s growing financial woes made it vulnerable to annexation. In 1772 its balance sheet finally showed the effects of the Bengal famine, and it defaulted on loan repayments to the Bank of England. The £1.4 million bailout that Parliament approved in June 1773 was made conditional on closer state supervision of company appointments and operations, beginning a trend toward nationalization that accelerated as Britain took control of the rest of India in the early nineteenth century. In Dalrymple’s hands the later life of Shah Alam, the Mughal emperor whom Clive humbled in 1765, is a plangent tale of thwarted revival. Exhausted by the brutality of the Marathas’ expansion from their heartlands in the west and by the annual sackings of Afghan raiders, many North Indians felt nostalgic for the comparative stability, plenty, and communal harmony that the region had enjoyed until Mughal authority began to wane in the 1680s. Setting out in 1770 to reoccupy his ancestors’ domains, Shah Alam and the commander of his army, an Iranian of royal blood named Mirza Najaf Khan, won to their side an eclectic set of recruits including opportunistic Maratha chieftains, European soldiers of fortune—among them a gloomy Alsatian, Walter Reinhardt, who kept a “numerous seraglio, far above his needs”—and the dreadlocked and naked Nagas, devotees of Shiva whose reputation for sanctity was known to inspire even their foes to prostrate themselves at their feet. The Delhi that the emperor occupied in 1771 after more than a decade in exile had been reduced by war to what the Urdu poet Mir described as “ruined walls and doorways . . . the palaces were in ruin, the streets were lost in rubble.” While Najaf Khan used modern tactics he had learned from French mercenaries to reimpose his master’s rule over large parts of northern India, the emperor played dice with his concubines, wrote lyric poems, and visited the saints’ tombs that delineate the sacred geography of Sufi Islam. Shah Alam’s Sunni faith was accommodating and eclectic. When Najaf Khan, a Shia Muslim, was stricken with consumption, the emperor attempted to placate the Hindu gods by distributing sweets to Brahmans and releasing cows 26 Tharoor’s arguments in Inglorious that had been earmarked for slaughter. pendence that mass famine has threatEmpire reflect a consensus, shared by After Najaf Khan’s death in April ened, in Bihar in 1967, the government many current Indian and Western his1782, rebellions surged in the provinces of Indira Gandhi stopped it in its tracks torians, on the iniquity of colonial rule. along with factionalism in Delhi. News using food aid and public works.) He is critical of the late Cambridge that the emperor’s Maratha guards To modern eyes the most odious ashistorian Christopher Bayly’s conwere neglecting the capital’s defenses pect of British rule was its racism. A tention that the schools, newspapers, reached the ears of Ghulam Qadir, an color bar denied talented Indian civil and courts of British India allowed Afghan chieftain’s son who wanted to servants access to senior jobs, and for the Congress Party to build a liberal avenge his father’s defeat at Mughal British judges the color of the defendemocracy after independence, and hands and the sexual humiliation that dant was sometimes the most importhe vigorously rebuffs the argument of according to some chroniclers he himant factor in a verdict. “The death of an Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian self suffered while a young captive at Indian at British hands was always an with professorships at Stanford and Shah Alam’s court. In July 1778 Ghuaccident,” Tharoor writes, “and that of Harvard, that the British Empire belam Qadir and his army entered Delhi. a Briton because of an Indian’s actions queathed its colonies such laudable Drawn mostly from sources in Peralways a capital crime.” The relative precepts as free trade and democracy. sian, Dalrymple’s account of Ghulam cultural intermingling of the 1780s gave Tharoor draws instead on research into Qadir’s despicable vengeance bears way to a British horror of miscegenation. comparison with the almost Whether in the bedroom, the contemporaneous writings of club, or the railway carriage, the the Marquis de Sade. An Afseparation of the races was ghan knife, Illahabadi recounts, the outstanding feature of Britwas used to scoop the emperish rule that distinguished it from or’s eyes from their sockets; the that of earlier colonizers, notably dowager empress was stripped the Mughals, who married Innaked and the younger prindian women and were quickly cesses searched “in every orisubmerged in the local gene pool. fice” before being raped. When In 1890 just six thousand a retainer whose mouth was to British officials presided over be stuffed with excrement pro250 million Indian subjects; tested that he had saved GhuStalin later found it laughable lam Qadir’s life as a baby, the that India was kept down by so latter retorted, “Do you not few. While many British offiknow the old proverb, ‘to kill a cials strove honestly to promote serpent and spare its young is harmony among India’s many not wise.’” racial, religious, and linguistic In due course Ghulam Qadir groups, a policy of divide and met his predictably violent end, rule informed the British debut the Mughal revival was cision in 1905 to split Bengal over almost before it started, into two provinces, a Muslimwith the sightless Shah Alam majority one and a Hindureduced to the status of a chessmajority one. That policy also board king in Maratha hands. influenced the constitutional reIn 1803 the British displaced forms of 1919, which introduced the Marathas, and the emperor a limited franchise while reservended his days a British patsy in ing seats in the new legislative an increasingly pacified North assembly along religious lines. India. “In comparison with the As independence approached, Robert Clive; portrait by Thomas Gainsborough, circa 1764 horrors of the last century,” the implications of minority Dalrymple writes, “the next status in a free India alarmed Britain’s exploitation of India’s wealth fifty years would be remembered as the many Muslims; they looked in vain to and on the work of Nicholas Dirks, a ‘Golden Calm.’” It ended with a rebelthe British to protect them from Hindu former chancellor of the University of lion in 1857, when mutinous soldiers in majoritarianism before adopting the California at Berkeley, who has written company uniforms rallied to the relucidea of a separate state, which had first that class- obsessed British bureaucrats tant Bahadur Shah Zafar, the grandson been mooted by a Muslim law student helped change the caste system from of Shah Alam, before being crushed by at Cambridge University in 1933. Maone measure of identity among many forces that stayed loyal to their British hatma Gandhi’s unavailing efforts to into the pervasive agent of social stratipaymasters. In the uprising’s aftermath bind communal wounds ended with fication it became. the British put an end to both the Muthe country’s bloody partition in 1947, Colonial India was a captive marghal dynasty and the East India Comwhich created Pakistan, resulted in ket for British products and services. pany, whose assets were transferred to the deaths of at least one million peoBritish-made rails carried British-made the crown. ple, and led to Gandhi’s murder at the rolling stock the length and breadth hands of a Hindu chauvinist. of the subcontinent; British ships offInglorious Empire is an impassioned nglorious Empire is a bracing, polemloaded Indian cargoes at British ports indictment of an alien government ical work that spans both the company after rules were introduced that diswhose true interests lay in an impeand imperial phases of Britain’s incriminated against ships that had been rial capital five thousand miles away. volvement in India. Its author, Shashi built in India. In the 1750s India had a And yet for all the rapacity of the naTharoor, was for years a senior official commanding global position as a probobs and the unrealized reforms and at the United Nations. In 2006 he came ducer of textiles, yet by 1870 it was investment—which, when applied by second to Ban Ki-moon in the contest importing more than a billion yards Meiji Japan in the 1870s, turned a for the secretary-generalship, after of British cloth and woven fabrics. As closed monarchy into a modern nationwhich he returned home to become a Britain’s home secretary put it in 1928, state—Tharoor’s assessment of British Congress MP, junior minister, and un“It is said in missionary meetings that conduct is too uniformly negative to do flagging presence on social media. The we conquered India to raise the level justice to a multifaceted engagement book is the byproduct of a debate he of the Indians. That is cant. We conthat lasted well over three centuries. took part in at the Oxford Union in quered India as an outlet for the goods While the premise and ethos of British 2015, in which he argued that Britain of Britain.” rule seem ever more suspect with the owed India symbolic reparations for Recalling the economist Amartya passing years, its consequences for the the wrongs it had inflicted on its coloSen’s dictum that “no famine has ever people of India were more mixed. nial subjects. Atonement, not money, is taken place in the history of the world In the 1750s the roughly 200,000 Inthe point; “a simple ‘sorry’ would do as in a functioning democracy,” Tharoor dians who flocked to live in British Calwell.” The Oxford debate got a lot of atnotes that between 1770 and 1900 some cutta (just a thousand or so of whose tention online (Tharoor has more than 25 million Indians died in famines, the residents were European) were drawn seven million Twitter followers), and mortality rates aggravated by colonial not only by the city’s wealth but also the he was congratulated even by his most officials who viewed with Malthusian prospect of security from the Marathas. prominent political opponent, India’s detachment nature’s solution to the (A recent Maratha invasion of Bengal prime minister Narendra Modi, for sayproblem of overpopulation. (In support had caused as many as 400,000 civilian ing “the right things at the right place.” of Sen, on the only occasion since indedeaths.) An affluent and literate class National Army Museum, London wrote, “acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat.” I The New York Review of Bengalis, the bhadralok, prospered alongside the company’s employees, while in the boom of the 1780s laborers’ wages rose 50 percent. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Bombay’s impressive public works and thriving Parsi and Jewish minorities attested to intense pockets of dynamic wealth creation and multiculturalism. Nor was the empire’s record of indigenization always as bad as Tharoor maintains. Having been a supplier of raw jute to the mills of Dundee, by 1914 Calcutta had eclipsed the Scottish port city as the world’s leading manufacturer of jute products, and Indians owned 60 percent of shares in the jute companies. Tharoor is frustrated by the “cravenness, cupidity, opportunism and lack of organized resistance” that his compatriots exhibited toward their colonial masters. Only after World War I, and intensifying after a British massacre of hundreds of protesters in the northern city of Amritsar in 1919, would polite requests for more Indian representation in the government harden into the independence movement. But no Indian empire in history had ruled as large a territory as the British Raj. That the fantastically diverse peoples whom the British had coerced into their Indian domain might voluntarily unite as a modern nation wasn’t as obvious to the Congress Party in 1885, the year of its foundation, as it seems now, seventy years into India’s independence. And when the republic’s founding fathers, Gandhi and his protégé Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, brought about this miraculous feat, the loss of Pakistan amid the violence of Partition proved to be surmountable traumas; the Republic of India is a sovereign state in good standing and has never been threatened with revolution or internal collapse. Ironically enough, the unwillingness of the British to set down roots in the countries they colo- nized made withdrawal more straightforward than it was for the French, for example, in Algeria. As soon as the economic and psychological reasons for keeping up the empire were exhausted, the British simply went home. Well into the late twentieth century a residue of India clung to postimperial Britain. To “have a dekko” (from the Hindi verb dekhna, to see) meant to take a look at something, while kedgeree and mulligatawny persisted on the menus of coastal guest houses. That residue has since flaked away along with memories of the Raj. No longer do national museums mount the kind of glittering exhibitions that were common into the 1990s, celebrating the scope and splendor of British rule; more representative is the recent exhibition “Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company” at the Wallace Collection in London (curated by Dalrymple), which featured deftly done ornithological pictures by hitherto little-known Indian painters in the company period. Gone, too, are the days when pupils at the nation’s schools were taught the heroics of “Clive of India.” Ten years into a government of Conservatives who brought the country out of the European Union amid grandiose talk of a return to greatness, the history syllabus that British schoolchildren must follow remains virtually silent on the empire, save for the iniquities of slavery, and few young people have any idea who Clive was. Amnesia isn’t the apology that Tharoor and his compatriots arguably deserve and will probably never receive. It is a national elision, an unstated decision not to interrogate ourselves about awkward aspects of the past. For India, living with the consequences of the events Tharoor writes about, its Gandhian template of communal amity trampled on by Hindu nationalist rule, there is no such comfort. Q AND A C URR ENT L I ST IN G The Drawing Room 55 Main Street East Hampton, NY 11937 (631) 324-5016 www.drawingroom-gallery.com Mary Ellen Bartley: Return to Summer Reading 0D\²-XQHɕ catalog available online Reading Color #17, 2020 archival pigment print 18" x 13" (edition of 7) Alexandre Gallery 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor New York, NY 10019 (212) 755-2828 alexandregallery.com 3OHDVHYLVLWWKHJDOOHU\·V new virtual viewing room at www.alexandregallery.com to see: Visiting Artist's Studios: Pat Adams, Brett Bigbee, Lois Dodd, Tom Uttech, John Walker, Stephen Westfall. We look forward to reopening to the public, by appointment, when safe for all. John Walker Studio, April 2020 Marlborough Graphics 545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 (212) 463-8634 info@marlboroughgallery.com Monday–Saturday 10AM –6PM Red Grooms Flatiron Building, 1995 Etching, soft-ground and aquatint in 5 colors on Somerset textured paper 45" x 26 " Edition of 75 Other works available by Red Grooms SONATA IN F MINOR, K.183: ALLEGRO WKHVKXIÀLQJRIVRPHRQHVWUHHWVZHHSLQJLQWKHVWUHHW 7KHLQVLVWHQWPHQRXWVLGH6WLQJUD\¶VWKHFXWRIIOXOO RIDPEXODQFHWHVWLQJVLUHQWKHZRPHQZKRVWHSLQWKHVWUHHWDQG\HOO WRDQ\RQHWKH\ORYHGRQFHDQGLWVRXQGVOLNHSUHOXGHLI 6FDUODWWLKDGQ¶WPRYHGWR0DGULG ZRXOGKHKDYHPRYHGWKHQRWHVGLDWRQLFDOO\DVWKHUDLQIDOOVXS DURRIDVFHQGVWKHVFDIIROGLQJ,W¶VLPSRVVLEOHWRUHDG ZLWKRXWVHHLQJ0UV+HGJHVRQPLQHOHDQLQJIURPDZLQGRZRQWKHJURXQG OHYHORIP\EXLOGLQJSHHULQJRXWXQGHUKHUUHGEDQGDQDFRQVLGHULQJ PHDV,OHDQP\ERG\RYHUWKHUDLOLQJDQGZDWFKWKHPHQGUHVVHG EODFNDQGLQJUD\,WHOODPDQWRVWRSSHHLQJRQP\FDUDQGZKHQ KHWXUQVDURXQGKHLVQRWVXUSULVHG+HVD\V KHLVQ¶WSHHLQJKH LVFRXQWLQJKLVPRQH\ —francine j. harris LewAllen Galleries Railyard Arts District 1613 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 988-3250, contact@lewallengalleries.com; www.lewallengalleries.com Philip Pearlstein: Resilience of the Real Show Dates To Be Announced 3KLOLS3HDUOVWHLQ·VZRUNFKDOOHQJHGWKHDUWZRUOG of the 1960s by reintroducing realism as an accepted mode of modernist art. Defying his YLHZHUV·H[SHFWDWLRQVRIERWKWUDGLWLRQDOUHDOLVP DQGFRQWHPSRUDU\DUW3HDUOVWHLQ·VDUWZDVDW the vanguard of a new movement that began in the early 1960s, called “New Realism,” which rewrote the trajectory of contemporary art. Contact gallery for catalog. Left: Model with Indonesian Mask, 2015, oil on canvas, 36" x 40" Top: Nude in Santa Fe with Self Portrait, 1994, watercolor on paper, 29.5" x 41.5" AND I f you w ou ld like t o k now m ore a bout t hi s li sti ng, pl eas e cont act gallery@nybooks.com or (212) 293-1630. June 11, 2020 27 Horace’s How-To Gregory Hays Scala/Art Resource Horace’s Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living by Jennifer Ferriss-Hill. Princeton University Press, 301 pp., $45.00 Among the previously uncollected pieces in Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories is a six-pager called “How I Write My Songs.” The “I,” like many of Barthelme’s narrators, is initially anonymous; we learn his name—it turns out to be Bill B. White—only in the secondto-last sentence. The songs he writes, or that Barthelme has written for him, are country- and blues-inflected numbers, vacuous yet weirdly plausible: Goin’ to get to-geth-er Goin’ to get to-geth-er If the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise. White is evidently a master of his craft: “When ‘Last Night’ was first recorded, the engineer said ‘That’s a keeper’ on the first take and it was subsequently covered by sixteen artists including Walls.” Such reminiscences alternate with helpful hints, all of them comically banal: “Various artists have their own unique ways of doing a song.” “It is also possible to give a song a funny or humorous ‘twist.’” In the final paragraph the lecture modulates into a pep talk (“The main thing is to persevere and to believe in yourself”) before ending on an oddly defiant note: “I will continue to write my songs, for the nation as a whole and for the world.” The story reads like a parody of something we half-recognize but cannot quite put our finger on. Is it the emptiness of popular song lyrics? The vapid idiom of Parade magazine? Or is it, we might wonder uneasily, Barthelme’s own readers who are being gently mocked? For the story purports to answer that question asked innumerable times of every famous artist—“Where do you get your ideas?”—with its implicit corollary: How can I do it? Whatever else Barthelme’s story may be, it is a sly rewriting of one of the classics of American literary criticism, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition.” In that essay Poe, in his best professorial voice, explains how he went about writing his most successful poem, “The Raven.” He began, he tells us, by settling on the ideal length (a hundred lines or so), the effect to be aimed at (beauty), the tone (sadness), the central device (a refrain), the nature of the refrain (a single word), and the kind of word needed (one with prominent o and r sounds, these being “sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis”). “In such a search,” he adds complacently, “it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word ‘Nevermore.’ In fact, it was the very first which presented itself.” But how should the refrain be introduced? At this point things take a perilous turn: “Here . . . immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself.” A brief vision flashes before our eyes: a nervous schoolchild standing before a prize-day audience to recite 28 Horace; detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco of the Last Judgment in the Cathedral of Orvieto, Italy, 1500–1503 Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Parrot.” But no, disaster is averted: the parrot is weighed and considered, but ultimately discarded in favor of a raven (“equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone”). Like his great detective, C. Auguste Dupin, Poe reconstructs logically for us the process that led ineluctably to the poem we know and love. This most emotional and romantic of poems was, it turns out, the product of cold calculation at every turn. Or was it? Is this how anyone writes a poem? And if Poe could really reason himself into writing this smash hit, how is it that he never wrote another poem as successful? The more one reads the essay, the more one suspects that Poe’s account is a typical Poe hoax, swallowed whole by gullible readers as his circumstantial account of crossing the Atlantic in a balloon was by the New York Sun. Surely it was the poem that came first. “The Philosophy of Composition” is an elaborate piece of reverse engineering, designed to conceal from the public (and perhaps, at some level, from the author himself) the unsettling truth: that Poe had no idea how he had managed to write “The Raven,” and no idea how to write another one. The ultimate ancestor of all such liter- ary howdunits is Horace’s Ars Poetica. In 476 lines of dactylic hexameter, one of the great Roman poets tells us, if not how he wrote his songs, at any rate how we should go about writing ours. The advice is not all his own; an ancient commentator notes that the poet drew some of it from a third-century BC Greek critic called Neoptolemus of Parium. But it is Horace’s version that has lasted. The Ars lays down literary laws observed by writers for centuries: modern editions divide Shakespeare’s plays into five acts, for instance, be- cause that’s how many Horace said a play should have. It canonized critical ideas, like the concept of artistic unity, that we now take as self-evident. Phrases from it have become conventional tags, some typically encountered in translation (“purple patch” from purpureus . . . pannus), but others familiar in the original Latin: ut pictura poesis; norma loquendi; in medias res; laudator temporis acti; sub iudice; ab ovo. Yet the work is full of mysteries, starting with its very title. The rhetorician Quintilian, several generations later than Horace, evidently knew it as the Ars Poetica, but we can’t be sure that Horace called it that. The poem, now normally printed after the second book of Horace’s Epistles, is addressed to three members of the Piso family: a father and two sons. Some critics therefore prefer to call it the “Epistle to the Pisos.” But which Pisos? Piso père might be Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law and the target of one of Cicero’s nastier invectives. Or it might be his son, consul in 15 BC . Both had literary interests, although the younger Piso is not known to have had a brother, nor can we be sure that he had two sons himself. Another candidate, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, did have two sons—but no known interest in literature. And why is the poem addressed to any Piso? Why not to Horace’s longtime friend and patron Gaius Maecenas, or to someone mentioned elsewhere in his oeuvre? We also can’t be certain where the poem falls in Horace’s career. Many readers have wanted to make it a late work, or even Horace’s last—a poetic testament comparable to Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben” or Stevens’s “The Planet on the Table.” A late date would fit the younger Lucius and his putative sons, and some metrical features might also support it. But there is no external evidence; if we opt for Gnaeus Piso or the senior Lucius as addressee, then the poem could be considerably earlier, a product of Horace’s prime. That Horace should write a poem about writing poetry is not in itself surprising. But here too there are puzzles. The rest of his oeuvre falls into two parts. On the one hand, we have the Odes and Epodes, short lyric poems of great metrical virtuosity. On the other, the Satires and Epistles, loose, talky poems written, like the Ars, in dactylic hexameter. Yet the Ars itself is primarily about how to write drama, a form that Horace never practiced and which employs a meter (iambic trimeter) that he barely used. It includes side notes on epic, another non-Horatian genre. Equally mysterious is the poem’s organization. Generations of critics have struggled to discern—and some have tried by main force to restore—a coherent structure in a text in which everything seems like a digression. Horace goes off on tangents, extends similes beyond their relevance, circles back to topics already covered. He includes a potted history of theater, not obviously useful to the aspiring dramatist, and answers elementary questions (like what an iamb is) that no likely reader could have had. As an actual manual, indeed, the Ars seems notably unhelpful. Much of its advice is negative (“Don’t put scenes that belong offstage onstage”), or uselessly vague (“Choose a subject appropriate to your strengths”), or comes down on both sides of a question (“Either take a traditional plot or invent a plausible one of your own”). A much later “Ars Poetica,” the brief poem by Archibald MacLeish, catches this quality well when it instructs us that “a poem should be palpable and mute/as a globed fruit.” It’s a lovely image, but perhaps not all that helpful to the aspiring author. Some of the difficulty may stem from the work’s genre. The Ars is a didactic poem, a form that goes back to the beginnings of ancient literature and remained vibrant into late antiquity. The oldest surviving example is Hesiod’s Works and Days, a kind of versified farmer’s almanac. The early thinkers Parmenides and Empedocles wrote philosophical treatises in verse, and the Roman Lucretius used Latin hexameters to expound the philosophy of Epicurus. The Hellenistic Greek Nicander wrote poems about venomous snakes and cures for poisons. Aratus of Soli composed a manual of astronomy in verse, which was translated several times into Latin (once by Cicero). Later Greek poets wrote about hunting dogs and ichthyology. Ovid, predictably, wrote an Art of Love, a send-up of the whole genre, and at least started a didactic poem on cosmetology. The didactic poet aimed both to instruct and delight—at least in theory. As Horace says in the Ars, “he hits the bull’s eye who has mingled utility with pleasure.” Of the extant poets it is perhaps Lucretius (and, ironically, Ovid) who did this most successfully. But usually utility was the junior partner. A doctor faced with a case of poisoning would have needed a scholarly commentary to understand Nicander’s The New York Review Rosenwald Collection/National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Alexipharmaca, and one does not envy thus “provides for Horace the ideal vehiArs Poetica, from the passing interest the aspiring farmer who tried to use the cle for connecting writing with living.” evinced in anger, death, and property Works and Days as a real guide. This Living, and also dying. For the Ars is management to the abiding importance is even more true of Vergil’s Georgics, notably concerned with transience and of friendship, teaching, and criticism.” by common consent the greatest exammortality. Its reflections on the coining It is striking that the things Horace ple of the form. It offers some practical of new words and their obsolescence values in poetry are virtues he endorses information on agriculture, but in small plainly echo Homer’s famous compariin life as well: the importance of decodoses—enough to give it that textbook son of the generations of men to leaves. rum, for example, and of knowing your feel, and to make digressions a welcome The principle that characters in drama place. A concept that crops up at varirespite. But then, the Georgics is only should be portrayed in a way appropriate ous points in the poem is pudor, a sense ostensibly a poem about farming. Its to their age prompts a character sketch of modesty or propriety, a quality as relreal subject matter is what it means to of an irascible old man, far longer than evant to writing (for Horace) as to manbe Roman, and, at a deeper level, what the context seems to require, leading to ners. Indeed, many terms that apply to it means to live as a human being in a a poignant meditation: “The arriving writing can also apply to one’s character world governed by nonhuman forces. years bring many enjoyments with them/ or actions. A poem, we are told, should “Human,” as it happens, is the openand many in their departure they take be “uncomplicated” (simplex), but siming word of the Ars Poetica. This is away.” The presence as addressees of plicity or the absence of duplicitousness unlikely to be an accident. Ancient two generations of Pisos allows Horace is also a virtue in people. writers gave thought to beginnings; after to touch on related topics: youth and age, Another example of this is rectum, a Plato’s death, his heirs supposedly found birth and death, parents and children. word that can mean anything between a tablet with various versions of the The Pisos are important to Ferriss“correct, by the book” and “morally opening of the Republic: Hill’s reading in other re“I went down yesterday to spects as well. Not their the Piraeus. . . .” The story exact identity, on which is probably apocryphal, she is agnostic. Indeed, she yet it reveals something suggests that it does not about the Republic, a work really matter much which in which we descend from Pisos are meant. Rather intangible verities to their the aristocratic “Piso” pale shadows in earthly sofunctions in the poem cieties. The Aeneid’s first primarily as a symbolic two words—“arms” and name, like “Rockefeller.” “man”—lay out its subWhat matters is the relaject: “warfare and a man at tionship the poem itself war,” as Robert Fitzgerald constructs between the expanded them. Simultaauthor and his addressees. neously, they establish the Yet that relationship is poem’s relationship to the curiously elusive. Horace Iliad (a poem of arms) and shifts unpredictably from the Odyssey (whose own the second person plural first word is “man”). to a singular “you” (one It might seem odd, then, of the Pisos? the reader?) Etching by Giovanni Battista Bracelli from Bizzarie di varie Figure, 1624 that the opening word of to an all-embracing “we.” the Ars does not point The Pisos undergo a simimore clearly to poetry—“songs,” say, lar slippage. Nominally the addressees right.” Horace tells us that “most of us or “lyre.” But it does not seem strange of the poem, they gradually prove to be poets . . . are led astray by the illusion of to Jennifer Ferriss-Hill, a classics proin some ways its subject: a wealthy amcorrectness” (specie recti). Our writerly fessor at the University of Miami; her ateur and his two failsons in search of a errors, that is, spring from a mistaken new book argues that the Ars Poetica writing coach—or perhaps just a cheerbelief that we are following the rules, is not really about poetry at all. It may leader. Didactic addressees are somedoing what we should. But is that not also masquerade as a guide for would-be times portrayed as slow or troublesome true of many of our nonwriterly errors? writers, but its real concerns are larger: students in need of a stern lecture. HeAgain, we are told that “the basis and human behavior, family relationships, siod characterizes his brother, Perses, wellspring of writing properly (recte) is friendship, and laughter. Rather than a as an idiot; Lucretius sometimes seems good taste.” But “good taste” here is sanew departure, the poem is in her view to show impatience with his addressee, pere, which can also mean “wisdom,” the a continuation of—or, if it is a late work, Memmius. Ferriss-Hill reads the relaquality that allows us not only to write a return to—the poetry of the Satires. tionship between Horace and the Pisos well but to act rightly. The two words In those early poems, Horace explores as similarly fraught, his attitude to will be juxtaposed again when Horace human weaknesses and self-deception, them as implicitly critical. compliments the older Piso son, who is not least his own, as they play out in For she sees the Ars Poetica as also being brought up by his father to behave social interactions. Here he does the an essay on criticism (the title of Pope’s properly (ad rectum) but also has good same. imitation catches something important sense himself (sapis). Ferriss-Hill is atWe do not typically think of literature about Horace’s original)—and not just tentive to such repetitions. As she notes: as a branch of ethics. When W. Somliterary criticism, either. Indeed, the erset Maugham said that “to write famous vignette that opens the poem Horace creates meaning by repeatsimply is as difficult as to be good,” he is a scene of assessment and critique. ing specific terms, clustering them was not equating the two. But earlier Suppose, says Horace, that a painter close together or layering them at readers saw closer connections: medidepicted a human head on a horse’s intervals . . . often in such a way eval commentators categorized Ovid’s neck with feathers and a tail: “If you that on the second or third recurArt of Love as a work of moral phiwere admitted to view it, friends, would rence of a term we feel we have losophy. A letter of Seneca’s famously you be able to restrain your laughter?” met it before but cannot say so for makes the case, summed up in Buffon’s On the surface the scene is there to ilcertain or recall where exactly that aphorism, that le style c’est l’homme lustrate an aesthetic principle: a work might have been. même. An important predecessor of should possess organic unity (“Be a Horace in this respect is the Greek EpRothko, not a Rauschenberg!”). But f poetry in the Ars is really a stalkingicurean philosopher Philodemus, parts for Ferriss-Hill it is the final line that horse for ethics, that might help explain of whose treatises have been restored we should be looking at. Horace here something about the structure of the to us in recent years as scholars unroll depicts criticism as something that poem. A little over halfway through, the and decipher charred papyrus scrolls takes place in a social context, among Ars shifts its focus noticeably, from pofrom Herculaneum. A poet himself friends. The image will return toward etry and poetic creation to the poet him(he wrote epigrams), Philodemus was the end of the poem as the poet quesself. Horace lures us in by promising to known personally to Vergil and pertions how to tell a true friend from help us with our writing, but his real goal haps to Horace too; it may not be coan insincere yes-man. (Philodemus, is our character and our relations with incidental that his principal patron author of the treatises “On Flattery” those around us. The focus on human afwas the older Lucius Calpurnius Piso. and “On Frank Criticism,” may be fairs might also explain why the Ars privHorace mentions him by name in the lurking here too.) The real friend, it ileges drama among other poetic forms: Satires, and for Ferriss-Hill his “finturns out, is the one who is willing to drama is built on human interaction and gerprints can be discerned all over the laugh at you—and not only at your bad I June 11, 2020 poetry—with a view to your improvement. And this, we might suppose, is what Horace does for the Pisos. In fact, it is what the poem itself does for them. Didactic poets sometimes close on a darker note. Lucretius’s poem, On the Nature of Things, meant to teach us inner tranquility, concludes with a description of a devastating plague. The first book of Vergil’s Georgics closes with the image of a chariot—the Roman state—running out of control, its driver powerless to stop it. The late Greek writer Oppian’s five-book poem on fishing ends with a sponge-diver mauled to death by creatures of the deep, his colleagues grieving over his remains. And the Ars? It ends with a comic yet disturbing portrait of a mad poet, lashing out at others like a savage bear or bleeding them dry like a parasite. (“Leech” is the final word of the poem, as “human” is the first.) For the poem’s message is in the end a negative one: “Horace does not concretely help his addressees . . . become better poets or become poets at all because he cannot; in fact, no one can.” Poets need talent as well as training, and for those who want to write without the former, Horace’s implicit advice is, “Don’t.” Ferriss-Hill has written a dense book, frustrating to the reader in the same way, and for much the same reasons, as the Ars itself. Her method is close reading in its most austere form: she worries at Horace’s phrasing, teases out implications, toys with alternative interpretations, follows him down blind alleys. The book loosely follows the trajectory of the poem, but it assumes knowledge of the whole: the discussion can jump forward unexpectedly, and passages we had thought we were done with will crop up again later, now viewed from a new angle or in light of new information. Readers without Latin are likely to find it hard going. Ferriss-Hill does provide an English translation facing the Latin text at the beginning of the book, though one that egregiously disobeys the poem’s own injunction not to translate word for word. When Horace discusses the coining of new words, for instance, we get: If it is perhaps necessary to show with recent symbols the hidden ones of things, it will fall to you to craft ones not heard by the girded Cethegi and a license taken up prudently will be granted. This painful woodenness is plainly deliberate; the rendering is meant solely as an aid in construing the facing Latin. Yet no reader new to Horace will emerge from the book with much sense of why he is a great poet. What the book does do well is to document an intelligent reader’s journey through this most elusive of poems. In the process it offers us a new way of thinking about it, one in which its apparent center moves to the margins and its apparent defects become strengths. It offers a richer and more interesting Ars than most of us are used to, but one recognizably by the Horace we know from other works. Of this Horace it could be said, as Robert B. Parker wrote of Ross Macdonald, “It was not just that [he] taught us how to write; he did something more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.” Q 29 Naked Souls Rachel Polonsky In the parilka, the wooden steam room at the heart of every Russian banya, a stove heats a pile of stones. When the stones are red-hot, water is thrown onto them, raising billows of light steam. Reclining or standing on wooden benches, bathers sweat and whip themselves with veniki, switches of leafy twigs. When they are hot enough (or too hot), the bathers leave the parilka to cool off by plunging into rivers, ponds, barrels, or marble-tiled pools, pouring tubs of icy water over their heads, or rolling naked in the snow. In grand urban buildings, village huts, and prison barracks; on trains, ships, and submarines; wherever Russian communities exist, the steam in the parilka has been endlessly refreshed. Over centuries, diverse cultural meanings have taken shape in this insubstantial vapor. As Ethan Pollock writes in Without the Banya We Would Perish, the banya “persisted in Russia despite radical changes in ideas about what constitutes bodily cleanliness and despite remarkable social ruptures.” With its connection to fire and ice, the banya seems to transcend history. Yet it has a history of its own, which gives “an access point to every stage of Russia’s history.” Muscovite tsarinas gave birth in the parilka. The Romanov tsars, who came to power in the early seventeenth century, saw steam baths as a lucrative source of tax. When the westernizing tsar Peter the Great uprooted Russia’s ancient customs at the beginning of the eighteenth century, shaving off the beards of his noblemen and dressing them like Europeans, he left the banya untouched, though nothing like it existed in the West at the time. Catherine the Great built a stone banya on her estate at Tsarskoe Selo in 1779, and promoted the ancient Russian institution as vital to the health and power of her expanding empire. In 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia, a popular broadside showed him in a parilka with three Russian soldiers. “I’ve never withstood such torture in my life!,” he cries, as the soldiers toss water on the stove and beat him with a venik. “They are scraping and roasting me like in Hell.” “You were the one who entered the Russian banya,” one of the soldiers reminds Napoleon, a stereotypical weedy foreigner (see illustration on page 31). A century later, when luxurious bathhouses were among the pleasures of the modern city, Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, cousin of Nicholas II, visited the banyas of St. Petersburg for paid sex with young banshchiki (male banya workers), confiding in his diary the torments of conscience he suffered over his “great sin.” Grigory Rasputin, who became the spiritual intimate of the tsar’s family, took aristocratic women with him to the banya, to “remind them,” in his peasant presence, “of their Russian bodies and souls.” For the Bolsheviks, the banya was a matter of public hygiene. In 1920 Vlad30 Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse by Ethan Pollock. Oxford University Press, 343 pp., $34.95 Boris Kustodiev: Russian Venus, 1926 imir Lenin lectured Leon Trotsky on the importance of banyas to the welfare of the revolutionary regime. Though there was a banya on the armored train from which Trotsky commanded the Red Army during the civil war, there were not enough in the cities and villages to slow the ravages of epidemics. A hot banya with soap and water could prevent infection and kill the lice that spread typhus. Propaganda posters explained the vector of diseases, ordering people to “go to the banya more often!” Joseph Stalin relaxed in the banya, but, as Pollock writes, the failure of the whole Stalinist project can be measured in “the woeful state of construction and upkeep of banyas” for the masses. No five-year plan could meet the people’s need for steam baths. Public health officials recommended bathing once a week, but by the end of the 1930s, there were hardly enough banyas in Moscow for monthly visits. In other cities, it was worse. Throughout the Soviet period, the chronic lack of clean, functioning banyas was one of the few subjects on which satirical criticism of state authorities was tolerated. After Stalin’s death, his henchman Vyacheslav Molotov condemned the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for going to a banya with the Finnish president, as though bathing with a foreigner meant capitulation to the international bourgeoisie. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the era of “stagnation” under Leonid Brezhnev, the banya was not so much a means of hygiene as, Pollock writes, “a magical space of rejuvenation and rebirth,” celebrated in popular culture. The singer Vladimir Vysotsky’s 1968 ballad “White Banya” still resonates with the lacerations of Stalinism. The song is told from the point of view of a man who has a tattoo of his lover Marinka on his right breast and a tattoo of Stalin on his left, above his heart: “Fire me up the banya, woman, /I’ll forge myself, burn myself/At the very edge of the bench, /I’ll destroy all my doubts.” “The end of the Soviet Union began in a banya,” Pollock writes. In August 1991 the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov, and a group of hard-liners from the army and the Communist Party gathered in a banya to plot a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. A few months later, Boris Yeltsin, who led the defeat of the coup, dissolved the USSR, celebrating afterward in a banya. As a young man, Yeltsin had been made by his grandfather to build a country banya with his own hands as a rite of passage. He reminisced that it was in a banya that he realized, in 1989, that he was no longer a believing communist: “The banya, after all, purifies things. . . . In that moment in the banya I changed my world view.” Vladimir Putin also grants the banya a transformative part in his own rise to power. As he tells it, he was taking a banya at his dacha with a group of friends in 1996, at a low point in his political career. As they cooled off in a nearby lake, he noticed that the dacha and banya were on fire. All that survived was an Orthodox cross, a gift from his mother, that he had removed from his neck before entering the parilka. With little but the cross salvaged from the ashes, Putin was back on course. Ten years later, the writer Vladimir Sorokin set the finale to his dystopian satire on Putin’s Russia, Day of the Oprichnik, at a grotesque allmale ritual orgy in a banya. “Great is the brotherhood of the banya,” the nar- rator declares, parodying centuries of nationalistic banya rhetoric. “Everyone is equal here—the right and the left, the old and the young.” “An archaic institution of pain distributed over a diverse geographical space” is how Daniel RancourLaferriere describes the banya in The Slave Soul of Russia (1995). He is in a long line of foreigners for whom the banya is the symbol of an essential Russian oddness. In the fifth century BCE Herodotus traveled to lands north of the Black Sea that would one day be within the Russian empire, and saw how the Scythians threw hemp seeds onto hot stones raising a vapor that made them howl with elation and took the place of a bath. Fifteen hundred years later, the Persian traveler Ibn Rusta observed the steppe- dwellers tossing water onto hot stones and cleansing their naked bodies in the steam. In the twelfth- century Primary Chronicle, a monastic document relating the origins of Kievan Rus, another foreigner, the Apostle Andrew, is amazed by the banya when he reaches the Slavic lands: They warm [their bathhouses] to extreme heat, they undress . . . take young branches and lash . . . themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water . . . they actually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves. . . . They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment. As the east Slavic tribes united under the rule of the princes of Kiev, the banya became a defining feature of medieval Rus’. It combined the opulent civic bathing traditions of Greece and Rome with the wooden sweat lodges of the Vikings. Its customs were shaped by the diverse cultures converging on the trade routes between Scandinavia and Byzantium: pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. It absorbed their taboos and age- old associations of bathing with purity and defilement, sanctity and licentiousness, virtue and corruption. While the Orthodox church integrated steam bathing into its teachings and rituals (with prohibitions on mixed-sex bathing), the banya was seen in folk culture as a place for sorcery, magic, and unclean spirits. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when public bathhouses had died out in Western Christendom, where they were associated with disease and illicit sex, the banya was part of everyday life in Muscovy. In the accounts of European travelers, astonishment at public nudity, extremes of temperature, and violent flagellation with veniki became a stock motif. Queen Elizabeth I’s ambassador, Giles Fletcher, described people coming “out of their bath stoves all on a froth and fuming as hot almost as a pig at a spit . . . in the coldest of all the wintertime,” and leaping “stark naked” into rivers. For the seventeenth- century scholar Adam Olearius, the men and women of Muscovy bathing together “divested themselves of every trace of shame and restraint.” The New York Review In the late eighteenth century Euro- pean observers began to consider the medicinal effects of the banya. Some even crossed the threshold into the parilka. “The heat was too much for me to bear,” the French astronomer JeanBaptiste Chappe d’Auteroche gasped. “[I] got out of the baths as soon as I could.” He had traveled from Paris to Siberia in 1761 to watch the transit of Venus across the sun. His Voyage en Sibérie, an account of the “manners and customs of the Russians,” published in 1768 with exquisite engravings by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, was one of the most influential travel books of its time, authoritative in Enlightenment debates about Russia’s standing beside “civilized Europe.” The banya fascinated Chappe. A natural philosopher in the spirit of Montesquieu, he viewed “Russianness” as a consequence of meteorological conditions acting on bodily fluids. “Whoever has been through one province knows all the Russians,” he assures his readers. He lists the banya as a cause of their “want of genius,” as though it were as much a part of the natural environment as a cultural institution. The “effect of the soil and the climate,” Chappe writes, makes the “nervous juice” of Russians “inspissated and sluggish,” while the “sensibility of [their] external organs” is blunted by “the flogging they constantly undergo in the baths, and the heat.” As he describes his own attempts to bathe à la russe, the assured discourse of the Enlightenment scholar becomes slapstick. In the steam, Chappe is no longer an objective observer wielding instruments of science, but a naked buffoon, giddy and panting. “The prodigious heat . . . seized my head,” he writes. “I . . . fell in an instant . . . my thermometer breaking to pieces.” An admirer of female beauty, Chappe recorded manifestations of Venus among the Siberian peasantry (noting that Russian women’s looks are “gone before they are thirty” because “the baths spoil their shapes”). Le Prince’s engraving of the banya in Voyage en Sibérie (which Catherine the Great regarded as “most indecent”) depicts a rococo idyll in which naked men, women, and cherubic babies wash together. At its center, a statuesque beauty, in the contrapposto of Botticelli’s Venus, her modesty concealed by a venik, empties a tub of water over her long hair. Le Prince’s image exemplifies the ambivalence of Europeans contemplating the banya’s simultaneous suggestions of innocence and license. A conspicuous advance in Enlightenment understanding came from the Portuguese doctor António Ribeiro Sanches, whose writings, Pollock says, June 11, 2020 had a “profound long-term impact on the way Europeans and Russians conceived of the banya.” Educated at the great medical schools of Europe, Sanches came to Russia as first doctor of the Imperial Army. He served at court and saved the life of the fourteenyear- old Princess Sophie AnhaltZerbst. When the princess became empress Catherine the Great, Sanches corresponded with her about the benefits of the banya. His Traité sur les bains de vapeur de Russie (1779) argued for the banya’s role in the prevention and cure of many ailments, and its importance to the state for the management of public health. After the regimen of parilka, veniki, and cold water, Sanches wrote, “the whole body will feel easy, fresh and the soul will also lighten. The banya is the great healer.” times sex, “for a few rubles and some beer”). “Not a single Muscovite abstained . . . not a master of trade, not an aristocrat, not a poor man, not a rich man could live without the commercial banya,” wrote Vladimir Gilyarovsky, a chronicler of city life. In the 1880s Anton Chekhov published two vignettes called “In the Banya,” in which naked mingling in the steam gives rise to comic muddling of social identities. In his essay of 1899, “On Writers and Writing,” the mystical nationalist writer Vasily Rozanov quoted the Primary Chronicle, hailing the banya as a thousand-year-long “stream of human contact,” “a wonderful world,” more ancient and democratic than the English constitution. As Pollock writes, he “welcomed the banya’s associations with sex, extreme the profound contentment to be found out of sight of men. The RussianScottish writer Eugenie Fraser remembers the “happy orgy of splashing” as she bathed in a late-imperial banya with her mother, nanny, and grandmother, who lay on the highest shelf in the parilka with a cold cloth on her forehead. In the women’s section of Moscow’s Sanduny in the late 1970s, the American novelist Andrea Lee enjoyed the “magical freedom . . . of women in a place from which men are excluded.” Among the “unpretentious and unself- conscious” women at the banya—women she had seen “carrying string bags on the metro”—Lee identified a “wholesomeness” that she found “characteristically Russian.” New York Public Library “Sex trumped health when it came to travelers’ assessments of the banya,” Pollock writes. Foreign onlookers assumed that its health benefits applied only to Russians. “In the whole world there is only themselves who can bear it,” one Frenchman remarked. The eminent London doctor Jodocus Crull noted in the late seventeenth century that banyas were “universal remedies,” contributing to the longevity of Muscovites, who live healthily “for the most part without physicians,” but he was more preoccupied by the fact that women were “not very shy to be seen by men” when they bathed naked. Napoleon being beaten in a banya; illustration by Ivan Terebenev, circa 1812 It took over a century for medical sci- ence to catch up. Russian doctors were among the last to concede that an indigenous practice so long regarded as backward could be at the forefront of European prophylactic medicine. By the late nineteenth century, when germ theory showed that microscopic organisms causing infectious illnesses lived on skin, bathing was generally acknowledged as a public good. In the wider culture, the banya was by now revered for its ancient origins, seen as a “uniquely Russian social space” untainted by the West, reflecting the intuitive wisdom and authenticity of the people. The banya’s “origins are synchronous with the origins of Russian history,” one doctor wrote in 1888; “it is directly connected with the conception of ‘Russian.’” Peasant sayings like “the banya steams, the banya cures” and “without the banya we would perish” were endorsed by the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia in 1891, which listed scores of ailments that the banya could treat, from catarrhal illnesses to neurosis and heart disease. Late-imperial Russia was a golden age for the urban banya. Innovation came from commercial proprietors rather than doctors or the state. Establishments like the Egorov banya in St. Petersburg and the Sanduny in Moscow were as much about sociability and relaxation as health. Typically, banyas had four sections with ascending levels of comfort and amenity. The luxurious sections were fitted out with leather couches, chandeliers, tiled washrooms, gilded mirrors, and swimming pools. Banshchiki provided a range of services: cleaning, hauling fuel, tending the steam, flogging bathers with veniki, and selling food and drink (and some- heat, and beatings that so shocked foreign observers.” In 1906 Mikhail Kuzmin’s novella Wings unveiled the banya’s homosexual subculture. For the Hellenist Kuzmin (unlike Grand Duke Konstantin), this aspect of the banya was an unashamed harking back to ancient Greece, but despite the aesthetic refinement of Wings, it was labeled pornographic. The photojournalist Karl Bulla’s pictures of the interior of the men’s washroom in St. Petersburg’s Egorov banya “almost dared his viewers not to see sex,” Pollock writes. His photographs are like tableaux vivants: frozen in their ablutions, men and boys lie on marble benches, stand under showers, and hold veniki over each other’s naked bodies. Representations of women bathing are a perennial fascination of male fantasy in visual art, and, at least since Le Prince’s engravings for Chappe’s Voyage en Sibérie, the banya has been an ideal subject. The painter Firs Zhuravlev imitated European depictions of languid odalisques with flirtatious eyes in his 1885 canvas Bridal Shower in the Banya. Zinaida Serebriakova sensationally disrupted these traditions in her 1913 painting The Banya. The powerful bodies and open faces of her bathing women convey, Pollock writes, “indifference . . . rather than allure.” Soviet paintings, from Boris Kustodiev’s Russian Venus (1926; see illustration on page 30) to the 1950s works of Socialist Realist painters Alexander Gerasimov and Arkady Plastov, confirmed the female nude in the banya as a timeless symbol of Russian wholesomeness: radiant flesh and long blond hair in a haze of steam against a backdrop of wood and wet birch leaves. Rare glimpses into women’s experience of the banya, meanwhile, convey Like all cultural rituals of purity and impurity, the rituals of the banya create unity in experience across time. In both tsarist and Soviet times, the banya could be a space of redemptive happiness, cleanliness, and freedom, or it could be hell. The aristocratic narrator of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead is horrified by a prison bathhouse: “Steam blinds your eyes; there’s soot, dirt, and human flesh packed together so densely.” Similar images echo in the testaments of the Soviet Gulag by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, and others, for whom the labor camp banya was a place of filth, degradation, and violence. In the Gulag banya there was “no limit to bullying” and “no limit to human endurance,” one survivor remembers. In the late Soviet period, the country banya resurfaced as a cultural ideal. By then, despite the efforts of the Banya-Laundry Administration and generations of Communist planners (whose activities Pollock recounts with a weight of statistical detail mined from the archives of municipal bureaucracies), banyas in the cities were often dilapidated, squalid, and scarce. In literature and film, the rural banya, “a space conducive to contemplation and potential redemption,” came to embody authentic Russian tradition. In Vasily Shukshin’s story “Alyosha at Large,” the peasant Alyosha steadfastly devotes his Saturdays to the slow rituals of the banya, true to the rural ideal in the face of modernization. In Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1980 film A Few Days from the Life of I. I. Oblomov, the rural banya makes a natural setting for soulful conversation between friends, conducive to “vigor and idleness all at once.” The urban banya was the ideal space for a different kind of male friendship, offering alcohol and freedom from domesticity. In The Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Steam, one of the most popular Russian or Soviet films ever made, the steam conjures a beneficial transformation in the life of the hero, Zhenia. The volatility of the post- Soviet period accentuated the banya’s power to heal and transform, “to set things right,” as Pollock writes: “The more the culture changed, the more the banya accrued value as something that was ancient and consistent.” As contemporary Russia revels in national traditions, the banya is still accruing value. The Sanduny, which preserves the grandeur of late-imperial Moscow, now sells its own brands of vodka and honey, with an oak leaf on the 31 label. Yet expert banshchiki still tend the steam, bathers still pay to be thrashed with fragrant veniki, and nakedness still feels wholesome. Pollock tells the long story of the banya in chronological order, exploring countless nuances of social reality and artistic representation, gathering its recurring themes. But he begins and ends his book in the present tense, naked in the parilka. In his prologue, Pollock is bathing with Russian friends in 1991, “as the Soviet Union collapsed and a new Russia emerged.” In the whimsi- cal epilogue, Pollock immerses himself in the illusion of the banya’s timelessness. His friends are transformed, in his daydream, into the many historical figures, writers, and fictional characters invoked in the pages in between, all bathing with him in the parilka. The lightness of the steam overcomes the weight of history, and culture is timeless. “I feel relaxed and alive,” Pollock writes, “washed clean enough to imagine that the banya has no beginning and, so long as there is Russia, that the banya will have no end.” Q Max the Fatalist Peter E. Gordon Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by Max Weber, edited and with an introduction by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, and translated from the German by Damion Searls. New York Review Books, 137 pp., $15.95 (paper) When the young Max Weber returned home in 1883 after his third semester as a law student at the University of Heidelberg, his mother slapped him. Gone was the lanky eighteen-year-old whose sagging shoulders made him, in the words of his future wife Marianne, a “candidate for consumption.” Thanks to nights of drinking with his fraternity, Max had gained considerable weight, and he had also run up a serious debt, compelling him to trouble his father with frequent entreaties for money. Worst of all, he bore a dueling scar on his cheek. At the time, this was nothing unusual. In German fraternities until the end of the nineteenth century, fencing remained a venerable tradition, a rite of manhood in which the contestants competed for ribbons that they wore on their ceremonial gowns while they sang patriotic songs and downed buckets of beer. But for his mother, Max’s transformation was evidently too much. Her first-born son had been named after his father, an esteemed deputy in the National Liberal Party, and he was expected to conduct himself with restraint. He soon abandoned his youthful ways and embarked on a scholar’s path. In 1889 Weber, now twenty-five, completed a doctoral dissertation on the history of trading companies in the Middle Ages, a formidable tome that straddled economic and legal history. In 1891, upon completing his habilitation—a second work required for advancement in the German university system—on Roman agrarian history, he secured a professorship in political economy, first at Freiburg and then at Heidelberg. He threw himself into his academic labors with great intensity, consumed by the idea that true worth comes only to a Berufsmensch—an individual who is dedicated to a vocation. This idea—that one must pursue the burdens of labor with dignity and quasi-religious devotion—proved his personal undoing. The precipitating incident may have been a violent confrontation with his father, who died before the two men could reach a reconciliation. Although Weber would not admit to any guilt, he slept poorly and often found that he could no longer speak. “When I look at my lecture notes,” he wrote, “my head simply swims.” Only a few years into his pro32 Max Weber fessorship he reached a point of complete exhaustion, and in 1899 he asked to be excused from his lectures. Several years passed before he could resume his scholarly career. By the end of his life, Weber enjoyed a growing reputation, not only in Germany but across the globe. This year marks the centenary of his death, which offers a suitable occasion for reflecting on his legacy and his continued significance. To call Weber the founder of modern sociology would seem uncontroversial, though the title must be shared with contemporaries such as Georg Simmel in Germany, Herbert Spencer in England, and Émile Durkheim in France, along with W. E. B. Du Bois in the United States. Weber corresponded with Du Bois, and upon reading The Souls of Black Folk he expressed his hope that the book might be translated into German. “I am absolutely convinced,” he wrote, “that the ‘color-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.” But Weber’s disciplinary identity is far from obvious. When he was writing his most celebrated works, the word “sociology” (an early-nineteenthcentury neologism coined by the French positivist August Comte) was still new, and if one considers how dramatically he shaped our thinking about the modern world, that single academic discipline seems far too narrow. His curiosity and capacity for learning were boundless. He wrote with confidence about trade law in medieval Europe and also about the Hindu religion, he studied ancient kingship and modern bureaucracy, and he even wrote an insightful treatise on the sociology of music. But he was forever afflicted by the fear that he was a mere dilettante, a word that he also hurled at adversaries. When asked by colleagues why he drove himself to such extremes of erudition, he offered a grim response: “I want to see how much I can bear.” The idea of work as a personal call- ing resounds with relentless rhythm through all of Weber’s sociological works. The theme of a calling (or vocation) is central to what is surely his most famous text, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, first published in two installments in 1904–1905. Like other books that have suffered from an excess of fame, The Protestant Ethic is often cited but frequently misunderstood, beginning with Weber’s contemporaries, some of whom faulted him for promoting the notion that capitalism had been “caused by” Protestantism, though he never said anything of the kind. His thesis was far more subtle. Modern capitalism had first arisen in the early-modern era in Northern Europe, within the distinctive setting of a Christian culture that traditionally looked upon economic life with mistrust and saw the pursuit of wealth as a sin. (This view found its biblical authorization in Matthew 19-24: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”) Throughout the medieval era the church also imposed restrictions on moneylending that frequently consigned it to Jews and other outsiders, which fed poisonous stereotypes that persisted well into modern times. Even Martin Luther, an Augustinian by training before his revolutionary break with Catholicism, nourished the old prejudice that financial activity was a sign of cupiditas. Weber now posed a question: How, given such patterns of Christian belief, could entrepreneurial habits have taken hold, and how, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could capitalist trade have flourished in Europe to such a degree that countries like the Dutch Republic and England, along with their colonies in North America, could effect fundamental transformations in all areas of modern life? His answer was ingenious. Capitalism, he argued, was not merely a set of institutions or transactions; it was also a behavior or cultural style, carried along by a host of attitudes and dispositions that made it singular and perhaps unprecedented. In Northern Europe its unusual strength was due in part to the spirit of methodical deliberation and restraint that merchants brought to their work. They amassed great fortunes but avoided all hedonism, conducting themselves with a sense of duty that drove them onward to further success. But what could explain such peculiar conduct? It was Weber’s great insight to propose that capitalism’s “this-worldly asceticism”’ might have found its initial warrant in Protestant teaching. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination had made divine favor into something The New York Review unknowable—a gift bestowed upon the elect. The effect was to elevate God’s sovereignty beyond all possible appeal, but for the believer this could be psychologically devastating, since human agency itself seemed stripped of meaning. The official teaching proved so intolerable that Calvinist preachers introduced a subtle modification that allowed worldly success to serve as a sign of divine election. From Luther and from Catholicism they adopted the idea of a vocatio or “calling,” namely, that one is summoned by God to the priesthood. (The German word for “calling” is Beruf, which derives from the verb rufen, to call.) In Calvinism, however, the idea of a calling was now applied to worldly pursuits that Christianity had once condemned. Election, of course, remained uncertain, since there could be no salvation through works. But a bond was reestablished between God and the world: if one conducted oneself in the proper spirit of piety and restraint, one’s good fortune in this world might serve as a sign of one’s ultimate fortune in the world to come. For Weber this seemingly minor shift in Calvinist doctrine had dramatic consequences. Protestantism could now license a plunge into this-worldly action, while capitalist entrepreneurs could see in their conduct a spiritual significance it would otherwise have lacked. As Weber noted, there had been something irrational about this conduct: it required a readiness to defer gratification, to save and reinvest for the sake of an uncertain future. It was the religious ethic of the ambient Protestant culture that infused commercial activity with a higher meaning. Clearly, this argument was not causal. Rather, it illustrated an “elective affinity,” a term Weber borrowed from Goethe’s 1809 novel of romantic liaisons. Capitalism and Protestantism were two historically independent formations that joined to create a uniquely powerful bond, and in concert they revolutionized the modern world. In the United States today one often encounters the boastful claim that its citizens are beneficiaries of a “Protestant work ethic,” as if this explained the power of American capitalism. But Weber offered a more tragic view. In his estimation the religiously inspired ethic of a calling had died out long ago, a casualty of the rationalization process it helped to set in motion. Capitalism, Weber argued, now runs on its own, with machine-like indifference to all spiritual values, while the idea of a calling “haunts our lives like the ghost of once-held religious beliefs.” Meanwhile, those who are caught in its mechanism are left with little more than a sense of mindless compulsion. “The Puritans wanted to be men of the calling,” Weber wrote; “we, on the other hand, must be.” In the US in particular, the pursuit of wealth had been “divested of its metaphysical significance” and was now linked with “purely elemental passions.” In the closing lines of The Protestant Ethic, Weber described the typical capitalists of his own time as mediocrities much like the stunted creatures that Nietzsche had called “the last men.” A world populated by such soulless beings ran not on individual initiative but on the imperatives of the system: “Today,” Weber wrote, this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism, and may well continue to do so until the day when the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed. Those final lines were prescient. Although Weber could not have anticipated the unfolding catastrophe of climate change or the environmental ravages that have attended the process of industrialization, he understood that capitalism’s unrestrained expansion across the planet could hardly be taken as a sign of social betterment or historical progress. In documenting the rise of the modern world, he sustained an attitude of cool skepticism. The purpose of sociology was not to discover general laws but to understand human action in all its complexity. This emphasis on the unique rather than the universal made his work difficult to categorize. Not a few of his colleagues were tripped up by his arguments—errors he attacked in print with lacerating criticism. Especially common was the mistaken view that he had written The Protestant Ethic as an idealistic corrective to Marxism, as if he had meant to suggest that religious ideas rather than the forces of production were the primary engines of historical change. Weber dismissed this as rubbish. Replacing a “one-sided” and “materialist” explanation of historical causality with a “one-sided” and “spiritual” explanation would only exchange one fallacy for another. A fter his resignation from Heidelberg, Weber gradually regained his ability to work, and by 1903 he had commenced a new phase in writing. Alongside The Protestant Ethic he also produced the major essay “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy.” In 1904 he traveled to the United States, accompanied by Marianne and the historian of religion Ernst Troeltsch. Manhattan left an impression of modernity in chaos. Their twenty-story hotel rose above streets that buzzed with traffic and smelled of horse manure. To get to their rooms they rode an “elevator,” a word that struck Marianne as exotic. They traveled as far as St. Louis and New Orleans, and on their return they stopped at Mount Vernon to see Washington’s birthplace, but also attended an African-American religious service. They were nearly stranded in Philadelphia due to the crowds that swarmed the train station to cheer the University of Pennsylvania football team on its departure for a game against Harvard. They spent their final evening in Brooklyn, where they attended a performance at a Yiddish theater. The last fifteen years of Weber’s life were ones of tremendous productivity. Starting in 1913 he worked on a comprehensive treatise in sociology that he did not live to finish; it was published after his death as Economy and Society.1 He also grew especially absorbed in comparative studies in the sociology of religion: between 1915 and 1919 he vaulted himself into the monumental 1 A superb new English translation by Keith Tribe has just been published by Harvard University Press. Please order books by using the contact information listed under each press’s name, or visit your local bookstore or online retailer. SHARE INTERNATIONAL www.share-international.org/books; (510) 883-1848 &! !" Creme describes an extraordinary planetary event now unfolding: the public emergence of Maitreya, the World Teacher, into the everyday world. Here to help us solve our most critical global problems, Maitreya is shown to be a great Spiritual Avatar as well as a friend and brother to humanity. His wise counsel, if heeded, will inspire a brilliant new civilization. 978-90-71484-39-1 • Paper, $6.00 • 132 Pages • Spirituality Available on Amazon &! !" Maitreya, the World Teacher, is living among us now, largely unknown. One day soon, he will declare his true identity openly, and the world will be forever changed. In this companion volume to The World Teacher for all Humanity, Creme describes the steps leading to that momentous event and anticipates humanity’s response, leading us on a prophetic journey filled with hope and expectancy for the world-changing events that are on the way. 978-90-71484-41-4 • Paper, $6.00 • 141 Pages • Spirituality Available on Amazon June 11, 2020 SAINT GAUDENS PRESS OFF THE COMMON BOOKS www.SaintGaudensPress.com; (805) 691-9248 www.levellerspress.com & %!& A viral pandemic presents a nightmare of disease, death, and unheard-of challenges. Avian influenza, deadlier than coronavirus, strikes and threatens the world. 9780943039572 • Print, $18.99 9780943039589 • eBook, $4.99 330 Pages • Popular Literary Fiction Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Author’s website: www.KevinEReady.com & %!& “This rich exploration of the human soul’s potential is a feelgood tale of achievement and rebirth.” —BookLife Reviews 9780943039558 • Print, $18.99 9780943039565 • eBook, $4.99 364 Pages • Literary Fiction Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram NAOMI WEISSTEIN: BRAIN SCIENTIST, ROCK BAND LEADER, FEMINIST REBEL Her Collected Essays #&"#!$" ! Naomi Weisstein was a leading figure in second wave feminism. And as well: a brain scientist, a stand-up comic, a New Left activist, a rock-and-roller—a brilliant, zesty original. “For years, I’ve been trying to explain that Naomi Weisstein was great at everything, from science and music to writing and friendship. If she hadn’t existed, no one could have invented her. Now, Martin Duberman has collected her essays, so you, too, can discover her.”—Gloria Steinem 978-1-951928-09-4 • Paper, $22.50 • 400 Pages • Available on Amazon. GREEN WRITERS PRESS greenwriterspress.com/book/dancing-with-langston; (802) 380-1121 &"&!#" “Its details exquisite and its characters compelling, a powerful novel about the rewards and the realities of following one’s dreams.”—Foreword Clarion Review (5 Stars) 9781950584192 • Paper, $19.95 • 206 Pages • Literary Fiction Available on Amazon, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, and Independent Bookstores; Author’s Website: www.dancingwithlangston.com 33 PRO ARTE BOOKS PETE KJ LLC HERBERT HADAD www.petekj.com; (303) 506-4979 (914) 769-4017 TENDER AND TOUGH / , Reflections on Art, Pseudo Art, Art Education & Theory /$# && * *'#$ A murderer returns to Africa. A woman escapes poverty in Africa. Their lives cross. “Lingers in the mind long after the reading.” —D. Donovan, Midwest Book Review 60 Years of Storytelling / * *, “Solidly argued and thoughtfully presented . . . eloquent . . . thoughtprovoking and often enjoyable. . . . An illuminating, strongly opinionated, and enthusiastically acerbic critique of today’s art world.” —Kirkus Reviews 9780990605737 • Paper, $18.00 380 Pages • Art Criticism Available on Amazon and Ingram Spark Illustrations on author’s website: www.mmkamhi.com 9781541102620 • Paper $11.95; eBook $0.99 • 453 Pages • Literary Fiction, African American Interest Available on Amazon Author’s website: petekj.com Available on Amazon Author’s website: www.herberthadad.com FRIESENPRESS (613) 565-430 www.jlynnady.com; (306) 861-4764 (541) 344-1528 COURAGE & COMPLICITY /&- ,, ("- ) “An engrossing story of a battered woman trying to reclaim her life and find true love. . . . A highly charged romance with plenty of intrigue and danger.” —Kirkus Reviews / /((/ A teacher struggles after uncovering abuse at her school. “Succeeds in making readers think and feel.” —Kirkus Reviews “. . . compelling novel. . . skillfully written” —Blueink Review How a Not-So-Kosher Jewish Girl Fell in Love with Jesus / $&% * 9781532682049 • Paper, $19.00 978108021579 • Paper & Kindle, $22.95 • 429 Pages • Memoir, Personal Essays SAPARE PRESS WIPF AND STOCK “A beautifully written and provocative account of one woman’s spiritual journey…is a rigorously intellectual one conducted through meticulous study of not only the Bible, but also philosophy, and theology.”—Kirkus Reviews “A keen eye for humanity. His writing achieves both the sweep of history and the intimacy of small moments.”—Jason Kelly, NY Bureau Chief, Bloomberg 978-1-5255-4520-7 • Paper, $22.99 • 409 Pages • Fiction & Literature 978-1-7750600-3-1 • Paper, $16.95 Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, FriesenPress 291 Pages • Historical Fiction Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble Author’s Website: courageandcomplicity.com 132 Pages • Spiritual Memoir Available on Wipf and Stock. JOHN HUNT PUBLISHING, O BOOKS COVENANT BOOKS Author’s website: Acongregationofone.com www.johnhuntpublishing.com (406) 364-2156 Journey to Mystical Union Through the Sacred and the Profane /*$# (0$ CHRACATOA PRESS www.chracatoa.com; (425) 298-3271 Sometimes, Dreams are Overrated / )!+ ,0 /'++)* -+,$()-0 $ # An eye-opening, fascinating account revealing the necessity of Tribulation for believers, the benefits of persecution, and the need to overcome opposition today and tomorrow. An open-hearted memoir of an affair that sparks one woman to travel externally and internally on a journey to sexual healing and spiritual awakening. “A welcome change from the average laser-blasting SF-action protagonist.” —Kirkus Reviews 9781785352621 • Paper, $11.40 “Exciting, conceptual, gripping and fascinating.” —Readers’ Favorite 272 Pages • Memoir, Relationships, Sexuality 9781645592679 • Paper, $19.95 • 376 Pages • Religious 978-1-951832-00-1 • Paper, $14.95 Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble 376 Pages • Science Fiction and Fantasy Author’s website: sacredjourneytomore.com Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Covenant Books Author’s website: RevelationBook.net. XLIBRIS ANAMCARA PRESS www.Xlibris.com; (888) 795-4274 www.anamcara-press.com; (785) 843-1849 Available on Amazon Author’s website: www.hofsetz.com SUE LOH /- )# “Sue Loh’s extraordinary, fun, technology centered novel follows a group of teenagers who’re handling an intense hacking scheme that could cost them their future.” —Foreword Reviews 9780578579467 • Paper, $9.99 • eBook, $.99 256 Pages • Young Adult Thriller Available on Amazon and Ingram Sparks Author’s website: EvilPlanTo SaveThe.World 1 1 A Memoir /.$ $#*+ A Mother’s Journey through Grief /*"* ,/-*(* '* “Much more than the memoir of an eminent gay law professor, this title is a seminal treatise on the history of hierarchical patriarchy and its corrosive effect upon men and women in every stratum of contemporary American society.”—US Review of Books “Boys’ Secrets and Men’s Loves is a crusading text that argues that women, LGBTQUIA individuals, and cisgender straight men ought to band together to salvage democracy.” —Clarion Foreword Review When her son Spenser was diagnosed with a disability, Kramar embarked on a transformative journey which emboldened her to question how we perceive others, what defines success, and what really matters. After Spenser died and she searched for him in the memories of relatives, teachers, and friends, she found a love that shatters any barriers that divide us and transcends death. 9781796037272 • Paper, $23.99 • 374 Pages • Memoir 978-1-941237-21-2 • Paper, $16.95 • 305 Pages • Memoir Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Xlibris. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and at local bookstores Author’s website can be found at its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles under David A.J. Richards Author’s website: www.margaretkramar.com To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl. 34 The New York Review IPBOOKS MARK DUFF OKEFENOKEE JOE IPBooks.net; (718) 728-7416 authormarkduff.com; (970) 309-5435 okefenokeejoe.com; (803) 258-3822 Norway, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: A Family Story /((!*$! )&,0 /*%-"" “This stunning memoir . . . tells the astonishing story of the author’s family, its displacement and survival in World War II Norway, to America . . . Retrieval, history, personal revelation, Jewish consciousness, and wonderful storytelling, this book reminds us brilliantly that we are our pasts, as well as the presents and futures we make of them.” —David W. Blight, Yale, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom MY WALK AMONG THE STARS “Kaleidoscopic…reminiscent of James Joyce.”—Kirkus Reviews An allegorical story that blends magical realism and philosophy; humorous antics by teenagers and greed by the companies that make standardized tests. Rubbing Shoulders with Country Giants /$% &)) 9780578476315 • Paper, $12.00 • 259 Pages • Literary Fiction, Philosophy, Magical Realism 978-0-9973371-8-1 • Paper, $16.99 • 250 Pages • Nofiction Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Author’s website: authormarkduff.com The trials of the author’s 19 years as a Nashville-based singer/songwriter knowing personally dozens of great country music legends of the ’60s. Available at okefenokeejoe.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble Author’s website: dickflood.com 978-1-949093-50-6 • Paper $25.95 • 268 Pages • Memoir Available at IPBooks.net, Alibris, and Amazon LITERARY WANDERLUST YANKEE CLIPPER PRESS www.literarywanderlust.com; (720) 314-8619 1 /*,$ *!!( GEORGES KASSABGI WHAT GAVE YOU THAT IDEA? Rediscovering the Development of Our Worldviews by Georges Kassabgi With this essay (2012), the author searches what might help humanity improve the effective-ness of actions regarding global challenges. In particular, he invites us to consider anew primal material/ nonmaterial attributes/interactions —underlying elements in the developments of existence—and remain aware that assumptions are not facts. Kassabgi shares thought-provoking conversations with readers of his essay in a second document “Postscripts” (2018) which includes original work dedicated to long-term resolution of conflicts (paper presented in academic setting and published in military journal 2013). Same proposition might benefit our debates on climate change, environment pollution, and respect for human rights. Noteworthy Distinctions and Guiding Lights: (1) “violence-forprotection/survival” versus “violence-for-abuse/punishment”; (2) “human-versus-nature-dependent inequalities”; (3) “each worldview/’policy/-ism has value . . . up to a point”; (4) “an understanding of underlying movements ought to be part of our priorities.” He therefore outlines a multidisciplinary study as the next critical step. PDF • Both books are available at no cost; go to: www.research- gate.net/search and enter author’s full name • Author’s website: www.ugik.com “. . . Green is a masterful storyteller, and her narrative fascinates from the first page to the last. . . . A captivating and intimate look at injustices in the judicial system.” —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) /((!'*$! #$.$! !*+!( 978-0-9881980-5-0 • Paper, $9.99; eBook, $4.99 9781942856436 • $17.95 372 Pages • Historical Fiction 286 Pages • Legal Thriller Available at: Literary Wanderlust, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Walmart Available on Amazon and at select bookstores Author’s website: martigreen.net Author’s website: www.AnnemarieSchiaviPedersen.com JEFF BOND BOOKS HIGHERLIFE www.jeffbondbooks.com www.ahigherlife.com; (407) 563-4806 /!"")( An Immigrant’s Tale at 7-Eleven /!(! $,! *$' Rival political dynasties clash at a Yale reunion, the first of a series. “A literary masterpiece . . . impossible to put down.”—Midwest Book Review “Lyrical prose, tight pacing, and memorable characters elevate The Pinebox Vendetta into a top-tier thriller.”—IndieReader 9781732255258 • Paper, $14.99 • 264 Pages • Mystery Thriller Available on Amazon and Ingram Spark [ Advertise in the NYRB \ Independent Press Listing 978-1-7332289-8-5 • Paper, $15.93 978-1-7332289-9-2 • eBook, 273 Pages • Historical Fiction CALADIUM PUBLISHING COMPANY SPINNING A YARN PRESS spinningayarnpress.com; (310) 560-0090 / ( *-() The New York Review of Books Independent Press Listing appears in thirteen of twenty annual issues of The New York Review of Books. As always, all titles appear on our website at no additional charge: www.nybooks.com/ipl. Aging, undocumented Nur Ali navigates amidst the local exile community while guiding his family in northern Pakistan through the turmoils of 2005– 2011 on the phone. Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble Author’s website: www.benedictegrima.com Author’s website: jeffbondbooks.com In Print & Online “An engagingly ornate tale of an Italian witch scare.” —Kirkus Reviews “The destinies of two indentured servants from Europe converge in the American colonies in this debut novel…a splendid historical epic with complex characters and richly drawn settings.” —Kirkus Reviews 978-1-7341652-1-0 • Paper, $15.99 424 Pages • Historical Fiction Available on Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, IngramSpark Author’s website: indrazuno.com 145C Selner Lane, Doylestown, PA 18902 (215) 340-7564; info@caladiumpublishing.com; www.caladiumpublishing.com as told to a philosopher /!**/*,$( “Martin has delivered us the most path-breaking material for future philosophical and theological reflection I have come across in a long time.” —Reading Religion 9780996725316 • Hardback, $19.95 376 Pages 9780996725323 • eBook, $4.95 Available at Amazon and www.indiebound.org Author’s website: www.godanautobiography.com To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl. June 11, 2020 35 36 Weber the more conventional view that the individual who embraces scholarship as a calling can lead a “meaningful life.”) To be a scholar one must acknowledge that in the modern age an irreparable chasm separates facts from values: facts are objective, values are not. Weber stated this point as early as his 1905 essay on objectivity: “the fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge” is that “we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis.” The highest ideals are formed “only in the struggle with other ideals,” and we must abandon our hope for their reconciliation. Weber portrays this predicament as a final consequence of the millennia-long process of disenchantment that has gradually stripped the cosmos of any objective meaning. For the individual who wishes to pursue scholarship as a calling, this political professionals. An authentic leader, however, must temper vision with realism. Even the most utopian movements must eventually compromise their idealism if they wish to remain in power. Politics, Weber declares, is like “a slow and difficult drilling of holes into hard boards.” The individual who feels a calling for politics must therefore achieve the proper balance between an “ethics of personal conviction” and an “ethics of responsibility.” True leadership demands far more than untamed charisma; it demands a sense of proportion and a grasp of what reality permits. “There is no more destructive corruption of political power,” warns Weber, “than the parvenu,” who goes “blustering around, conceitedly rejoicing in feeling powerful.” Weber died of pneumonia, possibly due to the Spanish flu (though the cause Ullstein Bild/Getty Images task of writing on all of the world’s major religions, completing volumes on Confucism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. (He died before he could finish the one on Islam.) In these works, Weber demonstrated an admirable capacity for understanding cultures other than his own, but he was still preoccupied with the question of the West’s unique character. Beginning with ancient Judaism, he traced a certain style of “occidental” rationalism in religion that gradually stripped the world of its magical luster and imposed on the cosmos the idea of a single and all-encompassing law. Protestantism, with its assault on priestly rituals and the veneration of relics and saints, brought this rationalizing process in religion to its terminus even while it also prepared the way for the emergence of a modern legal-bureaucratic society in which religion was pushed to the margins. In this process, Weber assigned an ambivalent role to religious intellectuals such as the Hebrew prophets. It was the intellectual class, the theologians and prophets, who first raised the question of the world’s “meaning.” Ironically, however, this group was also hostile to conventional and magical belief and thereby set in motion the process of world-rationalization that eventually brought to an end the very idea that the world had meaning at all. These arguments reappear in two lectures, “Scholarship as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation,” which Weber delivered near the end of his life. Masterpieces of concision, they have been newly translated by Damion Searls (as “The Scholar’s Work” and “The Politician’s Work,” though these titles lose Weber’s sense of Beruf as a vocation or calling) and published in a slender volume with a helpful introduction by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon. In a deliberate and solemn style that rises gently toward tragedy, Weber ruminates on the question of a “vocation” and on what is required of an individual who feels the calling for a career in scholarship or politics. No doubt the lectures left many in his audience dissatisfied, since they are as much warning as exhortation. Weber presented “Scholarship as a Vocation” in November 1917, at the invitation of a student society in Munich. At a moment when the ongoing war threatened to bring the ideals of European civilization to a crashing end, the theme of the lecture carried a special urgency. What purpose was to be found in the scholar’s life, and what historical and sociological significance inhered in such a career? Weber did not offer his students many words of encouragement. The modern world has passed through a trial of rationalization and disenchantment. While some cling to the consoling notion that the cosmos still has an objective meaning, a genuine scholar must be strong enough to confront the truth that this idea has been extinguished. Value has lost the appearance of objectivity; the world only has moral significance from a particular point of view. Monotheism has given way to a new polytheism: values clash with one another like warring gods. Weber portrays the scholar as a modern stoic who must be prepared to live in full awareness of the relativity of all value. But this posture can itself become a source of value. (In their introduction, Reitter and Wellmon do not capture this irony; they ascribe to A rally in support of the Weimar Republic in the Sportpalast, Berlin, February 1, 1925 process has a paradoxical consequence. If the heavens are empty, one can no longer speak of a caller behind the call; one can make one’s career into a calling only by a sheer act of will. T his stoic motif recurs in “Politics as a Vocation,” which Weber delivered before the same student organization in Munich in late January 1919. In the interval between the two lectures, the political situation in Germany had changed dramatically. The old Reich had collapsed at the end of the war, and the moderate wing of the Social Democrats had declared the founding of a republic. Though Weber remained a fierce nationalist, he assisted in the drafting of the new Weimar Constitution and served on the executive committee of the centrist German Democratic Party, which consisted chiefly of lawyers and other professionals. Meanwhile, a revolution had spread from Berlin to Bavaria, where the journalist and philosopher Kurt Eisner declared the founding of a Bavarian Socialist Republic. In his lecture on politics Weber speaks with disdain about the revolution, and he warns his audience that in the coming decade they should expect an era of darkness and political reaction. The modern state is little more than a machine—a vast bureaucratic entity that has gained a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence—and the only real question is whether it will bring about a democracy with authentic leaders to guide the machine or will settle for a “leaderless democracy” managed by a class of unimpressive remains uncertain) in June 1920, too early to see how Germany’s fledgling democracy fared. But the signs were not auspicious. Right-wing students had demonstrated against him when he condemned the pardoning of Count Arco-Valley, the Austrian aristocrat who had assassinated Eisner. Although Weber loathed the socialist revolution, he loathed political murder more, and he feared what would happen if citizens lost their faith in established conventions of law. He may have longed for a strong leader to seize the wheel of history, but he looked upon the development of the modern bureaucratic state with a certain fatalism. The age of prophecy and tradition was long gone, no more suitable to a disenchanted age than were the dueling fraternities of his youth. Any attempt to resurrect the charismatic leaders of the distant past would spawn only demagogues, not genuine prophets. Weber will no doubt remain a fixture of the modern canon of social and political thought even if central themes in his work now strike us as questionable. Consider, for instance, the sharp distinction between fact and value. It was Weber’s view that conflicts of value cannot be resolved through rational argument, since we cleave to our values with a conviction that surpasses critical scrutiny. This theory of value illustrates the affinities between Weber and Nietzsche, whose views on the will as the final grounding for value helped inspire Weber’s reflections on the irrational character of our moral commitments. Such affinities became an embarrass- ment for later Anglophone scholars such as Talcott Parsons, who wished to cleanse Weber of any taint of old-world irrationalism and reintroduced him in the United States as a cool-minded forerunner to his own “functionalist” theories of modern society. But Weber’s darker side is hard to ignore. If our value commitments lie at a level of pure decision beyond rational deliberation, then we are robbed of any prospect for genuine consensus. It should not surprise us that the rightwing political theorist Carl Schmitt saw in this “decisionist” theory of value a justification for Nazism. Nor was it implausible that the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, at the 1964 centenary celebrations in Heidelberg to mark Weber’s birth, described Schmitt as Weber’s “legitimate pupil.” The distinction between fact and value left Weber with a one-sided image of social rationalization. He failed to grasp the crucial point that a rationalized society is not necessarily a rational one; the latter demands not only a formal rationality of systems and procedures but also a substantive rationality in the values we endorse because they are right. Here we see how Weber’s views on scholarship and politics converge. The problem with the distinction between facts and values is not only that it casts values into a realm of irrational decision. No less questionable is Weber’s trust in the solidity of facts, seeing them as a hard and obdurate reality that intrudes upon the latticework of our value- commitments as if from the outside. An effective teacher, he declared, is one who makes the student look unflinchingly at facts even when they are “uncomfortable”2 or push against one’s partisan opinions. But in an age that is now drowning in “alternative facts,” the old distinction between facts and values may have lost its credence. Values not only frame facts, as Weber knew; they also lend facts their authority, propelling them into the public sphere where they are taken up into our political deliberations. But a fact can only count as a fact if society treats it as one. Today’s demagogues are not content with reshaping political values; they also seek to reshape facts, turning debate over policy into a struggle over what is real. Weber may have been ready to accept the relativity of values, even if he did so with some reluctance and in a fatalist mood. But we cannot blame him for failing to anticipate our modern tilt into the relativity of facts, which has robbed us of any confidence that in our political disputes we at least agree on what the facts are. Nor can he be blamed if he held fast to the heroic ideal of work as a calling. When one reads Weber today, it is difficult to overcome the impression that this ideal has lost much of its prestige, not least because many politicians (and not a few scholars) seem moved more by a longing for fame than a deeply felt belief in the integrity of their task. Weber’s idea of a calling embodies a paradox: it is a trace of religion in a nonreligious world. But we have passed beyond the last threshold of disenchantment, and even that final ideal now threatens to fall into total eclipse. Q 2 The old Hans Gerth translation of the lecture had “inconvenient” for the German word unbequem, but Searls’s rendering of it as “uncomfortable” is perhaps best. The New York Review Nasty, Brutish, and Long Colm Tóibín The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,268 pp., $40.00 Musil charts Törless’s engagement with this abuse, using subtle terms to invoke “the strange attraction that Basini exerted upon him.” It is clear that, while not the leader of the campaign against Basini, Törless is the one most affected by what he witnesses, and the one who derives the most pleasure from it. While the assaults on Basini are done in secret, it is as though the institution itself gives permission for them to occur, or creates the conditions, both physical and moral, whereby such a cruel vendetta could be carried out. the dormitories and his colleagues. In 2005 it emerged in The Ferns Report, the result of an official Irish government inquiry into clerical sex abuse in the diocese of Ferns (which included Wexford and St. Peter’s), that this priest, whose sexual interest in the students had come to the attention of the bishop, was placed in that old building so that he would be away from the dormitories. He later served a prison sentence for abuse of students in the school. Herbert List/Magnum Photos After almost half a century, I still dream that I am back at St. Peter’s, the Catholic boarding school in Wexford, Ireland, where I spent two years before I went to university. What is strange is how oddly comforting some of the images are. Even the dormitory, with its narrow cubicles, and the timetable, which began with morning hat Musil writes well mass and included daily roabout is the mixture of pure sary, with benediction benormality and high artificifore study during months ality in an all-male acadthat were deemed to be emy. At St. Peter’s, aged especially sacred, hold no sixteen, I was fascinated terror. The diocesan priests by Brendan Behan’s autowho were our teachers biographical novel Borstal seem warm, friendly presBoy (1958), which dealt ences, even though a couwith the incarceration of a ple of them, in reality, were boy more or less my age. He great brutes. The most disnot only experienced loneturbing part of the dream liness and loss in prison is that in it I am me now. but also became used to its And I am ready, despite routine and rules. Slowly everything, to be embraced it became normal, not a by the orderliness of life in microcosm of the outside that school, by the all-male world or anything as simcompany, by the possibility ple as that, but rather a of intense friendships, by place apart, fully enclosed the many rules and regulaby its own systems. tions, by the thought that I During the Christmas can decide almost nothing holidays of 1970, a friend for myself. told me about a film showSoon after I left St. Peing in Dublin called if . . . , ter’s, I found myself one directed by Lindsay Anday in the studio of the derson and set in an EnIrish painter Paul Funge, glish boarding school. I who had also been a stumanaged to convince my dent there. He handed me family that I needed to a book, saying that it was attend the Young Scienpossibly the most accurate tists’ Exhibition in Dublin version of our experience with a school group—there at boarding school. It was were special cheap train The Confusions of Young fares for visitors to this— Törless (1906) by Robert but once the train hit DubMusil. lin I slipped away from the Despite the fact that my Students from a boys’ school with a priest, Rome, 1953 group and found the right dreams of St. Peter’s are cinema and attended the benign, Musil’s unsettling early afternoon showing. account of all-male school life seemed What happens to Basini is presented as The regime in Anderson’s film was accurate to me, down to small deritual rather than outrage. It is almost harsher and more stylized than that tails such as a moment early in the normal; it happens calmly rather than at St. Peter’s. The sexual tension in book after Törless has left home for as a result of flared tempers. And it apthis boarding school was more apparboarding school, when his relationpears to satisfy something deep within ent than in ours, and the brutality and ship with his parents becomes strained the perpetrators. bullying more fierce. The boys in if . . . and uneasy. Once he has recovered In Musil’s novel, normal school life were also more obviously beautiful from missing them, he grows distant goes on as though the nightly attacks than any of my schoolmates. But the from them. His being away from home on Basini were merely a sideshow. At film brought into the open what was induces in him a kind of coldness St. Peter’s, I always had the sense that kept hidden by the dull routine at St. that no new-found independence will something else was happening that Peter’s that I had assented to. assuage. was hidden from us, or that some set And that was the idea of conformity, Young Törless deals most forcefully of codes were in use that had not been how easy it was to impose conformity. with violence and bullying. Like St. Pefully disclosed. At night, in my second The main fear at St. Peter’s was not that ter’s, Musil’s academy is an old building year there, I often had reason, once you would be beaten up or attacked, with unused rooms and hidden spaces. my dormitory became quiet, to make but that you would be excluded. EveryIt is to one of these that Törless and his my way to another dormitory, using a one’s behavior was fine-tuned to make two friends Beineberg and Reiting take shadowy cloister, dark stairways, long sure that he fit into the system created their classmate Basini to whip him, sexcorridors. There was not a sound. But a by his fellow students. In his novel The ually abuse him, and torture him. They few times I had to move quickly into a Catholic School, Edoardo Albinati do this ostensibly because they believe doorway as a priest’s footsteps could be writes about the need not to stand out: that he has been stealing. But their real heard approaching. I wondered where motive, it seems, is that they do it behe was going, what he was doing, at this No one realizes just how far a boy cause they can, and because they enjoy time of night. He might have wondered would go in order to win the apit. They take their time humiliating the the same about me. proval of his classmates and pals; boy, thinking of further, more rigorous Although the teaching priests all the quantity of abuse that he can punishments for him, taking him to had apartments close to the dormimake up his mind to tolerate, that hidden, private space night after tories, one priest was lodged in an whether inflicted upon himself or night. older part of the school, away from June 11, 2020 W inflicted upon others, in order to earn recognition. The Catholic School centers on San Leone Magno, a fashionable school in Rome run by the Marist Brothers, and a gruesome crime that took place in 1975 when three former students were found to have tortured two young women, then raped them and murdered one of them. Albinati, born in 1956, attended San Leone Magno and was acquainted with the perpetrators. The Catholic School, all 1,268 pages of it, is an effort to explore why boys from such a privileged and settled background would commit such a crime. It pays little attention to the crime itself; we learn hardly anything about the victims other than that they are from a lower class than the perpetrators. Instead, most of the book muses on the meaning of masculinity, on the family and the middle class, on rape, violence, the penis, sadism and masochism, not to speak of morals and manners among Italians of a certain income bracket. Albinati writes about how he “loved to go to school” and the “intolerable” idea “of going home when lessons were over.” He uses Musil’s novel as a template: “What happened to me was the exact opposite of what happened to young Törless as a student.” At home, he missed his “classmates. And the gym, the courtyard, the chapel, the priests.” While Törless suffers from homesickness and recovers, he does not revert to his previous self: “The disappearance of his yearning did not bring with it any long-awaited contentment, but left a void in the soul of young Törless.” It is that void that concerns Albinati, the strangeness that develops in an all-male institution as Musil describes it: “Here, where young, impulsive forces were imprisoned behind grey walls, the boys’ imaginations were crammed full with random, voluptuous images that robbed more than one boy of his senses.” The Catholic School has scenes that mirror moments in Young Törless, including one in which several boys whip a fellow schoolboy. Albinati’s “Now you could hear the whistle and snap of the cords on our classmate’s flesh” echoes Musil’s “From the sounds that reached him, Törless could make out that they were taking Basini’s clothes from his body and whipping him with something thin and flexible.” In both books, the boys believe that they belong to an exclusive world and have a duty to detect and exclude anyone who does not belong to it. In Musil’s novel, one of the most violent characters says: “After all, we’re being educated together because we belong to the same society.” In Albinati’s, the school leaves a mark of privilege that lasts for life, “practically an emblem, a trademark, to such an extent that nearly ten years later, a young woman would notice it, that indelible brand. ‘Say, by any chance, did you go to a school run by priests?’” This strange forced cohesion that develops in an all-male school can be quickly broken, as Anderson makes clear in if . . . when the students, formerly so willing to take part in the set of hierarchies that the school 37 “A rare glimpse into an insular world.” —Kirkus Reviews represents, stage an armed revolt on the roof of the school. Albinati describes going to a screening of if . . . himself and witnessing the joy when the headmaster is shot. “We all leapt to our feet.” At St. Peter’s, it was taken for granted that some priests had a sexual interest in the students. It was never spelled out but was part of a system of sly jokes and sneering whispers. At San Leone Magno the chemistry teacher, Svampa, an “elderly priest with [a] thin, nasal voice . . . would scrutinize each of us with a gaze that seemed to physically palpate the face and grope the body.” Since the brothers or priests in the school devote themselves to teaching academic subjects to rich boys rather than, say, visiting the sick and spreading the word of God, it is hard to understand precisely what their function as clergy is. Albinati sees the effect this has on them: Friend A Novel from North Korea PAEK NAM-NYONG Translated by Immanuel Kim “In its candid examination of domestic conflict and female ambition, Friend unsettles expectations of North Korean life ... [It] offers a beguiling introduction to the everyday, with none of the rockets and military parades that the words ‘North Korea’ often bring to mind.” —The New York Times “This tender, witty novel is indeed a page-turner. Neither a searing indictment of the regime nor a propaganda screed, Friend illuminates the personal rather than the political, the daily trials of workplace conflcts and martial woes. In doing so, it sharpens our ability to see the fragility and messy humanity in lives too often obscured by state agendas.” —The Guardian “Reading Friend is like sifting through a black box for clues into a sealed world.” —Times Literary Supplement COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU 38 The member of a male community, who lives in it for a long time or even for his entire life, is generally sadistic, narcissistic, obsessed with the power that he exercises and submits to on a daily basis, and homosexual, either practicing or latent. Otherwise, he won’t be able to hold out. In The Catholic School, the male students “hold out” through the intensity of their response to women: “For the males, the simplest way of proving that they are, in fact, male is to hold femininity in contempt.” And through their fear: The true opposite of masculinity wasn’t femininity but homosexuality: a perilous border. The masculine ideal could be defined as a negation: the exact opposite of a man wasn’t a woman, it was a queer. The most intolerable fear for us males was that someone might laugh at us . . . Toward the end of the book, Albinati has an evocative account of being fondled by a priest in the sick bay, but he also has descriptions of homoerotic moments between the boys themselves, such as a scene in which two of them, with their backs to each other for the sake of modesty, remove their swimsuits. It is the absence of women in the school that creates an intensity around male behavior: “In an all-male school,” Albinati writes, “the threat can be sensed in a physical way, as it is among dogs. . . . Males are monotonous, and monotony tends to evolve into frustration, and frustration in its turn splits into melancholy or aggression.” There is also the matter of insecurity: “The abstract ideal of virility, well, it’s almost impossible to nail it, the vast majority of men fail to come even close over the course of a lifetime.” Instead, there is “fragility, sense of inadequacy, anxiety, fear of judgment, of being unable to satisfy the expectations of others, fear of failure.” Albinati’s book, made up of many short sections, is long and long-winded. It lacks what we might call the literary tone, showing no signs of irony, inwardness, self-consciousness, or ambiguity. Most of the time it is simply garrulous. Reading it is like being buttonholed by a man in a bar who wishes to speak at length about sex and men and rape. Some of the comments in the book are startlingly crass. After giving some illustrations of male insecurity, for example, Albinati writes: There’s probably a connection between this insecurity and the number of women raped: as the insecurity increases, the number of rapes rises correspondingly. And the rape isn’t caused by testosterone, if anything, it’s a surrogate for it. The word “probably” here doesn’t help; it makes the conclusions even more glib. While Albinati has a great deal to say about why men commit the crime of rape, his observations sound half-baked and spurious. The tone he takes is filled with provocative assertion and blockheaded theory, but also a lack of awareness of what his own voice sounds like as he rattles on about testosterone and masculinity. The central question around which the book circles is: “Why shouldn’t our bourgeoisie, with its frenzy, its thirst for recognition, why shouldn’t it produce criminals?” In Albinati’s version of bourgeois life and male insecurity, something untoward is bound to occur. “Some of the most respected scholars of violence,” he writes, maintain that there is no violence more bloodthirsty than bourgeois violence. No revolution has ever been as ferocious as the ones led by intellectuals of bourgeois extraction and education (such as Pol Pot). No matter what the subject, Albinati has an opinion on it. “In five-a-side soccer, you can’t camouflage or disguise your nature.” “The religious sentiment does not depend on any particular process of reasoning.” “All this sex, all this violence could always be legitimized as a reaction against bourgeois hypocrisy, conformism, the stupidity of the world of television and consumerism.” “The underlying paradox of the family is that it originates from sexuality but is destined to become an institution.” “A cock is a tool with all the sensitivity of a hammer.” Albinati refers to his own verbose tendencies. At the opening of chapter 9 we are given permission to skip “to the next, decisive chapter.” At the opening of chapter 14, having asked, “Are you still listening to me?,” he writes that he “could recommend skipping a few chapters and go directly to Part V.” Later, on page 855, he writes, “I will be repetitive, obsessive.” One small reason not to skip any part of this book may arise from a note at the end telling us that it was begun in 1975 and finished forty years later. These are years in which so much changed in the conversations about the relationship between men and women. What is fascinating about The Catholic School is that it enacts, in the most extreme way, the very sounds some men might have made before they were invited to become more mannerly, more intelligent, more alert, more sensitive, and less stupid. The book was finished in a time when men were often asked to shut up completely and let someone else talk. The Catholic School is, sometimes, a good example of what it was like before this had any real effect. At other times, however, it is a good example of nothing at all, other than the author’s boorishness. Toward the end of the book, Albinati writes: The feminine sex organ sits there, anonymous, dark, concealed beneath layers of fabric but, so to speak, always present, always perceptible in its hiding place between the thighs, another hole just an inch or so from the hole that everyone has, even men. The best that can be said about this observation is that it occurs on page 916. Most readers will surely have become too exhausted by the book’s tediousness to get that far. Not long afterward, in his analysis of the motives that he imagines lie behind rape, Albinati writes with an even more intense crudeness: In rape, the targets are interchangeable: it depends on opportunities. Proof of this is the fact that when it was a matter of abusing wellto-do young women, before the CR / M [the crime that is the subject of the book], the boys certainly hadn’t been shy about it. You can find just as many reasons to rape a rich little bitch as you can to rape a working-class slut. In different but every bit as intense ways, you can feel provoked and challenged by both categories of girls, you can get the same itch on the palm of your hands, the same yearning to crush them underfoot, humiliate them, punish them. The only possible excuse for this passage, and many like it, is that Albinati may not, in fact, be speaking in his own voice, and that these opinions may belong to others. He is perhaps letting us know, as graphically as he can, what they sound like. Because the tone is often so glib, gross, and offensive, it might seem impossible that the author and the narrator could be one and the same. And it is thus tempting to feel that the author may merely be letting us know how men who take rape lightly speak when no one else is listening. In the following passage, for example, it appears almost unimaginable that a writer could offer these words to us as his own opinions rather than something overheard or ascribed to others: If a woman gets uppity, if she denies or concedes herself to too many men, the rape will put her back in line. If she likes solitude, or fun, or books and concerts, or if she goes around without an escort in the illusion that she is independent, autonomous, or if she is too demanding because she wants to be loved and understood, then rape will make it clear to her just where she was wrong. When it’s time to give her a lesson, rape is always handy, within reach. But there is no evidence at all that Albinati is reporting how others speak or feel, or that these passages in his book are acts of ventriloquism. In The Catholic School, the writer makes clear that his narrator is not a persona or a created voice. A number of times in the book, Albinati lets us know about his own life—his time teaching in a prison, The New York Review for example, or the year and place of his birth—thus emphasizing that the first-person singular here is not a literary invention but the author himself, an author who asserts that “feminist thinkers have set records for appearing equally brilliant and deranged” but who doesn’t name any of these thinkers or quote from any texts by them on the subject of rape, violence against women, class, and masculinity. It might have added a degree of subtlety to Albinati’s book had he become involved in a discussion with those who have put serious thought into the subject of rape. When he writes about rape not as a crime but as an aspect of sex between men and women, instead of quoting from research on the subject, or testimony from women who have been raped or from rapists, he offers his own offhand views as though they should be taken seriously: In every relationship between male and female, between any male and any female, rape is present. Even where there has been no coercion; even where there is love and tenderness, there is rape. Rape is the simplified paradigm of relations between the sexes, its energy-saving mode, its substantial diagram, and it lies at the foundation of every relationship, of every act of intercourse, not necessarily brutal ones. A decade ago, I spent time in a village near Rome, often using a network of narrow roads to drive between the city and the village. The more deserted the stretch of road, the more likely I was to see prostitutes, usually of African origin, standing alone, waiting for clients. They were totally vulnerable, at the mercy of pimps who had dropped them there, and at the mercy of those who might pick them up. For anyone driving by, I thought, this was a forlorn, miserable, desperate sight. Albinati witnessed a similar scene. When he writes about this, he registers no pity, no worry, no outrage. Instead, he sees African prostitutes as they “extend their rounded asses toward the road and those who are driving along it.” They do this, he writes, “even today, Easter Sunday.” He notices that they displayed their bottoms openly, “while simultaneously concealing the least attractive aspect, because their faces are ugly, extremely ugly, bad enough to drive away anybody.” Twenty pages later, he mentions advice from a friend when he found that a “homely” young woman, Maria Elisa, was interested in him, but her “pretty girlfriend” was not: “Don’t start thinking about how homely Maria Elisa is. Instead, think about what fantastic blow jobs she would give you. Often that’s the way real dogs are: they know they aren’t pretty, so they make an effort to bridge the gap by becoming first-class cocksuckers.” Albinati creates the impression that men, by virtue of having a penis and testosterone, are somehow irredeemable. He seems determined to become an example of what he also manages, at times, to deplore. The author gives the impression that he has thought deeply on these matters, an impression belied by the crudity of his language and his oafish attitudes. When he writes, “A man may make use of a female body in one of four ways: by paying the woman for her services; by viewing an image of her body, nude or clothed, in still photo or film; by seducing her; or by kidnapping her,” one wonders not only where he had been since 1975 that he could equate these four things, put them in the same list, but where his editors have been, and where the jurors of the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award for a novel, have been, since they gave this book the prize in 2016. Sometimes, Albinati makes clear that he is writing about Italy rather than the wider world. In this passage, for example: Bourgeois joy consists of the sentiment of contrast: possessing what others do not and what they therefore envy. Apartments, suits, automobiles, and women, wives or lovers selected like pieces of fine silver or paintings or tapestries or rare furniture. He must be in Italy too when he writes about people “always setting the table with double sets of utensils and two glasses, even when there’s nothing to eat.” But it is hard to know where in the world he is describing when he writes: “There is not a more ascetic creature in existence than the well-to-do housewife.” To write this book, Albinati emphasizes, he consumed “shelves full of books and a plethora of cases that actually happened; nearly every paragraph from here [page 855] to the end of Part VII of this book will be a condensed version.” Despite the length of the novel and the amount of detailed argument and heated assertion and digression, it is clear that rape and violence against women cannot be usefully dealt with in a tone that is so assertive, self-confident, and creepy. As he circles his subject, Albinati, who seems pleased with himself, lets us know in passing that he would like to have a street named after him, “just a little, out-of-the-way street.” To suit its name, the street would, of course, have to be long as well as out-ofthe-way, and it might lack a number of necessary signs suggesting caution. While Albinati’s descriptions of school life, of all-male enclaves and their discontents, are accurate and sharp, his ability to write about rape is limited. While his sense of class and privilege is perceptive, as is his version of Catholicism, the minute he begins to generalize he loses the plot. Because he has, it seems, no sense of his own limits, and because he gives the impression of someone who feels entitled to be heard, his book is of value only as an unexpurgated version of a dark unconscious, or a mind unfettered by circumspection, or a man who feels free to say whatever comes into his mind. It would be too cruel to suggest that this book is necessary reading for anyone, but it may be useful for those who wish to see an example of how little progress we have made over the past forty years, or for those who wish to experience an interminable display of loquaciousness and idiocy masquerading as a novel. Q SAVE THE DATES SEPTEMBER 28 - OCTOBER 5 Stay tuned for details on how we will celebrate authors and books this year. Keep Reading. Stay Safe. brooklynbookfestival.org June 11, 2020 39 The Dream of World Monarchy R. J.W. Evans Emperor: it’s an arresting title. And the concept looks simple. If it means a ruler over vast lands and numerous peoples, then Charles V eminently qualifies. Through the accidents of fecund marriages and mortality among other prospective claimants, he held sway over a multitude of territories across much of Europe—from the Straits of Gibraltar and Sicily to the North Sea and the Baltic—and over American colonies newly conquered and settled. Yet things are not quite what they seem. As monarch of Spain, his richest possession, he famously signed himself “Yo el Rey”—“I the King”—and was known as Charles I. So why do we remember him as Charles V? No one could be more aware of the complexities of Charles’s situation than Geoffrey Parker. Emperor is a meticulous and comprehensive account by a master of traditional biography, the powerful narrative of a military and political career like no other. Charles enjoyed his share of fortuna, of triumphs like that when, as a young man in 1525, he destroyed the army of his French adversaries at Pavia, and even took their king, François I, prisoner on the battlefield. Increasingly, however, there were disasters too, such as the catastrophic sieges of Algiers in 1541 and Metz in 1552; Charles himself was almost captured the same year during an insurgency of former client princes in Germany. Success predominated, according to Parker, but his reign ended in “downfall” (the last part of the book bears that heading), when the bankrupt emperor could no longer settle even small debts. Hence, perhaps, Charles’s dramatic abdication in 1556 and his retirement to a remote Spanish monastery. It’s a vast canvas, but most memorable for Parker’s love of small descriptive or corroborative details. Indeed, at the heart of his presentation he places Charles’s person: his measured and stylish manner, his winsome blond hair, conspicuous projecting lower lip, and mouth always lolling slightly open, his politesse and affability in public, and his forbearance with detractors (“kynges be not kinges of tonges,” he conceded). Many less attractive traits are also recorded: Charles could be uncommunicative and dilatory, evasive and mendacious, refractory, vindictive, obstinate, even outright wicked, though self-delusive about the motives of others. He was contradictory in his cast of mind too: a slow and reluctant reader, mainly of romances and books of devotion, but quite bright (none other than Erasmus said he had “plenty of brains”). Charles was selectively inquisitive, for example about the indigenous cultures of the New World, and later about clocks to the point of obsession. He was likewise selective in the crucial imperial skill of language acquisition: he learned French, then Spanish and Italian by immersion; he spoke German and Dutch with bare adequacy, and struggled over a lifetime 40 Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Emperor: A New Life of Charles V by Geoffrey Parker. Yale University Press, 737 pp., $35.00 Charles—diligent, and often supportive beyond the call of duty, especially his aunt Margaret of Austria and his sister Maria. They built up solid administrative practices across his realms, in loose and desultory liaison with the itinerant warrior and his chief advisers. Charles showed little affection for his kin, and regularly indulged in moral blackmail. That shines through both his major male relationships, with his son Philip and his brother Ferdinand, whom Charles rarely dealt with face to face (the brothers didn’t meet at all until Ferdinand was in his teens). Philip turned out cool and calculating, though he owed more to his father than he wanted to acknowledge. Charles micromanaged his education and trained him to be heir to all his lands. Ferdinand could be pliant, even submissive, and Charles took advantage, envisaging him as some kind of auxiliary ruler. Actually, however, Philip became a “true prince of Castile,” a ruler rooted in Spain, whereas Charles gradually came around to accepting Ferdinand’s authority in Germany. For decades he periodically contemplated a future partition of his lands but could never quite bring himself to it; that progressively poisoned relations with his brother and culminated in bitter estrangement later. Alongside Titian: Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg, 1548 with Latin. Increasingly he became preoccupied with his own physical sufferings, especially piles and gout, and by the end his body was often racked with pain. H ow do we know so much about him? Parker enlists a host of wonderful witnesses, for Charles was never alone. Particularly rich are the observations of Englishmen, from early diplomats like John Stile and Sir Thomas Spinelly to the perceptive scholars Roger Ascham and Sir John Mason, who can all be quoted in their own vivid language. Mason, for instance, is Parker’s correspondent at the abdicatory farewell in 1555, when Charles’s “heart seemed overwhelmed by grief, and his sobs prevented him from speaking, while tears poured down his cheeks, provoked”— the envoy thought—“by seing the hole company to doo the lyke before [him], being in myne opynion not one man in the hole assemblee” that during “his oration poured not owte habondantly teares.” Besides interrogating the vast array of printed sources, built up over centuries, from official correspondence to private diaries, Parker has conducted an exhaustive trawl of the archives too. Moreover, Charles himself created an extensive and revealing paper trail, notably the “secret document” to instruct his son Philip II, the future king of Spain, from 1543 and the “political testament” five years later. All this evidence yields remarkable insights into the everyday life of the emperor, with many intimate particulars and sometimes earthy language. The wealth of material fails, however, to convey much sense of Charles’s principal preoccupation: his endless warring. As one example, here he is, in that programmatic statement (Parker calls it his “grand strategy”) to Philip, about their chief adversary, the king of France: “I intend to defend myself from him. . . . But if I find that he has not attacked me, I will attack him.” If readers feel they are losing the thread of causation, that seems to be exactly what happened to Charles and his advisers. The same is true of all the marital permutations, pursued in series and in parallel between the Habsburgs and other ruling families, that litter Parker’s text. Yet the ultimate rationale for both aggression and conjugation was as clear then as it is now. Dynasticism, the dynasty as a principle of rule—in its Habsburg version—made possible Charles’s authority through the windfall of inheritance (much of it contrived by his grandfather Emperor Maximilian I) and was the vehicle for further strategic marriages. The Habsburgs had built on or usurped the familial networks of their rivals—Trastámaras, Valois, Luxemburgs, Jagiellons—yielding unions of crowns across the continent whose operations depended on the genes and brains of siblings. The often dysfunctional and increasingly inbred Habsburg clan dominates this book. It included Charles’s deranged mother, Joanna, the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who, although technically still queen of Castile and Aragon, was disempowered and held in seclusion for decades by her son. But other relatives were capable—some more so than the bonds of dynasty, Charles committed himself to a particular kind of courtly conduct and style of rule. The inspiration came not from Spain or Germany, but from the terrain of his upbringing, Burgundy. We might wonder today what was so special about this failed state, which had been based in what is today northeast France, Benelux, and adjacent parts of the Rhineland. But it was Charles’s native soil, “his owne patrymonye”; he spent half his life there and was always reluctant to leave it; he long hoped to be buried in its soil. He bore the name of his ancestor Charles the Bold, independent Burgundy’s last and most memorable ruler, and was always mindful that it had been the heartland too of an earlier and still more illustrious namesake, Charlemagne. Charles, needless to say, fought over these lands, added some provinces to them, and had all of his Low Countries established as a separate administrative unit (“circle”) in 1548. Yet the Burgundian traditions to which Charles clung were already a wasting asset. He espoused a world of chivalry, of joust and pageant, of duel and heraldic challenge, of aulic refinement—his court was already over three hundred strong as he entered his teens, and he took over six hundred retainers with him to Spain in 1517—and the ideal courtier. The famous Libro del Cortegiano of his protégé Baldassare Castiglione was one of his favorite texts. That meant frequent histrionics: extravagant ceremonies for his majority in 1515; the ceremonial entrance into Bologna and coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 1529–1530; the triumphal procession to Rome in 1536 after a successful campaign to recapture Tunis from the Turks; a grand reconciliation with the king of France in The New York Review 1539; the penance of the seditious burghers of his birthplace, Ghent, in 1540. Just to unfurl his standard before yet another battle could be a highly symbolic act. Reputation was all: “I do not want to disappear from the world without leaving something memorable behind”; “the day that a man loses his honour, he should die.” Such civilian virtues as financial competence or simple rectitude had little appeal for Charles. He was a military man to the core: brave, even reckless; marching at the head of his troops even into old age, “wearing full armour with a tunic made of cloth-ofgold, to make himself look good,” “reconnoitr[ing] enemy positions with his own eyes,” tackling mutineers head-on, and exercising the personal command needed over “almoost a dousen diverse nations . . . in myn armey.” The abdication too, proclaimed in Brussels, possessed Burgundian echoes. His grandfather Maximilian I had already toyed with such a step in Charles’s youth. It was an emotional occasion for all concerned, but Parker shows it to have been not a coup de théâtre or admission of failure, as it is often portrayed, but rather a pragmatic calculation and strategic withdrawal. Charles chose the seclusion of Yuste in Extremadura for his final residence, but he still desired some share in the affairs of state (Philip denied him that), and his cloister certainly did not become a locus of otherworldly meditation. Moreover, despite all those ailments the emperor was not a really sick man until—Parker’s ultimate irony—the monastery’s pestilential mosquitoes caused his death. As his final sojourn among the er- emites of Saint Jerome reminds us, Christianity was central for Charles, as a rhetoric of rule and as a living faith. The two went together: Charles’s genuine—and time-consuming—piety and the sincerity of some of his personal statements (freely cited by Parker) exposed the hollowness of many of the church’s official postures. That hollowness is what generated the enormous protests initiated by Martin Luther in 1517, and the subsequent schism over which Charles had to preside. He evidently saw what came to be called the Reformation as a squarely German problem, but troubles in Central Europe coincided with signs of spiritual crisis across his entire empire. Much depended on Charles’s relations with successive popes (he dealt with seven of them). These were often fractious and mistrustful; at times Charles could be entirely disparaging about prelatical behavior. He had a turbulent Spanish bishop tortured and murdered; then came the imperial troops’ sack of Rome in 1527 (though that was followed by another of Charles’s grand reconciliations); at the end he had to contend with the psychotic, cruel, and deeply divisive Pope Paul IV. Emperor and pontiffs agreed on the need to combat “heresy,” but that meant different things at different times and places. Charles equally sought a “council that the Germans say must be held in order to resolve the situation there,” without papal cooperation if necessary. In the event, he held aloof from the settlement reached with the Lutherans by his brother Ferdinand, but when a council friendly to June 11, 2020 Rome eventually convened at Trent in 1545 after decades of delay, he declined to endorse its doctrinal pronouncements either. For doctrine was not Charles’s concern. Although he appealed to theologians for edification and counsel, theology itself could send him to sleep. The unity, not the purity, of Christendom was central to the legitimacy of his rule. His celebrated motto “Plus Ultra” (Still Further) blended a classical and a Christian commitment to global dominion. For both his person and his dynasty, Charles believed in providence: even his chancellor had to warn him (unavailingly) not to expect “that God will always perform miracles in your affairs.” Had not the hegemony of the first Roman emperor providentially afforded a universal political vehicle for the emergence of the Christian community at the very start? If the vision was uniform, the reality was disjunctive. Parker graphically conveys the peripatetic life of Charles (who himself cataloged forty major shifts of location in as many years). The interminable travels, often with much discomfort, as when he first arrived in Spain in 1517 (“probably the most miserable [months] of his life,” says Parker), went with a trouble-shooting style of rule and an extraordinarily intense pursuit of personal diplomacy. We feel a sense of continual near chaos and helplessness in the face of those unprecedented challenges: “so many things happening at the same time”; “the wars that I have been forced to fight so many times and in so many places.” Yet that somehow melded with the beginnings of bureaucracy, based on written opinions (called consultas in the Spanish administration) and genuine assiduity over business. Charles had to leave much to a small team of shrewdly chosen and often long-serving advisers (above all the Perrenots de Granvelle, father and son). Hence laborious outcomes, which could be all too closely considered, as the emperor would “take his time to think things through,” and sluggish decision-making, sometimes by his own admission “so impenetrable and uncertain . . . full of confusions and contradictions.” It became a quip of the time that if death came in a letter from Spain we should all be immortal—though on occasion the regime did employ express couriers. All this worked best within the Hispanic lands. Charles first saw them when he was seventeen, and he only gradually and partially became a Spaniard. As a callow ruler there, he immediately faced a large-scale rebellion, the so-called revolt of the Comuneros, partly provoked by his own insensitive actions; but it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Thereafter Spain grew easier to govern, with its representative bodies near-dormant, and Charles could pioneer an administrative consolidation centered on Castile (“the chief among our kingdoms”), from which many of his chief counselors and confidants were drawn. Castile also managed and strictly controlled the great American enterprise: the freshly acquired tracts several times the size of Spain, with millions of mainly indigenous inhabitants. Their governance did not much preoccupy Charles, but the implications of this “New World of gold made just for him” were huge, since the Hispanic heartland and the galvanic transatlantic opportunities enabled his imperial adventures elsewhere. His “grand chancellor,” the cosmopolitan humanist Mercurino Arborio de Gattinara, came nearest to being the ideologue of this “dream of the last world monarchy,” or “acquisition of the whole globe.” Charles himself later repudiated such an ambition, but it underpinned his aspirations to gain a real empire when in 1519 he spent 1.5 million florins to achieve election as Holy Roman Emperor.1 Henceforth, this was his highest title: that’s why we remember him as Charles V 1 Strictly speaking, Charles was elected, in 1519, and crowned, in 1520, as “king of the Romans.” The substantive title of “Roman emperor” followed upon his coronation by the pope in Bologna ten years later. But the two dignities had become largely synonymous, the more so as this latter coronation proved the last of its kind. (Charlemagne seven hundred years earlier was deemed to have been the first). Prestige (“reputation”) and security alike required Charles to assume this unique dignity as the purportedly lineal successor to the universal imperium of ancient Rome. Spain had never been part of the Holy Roman Empire, but it did include Burgundy and much of Italy. Its center of gravity lay in “Germany”— then merely a loose geographical expression for a congeries of larger and smaller principalities, free cities, and lands of the church. Through his election Charles became officially Kaiser of “the German nation” and needed to be perceived as a native ruler (for all his erratic grasp of the language). He could browbeat there, even gain temporary mastery in the 1540s, fighting a hideously expensive war against his own people. But though he claimed that “I . . .will not bargain with my subjects,” mostly he needed consensus, and he never built the same secure political, ENCUUKƂGFU"P[DQQMUEQO 225 SMITH STREET, BROOKLYN, NY 11231 BOOKSAREMAGIC.NET bookshop While we are closed please shop on line for direct to home delivery www.foxbookshop.com Established 1951 41 social, or institutional base in Germany as he did in Spain. Protected by sympathetic—and calculating—princes, Luther could challenge Charles to espouse religious reform. And menacing Ottoman garrisons were now stationed just beyond the empire’s frontiers. The leaders of the “German nation” struck back again in 1552 (that’s when they nearly managed to take Charles prisoner), revealing the extraordinary debility of the emperor’s overall geopolitical situation, exacerbated as it was by resort to loans as wars became ever costlier and supplies of New World treasure tailed off. In the end, the “real” empire, and the unreal visions and expectations it had induced, proved to be the undoing of Charles. Yet he did leave one major legacy to Germany (unmentioned by Parker): the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, a major advance in the codification and administration of justice. Set alongside his better-remembered pioneering legislation on native rights in America, the Carolina did something to justify the confidence of his supporters that Charles would “lay down the law to all of Christendom.” However, its many hideous penalties reflected Charles’s own ideas of criminal (and international) law, which—as Parker repeatedly shows—could be both cruel and vengeful. One of the emperor’s last acts as a military commander was personally to order—with evident Schadenfreude—the total destruction of Thérouanne, not just a fortress but an entire cathedral city on the chronically contested border with France, which he reckoned contumacious. T he fate of Thérouanne was part of a much bigger picture, a token of Charles’s international legacy. Parker doesn’t make much of the “grand strategy” here, though he’s written about it elsewhere in relation to Charles’s son Philip.2 Perhaps even he is tiring by the end, and his “balance of the reign” appears rather mechanical and obvious by the supremely high standard he’s set and sustained hitherto. So let us give the word to Charles’s first serious biographer: It was during his administration that the powers of Europe were formed into one great political system, in which each took a station, wherein it has since remained. . . . The great events which happened then have not hitherto spent their force. The political principles and maxims then established still continue to operate. The ideas concerning the balance of power then introduced, or rendered general, still influence the councils of nations. 3 That is William Robertson, writing in 1769 (Parker calls it the earliest “standard work”). Robertson was an urbane and perspicuous commentator, just a decade before Gibbon, on the growth and rise—as it were—of another, more recent but still quasi-Roman empire. We should beware of accounting Charles a “European” avant la lettre, but these are issues of a novel and European balance. Did Charles’s ascendancy—and that of the Turks—bring about this new diplomatic equilibrium? The Muslim threat also coincided exactly (but improvidentially?) as Sultan Suleiman, later called the Magnificent, succeeded his father Selim, the conqueror of Mecca, in the same year that Charles became emperor. Yet Charles’s engagement with the Ottomans (by contrast with his brother Ferdinand’s) proved desultory. He said that “in order to defeat the Turks he would abandon everything,” but he failed to keep his word. He did just enough to make the Turks natural partners of Charles’s other foes, especially the French, and thus to spread an alliance system continent-wide. At least equally crucial was the newly established nexus between Ibe- ria and Central Europe. Habsburg rule became reasonably secure in each of them, but the combination of the two bred instability, as Charles realized in his more lucid moments, and as the next generation would show, when the perilous chemin des Espagnols, or Spanish Road, between the Habsburg territories in northern Italy and the Low Countries had to be negotiated by troops (fifty years ago, Parker traveled that route closely himself and launched his distinguished career with a book about it4). The militant response of a now encircled France left the Habsburgs seriously overextended, above all in the Netherlands. 4 The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ War (Cambridge University Press, 1972). This was, at heart, the lasting problem of Burgundy, the “middle kingdom” between French, German, and English spheres of influence. Charles’s fierce loyalty to it had huge geopolitical ramifications. For centuries to come, disputes over sovereignty there continued to provoke military conflicts. Meanwhile he facilitated, while Ferdinand created, a semidetached “Austrian” subempire, never envisaged as an entity in itself until much later, and always vulnerable to international power shifts. This “monarchy” of the Habsburgs would preserve something of their imperial pretensions, as part of a European power balance. Yet the gap between aspiration and reality grew ever wider for this dynastic state. Eventually, in 1918, it would go down in war (with another Habsburg emperor Charles at its helm), four hundred years after Charles V had first staked his claim to hegemony. Q HOLES In the midst of a continual program of demolition and reconstruction, we noticed, one summer, that our city had begun to replicate, via its infrastructure, the prohibitions of the mind. There were roadworks constricting almost every major thoroughfare. Buses were regularly terminated short of their destination or treated passengers halfway through their journey to the wearying and ominous automated announcement, “This bus is on diversion.” A number of these roadworks were connected to the development of a high-speed railway line whose viability had never been proven, now a pawn of warring factions of the government. Others looked temporary and unconvincing, as though they were only props intended to convey the impression of industry—but whether they were temporary or not, they remained. Our illusion of control, fundamental to whatever fragmentary sense of well-being we could cling to, became ever more illusory until it vanished completely. Several times I watched a man in a fluorescent vest roughly pry up a drain cover with a screwdriver, kneel down and start poking around inside it, something I took personally. You saw things like this every day in the city, where they were always digging. They would scratch and scratch with their tools at the surface of roads until they split them open because this was a necessary precursor to change, and change was intrinsic to growth. Anyone could see that the pursuit of perpetual growth was maniacal, but it went on all the same. Naturally the human body ceases to grow after a certain age; what grows after that are malignancies, like the growths one saw all over the city. It was unremarkable until you looked at it on the macro scale; in fact nothing ever changed, noth- ing of note—we had instead the sense that what was being uncovered in this relentless excavation was an advanced condition of sclerosis, a hardened and continually hardening rigidity, resistant to change. It was the same state we ourselves endured, were made hard by, in this city which had more and more holes where something had been dug up and never filled in (they could never be filled in, not really, even if they were filled in the city would still never be anything other than a collection of filled-in holes). On my route into town I passed buildings still standing that had been ripped half to pieces by bulldozers, looking desolate, bombed (though they had not of course been bombed, it had been arranged for all the bombing to happen elsewhere), their insides on show, like wrecked dolls’ houses atop a trash heap. Which is what they were, in a manner of speaking, to the forces of money that powered this city and destroyed it every day, except that they had not been cherished as a doll’s house is often cherished, they had been blighted and abandoned even as they stood intact. Torn-off wiring stuck out all over these blasted buildings like hair standing on end, and your hair did stand on end to see the remains of so many rooms that once enclosed people, providing, in the best-case scenario perhaps, the illusion of safety and permanence, if not actual safety and permanence, which were elusive in this city, even in this city, which was said to be among the world’s most important, this most powerful, most desirable, most influential, most visited, most expensive, innovative, sustainable, most—of course—investment-friendly, most popular for work city in the world. —Emily Berry 2 The Grand Strategy of Philip II (Yale University Press, 1998). 3 William Robertson, History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth (two volumes, London: Routledge, 1857), volume 1, p. vii. 42 The New York Review What Kind of Country Do We Want? In my odd solitude I stream the America of recent memory. The pretext for drama, in the foreground, seems always to be a homicide, but around and beyond the forensic stichomythia that introduces character and circumstance there is a magnificent country, a virtual heaven. In a dystopian future, children would surely ask what it was like to live in such a country. Candid memory would say, By no means as wonderful as it should have been, even granting the broad streaks of pain in its history. Before there was a viral crisis whose reality forced itself on our notice, there were reports of declines of life expectancy in America, rising rates of suicide, and other “deaths of despair.” This is surely evidence of another crisis, though it was rarely described as such. The novel coronavirus has the potential for mitigation, treatment, and ultimately prevention. But a decline in hope and purpose is a crisis of civilization requiring reflection and generous care for the good of the whole society and its place in the world. We have been given the grounds and opportunity to do some very basic thinking. Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design. Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be. No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. June 11, 2020 Magnum Photos Marilynne Robinson Doña Ana County, New Mexico, 2017; photograph by Matt Black This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress. If we want to avoid the word “progress,” then call it the creative unrest that made 2019 an advance on 1919. In recent decades, which have been marked by continuous, disruptive change and by technological innovation that has reached assertively into every area of life, a particular economics has become a Theory of Everything, subordinating all other considerations to some form of cost-benefit analysis that silently insinuates special definitions of both cost and benefit. If neither of these is precisely monetizable— calories might have to stand in for currency in primordial transactions— personal advantage, again subject to a highly special definition, is seen as the one thing at stake in human relations. The profit motive has been implanted in our deepest history as a species, in our very DNA. This kind of thinking has discredited ideals like selflessness and generosity as hypocritical or self- deceived, or in any case as inefficiencies that impede the natural economy of self-interest— somehow persisting through all the mil- lennia that might have been expected to winnow out inefficiencies, if the pervasiveness of this one motive is granted. I consider the American university to be among the highest achievements of Western civilization. And I know at the same time that varieties of nonsense that would not last ten minutes if history or experience were consulted can flourish there, and propagate, since our entire professional class, notably teachers, go to university. There has always been learned nonsense, of course. But when angels danced on the heads of pins, at least the aesthetic imagination was brought into play. Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning- off of lowincome workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China. The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle- class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II. In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values. Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work. Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, 43 44 history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore. The minimum wage has become the amount an employer can get away with paying. It is neither the amount a worker needs to sustain a reasonable life nor, crucially, to be important enough as a consumer for his or her interests to align with other interests. Because workers are underpaid, they are often treated as dependents, as a burden on the “safety net,” which is actually a public subsidy of the practice of underpayment. Workers often do not fall into the category of “taxpayer,” a word now laden with implication and consequence. It implies respectability, a more robust participation in citizenship, and, fairly or not, an extreme sensitivity to demands made on his or her assets for the public benefit. Equitable policies are often precluded in the name of the taxpayer so forcibly that the taxpayer— that is, a fair percentage of the public— is never really consulted. In this time of polarization, such language reflects an ugly, alienating division in our society, with bad faith at the root of it. Proud people are insulted, those same people we now call “essential” because they work steadily at jobs that are suddenly recognized as absolutely necessary. Behind all this there is a scarcely articulated variant of an old model, once prevalent throughout the West, that invoked national wealth as the summum bonum of collective life. For the purposes of the theory in its present iteration, the absurd wealth that has accumulated at the top end of polarization is reckoned as part of the national wealth no matter how solidly it is based in poverty. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, great engines of wealth built global empires that filled the world with colonialism, militarism, and racialism, as well as monuments and marching bands. These trappings of power generated the excited identification of the masses with the nation no matter how hostile the system was to their own interests. As adapted for what was recently the present, this wealth is still a product of national policies—favorable taxation, imaginative banking regulations, and low production costs, including depressed wages and lowered safety and environmental standards. The cinch that tightens such slack as remains in the lives of the underpaid is called “austerity” or “fiscal discipline.” Austerity has not touched the beneficiaries of these arrangements, nor has fiscal discipline. These policies amount to continuous downward pressure on the accommodations made to the fact that wages are not sufficient to meet basic needs. “Austerity” and “discipline” retain their brisk, morally coercive force, amazingly. The work ethic persists through impoverishment, unemployment, deindustrialization driven by pools of cheap labor elsewhere, and the de-skilling that is the effect of all these declines. This is to say that the kind of shame suffered most sharply by proud people has been put to use to sustain this ugly economic and social configuration, too opportunistic and unstable to be called a system. It offers no vision beyond its effects. Obviously the depletions of public life, the decay of infrastructure, the erosions of standards affecting general health are not intended to make America great again. They are, in the experience of the vast majority of Americans, dispossessions, a cheapening of life. T he theory that supports all this is taught in the universities. Its terminology is economic but its influence is broadly felt across disciplines because Theodor Jung/Library of Congress which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind. All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a lifeengrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this. The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk. Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislators—out of an association between political courage and parsimony—respond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms. How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in An abandoned brick factory, Ohio, 1936 it is in fact an anthropology, a theory of human nature and motivation. It comes down to the idea that the profit motive applies in literally every circumstance, inevitably, because it is genetic in its origins and its operations. “Selfishness,” its exponents call it, sometimes arguing that the word in this context has a special meaning, though the specifics of the sanitizing are unclear. Behind every act or choice is a cost-benefit analysis engaged in subrationally. This is to say that thinking itself is the product of this constant appraisal of circumstance, which is prior to thinking, therefore not subject to culture, moral scruples, and so on, which are merely a scheme of evolution to hide this one universal intention from the billions of us who, in our endless diversity, make up the human species. Greed is good, or at least good enough to have brought us this far. For an important part of any population, these would be glad tidings—moral considerations not only suspended but invalidated, moralists revealed as hypocrites and fools as well, since they have no idea that the genius and force of evolution are against them. By its nature, this worldview is based in the moment, in any new occasion to seek advantage. This view of things is radically individualistic, indifferent to any narrative of identity or purpose. It takes a cynical view of people as such, since no one’s true motives are different from those of the consciously selfish. Because there is only one motive—to realize a maximum of benefit at a minimum of cost—those who do not flourish are losers in an invidious, Darwinian sense. Winners are exempt from moral or eth- ical scrutiny since advance of any sort is the good to be valued. “Progress” is likewise exempt from the kind of scrutiny that would raise questions about the real value this process generates, reckoned against other value that is precluded or destroyed. Americans never believe that Americans are actually influenced by the education they require of themselves and one another, on which they lavish much wealth. To do so would smack of intellectualism, a trait we do not grant ourselves. The same economic model is prevalent in Britain and France, perhaps Europe in general, though it is asserted in other terms. Austerity has prevailed there for decades. The issues raised by the Yellow Vest movement in France are highly consistent with the situation in America. The retraction of policies that acknowledged the claims of the population at large on the wealth of their nation can be described, historically, as the return of the ancien régime, or as the final triumph of capitalism, or as proof of the waning of Judeo- Christianity, or as recognition of the fact that, when all is said and done, self-interest is indeed the one unvarying human motive. All these could be true simultaneously, each reinforcing the others. This theory has all the power among us of an ideology, though it lacks any account of past or future, any vision of ultimate human well-being. It promotes itself as nationalism, though its operations are aggressively global. The supposed nationalism plays on a nostalgia for the postwar decades, when the prestige of countries and regions was measured by living standards. Perhaps it derives also from the myth of ideological conflict, the notion that if the Russians had communism, America must have an equal and opposite ideology. This would be called and in time would become capitalism, though the economy Marx critiques under that name is the highly exceptional colonial, industrial, and mercantilist Britain of the nineteenth century. It is one of the stranger turns in modern history that, for the purposes of this epochal controversy, one man, Karl Marx, named and described both of these ideologies. This is a great concession made to someone whose thought his antagonists claimed to deplore, though it is fair to assume both that they had not read him and that they were simply content to be spared the effort of arriving at definitions of their own. Also, he had the chic of being dangerously European. The pastiche, or the motley, we are inclined to think of as American self-awareness is strange under scrutiny. If we are uniquely characterized by entrepreneurialism, for example, why is the only name we have for it a word of unassimilated French? That sort of thing is usually a signifier for pretentiousness or embarrassment. This little oddity is germane to the larger case against the status quo ante, in which many of our governing assumptions are flimsy and nonsensical, and have stood in the place of meaningful thought, especially in lofty circles, in institutions of great influence, the universities. Because of this quaint adherence to Marxian categories a narrative has emerged over time that capitalism is the single defining trait of American civilization, the force that has propelled the country not only to unpreceThe New York Review dented wealth but also to high levels of personal and political freedom. These assumptions are in need of scrutiny, not by comparison with other countries but of this country with itself a few generations ago. The other half of the great binary, communism, was never realized anywhere, never successful anywhere so far as it was attempted. That somehow legitimizes Marx’s schema, even though this is not at all the result he predicted. Never mind. We are left with the certainty that a civilization can be wholly described by its economy, and that ours is exhaustively and triumphally capitalist—making anomalous the many well- established features of the culture to which the word “public” might attach: schools, lands, and, more generally, public works, public services, the public interest. If the furthest implications of the reign of “selfishness” are not yet fully actualized, no doubt custom, manners, image, shame, or the occasional laws are the obstacle, since the theory itself is so simple and natural in its operation that it should be as small an intrusion on the order of things as multiplying everything by one. It could be used to rationalize stealing the pennies from a dead man’s eyes, true, even considering the nugatory value of the contemporary penny. Judgment as to whether it has reached this extreme must await a fuller knowledge of its global impact. Closer to home, it has scuppered the old habit of measuring wealth by standard of living. Averaging helicopters, yachts, and offshore accounts against imminent eviction would not yield a meaningful result. The cult of cost/benefit—of the profit motive made granular, cellular—not only trivializes but also attacks whatever resists its terms. Classic American education is ill-suited to its purposes and is constantly under pressure to reform—that is, to embrace as its purpose the training of workers who will be competitive in the future global economy. What this means, of course, is that universities and students themselves should absorb the cost to industry of training its workforce. Since no one knows what the industries of the future will be, a wrong guess about appropriate training could be costly, which means it would be all the smarter, from a certain point of view, to make colleges and students bear the risk. If this training produces skills that are relevant to future needs, their cost to the employer will be lowered by the fact that such skills will be widely available. In any case, the relative suitability of workers will be apparent in their school history, so industry will be spared the culling of ineffective employees. Those who fail to make the cut will be left with the pleasures of a technical education that is always less useful to them, skills that will be subject to obsolescence as industries change. Certain facts go unnoticed in all this. The great wealth that is presented as endorsing an American way of doing things was amassed over a very long period of time. Lifetime earnings as well as longevity are adduced to demonstrate the value of university education. Obviously, these are measures of the well-being of people who were educated a generation or two ago. Otherwise, there would be no way of measuring workers’ peak June 11, 2020 earnings or their longevity. So there is clear evidence of the economic value of an education based on the humanist model that is now under siege. There is no evidence that education designed to train a workforce would be equally productive of wealth, but it would be profitable in another way, cheapening labor by diminishing the participation of the public in whatever wealth is produced. This is the embrace of inequality, accumulation on one side accelerated by deprivation on the other. Historically, we have offered our young—though never enough of them—exposure to high thought and great art, along with chemistry and engineering. There is an opulence in all this that has no equivalent in the world. What were those earlier generations thinking when they built our great city-states of research and learning? All those arches and spires induce the belief in undergraduates that they have a dignified place in human history, something better than collaborating in the blind creep of a material culture that values only itself, that is indifferent on principle to the past, and inclined, when it considers a future, to imagine the ultimate displacement of the human worker and at the same time to develop systems of social control of which even Bentham could not dream. Why control people for whom no role or use is imagined? If these futures seem incompatible, the theory of cost/benefit does not admit of such criticism. Present trends, inevitably understood in light of emergent possibilities, are, in the nature of things, ineluctable—or they were until a few weeks ago, when the system that had become more or less coextensive with our sense of reality abruptly collapsed. Emergencies remind us that people admire selflessness and enjoy demands on their generosity, and that the community as a whole is revivified by such demands. Great cost and greater benefit, as these things are traditionally understood. If in present circumstances we are driven back on our primitive impulses, then we should be watching our collective behavior carefully, because it will be instructive with regard to identifying an essential human nature. In more senses than one we are living through an unprecedented experiment, an opportunity it would be a world-historical shame to waste. Its value as experiment is enhanced by the near absence of leadership from the central government. In various forms, the crisis will persist indefinitely. Over time communities will organize themselves according to their senses of decency and need. Since this crisis is as novel as the virus that has caused it, and since the lack of a helpful central government is unique in the modern period, old thinking and new thinking will emerge over time, and the calculus of cost will be reckoned against the cost of failing to sustain the things that are valued. Benefit will be realized in the fact that needs are identified and served, with all the satisfactions this will entail. Allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by. As Americans, we should consider our freedoms—of thought, press, and religion, among others—the basic constituents of our well-being, and accept the controversies that have always The perfect gift for your favorite young reader! A year’s worth of classic books — at 20% savings plus U.S. FREE shipping We’ve grouped some of our most popular books by age and interest and will send one book every other month for an entire year to the lucky child. All of the books in the NYRB Children’s Collection are “forever books”—praised for their beautiful covers and sturdy bindings, these books set a new standard for the definition of a classic. Classic Picture Books Best Early Readers Whimsical Early Readers Ages 3–7 Ages 3–7 Ages 3–7 First Chapter Books Early Chapter Books Heroines Ages 5–9 Ages 5–9 Ages 8–14 To order, please call 1-800-354-0050 or visit nyrb.com/cbc Our NY office is currently closed, but the NYRB Children’s Book Club selections are mailed from another location. . . . a small publisher that is a national treasure, responsible as they are for republishing or translating so many of the most astonishing books over the last two decades.” —Lauren Groff, The New York Times Book Review A membership in the NYRB Classics Book Club ensures a monthly literary surprise. Each month, editors select one book from our newest titles and we send it to members as soon as it is available The club is the most inexpensive way to own the books published in our acclaimed series. JOIN THE NYRB CLASSICS BOOK CLUB AND GET TWO BONUS BOOKS You may start your membership at any time but if you join by June 10th, you will receive the June selection, Lost Property: Confessions of a Bad Boy, Ben Sonnenberg’s book of memoirs and confessions and with an introduction by Maria Margaronis. “Its style is just right: darting, anecdotal, slightly bemused, possessing a lilting irony that makes for compulsive readability. There is also something funny, sexy, or shocking on every page.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Annual membership in the book club, including free shipping in the US, is $150. With our special limited-time offer you will receive 13 monthly books for the price of 12 PLUS a free bonus book: The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics selected by Edwin Frank, Editor of NYRB Classics. To order a membership for yourself or for another, please call 1-800-354-0050 or visit nyrb.com/bookclub. Our NY office is currently closed, but the NYRB Classics Book Club can accept new members because the monthly books are mailed from another location. 45 BOXES OF NYRB CLASSICS Treat yourself or give one as a gift! Paris: A Literary Visit Retail: $102.75; Your Price: $82.20 arisen around them as reflecting their vitality. Not so long ago they were something new under the sun, so if there is still a certain turbulence around them this should remind us that they are gifts of our brief history. We should step away from the habit of accepting competition as the basic model of our interactions with other countries, first because it creates antagonisms the world would be better off without, and second because recent history has shown that the adversary is actually us, and for ordinary people there is no success, no benefit. And we have to get beyond the habit of thinking in terms of scarcity. We live in the midst of great wealth prepared for us by other generations. We inherited sound roads and bridges. Our children will not be so favored. Since the value of basic investments is not realized immediately, we cannot rationalize the expenditure. We are the richest country in history, therefore richer than the generations that built it, but we cannot bring ourselves even to make repairs. Our thrift will be very costly over time. The notion or pretense that austerity is the refusal to burden our children with our debts is foolish at best. But it is persuasive to those who are injured by it as surely as to those who look at a pothole and see a tax cut. Hiding money in a hole in the ground has seemed like wisdom to some people since antiquity. And there are many who are truly straitened and insecure, and are trusting enough to assume that some economic wisdom lies behind it. Legislators all over America, duly elected, have subscribed to this kind of thinking and acted on it. We have seen where all this leads. It creates poverty, and plagues batten on poverty, on crowding and exhaustion. If the novel coronavirus did not have its origins in the order of things now in abeyance—other possibilities are even darker—that order was certainly a huge factor in its spread. As a culture we have spent a great deal of time in recent decades naming and deploring the crimes and injustices in our history. This is right and necessary. But the present crises have exposed crimes and injustices deeply embedded in the society we live in now. So we provide our descendants with a weighty burden of guilt to lament. This irony—too mild a word— casts grave doubt on the rigor of our self- examinations. All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one. The authenticity of our understanding must be demonstrated in our attempting to act justly even at steep cost to ourselves. We can do this as individuals and as a nation. Someday we will walk out onto a crowded street and hear that joyful noise we must hope to do nothing to darken or still, having learned so recently that humankind is fragile, and wonderful. Q LETTERS cost him his eye. Tailhade made the comment at a banquet, referring to the bomb thrown by Auguste Vaillant onto the floor of the Chamber of Deputies in 1893. The bomb resulted in no deaths but resulted in Vaillant’s execution and further acts of anarchist terror. into advertising and promotion, as a handy portmanteau that would cover his literary and advertising activities. I trusted that a full account of his work would preclude his being associated with the more recent meaning of the term. Evidently I was wrong, so I would like to make it clear that O’Brien was never a press agent or a public relations consultant. ‘ALMOST CERTAIN’ To the Editors: New York: A Literary Visit Retail: $101.70; Your Price: $81.36 French Classics in Translation Retail: $95.75; Your Price: $76.60 Italian Classics in Translation Retail: $99.70; Your Price: $79.76 All boxes are priced at 20% off the retail price and free US shipping is included in the price of each box. TO ORDER visit www.nyrb.com/boxes or email orders@nybooks.com. The boxes of books will be shipped from another location while our office is closed. 46 Jed Perl, in his review of the Félix Fénéon show at MoMA [NYR, May 14], speaks of how most historians who have looked at the evidence agree that it’s almost certain that Fénéon planted a bomb at the Restaurant Foyot, one that took out the eye of the writer Laurent Tailhade. Looking at the evidence and the historians’ accounts more closely, that near certainty evaporates. In the first instance, almost all historians cite the same source, Joan Ungersma Halperin’s brilliant and definitive biography of Fénéon. She, however, bases her account of Fénéon’s guilt not on any solid proofs but on a chain of hearsay (Fénéon supposedly confessed his guilt to the wife of a comrade who told the writer André Salmon who told a friend of his in 1964, who later reported it to Halperin) and the unreliable memoirs of André Salmon, written in 1959, decades after the events. Halperin adds unsourced details of Fénéon’s conduct in the minutes leading up to and immediately following the attack which have no basis in fact, but which lend her account an air of veracity. There is stronger reason to believe that one of two comrades of Fénéon’s, Armand Matha and Paul Delesalle, the latter of whom disappeared for a time almost immediately after the bombing, might have planted the bomb. None of these men, it must be said, were ever held by the police in connection with the Foyot attentat, nor was Fénéon even questioned at the prefecture. Another, equally likely possibility, was that the bomb was planted by the police. The device had little power, so did not risk causing death, yet it served the authorities in their war against anarchism, making the anti-anarchist lois scelerates more palatable. The historian Philippe Oriol has presented several other alternatives, including the tsarist Okhrana, again with the aim of darkening the image of the anarchists. Fénéon was certainly in sympathy with the propagandists of the deed, and there’s nothing in his ideas that would have prevented him from planting the bomb at the restaurant. Nevertheless, the case against Fénéon is far from proven, and certainly is not a matter of near certainty. Perl in his review also states that Tailhade’s famous quote “What matter the victims, if the gesture is beautiful!” was said to the police after the bombing that Mitchell Abidor Brooklyn, New York Luc Sante Jed Perl replies: Mitchell Abidor’s letter only confirms what I said at the beginning of my review, namely that “Fénéon’s political actions and beliefs, like many of his artistic opinions, aren’t always easy to pin down.” In assessing Fénéon’s involvement in the Restaurant Foyot bombing I am indebted to Joan Ungersma Halperin, whose biography, which Abidor describes as “brilliant and definitive,” leaves a reader in no doubt as to his culpability. Abidor’s disagreement isn’t with me but with Halperin, who describes Fénéon as he lit the fuse and set the bomb on the windowsill of the restaurant. Of course anybody who cares about Fénéon will be interested in the competing narratives that Abidor offers in his letter; the long and the short of it is that he doesn’t regard what he himself describes as Halperin’s “definitive” biography as all that definitive. Perhaps Halperin herself has somewhat modified her view in the more than thirty years since it was first published; in the Museum of Modern Art catalog she refers to Fénéon as “likely the perpetrator” of the bombing. In another essay in the catalog, on Fénéon’s anarchism, Patricia Leighten writes that “it is believed that Fénéon set the next bomb [at the Restaurant Foyot] himself.” My “almost certain” was meant to acknowledge these issues. None of this has anything to do with my central argument, namely that Fénéon’s attitudes toward art and politics should not and cannot, pace the curators of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, be viewed as “two sides of the same coin.” A PUBLICIST IN THE OLD SENSE To the Editors: In my review of Glenn O’Brien’s Intelligence for Dummies [NYR, April 9], I referred in passing to O’Brien as a “publicist.” I reached for that word, which once meant “journalist” and gradually extended Kingston, New York CORRECTIONS In Edward Chancellor’s “The Long Shadow of the Austrian School” [NYR, May 14], the Bolshevik who attended Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s Vienna seminars on economics was named Nikolai Bukharin, not Mikhail. A typographical error misrepresented a detail in Susan Tallman’s “The Master of Unknowing” [NYR, May 14]: Gerhard Richter’s Strip series was built from “4096 (212) segments,” not “4096 (212).” In David Cole’s “Why We Need a Postal Democracy” [NYR, May 28], the order allowing anyone in New Hampshire to vote by mail did not come from the governor, and the state did not officially move to no-excuse absentee voting. The secretary of state and the Republican attorney general issued an opinion permitting anyone with Covid-19 concerns to vote by mail not just in the primary but also in November, making New Hampshire the first excuse-required state to do so for the general election. The illustration on page 40 of Michael Dirda’s “Rending the Veil” [NYR, May 28] is from the book jacket of the 1906 edition of Arthur Machen’s The House of Souls, not the frontispiece. Letters to the Editor: letters@nybooks.com. All other correspondence: The New York Review of Books, 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994; mail@nybooks.com. Please include a mailing address with all correspondence. We accept no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Subscription Services: nybooks.com/customer-service or The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big Sandy,TX, 75755-9310, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info. In the US, call toll-free 800-354-0050. Outside the US, call 903-636-1101. Subscription rates: US, one year $89.95; in Canada, $95; elsewhere, $115. Advertising: To inquire please call 212-757-8070, or fax 212-333-5374. Copyright © 2020, NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. The cover date of the next issue will be July 2, 2020. The New York Review The Classifieds The Classifieds To place an ad or for other inquiries: email: classified@nybooks.com tel: (212) 293-1630. You may also place an ad through our website at www.nybooks.com/classifieds/ Classified Department The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson St., Suite 300 New York, NY 10014-3994 All contents subject to Publisher’s approval. Publisher reserves the right to reject or cancel, at its sole discretion, any advertising at any time in The New York Review of Books or on our website. The advertiser and/or advertising agency, if any, agree to indemnify the Publisher against any liability or expense resulting from claims or suits based on the contents or subject matter of the advertisement, including, without limitation, claims or suits for libel, violation of rights of privacy, plagiarism, copyright or trademark infringement, or unauthorized use of the name, likeness, statement, or work of any person. For NYR Boxes only, send replies to: 55¢ NYR Box Number The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300 New York, NY 10014-3994 PERSONALS COMPLIMENTARY MEMBERSHIP OFFER! NYC MatchPDNHU ORRNLQJ IRU HOLJLEOH EDFKHORUV IRU RXU H[FHSWLRQDO IHPDOH FOLHQWV ) ɓ D\#PHDQLQJIXOFRQQHFWLRQVFRP ɓ NEW YORK CITY ATTORNEY, ZHOO UHDG DQG ZHOO WUDY HOHG YLJRURXV HFOHFWLF JRRG OLVWHQHU %XW OLIH LV PRUH 6HHNV ZRPDQ WR VKDUH WKH DGYHQWXUH )HPPHV IUDQFR SKRQHVDSSUpFLpHVNYR Box 68070 AT 70 LOOKING FOR A PLACEWRUHWLUH4XLHWSULYDWH DQGVDIHZLWKVRPHLQWHOOLJHQFHDERXW$Q\VXJJHVWLRQV" 6*:0%RHWKLXVDG#\DKRRFRP ,QTXLULHV RUFODVVLÀHG#Q\ERRNVFRP MARKETPLACE GYPSY SCHOLAR SEEKS BOHEMIAN+DQGVRPH GWM EHDUUHWLUHGSKLORORJLVWFLQHDVWHVHDVRQHGWUDYHOHU IRUPHUH[SDWVHHNVNLQGUHGVSLULWWRVKDUHOLIH·VDGYHQWXUHV GDQLHOGHS#JPDLOFRP INCREASE AFFECTION UNATTRACTIVE BORING HEN VHHNV SHUIHFW PDQ IRU LPPHGLDWHPDUULDJH Created by Winnifred Cutler, Ph.D. in biology from U. of Penn, post-doc Stanford. Codiscovered human pheromones in 1986 PUNKISH, ALTERNATIVE BI/PANSEXUAL$VLDQZRPDQ VHHNVORYHGXULQJELRFULVLVDOD]\ODWHVPLOOHQQLDOSRHW VDUGRQLF IDFHWLRXV <RX LQFLVLYH NQRZLQJ DIIHFWLRQDWH ZR&RYLGZXOÀVK#JPDLOFRP NOT JUST A 20-SOMETHING SWM VHHNV DQRWKHU SUR ORQJHGDGROHVFHQWZKRJHWVWRWKHFODVVLÀHGV6HQGDZULW LQJVDPSOH/RYH7UXPSV+DWHvailnow@gmail.com Effective for 74% in two 8-week studies and for 68% in a 3rd 8-week study. IN THE TIME OF CORONA, &KLQHVH5XVVLDQ JUDQG PRWKHU\RXWKIXOVVHHNVDNLQGVHOIVXSSRUWLQJKHDOWK\ VLQJOHPDQ²VZLWKZKRPWRVKDUHVRPHOLIH³HQMR\LQJ FDUHHUWDLFKLWKHDWHU:DURQ'UXJV%XGGKLVWPHGLWDWLRQ DQGPRUHULWRGORPDMRQPD#JPDLOFRP BOOK-LOVING MAN ZDQWHGE\PDQORYLQJZRPDQJRRG ORRNLQJDQGVPDUWDQGIXOORIKHDUWDQJDUUQ#\DKRR .com WHAT GOOD SHALL I DO THIS DAY? NO MIND/BODY SPLIT HERE./RYHURIDUWVDWKOHWLFVDQG WUDYHO(QHUJHWLFDQGÀW&7ZRPDQORRNLQJIRUPDQIRU RXUQH[WDGYHQWXUH/PJDGRQ#FRPFDVWQHW Benjamin Franklin began each day by asking himself, in the pages of his journal, “What good shall I do this day?” and returned, at the end of the day, to ask himself the “evening question”: “What good have I done to-day?” This handsome faux-leather journal invites modern diarists to contemplate the good they can do in their everyday lives using Benjamin Franklin’s own daily questions, and to think about their lives in the way that Franklin thought about his. LOVELY, LIBERAL-LEANING, RETIRED LADY ODZ\HU UHDG\ IRU IXQ VHHNLQJ OLNHPLQGHG JHQWOHPDQ NYC /RQJ,VODQGURVHYLROHW#JPDLOFRP MIGHT YOUR IDEAL OF BREAKFAST LQ D FRXSOHW LQ FOXGH IUHVK IUXLW ZLWK FRIIHHWHDKRW FKRFRODWH D GDG /9 ZKRVH GDXJKWHU OLJKWV XS +DQXNNDK D :HVWZRRGEDVHG VWDWLVWLFVSURI"/HW·VWDONVRPHYours-Truly@writeme.com. TELL YOUR STORY and share it with the readers of The New York Review of Books The Independent Press Listing showcases new and notable books from independent presses and self-published authors. To learn more visit: www.nybooks.com/ipl or contact Sharmaine Ong at ipress@nybooks.com. PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES ATHENA PHEROMONEStm A Journal Inspired by Benjamin Franklin This 340-page journal features 365 undated entries and includes 75 quotations drawn from Franklin’s life and writings, as well as an informative and delightful introduction detailing the specific ways that Franklin used his journal, and how he made it central to his life. Also included is a facsimile of a template page of Franklin’s journal, a list of Franklin’s 13 ideal virtues, and pages for notes. Use this journal to brainstorm, set intentions, and reflect on your accomplishments. increase your attractiveness. Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 10:13 tm For Women $98.50 Unscented Fragrance Additives Cosmetics Free U.S. Shipping ♥ Joseph (MI) “Fabulous product. You guys were very well respected, you have gone through the double blind studies. You did the research! I was shocked at how well 10X works. I am married and am with my wife only. Well within 5 days it was amazing. The affection level went up 20 fold. I am so grateful to you Dr. Cutler. Thank you so much for your research!” Not in stores tm 610-827-2200 Athenainstitute.com Athena Institute, Braefield Rd, Chester Spgs, PA 19425 NYB :5,7(5·66(59,&(6 TIME TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIR? *KRVWZULWLQJ E\ New York Times EHVWVHOOLQJ DXWKRUELRJUDSKHU ZZZMDFNLHDVHGLWRUFRP FURNITURE WANTED BUYING MID CENTURY DESIGN FURNITURE The 5½" x 7¼" x 1" journal is bound in red faux-leather with gold embossing. 1950s-1970s Danish, French, Italian Modern, Herman Miller, Knoll, Memphis. Noted designers sought: Eames, Wegner, Juhl, Nakashima, Ponti, Bertoia, Noguchi, Prouvé, Perriand, Chapo, Royère. #05-BF463 • $16.95 Open Air Modern (718) 383-6465 info@openairmodern.com Price above does not include shipping and handling. DATING FOR BOOK LOVERS )LQG D GDWH WKDW ORYHV ERRNV-RLQIUHHZZZERRNORYHUVGDWLQJ TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call 646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com. WIDOWED MARGRAVINE SEEKS RESPITE IURP FR WHULH RI V\FRSKDQWV (QFORVH \RXU PRVW SUXULHQW SRHP lasciviousmargravine@gmail.com. SOUTH BAY/SAN FRANCISCO, LATE-60s, ZDUP DW WUDFWLYH VSLULWHG 3K' ZLGRZ VHHNV LQWHOOLJHQW SURIHV VLRQDOFXOWXUHGFDULQJLQYROYHGLQWKHZRUOGFRPSDQLRQ IRU PRYLHV FRQFHUWV ZDONV KLNLQJ WUDYHO DQG D PHDQ LQJIXOORYLQJFRQQHFWLRQ NYR Box 68345 INTERNATIONAL RENTALS ST GERMAIN CHARMING LAST FLOOR, DJUHHDEO\ IXU QLVKHGYLHZHOHYDWRUPD[SHRSOHnicusit3@gmail.com NEW LOOK... SAME GREAT CONTENT Follow NYR on Social Media! a “selections” product in Oprah magazine AIRBRUSH Eye Refining Treatment TUSCANY, MONTEPULCIANO: FXOWXUH ZLQH WKHUPDO EDWKFRXQWU\6SDFLRXV²EHGURRPVEDWKV HXURV ZN RU EHGURRPV EDWKV HXURVZN DSDUWPHQW LQ FLW\FHQWHU³YLHZVRIFRXQWU\VLGHIURPWHUUDFHDQGJDUGHQ IXOO\ HTXLSSHG NLWFKHQ ODXQGU\ :L)L 'D\ WULSV WR 6LHQD )ORUHQFHZHHNVPLQ skim@koetterkim.com PARIS (SQUARE BERLIOZ³WKDUU )LEHU%5%WK EHDXWLIXO IXOOÁRRU FRQGR WK Á HOHYDWRU ZZZSDULVÁDWX .com7HO @nybooks facebook/nybooks EĚCSSKĂGF"NXDOOLSEOM NEED BETTER FOCUS? 7KLVPDWFKDGULQNVPRUHOLNHZLQH WKDQWHDRIIFRGH1<%22.6www.breakawaymatcha .com World’s Finest Eye Cream FRANCE, DORDOGNE³3ULYDWHO\ VLWHG EHDXWLIXOO\ UH VWRUHG WKFHQWXU\ VWRQH IDUPKRXVH $QWLTXHV PRG HUQ DPHQLWLHV VDOWZDWHU SRRO EXFROLF DFUHV RI ZRRGV PHDGRZ RUFKDUGV VWUHDP &KDUPLQJ QHDUE\ YLOODJHV 6OHHSV :HHNO\ MXGLWK#WHUUDÀOPVRUJ www.gaurenne.com GOURMET Reg $68 Now only $54.40 Compare to: La Mer Eye Balm @ $200 Shiseido Solution LX @ $130 La Prairie Swiss @ $240 Airbrush Eye Cream reduces puffiness right away, especially when cold. Promotes new collagen which reduces fine lines and wrinkles. Reduces dark circles, is soothing, hydrating and promotes a youthful healthy glow! Hypo-allergenic and natural containing emu oil serum, green tea extract, aloe vera, collagen and elastin. Use am & pm for best results and the jar will last about 3 months! Use 20% discount code: BRW at @nybooks THERAPEUTIC SERVICES FREE YOURSELF FROM PAIN AND STRESS.$OH[DQGHU 7HFKQLTXH OHVVRQV XQGR KDELWXDO WHQVLRQ SRVWXUDO FRO ODSVH GLVFRPIRUW LQ PRWLRQ DQG PRUH )UHH LQWURGXFWRU\ OHVVRQ www.betteratbeing.com June 11, 2020 www.dremu.com or call 800-542-0026 and get free shipping. Open 7 Days 47
