Brodsky/Baryshnikov

a theater piece written and directed by Alvis Hermanis

New Riga Theatre, Riga, Latvia, October 15–November 7, 2015
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York City, March 9–19, 2016

Many emotions are entwined in the theater piece Brodsky/Baryshnikov, which had its premiere at the New Riga Theater in October and will open at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York in March. Its subject is Joseph Brodsky, who was born in Leningrad in 1940 and died in Brooklyn in 1996. Other Russians of Brodsky’s time—notably his great elders Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak—were made to feel more keenly than he their government’s scorn for artists, but his case too is notorious. Soon after he began circulating verse in samizdat in his late teens, he came under the eye of the authorities. He was denounced in a Leningrad newspaper in 1963 as “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” In 1964, he was tried for “social parasitism” and sentenced to five years’ hard labor.

He landed in the small village of Norenskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region of the Arctic. By day he chopped wood and hauled manure. By night he taught himself English, and read English and American poetry—above all, John Donne, Robert Frost, and his idol, W.H. Auden—in his hut. He later said that this was one of the happiest times of his life. Meanwhile, the transcript of his trial had been smuggled to the West, and his case became an international scandal. Embarrassed, the Brezhnev government released him after only a year and a half.

This did not mean that he was free, however. By then, because of the trial and because of poems of his that were being published in the West, he was a famous man. When literary dignitaries came to Russia, he was often the person they wanted to meet. But he could not get a poem published in the Soviet Union, not to speak of obtaining permission to attend literary conferences outside the Soviet Union. This is the sort of tragicomedy in which the USSR specialized. The authorities eventually tired of it, though, and one day, in June 1972, he was simply taken to the airport and put on a plane.

He did not know whether the plane was going east or west. It went west, to Vienna, and at the airport he was met by the American Slavist Carl Proffer, whom he knew, and whose small press, Ardis, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, would publish a number of his writings in Russian. Auden had a second home outside Vienna, and the day after Brodsky’s arrival Proffer rented a car and deposited Brodsky there, to what was apparently Auden’s surprise. Brodsky stayed for four weeks. Auden got him some money and called various people to say that he was coming.

Proffer arranged for him to be given a job as poet in residence at the University of Michigan, where he himself taught. In July 1972 Brodsky flew to the United States, where he would live until his death twenty-three years later. Almost always, he taught—after Michigan at other schools, above all, Mt. Holyoke, where he became a chaired professor. Over the years he received just about every important award a poet could want, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1987.

Two years before Brodsky turned up on his doorstep, Auden had written a foreword to a collection of the Russian’s poems, translated by George Kline. Brodsky, Auden said, was

a traditionalist in the sense that he is interested in what most lyric poets in all ages have been interested in, that is, in personal encounters with nature, human artifacts, persons loved or revered, and in reflections upon the human condition, death, and the meaning of existence.

This seems rather soft-spoken, but it is accurate. Brodsky was not a modernist in the sense of embracing the absurd or expressing weariness. Quite the contrary. He pursued the “great themes,” energetically.

And because of what he saw as the gravity of his subject matter, he hated any looseness in a poem. He said that the poet Evgeny Rein, a friend of his, taught him:

if you really want your poem to work, the usage of adjectives should be minimal; but you should stuff it as much as you can with nouns—even the verbs should suffer. If you cast over a poem a certain magic veil that removes adjectives and verbs, when you remove the veil the paper still should be dark with nouns.

Dark with nouns: what a phrase! It reminds me of the frames that beekeepers use. When you pull one of the frames out of the box, it is thick with bees, clotted with them. The note of menace here is also true to Brodsky. In an interview for The Paris Review he told Sven Birkerts that one thing he loved about Robert Frost was his restraint, “that hidden, controlled terror.”

He too showed a hidden terror, and long before his trial the Soviet Union had given him cause. As a small child he nearly died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad. Because the family was Jewish, his father, a photographer, lost his job during Stalin’s onslaught against the Jews in the early 1950s; the family was supported, barely, by his mother’s clerical work. Partly to help out, Brodsky quit school at fifteen and took various low-level jobs, including, at one point, cutting and sewing bodies in a prison morgue. He fell in love with a painter, Marina Basmanova, but soon his friend and fellow poet Dmitri Bobyshev was also in love with Basmanova. That was when the denunciations began—a fact from which people have drawn conclusions about Bobyshev’s responsibility. Brodsky was twice detained in psychiatric hospitals. Then came the trial, the “internal exile” in Norenskaya, and, ultimately, the expulsion.

In his autobiographical essay “Less Than One,” first published in these pages, Brodsky records a memory from 1945, when he was five. He and his mother were in a train station, which was bedlam, because the war was just over and people were trying to get home:

My eye caught sight of an old, bald, crippled man with a wooden leg, who was trying to get into car after car, but each time was pushed away by the people who already were hanging on the footboards. The train started to move and the old man hopped along. At one point he managed to grab a handle of one of the cars, and then I saw a woman in the doorway lift a kettle and pour its boiling water straight on the old man’s bald crown.^*

Another writer might well have expatiated on the pain of witnessing such a scene. Brodsky does not. For that modesty as well as his tremendous poetic powers he was cherished not just as an artist. He was a moral hero, to many people.

One was Alvis Hermanis (born in 1965), who is an important man in European theater. Hermanis started as a movie actor in his native Latvia. Now he is a director and works very widely across Europe, especially in German-speaking theater and in opera. (He just directed a Damnation de Faust at the Paris Opera. In 2018 he will stage Lohengrin at Bayreuth.) Since 1997 he has also been the head of the New Riga Theatre, a playhouse that opened, under that name, in 1902. In later years it was put to various uses by Nazis and Communists, but in 1992 it reopened as a repertory theater.

In the early 1990s, Hermanis was invited to perform in New York, and he stayed in the United States for two years. It was a difficult time for him. In his words, “I put my head in a washing machine.” He worked in New York for a year. Then he moved to San Diego, where he lived in a welfare hotel and communicated with no one. (“It was very cruel to my parents. For six months they did not know where I was.”) He spent every day, all day, in the San Diego Public Library, reading books that were forbidden in Latvia during Soviet times. This is when he encountered Brodsky’s poetry. He was overwhelmed by it. One day, at closing time, he could not bear to part with his Brodsky book, so he decided to steal it. “I did not know that they had put those little chips in the books. So when I tried to leave, many bells rang. I was so humiliated. I had to take this book out of my pants.”

Reading Brodsky, Hermanis says, is not just a mental but a physiological experience. “All those images have to do with physical sense, and it is physically painful, almost, to read him.” In this regard, he compares Brodsky to Chekhov, but he says that Brodsky is worse:

He is like a surgeon who is cutting with a knife your belly and looking straight in your eyes. He is killing you, and he is telling you. I had never before read a writer who has so no hope, who gives not the slightest chance. Whatever illusions you had, Brodsky makes you say goodbye to them. And so you achieve a sort of Buddhistic calm.

Hermanis conceived Brodsky/Baryshnikov as a tribute to Brodsky, but as the title indicates, he wrote it to be performed by only one man.

Mikhail Baryshnikov is a favorite son of Riga. Both his parents were Russian, but after the war the Soviet Union was faced with a drastic housing shortage, and the outlying territories were forced to take in many Russians, including Lieutenant Colonel Nikolay Petrovich Baryshnikov, who taught military topography, and his wife, Aleksandra Vasilievna. Mikhail Nikolayevich was born soon afterward, in 1948, and lived in Riga until, when he was in his early teens, his mother died (by suicide), his father remarried, and his ballet teacher—he had started lessons at age nine, at his mother’s behest—decided that he had progressed beyond the training that Latvia could give him. He needed to go to Leningrad, to the Kirov Ballet’s Vaganova Institute.

By the time Baryshnikov graduated from the Vaganova Institute and joined the Kirov in 1967, Brodsky had already returned from Norenskaya, and for the next seven years the two men lived in the same city. Baryshnikov knew Brodsky’s poetry, but the two men did not meet, and if they had, it wouldn’t have been good for Baryshnikov. Brodsky was a dangerous person to be seen with.

By this time, furthermore, Baryshnikov too was under suspicion, as a defection risk. In 1972, Brodsky was thrown out of Russia, and two years later Baryshnikov threw himself out. On tour in Toronto, he walked out of the stage door after a performance, signed some autographs, and then, instead of getting into the company bus, he turned and ran. A getaway car, arranged by friends, was waiting a few blocks away. He was now a Western artist.

In a long interview that he recently gave to the Latvian magazine Laiks, Baryshnikov recalled that he met Brodsky soon afterward, at a party at Mstislav Rostropovich’s house. “Joseph was sitting on a couch. He looked at me and said, ‘Mikhail, come sit down. There are things to talk about.’” Baryshnikov, though a celebrity, considered Brodsky a far greater celebrity. “My hands were shaking. The cigarette was going back and forth, like this,” he says, waving his hand like a windshield wiper. He sat down, and they talked for a long time. Thereafter they were friends for over twenty years, until Brodsky’s death. They spoke to each other every day.

In Brodsky, born eight years before him, Baryshnikov acquired a kind of older brother, and he needed one. Though a number of people were very kind to him, he did not, at this early point, have close friends in the United States, and he was slow in making them, because he had no time to study English. With Brodsky he could speak in Russian, and they had a city, a government—in some measure, a history—in common. “Over the years that we spent together, he really set me on my feet. I acquired a kind of certainty.” In addition to his lodgings in Ann Arbor, Brodsky eventually found an apartment in New York, on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. When he was in town, he and Baryshnikov would take walks along the nearby Hudson River.

Or we’d drink whiskey or we’d talk about girls or whatever—anything—and it was a real release for me. His house was so cozy. And there were always interesting people: Czesław Miłosz, Derek Walcott, Stephen Spender, Susan Sontag. He got me to read Russian classical literature that I hadn’t had time for when I was in Russia. I couldn’t yet talk to him very seriously about poetry, but I knew some poems by heart—Baratashvili, Mandelstam—and he would get me to recite them.

He was a stern judge. When he didn’t like something that I was doing, he’d say so. I remember, I did some sort of performance, a piece by Maurice Béjart, and there I’m dancing a solo of Hamlet in an empty café, and I recite “To be or not to be”

—this was Béjart’s Hamlet, to Purcell and Duke Ellington—

and then I throw down Yorick’s skull. Joseph saw this on TV, and when I saw him next he said to me, “We have to talk.” We went to a café and he said “Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this ballet because—what are you doing? It’s so vulgar.” He would say to me, “Be good.”

Baryshnikov was charmed by Brodsky’s vivacity, his capacity for fantasy and play, his readiness to love things. Brodsky loved water—he loved oceans, rivers. He adored Venice—he wrote a book on it, Watermark—and the Venetians made him an honorary citizen. He loved cats. (When he was young, he and his parents had a game where they would converse in a sort of cat-talk, meows in various registers.) He said that if he had to live another life he would like to be a cat in Venice, or even a rat. (He called Baryshnikov Mysh, or Mouse.) He cared about world events, and he hated to miss the evening news. He was a skirt-chaser, and women were crazy about him, too. (“He rarely left a party alone,” says Baryshnikov.) The prospect of his birthday thrilled him, and he would always stage a huge feast. “People came from faraway cities,” Baryshnikov recalls. “The place was packed. They partied all night long.” Baryshnikov, by contrast, was always rather embarrassed by his birthday. But Brodsky would bring him a book, with an inscription in it. In his interview with Laiks, Baryshnikov pulled one of the birthday books off his shelf and read the inscription:

Mysh is forty-three.
He has dumplings inside him.
His knee hurts.
There’s a fire burning in the hearth,
There’s smoke coming from the hearth.
And we’re siting here drunk.

“It rhymes,” Baryshnikov says.

As the lights go up on Brodsky/Baryshnikov we see a small glass house, nine feet by eighteen, with a front door and a back door, sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty stage. The house is in Art Nouveau style—it looks as if it had been made by the French Art Nouveau architect Hector Guimard—but with certain odd features. Next to its front door, for example, is a dirty old fuse box that periodically spits out frightening sparks. Also, there is some sort of blackish moss creeping down the wooden strips that join the glass panels.

The music adds to the strangeness. There seems to be a sort of distant chorus, but sounding an unvarying note, plus, in the foreground, a noise of crickets. (This becomes more strange when you find out later that the distant chorus is also a recording of crickets, but very, very speeded up.) Both elements—the set design, by Kristīne Jurjāne, and the score, by Oļegs Novikovs and Gatis Builis—are elegant and sinister at the same time.

A man, Baryshnikov, appears at the back door carrying a small suitcase. You can tell that he has never been here before and that, in the manner of a fairy tale, he doesn’t know whose place this is, or what it is. He walks into the house, comes out the front door, pulls out a cigarette, bites off the filter (Brodsky used to do that), pats himself down to locate a pack of matches, finds none, and unhappily replaces the cigarette in its box. He opens the suitcase and takes out an alarm clock, a couple of books, and a pint of Jameson (Brodsky’s drink of choice). He puts on his glasses, opens one of the books, and begins reading a Brodsky poem. The rest of the play’s text flows from there: forty-four Brodsky poems, mostly unabridged, not at all in chronological order. (The one that ends the play was written when he was seventeen.) The poems were all chosen and arranged by Hermanis. They are spoken in Russian, with supertitles scrolling up the cornice of the glass house. (In Riga, the supertitles were in Latvian; in New York, they will be in English.)

I asked Hermanis whether he hadn’t worried that his show would turn out to be static—a poetry reading. He said no.

I had a story in my mind, that the play would be about a meeting between two people who had been closest friends for twenty years, and then one died. The performance would be like a spiritist séance. Direct communication with the audience is not our goal. Audience is not necessary. Audience is able just to witness.

Baryshnikov designed all the more elaborate movements, and he gives us a lot to look at. He spins, he stands on the chair, he strikes classical poses, he checks his teeth, he drinks the Jameson, he takes his clothes off and puts them on. He is constantly moving in and out of the house and thus from a state of firm reality to a sort of watery, dreamlike image as we watch him through the glass. During the recitation of “The Butterfly,” he chases an invisible butterfly and then, wittily, turns into one. During a beautiful poem about a horse, he does a brief flamenco dance, his chest as high and proud as a horse’s. There is a crisis. In the course of the poem “Portrait of Tragedy” he undergoes a grotesque series of convulsions. He stabs his navel so hard—he is shirtless here—that you think he is really going to harm himself.

But the main drama is in the use of the language. Sometimes Baryshnikov reads the poems from one of the books; sometimes he whispers the words, sometimes he yells them, sometimes he just opens his mouth and lets them fall out. Usually he speaks them from memory. Unnervingly, sometimes Brodsky reads the poems, over the sound system. (At those times, an old reel-to-reel tape recorder turns on one of the benches.) But then sometimes Baryshnikov too reads the poems on tape, and you’re not always sure which of them is speaking. Brodsky chants his poems, as some poets do, and Baryshnikov too chants, and davens, as if reciting a Jewish liturgy. Hermanis told me that Baryshnikov did this without being directed to, and that it is natural to people reciting poetry. It is part of poetry’s shamanism, he says.

Great dancer that Baryshnikov is, he has always been a considerable actor as well, and the treatment of the language is the most impressive thing in the show even, probably, to those who are getting it from the supertitles. Many knowledgeable people say that Brodsky’s poetry loses a huge portion of its power when it is not in Russian. “How could anyone who had not read him in Russian understand him by his English poems?” asked Isaiah Berlin, speaking, I believe, both of the poems that Brodsky wrote in English (he tried) and of English translations from Russian, both by him and by expert translators, often working with his help. “It’s utterly incomprehensible. Because there is no sense that they were written by a great poet. But in Russian,…from the very beginning, as soon as it starts, you are in the presence of genius.” Brodsky himself seemed to admit the problem. He called himself “a Russian poet and an American citizen.” His friend Lev Loseff, who taught in the Russian department at Dartmouth for thirty years, said in his masterful book on the poet that Brodsky won the Nobel Prize not for his poems, but for his essays, most of which he wrote in English.

Alvis Hermanis says that he knows Brodsky’s work in translation and that “there is no way to compare it to what he did in the Russian language.” But this does not discourage Hermanis. Remember his statement that reading Brodsky’s poetry is a physiological experience. In Brodsky’s mind, he says, language “bubbles, it scratches, it never stops.” And the play aims to show that.

As much as I am interested in the sense of the poetry, I am interested in the sound—how it goes through the body, sensual, erotical, or like an electrocution. Misha was interested in that, too, and willing to show it. The play is a real striptease. Misha is brave, he is crazy.

For both men, this is no doubt related to what is said to have been Brodsky’s belief that poetry was not something contained in a language as much as it was, itself, a language, speaking truths found only there, and which you ignore at your peril. Indifference to poetry, he felt, underlay the Soviet Union’s political crimes. In the Paris Review interview, Brodsky told Birkerts that his main interest was “the nature of time…what time can do to a man.” By which he seems to have meant not just that time kills us; it may also efface any sign of our passing on this earth.

Of the poems that Hermanis collected for his play, the most moving, I think, is “Letter to a Wall,” written by Brodsky when he was leaving his job at the prison morgue. “Keep my shadow,” he says to the wall. “Keep my shadow. I don’t know why./Preserve my shadow. I cannot explain. I’m sorry./It is important now. Preserve my shadow.” Of course, a shadow is a thing that may vanish instantly, and the people passing this particular wall—criminals, madmen—would have been most unlikely to be memorialized. That is why he chose the wall. He was twenty-four, and his trial was coming up in four months. He was afraid of being extinguished.

In 1990, Brodsky got married, to Maria Sozzani, an Italian woman with some Russian ancestry as well. She was twenty-two years younger than he. They had a child, Anna, in 1993. But he was already in poor health. “It’s hard to walk the length of a building,” he wrote to a friend late in 1995. A month later, his wife went to his study in the morning and found him dead on the floor, of his fourth heart attack, at fifty-five. He was buried in Venice.

At the end of Brodsky/Baryshnikov Baryshnikov packs his things back into the suitcase and heads out the back door of the little glass house. But something strange has appeared right beyond the threshold: a big, bushy green fern. It wasn’t there when he arrived, or it wasn’t lit so that we could see it. The play has been about a dead man, or a man visiting a dead man. He should not, at the end, be faced with this robust greeting from Mother Nature. Maybe Hermanis is saying that Brodsky was right: that there is some truth-beyond-truth that poetry, and nothing else, confers. Maybe if, in Hermanis’s words, you let yourself be electrocuted by Brodsky, you don’t die. You start to live.

For information about the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, founded by Mikhail Baryshnikov with Brodsky’s family to honor the poet, please visit josephbrodsky.org.

1.

As the concentration of wealth in America has grown, so has the scale of philanthropy. Today, that activity is one of the principal ways in which the superrich not only “give back” but also exert influence, yet it has not received the attention it deserves. As I have previously tried to show, digital technology offers journalists new ways to cover the world of money and power in America,¹ and that’s especially true when it comes to philanthropy.

Over the last fifteen years, the number of foundations with a billion dollars or more in assets has doubled, to more than eighty. A significant portion of that money goes to such traditional causes as universities, museums, hospitals, and local charities. Needless to say, such munificence does much good. The philanthropic sector in the United States is far more dynamic than it is in, say, Europe, due in part to the tax deductions allowed under US law for charitable giving. Unlike in Europe, where cultural institutions depend largely on state support, here they rely mainly on private donors.

The tax write-offs for such contributions, however, mean that this giving is subsidized by US taxpayers. Every year, an estimated $40 billion is diverted from the public treasury through charitable donations. That makes accountability for them all the more pressing. So does the fact that many of today’s philanthropists are more activist than those in the past. A number are current or former hedge fund managers, private equity executives, and tech entrepreneurs who, having made their fortunes on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, are now seeking to apply their know-how to social problems. Rather than simply write checks for existing institutions, these “philanthrocapitalists,” as they are often called, aggressively seek to shape their operations.

When donors approach a nonprofit, “they’re more likely to say not ‘How can I help you?’ but ‘Here’s my agenda,’” Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, told me. Mainstream news organizations haven’t caught on to this new activism, he said, adding that most of them are into covering “the ‘giving pledge,’” by which the rich commit to giving away at least half their wealth in their lifetime. David Callahan, the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a website that tracks this world, says that “philanthropy is having as much influence as campaign contributions, but campaign contributions get all the attention. The imbalance is stunning to me.”

Callahan, the author of Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (2010), created Inside Philanthropy in 2013 to help fill this gap. (The Chronicle of Philanthropy is another valuable resource.) The site offers a rich storehouse of information about the causes to which the wealthy give. An entry on Robert Mercer, for instance, notes that he is the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies (a hedge fund) and a leading contributor to Super PACs, and that his family foundation backs a sprawling array of conservative institutions, including the Media Research Center, which scans the media for liberal bias; the George W. Bush Foundation, which supports the Bush library and museum; and the Heartland Institute, a leading promoter of climate-change denial. The Inside Philanthropy page on eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll notes that his foundation is a leading funder of social entrepreneurs, who seek to apply to social problems techniques borrowed from the business world.

As Callahan notes on Inside Philanthropy, social entrepreneurship—offering microfinance, setting up farmer cooperatives, creating programs for disadvantaged youth—has become a favorite cause of the wealthy, yet its effectiveness has gone largely unexamined. The site has also addressed such subjects as “Why Wall Streeters Love the Manhattan Institute” and “Which Washington Think Tank Do Billionaires Love the Most?” (the American Enterprise Institute).

Inside Philanthropy shows how digital technology can be used to track the new philanthropy. The information offered on the site is all the more impressive given its slender resources. Relying entirely on subscribers, Inside Philanthropy has a modest budget and a staff consisting largely of freelancers. That, unfortunately, limits the amount of digging it can do. The site does not generally undertake extended investigations into how donors have amassed their wealth, or the impact their philanthropy has had, or the sometimes hidden goals of their giving.

The importance of such questions can be seen in, for example, the work of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. According to its website, it concentrates on a handful of subjects, including education, criminal justice, “research integrity,” “evidence-based policy and innovation,” and “sustainable public finance.” On that last matter, the foundation says that it

works to promote fiscal sustainability and the effective oversight of public funds. We are funding efforts to help governments evaluate the impact of tax policies and design public pension systems that are affordable, sustainable, and secure.

All of which sounds quite laudable. A little probing, however, shows that John Arnold for years worked at Enron, trading in natural gas derivatives. In 2001, he reportedly helped earn the company three quarters of a billion dollars, for which he received an $8 million bonus. When Enron collapsed, Arnold set up a hedge fund in Houston that specialized in natural gas trading. Ten years later, he was worth about $3 billion. In 2012, he retired from the fund and set up his foundation. Since then, Arnold has led a campaign to cut public employees’ retirement benefits, making large contributions to politicians, Super PACs, ballot initiative efforts, and think tanks.

As part of that campaign, the Arnold Foundation gave $3.5 million to WNET, the public television station in New York, to support production of a two-year news series called The Pension Peril, to be shown on PBS. The foundation’s involvement was not explicitly disclosed. In a February 2014 article for Pando, an online magazine covering Silicon Valley, David Sirota revealed Arnold’s involvement and noted that the show (which had already begun airing) echoed many of the same pension-cutting themes that he was promoting in state legislatures. Amid growing protests, PBS decided to return the grant and suspend the series, citing internal rules that deem the existence of a clear connection between the interests of a proposed funder and the subject matter of a program unacceptable. Sirota’s article illustrates the type of scrutiny that a website on money, power, and influence could regularly provide.

On Inside Philanthropy, David Callahan noted that the Arnold/PBS case is hardly unique. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—a strong backer of the Affordable Care Act—gave NPR $5.6 million to report on health care between 2008 and 2011, and the Ford Foundation, which is committed to fighting economic inequality, gave $1 million to public radio’s Marketplace to report on that subject. “Nearly all funders have some kind of ideology and agenda,” Callahan observed. “And whatever media grantees say about their editorial independence, all nonprofits are wary of biting the hands that feed them.” He’s right. Keeping regular track of the growing efforts by foundations and philanthropists, both conservative and liberal, to shape the news would be one of the missions of a website devoted to covering America’s privileged class.²

After Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced their plan to donate nearly all of their Facebook stock to charitable causes, the initial laudatory coverage was followed by a series of stories that raised many important questions about their decision, including its implications for avoiding taxes, the large sums it would potentially cost the US government, and the huge amount of power it would place in the hands of two people. As John Cassidy observed in The New Yorker, “The more money billionaires give to their charitable foundations, which in most cases remain under their personal control, the more influence they will accumulate.” Such influence makes regular scrutiny of these kinds of investments all the more urgent.

2.

As a number of the above examples suggest, much of today’s philanthropy is aimed at “intellectual capture”—at winning the public over to a particular ideology or viewpoint. In addition to foundations, the ultrarich are working through advocacy groups, research institutes, paid spokesmen, and—perhaps most significant of all—think tanks. These once-staid organizations have become pivotal battlegrounds in the war of ideas, and moneyed interests are increasingly trying to shape their research—a good subject for a new website. As The Washington Post reported in 2014, for instance, the Brookings Institution, long known for its “impeccable research,” has in recent years placed more and more emphasis on expansion and fund-raising, “giving scholars a bigger role in seeking money from donors and giving donors a voice in Brookings’s research agenda.” In one example, Brookings in November 2012 was visited by a lawyer representing Peter B. Lewis, the billionaire insurance executive who toward the end of his life embraced the cause of legalizing marijuana. Before the visit, the think tank had done little work on the issue, but soon after, the Post reported, it “emerged as a hub of research” supporting legalization, with prominent scholars offering at least twenty seminars, papers, or Op-Ed pieces. Before his death in 2013, Lewis donated $500,000 to Brookings, and two of the scholars involved said they knew he was their benefactor.

Think tanks are also being targeted by foreign governments eager to shape their research to reflect their national interests. As The New York Times reported in 2014, these contributions have “set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom,” with some scholars saying that they “have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.” Norway for example committed at least $24 million over four years to an array of Washington think tanks, transforming them “into a powerful but largely hidden arm of the Norway Foreign Affairs Ministry.”

As both these articles suggested, there’s a new ecosystem of lobbying in Washington, with traditional forms of arm-twisting complemented by multipronged campaigns that use surrogates to create the impression of broad support for a company’s or a government’s positions. Given the importance of these new forms of influence-peddling, the articles in the Post and Times cried out for continued follow-up.

The type of website I have in mind would provide it. In the process, it could compile a registry of corporate spokesmen, front groups, researchers for hire, and “astroturf” organizations—ostensibly independent groups that are created by industries and trade groups to advance their interests. Accessing this registry, readers would be able to learn that, for example, Broadband for America, which bills itself as a coalition of consumer advocates and content providers and which opposes net neutrality, is partly funded by the cable industry, and that Energy in Depth, which calls itself a “research, education and public outreach campaign,” is actually an arm of the petroleum industry.

It’s not just conservatives and corporations that are seeking intellectual capture. The Democracy Alliance was founded in 2005 by a group of liberals looking to counter the tide of corporate money into think tanks and advocacy groups. As Kenneth Vogel has reported in Politico, the alliance has compiled a roster of a hundred or so wealthy individuals committed to giving at least $200,000 annually to twenty-one endorsed institutions, among them the Center for American Progress, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Media Matters for America. Major donors include George Soros; Rob McKay, the heir to the Taco Bell fortune; Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund manager turned environmental activist; and Houston trial lawyers Amber and Steve Mostyn.

How much each donor gives and to what is not known, however, for the Democracy Alliance is highly secretive, with a website that seems opaque by design. This has fostered a belief on the right that the alliance is at the heart of a vast liberal conspiracy. Leaving aside such hyperbole, the organization seems ripe for examination by an online journalistic website about the superrich.

Such a site would also track the flow of money into universities—another front in the ideological contest that’s underway. The 2010 documentary Inside Job showed how some economic professors, including Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard and Frederic Mishkin, expressed views about the economy without revealing that they’d received income from interested parties. The film set off a vigorous debate at Columbia, which led its business school to adopt new guidelines requiring professors to disclose all outside activities that create possible conflicts of interest. But the influence of big money on campus extends far beyond disclosure forms, with banks, corporations, and entrepreneurs setting up chairs and institutes that apparently are intended to promote capitalism and free enterprise.

In 2009, for instance, the billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson gave New York University $20 million to create both an Alan Greenspan Chair in Economics and a John A. Paulson Professor of Finance and Alternative Investments. In 2010, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which is dedicated to reducing government spending and the national debt, gave a three-year $2.45 million grant to Columbia University’s Teachers College to develop a curriculum “about the fiscal challenges that face the nation,” to be distributed free to every high school in the country. The philanthropic arm of BB&T, a financial services company in North Carolina, has given millions to more than sixty colleges and universities to examine the “moral foundations of capitalism” and promote the works of Ayn Rand. What has been the impact of these donations? How much control, if any, do the donors have over what’s taught? The type of website I’m proposing would seek to answer such questions.

It would also try to show the growing influence of university boards of trustees. These are increasingly made up of corporate figures who, in addition to raising large sums for their institutions, are playing an ever-larger part in their management. A good example is New York University and the furor that erupted over its plan to expand its campus in Greenwich Village and beyond. Officially called NYU 2031, the document became known as the “Sexton Plan,” after the university’s president, John Sexton. Sexton bore much of the faculty’s ire over the plan and the undemocratic way in which they felt it was adopted—all of which received abundant press attention. Less heed was paid to the real center of power at NYU—its board. Of its more than sixty trustees, all but a few come from the worlds of finance, real estate, law, construction, and marketing.

Even within the board, one figure was dominant: Martin Lipton. A prominent corporate lawyer, Lipton served as the board’s chairman from 1998 until his retirement this past October. As Geraldine Fabrikant reported in a 2014 profile in the Times (which was buried deep inside a special education supplement), Lipton was the university’s “power broker,” running the board “with an iron hand,” as several board members told her. More than a decade earlier, he had handpicked Sexton to be president “without any systematic search process.”

More recently, Lipton was deeply involved in the university’s expansion plans. He also sat on the committee to select his own replacement as chair, and (as William Cohan recounted in the Times) played a crucial part in steering the board toward the candidate it eventually settled on—William Berkley, the billionaire chairman of an insurance holding company in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the chairman of a charter school company. To be fair, NYU during Lipton’s reign raised nearly $6 billion, and the man recently chosen as Sexton’s successor, Andrew Hamilton, is a respected Oxford don (and a renowned chemist). But the selection of Berkeley as Lipton’s replacement, together with the continued presence of so many moguls on NYU’s board, suggests that big money will continue to have an outsized influence at the school. Just what form might that influence take? A website devoted to chronicling the activities of the one percent would attempt to keep track of such situations across the country.

It would pay special attention to public universities. With state governments slashing allocations for higher education, public universities have tried to fill the gap through fund-raising campaigns, opening the way for wealthy donors and trustees to gain a greater say in their operations. The most highly publicized case came in 2012 at the University of Virginia, when Teresa Sullivan was suddenly forced out as president. As was widely reported, her ouster was engineered by Helen Dragas, the real estate developer who headed the university’s Board of Visitors and who acted in concert with a small group of board members. They gave only vague explanations for their decision, and as protests by students, faculty, and alumni mounted, the board reversed its decision and Sullivan continues to be president.

Similar but far less publicized clashes have occurred in Texas, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oregon, and, most recently, North Carolina. There, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina, working with Republican legislators, pushed out Tom Ross, the popular president, and in October they announced his replacement: Margaret Spellings, who served as secretary of education under George W. Bush and, more recently, as the president of his library. Many students and faculty protested the decision as reflecting political considerations. A website on money and power would look into such cases and assess the various claims—part of a more general effort to chronicle the activities of the wealthy to reshape higher education in America.

3.

Such a website, in reporting on philanthropists, would pay special attention to the sources of their wealth. Take David Rubenstein, for example. The cofounder and co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, the largest private equity firm in the world, Rubenstein is worth about $2.5 billion. In his giving, he specializes in what he calls “patriotic philanthropy.” He has given $9 million to promote panda procreation at the National Zoo, $7.5 million to help repair the Washington Monument, and $10 million for the restoration of Monticello. After purchasing a copy of the Magna Carta for $21.3 million, he loaned it to the National Archives. These donations have resulted in favorable stories about Rubenstein in both The New York Times and The Washington Post and a glowing segment on 60 Minutes, titled “All-American.”

His generosity is certainly admirable, but from a journalistic standpoint, it has had the effect of deflecting attention from the way he earns his money. The Carlyle Group is known for its secrecy and connections. Nicknamed the Ex-Presidents’ Club, it has had as board members both George Bushes, James Baker, and John Major. From 1992 to 2003, the chairman was Frank Carlucci, the former defense secretary and CIA deputy director, who opened doors for the company in Washington, especially in the defense and intelligence industries, where it acquired many businesses. Carlyle has since branched out into other fields, including telecommunications and media, and in 2014 it hired Julius Genachowski, the former chairman of the FCC, to help spot investment opportunities. In short, Carlyle’s success is to a degree built on its insider connections. So, while Rubenstein’s good works get much attention, the complex workings of the Carlyle Group do not.

The whole subject of private equity has been woefully undercovered. Firms like Carlyle, Blackstone, and KKR have been the main force behind the flood of mergers and acquisitions of recent years. News accounts have focused far more on the market effects of these deals than on their implications for employment, the concentration of wealth, and community welfare. Back in 2012, such factors were closely analyzed in connection with Mitt Romney’s work at the private equity company Bain Capital, but since then interest in private equity has waned even as the field has boomed. Naked Capitalism, an influential financial blog, recently ran a long post about how private equity companies “are far more obviously connected to an undue concentration of wealth at the expense of workers and communities” than are CDOs (collaterized debt obligations) and the other finance instruments that once drew such attention. Though the top one percent of the one percent “consists disproportionately of private equity and hedge fund principals,” the blog ruefully lamented, few of its readers seem interested. The same could be said of the press. A website on the nation’s power elite would pay close attention to the reach and impact of both private equity and hedge funds.

Remarkably, the Wall Street institution that may be the most powerful of them all is also among the least known. BlackRock is the largest money management firm in the world. Its chairman, Laurence Fink, oversees more money (about $4.5 trillion) than Germany has GDP. Fink regularly takes calls from governments and businesses from around the world seeking his advice and, as Susanne Craig reported in the Times in 2012, the company has exerted “enormous influence as a behind-the-scenes adviser to troubled governments” in places like Greece and Ireland. When seeking to analyze the health of a bank, the US Treasury Department often turns to BlackRock, leading a senior bank executive to call it (in an article in Vanity Fair) “the Blackwater of finance, almost a shadow government.” Fink himself is worth more than $300 million and sits on the boards of many institutions, including NYU and the Museum of Modern Art. Nonetheless he and his company have managed to escape serious journalistic scrutiny. A website on money and power could provide it.

Wall Street is hardly the only powerful precinct in need of sharper reporting. Hollywood is another. Coverage of it tends to be thin, with a heavy emphasis on ticket sales, executive rivalries, celebrity interviews, and awards ceremonies. Back in 2005, Bernard Weinraub, in a confessional reflection on the fourteen years he spent covering Hollywood for the Times, described how eagerly journalists sought access to stars and executives and how easily they were “co-opted by the overtures of a Michael Ovitz or the charm of a Joe Roth.”

That’s no less true today. Zenia Mucha, the head of communications for Walt Disney and a top adviser to its chairman, Robert Iger, is known for her skill at cajoling and browbeating reporters. As one journalist who covers the industry told me about Disney, “Almost no one writes a bad word about them so as to have access to top officials.” (He was not, of course, referring to film reviews.) Given the vastness of Disney’s holdings—they include Walt Disney Studios, the Disney Channel, Disney Resorts, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, ABC TV and News, ESPN, A&E, and Lifetime—assessing Mucha’s alleged success at shaping the news about the company would itself seem a subject worth pursuing.

Silicon Valley is in need of similar probing. Current coverage of the tech world leans heavily toward products, start-ups, and personalities. A website on money and power would instead concentrate on its growing political might. Ten years ago, for example, Google had a one-person lobbying shop in Washington; today, it has more than one hundred lobbyists working out of an office roughly the size of the White House. In addition to such traditional lobbying, Google is financing research at universities and think tanks, investing in advocacy groups, and “funding pro-business coalitions cast as public-interest projects,” as Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold reported in 2014 in The Washington Post.

They described how in the spring of 2012 Google—facing possible legal action by the FTC over the dominance of its search engine—played a behind-the-scenes part in organizing a conference at George Mason University, to which it is a large contributor. It made sure that the program was heavily weighted with speakers sympathetic to Google and, according to the Post, it arranged for many FTC economists and lawyers to hear them. In the end, the commission decided against taking legal action. Just why could be a good subject for inquiry. Today, Google is working hard to protect its right to collect consumer data and to that end has sought the support of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation. The type of string-pulling described by the Post goes on routinely and deserves more routine coverage.

Finally, there’s corporate America. Once, Fortune 500 companies were the bread and butter of business coverage. Since the 2008 financial collapse, however, the preoccupation with Wall Street has pushed these companies aside. As Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica observed to me in an e-mail, journalists

don’t adequately cover how corporations keep their wages down, treat their employees in general, fight unions, lobby for their corporate needs, arrive at decisions to pay their top executives, or dominate their markets. We don’t hear about the GM or VW scandals until after they break. (Once they do, we get good coverage, but that’s archeology, not detective work.) Where is the coverage of Boeing, 3M, Dupont, FedEx or CVS? Energy? Insurance? Trucking? Construction?

A website on money and power would try to fill this gap. The activities of unions could be examined as well.

The power of the megarich does not stop at America’s borders. As Chrystia Freeland writes in her 2012 book Plutocrats, “the rise of the 1 percent is a global phenomenon,” with the world bifurcating into the rich and the rest. A website on the power elite could offer links to its international members. A page on Mexico’s Carlos Slim, for instance, could point out that his fortune (estimated at more than $70 billion) is equal to about 6 percent of his country’s total annual GDP, helping to make it one of the most unequal societies in the world.

As a 2014 Oxfam briefing paper explained, most of Slim’s wealth derives from his having gained near- monopolistic control of Mexico’s telecommunications sector when it was privatized twenty years ago. Over the seventy years that Oxfam has spent fighting poverty around the world, the report stated, it has seen “first-hand how the wealthiest individuals and groups capture political institutions for their aggrandizement at the expense of the rest of society.” It’s impossible to understand Mexico’s many problems without taking into account Slim’s dominance, yet he rarely appears in reports about that country.

Earlier this year, Slim more than doubled the number of shares he owns in The New York Times Company (to nearly 17 percent), making him its largest individual shareholder (though the Sulzbergers retain control). It’s interesting to note that Slim rarely appears in the paper’s news pages. On the surface, this seems a glaring conflict of interest. Exploring the reality behind it would be an excellent subject for a website on the one percent.

4.

From my research, I’ve come away impressed by the number of informative articles that have appeared on America’s superrich; I’ve cited quite a few of them. I’ve also come to appreciate how hard it can be to ferret out information about this group. I’ve had an especially hard time exploring the influence of big money on the museum and art world. The mega-rich have come to dominate both museum boards and the art market, and through them they have left a deep imprint on American culture, but in my reporting I kept running into roadblocks. Clearly, this is an area ripe for further inquiry.

The same is true of all the other sectors I’ve discussed. For all the good work they’ve done, news organization have barely begun to penetrate the structure of economic power and influence. That’s why I think a new, independent website on this world is urgently needed. Such an enterprise would cover the super-elite with unflagging single-mindedness. It would dig deep into the worlds of hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions, treating them not as arenas of Wall Street wheeling and dealing but as avenues of financial maneuvering that have significantly fed the economic imbalances in this country. It would devote sections to philanthropy, think tanks, lobbyists, advocacy groups, education, cultural institutions, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, corporations, and foreign tycoons and show the cross-cutting ties among them. The information gathered would be fed into a constantly updated database, allowing users to learn with a few keystrokes about hedge fund managers’ backing of charter schools, influence-seeking donations to Brookings and AEI, Google’s latest lobbying venture, and the promotion of Ayn Rand on campus.

The website could also feature bloggers able to expose the internal workings of Wall Street. It could dispatch video crews to exclusive enclaves like Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida, to show the opulent mansions and cloistered lifestyles of the super-haves. It could post analytical dispatches from such elite gatherings as the Boao Forum (Asia’s Davos), the Zeitgeist conference (a Google version of TED), Sun Valley (where media barons meet annually to make deals), and Bilderberg (the most secretive executive conclave in the world). It could hire a press critic to document cases of the media accommodating the rich and show what’s not being reported. It could even produce John Oliver–like send-ups of the many ways in which corporations use front men, researchers-for-hire, and fake grassroots groups to try to influence and mislead the public.

There remains the question of how to pay for all this. Given the sizable staff that such an enterprise would require and the limited potential for advertising, it’s doubtful it could ever turn a profit. That means relying on philanthropy. Is there perhaps a consortium of donors out there willing to fund an operation that would part the curtains on its own world?

—This is the second of two articles.

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) was the first film I saw after I moved to Japan in 1987. A Zen-trained painter from San Francisco, who’d spent fifteen years around Kyoto mastering its classical arts and the graces they stand for, pushed a videotape into his creaking machine the day we met, my first week in the old capital, and urged me to sit still. He’d already spent all day showing me the sights of my new adopted home, and now he might have been sharing with me a guidebook to its heart. We sat for 143 minutes on the tatami mat in his crumbling old wooden house, paper screens around us, and the piercing melancholy of the central story, about a bureaucrat in a dead-end job suddenly realizing he is about to die of stomach cancer, carried me off into what seemed to be a distinctly Japanese sensibility. I’d been trained, after all, by devouring most of Kurosawa’s other films before I arrived, as he was the Japanese filmmaker most accessible to (and in) the West.

But when I watched the film again recently, after half a lifetime in Japan, I was taken aback at how very un-Japanese it seemed: in the broadness of its satire, in the zaniness of its switches from one genre to another, in the almost violent simplicity of its message and story. The end was more moving than ever, as it famously cuts to the old man, Watanabe, on a swing, waveringly singing “Life is Brief”; twenty-eight years with a Japanese wife helped me to recognize and feel the spirit and charm (as well as the unabashed appetite) of the hero’s young female colleague, who gives the film its moments of sunshine and fresh purpose. I was even able now to notice that, when she greets the central figure in the street with what is translated as “Station Chief,” she is in fact calling out, “Daddy!”

More than that, I could better appreciate with my own mounting years both the piquancy of the premise and the intricate structure that keeps us constantly off-guard, moved to contrast Watanabe’s actual son with the colleague who inherits his vision, or to understand how and why the film begins with its ending, in a sense, and continues long after what might seem its human climax. I could see how the hero does indeed enjoy a kind of rebirth as some girls around him sing “Happy Birthday!,” a mechanical rabbit, of all unlikely things, turning his gaze away from his own predicament and towards all that he can do for unmet children. I loved the way the filmmaker looks so unflinchingly at essential truths, brushing the trivial aside.

At the same time, I could see why so many Japanese write Kurosawa off as a “Western” director, a dismissal that had surprised me when first I arrived in Kyoto. The film offers an unapologetic attack on lives of quiet desperation of the kind that were coming out in the US at around the same time, in works such as The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Its concerns, for a work about an old man dying, are strangely social and public, the pathos of one man’s final days all but overshadowed, especially at the film’s end, by assaults on Japanese bureaucracy and conformity. The nuance, stillness, and sense of privacy one finds in a movie by Kurosawa’s great contemporary, and counterpoint, Yasujiro Ozu, are replaced by bold-type assertions; Ikiru reminds me how masculine and strident a filmmaker Kurosawa could be, head-on in his effects and unqualified in his declarations (whether it’s an antic depiction of “passing the buck” in the opening scenes or a whirligig journey through a kind of Fellini night-town that makes for some virtuoso passages in the middle). Classical Japanese art is often about putting on veils and masks so that what is not said or shown becomes the heart of the story; a central moment in Kurosawa’s film is a striptease, and much of the film seems to be about stripping away pretensions and platitudes to show the selfishness and hypocrisy that surround poor Watanabe.

Of course, at a remove of sixty-three years, one can also see how Kurosawa was catching something essential to the Japanese postwar predicament, as his culture began to waver between its Buddhist roots and a new, imported American optimism. Japan, then as now, was looking in two directions at once, as brassy Western fashions began to encircle its modest wooden houses. Two women of the night here burst into a ditty they’ve no doubt learned from visiting GIs—“I’m gonna give you a Christmas tree”—delivered in a kind of saucy English, while the more innocent girls who later belt out (in English once again) “Happy Birthday to You!” might be smuggling a foreign confidence and blitheness into a society more attuned to the bittersweet song at the center of Ikiru, “Life is Brief.” Impermanence, the fleetingness of things—mono no aware, as it’s called—still sit at the heart of Japan, even in the midst of its bright, fluorescent, 7-Eleven diversions. And at the core of the film lies a cynical upending of a truth that you might find in any Zen temple: “The best way to protect your position is by doing nothing at all.” Yet still, I watch Ikiru today and recognize the streets, the settings, and the surfaces of my acquired home more than I recognize its relatively intimate and recessive heart.

It’s a familiar trope, I’m sure, but to set Kurosawa next to Ozu is to be startled by their differences. Ozu’s films are often about characters who stoically accept their duty, even as everything in them cries out against it; Kurosawa’s, as here, are about raging, often quixotically, against the system and its accepted pieties. Ozu, you could say, catches the stifled sobs and brave smiles of Cordelia, where Kurosawa, whose Ran famously plays off King Lear, fastens on the rebellions of Goneril and Regan. Ozu’s concern is with the family, and how an intricate structure of social obligation is under stress as trains propel a new, foreign world into their midst; Kurosawa is much wider and wilder in his interests, unashamedly deploying an Olympian voice-over in Ikiru to declare, “This man has been dead for twenty years,” while scheming relatives announce, “I just hate Japanese houses. We need a modern home.” Ozu famously kept his camera still, at tatami level, in long takes designed to see what lay beneath the silences within a near-empty room; Kurosawa swivels it around to the raucous streets and offices of the unsubtle world.

As I say all this, though, I realize that it may be me, and not Kurosawa, who is truly failing to catch Japan. I recall how startled I was when I took my thirteen-year-old Japanese step-daughter to a Kyoto hospital—she had Hodgkin’s Disease, Stage 3—and was reminded that, even now, as in the movie, doctors in Japan try not to tell patients, or their families, that they have cancer. I look at moist-eyed Watanabe, shuffling around in his heavy coat, doomed to be misread by everyone he knows, and I see the salarymen around me in my neighborhood, whose positions as Section Chiefs of Public Affairs routinely ensure they have little time for private affairs. Visiting Fukushima after the nuclear disaster in 2011, I was reminded—as in Ikiru—that it was the recurring attempt to cover up the truth (and to save their own skins), on the part of both government and industry, that outraged everyday Japanese. And, as in Ikiru, both the outrage and the humanity are delivered most expressively by Japanese women, the same women who seem to be all bows and acquiescence when you see them serving tea.

Even more privately, I recall how, whenever I’m asked why I left my secure-seeming life in New York City to move to a small room on the backstreets of Kyoto, I say that I didn’t want to die feeling I’d never lived. Perhaps something in me was already moving toward Ikiru even then. I chose Japan as the place to move to in part because it seemed to be a quietly realistic society inclined to see life within a frame of death. (Not long ago, I heard the creator of the hugely successful TV series Breaking Bad confess to Terry Gross that his work had been inspired by watching Ikiru, even as he inverted its message—or converted it rather into an all-American story of crime.) In my two-room apartment in suburban Nara, I revisit every autumn, almost religiously, My Life Without Me, by Isabel Coixet, a rendingly unself-conscious movie about a twenty-three-year-old mother in Canada suddenly told she has little time to live. My wife knows the film by its title in Japan, Ten Things to Do Before I Die.

When I finish watching the film, I return to my stepdaughter’s desk in one corner of the apartment, lavishly appointed with stickers of Hello Kitty and pictures of Brad Pitt, and work on a novel about a monk who has been told he has only three months to go. In the street outside my window, I can see the men heading out in their suits before dawn to stand at the local bus stop to commute to faraway offices that can surely seem a death-in-life. From across the way, I hear the sound of children in the playground of the neighborhood junior high school, right next to a park. Another park down the road offers swings, which I see every day as I walk to play ping-pong with retired grandfathers exulting in the chance to spend time with the families they neglected during forty years in the office.

Ikiru, in short, may have looked a bit more broad and didactic than I remembered when I watched it again, a far cry from the subtlety and self-containment that are to me the graces of Japan. But somehow it still touches on a world that grows deeper within me every autumn, even as its themes and props encircle me. I met my old Zen painter friend not long ago—he’s moved back to California now—and all our talk was of turning leaves and aging parents, how to give our short lives a sense of purpose. Maybe that plangent sound of “Life is Brief”—and the sense of urgency and a need for service it awakens—has caught up with me in spite of everything?

Part of a continuing NYR Daily series on life-changing films. This essay appears in slightly different form in a new Criterion DVD reissue of Ikiru.

Recently, while writing an essay on T. S. Eliot for The New York Review, I read or reread the work of many earlier critics, and was impressed most by two of them. One was Frank Kermode, who was ninety when he wrote, in 2010, one of his greatest essays, “Eliot and the Shudder,” a breathtakingly wide-ranging and sharply-focused piece about Eliot’s unique response to the common experience of shuddering. The other was a twenty-two-year-old college senior named Barack Obama, who wrote about Eliot in a letter to his girlfriend, Alexandra McNear, when she had been assigned to write a paper on The Waste Land for a college course.

Obama’s letter appeared in a biography by David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story, published in 2012, and prompted dozens of comments, some praising, some condescending. What struck me on rereading it was that, hasty and elliptical as it was, it exemplified literary criticism—like Frank Kermode’s—at its best, and showed why it might be worth doing. It also pointed toward something unsettling about its author’s later career.

This is what the young Obama wrote to his friend, divided into paragraphs for easier reading on screen:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time.

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.

Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)

And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

Obama begins with a strikingly suggestive insight into Eliot’s literary and religious tradition and his special relation to it: Eliot is one of a line of Protestant visionary and apocalyptic writers from Thomas Münzer (or Müntzer) in the sixteenth century to Yeats in the twentieth, but distinguishes himself by finding his apocalypse in the actual world, not in a visionary one. Obama then describes Eliot’s double impulse toward, on one hand, a visionary realm of “ecstatic chaos” together with “asexual purity,” and, on the other, the “lifeless mechanistic order” and “brutal sexual reality” of everyday existence. And he recognizes that Eliot accepts this double impulse as a tragic fate that he can never transcend or escape.

Obama sees that Eliot’s conservatism differs from that of fascist sympathizers who want to impose a new political hierarchy on real-world disorder. Eliot’s conservatism is instead a tragic, fatalistic vision of a world that cannot be reformed in the way that liberalism hopes to reform it; it is a fallen world that can never repair itself, but needs to be redeemed. Behind this insight into Eliot’s conservatism is Obama’s sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere. So the liberal Obama can respect the conservative Eliot, because both seek what are ultimately moral, not political, ends.

Eliot’s fatalism, which Obama shares “with the western tradition at times,” had its source, Obama continues, in Eliot’s sense that life requires death. The living fertility hoped for in The Waste Land must seek its own death in order that new life may arise; the seed must die. This is the point of the “Death by Water” section in The Waste Land and the lines in Four Quartets where the wedding dance leads inevitably to “dung and death.” And the fatalistic cycle of “birth, and copulation, and death” (Eliot’s words in Sweeney Agonistes) always contrasts with the undying perfection that The Waste Land glimpses briefly in “the heart of light, the silence.”

Obama asks his friend, “You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?” Instead of isolating Eliot in some social, ethnic, or sexual category, instead of hearing in him the voice of political or ideological error, Obama finds a deep ambivalence that might be felt by anyone, just as Kermode sees Eliot’s “shudder” as a special case of something felt by everyone. And instead of making an assertion to his friend about her own ambivalence, Obama asks her a rhetorical question, because no one can be certain about someone else’s inner life, though sympathy makes it possible to guess. Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done.

Like everyone, I imagine, who was moved and hopeful after the 2008 elections, I have mixed feelings about Barack Obama’s presidency, and I doubt that “a fatalism I share with the western tradition” is desirable in a practical politician. To be fatalistic is to believe that nothing can be fixed, that the best anyone can do about the miseries of the world is to talk about them, eloquently, while hoping for the world to be redeemed.

Few of the representations of late-nineteenth-century Iran that are currently on display at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World would win any prizes. Part of an exhibition called “Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past,” they have for the most part been composed with little wit or imagination and show individuals or small groups in not very inspiring locations. A number of them were shot in portrait studios with backdrops of classical balustrades and rotundas; some of them are badly faded. For harmony, crispness, and grandeur, they suffer in comparison to the commercial work done by Victorian photographers in the Middle East, such as Francis Bedford’s majestic, lonely studies of the Holy Land from 1862.

Yet the photographs in “Eye of the Shah” are filled with humanity: self-love, pretension, tyranny, hesitancy, and charm. The exhibition’s two hundred-odd images were executed for the most part by a small number of court and portrait photographers using an ultra-modern medium in a land still run according to the divine writ of kings, where the Shah’s harem contained hundreds of wives, concubines, and eunuchs, and many people continued to keep slaves. It’s in this confrontation—between the bastinado and the wet collodion method—that the principal interest of “Eye of the Shah” lies.

The Shah of the exhibition’s title was Naser al-Din, fourth monarch of the Qajar dynasty, who reigned from 1848 to 1896 and whose resistance to modernization was blemished only by his pursuit of European gadgetry. Naser al-Din came to photography in the 1850s—he was taught by a Frenchman—and while no piece in the exhibition can be firmly attributed to him, it seems likely that a few—particularly those of the harem—did indeed issue from the “Exalted Royal Photography Atelier.”

The otherwise useful catalog essays would have done well to explore the anachronistic position and odd personality of the Shah himself, because these aspects of his rule are helpful in appreciating what one is seeing. By the mid-nineteenth-century, forces of modernization were tugging Iran towards the kind of institutional change that was being pursued with some success in Turkey and Egypt—but the Shah himself was one of the main impediments. Apart from being an instinctive stick-in-the-mud, Naser al-Din’s monopoly over the government seems to have planted in his mind the notion that he need not behave with restraint or good sense; he murdered his first decent prime minister in 1852 and didn’t share power after that. After returning from one of his ruinously expensive trips to Europe, and apparently inspired by the Paris ballet, the Shah ordered the women of the harem to give up their traditional attire of long, voluminous, embroidered trousers in favor of a loose-sleeved jacket of the richest brocades above a species of knickerbocker, with the knees exposed and white socks rising half-way up the calf. This egregious combination, documented in a series of images in the New York show, remained the harem “uniform” for the rest of his reign.

Sartorial whimsy was bad enough, but the effects of the royal despotism were felt more painfully in his preferred parlour game, “lights out”—a veritable fusion of Breaking Bad and the Mad Hatter’s tea party. “My father,” as his daughter Tāj al-Salṭaneh recalled,

would sit on a chair near the light switch. As they [the women of the harem] were busy in their conversation, he would turn out the light. Suddenly all hell would break loose. Screams, cries for help, oaths, curses and wailing would be heard everywhere…amid this pandemonium of keening and wailing whose effect was heightened by the absolute darkness…the lights would suddenly come back on, catching everybody in some act. Usually the clothes would be ripped to shreds, the faces and cheeks bloody, the bodies obscenely exposed…the women’s faces were grotesque, their hair dishevelled, their eyes bloodshot and filled with rage…the session concluded, the poor women would scatter to go home, where they attended to their appearance until morning.

This, then, is the arbitrary, all-powerful Shah of the show’s title, and while there is no hint of “lights out” in the generally decorous portraits on display, “Eye of the Shah” nonetheless conveys the impression of an exotic, tawdry fin-de-siècle. In one of several photographs of the harem women in their ballet get-up, next to the Shah’s senior wife stands one of the eunuch slaves whose emasculation allowed them to move freely between the male and female quarters. In another photograph, two eunuchs, one severely stunted, are in a garden, holding themselves with pained dignity. Two other portraits show royal subjects, including the Shah’s toddler grandson, in the company of dead ibex that have been propped up to simulate a hunt; the effect is so removed from any modern idea of adornment or pleasure as to seem eerie.

Some of the most interesting photographs in the show were taken by Antoin Sevruguin, who was born in Iran to parents from the Caucasus, and who differed from most of the other photographers in that he travelled. His depiction of farrashes, or the camp attendants of merchants or pilgrims, carrying rolled up felt tents, evokes the tribal, transient existence of most Iranians at the time, while other mundane shots, of tea-pickers, bakers, camels resting at a way-station, and finally a criminal waiting to be bastinadoed, his bare feet fettered and bound to a pole, are important documents of pre-modern Iranian life.

In another work, a portrait of a black militiaman, presumably a slave of Nubian origin, testifies to the continued existence of human chattel despite an official ban on the maritime trade in 1848. There are other moments when the catalog fails to provide useful background. Sevruguin’s photograph of a three-carriage pleasure train only makes sense if one knows that it traveled a length of track just six miles long, linking Tehran and the capital’s favorite shrine; this was the sum total of the country’s railway network until well into the twentieth century. (The British and the Russians, effectively the only countries that could have built a railway in Iran, were each determined to prevent the other from raising its influence in Iran, and exercised a reciprocal veto on all railway projects.)

Sevruguin was also responsible for many of the images of antiquities that are included in the exhibition, among them the Achaemenid sites of Persepolis and Pasargadae. Taking their queue from their pre-Islamic forebears, the Qajars also trod hesitantly into the contentious area of human representation, executing rock-cut reliefs that commemorated their prowess in battle or the saddle. A photograph by Sevruguin of a bronze equestrian statue of Naser al-Din is important because the statue was disapproved of by the clergy and later melted down. Its lineage can be traced to an earlier statue of Egypt’s great modernizer, Muhammad Ali, in Alexandria, which in turn drew inspiration from the Bronze Horseman in St. Petersburg.

In the end the immobility that comes across in many of these photographs turned out to be deceptive. In fact, as we know now, the country was enjoying a final illusion of isolation before it was hurled into a fireball of revolutionary politics and great-power intervention. Naser al-Din would be the first victim, falling to an assassin’s bullet in 1896, and the show has two powerful photographs of his assassin’s execution by hanging, one of them showing the massed crowd and gibbet from a distance, and in front of that the silhouette of the photographer, his assistant, and the hooded camera itself.

After that the crown went to Nasser al-Din’s son Mozaffar al-Din. He too is represented in the show. In one shot he sits on a cane chair in Carlsbad, carnation in buttonhole, clutching a sprig of something, every inch the foppish tourist—except for the pillbox astrakhan, the tusk-like whiskers, and the worried look on his face. In 1906 a democratic uprising against his profligacy and reliance on foreigners forced this sickly, indecisive man to give up many of his powers to an elected parliament; while the harem closed down, the press exploded into life, and a new politics of rights and invective replaced the old one of servility and torpor.

Mozaffar al-Din died a week after he granted the country’s first constitution, and the following year his son and heir, the tyrannical Muhammad Ali (Naser al-Din’s grandson), destroyed parliament with the help of Russian bombardiers, as England winked from the sidelines. Iran had begun its struggle for true parliamentary democracy, its path blocked by the strongest nations on earth, and photography became fervently political. The lights were on.

“The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past” is on view through January 17 at The Institute For the Study of the Ancient World in New York. A catalog of the show, edited by Jennifer Y. Chi, is published by Princeton University Press.

The ordeal of filming The Revenant, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s fur-trade odyssey of survival and sweet revenge, has received a great deal of attention: for its remote wilderness locations in Alberta and Argentina; for the director’s mad insistence that the scenes be shot in narrative sequence, in natural light, with minimal digital intervention; for the grueling schedule imposed on actors and crew. This is all a bit reminiscent of the hair-raising stories of the production of Werner Herzog’s rainforest epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in which arduousness is felt to entail authenticity, as though the movie is a reenactment of the events it records rather than a mere Hollywood facsimile.

Iñárritu has compared the rigors of making the film to the mauling by a grizzly bear that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass, the revenant of the title, suffers near the beginning (one imagines Iñárritu would have preferred to enlist a real bear)—the prelude to Glass’s long journey back, through mile after mile of gorgeously filmed country, to settle his score with the men who abandoned him. Revenant is the French word for someone who “comes back,” ghostlike, from the dead. Iñárritu, for his part, is drawn to comebacks, that hoary chestnut of Hollywood melodrama. “We’ll make a comeback,” says aging actor Riggan Thomson’s superhero doppelganger in Iñárritu’s 2014 hit film Birdman.

A veritable Bearman in The Revenant, DiCaprio dons a voluminous bearskin for his wilderness adventures, as though adopting the animal’s identity. Superhero-like, he survives long immersion in a swirling waterfall in midwinter, a plunge over a cliff while eluding a band of rifle-wielding Indians, in addition to enduring that murderous bear.

Iñárritu seeks to persuade us that all this really happened. “This film is based on actual historical events,” proclaims a solemn note near the end of the long credits. “Dialogue and certain events and characters contained in the film were created for the purposes of dramatization.” Viewers should be warned, however, that the balance of history and fantasy is actually almost entirely the reverse. The Revenant is, in truth, an almost wholly fictional film. Certain historical events and characters were added for the purposes of verisimilitude.

Even the historical basis of many of the “true” events remains in doubt, as the best source on the Hugh Glass saga, John Myers Myers’s lively Pirate, Pawnee and Mountain Man (1963), makes clear. A hunter-for-hire named Hugh Glass does seem to have joined a party of fur traders led by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson in the film), who ventured up the Grand River in 1823 headed for the Yellowstone in search of beaver pelts, the “soft gold” of the American outback. Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), a famous wilderness guide on the Oregon Trail later in life, was a member of the party and so, apparently, was a shadowy figure named Fitzgerald (played, with unsettling relish, by Tom Hardy).

It was part of the oral lore of mountain men and wilderness guides that Glass, while out hunting for the party of trappers, was hideously mauled by a grizzly bear and miraculously survived, after being left to his fate by a pair of fickle companions who had promised (in exchange for a large share of the profits up front) to give him succor and proper burial. (“What happened to you?” a friendly Indian asks DiCaprio’s Glass beside the corpse of a buffalo he’s munching on. “A bear,” Glass answers in fluent Pawnee. “My men left me for dead.”) Important details of the old legend changed with the teller. Was Glass alone when the bear attacked him or accompanied by others? Was Bridger, not yet twenty, really one of the men entrusted with his care? It depends on the source.

Missing from the story of this mountain-man Odysseus was a Penelope, a love interest other than the love of killing innocent animals. A solution was proposed, a century ago, by the poet-historian John Neihardt, whose book-length epic poem in heroic couplets, The Song of Hugh Glass (1915), has Glass fall in love with his maidenly protégé Bridger:

Blue-eyed was he and femininely fair,
A maiden might have coveted his hair.

Such same-sex relationships may be truer to history (one sees, fleetingly, two men dancing together in a drunken clinch in The Revenant) than Iñárritu’s equally sentimental solution, not present in Michael Punke’s slapdash 2002 novel on which the film is partially based: when we first see Glass in The Revenant, he forms part of an idyllic family triangle, with his beautiful Native American lover and their young son, Hawk. They speak to each other in murmured Pawnee, with English subtitles. Glass (who according to Myers lived for a time with a band of Pawnee that had taken him captive) regales his child with banal native proverbs (“The wind cannot defeat a tree with strong roots”) and warnings about bigoted white men (“They only understand the color of your skin.”).

If a native lover, as in Dances with Wolves or The Last Samurai, adds a dash of exotic romance, young Hawk is enrolled to enhance the revenge motive. When Hawk—who joins Bridger and Fitzgerald in the deathwatch for his father—catches the dastardly Fitzgerald, scalped in some earlier encounter and something of a revenant himself, in the act of smothering Glass, Fitzgerald stabs and kills the boy witness. (He also hides his body from Bridger, who is portrayed as another victim of Fitzgerald’s evil cunning.) Glass, accordingly, has two good reasons to track down Fitzgerald and exact some frontier justice: for abandoning him and for murdering his son.

The weakest parts of the movie are the scenes of Native Americans, who are portrayed as natural ecologists, killing only for food or in self-defense, while the Europeans are invariably seen as cheats, rapists, and plunderers. On est tous des sauvages, French cutthroats scrawl on a sign appended to the corpse of a native brave they have hung from a tree: “We are all savages.” But really the whites are the sole savages in these imagined forests. The only good white man is a dead white man, or one who, like Hugh Glass, has gone native, in the best James Fenimore Cooper tradition. It hardly needs to be said that such depictions seek to redress manifold sins of movies past. And yet, idealization is ultimately as dehumanizing as demonization. One would wish for an occasional moral lapse on Glass’s part. But the wind cannot defeat a tree with strong roots.

What’s best in this two-and-a-half hour film that feels much longer is Emmanuel Lubezki’s gorgeously unhurried cinematography, accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ghostly score, and supplemented with atmospheric compositions by John Luther Adams, Messiaen, and others; as in Iñárritu’s previous films, including Birdman and Babel, the soundtrack, with its repeated, unresolved chords, is crucial to the action, directing our emotional responses to some mystical realm. The film almost has a surfeit of natural beauty, spangled with glinting sunlight, not always clearly keyed to what’s happening among the human characters. The rushing rivers, the majestic trees, and the frigid winter landscape dwarf the human presence. You half expect, as in Terrence Malick’s similarly meditative Tree of Life, to see dinosaurs lumber into the primeval forest.

What the human characters are up to—in confusing, ever-on-the-move cohorts of French, Americans, and Indians—doesn’t feel like it amounts to much. The sinister Fitzgerald is given the best line in the film, suggesting a certain anarchic randomness in the world of beast and man. “God,” he gnomically proclaims, “is a squirrel.”

Will Glass get his revenge? Do we really care in the end? “Revenge,” as he says in his Pawnee way, “is in the creator’s hands.” Partially buried alive by Fitzgerald, Glass comes back to life, despite seemingly impossible odds, with the coming of spring. He’s a sort of seasonal god, like Osiris, who dies and returns to life, repeatedly. Once, amazingly, he cinctures himself into a horse’s still warm, hollowed-out carcass, another premature burial. “I ain’t afraid to die anymore,” he murmurs. “I done it already.” When he thrashes about with Fitzgerald in their final, seemingly inevitable, bear-hug clinch, the blood spews right onto the camera lens—another ambiguous demonstration of authenticity.

Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head. It’s as though Iñárritu has determined that revenants are uniquely prone to dreams (rêves), and that the moviemaker’s job is to fix them with ardor and arduousness.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’sThe Revenant will open across the country on January 8.

Rodin: The Laboratory of Creation

an exhibition at the Musée Rodin, Paris, November 13, 2014–December 6, 2015.
Catalog of the exhibition by Catherine Chevillot, Hélène Marraud, and Hélène Pinet, translated from the French by John Adamson.
Paris: Musée Rodin/Faton, 64 pp., €9.50 (paper)

Rodin

by Raphaël Masson and Véronique Mattiussi, translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre, with a foreword by Jacques Vilain, revised and reissued on the occasion of the reopening of the Musée Rodin

Paris: Flammarion/Musée Rodin, 248 pp., $29.95

Picasso Sculpture

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, September 14, 2015–February 7, 2016; and the Musée Picasso, Paris, March 8–September 18, 2016
Catalog of the exhibition by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland
Museum of Modern Art, 320 pp., $85.00

About the origins of modern sculpture there is a general consensus. The story begins with Auguste Rodin, who died in 1917 at the age of seventy-seven. Rodin was a mythomaniac in the perfervid Romantic style of Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner. He was also a connoisseur of particularities and eccentricities, who sometimes preferred the fragment to the finished work. He struggled to imagine and on a couple of occasions succeeded in creating the monuments that nineteenth-century statesmen, industrialists, and intellectuals demanded for their official buildings and public squares. All the while, he could see that the Apollonian order embodied by those monuments was giving way to increasingly Dionysian forces, which he celebrated near the end of his life with a small study of Nijinsky, the mesmerizing dancer many embraced as the avatar of a new age.

Rodin, with his zigzagging enthusiasms, may have been the first sculptor to conceive of the monument in ways that unmade the monument. He set the stage for the twentieth-century sculptor’s conflicted allegiances to grandiosity and intimacy, as well as what many have come to see as modernism’s embrace of ambiguity. Although Rodin was capable of placing an expressive figure on an imposing base, as in his beguiling salute to the seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, often he aimed to destabilize the monument, suggesting with The Burghers of Calais that heroic figures might have no need for a pedestal and transforming the imposing, cloaked figure of Balzac into a mountainous talisman, a primordial plinth. In Rodin’s anti-monuments we see ambitions and equivocations that lead in ways direct and indirect to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, the various versions of Pablo Picasso’s Monument to Apollinaire, Alberto Giacometti’s towering Women of Venice, Alexander Calder’s immense stabiles in Spoleto, Montreal, Mexico City, and Chicago, and Donald Judd’s one hundred mill aluminum boxes in Marfa, Texas.

The reopening in Paris of the Musée Rodin—all its subtleties and surprises only sharpened and freshened by a three-year renovation—is one of a series of events occurring almost simultaneously in cities on two continents that, if taken together, offer new opportunities to explore Rodin’s power and influence as they resonate through several generations. We are at a moment in the arts when historical reckonings, involving as they do considerations of precedent, genealogy, and chronology, can too easily be dismissed as reactionary gestures, canonical considerations to be tossed aside. There is all the more reason to press for a reconsideration of the tradition that begins with Rodin.

While no three or four exhibitions will enable us to survey the entire story of modern sculpture, we can certainly trace some of the seismic shifts in the modern artist’s experience of the third dimension by exploring “Picasso Sculpture” (at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), “Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture” (at Tate Modern in London), and the retrospective devoted to Frank Stella (at the Whitney Museum in New York). Stella, still in his twenties when he was first celebrated as a painter, has more and more over the years experimented with sculptural elements and by now produces what can only be called sculpture. In his work he renews an age-old argument about the relative values of painting and sculpture, a debate that he addressed, albeit indirectly, in his brilliant Norton Lectures, presented at Harvard in 1983–1984 and published as Working Space.

Rodin, whose work often strikes sophisticated museumgoers as armored and ostentatious, was a believer in the Great Tradition who recognized all tradition’s dangers—the prepackaged emotions, the schematic thinking, the programmatic solutions. His megalomania can be off-putting, especially now, when the megalomania of Koons, Hirst, and their kind has so trivialized the very idea of a Great Tradition. There is no question that Rodin is not an artist who is easy to love, at least not unreservedly. This helps to explain the dramatic shifts in his reputation that have occurred in the nearly one hundred years since his death.

The last great revival of interest in his work was in the 1960s. The reason is not difficult to discern. It was a time when many astute observers of the contemporary scene were arguing that new sculpture by artists ranging from David Smith to Donald Judd was outstripping new painting in originality and importance, a turn to the third dimension chronicled in a legendary exhibition, “American Sculpture of the Sixties,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1967. Rodin looked to be a progenitor. Could it be that the times are now ripe for another renewal of interest in Rodin, whose engagement with tradition may prove to have been as ambiguous, contradictory, and conflicted as our own?

We cannot begin to understand Rodin without looking back a generation, to an outpouring of beautifully nuanced thinking and writing about his work by artists, critics, and scholars. Albert Elsen’s monograph on Rodin was published in 1963—significantly, by the Museum of Modern Art, at the time of a major retrospective. For over a decade after that there appeared a group of books on modern sculpture that have still not been superseded—and each begins with Rodin or at least celebrates him as a seminal figure. These include the critic Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, the historian Rosalind Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture, the sculptor William Tucker’s The Language of Sculpture, as well as Beyond Modern Sculpture by the sculptor Jack Burnham and What Is Modern Sculpture? by the historian Robert Goldwater.

For Rosalind Krauss, the essence of Rodin is his “belief in the manifest intelligibility of surfaces.” She admires his “lack of premeditation, a lack of foreknowledge, that leaves one intellectually and emotionally dependent on the gestures and movements of figures as they externalize themselves.” Krauss was by no means alone in her emphasis on Rodin’s tactile spontaneity. William Tucker, a writer with none of Krauss’s taste for theory, also locates Rodin’s essence in his surfaces, in the modeling that signals

a total and violent break with the past, achieved through the uninhibited manipulation of substance to the point at which the intelligible communication of form would break down, were it not for the figure as vehicle. Clay is here asserted for what it is: soft, inert, structureless, essentially passive, taking form from the action of the hands and fingers.

So Rodin, in these commentaries composed half a century ago, emerges as an artist in revolt against classical stability.

With Rodin, surfaces become changeable, unpredictable, roiled, coruscated, with a life of their own. Rilke—who arrived in Paris in 1902 to write a monograph about Rodin, admired the artist immensely and spent a good deal of time at his side, eventually working as his secretary—was the first to declare that “the fundamental element of his art [was] the surface.” The poet wrote of “this differently great surface, variedly accentuated, accurately measured, out of which everything must rise,” arguing that it was “the subject-matter of his art.” Rodin rejected the sense of completeness—of the figure as a whole, perceived all at once, from head to foot—in favor of the figure that is masked or shrouded, or barely separated from the block of marble from which it emerges, or only a fragment, the body disembodied, with the part (a hand, a foot, a torso) standing in for the whole. This breakdown of the classical figure suggested entropy—a move toward disorder—but also possibility, a dismemberment of the heroic body that brought not death but renewal.

For much of the past hundred years the Musée Rodin has been a Parisian landmark, embraced by casual tourists as well as ardent Francophiles. Housed in the Hôtel Biron, an eighteenth-century structure that Rodin occupied in his last years, the museum was Rodin’s idea, with the French state agreeing to turn the building into a museum as a condition of Rodin’s gift to the nation of his life’s work. As for the garden full of sculpture that surrounds the house, it may have for Parisians some of the same enduring charm that the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art holds for New Yorkers.

Even during Rodin’s lifetime, visitors to his various studios were awestruck by the profusion of his work. Rilke, visiting his studio in suburban Meudon, felt nearly blinded by the play of bright sunlight on statues in plaster. And he wondered at the extraordinary array of sculpted hands and other body parts, which Rodin moved around freely, incorporating them in different figures, or creating unconventional works such as The Cathedral, with two hands lightly held together, suggesting a prayer.

Much of the fascination of the Musée Rodin has always resided in the overload of works, with visitors left to discover things for themselves. It is the genius of this renovation, overseen by the museum’s director, Catherine Chevillot, that it brings a new clarity and brightness to the Hôtel Biron without sacrificing any of the museum’s offbeat magic.

Although some early landscape paintings by Rodin as well as works by Monet and Van Gogh that he collected serve to remind us that Rodin came of age with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, he stood somewhat apart from the embattled confrontation with nature that shaped painting from Courbet and Manet to Cézanne and Matisse. It is true that The Age of Bronze, the standing male nude that first established his reputation when it was exhibited at the Salon in 1877, struck audiences as astonishingly naturalistic, so much so that Rodin was accused by some of having cast the figure from life. But even in The Age of Bronze, Rodin’s struggle was not so much with the exigencies of nature and perception as with the classical ideal of the human figure as a stable form. What was modern in Rodin’s work grew out of his never-ending argument with the poise and balance-within-imbalance of the Greco-Roman ideal, which he saw as already profoundly unsettled by Michelangelo’s hyperbolic achievement. If modern painting is an argument with naturalism, modern sculpture, as it began with Rodin, is an argument with classicism.

Rodin’s development was cyclical, a perpetual reconsideration of the human presence. The commission he received in 1880 for The Gates of Hell, bronze doors for a proposed museum of decorative arts, set him on a decade-long effort to encompass Dante’s Divine Comedy in a single vast composition, and well after the original commission had faded he was exhibiting elements of the composition—The Thinker, The Lovers, Ugolino—as freestanding works of art. Beginning with a composition of rectangular bas-relief units inspired by Ghiberti’s Baptistry doors in Florence, Rodin pushed farther and farther into a baroque symphonic composition, a disorder of swirling, entangled figures that left all practicalities of door and doorway behind. Cluttered, coagulated, the doors became a work that could never be finished, its mingled influences from Hellenistic sculpture, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, and Art Nouveau’s swirling patterns a combustible mix that generated, in ways both direct and indirect, the ambiguous, dreamlike drama of later compositions large and small.

This artist who spent years working on monuments to Hugo and Balzac was, like those titans of French literature, looking for a modern cosmology, the pieces of a puzzle that would perhaps never cohere, an epic in parts drawn from a fragmented universe. It is no wonder then that what one takes away from the Musée Rodin is less a strong impression of particular works than a more general sense of varieties of surfaces, muscular possibilities, greater and lesser levels of finish and completeness and incompleteness, the play of the imagination. All forms of movement—bending, stretching, walking, leaping, falling—are considered from a variety of angles, in many different ways. Rodin pursued a number of curious experiments, one striking example a group of works with small clay studies of men and women placed in antique bowls to create fantasies of growth and struggle, the vessel’s cool symmetry pitted against the figure’s agitated gestures. When Rodin explored a naturalistic gesture—the close embrace of The Lovers or the seated, contemplative pose of The Thinker—his goal was not quotidian truth but allegorical impact.

Rilke, whose studies of Rodin came in two parts, a brief monograph published in 1903 and a lecture presented four years later, announced in his lecture that he did not intend “to speak of people, but rather of things.” This strikes me as the key that can unlock not only the art of Rodin but modern sculpture more generally. Rilke ruminated on the nature of things, urging his listeners to think back to some object in their childhood that meant a great deal to them, and consider the “urgency, the particular, almost desperate earnestness all things have,” what he called “an unimaginable beauty,” what he finally referred to as “the thing itself, which evolves irrepressibly in human hands, [and] is like the Eros of Socrates, it is the daimones, between god and man, not necessarily beautiful itself, but pure love and longing for beauty.”

Remove the filigree of fin-de-siècle spiritualism from Rilke’s remarks and they provide a valuable guide to the variety of objects on display in “Picasso Sculpture,” the exhibition that fills the entire fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art. Certainly the roiled surfaces of Picasso’s work in plaster and bronze—from The Jester (1905) to the Man with a Lamb (1943)—owe much to Rodin, whose work Picasso knew well during his early years in Paris. But there may be more that we learn about Picasso from Rilke, whose Fifth Duino Elegy was inspired by Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques and who wrote movingly about Cézanne as well as Rodin.

Picasso’s Cubist sculpture—the Glass of Absinthe (1914) shown at MoMA in six differently painted versions, and the abstract guitars made over a decade in cut, bent, and sometimes painted sheet metal—confounds any conventional notion of sculpture, presenting us with a glass from which we cannot drink and a series of guitars that cannot be played. The work of art becomes a conundrum, an unreal object set in the real world. Sculpture, in Picasso’s hands, has given way to things—precisely what Rilke saw happening in the art of Rodin.

Picasso was not the only artist who embraced sculpture’s new status as enigmatic object. Brancusi, in compositions such as Timidity (1917) and The First Cry (1917), transformed elaborate wooden bases into inscrutable, virtually independent works of art. Both Picasso and Brancusi recognized, at the core of the classical tradition, certain totemic and fetishistic impulses. The art of Africa and the South Seas, a discovery in Picasso’s circles in the first years of the new century, suggested alternative traditions, all the more powerfully because they were so utterly unfamiliar. When the Galerie Ratton in Paris mounted a famous exhibition of three-dimensional works in 1936, the title was “Surrealist Exposition of Objects,” the word “objects,” like Rilke’s “things,” suggesting that the works on display by Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, and a host of other artists had what Rilke referred to as “an unimaginable beauty” and André Breton would have described as a “convulsive beauty.”

Among the avant-garde there was a growing belief that new terminologies might be needed to describe unprecedented forms of three-dimensional expression, among them the abstract wire constructions of Calder. Duchamp dubbed Calder’s kinetic works mobiles, Arp suggested that his static works be called stabiles, and Calder himself in his later years invariably referred to his creations as objects rather than sculptures. This rechristening of art’s third dimension culminated with Donald Judd, who in the 1960s dubbed many of the contemporary works that interested him “specific objects”—which might be regarded as a plainspoken American way of continuing Rilke’s Germanic talk of “the thing itself.”

“Picasso Sculpture,” which will travel to the Musée Picasso in Paris, is among the largest exhibitions of the artist’s work in three dimensions ever held, and it is no surprise that it has been received with rapturous reviews in New York. Through much of his life, Picasso was reluctant to exhibit his sculpture in public—most of it remained in his own possession—and it was only in the mid-1960s, when he was in his seventies, that he agreed to make generous loans to retrospectives in Paris, London, and New York. MoMA has pulled out all the stops for what is the second major exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture in this country; the first was also mounted at MoMA, in 1967. The fourth floor of the museum, generally devoted to the permanent collection, has been emptied and filled with Picassos, the installation so spacious as to feel almost stark, an impression increased by the absence of identifying labels on the works (a brochure available at the beginning of the show contains this information).

While Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, the curators in charge, probably meant to create a dramatic atmosphere with this stripped-down presentation, I am sorry to say I find something slack in the installation, some reluctance to shape this highly variegated body of work. This is an exhibition without a clear rhythm or clear climaxes, the triumphs and near misses and misses hardly distinguished. The curators’ idea may have been to stand back and allow the work to speak for itself, but the work speaks in so many voices and dialects that the ultimate effect of all the white walls and evenly sized and scaled spaces is to muffle Picasso’s multidirectional assault on museumgoers. For Picasso—who discovered in African and South Seas masks and statues an unnerving antinaturalistic power to set against his birthright, which was the Greco-Roman tradition’s unshakable equanimity—sculpture would always be a speculation, a gambit, a dare.

There is something almost lunatic about Picasso’s profligacy with methods and materials. The catalog of the MoMA show, with its detailed chronological narrative of his sculptural pursuits, is a brilliant piece of work that brings his careening, unpredictable, stop-and-start production into focus. Unfortunately, when it comes to the exhibition itself, the curators have failed to honor the distinctive, highly variegated qualities of Picasso’s work with clay, plaster, cast bronze, welded metal, scrap metal, sheet metal, metal rods, carved wood, wood constructions, cardboard, paper, stone, glass, not to mention found objects of all kinds. The masterpieces—the openwork Figures made as studies for the Monument to Apollinaire, the scrap metal Women in a Garden, the heads of Marie-Thérèse Walter in plaster and bronze—are insufficiently distinguished from what amount to masterful jeux d’esprits, such as the boxed, sand-covered assemblages done in the summer of 1930 or the etched stones and glass figurines from the 1940s. I find myself wondering if Temkin and Umland clearly saw the difference between Picasso in dead earnest and Picasso when he’s just kidding around.

Picasso was the most dialectical of artists, and when it came to sculpture he was forever arguing with the ancient obligation to graciously represent gods and goddesses, the bizarre twists and turns of his sculpture as often as not an Olympian joke on its own Olympian origins. Consider the guitars made of sheet metal, those unplayable musical instruments, with their elegant mockery of utilitarianism. Or the openwork structure of the various studies for the Monument to Apollinaire, which skewer the solidity of the old-fashioned monument. Or the massive heads inspired by his lover Marie-Thérèse, produced at the Chateau of Boisgeloup in the early 1930s, which honor the classical ideal of gently curving volumes even as they mock those classical values by turning a woman’s face into a man’s genitalia.

Picasso was always a trickster, a clown of metamorphosis, etching stones found on the beach to create faux ancient fragments, and producing, in the old pottery town of Vallauris, the hundreds of plates, pitchers, and bowls that marshal the potter’s wheel for an Ovidian game, pitchers turned into birds, vases into women, and platters into amphitheaters on which bullfights unfold. Of course the exhibition includes Picasso’s most famous tranformations: the bicycle seat and handlebars turned into a bull’s head, and the Baboon and Young, whose head is cast from a toy car, the windshield become a pair of eyes, the car’s hood a snout.

In 1933, not long after producing his heads of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso created a series of etchings on the theme of the sculptor’s studio, a few of which hang in a hallway at MoMA, not far from the entrance to the exhibition. Here we have Picasso in his storyteller mode, imagining the atelier of a sculptor of the classical period, the artist relaxing with the woman who is his mistress and muse, the two of them together contemplating the fruits of his labor.

In at least one extraordinary image there turns out to be trouble in paradise. The artist’s muse, a naked classical beauty, finds herself face to face with a surrealist sculpture of a seated figure. She regards this grotesque vision, a collage of bizarrely knocked-together body parts, with a surprisingly cool fascination. Apparently the athletically built, bearded sculptor, although sometimes wreathed with laurel, cannot rest on his laurels. For him Pygmalion’s dream of bringing a statue to life gives way to the larger question of the various kinds of life the artist can grant to clay, plaster, metal, wood, and stone.

Like Rodin, Picasso was fascinated by Michelangelo’s Slaves, those men whose struggle for freedom is framed by the sculptor’s struggle to free the figure from the block of marble. What Picasso confronted throughout his life as a sculptor was the sure knowledge that the materials had a life of their own. The materials became his muse.

—This is the first part of a two-part article.

Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.
It did not last: the Devil howling “Ho!
Let Einstein be!” restored the status quo.

—J.C. Squire, “In continuation of Pope on Newton”

Most theories in physics are produced in response to some experimental phenomena. The quantum theory is like that: the phenomena seemed so weird that they cried out for a new theory to explain them. While there were some anomalies in the planetary orbits that needed explanation—at one point it was even suggested that an unobserved planet might be responsible—this is not what motivated Einstein. He was trying to fit gravitation into the worldview he had created with his 1905 special theory of relativity. It took him a decade to do this and he had to learn some mathematics that had never been applied to physics. A mathematician named Marcel Grossmann whom Einstein had known since his student days in Zurich helped him.

Here is the theory:

The term with the capital lambda is the cosmological constant. The term on the right hand side multiplied by Newton’s gravitational constant G is the matter term. The other two terms contain the geometry of curved space.

The key to the whole business turned out to be what it means to be “weightless.” Suppose someone is standing on a scale that gives way so he or she falls freely. What will the scale read? The answer is zero. As far as that person is concerned the effect of gravity has disappeared. When later Einstein tried to explain this to lay people he introduced the metaphor of what became known as the Einstein elevator. He imagined an elevator somewhere in outer space, far from any gravitating object. He imagined a genie that could pull the elevator up by a rope so that it had any acceleration one wanted. If he pulled it up with exactly the acceleration of a freely falling body on Earth then the occupants of the elevator would think that they are in the Earth’s gravitational field. One can thus switch on and off the effects of gravity by changing the acceleration. This is known as the “principle of equivalence.” It has remarkable consequences, as Einstein discovered. One of them that I will now explain is that space in the presence of gravity is “curved.”

Light in a vacuum propagates in straight lines. If you made a triangle of three light beams you would find that the interior angles add up to 180 degrees—as Euclid said. This is the “flat” space prediction. Now let us return to our elevator. With the elevator stationary, we emit a light beam from one side and it propagates to the other in a straight line. It is always the same distance from the floor. Now we do the same thing when the genie pulls up the elevator. The floor keeps rising to meet the light beam, so viewed from inside the elevator the beam follows a curved path toward the floor. If we make a triangle of three of these curved light beams the angle sum will no longer be one hundred eighty degrees but might be greater or lesser. Space has become curved and the geometry is no longer Euclidean.

But by the principle of equivalence this setup can be replaced by a stationary elevator in a gravitational field. Gravity curves space. Light follows the straight lines in this space as do other gravitating objects. In relativity, space and time must be treated together so it is more correct to say that the geometry of space-time is curved. The difficult mathematics is going from a distribution of matter to the geometry of space-time. Now there are computer programs that do this for you, at least in some cases. Einstein was able to study simpler cases where at least he could do this approximately.

This explains the anomaly in the orbit of the planet Mercury. Mercury is following the curved path that is determined by the geometry of space-time created by gravity. In Einstein’s theory of gravity there are no gravitational forces, only the curving of space-time. Einstein proposed that this could be tested by observing the bending of starlight by the gravitational field of the sun. This was tested in the 1919 expeditions led by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington to observe stars during a total eclipse of the sun. The results, which showed, as predicted, an observable displacement of the star’s observed position due to the gravitational bending of light, agreed with the theory and Einstein immediately became a world celebrity.

After 1915 he continued drawing out consequences of the theory. One of them was the notion of a gravitational wave. An accelerating gravitational object can emit waves of gravity, but these waves show up as distortions in space-time. Einstein proposed this in 1916 and it has been detected indirectly by observing the orbits of neutron star pairs. Very elaborate experiments are now underway to detect them directly. Einstein also noted that a star could act like a gravitational lens and distort the image of a star behind it. He thought that this effect would never be detected but it is now a commonplace tool of astronomers.

In 1917 Einstein published a paper on the application of the theory of relativity to the universe at large—cosmology. He had decided that the universe was stationary—neither expanding nor contracting—so he added a term, the cosmological constant, to his original equations with a value of the constant, the Λ in the above equation, chosen to guarantee this.  He abandoned this once it was shown in the 1920s by Edwin Hubble that the universe was actually expanding. Now it has been shown that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate—so the cosmological term is given a new value, the dark energy, now adjusted to produce the acceleration. This is typical of what has happened in the last few decades. Cosmology, aided by some marvelous experimental discoveries, has become the center of attention. There is nothing more exciting.

Among the cosmological phenomena that the theory of relativity successfully predicted was one that Einstein could never accept: the existence of black holes. In fact, in 1939 he wrote a paper arguing that what we now call black holes violated his theory of relativity. He submitted the paper to the Physical Review. It was sent to a referee who rejected it, so Einstein then published it in a mathematics journal, Annals of Mathematics. The math of his paper is correct but irrelevant, since what he showed was that to form a black hole one needs stellar collapse.

Einstein was apparently unaware that around this time Robert Oppenheimer and his students had shown that if a star was massive enough it could collapse into a black hole. After the war, Oppenheimer decided that this was of such little interest that he refused to discuss it. He did not live long enough to learn about the work of Stephen Hawking, who showed that black holes can actually radiate and eventually disappear. Today, there are, as far as we know, massive black holes in the center of every galaxy, including our own.

It was probably the work of Hawking, and of course the astronomical discoveries, that revived interest in black holes. I have a vivid memory of a small meeting I attended at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1967 just after Oppenheimer’s death. Indeed, the meeting was in his honor. There was an extraordinary array of physicists on hand including people like Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, my teacher Julian Schwinger, T.D. Lee, and C.N. Yang—Nobelists all. The talks were about the latest theories and experiments. John Wheeler wanted to give a talk on black holes. There was so little interest that his was the last talk on the last day, and some people had already left.

Wheeler spoke about a theorem that he called the “no hair theorem.” This is the statement, still not proven in general, that, viewed from the outside, black holes exhibit only three properties—their mass, their electric charge, and, if they are rotating, their angular momentum. What they are made of is irrelevant. This is now a basic element of the theory of black holes, but as Wheeler was describing it, no one was paying the slightest attention, with the exception of Freeman Dyson, who understood its importance. That is the only thing I remember from that meeting, but Dyson was right.

I often think of the exchange Einstein had in 1919 when a cable came to him in Germany from Eddington informing him that his general theory of relativity and gravity had been confirmed. A student was present and she asked how he would have felt if it hadn’t been. He replied “Da kömmtmir halt der liebe Gott leid tun, die Theorie stimmt doch.” “I would have been sorry for the dear Lord—the theory is correct.”

I do not think he ever changed his mind about black holes.

Augustine: Conversions to Confessions

by Robin Lane Fox

Basic Books, 657 pp., $35.00

His [Augustine’s] monastic base was still combined with travel, always on horseback (without stirrups).
—Robin Lane Fox

Robin Lane Fox, a British classical scholar, was the historical adviser for Oliver Stone’s godawful movie Alexander. He asked to be, and was, repaid by riding bareback in the movie, in the front line of Alexander’s cavalry. He is an adventurous fellow. Now he tells us he can reveal the hitherto-unknown deep meanings of Augustine’s Confessions, the book in which Augustine described his own life from his birth in 354, to his early belief in Manichaeism, to his baptism in Milan and the death of his mother, Monnica, in 387. He takes over five hundred pages to get us to the time Confessions was written (397), Augustine’s forty-third year (with thirty-three years more to live).

Lane Fox’s book largely traces the progress of Augustine with reference to dreams, conversions, ascents, and visions. He sets a low bar for these mystical events. In the famous garden “conversion scene” in 386 AD, for instance, Lane Fox claims that the appearance of Lady Continence talking to Augustine was an actual vision—though he admits that the previous image (of seductive women pulling Augustine back from his decision) is a literary convention.

To assure us that prophetic dreams, mystical ascents, and visions were common and believed in, he traces their influence on the thought and actions of two men who were Augustine’s contemporaries, though Augustine did not know, know of, or read them. He locates Augustine (354–430) by a kind of triangulation, tracing similarities with, and differences from, the Christian bishop Synesius of Cyrene (circa 373–414) and the pagan orator Libanius of Antioch (circa 314–393). Since these men are less known than Augustine, this is explaining ignotum per ignotius. He thinks of it, rather, as “like a triptych on a medieval Christian altar,” with Libanius on the left “casting a look of profound disapproval up at Augustine,” and the Christian Synesius on the right “looking up with tempered adoration.” Lane Fox wants us to know that the other two believed, like Augustine, in dreams, ascents, visions, and devils—though the more interesting question would be who, at the time, did not.

He brings in the other two not only to learn about attitudes toward the supernatural. Every sameness or difference of the three is recorded, as on a checklist. Augustine studied hard at school—so did they. Augustine had a concubine, and so did Libanius. He was a bishop, and so was Synesius. But Synesius loved to hunt, and Augustine did not. Did Augustine have throat problems? Libanius had migraines and gout. This is what Lane Fox calls significantly “similar health problem[s],” but who of us doesn’t have some illness sometime?

The conviction grows that if Augustine had at any time described himself as sneezing, Synesius or Libanius would be found doing or not doing that. He not only compares what the three men did, but imagines what they would have thought of each other if they had been acquainted.

Mind reading is another part of Lane Fox’s method. When in 386 Augustine leaves the profession of rhetoric, which he taught first in Carthage and then in Rome and Milan, Libanius, who lived for rhetoric, “would have snorted in disgust,” but Synesius could have helped Augustine hone his arguments in “a ‘conference call’ with Augustine and [Augustine’s friend] Nebridius,” had cell phones existed in the fourth century and had they known whom to call. It becomes wearying to watch Lane Fox leap from one of his three yoked horses to the other as they gallop forward, though he seems to find it as exhilarating as riding with Alexander’s cavalry.

In all this comparing of the three men, Lane Fox fails to examine the one enormous difference Augustine had from the other two. They lived in the great world; he did not. The great world of the fourth and fifth centuries was Rome’s Eastern empire. That is where the theological and ecclesiastical action was. The ecumenical councils occurred there—Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451)—with little or no participation from the West, which was a lesser world intellectually. The early theological giants were from places like Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Constantinople. Among them were Origen, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and others. They debated and defined Christian teaching, in technical Greek terms, homoousion, hypostasis, prosopon, and the like. The Western church had fewer and lesser men before Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and Augustine, and of these only one—Augustine—was not in communication with the East, since he did not know Greek.

That is an astonishing fact, one that Lane Fox brushes away, saying without offering any evidence that “Augustine’s writings in later life reveal that his Greek improved until it was far from rudimentary.” Even if that were true, it would depend on what “later life” means—leaving most of his years Greekless, unable to read the Koine text of the New Testament. In fact, as James O’Donnell, the best editor of Confessions, has rightly concluded, Augustine’s Greek was “pathetic”—in fact, Augustine was the only major thinker of late antiquity who was monolingual. O’Donnell measures the deep significance of that fact:

To come at the end of the fertile years that were marked by the literary careers of Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Evagrius Ponticus, to name only a few, and to be heir to a Christian tradition that numbered Origen among its most learned and original figures, and to be unable to read any of them except in very limited and partial ways reflected through translation was bad [enough]. But to be cut off from direct reading of the gospels and Paul as well was ultimately very damaging to what he could say and do. Yet he never seems to have been truly distressed by his lack, though there had to be people around him who sniffed at him for it.¹

There were indeed people who scoffed at Augustine’s provincialism. The well-educated Julian of Eclanum dismissed Augustine as “what passes for a philosopher in Africa” (philosophaster Africanus) and a “donkey keeper” (patronus asinorum) of his little flock in Hippo.²

Lane Fox cannot recognize the gap between the greater and lesser intellectual worlds of the time, since he wants to have his three men share one culture, to be at all times and in all ways comparable. He needs the intellectual equivalent of Thomas Friedman’s economic “flat world,” so he can dart back and forth from one to another of his chosen three men. Other scholars, with different concerns, have tried to deny that Augustine was ignorant of Greek and of the Eastern church. They tease out hopes that his discussions of Greek words and Bible verses are not like those of a person deciphering phrases in the Loeb Greek series with the help of the facing page of translation. But Augustine was forthright in admitting his lack of Greek, especially when he treated the Trinity, a doctrine that had been thoroughly vented (some say invented) in the East:

Things for me to read on this subject [the Trinity] have not been widely circulated in Latin—perhaps because they do not exist, or they cannot be found, or I at least have trouble finding them. As for writings in Greek, I am not familiar enough with that language to read easily or understand thoroughly [Greek] works on this topic—though I am sure, from what little has been translated, that they may contain the answers to any questions we could reasonably ask of them.³

Why, when he recognized this deficiency, did Augustine not remedy it? He admits he resisted others’ efforts to teach him Greek in school, but he had many opportunities to learn it afterward. When he was at the Greek-speaking court of the emperor in Milan, officials and soldiers around him used Greek. So did the Christians who most influenced him at this key moment in his life and introduced him to Neoplatonic views—Ambrose, Simplician, Mallius Theodore. The bishop who ordained him in Hippo was a Greek speaker from birth.

It seems that Augustine intuited from early on that concentration on his own resources, especially those born out of inner needs, would foster his greatest gift as a thinker—his endless originality. He says that he sought God within himself, mystery seeking mystery. “You were more in me than I was in me” (interior intimo meo). “You remained within while I went outside” (intus eras et ego foris).⁴ Starting thus from his own inner place, he humbly invites others to join him in his exploration of the unknown:

Anyone reading this should travel on with me where we agree; search with me where we are unsure; rejoin me if he finds he is astray; call me back if I am astray. In this way, we may jointly proceed along the path opened by love, venturing toward the one of whom we are told, “Search always for his countenance.”⁵

By starting every inquiry from a new place, Augustine surprises us, time after time, page after page, with the absolutely original things he has to say. The eminent classicist Albrecht Dihle, after devoting his famous Sather Lectures to a survey of Greek and Latin writings on the human will, concluded: “It is mainly through this entirely new concept of his own self that St. Augustine superseded the conceptual system of Greco-Roman culture.”⁶ The philosopher Gareth Mathews calls De Trinitate“the first…treatise on mind in the modern sense of ‘mind.’”⁷ The Plotinus scholar Paul Henry claimed that Augustine was “the first thinker who brought into prominence and understood an analysis of the philosophical and psychological concepts of person and personality.”⁸ Augustine invented an entirely new theology of the Trinity by finding it reflected in the one-and-many aspects of human personality.

Lane Fox does not follow any of these paths into Augustine’s originality. Instead, he keeps trying to demonstrate his own originality by ringing all the changes on his comparisons with Libanius and Synesius. It is not enough for him to say that Synesius was a Christian bishop, like Augustine, but that Synesius was married with children (a not uncommon situation in the fourth century). He has to go on and imagine what the whole course of Augustine’s life would have been if had been a married bishop. We are marshaled by phrases like he “might have” (three times) or “would have” (four times) toward a bridge to nowhere. He even tells us how many children Augustine might have/would have had—four. It’s a wonder he doesn’t tell us their names. Lane Fox aspires to know the unknowable, even when it is not worth knowing.

The absurdity of this procedure would not be so frustrating if he did not waste so many pages in its obsessive pursuit. Though many people date the composition of Confessions in stages over more than a year, he argues cogently that it was written all at once, in a great feat of concentration. But then comes the inevitable comparison with Libanius, who wrote his own autobiography in the form of an oration, but did it in stages—and we get five close-printed pages to describe those stages. Then, when we finally get back to Confessions, Lane Fox tells us not only what year it was written in (397) but what days—during Lent for the account of his sins and during Easter season for the last books on the creation verses of Genesis. It is an interesting though unverifiable guess, but it does not change the meaning of the text or our reaction to it.

Lane Fox does not restrict his stringing out of hypotheses to comparisons with Libanius and Synesius. Since Halley’s comet appeared in 374, when Augustine was a twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher, if he looked up at it, and if there was no cloud cover over Carthage, he might have considered it a supernatural omen, as Libanius would have if he saw it in Antioch. But Lane Fox prefers to think it would be for Augustine, as for his fellow Manichaeans, “a flash of divine Light”—which does not tell us much about Augustine, who never mentions seeing the comet, but it gives Lane Fox another of his visions.

The book has many finespun hypotheses, but the most revealing of them is the semen bread episode. The millionaire ascetic Paulinus of Nola had begun an admiring correspondence with Augustine, who was disturbed when Paulinus did not respond to him for a while. In a period when letters (carried by friends or hired couriers) often went astray or went undelivered, there are many possible explanations for this—there could be letters lost before delivery, or now lost to us after they were delivered; Paulinus could have been sick or otherwise disabled for some of the time, or tied up with his new duties at the shrine of St. Felix in Nola, Italy. But Lane Fox has the real explanation. He is the “truther” of this self-created scandal. It is the case of the sperm-filled loaf. It is worth looking at this best example of his daisy-chaining of flimsily connected guesses, along with a virtuoso indulgence in mind reading. This, as perhaps the flimsiest as well as the most sensational of his arguments, should be looked at in detail. Lane Fox connects and confuses three different things.

1. Semen bread. The story begins when Augustine, as a Manichee, may have heard (must have heard according Lane Fox) an anti-Manichaean slander that the cult’s Elect, at their secret meals, had sex on top of flour spread on the floor. Their joint juices were spilled on the flour, and the male like some unknown Onan spilled his seed upon the ground, making the flour a carrier of the particles of light from the Elect, as the members of the Manichee sect were called. Bread was then made of the flour for the Elect to consume. Like most attacks of bigotry, this slur was illogical. What good would it do for the Elect to recycle light out into bread and then back into the source of the light in the first place? There is no way to know how widely this crude attack was known to people, much less to know how many credited its nonsense.

2. Love spell. In 396, when Augustine was no longer a Manichee but a Catholic priest, his bishop in Hippo, Valerius, and Africa’s leading bishop, Aurelius, wanted to make him an auxiliary bishop. They invited Megalius, Africa’s longest-serving bishop in Calama, to join them in the consecration. Megalius said he would not join them, because he had heard that Augustine was still a secret Manichee, and that he gave “love spells” (amatoria maleficia) to a married woman with her husband’s consent. He said this in a letter now lost, but later quoted against Augustine.⁹ Nonetheless Megalius went to Hippo, where Augustine and his sponsoring bishops persuaded him the rumors were wrong, and Augustine was consecrated by him.

Lane Fox assumes that (a) because one charge Megalius reports is that Augustine was still a Manichee, (b) the other charge, of love spells, must have been connected with Manichaean practice, (c) so the spells must have worked through the Manichaean semen bread. This makes no sense. The semen bread was not a love spell, but a way of recycling light among the Elect. The charge of using evil magic (maleficium) was a common one used against witches and wizards.

3. Paulinus. Lane Fox assumes that Augustine’s love spell—his “noxious love charms” for a married woman—referred to Therasia, the wife of a complacent husband, Paulinus of Nola, in a sexless marriage inspired by piety. Paulinus, a friend of Alypius, Augustine’s alter ego, had written an admiring letter to Augustine introducing himself, and enclosing “one bread as a sign of community” (panis unus indicium unanimitatis). It was a custom of early Christianity to share the communion bread with other communities, to express that the believers were all one in Christ, what Paul called “one bread, one body.” Lane Fox says that this was a foreign custom in Africa, but Augustine surely knew it from his days in Milan, and he responded to Paulinus by sending his own blessed bread.

Lane Fox at last has his solution to Paulinus’s lapse in correspondence with Augustine. Paulinus, after consuming Augustine’s bread, heard of the charge against Augustine of using a love charm, and thought of it as the sperm bread of the Manichaeans. Why would he think that? The sperm bread was not a love charm, and if the communion bread was a love charm, how was Augustine in Africa going to seduce Therasia in Italy? Or was he trying to make Paulinus and Therasia break their vow of abstinence? Why? Augustine admired their joint renunciation of sex after they became Christians.

Why would Paulinus suspect that Augustine’s bread, offered in response to his own blessed bread, broke that currency of exchange to introduce a love spell? To entertain that suspicion Paulinus would have to think that Augustine, whom he had recently praised, was not only hostile to him or capable of evil magic (maleficium), but blasphemously treated the communion bread of their common faith. Does Lane Fox think Paulinus was a blithering idiot?

Lane Fox has an explanation (of sorts) of Paulinus’s change from admiring Augustine to snubbing him. In 397, Augustine wrote to his friend and fellow bishop Profuturus that Melagius had died three weeks before. He then reflects, perhaps remembering Megalius’s initial opposition to his consecration as a bishop, that we should not give way to anger, and he reminds Profuturus of a recent conversation they had on a journey.

What is the connection here? Lane Fox says that the “neatest guess” is that Profuturus had told Augustine about Melagrius’s letter and one or the other had to check his anger. Moreover, this conversation let the world know of Megalius’s charges. Why? It was not in the interest of either Augustine or Profuturus to promote the slander. Yet Lane Fox with the wave of a wand changes the situation in which nobody knew (even Augustine) of Megalius’s letter to one where everybody knew (including Paulinus). “Once known, there would be no containing it [Megalius’s letter] from the vicious twitter of Donatists and other suspicious bishops in Africa. Inevitably, it would swirl across to Italy and reach Nola” (emphasis added).

Events in Lane Fox’s time scheme occur as close to another as anything in Shakespeare’s plays. Paulinus has to get and eat Augustine’s bread of blessing, and then, before he can write back to Augustine, he has to hear and believe the swiftly spreading news about Megalius’s letter and decide not to write Augustine ever again. Lane Fox, having explained to his satisfaction how a rift occurred, says nothing about how it was healed when Paulinus and Augustine continued to correspond with mutual friendship and admiration following the hiatus.

Though the semen bread story has nothing to with the putative focus of this book—which is Augustine’s Confessions—Lane Fox brings it in toward the end of this long book, where it is given a separate chapter coyly titled “Food For Scandal.” We are asked to watch, in fascinated horror, how Augustine “dispatched the fateful gift,” after which Paulinus realized “that he and his wife had swallowed Augustine’s seeded loaf.” None of this is mentioned by Paulinus himself in his letters to Augustine or anyone else. The whole tale of horror takes place in Paulinus’s mind, as that is read by a special access granted to Lane Fox.¹⁰ And now that he has taken us into Paulinus’s head, why not ask whose sperm Paulinus thought he had swallowed. Did Augustine fill the loaf with his own sperm? Did he recruit or hire some other filler or fillers? Only Lane Fox knows.

February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the government crackdown in 2008. A monk by the name of Tapey stepped out of the Kirti Monastery and set his body alight on the streets of Ngawa, in the region known in Tibetan as Amdo, a place of great religious reverence and relevance, now designated as part of China’s Sichuan Province.

At least 145 other Tibetans have self-immolated since then. Of these, 141 did so within Tibet, while the remaining five were living in exile. According to the best information we have, 125 have died (including 122 within Tibet and three abroad). Most of these individuals are men, though some are women. Many were parents who left behind young children. The oldest was sixty-four, and the youngest was sixteen. Seven underage Tibetans have either self-immolated or attempted self-immolation; two of them died, and two were detained and their fate is unknown. The numbers include three monks of high rank (tulkus, or reincarnated masters), along with thirty-nine ordinary monks and eight nuns. But many were ordinary people: seventy-four were nomads or peasants; among the others were high school students, workers, vendors, a carpenter, a woodworker, a writer, a tangka painter, a taxi driver, a retired government cadre, a laundry owner, a park ranger, and three activists exiled abroad. All are Tibetan.

These events constitute the largest wave of self-immolation as a tool of political protest in the modern world—yet there is no such tradition in Tibetan history. How did we get here?

Recent decades have brought increasingly extreme oppression to Tibet’s third generation under Chinese rule. This oppression is primarily manifested in five areas of Tibetan life. First, Tibetan beliefs have been suppressed, and religious scholarship has been subjected to political violence. The dispute over the reincarnation of the tenth Panchen Lama in 1995, in which Beijing selected its own Panchen Lama and placed the Dalai Lama’s chosen appointee under house arrest, created the world’s youngest political prisoner and produced an irreparable break in relations between Beijing and the Dalai Lama.

A similarly paranoid decision in 2008 to expel all monks who were not born and raised in Lhasa from the city’s three main monasteries (Drepung, Sera, and Ganden) was one of the main factors leading to the protests that spread throughout the region that March. After the 2008 protests, a “patriotic education” program, forcing monks to denounce the Dalai Lama openly, was intensified and expanded beyond Lhasa to cover every monastery across Tibet. Outside of the temples, the people of Tibet face regular searches of their residences: images of the Dalai Lama are confiscated from their homes, and there have even been cases of believers being imprisoned simply for having a photograph of His Holiness.

Second, the ecosystem of the Tibetan Plateau is being systematically destroyed. The state has forced thousands to leave behind the sheep, grasslands, and traditions of horseback riding with which they have practiced for millennia to move to the edges of towns, where they remain tied to one place. In their wake, a sea of Han workers has arrived from across the country armed with blueprints, bulldozers, and dynamite. They have immediately gone to work on the empty grasslands and rivers, mining copper, gold, and silver, building dams, and polluting our water supply and that of Asia as a whole (in particular, the upper reaches of the Mekong, Yangtse, and Yarlung Tsangpo rivers). The result of this “development” has been widespread pollution and increasing earthquakes, avalanches, debris flows, and other disasters.

Third, Tibetan-language education has been systematically undermined. Take the state’s reform of Tibetan-language teaching in Qinghai Province, which stipulates that “Chinese shall be the primary language of instruction, and Tibetan a secondary language.” Such educational reform, viewed as a “pressing political task” for the Tibetan regions, aims to accomplish what the rulers of China have been unable to do by any other means over the past sixty years: making Tibet “Chinese.”

Fourth, under the pretext of “developing” Tibetan regions and attracting new talent and investment, the government has provided preferential taxation, land, finance, and welfare policies for Han immigrants to Tibet. A new policy, initiated in 2008, recruits local police from the military and special forces stationed in Tibet, reaping the dual benefit of providing plenty of well-trained recruits for the mission of “maintaining stability” in Tibet while at the same time ensuring a stable population of colonizers.

Finally, the authorities have spared no effort in developing an Orwellian surveillance system, known simply as “the grid,” that covers every inch of Tibet. The grid divides neighborhoods into multiple units with corresponding government offices, which are benignly advertised as expanding social services. In practice, however, these offices are used to monitor such “critical groups” as “former prisoners, nuns, and monks who are not resident in a monastery or nunnery, former monks and nuns who have been expelled from their institutions, Tibetans who have returned from the exile community in India, and people involved in earlier protests.” According to the authorities, the grid “will cast an escape-proof net over Tibet for maintaining social stability” with “nets in the sky and traps on the ground.”

What happened in 2008? On March 10 of that year, in his statement on the forty-ninth anniversary of Tibetan National Uprising Day, the Dalai Lama declared: “Since 2002, my envoys have conducted six rounds of talks with concerned officials of the People’s Republic of China to discuss relevant issues. However, on the fundamental issue, there has been no concrete result at all. And during the past few years, Tibet has witnessed increased repression and brutality.” The fundamental issue, according to the Dalai Lama, is China’s lack of legitimacy in Tibet—a result of the state’s apparent inability “to pursue a policy that satisfies the Tibetan people and gains their confidence.”

His Holiness’s words shocked Tibetans, who had been waiting patiently, year after year, for any sign of real progress. The Dalai Lama suddenly acknowledged what Tibetans living in Tibet had long known: not only had there been no progress, but life in Tibet had only become more oppressive. The monks of the Sera Monastery near Lhasa were among the first to hear the Dalai Lama’s comments, and they immediately came to an agreement: “We must stand up!” They took to the streets, carrying the Tibetan flag and shouting slogans for freedom, launching the first stage of the protest movement that would rock culturally Tibetan regions in the coming weeks. That same afternoon, hundreds of monks from the Drepung Monastery—another of the capital’s three historic monasteries—came down to the center of Lhasa from the hillside in protest. They were followed in the following days by monks and nuns from all of the monasteries across the city.

Once these protests had emerged, they grew and spread quickly. A common, cynical view of the events, which are known in China simply as the “March 14 Incident” and portrayed in social media as an unprovoked riot by ungrateful savages, blames protesters for all of the oppressive government actions that followed in their wake: the cruel repression, the tightening of security restrictions and expansion of police posts and checkpoints, and the transformation of Tibet into an open-air prison patrolled by omnipresent armed military police, armored personnel carriers, and surveillance cameras. But blaming protesters for state suppression is like arguing that the slave-driver uses his whip only because the slave has been disobedient; if we see the world through such a lens, the slave will always remain a slave.

Just as monks were integral in leading the struggles of 2008, they have also taken the lead in initiating and developing self-immolation as a form of protest. The first thirteen cases of self-immolation were all carried out by monks or former monks who had been driven out of their monasteries by the authorities. Only in December 2011 did a layperson first commit self-immolation, further expanding the scope of this protest movement.

In the first quarter of 2012, fifteen out of twenty self-immolators were monks; but by the second and third quarters of 2012, the majority of self-immolations were carried out by laypeople. In the first seventy days of the fourth quarter of that year, forty-three out of fifty cases of self-immolation involved laypeople. In 2013, sixteen of the twenty-eight cases of self-immolation were also carried out by laypeople, as were seven out of eleven in 2014, and four out of six in the first half of 2015. With the passage of time, people from various walks of life and backgrounds across Tibet have become increasingly involved in this attempt to press for change.

Reviewing the events of the past six years, we find that the single month with the most incidents of self-immolation was November 2012, when a total of twenty-eight men and women, both young and old, engaged in this final act of protest. The month with the second-highest number of incidents was March of the same year, when eleven Tibetans set their bodies alight. Six were monks, while the other five included high school students and parents of young children. It is worth examining why there were spikes at these particular moments and what they might tell us about protesters’ goals and demands.

Looking first at March 2012, we should note that March has long been a politically charged month in Tibet. March 5, for example, marks the anniversary of the suppression of protests in Lhasa in 1989, when People’s Armed Police soldiers opened fire on peaceful protesters who had been gathering for weeks on the streets of Lhasa. March 10 is Tibetan National Uprising Day, commemorating the uprising of 1959 following the Dalai Lama’s escape to India. March 14 is the anniversary of the beginning of the protests that spread across Tibet in 2008. March 16 is the anniversary of the state’s brutal crackdown on protesters in Ngawa in 2008. And since 2009, March 28 has been designated by the Chinese government as Serfs’ Emancipation Day—an official holiday meant to commemorate and “celebrate” the CCP’s supposedly benevolent liberation of the Tibetan people. On account of this surplus of sensitive dates and the politically charged atmosphere they create, the authorities are reliably on guard for any signs of unrest every March. Indeed, the vast majority of protests in Tibet are concentrated in this month.

As for November 2012, the peak in self-immolations at this point coincided with the eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party, at which the new generation of state leaders was to take control of national policy. Twenty-eight Tibetans engaged in self-immolation, nine doing so in the days before and during the Party Congress. The revealing pattern of self-immolations at this politically significant moment clearly suggests that protestors hoped to press the new generation of leaders to change their policy in Tibet, and that they viewed self-immolation as a means of pressing for such change. An understanding of this point is essential to an understanding of the act of self-immolation itself.

In my interviews with international media on the topic of self-immolation, I have always tried to emphasize one area of frequent misunderstanding: self-immolation is not suicide, and it is not a gesture of despair. Rather, it is sacrifice for a greater cause, and an attempt to press for change, as can be seen in these two peaks in self-immolation. Such an act is not to be judged by the precepts of Buddhism: it can only be judged by its political results. Each and every one of these roaring flames on the Tibetan plateau has been ignited by ethnic oppression. Each is a torch casting light on a land trapped in darkness. These names are a continuation of the protests of 2008 and a continuation of the monks’ decision that March: “We must stand up!”

Attempts to label these acts as suicide—or even, curiously, as a forbidden act of “killing”—are either a complete misinterpretation of the phenomenon or, more likely, the type of deliberate misrepresentation that we see all too often in Chinese state propaganda. A high-ranking monk once confided in me very clearly: “The cases of self-immolation in Tibet absolutely do not violate our Buddhist teachings on killing. They are not in any way opposed to Dharma, and certainly do not violate it. The motivations of self-immolators in Tibet, whether monks or laypeople, have nothing at all to do with personal interest…. These acts are meant to protect the Dharma and to win the Tibetan people’s rights to freedom and democracy.” Self-immolators are bodhisattvas sacrificing the self for others, phoenixes reincarnated from the flames of death.

Adapted from Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, translated by Kevin Carrico, which will be published by Verso on January 12.

At the heart of the romance were two great mysteries. One was girls, who saw something boys did not, or did not quite; the other was Indians, who had been exempted by the Great Spirit from the things that made white boys chafe—Saturday night baths, long hours in schoolrooms on sunny days, chopping stove wood, sitting in parlors when guests came. The heart of the Indians’ appeal was this: they did as they pleased. In the fall of 1933 the Chicago Tribune printed a new Sunday comic built around girls and Indians that was written and drawn by an all-around newspaperman from Wyoming named Garrett Price. The strip’s name, White Boy, promised a world of exotic excitements. The hero was just that, a slender, nameless lad who left everything familiar when he was captured by Indians, given to a woman whose own son had been killed by whites, and adopted into the tribe.

Garrett Price (1895-1979) is best known for his work over a half century for The New Yorker, hundreds of cartoons and a hundred covers, including two during the magazine’s first year (“Paris Café” and “Heat Wave,” August 1 and 29, 1925). The long-forgotten three-year run of White Boy (renamed Skull Valley at the halfway mark) has now been republished in its entirety, about a hundred and fifty strips, by Sunday Press Books of Palo Alto, California. It is a big (16 by 10 ½ inches), sumptuous volume in color providing a rich sample of the work of a gifted artist with a sly sense of humor and a sure feel for the line – so sure that the line is pretty much the whole of his style. Price was in his late thirties when he created White Boy to fill a request of the Tribune’s editor, J.M. Patterson, but there was enough of the boy left in him to focus on the mysteries of girls and Indians.

Read now, the strip is politically incorrect in a cheerful way, comfortably calling the principal girl “Little Squaw.” Her given name is Starlight, and she is frankly presented as a long-legged maid in a buckskin dress with kissable lips of the Clara Bow sort who soon has White Boy’s full attention. The Indians are a range of types from central casting: chiefs in feathers, two Indian boys, warriors with oddly chosen names like Trips-Over-a-Dog and his brother, Brother-of-Trips-Over-a-Dog, and a sinister elderly fellow with dark purposes called Snakeface, whose eye is on Starlight. Price’s strips reveal a week at a time what interested him as a writer and an artist. As a writer he is drawn to a kind of camp humor, poking fun at the conventions of the western tale, and as an artist he loves bold composition and grand drama.

In an early strip of only three panels, instead of the usual seven or eight, Price fills his page with a panorama of White Boy and Starlight trapped by a prairie fire and threatened by stampeding buffalo. White Boy searches his pocket and finds a single match with which to start a counter-fire to save them from death. “What is a match?” asks Starlight. In the next strip they get the fire going and are portrayed at the center of one long panel in black, burned-over ground while flames and smoke around them fill a quarter page of the Sunday paper. “White Boy,” asks Starlight again, “what is a match?”

It is obvious that Garrett Price had a good time with White Boy, drawing heavily on his boyhood home in Saratoga, Wyoming, which was serious farming and ranch country but so remote and isolated (about sixty miles east of Laramie) that Price once rode eighty miles to see a circus. The early 1900s was a golden age of Old Timers—the men who had gone west before the Indians were confined to reservations, and the buffalo had been hunted close to extinction. Price’s character Trapper Dan Brown was a familiar frontier type, with a high opinion of himself and a low opinion of Indians.

In one strip Trapper Dan challenges Lark Song, a noted orator in his tribe, to best if he can a song Dan has written. One verse goes:

Oh, I don’t like books
and I don’t like tea,
I wrassled a bear
when I was three.
Ki-Yi-Yippy-Yippy Yea.

Dan tells White Boy he knows Redskins—“one White Man is worth a whole tribe of them.” But Garrett Price has none of the anti-Indian prejudice typical of Wyoming Old Timers when he was a boy. There is nothing threatening about his Indians, who run the usual range of human types. What interests Price most is drawing, capturing the looks and gestures of his characters and the life of the Plains, as he does in one strip (June 3, 1934) devoted to the Indians striking camp. It is full of the romance of times gone by.

But the truth is that Price’s interest in Indians was shallow and I would argue that his early, enamored drawings of Starlight worried his editors. After the early strips she stops hiking her skirt. Near the end of the second year the strip was altered more thoroughly and abruptly. Changing the name to White Boy in Skull Valley was the least of it. The hero is now Bob White, the girl is Doris—same girl, same lips, but wearing short hair, jodhpurs, and boots. The time is more or less modern-day (cars, a boat with an outboard), with assorted bad men, a dude ranch run by a beautiful redhead, a sinister landlord ready to foreclose when the mortgage money is late. The change went unexplained but the editor of the Sunday Press collection, Peter Maresca, guesses reasonably that Price’s boss at the Tribune simply tired of the Indians, and it is likely this also explains the sudden death of the strip in August 1936.

The glory of White Boy is largely found in its opening weeks and later, intermittently, with story lines involving wild beasts and dramatic scenery that interested Price when he had a pen in his hand. Two strips depict a fight between a mountain lion and a black bear in a tree over a raging river. The drawings don’t have much to do with “the story” but are full of tense drama.

Another run of strips are all about buffalo and an Indian who dreams he has become one of them. It’s the buffalo action that interests Price, not what happens to the Indian when he regains his old identity as Good Heart, “the lost son of our chief.” Continuity was the chief motor of the Sunday comic strip in the 1930s. Price was good at setting a story in motion, and he was among the first comic artists to borrow film techniques—the close-up, the unfolding panorama of action, the focus on significant detail. But he had no patience for the week-in, week-out pursuit of characters through the whole of an improbable story.

Garrett Price was a different artist during his laterNew Yorkeryears, when he lived in Westport, Connecticut. The subjects in his cartoons have pot bellies at the beach and noses like parrot beaks, are baffled by the world, and cannot remember what it was like to hike a skirt, or to watch it happen. Some of his covers have a stunning, wistful beauty, like a 1956 cover of circus queens riding elephants into the ring, a 1949 cover of a boy all alone on a spring ball field sliding into home plate, and a 1951 cover of autumn leaves falling over a summer house being closed for the winter—a husband sits waiting in the car as his wife gathers a last armful of flowers. Price’s wife died of lung cancer in 1973, his last cover ran the next summer, and Price himself died in 1979. One previous collection of his work,Drawing Room Only, mainlyNew Yorkercartoons, was published in 1946.

Garrett Prices’s WhiteBoy in Skull Valley is published by Sunday Press Books.

A revolution is taking place in our presidential campaign. Though no one has voted yet and the polls—especially nationwide ones—shouldn’t be taken too literally, there’s every indication in both parties that what’s termed the political establishment is being rejected. We’re some distance from the end of the nomination contests, though perhaps not in the Republican race: if Donald Trump were to sweep Iowa and New Hampshire it’s hard to see how he can be stopped. So far, the talk of a savior entering the race is only that, and to make such a challenge would be daunting. Those who’ve ventured to predict the outcome and gone by past patterns haven’t had it right. Politically, this country is in a new place. It’s best to ignore suggestions of historic parallels.

As of now, the anti-establishment candidates in both parties—Trump and Ted Cruz for the Republicans, and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats—are either well ahead of or giving close chase to the rest of their respective fields. That shouldn’t be a surprise. The public mood has been building toward this situation. Leaders in both parties are seen as having failed various tests and are being rejected. The complaints against the status quo are similar among Democratic and Republican voters. In fact, so alike is the dissatisfaction that there are indications of a possible large crossover vote; in a recent survey, nearly 20 percent of Democratic voters say they would vote for Trump in a general election. Some of the complaints are familiar, but a striking one is new.

The most familiar—and bipartisan—grievances are that the middle class has been squeezed; that wages haven’t kept up; that the divide between the very rich and poor continues to grow. These are deeply felt issues, despite the fact that, in recent months jobs have been coming back and unemployment, at just 5 percent (among those who’ve remained in the job market), is half of what it was when Obama took office, an achievement that virtually no one expected. A sleeper issue, however, has also finally come to the fore: the corruption that infects our political system. It had long been said that the public doesn’t care about this matter, but upset over the gradual loss of control of our political system to those who can buy it is now palpable. For very different reasons, both Trump and Bernie Sanders are seen as incorruptible.

On the Republican side, there’s major disappointment that’s led to embitterment about their elected politicians. It wasn’t just the radicals who were swept into Congress in the 2010 midterm and subsequent elections who failed to deliver on their promises. To assuage the radicals, Republican leaders also pledged to do things they couldn’t, such as block the president’s proposed bailout of the banks—a major rallying cry for what became the Tea Party—or repeal Obamacare; despite umpteen votes in Congress, the health reform act still stands and has a growing constituency. There’s still a sizable budget deficit (though it’s been reduced by more than half). The reckless Iraq war continues in another form; the Middle East is more a shambles and more dangerous than before that war; and the US doesn’t seem to be “winning” against the terrorists, particularly ISIS. It doesn’t matter that some of these charges may be somewhat at odds with reality—it’s what a large portion of the public believes. In politics, impressions triumph over facts. Further, though President Obama has accomplished quite a lot, especially considering the implacable Republican opposition he has faced, the widespread impression is that Washington is dysfunctional; the Republican strategy of trying to keep Obama from succeeding has boomeranged on the party itself.

Over the period of Obama’s presidency, many voters have come to view the established politicians as out of it and irrelevant, and so the thing to do in this election is to try something new. This feeling seems to be particularly prevalent among Republicans, where if Trump and Ted Cruz come off as nihilists and are dismissed by the party’s establishment that’s in their favor. But the public rejection of conventional politics has also hit Hillary Clinton. Though she’s to the left of the way her husband governed, she’s been cautious in her approach to several controversial issues, and though sometimes the caution reflects that she’s being responsible, that she thinks in terms of governing, she fails to generate the excitement that Sanders does. She has of course been pulled somewhat further to the left by Sanders’s unexpected challenge, and her campaign is concerned about the dangers of that when it comes to winning the general election. Recall the profound lack of enthusiasm last year when the consensus among political observers was that the country was headed for a presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

The leading rebels in both parties, Trump and Sanders, are admired for similar traits: they speak in clear, uncomplicated terms; they come off as uncompromised; they reject the status quo; they “tell it like it is”; they evoke some humor—and their nearest rivals don’t. Both Trump and Sanders could be bringing large numbers of new people into the nominating process. The huge crowds that both candidates draw are heavily comprised of people who haven’t voted before. On the Democratic side, there’s a sharp distinction in the age groups, with Sanders drawing younger voters than Clinton does. Traditionally, older voters are more likely to show up at the polls, but in the ahistoric moment we’re in, precedents may be irrelevant. Trump is drawing people of all ages.

The primary contests to come after Iowa and New Hampshire are of a different nature, particularly in the Democratic race: South Carolina and Nevada—and after them first a group of southern states, which vote on March 1, and then industrial states (where industry is coming back, whether or not people feel it), states that are closer to the overall demographics of the Democratic electorate, in which minorities comprise 42 percent. The Republican party’s electorate in the southern states is more conservative than it is in Iowa and New Hampshire. Theoretically, Hillary Clinton should do better among the Southern and industrial states than Sanders, whose Vermont constituency contains few minorities; in the early stages of the campaign Sanders’s somewhat defensive rhetoric about his record vis-a-vis blacks rested on his long-ago support of the civil rights movement. Lately, to appease the new and more radical Black Lives Matter movement, he’s included a sentence or two in his talks about more contemporary black concerns such as police brutality, but this may not be convincing. The pollster Peter Hart, says, “So far, there’s no real sign that blacks are about to turn on Hillary.” Further, if Clinton takes on Sanders’s inexperience in international matters and can paint him as naïve in the face of new terrorist threats, she may make more headway against him in later primaries.

For now, having Sanders as her opponent is turning out to be Clinton’s worst nightmare. His relative leftism and her connections with Wall Street allow him to portray her as a captive of the corporate world—a charge about which she’s defensive. Further, the word authentic has been greatly overused but in this case, it’s a crucial part of what’s been making Sanders much more appealing than Clinton. If Sanders is successful in the early contests, he does have an advantage for the longer haul: he has raised a great deal of money in small donations—in the fourth quarter of 2015, he raised an impressive $33 million, nearly as much as Clinton, but with an average donation of just $27–he can go back for more. Sanders doesn’t come across as encumbered by the Democratic party’s interest groups or big donors, as Clinton does. And while Clinton can seem programmed and compromised, the Vermont senator, having buried his innate grouchiness, comes across as the grandfather or uncle people can trust.

A truism has arisen that Clinton performed better in 2008 when she was under unexpected pressure from Barack Obama. She did become a more skilled campaigner but she isn’t at her most attractive on the defensive, and when attacking she loses a positive message. Subtle knife work isn’t in her arsenal. Lately she’s been using some of the same lines she did then. On Tuesday, she pulled out the mocking image she had used against Obama in 2008, of his supposed assumption that once he was elected it would all come easily because the heavens would open and a “celestial choir” would sing. She misleadingly describes Sanders’s health care proposals as damaging Obamacare and other health care programs by carrying them over to the state; when in fact what Sanders proposes is to enact a single payer system. In Iowa, daughter Chelsea went further, saying simply Sanders wanted to abolish Obamacare. This was a strange debut for their offspring and a sign of the Clinton camp’s nervousness if not panic at the growing possibility of Sanders victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Hillary Clinton has taken to asserting that she is more electable than Sanders, but national polls, for what they’re worth, show Sanders prevailing over Trump and Cruz to both of whom she loses. (Clinton also has a potentially quite serious subterranean problem: the possible results of a major FBI investigation, examining her having used a private email server while she was Secretary of State and the potential conflicts arising from the fact that some major donors to the Clinton foundation also had business before the State Department.)

Both a reflection and a symptom of significant public uneasiness with the choices they’re being offered in this election is that according to a very recent Washington Post-ABC poll, of all the serious candidates only Sanders has a net favorable rating—what pollsters use to measure a candidate’s likability. Sanders’s favorable margin is 4 percent, while Clinton and Cruz rate unfavorable by one point. Perhaps signaling a new trend, or limits on how far he can go—whether if he’s the nominee he can he be elected—Trump has the highest unfavorable rating of all, at 35 percent favorable and 62 percent unfavorable, while Jeb Bush ranks second in that unwanted category with 35 favorable and 58 unfavorable. Bush has recently improved considerably as a candidate, more confident and coherent, but it may be too late and his patronym may turn out not to be helpful, nor may his relative centrism amid a very conservative field be what the Republican electorate is looking for.

This fascinating election is also a troubling one. The center isn’t holding and both parties are so deeply divided as to raise the question of whether any victor will be able to govern. Trump and Cruz are appealing to our darker impulses; and lately Marco Rubio, highly ambitious even as this group goes, and scrambling for third place in the first two contests, has dropped his once-sunny demeanor and begun to echo the front-runners. Trump has a genius for reading what his audience wants—which can lead him to bully-boy tactics, as when his supporters were beating up a Black Lives Matter protester at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump shouted various versions of “Get him the hell out of here.” But his followers love him because he breaks the rules. He suggests that he will get things done through the sheer force of his personality. The Des Moines Register political reporter Jennifer Jacobs recently wrote, “[A] desire to disrupt the way government typically works is a major consideration for caucus goers. And they see The Donald as a demolition agent.”

The anger, fear, resentment, racism, and frustration that are playing into the current political climate make for a turbulent situation.  This is a situation prone to undermining our democratic system. It’s not an overstatement to say that in this political climate this election encourages a certain fascist strain. We’re not there yet and our democratic impulses are strong. The disturbing thing is that that fascist tendency can even be glimpsed.

Investigative reporting got a boost in 1976, after the movie All the President’s Men showed what a small team (two men) could do if an editor and owner like Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham at The Washington Post let them keep digging for a long time. Another such coup was brought off by TheBoston Globe in 2002, when its own investigative team of four people, called “Spotlight,” broke the story of Cardinal Law’s protection of priests who sexually preyed on children. In this case, Spotlight, which normally chose its own subjects, had not followed up on leads fed to the paper. It took an outsider, Martin Baron (played by Liev Schreiber), who had become editor of the paper in 2001, to jog the team into action. Baron was sent by the Globe’s new owner, The New York Times, to trim costs, yet he spent heavily on the priestly abuses scandal. An instinctive deference to the Church had inhibited the press in this Roman Catholic city from recognizing a scandal in its own backyard. Baron was not subject to that thrall. He was initially thought of as outside the Boston culture—an unmarried man, a Jew, not interested in the sacred Boston Red Sox.

In Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight—which has received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Film and Best Director—The Boston Globe story has been given a movie treatment like that of The Washington Post story. Both films retain some of the clichés of such tales—the resistance of society to what the enterprising reporters are trying to do, the difficulty of prying evidence from fearful witnesses, the final victory of the good guys over powerful resistance. But there are many differences. Woodward and Bernstein were outside the normal political reporting of Washington. The “Spotlight Four,” though not churchgoers, were all Catholic-raised or influenced.  The crimes being investigated were more personal and religious, combining sexual and theological inhibitions.

As the team begins, lethargically, to go into the one case that had been superficially handled in the Globe, the serial abuses and regular moves of Father John J. Geoghan, they saw that other priests had been treated the same way—four, they turned up; then eleven. In diocesan records they began tracing the patterns of such frequent shiftings-about for priests. They were stunned as they found that large numbers of priests fit the pattern. They called on Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and psychotherapist who has studied priestly sexual activity for decades. (He is a respected scholar whom I have consulted for my writing and speaking on priests.) He tells the Spotlight team over the phone (his voice supplied by the actor Richard Jenkins) that he had found a high quotient of predatory priests in America, almost uniformly protected by bishops, and by that quotient the number of offending priests in Cardinal Law’s domain would be ninety—which was eerily close to the number they had turned up in diocesan records—seventy-six.

The team now had to interview the priests and find their victims. The priests were protected by Cardinal Law, and many victims did not want to be reminded of their shame. The feisty leader of the team, Walter “Robby” Robinson (played by Michael Keaton), talks to people from his high school to find out what a coach did there, and continuously pressures a golfing pal who is a lawyer for the diocese to speak with him candidly. Over and over he is told he cannot write this story. But he threatens back, telling one man, “You do not want to be on the wrong side of this story,” and telling another that there are going to be two stories, one of the priests and bishops who committed the crimes, the other of the people who covered them up. “Which one do you want to be in?” These are uncomfortable bits of dialogue, since it soon develops that even the Globe is part of the cover-up story.

An early member of the important (then nascent) organization SNAP—Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests—brings in records of abuse, and the team asks him to turn them over. He says he already did give them to the paper, five years ago.  From this time on, the mystery grows—where had those records gone? Keaton’s Robby gets more stunning news when a lawyer he has been pressing to tell him about his work for the diocese tells him he had turned over a long list of priestly abusers twenty years ago. What happened to them? We are bound to suspect Ben Bradlee, Jr. (played by John Slattery)—the Globe’s deputy managing editor and the son of the legendary Washington Post editor who exposed the Watergate scandal—since he has been skeptical all along about the possibility of prevailing over the Church’s many allies, and considering lawyers for the victims just cranks.

The script, written by the film’s director Tom McCarthy and the academic- and-showbiz marvel Josh Singer, is amazing in its mastery of the complex material, since many strands converged for the paper to break the hold of the hierarchy over the city—not only records of priest moves, testimony of victims and predators, but  correspondence of the Cardinal and other bishops that were obtained by court action but put under a seal that the Catholic judge refuses to lift. That bottleneck is broken by one lawyer for the victims, actually a compound of several lawyers working for the abused. This man, plodding on with bent back and no time for frivolities, is played by Stanley Tucci, who is normally the best thing about any movie he is in. His character, an Armenian, Mitchell Garabedian, has been defeated too many times to give in to the pestering of the hothead on the Spotlight team, Mike Rezendes (played by Mark Ruffalo); finally he indicates that some of the sealed material was attached to one of his cases and is outside the ban, but the documents have been removed (“Boston is a Catholic city”). Rezendes scrambles for a judge to return the removed documents—and he wins.

Now the paper has a case solid enough to be published. But Robby opposes publication. He now wants to bring down the whole nationwide system of Church corruption. Boston can wait for that bigger story. But the momentum is too great to be held up and the story goes to press. There is a stock picture of the presses rolling, the triumph scene of many journalism movies, but there is not universal jubilation. One member of the team has to break the news gently to her pious grandmother. Rezendes takes one of the first copies off the press to Garabedian, who receives it wearily because he is interviewing new victims.

There was a crucial scene before publication, when the investigative team met with their superiors, Baron from the Times, Ben Bradlee, Jr. from the Metro section, and a representative of the paper’s legal department. They are facing the fact that a lawyer hounded by Robby finally said that he turned over a list of victims to the Globe twenty years ago. Ben Bradlee, Jr., the man we have been suspecting of burying that list, was not at the paper twenty years ago. The lawyer says he turned it over to Metro. Ben Bradlee, Jr., looks at Robby and says, “It was you. You were Metro.”  Robby, with blank eyes says, yes, “It was me.” As others look at him in amazement, he mutters, “I forgot.” His early zeal on the quest makes this claim convincing. People do forget what is unpleasant, or what would be a terrible disturbance in a city with many ties of loyalty and dependence. But in a carefully calibrated shift Keaton manages perfectly, a memory has been growing that is a burden and makes him not want to reach the goal he began to chase so well.

At this point, with the Spotlight team sitting there irresolutely, Schreiber caps a calmly powerful performance as the New York outsider who put the investigation into motion. He says that when people have been in the dark a long time, and the light is suddenly turned on, they are stunned and disoriented. He softly pronounces that he knows only one thing now, that a difficult task has been done very well. He is advising the others to forgive Robby. But does Robby forgive himself?

We get the answer in the very last scene. The team has come back to the paper  on the day after the story appeared,  and the phones in the Spotlight are ringing with reports from new victims, who know now they will be heard. Rezendes and Robby are just in the door when they are told to pick up the phones and take down the victim information. Rezendes is quick to move to his phones, but Robby hesitates at the door, and the expression on his face is not of elation but anguish. Then he walks to his desk at the far end of the office, turns back to face the room jangling with phones, looks disconsolate for a moment, then picks up his own phone. We are not told, but we know, that he is thinking of all these kids whom he could have protected twenty years ago. The whole city, including its paper, was complicit.

The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

by Joy Williams

Knopf, 490 pp., $30.00

What kinds of narratives fit comfortably into the short-story form? An impossible question: at no time has there been any general consensus about how to answer it, and anyone who tries to formulate such an answer usually becomes the victim of critical potshots. But the issue is worth raising, because even a partial explanation might tell us what short stories actually do, what part they play in our culture, and why writers go on stubbornly committing them to print.

Sonnets are better at describing matters of the heart than at depicting, say, the Battle of Austerlitz. Short stories, given their form, are probably better at dramatizing certain subjects rather than others. But which ones? Probably the most notorious response to this question has been Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, which started as a series of lectures at Stanford and was first published in 1963. Its arguments are exciting, mind-haunting, and occasionally, thanks to its wild claims, “far from wise,” as Russell Banks writes in his otherwise laudatory introduction to the 1985 reissue.

O’Connor’s central idea is that the short story is a more private art than that of the novel. And its dramatis personae are of a different order: more solitary, isolated, and uncommunicative. Going out on one of several limbs, O’Connor claims that we do not identify with most short-story characters. Instead, we find in stories “a submerged population group” made up of lonely outcasts, “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo….” He is thinking here of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and its central character, Akaky Akakievich, and Akaky’s distant, echoing similarity to Christ:

What Gogol has done so boldly and brilliantly is to take the mock-heroic character, the absurd little copying clerk, and impose his image over that of the crucified Jesus, so that even while we laugh we are filled with horror at the resemblance.

Allied to romance rather than realism, the short-story form, O’Connor suggests, does not provide the kind of necessary space for a writer to build up a worthy and heroic individual as novels do. Remembering an author’s stories, we therefore recall a population group and not an individual. As a consequence, what we encounter in short stories are these exemplars of various subcultures, “remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent,” a class of people who were largely invisible to us before our reading. Accordingly, the central feeling of short stories, O’Connor asserts, is that of the loneliness associated with that particular group.

O’Connor’s list of these submerged population groups includes “Gogol’s officials, Turgenev’s serfs, Maupassant’s prostitutes, Chekhov’s doctors and teachers, Sherwood Anderson’s provincials,” to which, in the spirit of things, one might add Poe’s madmen, Cheever’s suburban commuters, Welty’s genteel southerners, Alice Munro’s small-town Canadians, Salinger’s adolescents and children, Edward P. Jones’s African-American inhabitants of Washington, D.C., Grace Paley’s New Yorkers, Denis Johnson’s addicts, Louise Erdrich’s Native Americans, and Raymond Carver’s hardscrabble part-timers. More recently, George Saunders’s haplessly eager victims of hallucinatory capitalism seem to have walked straight out of O’Connor’s theory.

O’Connor’s book has had a certain staying power despite all the holes in its arguments and the numerous exceptions one can think of. His formulation is site-specific: as he acknowledges, the theory applies to North American and Irish writers in a way it does not for those from other cultures. And it doesn’t really account for the rise of the shadowy antihero in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel. Something is off, or some element is missing entirely.

Advancing through Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, the reader is likely to notice a pattern in the narratives that’s so prominent and obvious that it might prompt another claim about what short stories characteristically do—a kind of supplement to O’Connor’s. Given a twist, so that the theory depends on behavior rather than identity, one might say that short stories—and Joy Williams’s are exemplary in this regard—thrive on impulsive action that comes out of nowhere, that is unpremeditated, unplanned, and unconsidered and is therefore inexplicable. Her characters seem to be in the grip of a god or a demon and seem to be following orders whose logic even they could not possibly justify.

If short stories constitute the Theater of Impulsive Behavior, there must be a reason: the limitations of the form tend to reduce the amount of history that can be shoehorned into the narrative. As anyone who has tried to write a story knows all too well, you can’t load on massive quantities of background information at the beginning of a tale without making readers feel uneasily that they have come into the movie late. Novels are quite comfortable about establishing lengthy histories, but short stories are not; they don’t have the time for it. In this particular genre, the God of Impatience rules.

But if you cut out much of a character’s history, you also cut out much of his motivation for action. You can no longer show a character’s lengthy deliberations prior to making a fateful decision. That’s the territory of the novel. Instead, with the contraction of narrative time, and with the character’s past chopped off and a possible future truncated or missing altogether, the protagonist simply acts, going from here to there without entirely grasping why she did what she did and often having no idea of how she ended up where she is now. She experiences the tyranny of the present presiding over an obliterated past.

Furthermore, when the character arrives in the nowhere to which her trajectory has led her, she’s not inclined to settle down. Why should she? She must either keep moving or patch a life together somehow, and if she tries domesticity, her reliance on the glue of love, which is as unconsidered and impulsive as all the other emotions, will prove to be weak and susceptible to breakage.

Like it or not, this vision of a population blown around by its own impulses has struck many readers as an accurate depiction of the way a sizable number of Americans typically behave. The pure products of America are going crazy on a regular basis these days. Unmethodical and uprooted erratic behavior is our signature, our keynote. If a character is incapable of planning anything or remembering her own history, then where does she belong? In with a shadowy, helter-skelter submerged population group, that’s where.

The Visiting Privilege, titled inaccurately as a volume of Joy Williams’s collected stories, omits several from her previous books, including “Woods,” “Building,” and “Traveling to Pridesup” from Taking Care (1982), “The Route” and “Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State” from Escapes (1990), and “Claro” from Honored Guest (2004). Those that do appear have been revised and in most cases streamlined, making the velocity of the action even faster than it was before. And the style, which to my ear begins with overtones from Donald Barthelme deployed for domestic semirealism, is notable for its progression of breathless and vehement declarative sentences, usually unmarked by commas:

I am so weary I can hardly lift up my hand to my head. I must make dinner for us but I think the simplest omelet is beyond my capabilities now. I suggest that we go out but he says that he has already eaten with the tutor. They had tacos made and sold from a truck painted with flowers and sat at a picnic table chained to a linden tree. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My rage at Jeanette is almost blinding and I gaze at him without seeing as he orders and reorders his papers, some of which seem to be marked with only a single line. I feel staggeringly innocent.

Note the absence of qualifiers, the exhaustion, the rage, the disingenuousness, the inability to sit down. Joy Williams’s stories contain many different situations, of course, and their prose glitters with acute perceptions on the part of the characters (“Life was like a mirror that didn’t know what it was reflecting”), but their perceptions and insights rarely do anyone much good. The narrative rhythms have the energy and tone of screwball comedies that somehow have taken an unexpected left turn toward tragedy without quite arriving there, but with the tragedy always in view, off in the distance, unavoidable.

Using this method and this tone, Joy Williams has written several great stories, among the best we have in contemporary letters, located in a book that is almost impossible to read straight through. There is such relentless vehemence in the exposition and drama that reading too many of her stories at one sitting can turn into an ordeal. The terrible suffering, viewed at sixty miles an hour in a landscape infused with unappeasable longings, inspires a kind of awed fascination. Imagine a marathon of Preston Sturges movies going on for days, their hypermanic characters gradually wearing down the viewer into submission, with all the comedy growing bleaker by the minute, and you have a sense of the reading experience of The Visiting Privilege. The only way to read it properly is by slow increments, one story at a time, with pauses for recovery.

Joy Williams’s first collection contained one of her least characteristic stories (though one of her finest), “Taking Care.” The story showed a direction that, for the most part, her stories did not subsequently take. Its protagonist is Jones, a preacher, whose downfall has been his capacity for love. “As far as he can see, it has never helped anyone, even when they have acknowledged it, which is not often. Jones’s love is much too apparent and arouses neglect.” In the world of these stories, Jones’s generosity of spirit makes him a victim, particularly of his daughter’s flighty psychopathology. She has had a baby and soon after its birth has given over its care to her parents while she spends her time wandering through Mexico.

Having done so, Jones’s daughter anticipates having a breakdown. She “has seen it in the stars and is going out to meet it” and in the elongated eternity of her present life ambles through Mexican jewelry shops looking at Fabergé-like eggs. Fate, meanwhile, has given a blood disease to Jones’s wife. She has spiritually abandoned Jones, the story tells us; “she is a swimmer waiting to get on with the drowning.” The pathos intensifies: taking care of his wife, the baby, and a dog, Jones puts on a phonograph record for consolation, whereupon fate intervenes again. The record is, of all things, Mahler’sKindertotenlieder, and Kathleen Ferrier is singing them. In the early version of the story, Jones knows some German and plays the record “again and again,” but in the revised story in the collection under review he listens to it only once, but closely enough to register these lines: Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen,/Bald werden sie wieder nach Hause gelangen (“I often think: they have just gone out/And now they will be coming back”). It is as if circumstances have gleefully conspired to intensify his sorrow.

At the story’s end, Jones is picking up his wife, “thin and beautiful,” at the hospital. He has cleaned up their house in preparation for her return to it, and in the story’s last sentence, one tinged with muted radiance, “Together they enter the shining rooms.” Her arrival at home, into the shining rooms, constitutes the only heaven that the story affords. What’s notable about the stories that follow is how infrequently characters like Jones—people with settled, steady attachments and a feeling for the care of others—appear in them. Instead, the norm involves children or young adults with often-divorced parents (“Fortune”), or the children of murderers (“The Blue Men”) or their parents (“Brass,” “The Mother Cell”), or alcoholics (“Escapes,” “White,” and many others), those who have attempted suicide, and the innumerable characters who are afflicted with obsessions that seem almost god-struck in their intensity. Jones has been left behind, but we will see variations on his daughter many times again.

The one other story in which Jones appears, “Bromeliads,” presents us again with his predicament. “He senses that he has fallen into this room, into, even, his life.” Then he realizes that what he has been thrown into is the present—but a particularly empty present, one that seems to have little or no relation to its own history. “He is in the present, perfectly reconciled to the future but cut off from the past.”

Of course these kinds of tales can be imported into the novel form, but I find Joy Williams’s novels, for all their brilliance, often too frantic for my taste, and, in an odd way, too brightly lit, or as if, to change metaphors, they had been written in too high a key. The Quick and the Dead (2000), for instance, has a marvelous central character, a young woman named Alice, beset with inner rage and dedicated to ecoterrorism. But the book in which she appears is crowded with so many marvels and weirdos and characters vying for the reader’s attention that the effect is a bit like an opera that consists entirely of arias, with almost no transitions, with the apparent presumption that our attention is bound to flag and fail if the style drops from its customary high coloratura volume and nonstop eloquence. There is never a dull moment, and very little modulation, and that is the trouble.

Her essays, in Ill Nature (2001), subtitled “Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals,” have some similar qualities, though in this case with clear targets: overpopulation, hunters, safaris, environmental degradation, cruelty to animals. As advertised, the essays often have the quality of rants, but in almost every case the rage they contain seems like a perfectly appropriate response to the monstrous practices they depict. There is an art of the rant, and Joy Williams possesses it. The book concludes with a kind of ars poetica: any author “writes to serve…something.” Later she identifies this “something” with “that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”

Well, maybe. This particular formulation sounds religious, but the face we view in The Visiting Privilege often looks out with the mad, blank stare of Jared Lee Loughner, the mass-murderer of six people at a Tucson shopping mall in 2011, and who is the real-life protagonist of one of the new stories, “Brass.” D.H. Lawrence’s verdict in Studies in Classic American Literature that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” comes close to getting at the fixed-but-empty concentration of so many of the characters in these tales. They seem so eager to shed their pasts that their behavior seems to be unmapped on any psychological grid. Nor have they signed any social contract.

Nevertheless, characters like Jared Lee Loughner have become so common these days that we now take them for granted. As Jared’s father, the narrator of “Brass,” says, “No, we were never afraid of him. Afraid of Jared?”

The American settings, too, have acquired here the hard glossy patina of madness. “She was living in a motel out on the highway that was next to a burned-out gas station and a knife outlet.” Sometimes the settings themselves seem to be sentient:

But how could he hear her? This annoying room was listening to every word she uttered. And what did it know? It couldn’t know anything. It couldn’t climb from the basement into a life of spiritual sunshine like she was capable of doing, not that she could claim she had. The individual in the hall howled with laughter at this. There were several of them out there now, a whole gang, the ones from the dinner party, probably, the spectacular-wrecks people, just shrieking.

Other characters in these stories are under such heavy psychic pressure much of the time that we wait for them to explode, which they do with some regularity, usually in the form of a monologue that starts up and cannot stop itself. Williams is a specialist in the out-of-control speech that gradually loses its bearings and wanders comically and eloquently in a mad dash from one vanishing thought to another. “Cats and Dogs,” “Hammer,” “The Other Week,” and “Rot” all contain crazed moments of brilliant speechifying that in their unsettled brilliance can rival similar moments in the work of Don DeLillo and Philip Roth.

Accordingly, given the absence of steady thinking and the characters’ inability to concentrate, many of the stories take the form of subverted quests. If a character sets out at the beginning of a story to go to a funeral or to visit a friend, you can be sure that she or he will arrive somewhere else, a place out in the middle of nowhere, like the Motel Lark and its horrific environs. “She squinted, frightened, at black heaps along the shoulder and in the littered grass, but it was tires, rags, tires. Cars sped by them. Along the median strip, dead trees were planted at fifty-foot intervals.”

Joy Williams has also mastered all the elements of distracted attention, including non sequitur dialogue in which the participants are only half-listening to each other, and questions that have so little hope of being answered that they lack an upward inflection and a question mark. These moments are decorated with what James Agee once called “expressive little air-pockets of dead silence.”

“You’d like Donna,” Bliss said to Joan. “You know where she’s from? Panama City.”

“How’re she and Harry doing,” Daniel asked.

“Time has wrought its meanness on their attachment,” Bliss said. “You know what I told her? I told her, to God both the day and the night are alike, so are the first and last of our days.”

“My, that’s very good,” Daniel said, “but a bit cold.”

These stories, with their characters weighed down with inarticulate eloquence, strike a very clear note. What they generally lack in pathos, they make up for in dark comic energy. Witty, and with a concert-hall pitch for American idioms, the stories glitter with a bright, desolate light. The characters, many of them, seem to have just awakened from shock treatment and are groping to remember anything at all. In a sentence that seems to have caused Joy Williams a lot of trouble, the story “Marabou” concludes, in its first version in Honored Guest, this way:

It would never be that once, again, when she’d learned that Harry died, no matter how much she knew in her heart that the present was but a past in that future to which it belonged, that the past, after all, couldn’t be everything.

In its new version in the volume under review, the sentence has been revised, and its meaning has changed:

It would never be that once, again, when she’d learned that Harry died, no matter how much she knew in her heart that the past was but the present in that future to which it belonged.

In the second version, if I am reading it correctly, the past is not only incapable of being everything, it has vanished altogether. Welcome to crazy times.

The Dream of My Return

by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver

New Directions, 136 pp., $15.95 (paper)

How to place the savage fictions of Horacio Castellanos Moya? Now fifty-seven, Castellanos Moya is a stellar fixture in the still-running second boom in Latin American literature, whose leading artist is the late Roberto Bolaño. The booms (the first, in the Sixties and Seventies, and the second, late Eighties and ongoing) are porous constructs with writers like Mario Vargas Llosa and Luisa Valenzuela starring in both of them. Compared to the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar, to mention just the best-known names, the works of the second boom are bleaker, a little less operatic, and differ more among themselves—but perhaps the most different among them are those of Horacio Castellanos Moya.

A main thing that sets Castellanos Moya apart is his intense concentration on his home country of El Salvador and the US-sponsored counterinsurgency wars and terror afflicting that region in the 1970s.^* His eleven novels and five collections of short stories descend directly or indirectly from the enormities of this time and place. He goes over the same ground from different angles, reuses characters at varying stages of their fates, follows entire families, all with an eye to the damage done to these—mostly—peripheral players in the tragedy of El Salvador. Moya’s instinct for the jocular also demarcates his work: he captures the noir absurdities that arise in the most mordant or unlikely settings. His latest novel, The Dream of My Return, presents in compact and indelible form his tricks, his daring, his disgust, his humor.

Erasmo Aragon, a Salvadoran exile in his forties, the narrator of The Dream of My Return, has been working as a journalist in Mexico City for the last five years. He is married and has a young daughter. It’s 1992 and the civil war in El Salvador is ending. A peace treaty is imminent. He has a month to complete the preparations for his return. He ought to be happy. However, he is suffering from obscure pains in his liver, and his regular doctor, a homeopath, has abruptly and permanently returned to Spain.

Erasmo finds another doctor, one Don Chente, an odd duck. This doctor first treats his pain with acupuncture, but decides that a cure will require therapy by hypnosis. He proposes various contradictory etiologies for Erasmo’s distress. One of them is this:

When humans took shelter in caves and were forced to live a sedentary life, they discovered that they did not like to defecate or urinate where they slept…. This was also the first time a human being experienced the emotion we now call anxiety, which consists of having to choose between two options: either he satisfies his instinct to empty himself wherever he happens to be, which means he’d have excrement next to his bed,…or…elsewhere…. Anxiety and bowel control are closely related…. This is the cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome…. This is your ailment.

Although he is quite taken by this theory, Erasmo reminds Don Chente that it is his liver and not his colon that is hurting. Don Chente immediately produces a different diagnosis, one that will require hypnotherapy focusing on Erasmo’s maternal grandmother:

She had devoted her life to crushing my image of my father with the greatest possible cruelty, and it was precisely this damage to my father figure that was undoubtedly the main cause of my ailments.

Erasmo goes for it. He comes from an old conservative Salvadoran family associated with the formerly powerful National Party. He has vague memories of traumas in his boyhood, including his father’s assassination by an unknown killer and seeing the front of his grandmother’s home blown up. Radicalized, he worked briefly for a rebel periodical before going into exile. He is pretty much an homme moyen of his social class. His mental furniture is ordinary, much of it consisting of items from American popular culture. He is no longer concerned with political ideas in any substantive way. His own concerns and ailments interest him, but he has no strong feelings for his wife and daughter, who are to be left behind when he returns to El Salvador.

The hypnotherapy sessions commence. Erasmo is counting on the success of this process to heal his liver pains. The memories he is supplying as raw material to enable Don Chente to create in him a new self-understanding seem increasingly specious to Erasmo. While in a trance state, he free-associates about his life. He awakens from these trances with no memory of what he has said. He never sees the record of his sessions that is kept by Don Chente in a notebook that ultimately disappears—as, for a while, does Don Chente.

Erasmo’s marriage is further weakened by sudden reciprocal confessions of cheating. Oddly, he is annoyed enough about it to arrange for an exile friend of his—a hit man and gun runner for the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—to kill Antolin, his wife Eva’s lover. The hit man, whose nom de guerre is Mr. Rabbit, is to tail Antolin in order to get his address. Erasmo waits in the car while Mr. Rabbit is ascertaining Antolin’s apartment number, and is horrified when Mr. Rabbit returns and tells him that he has found Antolin at home and expeditiously killed him. Erasmo concludes that he must himself have been bluffing when he commissioned this hit. In any case, Mr. Rabbit placates him by utterly changing his story: he has only shot up a flower pot outside Antolin’s door, as a warning. Mr. Rabbit presents his pistol, still warm and smelling of gunpowder. The actual truth of what has taken place is never revealed.

Erasmo is desperate for his liver pains to subside (although not desperate enough, one notices, to curtail his episodic blackout drinking binges). As the hypnotic sessions continue, he experiences deepening mistrust in the accuracy of the memories that he believes he’s supplying to Don Chente—at least the ones he’s thinking about as he goes into the therapeutic trance. And he is realizing that not only are these memories suspect but the only ways he can think of to verify or refute them are chimerical:

I had been certain that my first childhood memory,…the point at which I would have to begin to tell the story of my life, was of the bomb that destroyed the façade of my maternal grandparents’ house…, and my memory consists of one precise image: my grandmother Lena carrying me in her arms across the dark courtyard…. That was the image I returned to with a certain amount of pride whenever I was called upon to explain how violence had taken root in me at the very beginning of my life…. The truth is, I suddenly found myself wondering,…how this almost cinematic image had lodged itself in my memory, considering the fact that if I was in my grandmother Lena’s arms, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to have seen myself from the outside…. I was doubting the veracity of my first memory.

The only way to confirm what my memory was telling me was to travel to Honduras to ask my grandmother Lena,…but I soon thought better of it, it would be utterly senseless to go visit my grandmother Lena, who, at eighty years old, was suffering small strokes that would soon leave her in a state of limbo, and perhaps my memory had been shaped precisely by what she had repeated to me over and over again, whenever her buttons got pressed and she’d begin to rant against the Liberals, whom she never distinguished from the Communists, blaming all of them for whatever was wrong with her country; moreover, I had absolutely no interest in traveling to Honduras….

Erasmo’s problems with his own power of recall are not helped by a critical feature of the Mexico City exile milieu he inhabits: his associates chronically dissemble, revise past roles, plead amnesia. People seem to recall his doctor Don Chente as both a suspected Communist and a CIA agent. At a social gathering, Erasmo’s uncle Munecon faces accusations of involvement in a nasty collaboration between Communists and right-wing death squads. Munecon denies it and begins to tell the story of the murder of his own son by death squads, but Erasmo derails and distracts him: the story is too long for Erasmo, and he has heard it too many times.

We take leave of Erasmo as he approaches the departure gate at the Mexico City airport. There is a bathetic conclusion in keeping with the fantasia of misconception leading up to this moment:

I would board the airplane that would carry me to a new phase in my life, to confront the challenge of reinventing myself under conditions of constant, daily danger, where I would be forced to remain lucid and would learn to have control over how I spent my energy, which I was looking forward to; to achieve this, I counted on meeting, at least once more, Don Chente….

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Honduras, where he lived with his Honduran mother and Salvadoran father for four years. Thereafter, the family lived in El Salvador. In 1969 Castellanos Moya left El Salvador to attend York University in Toronto. On a return visit to El Salvador, he witnessed the massacre by government snipers of twenty-one unarmed students and workers. He dropped out of college and left El Salvador to work in Mexico as a journalist. His sympathy with the rebel cause was destroyed by the spectacle of internecine conflict that became the curse of the movement. He returned to El Salvador in 1991, on the eve of the peace treaty that ended the conflict (like Erasmo in The Dream of My Return).

From 1991 to 1997, Castellanos Moya worked for literary periodicals and wrote four volumes of short stories, as well as the novels Baile con Serpentes (1996) and El Asco, Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador (1997), which resulted in death threats against Moya’s family. This unpleasantness led to a renewed exile of ten years, again in Mexico City. He continued to write short stories and novels and strengthened his bonds with other writers in exile, including Roberto Bolaño, who called him “the only writer of my generation who knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time.” Castellanos Moya was a writer in residence at various colleges during this period. Currently he teaches at the University of Iowa.

Moya is a bold and accomplished craftsman. The Dream of My Return is told in the first-person past tense. The vocabulary and phrasing fit Erasmo perfectly, just as the rambling, pages-long paragraphs accord with the obsessive sequences of self-questioning and out-of-control mental wandering he succumbs to in his reflections. Everything is clear. Those who criticized some of the first-boom writers for modernist self-consciousness (hence elitism) will have no complaints here. Castellanos Moya is a vernacular writer.

From novel to novel, Castellanos Moya varies his mode of attack. TheShe-Devil in the Mirror consists of nine separate unbroken paragraphs in the voice of an upper-class Salvadoran woman discussing, with a confidante, her version of a mysterious death. Tyrant Memory has another female narrator, present in a bricolage made from diary entries, standard past-tense narrative segments, and very long passages of naked dialogue. (Among contemporary male Latin American writers, Castellanos Moya is distinguished in the facility with which he writes about women.) Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador is a continuous, howling monologue about the fallen condition of El Salvador today, delivered to Castellanos Moya by a friend whose outrage resembles that of the great Thomas Bernhard.

The Dream of My Return was translated from the Spanish by the renowned Katherine Silver. When asked in an interview “What do you think should be the most important criteria in choosing books to translate into English?,” Silver replied, “Maybe that it be astonishing and that nobody is or could be writing anything like it in English.”

You can get out of breath reading Moya, who seems to have some occult command over the relationship between subject matter and the kinetics of the language chosen to present it in. There are no longueurs in his books.

Erasmo Aragon is not a superfluous man in the canonical mold of Turgenev’s hero in The Diary of a Superfluous Man. The literary woods are of course as full of superfluous men as they are of unreliable narrators and, these days, really rebarbative antiheroes. Superfluous men make up an illustrious lineage: Goncharov’s Oblomov, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Melville’s Bartleby, Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, all the way down through Sartre’s Roquentin and the hero of Ben Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. Superfluous men respond with disaffection, dysfunction, or withdrawal when they are unhorsed or irritated by the changing fortunes that the social machine spits out. It can be anything—plunging status, national disgrace, political or religious disillusion, extreme boredom.

Erasmo Aragon is his own variant on the type. He doesn’t keep going back to bed like Oblomov or turning down jobs like Bartleby. The concatenation of the specific events in his personal history has resulted in a dazed, feverish doggedness, in which state he systematically creates his own certain defeat. His critical consciousness is highly intermittent, you might say.

Do we need another superfluous man manqué? I think so. It’s always interesting to pick at the question of why these guys are the way they are. Sometimes the answer is on the surface and sometimes it’s complex and not on the surface at all. First of all, it’s fun to read about superfluous men. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe they offer to overworked and overbooked readers a dream of letting go, enjoying regression. There is learning and pleasure to be got from reading about them. (There is to my knowledge no parallel tradition of applying that nineteenth-century coinage to female characters: there is no category of “superfluous woman.”)

Erasmo’s characterological symptoms are typical in survivors of political terror and the post-traumatic stress it produces. Castellanos Moya knows that the characters in this book—which he takes from the more privileged sectors of Salvadoran society—have, for the most part, been spared the worst of the horrors that have occurred in their country. They may endure imprisonment—brief or not—and the perils of flight are real enough, and the experience of exile is often very rough. But they have escaped torture, rape, and death—they have money to get them out of town, money for false papers, friends in Miami, etc. They suffer nonetheless, and their lives bear the marks of that suffering. (Among the many formative memories in Erasmo’s life that are replays of Moya’s own is the blowing up of the front porch of his grandmother’s house.)

The new novel is a character study of one of the demoralized and still half-obtuse victims of past turbulence. Erasmo is unusually screwed up. What animates him is a sourceless conviction that going home again will remake him. He has just enough life force to continue putting one foot in front of the other as he prepares his return. But what is most alive in him is his sense of disconnection and disillusion and his utter rejection of the idea that a renovated left will make a difference in his future. The left is wholly deglamorized in Moya’s works. Here Erasmo is recalling Héctor, “a man who left Che in the dust as far as revolutionary adventures are concerned”:

Immediately after the triumph of that [Sandinista] revolution,…while the commandantes were still singing the refrain “implacables en el combate y generosos en la victoria,” “implacable in battle and generous in victory,” he, on his own initiative, paid a visit to several prisons and expeditiously executed all the officers and noncommissioned officers in the dictator Somoza’s defeated National Guard—only by terminating them immediately could a counterrevolution be prevented….

Moya is not simpleminded in the presentation of his characters, many of them casualties of American interventionism, some of them guilty beneficiaries of it. His scorn goes where it is deserved, to the left as in the vignette of Hector above—and as for the right, asked about the origins of “the curse of violence” in Latin America, this was his response in a 2008 interview:

The answer to this question is material for a book. I have no doubts that the politics of domination and plundering of the United States toward Latin America has played an important role in the recycling of violence, but it is not the only element nor do I think it is the historical origin of it…. The phenomenon was more complex, at least in the case of El Salvador: while the government of Reagan was giving millions of dollars in guns per day to the Salvadoran militaries so that they could commit the massacres against the population, it was within the United States itself that the biggest movement in solidarity with the revolutionary forces of El Salvador developed, a movement that contributed a lot of money. In literature things aren’t black or white; shades and paradox are almost always at the base of great art.

At the end of The Dream of My Return, the reader understands that Erasmo Aragon’s misadventures are fated to continue. His struggles to function in a medium of fear, paranoia, and deceit have led him into a novel kind of active passivity—passivity disguised as action.

Five novels as well as five collections of short stories by Horacio Castellanos Moya have not yet been translated into English. They should be.

The following is a revised version of an interview between George Soros and Gregor Peter Schmitz of the German magazine WirtschaftsWoche.

Gregor Peter Schmitz: When Time put German Chancellor Angela Merkel on its cover, it called her the “Chancellor of the Free World.” Do you think that is justified?

George Soros: Yes. As you know, I have been critical of the chancellor in the past and I remain very critical of her austerity policy. But after Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, she became the leader of the European Union and therefore, indirectly, of the Free World. Until then, she was a gifted politician who could read the mood of the public and cater to it. But in resisting Russian aggression, she became a leader who stuck her neck out in opposition to prevailing opinion.

She was perhaps even more farsighted when she recognized that the migration crisis had the potential to destroy the European Union, first by causing a breakdown of the Schengen system of open borders and, eventually, by undermining the common market. She took a bold initiative to change the attitude of the public. Unfortunately, the plan was not properly prepared. The crisis is far from resolved and her leadership position—not only in Europe but also in Germany and even in her own party—is under attack.

Schmitz: Merkel used to be very cautious and deliberate. People could trust her. But in the migration crisis, she acted impulsively and took a big risk. Her leadership style has changed and that makes people nervous.

Soros: That’s true, but I welcome the change. There is plenty to be nervous about. As she correctly predicted, the EU is on the verge of collapse. The Greek crisis taught the European authorities the art of muddling through one crisis after another. This practice is popularly known as kicking the can down the road, although it would be more accurate to describe it as kicking a ball uphill so that it keeps rolling back down. The EU now is confronted with not one but five or six crises at the same time.

Schmitz: To be specific, are you referring to Greece, Russia, Ukraine, the coming British referendum, and the migration crisis?

Soros: Yes. And you haven’t even mentioned the root cause of the migration crisis: the conflict in Syria. Nor have you mentioned the unfortunate effect that the terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere have had on European public opinion.

Merkel correctly foresaw the potential of the migration crisis to destroy the European Union. What was a prediction has become the reality. The European Union badly needs fixing. This is a fact but it is not irreversible. And the people who can stop Merkel’s dire prediction from coming true are actually the German people. I think the Germans, under the leadership of Merkel, have achieved a position of hegemony. But they achieved it very cheaply. Normally hegemons have to look out not only for their own interests, but also for the interests of those who are under their protection. Now it’s time for Germans to decide: Do they want to accept the responsibilities and the liabilities involved in being the dominant power in Europe?

Schmitz: Would you say that Merkel’s leadership in the refugee crisis is different from her leadership in the euro crisis? Do you think she’s more willing to become a benevolent hegemon?

Soros: That would be asking too much. I have no reason to change my critical views on her leadership in the euro crisis. Europe could have used the kind of leadership she is showing now much earlier. It is unfortunate that when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, she was not willing to allow the rescue of the European banking system to be guaranteed on a Europe-wide basis because she felt that the prevailing German public opinion would be opposed to it. If she had tried to change public opinion instead of following it, the tragedy of the European Union could have been avoided.

Schmitz: But she wouldn’t have remained chancellor of Germany for ten years.

Soros: You are right. She was very good at satisfying the requirements and aspirations of a broad range of the German public. She had the support of both those who wanted to be good Europeans and those who wanted her to protect German national interest. That was no mean feat. She was reelected with an increased majority. But in the case of the migration issue, she did act on principle, and she was willing to risk her leadership position. She deserves the support of those who share her principles.

I take this very personally. I am a strong supporter of the values and principles of an open society because of my personal history, surviving the Holocaust as a Jew under the Nazi occupation of Hungary. And I believe that she shares those values because of her personal history, growing up under Communist rule in East Germany under the influence of her father, who was a pastor. That makes me her supporter although we disagree on a number of important issues.

Schmitz: You have been so involved in promoting the principles of open society and supporting democratic change in Eastern Europe. Why is there so much opposition and resentment toward refugees there?

Soros: Because the principles of an open society don’t have strong roots in that part of the world. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is promoting the principles of Hungarian and Christian identity. Combining national identity with religion is a powerful mix. And Orbán is not alone. The leader of the newly elected ruling party in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, is taking a similar approach. He is not as intelligent as Orbán, but he is a canny politician and he chose migration as the central issue of his campaign. Poland is one of the most ethnically and religiously homogeneous countries in Europe. A Muslim immigrant in Catholic Poland is the embodiment of the Other. Kaczyński was successful in painting him as the devil.

Schmitz: More broadly, how do you view the political situation in Poland and Hungary?

Soros: Although Kaczyński and Orbán are very different people, the regimes they intend to establish are very similar. As I have suggested, they seek to exploit a mix of ethnic and religious nationalism in order to perpetuate themselves in power. In a sense they are trying to reestablish the kind of sham democracy that prevailed in the period between the First and Second World Wars in Admiral Horthy’s Hungary and Marshal Piłsudski’s Poland. Once in power, they are liable to capture some of the institutions of democracy that are and should be autonomous, whether the central bank or the constitutional court. Orbán has already done it; Kaczyński is only starting now. They will be difficult to remove.

In addition to all its other problems, Germany is going to have a Polish problem. In contrast to Hungary, Poland has been one of the most successful countries in Europe, both economically and politically. Germany needs Poland to protect it from Russia. Putin’s Russia and Kaczyński’s Poland are hostile to each other but they are even more hostile to the principles on which the European Union was founded.

Schmitz: What are those principles?

Soros: I have always looked at the EU as the embodiment of the principles of the open society. A quarter of a century ago, when I first became involved in the region, you had a moribund Soviet Union and an emerging European Union. And interestingly, both were adventures in international governance. The Soviet Union tried to unite proletarians of the world, and the EU tried to develop a model of regional integration based on the principles of an open society.

Schmitz: How does that compare with today?

Soros: The Soviet Union has been replaced by a resurgent Russia and the European Union has come to be dominated by the forces of nationalism. The open society that both Merkel and I believe in because of our personal histories, and that the reformers of the new Ukraine want to join because of their personal histories, does not really exist. The European Union was meant to be a voluntary association of equals but the euro crisis turned it into a relationship between debtors and creditors where the debtors have difficulties in meeting their obligations and the creditors set the conditions that the debtors have to meet. That relationship is neither voluntary nor equal. The migration crisis introduced other fissures. Therefore, the very survival of the EU is at risk.

Schmitz: That’s an interesting point, because I remember that you used to be very critical of Merkel two years ago for being too concerned with the interests of her voters and establishing a German hegemony on the cheap. Now, she has really changed course on the migration issue, and opened the door wide to Syrian refugees. That created a pull factor that in turn allowed the European authorities to develop an asylum policy with a generous target, up to a million refugees a year with the target open for several years. Refugees who are qualified to be admitted could be expected to stay where they are until their turn comes.

Soros: But we don’t have a European asylum policy. The European authorities need to accept responsibility for this. It has transformed this past year’s growing influx of refugees from a manageable problem into an acute political crisis. Each member state has selfishly focused on its own interests, often acting against the interests of others. This has precipitated panic among asylum seekers, the general public, and the authorities responsible for law and order. Asylum seekers have been the main victims. But you are right. Merkel deserves credit for making a European asylum policy possible.

The EU needs a comprehensive plan to respond to the crisis, one that reasserts effective governance over the flows of asylum seekers so that they take place in a safe, orderly way, and at a pace that reflects Europe’s capacity to absorb them. To be comprehensive, the plan has to extend beyond the borders of Europe. It is less disruptive and much less expensive for potential asylum seekers to stay in or close to their present location.

My foundation developed a six-point plan on this basis and announced it at exactly the same time as Orbán introduced his six-point plan, but the two plans were diametrically opposed to each other. Orbán’s plan was designed to protect the national borders against the asylum seekers; ours sought to protect the asylum seekers. We have been at odds ever since. Orbán accuses me of trying to destroy Hungary’s national culture by flooding the country with Muslim refugees. Paradoxically, our plan would keep qualified asylum seekers where they are currently located and provide facilities in those places; it is his policies that induce them to rush to Europe while the doors are still open.

Schmitz: Could you make your paradox a little clearer? Why would your plan prevent refugees from flooding Europe?

Soros: We advocate a common European asylum policy that would reassert control over the European rather than national borders and allow asylum seekers to reach Europe in a safe, orderly way, and at a pace that reflects the EU’s capacity to absorb them. Orbán advocates using the national borders to keep out migrants.

Schmitz: And who is winning the conflict?

Soros: In Hungary, he has won hands down. More disturbingly, he is also winning in Europe. He is challenging Merkel for the leadership of Europe. He launched his campaign at the party conference in September 2015 of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (the sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union) and he did so in cahoots with Horst Seehofer, the German party chairman. And it is a very real challenge. It attacks the values and principles on which the European Union was founded. Orbán attacks them from the inside; Putin from the outside. Both of them are trying to reverse the subordination of national sovereignty to a supranational, European order.

Putin goes even further: he wants to replace the rule of law with the rule of force. They are harking back to a bygone age. Fortunately, Merkel has taken the challenge seriously. She is fighting back and I support her not only with words but also with deeds. My foundations do not engage only in advocacy; they seek to make a positive contribution on the ground. We established a foundation in Greece, Solidarity Now, in 2013. We could clearly foresee that Greece in its impoverished state would have difficulty taking care of the large number of refugees that are stuck there.

Schmitz: Where would the money for your plan come from?

Soros: It would be impossible for the EU to finance this expenditure out of its current budget. It could, however, raise these funds by issuing long-term bonds using its largely untapped AAA borrowing capacity. The burden of servicing the bonds could be equitably distributed between member states that accept refugees and those that refuse to do so or impose special restrictions. Needless to say, that is where I remain at odds with Chancellor Merkel.

Schmitz: You have retired from running your hedge fund and devote all your energies to your foundation. What are your major projects?

Soros: There are too many to enumerate. We seem to be involved in most of the burning political and social issues of the world. But I would single out the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and the Central European University (CEU) because there is a revolution going on in the social sciences and I am deeply involved both personally and through my foundations. With the help of the natural sciences, mankind has gained control over the forces of nature but our ability to govern ourselves has not kept pace with the achievements of natural science. We have the capacity to destroy our civilization and we are well on the way to doing so.

Schmitz: You paint a bleak picture of our future.

Soros: But it is a biased view and deliberately so. Recognizing a problem is an invitation to do something about it. That is the main lesson I learned from the formative experience of my life, in 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary. I might not have survived if my father hadn’t secured false identification papers for his family (and many others). He taught me that it’s much better to face harsh reality than to close your eyes to it. Once you are aware of the dangers, your chances of survival are much better if you take some risks than if you meekly follow the crowd. That is why I trained myself to look at the dark side. It has served me well in the financial markets and it is guiding me now in my political philanthropy. As long as I can find a winning strategy, however tenuous, I don’t give up. In danger lies opportunity. It’s always darkest before dawn.

Schmitz: What’s your winning strategy for Greece?

Soros: Well, I don’t have one. Greece was mishandled from the beginning. When the Greek crisis originally surfaced toward the end of 2009, the EU, led by Germany, came to the rescue, but it charged punitive interest rates for the loans it offered. That is what made the Greek national debt unsustainable. And it repeated the same mistake in the recent negotiations. The EU wanted to punish Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and especially his former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at the same time as it had no choice but to avoid a Greek default. Consequently, the EU imposed conditions that will push Greece into deeper depression.

Schmitz: Is Greece an interesting country for private investors?

Soros: Not as long as it is part of the eurozone. With the euro, the country is unlikely ever to flourish because the exchange rate is too high for it to be competitive.

Schmitz: How concerned are you that in the middle of all these crises an important EU member state such as the UK is considering leaving the European Union?

Soros: Very. I am convinced that Britain should stay in Europe not only for economic but even more for political reasons. An EU without the UK would be a much weaker union.

Schmitz: But surveys show a British majority for a Brexit, or British exit from the EU.

Soros: The campaign for the Brexit has deliberately misled the public. Currently, Britain has the best of all possible deals with Europe. It has access to the common market where nearly half of UK exports go while it is not weighed down by the burden of having joined the eurozone.

Schmitz: Why is the British business community not more vocal about the disadvantages of a Brexit?

Soros: The managements of the multinational corporations that have built up their manufacturing capacity in Britain as a springboard into the common market are reluctant to say that they oppose a Brexit publicly because they don’t want to get embroiled in a political debate where their customers have divergent views. But ask them privately, as I did, and they will readily confirm it.

The Brexit campaign has tried to convince the British public that it is safer to stay out of the common market than to be part of it. The campaign had the field to itself because the government wanted to give the impression that it is holding out for the best deal.

Schmitz: For a long time, Europe—and the world—could count on China as a growth and credit engine.

Soros: China is still historically the most important country. It still has very large accumulated foreign currency reserves.

Schmitz: And that will shelter the country?

Soros: China is exhausting these reserves very rapidly. It also has an incredibly large reservoir of trust from the Chinese population: many people may not understand how the Chinese regime actually works, but they believe that a regime that has managed to overcome so many problems knows what it is doing. But the reservoir of trust is also being exhausted at a remarkably fast rate because the leadership has made many mistakes. President Xi Jinping can carry on with his current policies for another three years or so, but during that time, China will exert a negative influence on the rest of the world by reinforcing the deflationary tendencies that are already prevalent. China is responsible for a larger share of the world economy than ever before and the problems it faces have never been more intractable.

Schmitz: Can President Xi rise to the challenge?

Soros: There is a fundamental flaw in Xi’s approach. He has taken direct control of the economy and of security. If he were to succeed in a market-oriented solution it would be much better for the world and for China. But you cannot have a market solution without some political changes. You cannot fight corruption without independent media. And that’s one thing that Xi is not willing to allow. On that point he is closer to Putin’s Russia than to our ideal of an open society.

Schmitz: What is your assessment of the situation in Ukraine?

Soros: Ukraine has done something almost unbelievable in surviving for two years while facing so many enemies. But it needs a lot more support from outside because it’s exhausted. By putting Ukraine on a short financial leash, Europe is repeating the mistake it has made in Greece. The old Ukraine had much in common with the old Greece—it was dominated by oligarchs and the civil service was used by people who were exploiting their position rather than serving the people. But there’s a new Ukraine that wants to be the opposite of the old Ukraine. The Rada has recently passed a budget for 2016 that meets the conditions imposed by the IMF. Now is the time to hold out the prospect of the additional financial assistance that the new Ukraine needs to carry out radical reforms. That would enable the country not only to survive but to flourish and become an attractive investment destination. Turning the new Ukraine back into the old Ukraine would be a fatal mistake because the new Ukraine is one of the most valuable assets that Europe has, both for resisting Russian aggression and for recapturing the spirit of solidarity that characterized the European Union in its early days.

Schmitz: Many criticize US President Barack Obama for being too weak toward Russia.

Soros: Rightly so. Putin is a supreme tactician who entered the Syrian conflict because he saw an opportunity to improve Russia’s standing in the world. He was ready to keep pushing until he encountered serious resistance. President Obama should have challenged him earlier. If Obama had declared a no-fly zone over Syria when Russia started to supply military equipment on a large scale, Russia would have been obliged to respect it. But Obama was eager to avoid any chance of a direct military confrontation with Russia. So Russia installed antiaircraft missiles and the US had to share control of the skies over Syria with Russia. You could almost say that by shooting down a Russian fighter jet, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did Obama a favor. Putin had to recognize that his military adventure had run into serious opposition and he now seems ready for a political solution. That is promising.

There is also ISIS and the terrorist attacks that threaten to undermine the values and principles of our civilization. The terrorists want to convince Muslim youth that there is no alternative to terrorism, and if we listen to the likes of Donald Trump they will succeed.

Schmitz: I can’t help but ask. Do you know Trump?

Soros: Going back many years Donald Trump wanted me to be the lead tenant in one of his early buildings. He said: “I want you to come into the building. You name your price.” My answer was, “I’m afraid I can’t afford it.” And I turned him down.

In a recent letter to the editor, Leon Botstein, the head of Bard College, scolds The New York Review for not mentioning translators. As a translator myself, I’m all too familiar with the review that offers a token nod to the translation, announces it good, bad, or indifferent, perhaps offering one small example to justify praise or ignominy. But although not specifically singled out by Botstein, I fear I am one of the culprits. My review of Levi’s Complete Works did not name the translators or discuss their work.

The fact is that much space is required to say anything even half-way serious about a translation. For example, the three volumes of Levi’s Complete Works include fourteen books and involved ten translators. There is the further complication that the three best-known books—If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Periodic Table—had already been translated, the first two by Stuart Woolf, the third by Raymond Rosenthal. If This Is a Man appears here in a “revised” version of the 1959 translation, Woolf himself having carried out the revision more than a half century after his original. However, The Truce appears in an entirely new translation by Ann Goldstein. One can only imagine what negotiations lay behind this odd arrangement; Levi’s writings are still under copyright, which presumably allowed Woolf or his publisher to dictate terms. Ann Goldstein also offers a new translation of The Periodic Table, and is the translator of Lilith and Other Stories, another book in the Complete Works.

We should say at the outset that while Levi liked to describe himself as a writer with a determinedly plain style, the truth is rather different. Often a direct, speaking voice shifts between the colloquial and the literary, the ironically highfalutin and the grittily scientific. It’s true that there are rarely serious problems of comprehension, but the exact nature of the register, which is to say the manner in which the author addresses us, the relationship into which he draws us, is a complex and highly mobile animal. It is here that the translator is put to the test.

Stuart Woolf, later to become a distinguished professor of Italian history, was in his early twenties when he met Levi in 1956 and worked with him on the translation of If This Is a Man, which would appear to have been his first book-length translation. “It is opportune to recall,” he remarks in his translator’s afterword, “that half a century ago the complexities, ambiguities, and compromises that have become inherent in the expression of one culture in the language of another were not yet discussed.” This is not true. There was a rich body of reflection on translation long before the invention of Translation Studies, and Italy, a country that translated more novels than any other throughout the first half of the twentieth century, has a particularly strong tradition in this area.

Angela Albanese and Franco Nasi recently published L’artefice aggiunto, riflessioni sulla traduzione in Italia: 1900-1975, an anthology of writings on translation in Italy before the invention of modern translation studies. Going further back in time, Leonardo Bruni, Melchiorre Cesarotti, Ippolito Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo, Giovanni Berchet, Pietro Giordani, Niccolò Tommaseo, and, most wonderfully, Giacomo Leopardi all offered fascinating accounts of “complexities, ambiguities and compromises.” In any event, Woolf’s afterword mainly describes his own relationship with Levi, gives no examples of translation from the text, and does not discuss his criteria for revision, leaving us with the elusive remark, “I have made what I believe to be improvements in the translation, and I owe thanks to Peter Hennig for sending me a substantial list of alternative words and phrases, some of which I have adopted…”

Here are some of the changes I have found.  In this first passage, Levi is describing his days as a new arrival in the camp. Here is the 1959 edition:

And it is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone. You are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)

Here is the 2015 edition:

And it is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone. You are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only way out is through the Chimney. (What does that mean? We’ll soon learn very well what it means.)

Levi’s original gives:

Ed è questo il ritornello che da tutti ci sentiamo ripetere: non siete più a casa, questo non è un sanatorio, di qui non si esce che per il Camino (cosa vorrà dire? lo impareremo bene più tardi).

The Italian here is entirely standard, plain, and colloquial, with just a little touch of drama in the capitalization of Camino (Chimney) and again in the closing parenthesis. Given the awfulness of what is being discussed, this downbeat style is remarkable and hence should be preserved at all costs.

The 1959 version shows all Woolf’s inexperience. Can we really imagine the camp inmates saying, “the only exit is by way of the Chimney?” The Italian di qui non si esce che (literally, “from here one doesn’t go out but by”) suggests something like, “the only way you’ll get out of here is through the chimney.” In the 2015 edition “exit” has been replaced with “way out,” which is certainly an improvement. In the following parenthesis the verb has been shifted from past to present—“What does that mean?”—which livens things up a little. However, the Italian uses a future tense, cosa vorrà dire?, which gives the sense “what is that supposed to mean?” The 1959 solution, “we were all to learn,” is shifted in 2015 to “we’ll soon learn,” respecting the new tense sequence but leaving “learn” where a more standard English idiom might use “know” or “find out.”

I include the first part of my quotation, which remains the same in both texts—“it is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone”—to suggest Woolf’s difficulties with the syntax. A more idiomatic translation might have given “that we hear everyone repeating” (the Italian doesn’t use a passive here so why should the translation?). “Refrain” too, though literally it has the same sense as ritornello has a rather more elevated feel; Italians often use ritornello disparagingly to suggest a trite phrase mindlessly repeated, something we don’t do with refrain. All in all, a translator wishing to get the fluent directness of the original might offer,

Everyone keeps repeating the same thing: you’re not at home now, this isn’t a sanatorium, the only way out of here is through the Chimney (what’s that supposed to mean? We’ll soon find out).

In general, Woolf’s revisions to his 1959 translation are very light. In a second example, the camp inmates are so determined to be on time for their meal that they are unwilling to stop to pee. Levi has:

Molti, bestialmente, orinano, correndo per risparmiare tempo, perché entro cinque minuti inizia la distribuzione del pane, del pane-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyér, del sacro blocchetto grigio che sembra gigantesco in mano del tuo vicino e piccolo da piangere in mano tua.

Woolf’s 1959 text gave:

Some, bestially, urinate while they run to save time, because within five minutes begins the distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb-pain-lechem-keynér, of the holy grey slab which seems gigantic in your neighbour’s hand, and in your own hand so small as to make you cry.

Why we have “some” (which would be qualcuno or alcuni in Italian) rather than “many” is not clear. Bestialmente can be used in Italian to mean simply, like an animal. “Bestially” sounds rather like a criticism of these desperate folk. And do we usually invert verb and subject “begins the distribution of bread”? Wouldn’t we normally put an article—“of the bread”? Again, the Italian is entirely standard here, by which I mean that one could hardly think of a simpler way of putting this. However, if the translator uses a more standard English—“Because in five minutes the bread distribution begins”—he will have a problem of the phrase in apposition immediately afterwards (“of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb”, etc.). Since this needs to be tagged directly onto the word “bread,” Woolf decides to leave the Italian structure intact. Of course, this solution is entirely possible in English, but gives the feeling of something rather more elaborate and less spoken than the Italian. In the end, the only things revised here in the 2015 edition are the English spelling (grey/neighbor), the use of “which” rather than “that” and the repetition of the word “hand.”

My own sense of Levi’s original might go like this:

To save time many are urinating as they run, like animals, because in five minutes they’ll be handing out the bread, Brot-Broid-chleb-pane-pain-lechem-keynér, that sacred gray slab that looks so huge in the hands of the man next to you and so small you could cry in your own.

I’ve risked a little confusion using two “they”s with different referents in the first line, though in the context of the paragraph the sense will be clear enough. Italian has no other word but distribuire for the idea of distributing, but English has “handing out.” Why go for the more formal “distribute” for this rather brutal process of handing over slabs of stale bread? I’ve introduced pane into the list of words for bread, since it seems strange to eliminate Italian from the languages the inmates are speaking. I’ve also used the straightforward “looks” instead of “seems” (again Italian has no choice here) and I’ve speeded up the end “so small you could cry in your own” in line with Levi’s extremely condensed piccolo da piangere in mano tua. Meanwhile, il tuo vicino is a tricky problem. It means “the person next to you,” hence also “your neighbor.” So it could take on a Biblical ring. But it is also absolutely the word you would use for the guy standing next to you in a line at a bus stop. The question is, how much attention do we want to draw in the English to a word that draws none at all to itself in Italian?

Sometimes Woolf’s revisions actually make things less clear. Here, after the men get their bread and return to their dormitory block the 1959 edition tells us that, “the Block resounds with claims, quarrels and scuffles.” In the new version this becomes, “the block resounds with claims, quarrels, and flights.”

Flights? On reading this I confess it took me a moment to grasp what was meant. Levi is explaining that in the camp bread is the only form of currency for trading, hence the moment the men get their bread is payback time. If someone owes you something, you need to get his bread off him now, before he can eat it. The Italian gives:

Il Block risuona di richiami, di liti, e di fughe.

Richiami could indeed mean “claims” or “protests” but would more usually indicate “calls,” “shouts,” “cries”; in particularly it is used to refer to the noises animals make calling each other, something that links back to bestialmente and indeed the whole theme introduced by the title If This Is a Man; liti means “quarrels,” or even “fights.” Fughe is “flights” in the sense of people running for it. Again, it’s a word in common use in Italian; we could talk of the fuga of a soccer player who breaks free of his defender, or a thief running from the police. In English the word is barely comprehens­­ible here and even if we do understand, it takes us back to a usage of long ago in a higher register: the flight from Egypt, perhaps; or something metaphorical: “The Flight from Conversation,” a recent New York Times article was headlined.

I can find no example in English of “flights” used in the plural in this sense without a qualification of who is fleeing from what or whom. This no doubt is why Woolf avoided the word in the 1959 version. Introducing it now in the new edition, presumably for correctness, since fughe definitely does not mean “scuffles,” he disorients the reader. The upward jolt to the register reinforces the slightly literary tone of “resound” (“the block resounded”), which, like “refrain,” has a more elevated feel than the word it is translating, in this case risuona, which again is standard Italian fare. The whole thing might have been delivered as,

The Block is filled with the noise of cries, quarrels, men running for it.

I spoke of a play of registers in Levi’s writing, but so far have only given examples of his plain prose. Needless to say, if your translation of the plain prose sounds anything but plain, it will be difficult to indicate a change of gear when you shift up a register. That said, Woolf is more convincing with the high register. There is a tough moment near the beginning of the book where, having heard that they are to be deported to Germany the following morning, a group of Jews in a detention center, Levi included, spend a sleepless night, at the end of which

L’alba ci colse come un tradimento, come se il nuovo sole si associasse agli uomini nella deliberazione di distruggerci.

In 1959 Woolf translates the first sentence fairly freely. “Betrayal” (tradimento) becomes “betrayer,” the idea of the sun joining up with gli uomini—“men/mankind”—in the determination to “destroy us” is somewhat paraphrased:

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

In 2015 he moves closer to the original in the first part of the sentence, cuts the unnecessary and cumbersome “seemed as though,” and offers a different paraphrase of the second part:

Dawn came upon us like a betrayal, as if the new sun were an ally of the men who had decided to destroy us.

This sounds pretty good, but still loses the impact of Levi’s use of gli uomini in the general sense of all men, or, in a higher register, mankind, not a specific group of enemies. Again this usage fits in with the book’s questioning of what it means to be a man, to be part of the human race. Here the Jews are being treated as if they didn’t belong among men. So more accurately we might have:

Dawn came upon us like a betrayal, as if the new sun were joining forces with men in the determination to destroy us.

If you wanted to stress this point, it would be acceptable to give “as if the sun were joining forces with mankind.” That is the kind of decision one might take on one’s nth reading of the whole translation, when you have the voice firmly in your mind. At the moment it seems a little too “loud” to me.

Let’s move a few lines further on for our last example. With the dawn comes action; the hiatus of the night is over; Levi winds up the register with some archaic terms and images:

Il tempo di meditare, il tempo di stabilire erano conchiusi, e ogni moto di ragione si sciolse nel tumulto senza vincoli, su cui, dolorosi come colpi di spada, emergevano in un lampo, così vicini ancora nel tempo e nello spazio, i ricordi buoni delle nostre case.

In 1959 Woolf drops the senza vincoli (literally, “without constraints”), presumably in order to keep the English tight, though the real problem in this sentence is Levi’s rather mysterious use of the verb stabilire, which in the translation appears as the noun “decision.” As for the archaic conchiusi (“concluded,” “finished”) it is hard to see how it could be rendered in English.

The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason dissolved into a tumult, across which flashed the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space, as painful as the thrusts of a sword.

What decision or decisions could people have been taking, since their destiny is now entirely out of their hands? There has been no mention of decisions to be made. Woolf doesn’t clarify this in his 2015 translation, but recovers the idea of senza vincoli in “unrestrained tumult” and rearranges the second part of the sentence for fluency:

The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason dissolved into an unrestrained tumult, across which flashed, as painful as the thrusts of a sword, the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space.

This works well enough, though a phrase like “as painful as the thrusts of a sword” still has a wearisomely translationese feel to my ear. But let’s put some pressure on that word stabilire. Usually this verb takes an object, to establish/fix/set/decide something. But what can it mean if there is no object, and in the generally portentous lexical mix Levi has concocted here? People have spent the night reflecting on their destiny. They have meditated. They have, literally, “established.” But now that time is over. Now reason, or rather every moto di ragione (literally, movement of reason), dissolves (si sciolsero) and we have a tumult that is unrestrained (senza vincoli).

There is an evident polarity here between reasoned construction of some kind of response (what people have tried to “establish” through the hours of the night), and confused, ungovernable dissolution, as the fateful day begins and a tumult of emotions takes over, robbing people of their human dignity. It’s a polarity, that, when linked to the idea of “the time for this and the time for that” cannot but remind us of Ecclesiastes. And indeed Italian annotated versions of the text suggest a reference to “a time to break down and a time to build up.”

How to get this across in translation? If one offers “the time for gathering thoughts (or coming to terms with things) was over,” one perhaps gets something of the idea and a proper contrast with thoughts that are then scattered, but still the strangeness of the Levi’s usage would be lost. I offer a version I’m not happy with, but it’s the best I can do:

The time to meditate, the time to settle, was over and every effort of reason dissolved in this unrestrained tumult through which the happy memories of our homes, still so close in time and space, stabbed painfully as sudden sword thrusts.

To sum up, in 1956 Woolf had the intuition that Levi’s book, then largely un­recog­nized, was an important work, worthy of translation. Bravely, he translated it on spec, without a contract; later an American publisher, Orion, got in touch with him and eventually published it. We owe Woolf our gratitude and admiration for having introduced the book to the English-speaking world when it mattered in a highly serviceable, if undistinguished, translation. Unfortunate­ly, that is the version we still have, since the 2015 “revision” amounts to little more than a light edit.

Why then, you might ask, has this translation (in both its manifestations) been widely praised? It is a fascinating question that I will try to answer in my next post.

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

by Jonathan Bate

Harper, 662 pp., $40.00

On page 313 of his biography of Ted Hughes, Jonathan Bate paraphrases a racy passage from the journal Sylvia Plath kept in the last months of her life:

On the day that she found Yeats’s house in Fitzroy Road, she rushed round in a fever of excitement to tell Al [Alvarez]. That evening, she noted in her journal with her usual acerbic wit, they were engaged in a certain activity when the telephone rang. She put her foot over his penis so that, as she phrased it, he was appropriately attired to receive the call.

We assume that Bate is paraphrasing rather than quoting Plath’s entry because of the copyright law prohibiting quotation of unpublished writing without permission of the writer or of his or her estate. As Bate wrote in TheGuardian in April 2014, in an angry article entitled “How the Actions of the Ted Hughes Estate Will Change My Biography,” the estate (of which Plath’s writings are part) had abruptly withdrawn permission to quote after initially enthusiastically approving “my plan for what I called ‘a literary life.’”

But in fact, the action of the estate was not the reason for Bate’s resort to paraphrase. As readers familiar with the Hughes/Plath legend will realize or have already realized, Bate was paraphrasing words he could not possibly have read since Plath’s last journal was destroyed by Hughes soon after her suicide. (“I did not want her children to have to read it,” Hughes explained when he revealed his act of destruction in the introduction to a volume of Plath’s earlier journals.) What Bate was paraphrasing, he tells us, was Olwyn Hughes’s memory of what she had read in the journal before her brother destroyed it.

In the introduction to his book, Bate—who is a professor of English literature at Oxford and the author of numerous books on Shakespeare, along with a biography of John Clare—offers a “cardinal rule” of literary biography: “The work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical.” And: “The task of the literary biographer is not so much to enumerate all the available facts as to select those outer circumstances and transformative moments that shape the inner life in significant ways.” But these fine words—are just fine words. The revelation, if that’s what it is, of sex between Plath and Alvarez (in his autobiographical writings Alvarez indicated that there had never been any) illuminates neither Hughes’s work nor his inner life. It only makes plain, along with his prurience, Bate’s dislike of Alvarez. “At the time of Sylvia’s death, a contemporary noted that Alvarez had a ‘hangdog adoration of T.H.’ and expressed the opinion that he was ‘stuck in Freudianism like an American teenager,’” Bate writes, and, as if this wasn’t mean enough, adds: “Alvarez could make or break a poet, but his own poetry was thin gruel.” Bate’s malice is the glue that holds his incoherent book together—malice directed at other peripheral characters but chiefly directed at its subject. Bate wants to cut Hughes down to size and does so, interestingly, by blowing him up into a kind of extra-large sex maniac.

He starts the book with a chapter called “The Deposition.” In 1986 a psychiatrist named Jane Anderson, a friend of Plath’s on whom a character in The Bell Jar had been based, sued the makers of a film version of the novel, along with Hughes (who held the copyright of the book), for portraying her as a lesbian. The lawsuit was settled. It was a nuisance and expense for Hughes, but hardly a seminal event that merits the opening chapter of his biography. The purpose of the chapter is to introduce this piece of Anderson’s testimony:

[Sylvia] said that she had met a man who was a poet, with whom she was very much in love. She went on to say that this person, whom she described as a very sadistic man, was someone she cared about a great deal…. She also said that she thought she could manage him, manage his sadistic characteristics.

Q. Was she saying that he was sadistic towards her?

A. My recollection is she described him as someone who was very sadistic.

The stage is now set for the examples of Hughes’s sadism that give Bate’s book the sensational character that caused the estate to withdraw from it in horror. The most shocking of these examples is a scene of sex in a London hotel between Hughes and Assia Wevill, the beautiful woman with whom he began an affair in the last year of his marriage to Plath, and who killed herself and her four-year-old daughter with Hughes (by gas, presumably in imitation of Plath, after living with him intermittently for five years). At the hotel, Bate writes, Hughes’s “lovemaking was ‘so violent and animal’ that he ruptured her.” Bate’s source is a diary kept by Nathaniel Tarn, a poet, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst in whom, unbeknownst to each other, Assia and her husband David Wevill confided.

Tarn would write down what they said to him and his papers, including the diary, found their way to an archive at Stanford University, where anyone can read them. Bate was not the first to do so. The scene of the violent and animal sex appeared in a biography of Assia Wevill, A Lover of Unreason, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev. Bate writes condescendingly of Koren and Negev as “touchingly literalistic” in their interpretation of a poem of Hughes about Assia, but he is not above quoting from their interview with David Wevill in which he told them that Assia told him that Sylvia caught Hughes kissing her in the kitchen of his and Plath’s Devon house during their first visit to the couple.

Like the evidence of Olwyn’s memory, the evidence of Tarn’s diary or of David Wevill’s interview is not evidence of the highest order of trustworthiness. The standing that the blabbings of contemporaries have in biographical narratives is surely one of the genre’s most problematic conventions. People can say anything they want about a dead person. The dead cannot sue. This may be the least of their troubles, but it can be excruciating for spouses and offspring to read what they know to be untrue and not be able to do anything about it except issue complaints that fall upon uninterested ears.

Hughes’s widow Carol recently issued such a complaint, in the form of a press release written by the estate’s lawyer, Damon Parker, citing eighteen factual errors in the sixteen pages of the book she had been able to bring herself to read. The “most offensive” of these errors concerned Bate’s account of the car trip Carol Hughes and Plath and Hughes’s son Nicholas made from London to Devon with the hearse carrying Ted Hughes’s coffin: “The body was returned to Devon, the accompanying party stopping, as Ted the gastronome would have wanted, for a good lunch on the way.” Parker quotes an outraged Carol Hughes: “The idea that Nicholas and I would be enjoying a ‘good lunch’ while Ted lay dead in the hearse outside is a slur suggesting utter disrespect, and one I consider to be in extremely poor taste.”

If poor taste is uncongenial to Mrs. Hughes, she will do well to continue not reading Bate’s biography. Among the specimens of tastelessness lodged in the book like the threepenny coins in a Christmas pudding, none may surpass Bate’s quotation from Erica Jong in her book Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, about meeting Hughes in New York and resisting his advances (“He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish, warlock appeal…. He did the wildman-from-the moors-thing on me full force”), after which “I taxied home to my husband on the West Side, my head full of the hottest fantasies. Of course we f—— our brains out with me imagining Ted.”

But beyond tastelessness there is Bate’s cluelessness about what you can and cannot do if you want to be regarded as an honest and serious writer. Here is what he does with an article in the Daily Mail called “Ted Hughes, My Secret Lover” by a woman from Australia named Jill Barber. Barber wrote: “His first act of love was to hold me tenderly, mopping my brow with a wet flannel as I threw up the cheap champagne into his sink…. He lay me on the bed and tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped me and gazed admiringly at me…. He was rough, passionate and forceful.” Bate writes: “He mopped her brow with a wet flannel as she threw up the cheap champagne into his sink, then he tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped her, gazed admiringly at her body and made forceful love to her.”

In 2000 Bate came to Faber and Faber, which acts as agent for the Ted Hughes estate, proposing to write an authorized biography of Hughes, who was “the obvious choice for my next literary biography after I had done with two of his favourite poets, Shakespeare and John Clare.” He was told that Hughes had left instructions opposing an authorized biography, so that was that. But in 2009, emboldened by Carol Hughes’s sale to the British Library of documents that Hughes had held back when he sold his papers to Emory University in Atlanta, and by the publication of a book of his letters, Bate approached Faber and Faber again and proposed to write not a biography, but a work of literary criticism in which the life would merely figure.¹

This time the estate accepted. In his Guardian piece Bate recalled a delightful initial lunch with an editor from Faber and Faber and Carol (who “expressed herself ‘totally happy with my idea of using the life to illuminate the work’”) at a restaurant “in, of all places, Rugby Street—where Ted first made love to Sylvia Plath. I took this to be my symbolic anointing.” After the deal hideously unraveled, Damon Parker wrote in TheGuardian:

At the risk of disillusioning him, there was no significance to the restaurant or the street chosen for a lunch with Mrs. Hughes and the poetry editor. The restaurant just happened to be a favourite haunt of Faber & Faber executives at that time. Nor was there any “symbolic anointing” of him in anyone’s mind other than his own.

The estate and Faber and Faber had begun to smell a rat early on. “The tone and style of a draft article Professor Bate wanted to submit to a respected literary magazine here soon after he was commissioned, based on his initial researches, led to concerns that he seemed to be straying from his agreed remit,” Damon Parker wrote in reply to my inquiry about what had got their wind up. (He could say nothing further about the article.) Also

despite what had been previously agreed Professor Bate then resisted repeated requests to see some of his work in progress, from that time in 2010 right up until the Estate withdrew support for his book in late 2013…. The Estate could no longer cooperate once it seemed increasingly likely that his book would be rather different in tone and content from the work of serious scholarship which he had initially proposed.

Bate and Faber and Faber parted company and HarperCollins became the book’s publisher.

Bate’s claim that withdrawal of permission to quote forced him to write the distasteful book he has written is hard to credit. In “How the Actions of the Ted Hughes Estate Will Change My Biography,” he writes of the “pages and pages of detailed analysis of the multiple drafts of the poems” that will now “have to go,” and of how “the new version will be much more biographical.” What Bate writes about Hughes’s poetry in the HarperCollins text is of staggering superficiality. He tells you what he does and doesn’t like. When he likes a poem he uses terms like “aching beauty” and “achingly sad.” When he dislikes a poem he will talk of Hughes “operating on auto-pilot, writing nature notes instead of penetrating to the forces behind nature and in himself.”

It is odd to read that last awkward phrase. Bate should be the last person to complain about the absence of unseen forces. For the mystical and mythic influences that inform Hughes’s understanding of imaginative literature and shape his poetic practice, Bate has only contempt, writing of his “sometimes bonkers ideas about astrology and the occult; his use of ancient ideas and obscure literary sources as a way of explaining, even justifying, what most reasonable people would simply describe as bad behavior.”

In a letter of 1989 to his friend Lucas Myers, published in Letters of Ted Hughes,² Hughes writes about how “pitifully little” he is producing and goes on to

wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69 [the years of Plath’s and Wevill’s suicides]. I have an idea of those two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors—but I believe big physical changes happen at those times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn’t long enough to wake up from them.

Hughes’s feeling of not writing enough is common among writers, sometimes even among the most prolific. In Hughes’s case it was certainly delusory. The posthumous volume of Hughes’s collected poems is over a thousand pages long and there are five volumes of prose and seven volumes of translations. But without question Hughes suffered blows greater than those it is given to most writers to suffer. His life had been ruined not just once, but twice. It has the character not of actual human existence but of a dark fable about a hero born under a malign star.

That it was Bate of all people who was chosen to write Hughes’s biography only heightens our sense of Hughes’s preternatural unluckiness; though the choice might not have surprised him. Ancient stories about innocents delivered into the hands of enemies disguised as friends were well known to him, as was The Aspern Papers. He emerges from his letters as a man blessed with a brilliant mind and a warm and open nature, who seemed to take a deeper interest in other people’s feelings and wishes than the rest of us are able to do and who never said anything trite or obvious or pious or self-serving. Of course, this is Hughes’s epistolary persona, the persona he created the way novelists create characters. The question of what he was “really” like remains unanswered, as it should. If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self. Biographers, in their pride, think otherwise. Readers, in their curiosity, encourage them in their impertinence. Surely Hughes’s family, if not his shade, deserve better than Bate’s squalid findings about Hughes’s sex life and priggish theories about his psychology.

In response to:

The Trouble at Yale from the January 14, 2016 issue

To the Editors:

David Cole’s comments on “The Trouble at Yale” [NYR, January 14] neglect an important aspect of the controversy there and elsewhere on university campuses where student protesters have framed their demands for an end to discrimination in terms of their need for individual comfort and safety. It is the administrators, not the students, who have set the terms of the protests.

The context for what are surely threats to First Amendment and academic freedom rights comes from university administrators who increasingly treat their students as paying clients whose comfort and safety are a university priority. A classic recent example comes from Margaret Spellings (the former Bush administration secretary of education and the president-elect of the University of North Carolina), who explained her support of for-profit colleges this way: “The reason I did it was because I learned a lot about how we can serve our students and think of them as customers in providing a product in convenient ways for them.” Last year, a number of university presidents issued calls for “civility” in the face of controversies about everything from Israeli politics to football scandals. Nicholas Dirks, the chancellor at UC Berkeley, was typical: “We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.” (Italics mine.)

A lack of civility, the failure to take into account the feelings of those who may be hurt or made uncomfortable by one’s remarks, comments, ideas, or political opinions, has now become the grounds for censoring them in universities all over the country and for firing faculty who have been accused of some form of “incivility” or verbal harassment. Calls for “trigger warnings” on syllabi (to alert students to potentially distressing material they may encounter) and Title IX compliance requirements for evaluating what counts as sexual harassment all come in the form of an insistence on the safety and comfort of students. Is it any wonder, then, that the angry student in the Yale video replies to Nicholas Christakis that she wants not “an intellectual space” but “a home here”?

The crisis of diversity we are witnessing at many campuses is the result of a conflict between genuine commitments to diversity on the one hand and the failure to address issues of institutional racism on the other. It is as if the simple addition of students of color will solve deeply rooted problems of discrimination, when in fact their increased presence exposes those problems. That they then respond, at least in part, in the language of disaffected customers—demanding the suppression of speech that hurts—ought not to be surprising, in that they are echoing the ideas of Margaret Spellings, Nicholas Dirks, and Title IX enforcement officers, who promised them safety and comfort, and consider it a more important value than free speech.

Joan W. Scott
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

To the Editors:

David Cole’s otherwise excellent article on recent student protests misses the mark in one significant respect. He suggests that efforts to rename a residential college at Yale or a school of public affairs at Princeton attempt to limit speech.

That can’t be right. Of course, naming a college after John Calhoun or a school after Woodrow Wilson involves speech. But so does the decision to name either of them after someone else. The demand that these names be changed no more subverts civil liberties than a call to substitute Susan B. Anthony for Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.

As Professor Cole aptly states, such protests may be symbolic at best and silly at worst. But, unlike the students’ calls to fire Mr. and Ms. Christakis, they are in no way threats to freedom of expression.

Steve Mayer
Berkeley, California

To the Editors:

David Cole’s essay on the racial controversy at Yale, and the need to maintain free speech in practice as much as in principle, while excellent, missed an opportunity. Cole is surely correct that to change the names of buildings named for Americans whose racial views ran the gamut from retrograde and white-supremacist (Woodrow Wilson) to genocidal (John Calhoun) is an empty gesture. Cole suggests that the answer lies in “new monuments” and “new naming opportunities [that] express a message of inclusion.” Cole is right, but only partially so. In these matters, we are not limited to a choice between celebrating such historical figures uncritically and adding names and stories to the mix for “balance.” There is always the option, indeed the obligation, of morespeech about the people we have decided, for better or for worse, are worth remembering.

In other words, why not leave the names of such “great Americans” on the buildings, but find the ways and means to tell the fuller, darker story as well? Every such building should include, in its lobby or near its entranceway, a prominent and well-sourced exhibit that explains—not as a historical footnote, but as central to the story—how and why the person honored with a naming failed to live up to our nation’s highest ideals. No one should enter the Washington Monument, for example, and not be confronted with the fact that George Washington—the “indispensable man” of the early Republic, and almost certainly our greatest president—bought, sold, and owned human beings. Visitors need to know who those human beings were, what they suffered, and what Washington had to say about it. It is core to the project of history and remembering.

This is, after all, the central American paradox: that many of our history’s “great men” articulated and fought for the expansion of freedom, while simultaneously enforcing an ugly, even murderous racial order. The truth—our American truth—is complicated, to put it charitably. The proper response is neither to whitewash our history, nor to seek to erase it, nor even, as Cole suggests, merely to balance it with stories of righteousness. The answer is to fully understand it, to embrace it, and to learn from it, exercising our high civic value of freedom of speech to do so.

Andrew G. Celli Jr.
Emery Celli Brinckerhoff + Abady LLP
New York City

David Cole replies:

I agree with Joan Scott that a concern for “safe spaces” and comfort cannot trump the freedom of speech that is essential for intellectual exploration in a university. But I think it misreads the situation to dismiss student demands as driven by administrators who have coddled them as customers instead of demanding their critical engagement as scholars. I think rather that today’s demands are shaped by the harsh reality that African-American students continue to confront in the real world, one made plain by all too frequent police harassment and brutality, and countless empirical studies demonstrating that professors, employers, and peers continue to be affected by implicit biases that disadvantage and demean people of color on a regular basis. The harms are real, and we ought not to be too quick to dismiss them as a desire to be coddled.

Civility also cannot be so easily rejected. As a professor of criminal justice and constitutional law, where divisive issues of race, gender, class, and religion are the order of the day, I have long found it critical, in order to encourage intellectual engagement, to assure my students both that all views are welcome and that it is necessary to express themselves in a civil manner that respects their fellow students. Had the Yale college associate master Erika Christakis sent an e-mail to her students consisting of racist or demeaning insults, her dismissal would have been appropriate. In my view, at least, it is critical to her defense that her e-mail was entirely civil and respectful, and thus adhered to the demands of civility that are as essential as tolerance is to the academy. Civility is not about coddling customers, but about facilitating a meaningful exchange of ideas.

I take Andrew Celli’s excellent suggestion as a friendly amendment; as I wrote in the original piece, it is far better to teach Americans that our “national heroes did things that we now judge as immoral and unjust” than to erase the names of those we no longer approve. Finally, while Steve Mayer is correct that the issue of renaming colleges and buildings does not directly implicate free speech, I think George Orwell would recognize that official decisions to whitewash the past because different values are in ascendance today nonetheless raise concerns. But my principal point was not constitutional but strategic. As I see it, the focus on renaming is a sideshow, and distracts from more central and challenging issues of racial equality and inclusion.

Renaming a building is a cheap and easy token. Revamping an institution’s priorities to encourage more students of color to enter academia, to hire more faculty of color, and to engage in concrete measures, including recruitment and financial assistance, to make it possible for students from disadvantaged backgrounds to make it to and succeed at the nation’s best universities takes a real commitment of resources. Changing the name of Calhoun College at Yale or the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton is unlikely to do much if anything to improve the lot of minority students at Yale and Princeton. The more concrete measures demanded by the students almost certainly would.

The presumed kidnapping of the Hong Kong bookseller and British citizen Lee Bo late last year has brought international attention to the challenges faced by the Hong Kong publishing business. During a break from The New York Review’s conference on the “Governance of China,” which took place in Hong Kong earlier this month, just weeks after Lee’s disappearance, I spoke to Bao Pu, one of the Chinese-language world’s best-known publishers of books about the Chinese government.

Along with his wife, Renee Chiang, the forty-nine-year-old Bao runs New Century Press, a small but highly influential house that specializes in works about Chinese politics that would be banned on the mainland. The son of Bao Tong, the well-known policy secretary to deposed Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, the younger Mr. Bao participated in the 1989 Tiananmen protests, and then moved to the United States where he became a citizen and worked as a consultant. In 2001, he moved to Hong Kong, working first at a high-tech start-up. In 2005, he and his wife founded New Century.

The books Bao publishes tap into a vein of political writing that challenges orthodox interpretations of Chinese Communist history; they include the secret journal of Zhao Ziyang (translated as Prisoner of the State), and Xu Yong’s photos of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Its most recent book draws on close readings of Zhou’s diaries and papers to argue that Communist China’s most famous premier, Zhou Enlai, was gay.

Ian Johnson: The books you publish are often critical of the government, or highlight forgotten parts of history that the government wants covered up. Why do you bother if you’re so pessimistic?

Bao Pu: I just do what I can. That’s the current value that I hold. I have no ambition to save China.

One of your first big coups was publishing Zhao Ziyang’s secret memoirs in 2005.  How did you do it?

I had been brokering manuscripts by Party cadres who had been victims of the system. I was negotiating with the old Communist Party cadres who had Zhao Ziyang’s recordings. It was a complicated process to convince the cadres to agree to do this. They had the tapes. They wanted to know who would publish. So eventually I said I would. They said, Do you know how to do publishing? So I published a few books to prove that we could. That’s how we did it. We did poetry books and intellectual books. It was all professionally done—just to convince them.

And then after you published the secret journals, a lot of people got in touch with you. You publishedanalyses of political reform in the 1980s, a biography of the reformerChen Yizi, and memoirs of reform-minded generals, such asQiu Huizuo, andDing Sheng.

In the mainland many former officials or their families had grievances against the Party, so I thought maybe it’s time to preserve it.

Publishing these kinds of books seems increasingly sensitive with the recentkidnappings of employees of a Hong Kong publisher. Are you worried you’ll be next?

They’re in a different business. They’re selling a product, and whatever sells they’ll sell. I was irritated by the media because they kept grouping all independent publishers together in one “banned books” category. But booksellers just publish whatever they want [without regard to facts]. Truth and fabrication are different.

How do you make sure your books are accurate?

Most importantly, I insist that authors of non-fiction use their real names; no pen names. Even though there is risk, they must be willing to take the risk and responsibility for their writing. I find people who know the subject in question to edit and fact-check. I have a Cultural Revolution guy. A guy who does early Mao. Others.

And the books are printed in Hong Kong. Have any been shipped to the mainland?

That’s difficult to do. People buy them in Hong Kong and carry to the mainland, but this has become tougher recently because of stronger border controls. This has hurt our sales.

You’ve been publishing fewer books in recent years. Last year, you published only three books. Why have you scaled back?

The main problem is the new generation doesn’t want to know. They don’t know about the Mao era or who Deng was. Another big problem is there aren’t interesting manuscripts.

Why?

The hongerdai [the “second red generation”—the children of the founding generation of Communist leaders] are liberated under Xi Jinping. In the past they had grievances, but now they feel that this is the best time for their interests: “We don’t want to rock the boat.”

What about memoirs of the Cultural Revolution? I don’t mean famous people but common people, what they experienced in those times, when millions were killed, sent into exile, beaten, and tortured.

Unfortunately they’re not very interesting. Everyone feels he was a victim. If you look at them, you wonder, What the fuck were you doing in that situation? It was everyone else’s fault? You can’t blame everything on Mao. He was responsible, he was the mastermind, but in order to reach that level of social destruction—an entire generation has to reflect. But they all say they were victims.

I had this manuscript by Cheng Weigao [the former Party Secretary of Hebei Province toppled by charges of corruption in 2003]. He said, “I thought about this after I was put in jail: our system lacks rule of law.” I thought: Where the fuck have you been? When you were taking advantage of the system you didn’t care about this. Those corruption charges involved profiteering on real estate projects, and those always involve chasing people off their land [forced evictions, often violently]. But he didn’t discuss that.

What are some of the projects you are interested in now?

I am interested in telling stories about human nature. The Communists are so against human nature. The world needs to know more about Chinese culture. But there’s no creativity in the mainland. I mean, books like Wolf Totem? Give me a break. Censorship has stifled creativity.

Then you’ll be doing soft power for China.

I’m going to demythify Chinese culture. My example is Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta. A lot of Orwell’s ideas are apparently too complicated for today’s young people, but V for Vendetta is instantly understandable. Our next book will be like that—a graphic non-fiction book on the Lin Biao incident [the probable attempted coup and flight by Mao’s most trusted aide in 1971, ending in his death in a plane crash].

It’ll be censored on the mainland.

I want to ignore the censorship. It will sell to overseas Chinese but the people on the mainland, they’ll get it. If they like it, they’ll get it. The Zhao Ziyang book had 20 million downloads.

You studied at Princeton’sWoodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Should Princeton remove Wilson’sname from the school?

I feel uneasy. Morals are unreliable in history. I’m a believer in Max Weber in that sense. He has a profound statement that no one takes seriously, which is that the direction of human society is progressively toward disenchantment. You keep breaking the beliefs that you had before. You had more convictions in ancient times but now things are breaking up and you have different ideas.

But there has to be someminimal morality.

Currently, yes, but in a hundred years it might shift.

Should we judge Mao?

There’s no justice in history. It’s kind of scary.

It’s depressing.

There is no ultimate meaning either.

So what motivates you, then, to publish these books?

I just view it as my personal vendetta. I was on the street [in Tiananmen Square] and people started shooting. I don’t believe they should have shot at me. The [official verdict on the] June 4 event as a “counterrevolutionary movement” has to be overturned.

But you still seem idealistic. You worked at Human Rights Watch. You compiled databases of dissidents. You say you just want revenge, but I don’t believe you. Is it really all a vendetta?

[Laughing] Even my wife doesn’t believe me. But I cannot give it a higher meaning. It’s how I see it. I thought that anyone who saw what I saw, would feel what I feel.

But that’s a sense of justice.

Even a monkey has this feeling. There’s a famous experiment with monkeys and grapes. They sense injustice too.

So you have a monkey’s sense of justice?

That’s our nature. It’s not much higher. We like to think we’re higher beings but we’re not.

Your father, who was one of the senior aides to Zhao Ziyang, was jailed for his role in promoting political reform and has been under continual surveillance for twenty years.Is this aboutavenging him?

It’s not about him. When I consider his career, he did what he could. But he’s still got a problem. That he sacrificed himself for some greater good—I reject that. After 1989 his role has been to engage in a permanent political struggle. He feels he’s still part of it. I feel he should step back and reflect, rather than still try to participate. I’ve told him that many times. For him, no, it’s an ongoing political struggle. He says he’s got a struggle that’s bigger than his life. That’s the trouble with these old Communists.

Aren’t you like that? You’ve got your struggle and he has his.

I reject his generation’s grand project to save China or to build the ideal society. Their value is that, “My life isn’t important compared to this grand project for the betterment of humanity.” That sounds very good. But if you believe in that and if you’re in power, chances are you’ll sacrifice other people without blinking an eye. Just a half step from that ideal situation, you have a mass murderer.

All these people, including the victims of the revolution, like the deposed defense minister Peng Dehuai, the deposed former president Liu Shaoqi, and even Zhou Enlai, are the same in this way. It’s dangerous. So that’s why I say that for me it’s a personal vendetta. I’ve thought this through. For my internal logic it makes sense. I’m not going to sacrifice myself for a grand idea. That is not the way to go.