This episode is a reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay, “A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy, an adaptation of the Iliad, from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. It is read by the countertenor and opera director Anthony Roth Costanzo. Among many other roles, Costanzo has performed as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, both at the Met Opera, and he won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022 for the cast recording of Akhnaten. He is currently the director and president of Opera Philadelphia.

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Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.

Last week’s episode was an interview with Mendelsohn on Homer’s Odyssey, both his own translation and Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation. You can read “A Little Iliad” and other essays by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.

This week in the NYR Online, Geoffrey O’Brien reviews Steven Spielberg’s latest science fiction movie, Disclosure Day. Twenty-four years ago, in a season that seemed to predict the future—like this year, the summer of 2002 also featured a Spider-Man movie, a Star Wars movie, and a Christopher Nolan movie—O’Brien reviewed another Spielberg sci-fi epic, Minority Report.

Prospero on the Run

Geoffrey O’Brien

Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report” which was first published in the magazine Fantastic Universe in 1956, posits a future America in which crime has been virtually abolished through the employment of mentally retarded people—”gibbering, fumbling creatures, with…enlarged heads and wasted bodies”—who possess the wild talent of seeing crimes before they happen. Wired to a network of computers, the “pre-cogs” transmit visions of future events, on the basis of which future criminals are arrested and incarcerated in a vast detention camp.

The story’s tricky but oddly perfunctory narrative hook—the director of the Precrime program is himself fingered by the pre-cogs as a future murderer—provides the occasion for a run-through of paradoxes associated with prediction, particularly the notion that knowledge of how things will turn out makes it possible to change the outcome. The “minority report” of the title refers to a dissenting pre-cog’s variant vision of the future, proven wrong by the concurrence of two majority reports, a situation which is likened to the use of multiple computers to verify a solution. Of the story’s relevance to actual problems of cybernetics or to the laws of probability I am not competent to speak; to a lay reader it has more the effect of a discussion of mathematical theory overheard in a dream.

With its background of postwar devastation and a murky, top-secret contention between military and civilian branches of government, its concern for the fate of thought criminals, and its troubling linkage (under federal auspices) of brain damage and computer science, “The Minority Report” is a dream—a bad dream—straight out of the 1950s. Written relatively early in Dick’s prolific career, it offers only rudimentary traces of those virtual realities and industrially marketed simulacra characteristic of his remarkably influential later fiction. Also suggestive of the 1950s is its no-frills prose style, which evokes a perfectly dull future devoid of exoticism or poetic resonance: “Cold, light rain beat against the pavement, as the car moved through the dark streets of New York City toward the police building…. Helplessly, Anderton watched pedestrians hurrying along the rain­swept sidewalks. He felt no strong emotion.” We might have stumbled into the middle of The Pre-Cog in the Gray Flannel Suit.

The movie that Steven Spielberg has made from this by now somewhat distant source is couched in a style far removed from Dick’s flatly functional prose. Its first reel is as bravura a display of style as Spielberg has ever offered, as we watch a movie-within-a­movie of adultery, jealousy, and homicidal rage being assembled from the visions of the pre-cogs by Tom Cruise and his team of Precrime techies who must race against time to find within these images clues to the location of a murder before it is committed. The rapid cutting between the “real” events, the stylized, fragmentary visions of the pre-cogs (a trio of semi­dormant prophets lying on their backs in a glassed-in pool), and the zooms and enlargements effected by Cruise with a mere wave of his hands to the tune of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, each image interlarded with billowing layers of reflections and superimpositions, is a relentless display of the futuristic technology on which it comments: even the smoke and mirrors have smoke and mirrors. Spielberg seems to want to make a catalog of his own devices, to lay bare the inventory of tricks available to him, in a mood compounded of exhilaration and dread.

If I can do this, he appears to suggest, then the future that the film is about has already arrived. Unlike the other Dick-derived films of recent decades—Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall—Minority Report is not so much a work of elegiac or satiric anticipation as it is an acknowledgment that it is already too late to turn back. Even if the screenplay raises moral issues about free will and advance knowledge, insisting somewhat stridently that one can always choose a better course of action, the dazzling and enveloping stylistic maneuvers imply that such independent renunciation is henceforth likely to occur only in the movies. The technology is just too powerful for the characters to assert an existence apart from it. The very notion of background and foreground is obliterated by a visual field in which the people are little more than swirls of information oscillating among other analogous swirls. If Spielberg’s last film, the much-underrated A.I., culminated in a tragic apprehension of human limitation, Minority Report charts a more self-contradictory path. At its strongest it unleashes mythic forces that it then tries to contain with relatively flimsy last-reel fix-ups; it’s as if the Cumaean Sibyl were uneasily cast in a remake of The Fugitive.

Dick’s story plays with the idea of multiple future time-paths, something like Borges’s garden of forking paths. In its early stages Minority Report—with its casual interaction of present-­tense humans with three-dimensional talking archival holograms and live­action prophetic visions—suggests the idea of a movie in which past, present, and future can unfold simultaneously. Tom Cruise’s Precrime “theater of operations” could be seen as the ultimate film studio, capable not merely of imitating but of intervening in reality, and getting its inspired script concepts not from a bunch of contract screenwriters but from a captive team of seers, throwbacks to the most ancient oracles, who soak endlessly in a high-tech aquarium (called, appropriately, the Temple) complete with an infatuated, half-mad scientist-companion. These early scenes of the lab at work have a charm that must be autobiographical, since they amount to a metaphorical description of Spielberg’s daily routine making movies. In that light, it is easy to imagine that considerable personal anxiety underlies the notion (suggested by Cruise’s fate after the pre-cogs identify him as a murderer-to-be) of the director shut out from his own studio—barred from using the equipment that he has so incomparably mastered, accused, as it were, by his own creation.

Prospero on the run: except that Prospero in this version is a damaged man in perpetual mourning for his mysteriously vanished six-year-old son, separated from his wife, and addicted to a drug that he buys from a drug dealer with empty eye sockets. The revelation of those dreadful holes is part of an elaborate pattern of eye­related motifs summed up in the female pre-cog’s repetitive question: “Can you see?” In the world of Minority Report, public security is maintained by random eye-scans, and criminals have their eyes replaced in order to elude the scanners; crime is suppressed by the transmutation of the pre-cogs’ inner visions into electronically reproducible form; the memories of past anticipations are downloaded electronically from the brains of the pre-cog seers. The symbolism looms portentously—was it to invoke the totemic presence of Ingmar Bergman that Max von Sydow was cast in the picture?—but with undeniable effectiveness.

By the time Tom Cruise is having his eyes surgically removed by a grotesque doctor-and-nurse pair holed up in a generically sleazy tenement apartment, the symbolism has veered into the realm of a horror-movie creepiness that Spielberg has never—or at least not since Jaws—explored with quite such enthusiasm. Like the best horror movies, this segment derives its effect more from what we don’t see than from what we do, but the power of suggestion is sufficient to conjure up a mood of deep unpleasantness from which the rest of the film wants in some sense to escape, just as the spectator wants unquestionably to escape from the clamps that pin Cruise’s eyes open in preparation for his operation. The film seems to gain a cumulative power—laced with grotesque humor—the deeper it drives its protagonist into darkness.

While the blindfolded hero (he must wait twelve hours for his replaced eyes to heal) submits to uncontrollable inward visions—like home-movie playbacks—of his son’s disappearance, police investigators unleash small electronic eye-scanning spiders into the tenement where he’s hiding out. We are given an aerial view as the spiders swarm through the building, “reading” the eyes of tenants as they quarrel, make love, or sit on the toilet, their activities scarcely interrupted by the incursion.

The whole episode is a kind of giddy parody of an early 1930s movie in the Street Scene or Dead End mode (complete with camera angles worthy of Busby Berkeley). The tenement itself is a retrograde reminder of a vanished pre-techno world of milk bottles and peeling wallpaper, while the electronic spiders—like all those symbolic eyes—evoke nothing so much as the made-for-Hollywood surrealism of Dalí’s designs for Hitchcock’s Spellbound. (In a similar way the slimy and cynical eye doctor and his aging peroxide-blonde companion seem to have crawled out from an obscure Graham Greene novel adapted into a Bela Lugosi movie.) This ought to be indigestible but it’s exuberantly sustained, as if to show just how many moods and cultural references and potential plot turns Spielberg can telegraph from one shot to the next. Like much of Minority Report, the sequence has an air of willful gaudiness seeking constantly to surpass itself.

“Put the camera down,” a hologram of Cruise’s estranged wife tells him only half-jokingly in an early scene, in a three-dimensional home movie retrieved from happier days, to be endlessly replayed in his moments of drugged, anguished leisure. The voyeuristic nastiness of, say, the camera­-obsessed killer in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is not so far away, and a good deal of the fascination of the movie’s early scenes lies in wondering just how far the director is willing to push things. One so wants Cruise to live up to the seedy aura of these first scenes, to be less of a hero than he must finally become to satisfy the requirements of the chase thriller into which the movie gradually evolves.

The tone shifts with a needlessly protracted flight-and-pursuit sequence—all soaring and swooping and dragging through the mud, sliding through burning tunnels and crashing through floorboards—that seems designed chiefly to wake up anyone who might be dozing over his popcorn. The computer-­game wizardry continues with an elaborate but empty scene in a car factory, with Cruise and his pursuers fighting it out on the assembly line to the point where Cruise ends up built into the car and driving it off the line, a variation on an unrealized Alfred Hitchcock gag intended for North by Northwest, realized in the manner of a James Bond punchline. But then changes of emotional register seem almost the point here: each episode resembles a movie in itself—the suspense plot, the marriage plot, the technology and ethics plot, the mystical wonder plot—so that the cynicism of one scene is contradicted but not annulled by the hopefulness of another.

Read the full review for free on the Review’s website here.

The words of the Declaration of Independence are now 250 years and one day old, but the document itself wasn’t completed and signed until August 2, 1776. In the Review’s November 21, 2024, issue, Andrew Raftery wrote about the history of the parchment—and the many efforts over the years to preserve it as well as market it with florid redesigns and a variety of “official” reproductions and prints.

Rescuing the People’s Parchment

Andrew Raftery

It is safe to say that most of the 1.1 million annual visitors to the National Archives Museum, in Washington, D.C., enter John Russell Pope’s magnificent temple on Pennsylvania Avenue to see the permanent exhibition, “Charters of Freedom,” which includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and, shown separately, the Bill of Rights. After some displays relating to the Revolutionary War, they encounter the stone-and-bronze case holding the parchment of the Declaration, written in a large, clear hand (or “engrossed,” as ordered by Congress) by Timothy Matlack, an officer in the Continental Army. In his competent clerk’s script, Matlack transcribed the text adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, rendering it in the form and materials then used for significant legal documents. It was ready to receive the fateful fifty-six signatures on August 2.

Visitors peer through thick glass into the helium-filled case to see the Declaration illuminated by soft green light. We can recognize the familiar configuration on the parchment, but the text is not completely legible and the signatures are barely there. The classical architecture of Pope’s sanctuary, the subdued lighting, and the hushed atmosphere make the space into a giant reliquary. The direct witnessing of an object of such historical consequence is not less affecting for being imperfectly discernible.

We know what it once looked like thanks to an engraving commissioned in 1820 by John Quincy Adams when he was secretary of state. Adams was concerned about the already evident deterioration of the parchment and wanted to publish an authoritative replica of the document he revered. He hired a young Washington engraver, William J. Stone, to make a facsimile. In a decade of technical and artistic innovation in the graphic arts, including Goya’s late lithographic portfolio, The Bulls of Bordeaux (1825), Blake’s engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), and the young Delacroix’s lithographs for Faust (1828), Stone produced one of the most remarkable prints. Like those harbingers of Romanticism, who introduced expressive techniques and novel interpretations of biblical and literary texts (Goethe felt Delacroix’s images had exceeded his own imagination), his work looked forward—in his case to a new standard of clarity that would be codified with the introduction of photography in 1839.

Stone did more than execute the calligraphic text in the smooth curves inherent to engraving, as earlier engravers would have done. After all, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when penmanship was learned from engraved copybooks, it was natural to bring the writing back to its printed origins. Instead he took fidelity into fresh territory by scrupulously rendering the effect of iron gall applied to parchment with a goose quill, capturing the slight drag that happens when the pen crosses over still-wet ink. Splatters, stray marks, and blobs are reproduced with consummate virtuosity. The rough edges on the large strokes of John Hancock’s signature suggest that ink had already chipped off by the time Stone made his copy. His facsimile is utterly convincing, even though we can no longer compare it with the original. It is the iconic image of the Declaration, endlessly multiplied in history books, classroom posters, and online.

It must be remembered that Stone accomplished his Olympian feat of verisimilitude by incising lines in reverse, using this slowest of methods to replicate signatures that probably took less than a minute to write. But how did he transfer the image so perfectly onto the copper? The plate itself gives a few hints.¹ Some inadvertently unfinished items of punctuation that are outlined but not shaded show that Stone scratched the contours of each letter into the surface before reinforcing the shapes with deep grooves made by the engraving tool. A process of dampening the actual document and running it through the press to make a reverse transfer onto the plate has been suggested, but I find this highly unlikely. The ink had been oxidizing for fifty years and was deemed somewhat abraded.

That was a poor prospect for the perfect image Stone required and a risky proposition in any case. I believe he made a precise tracing in graphite on translucent paper that was transferred in reverse onto a copperplate coated with a waxy substance. The text would have been retraced with a fine point that firmly pushed the contours through the paper into this receptive surface, Stone then following those outlines with a sharp steel stylus, all the while checking his accuracy against the original. A very particular John Quincy Adams verified Stone’s work as it proceeded. The final resolution—firming edges and creating the effect of solid black ink using closely spaced crosshatched lines—happened letter by letter with ever more attention to exactitude. It took three years.

Adams ordered two hundred vellum prints of the Declaration to be distributed to the three living signers, the Marquis de Lafayette, branches of the federal government, state governors and legislatures, and universities.² The State Department retained the plate, but Stone was allowed to periodically issue impressions on paper. In 1833 a large edition of facsimiles was ordered for Peter Force’s American Archives (1837–1853), a monumental history of the nation as told through documents from Columbus through the Constitution. The initial order was for four thousand copies, but by the time the volume on the Continental Congress was published, in 1848, interest and funding had foundered, suggesting a smaller run of 1,500. This is still well beyond the thousand or so fine impressions one can expect from a copperplate. The matrix, now in the National Archives, is indeed very worn, but it yielded good copies the last time a few were made, for the bicentennial. Stone’s engraving is uniquely authoritative, but it was not the first and far from alone in the field of printed versions of the Declaration of Independence. Published by the State Department in limited editions and aimed at government and academic audiences, it was overshadowed by competing prints that were widely distributed throughout the nineteenth century.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Last Friday marked the fifth year that Juneteenth has been observed as a federal holiday in the United States. In the summer of 2020, one year before President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Act into law, Darryl Pinckney went looking for mention of the holiday in the historical record and his personal life. His search brought him to a silent film shot in Oklahoma City in 1925; Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth; and, finally, the window of his home in Harlem, watching a Juneteenth celebration during the summer that “young America blew the lid off lockdown.”

‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’

Darryl Pinckney

I will look for you in the stories of new kings. Juneteenth isn’t mentioned in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois or Carter Woodson, the founder of The Journal of Negro History. I haven’t yet come across a description of the first Juneteenth celebrations equivalent to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s report of the ceremonies for the Emancipation Proclamation as it was read aloud on Port Royal Island, South Carolina, on New Year’s Day, 1863. Black troops, white commanders, white clergymen, white women schoolteachers, black women schoolteachers, and the formerly enslaved turned resisters gathered at the sober campground to ratify in their hearts the next covenant of the Republic.

Various sources tell us that when news of Lee’s surrender in Virginia reached the West a few weeks later, the Confederate army in Texas began to fall apart. Even so, federal authority depended on the presence of Union troops. In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant remembers that General Gordon Granger charged with “such a roar of musketry” at the Battle of Chattanooga that the rebels heard him from a long way off and had time to get away. When Grant learned that Granger had turned up in New Orleans, the War Department ignored his advice that the general not be given another command. Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to announce and enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Texas was the last Confederate state to be occupied.

Surprise is an essential element of beauty, the poets say, and several arresting minutes of silent film shot by Reverend S.S. Jones in Oklahoma City in 1925 have been making the Internet rounds of late. His stationary camera captures a Juneteenth parade, a bold march of heartbreakingly well-dressed black people—marching bands, Pullman porters, black women’s clubs under large black umbrellas, and black veterans of both World War I and the Spanish-American War. They are moving through a residential neighborhood where we see scarcely any spectators, as if everyone who lived on that tidy street were in the parade. Juneteenth was a black holiday out West, not down South, I assumed, and therefore not a memory that traveled with black people in their migrations to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century. Observance of Juneteenth supposedly fell off over time. It was revived nationally in the Black Expo days of the 1970s, when Kwanzaa was first catching on as the Africanist Christmas.

I’d not heard of Juneteenth until Ralph Ellison’s long-awaited second novel was published posthumously in 1999.^* Juneteenth is mostly voice, or voices, “in the beloved idiom,” as Ellison said. It centers on the confrontation between a white senator and the black preacher who taught him when still a boy how to hold a crowd. The Ellisonian twist is that the racist senator may have been a white boy who’d been brought up as a black boy. The novel opens in the 1950s and flashes back to the senator’s childhood with the preacher on the black revival circuit in the South before World War I and his escape across the color line as a roving white filmmaker in the Southwest sometime in the 1920s. Ellison’s rhetorical invention reaches its climax as the senator and preacher remember, separately and together, a Juneteenth celebration on a hot, dusty night in a tent in rural Alabama, not out West.

Old-fashioned Negroes getting Emancipation mixed up with the Resurrection and vaudeville, the senator thinks at first. The preacher remembers the workers in white uniforms, barrels of ice, yellow cases of soda pop, the vast quantities of catfish and ham, coleslaw and chocolate cake. At the sunrise services, they were “playing for keeps.” The preacher is dismayed that his former prodigy could have forgotten how they in their sermon invoked the Middle Passage and its images of tongues cut out and talking drums stolen. One group can’t be given license to kill another in order to prove their superiority, he thinks to himself. He carries scars from the fights he got into trying to go to the polls in Oklahoma armed with ax handles and pistols, and accompanied by some Native American and white sympathizers. Ellison has maybe given his preacher a fighting past he wished he’d had himself. But then his preacher suspects that whites were attempting to destroy the humility of black people because they had sensed its life-preserving power, as if Ellison had to reposition him so that his Juneteenth peroration emphasizes how blacks sang and danced, survived and flourished.

Ellison opposed the notion of black life as a “metaphysical condition” of “irremediable agony” because that made it seem as though it either took place in a vacuum or had only one theme. In his writings about the jazz greats he heard play in his youth in Oklahoma, he gives them credit for expressing something about the optimism of blacks as a group that found no definition elsewhere. Ellison recalled with pride his music teacher, who had her students join the Scottish reel competition on May Day, ignoring people who said black students ought not to learn European folk dances. Black people coming from enslaved circumstances couldn’t cling to their cultural idioms and survive, therefore they sought to extend their range, Ellison claimed. Cultural synthesis was important to “the unnoticed logic of the democratic process.” He insisted that segregation had not cut off black people from various fields of influence and that in turn American culture was marked at every point by black vernacular culture. This mixture was an opportunity, as he saw it, a chance to make a humanly richer society.

Ellison, born in 1913, made much of the pioneer spirit shared between black and white, and it mattered to him that Oklahoma had not been a part of the Confederacy. Though blacks by law had the vote, Oklahoma’s state constitution in 1907 forbade integrated schools and classified as “colored” anyone with any degree of black blood, while Native Americans were classed as “white.” Ellison was only eight years old when in 1921 in Tulsa a black youth, Dick Rowland, was arrested for supposedly assaulting a white woman in a downtown elevator. Armed black men protecting the prisoner in the county jail turned back a white mob, after which white people went on a rampage, destroying Greenwood, the thriving black business section, looting, burning black homes, running black people out of town. Seventy black people were killed and nine white people.

In 1930, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a black youth—Henry Argo—was arrested for the rape of a white girl and the attempted murder of her child. It was rumored that Argo and the girl were lovers. A mob of two thousand white men attacked the jail with battering rams, drove off the National Guard with gunfire, used commandeered National Guard equipment to pull the jail doors off their hinges, smashed a hole through the concrete cell that held Argo, shot him, and stabbed him. He bled to death on his way to a hospital in Oklahoma City.

In her autobiography, A Matter of Black and White (1996), Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher recalls that in her family the story was that the mob came back for Henry Argo only after the sheriff had assured the armed black men guarding the jailhouse that he was no longer in danger. There had been talk of parading his body through the black part of town to teach them a lesson. The town’s one black doctor gathered together bootleggers and gamblers—“this was no job for church folks—and declared that any white man who crossed Minnesota Street with that boy’s body would die in colored town.” Whether the story of black anger was legend or not, Sipuel notes that Argo’s murder was the last recorded lynching in the state.

Sipuel’s parents had moved to Chickasha shortly after the riot in Tulsa, where black men like her father—a Pentecostal minister—who tried to protect black properties got rounded up by white militias. There were no parks or playgrounds for black children in Chickasha when Sipuel was growing up in the 1920s. After she graduated from Langston University in 1945, the only state-supported college open to black students in Oklahoma, Sipuel volunteered to join Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP challenge to the state’s segregation laws by applying to the all-white University of Oklahoma law school—the only public law school in the state. In Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), the Supreme Court agreed with the argument that the state had to provide her with a law education under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Sipuel’s case was a precursor of Brown v. Board of Education.

The weirdness was elsewhere, I was telling myself back in February. My aunt in Massachusetts, a long-retired middle school teacher, was perplexed that her favorite Chinese restaurant was completely deserted, except for us. On my first visit to her little town near Fort Devens, where her husband had been reassigned, her history lesson was about the soldiers who came back to Fort Devens in 1918 with Spanish flu, and it spread from there. Fort Devens is long closed, phantoms snuck through my aunt’s window and replaced the thermostat she loved with an inferior one, and it was a further measure of her dementia that sitting there over egg rolls too rubbery to tear, she had never heard of influenza at Devens. It has been a measure of her dementia in the past few months that her understanding of Covid-19 remains on a par with that of seemingly everyone in the White House.

On March 16, New York City woke to learn that schools, restaurants, theaters, and concert venues would be closed. In the unpredicted schedule of gyms shuttered next and speaker-loaded squad cars roaming my neighborhood to warn people to maintain social distance; in the unprecedented drama of self-isolation and quarantine, followed by lockdown, angry noncompliance among black people was a clue as to how vulnerable we are in the pandemic. My trainer, a young black family man who saved himself from the streets, speculated that Covid was a Chinese invention for the trade war, but it backfired. In the face of mounting evidence about how, in lieu of a vaccine, social behavior mattered in dealing with the virus, my trainer, already streaming workout sessions, was adamant that he was more afraid of the police than he was of the pandemic.

The class character of the pandemic was soon very clear anyway—who worked in what were deemed essential services, who had to show up on those front lines, who had to keep packing and delivering, whom they were going home to, who had poor health in the first place and often inadequate health care. By mid-April in some states, black people made up a much higher percentage of confirmed cases than the percentage of black people in the general population. Black people were 40 percent of Covid sufferers in Michigan, while only 14 percent of the population. “Liberate Michigan,” immortal white people in Lansing chanted against strict lockdown. The pandemic was showing us that most of us had never had merely to survive before.

Empty streets as a shared global experience, cleaner air, surveillance anxiety, loss of livelihood, disturbances in overcrowded prisons, hospital staff martyrs, double bunking in the graveyards, and nightly salutes to workers, soldiers, and volunteers in danger also underscored how small is the man trying to hold our national destiny hostage to his sour vanity. Drink bleach, inject bleach, rise by Easter. If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But if a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition? My partner said Republican Party policy was simply, “You can go back to work and you can die.”

By May Day, the stay-at-home order in the city was beginning to crumble. Footage would appear on social media of, say, an incident in Brooklyn in which the police had used social distancing guidelines as the reason to get rough with black guys hanging out in groups on sidewalks and between parked cars. They almost followed a script: disperse, why, disperse, no, stand-off, push, push back, take down. Then it happened.

Say his name
George Floyd

The pandemic dramatized what inequality looks like, and the police killing of George Floyd showed everyone what being black in America feels like, over and over again. Young America blew the lid off lockdown, a blast wave of outrage that reached around the world. Jill Nelson told Henry Louis Gates Jr. years ago that she was tired of going to all-black or mostly black demonstrations for social justice, that it was time for white people to show up. They did: their vast numbers are what Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson have led to, in part. Sustained public protest, staying in the streets, those who shall not be moved, taking over the mainstream narrative, if you want to talk that way, the coming together of opposition, if you prefer. Black Lives Matter was ready.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Today is Walt Whitman’s 207th birthday. For many years before the publication of Leaves of Grass he was a freelance journalist, writing for dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Broadway Journal, for which, in 1845, he wrote about the Cheney Family Singers, a review that the Review reprinted on May 16, 2015 (making Whitman, quite possibly, our oldest contributor).

Great is the power of Music over a people! As for us of America, we have long enough followed obedient and child-like in the track of the Old World. We have received her tenors and her buffos, her operatic troupes and her vocalists, of all grades and complexions; listened to and applauded the songs made for a different state of society—made, perhaps, by royal genius, but made to please royal ears likewise; and it is time that such listening and receiving should cease. The subtlest spirit of a nation is expressed through its music—and the music acts reciprocally upon the nation’s very soul. Its effects may not be seen in a day, or a year, and yet these effects are potent invisibly. They enter into religious feelings—they tinge the manners and morals—they are active even in the choice of legislators and high magistrates. Tariffs can be varied to fit circumstances—bad laws obliterated and good ones formed—those enactments which relate to commerce or national policy, built up or taken away, stretched or contracted, to suit the will of the government for the time being. But no human power can thoroughly suppress the spirit which lives in national lyrics, and sounds in the favorite melodies sung by high and low.

There are two kinds of singing—heart-singing and art-singing. That which touches the souls and sympathies of other communities may have no effect here—unless it appeals to the throbbings of the great heart of humanity itself—pictures love, hope, or mirth in their comprehensive aspect. But nearly every nation has its peculiarities and its idioms, which make its best intellectual efforts dearest to itself alone, so that hardly any thing which comes to us in the music and songs of the Old World, is strictly good and fitting to our own nation.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Monday, June 1, 2026, at 5:00 PM EDT

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation, held via Zoom, will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

Register here.

The great jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at his home in Woodstock, New York, on Monday at the age of ninety-five. Today we have unlocked an essay on Rollins by Christopher Carroll that was published in the September 27, 2012, issue of The New York Review, shortly after one of Rollins’s final public performances.

The Sound of Sonny Rollins

Christopher Carroll

Though he ranks alongside Charlie Parker and John Coltrane as one of the greatest jazz saxophonists in history, no one knows why exactly Sonny Rollins hasn’t recorded a first-rate studio album since the 1960s. Some say that his style was irreparably damaged by years spent experimenting with funk, disco, and fusion in the Seventies and Eighties. Yet anyone who has seen Rollins perform on a good night knows that, even at eighty-two, he is still capable of playing with the same brilliance that first made giants like Parker, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk take an interest in him in the 1950s. And if there were any lingering doubts, the news that Rollins won three major jazz awards this summer should dispel the notion that his best years are behind him.

In spite of his advanced age, Rollins remains one of jazz’s most talented improvisers. He has almost inexhaustible stamina, complete control of his instrument, and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of musical knowledge (ranging from jazz standards and pop to folk songs and classical music), to say nothing of his decades of experience playing with almost every major figure in jazz. More important still, he has an impish and ironic sense of humor. He also has a keen appreciation of his audience; when performing he often walks into the crowd as he plays, hoping to draw inspiration from them.

In his newest album of live performances, Road Shows Vol. 2, there are moments when all this can be heard firsthand. A compilation of two recent live shows, including his eightieth birthday concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York, the record captures Rollins playing with the energy of someone half his age. Particularly noteworthy is the twenty-minute version of his classic twelve-bar blues, “Sonnymoon for Two,” on which he is joined by the multi- instrumentalist genius Ornette Coleman, whose free jazz heavily influenced Rollins in the 1960s. This is the first time the two have been recorded together, and though they do not connect in the way that one might have hoped, to hear Coleman playing side by side with Rollins is nevertheless a historic occasion. Perhaps more remarkable simply for the quality of playing is his performance of “Rain Check,” an old Billy Strayhorn song. As he and the forty-two-year-old trumpeter Roy Hargrove begin to trade fours—that is, exchange four-bar improvisations—Rollins’s relentless exuberance overtakes the young trumpeter, whose playing improves audibly the more he interacts with Sonny.

These kinds of moments should awaken listeners to a musician who is still, in Stanley Crouch’s words, capable of “summoning the entire history of jazz.” He was born in Harlem in 1930, the heyday of swing bands. Duke Ellington was a neighbor, and Louis Jordan, the father of R&B, inspired Rollins to pick up the alto saxophone as a child (he would later switch to tenor). He grew up within walking distance of the Apollo and Minton’s Playhouse, where Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and the guitarist Charlie Christian held the all-night jam sessions—Ralph Ellison called them “a continuing symposium of jazz”—that were so central to the development of bebop.

By the time he was twenty-one, he was playing with Miles Davis. Within the next five years, he achieved the kind of success that most jazz musicians might hope for in a lifetime: he was leading his own groups, making albums that were widely praised. Still in his twenties, he had already developed an unmistakable sound, a caustic, sometimes barking tone that The New Yorker’s jazz critic, Whitney Balliett, aptly described as “bossy” and “demanding” (and, somewhat less charitably, “persistently goatlike”). Here is Balliett on how Rollins melded his chief influences, the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker:

He extracted the muscle from Hawkins’ tone and left the velvet, lopped off Hawkins’ famous vibrato, and sharpened Hawkins’ method of melodic playing by making it parodic. He learned Parker’s teeming disregard of bar lines, Parker’s way with rhythm (the oddly placed notes, the silences, the avalanches of thirty-second notes), and Parker’s trick of mixing surreal melodic passages with tumbling bursts of improvisation. And over all this he superimposed a unique and witty garrulity that made his immensely long solos seem, paradoxically, like endless strings of epigrams.

For many, this period was Rollins at his best. He released a number of landmark albums, like Saxophone Colossus, which contains, among others, his famous solo on “Blue 7,” praised by Gunther Schuller in 1958 as the leading example of a new movement toward “thematic and structural unity” in jazz improvisation. On Way Out West, another album released in these years, Rollins plays with a stripped-down, pianoless trio, using hackneyed songs from the cowboy movies he grew up watching at the Apollo as vehicles for wonderfully complex improvisation.

In spite of this success, Rollins quietly withdrew from the jazz world in 1959, citing dissatisfaction with his playing. For two years he did nothing but practice in his apartment. When a neighbor had a new baby, he moved his practice sessions to the Williamsburg Bridge. When he returned to the scene in 1962, he released The Bridge, one of his most beloved albums, which includes a gorgeous rendition of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.” Yet though he had probably reached his technical peak, in the time he had been gone Rollins had nevertheless been overtaken by two towering figures of the avant-garde. The first was John Coltrane, who in 1960 released the revolutionary Giant Steps—which contains one of the most harmonically complex jazz songs ever written—and thereafter began an ascent that would stop only with his untimely death in 1967. Second, and more radical still, was Ornette Coleman, one of the leading figures of free jazz. Suddenly Rollins was regarded—unfairly—as a conservative, a remnant of the old bebop and post-bop tradition.

The irony of this conservative label is that Rollins embraced these new styles, recording innovative albums with both Coleman’s and Coltrane’s band members (Our Man in Jazz and East Broadway Run Down, respectively). But by the end of the Sixties he told Balliett in an interview that he was “disillusioned...with the music scene” and again went on a sabbatical, much of which he spent in India. When he returned to New York in 1972 he began what some have seen as a long, slow decline.

As rock’s influence grew and fusion became popular among jazz musicians, Rollins, just as he had with Coleman’s “new thing,” once again attempted to meld elements of the latest style into his music. Yet in this instance he seems to have gone too far. He led ensembles structured more like rock groups, heavy on electric bass. His albums, incorporating not just rock, but funk and disco, came to sound more commercial, often resembling Gato Barbieri more than Sonny Rollins. He also struggled with advances in recording technology, especially as the old method of recording complete (or near-complete) takes in the studio gave way to the painstaking, piecemeal process of overdubbing. “I’ve always felt a little bit restricted in a studio,” he said in a 2008 interview with the jazz critic Gary Giddins, “at least when the technology came out that you can overdub and...change your original statement. So then I think I got spooked and I began trying to do everything perfectly.”

Of course, these records did not, as some have speculated, somehow impair Rollins’s ability to play thoughtful music. Silver City, Giddins’s carefully selected compilation of some of the best songs Rollins recorded on the Milestone label during this period, proves that he was still capable of playing at the same high level he always had. But his great moments of inspiration are fewer, and seem to come in spite of their surroundings, cropping up unaccountably in the middle of an otherwise insipid funk tune or disco track and just as quickly disappearing.

But in the mid-Seventies and early Eighties—even as he continued to release largely uninspired studio albums—another Sonny Rollins emerged on stage. This was the musician who had learned the art of crowd pleasing from Louis Jordan; who emerged years later from Charlie Parker’s long shadow; and who had devoured and assimilated every avant-garde idiom while still remaining, ultimately, himself. He can be seen in Sonny Rollins, ’74: Rescued, a newly discovered video of a set Rollins played at Ronnie Scott’s in 1974. He can also be seen in footage of a concert from 1986—reproduced in Robert Mugge’s documentary Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus—giving an electrifying performance of the song “G-Man,” a fifteen-minute modal marathon with, in Robert Christgau’s words, “riffs jumping and giving long past their breaking points, notes held so long it’s a wonder Rollins hasn’t passed out.”

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Monday, June 1, 2026, at 5:00 PM EDT

New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act. The conversation, held via Zoom, will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

Register here.

One hundred and forty-three years ago today, the East River Bridge—later renamed the Brooklyn Bridge—opened in New York City. It was the first bridge to connect Manhattan with Long Island and, at the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world.

In the Review’s July 15, 1965, issue, Alfred Kazin wrote about the symbolic power of “the biggest and most useful nineteenth-century structure still standing in New York.”

The Bridge

Alfred Kazin

As a people, Americans have been absorbed in “making it,” in their own success story, in the making of Americans. To be an American is itself a career, as so many Americans, old stock as well as new, have testified. We are a legend to ourselves, and though the rest of the world has believed in this legend and has contributed to it, only we have lived it with the absorption that makes it necessary for us constantly to note our progress.

By now there must be a book for every day of American history—and the universities and the mass media are joined in incessantly producing still more documentation of “just what makes us tick” and “our American heritage.” Nothing “American” is alien to our incessant cultural analysts, many of them of recent immigrant stock and endlessly fascinated by the wealth of material to which they feel happily related by their newfound status. This material—often perilously thin—they comb over and over for ideas, perspectives, approaches, that are usually based on facts that genuine historians have dug up for them. Everything in American experience is worthy of study, and every “approach” in this “area” is “unexpected,” “provocative,” “noteworthy.” There is no one to contradict us when the “area of interest” is, simply, our interest in ourselves. Who is to deny us Custer’s Last Stand, the Greek Revival, Concord families, slavery in the cities, Long Island painting, Scott Fitzgerald’s college stories, W.P.A. art, Italians in California, old Charleston literati, pro-Franco sentiment in New England, William Jennings Bryan’s voice, pro-British Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, the agrarian radicalism of Mary Ellen Lease? Who is to say that there is not “something to be learned” from the myth of America as a garden, the pastoral image, the American Adam, Warren Harding’s sex life, Abraham Lincoln’s trouble with his wife, Freud’s theory of the instincts, Geoffrey Gorer’s theory of the American character, David Riesman’s inner-outer character formula? Whom and what dare we reject for our intellectual enlightenment when the object of these studies, called “American civilization,” is really our society as ourselves, our lives, our wish to get hold of every possible problem and do something about it now? Anything goes in this collective autoanalysis, and everything goes into it—any borrowing from sociology and esthetics, and enforced joining of the unjoinable; any political nostalgia or irritable political reflex. There are no intellectual checks on the production of “American studies,” for there can be no genuine demonstrations of causation; the “field” is never social history, economic history, literary history, intellectual history, but the number of relationships that we can make between facts that we have not discovered for ourselves and which therefore are used as symbols.

“America” itself is always the greatest, the inexhaustible, symbol. After all, we are Americans engaged in the adventure of making ourselves Americans or understanding what unmade the Americans we used to be; we have fulfilled desires that 90 per cent of the human race has never heard of; ourselves the products of many genuine revolutions and unending social transformation, we want the best values for ourselves as we want the best kitchens, and where shall we apply them but in the field of “American civilization”? What Socrates attributed to the passions and Montaigne to human vanity, Dostoevsky to spiritual servility and Kirkegaard to the fear of self-contradiction, we attribute to the American character, the American economic system, American nursery schools, American sexuality, American breast-fetishism—and at a pinch, if we are of the right sort. Calvinism along the old Southwest frontier. The cultural synthesizers never feel that any fact is out of place any more than the psychoanalysts do, for we all want to do right by ourselves, to make our lives right, to get on with the improvements.

Behind “American studies” is not so much the intellectually standardless careerism now become a mass phenomenon in the universities, though this certainly explains the junkheaps of unnecessary and even cynical publication, as the common frustration of the utopianism, liberalism, radicalism that are so marked in our intellectual history. No one of any real intelligence goes into the “American field” without some prophetic instinct; after all, that is its greatest interest; we have no Shakespeares. But we do have this need to record our progress and to make it, seemingly, total. We have an insatiable utopian will, which whether based on what once seemed to be limitless land, or on eighteenth-century rational hopes, or nineteenth-century romantic Protestantism, or immigrants passion, has always sought to marry nature to spirit, democracy to individual perfection, God to his “chosen country.” We have achieved more, we expect more, we believe more in the possibilities of joining together individuals, peoples, religions—yes, and races. What if America had no literary tradition in the early period—what if Henry James in his English-European way was right about the “thinness” of Hawthorne’s world? “We“ have a tradition of popular humor, of folklore, of non-literate and brazenly commercial entertainment. Is art so important, or intellectuals, when America itself has been such a “success”? We need to know what the average man thinks, for his life is more real to us than historic Geist. What if beauty, with us, must come out of existing ugliness? This is exactly our opportunity and our mission as Americans—to mate all opposites, to show what can and ought to be, to realize the correspondences that wait in all things between matter and spirit, the real and the ideal, nature and God, America and its cosmic destiny.

Take Brooklyn Bridge and its many myths. Alan Trachtenberg has written a good little book about it, sensitively intelligent, which in the end reflects the anxious and rhetorical will-to-meaning that is its real subject. Brooklyn Bridge is in fact the biggest and most useful nineteenth-century structure still standing in New York. The plan was sketched two years after the Civil War by John Augustus Roebling, a German immigrant who had been a favorite student of Hegel’s, who came to this country as a utopian communist and became an Emersonian. Roebling was a great pioneer of suspension bridges in this country, he invented wire rope, he was a brilliantly thorough engineer and at the same time an indefatigable seeker after the single spiritual truth that must, he thought, explain the physical structure of our universe. He was a passionate American patriot who brusquely sent his son Washington off to fight in the Civil War; this son became a famous bridge-builder in the Union Army, and when the father died from lockjaw after a Brooklyn ferry rammed the pier where old Roebling was calculating the bridge that would replace the ferry, the son, who during the war would not communicate with his father, completed the father’s bridge. He developed caisson disease from working on the foundations of the Brooklyn tower, and at the end sat paralyzed in a wheel chair at his window overlooking Columbia Heights, directing the work through a spyglass.

The great towers of Brooklyn Bridge are a memory of a Gothic church in Roebling’s native Muhlhausen in Thuringia; they have also represented, to many architects, writers, painters, poets, pedestrians on the great central promenade, a glorious adaptation of form to function, of masonry to steel, of Brooklyn-New York to the great harbor. John Roebling, founder of the Roebling fortune, sometime Hegelian, Swedenborgian, Emersonian, also devised, for safety’s sake, the system of beautiful diagonal stays which extend from the tops of the towers to the main cables. These stays, he said, would be strong enough to support the roadway if the main cables should be removed or damaged. No one walking Brooklyn Bridge needs to know anything about engineering in order to appreciate the solidity and tension of the diagonals that these stays make as they run from the towers through the roadway; he recognizes as beauty what was designed to be further assurance of support to Roebling’s revolutionary suspension bridge.

Brooklyn Bridge has everything for the student of American culture: the memory of Gothic cathedrals, American engineering and American art, the old utopian communist who became an American power by his faith in wire rope and suspension bridges; directly or by implication, Brooklyn Bridge is the history of American transportation, of New York harbor, of old Dutch Brooklyn in the days when the burghers would not live in Manhattan. Sooner or later many an American power gets into the story, from Boss Tweed, who had to be bribed so that a permit could be obtained, to Hart Crane, who in order to write The Bridge lived in Washington Roebling’s old house on Columbia Heights. Whitman described the towers going up in Specimen Days; Henry James was fascinated in The American Scene by the traffic on Brooklyn Bridge; John Marin and Joseph Stella are only the two most famous of the dozens of gifted painters who have been haunted by all possible images to their eyes of Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn Bridge still represents, in all its massiveness, the American power that was fully to burst upon the consciousness of Americans only in the years after the Civil War. And because it is so beautiful in its power, complex but unadorned, it has become the symbol of the American longing to wrest beauty out of a purely industrial environment, to find in the skills of our native capitalism and the hardness of our cities some hint of a more humane order, even of the spiritual fruition that the churchless individual might yet find in this country; so dreamed the transcendentalists in the nineteenth century, and many a liberal and utopian mind in the twentieth. “Where but here?” the substance of the Emerson-Thoreau-Whitman faith in the individual and the mission of romantic American nationality, was succeeded by Waldo Frank’s faith in “organic wholeness,” which helped to shape Hart Crane’s frantically apocalyptic attempts to make Brooklyn Bridge a road back to old Virginia, the frontier, Cathay, Atlantis itself. “O harp and altar/Of the fury fused /How could mere toil align thy choir-prophet’s pledge/Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry.”

“And of the curveship lend a myth to God.” It is a wonder that The Bridge is in sections as good as it is, for rarely has a poet, admittedly of great linguistic cunning, had so much abstract matter in his way. What saved The Bridge (nothing could have saved Crane as a man) is the fact that by the outstretched arms of Brooklyn Bridge, he meant his own outstretched arms, his own longing for love, completion, God: in a word, he meant his own ambiguity. He was the taut cables and the lonely man waiting in the shadows of the pier for sailors; he was the drowning from which the bridge both actually and metaphorically saves us who cross over it—pontus, keeper, father…

Beauty in power, beauty through power: the real American faith, for we are entranced by our power, though not many acknowledge it, and seek beauty and salvation through power, “Save me!” said Crane in the shadows of Brooklyn Bridge. “Save us!” say the new Americanists to American power. “Show us the way to beauty, truth, culture, and salvation through the Pepsi-Cola art contest, the White House arts festival, the corporations, the factories, the foundations, the all-day conference on art in our time! Don’t ask us to give up anything—not a vibration in the mixmaster, not a sale at our art merchants—only show us how to bring together the lion and the lamb, war prosperity and a good conscience, money and beauty, ugliness and beauty, sex and God!”

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

The first color photograph—as distinct from hand-tinted monochrome photographs—was produced 165 years ago today. The English inventor Thomas Sutton’s image of a tartan ribbon was made using a pioneering three-color process, but due to the expense and difficulty of early technologies, color photography did not become the predominant medium for another hundred years.

On September 5, 2014, Adam Hochschild wrote about the “startling” experience of seeing color photographs of World War I, only a few thousand of which are known to exist: “It feels like looking at a familiar scene through a different pair of eyeglasses, one that allows you to see all sorts of things…that are hard to imagine even now from the many TV documentaries marking the war’s centennial.”

Into the Trenches in Red and Blue

Adam Hochschild

Because of the photography of their day, we tend to think of the world wars in black and white. This is especially true of the first. As a child I pored endlessly through a book of photographs from 1914-1918 on my parents’ bookshelf: grey trenches, blackened ruins of bombed-out buildings, soldiers’ drab uniforms, a corpse on the ground (was that darker spot blood?), with the caption: “Some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.”

It is startling, therefore, to see the some 320 images in Peter Walther’s The First World War in Colour (Taschen), chosen from the few thousand color photographs of the war that exist. It feels like looking at a familiar scene through a different pair of eyeglasses, one that allows you to see all sorts of things that that six-year-old self of mine couldn’t picture, and that are hard to imagine even now from the many TV documentaries marking the war’s centennial. (One reason these images seem not to have been better known is that they have been dispersed in various archives across Europe and are difficult to access. Some of the more remarkable photographs in the book were not available for reproduction in this post.)

The first thing that stuns you is the brilliant colors of the uniforms. Most of the photos in this book are from France, and the French army of 1914 was the most snappily dressed in Europe. French infantrymen wore bright red trousers, bright blue coats, and bright red caps. And these were combat uniforms, not just dress uniforms. When, at a parliamentary hearing two years before the war, a reformer had suggested doing away at least with the red trousers, the minister of war shouted him down: “Jamais! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!”

The French were not the only World War I army in love with color. Austro-Hungarian cavalry troopers also went into battle wearing bright red and blue, which they didn’t abandon until 1916, and Scottish infantry had colored tartan bands on their caps. On the uniforms of the colonial troops, too, eye-catching hues abound: red, white, and blue on the Zouaves from French North Africa; gold caps and broad stripes on the red trousers of their French officers; red sashes and high red caps on Moroccan cavalry. Although barely mentioned in most histories of the war, hundreds of thousands of colonial troops were brought to the Western Front by both France and Britain. The great variety of their uniforms constituted a sort of boast about just how much of the world the major colonial powers controlled.

Why such stunning disregard of what would make a soldier so conspicuous a target for an enemy sniper rifle or machine gun? This blitheness about bright colors stemmed from the previous military experience of the Western Front generals—British, French, and German alike—which had been mostly limited to fighting people who lacked sniper rifles or machine guns: poorly-armed rebels against colonial rule in Africa or Asia. The generals knew, of course, that this would no longer hold true for a war in Europe, but there’s always that curious difference between knowing and acting, and never more so than with the military. Huge armies change their ways very slowly. Hundreds of thousands of red-capped French infantry troops and cavalrymen with brilliantly shining breastplates were killed—more than 27,000 died in a single day several weeks after the war began—before new uniforms were distributed to the troops in early 1915.

Color photography in this era was cumbersome: cameras were heavy and film was slow—even in bright sunshine, a subject had to stand still for a full second, and for much longer if it was overcast. Hence there are no color photos of actual combat or of troops under fire. But plenty of civilians were happy to pose for the camera. Particularly haunting are Léon Gimpel’s images of Parisian children in 1915 performing, complete with colored uniforms, their fantasies of combat on the ground and in the air, and even of an execution. German children were surely acting out similar scenes in the streets of Berlin. A quarter-century later, both sets of children would be fully grown and their rifles and airplanes would no longer be toy ones.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Fred Astaire was born 127 years ago today. In the Review’s April 5, 2012, issue, Arlene Croce wrote about his more than seventy-year career. From some of the earliest sound films to one of his final public performances, on The Dick Cavett Show, Astaire was an innovator in dance, film, and music. As Croce argues, “any way he cared to entertain us was the right way”

They’re the Top

Arlene Croce

Now that The Artist has whetted our interest in the silent film and the revolutionary impact of sound, it may be time to reconsider the career of the man who made the conversion to sound the basis of a whole new kind of movie, Fred Astaire. The Artist suggests quite accurately that the definitive event of the new sound era was the arrival of the film musical. Sound meant music; music meant jazz. But the technological transition was slow. After the first feature-length sound movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), which starred Al Jolson, it was six years before the advent of the Jazz Dancer proved that talking and even singing mouths were not nearly as expressive in the new medium as dancing feet, especially and almost exclusively the feet of Fred Astaire. Astaire and the difference he made to the film musical add up to more than the story of one career. No other film genre provided as perfect a synchronization of sight and sound or an experience as exhilarating, and that was very largely Astaire’s doing.

The title of Todd Decker’s highly specialized, richly detailed book, Music Makes Me, comes from the Vincent Youmans song to which Astaire danced his first screen solo, in Flying Down to Rio (1933). Earlier in the movie, Ginger Rogers sang it:

I like music old and new,
But music makes me do the things
I never should do.

As Decker notes, Rogers’s rendition is sexy, but when Astaire blasts off, the meaning changes: music makes him dance. His timing, as usual, was impeccable. Decker places the Astaire of the 1930s at the confluence of the trends in movies, big-band jazz (or swing), radio, and recordings that were changing the tone of American life. The songwriting industry had conformed instantly to this new pattern: suddenly a hit song was no longer sheet music on people’s piano racks; it was the air they breathed.

No matter that as a singer Astaire was not in a class with Jolson and Crosby, or with Crosby and Sinatra. By the end of the swing era he had introduced more outstanding songs than anybody else, twenty-six by Irving Berlin alone. Astaire was himself a songwriter whose skill in manipulating musical material other songwriters knew they could trust. Decker, the first writer to pay close attention to the full range of Astaire’s musical choices, is also a fine judge of his artistic sensibilities. And so was Astaire: in a ringingly declarative sentence, quoted from the uncut manuscript of his autobiography, Steps in Time (1959), he separates himself from colleagues who only performed. That sentence, which Decker uses as a chapter head, is “I am a creator” (Astaire’s italics).

In Hollywood (appropriately, Astaire signed with the studio called Radio Pictures), the one aspect of the business that did not engage him was the content of complete motion pictures. He was not even interested in complete production numbers, leaving the staging of ensembles to others. What Astaire produced was himself, in all his variety—as soloist, as partner, as singer, as actor, as instrumentalist (piano, drums). He choreographed all his own numbers, usually with the assistance of his near double Hermes Pan; he supervised the filming and cutting; and before choreographing a number he worked out its whole musical structure, often basing it on an introductory song by Berlin or Gershwin or Kern or, just as often, on improvisations by rehearsal pianists. His interventions weren’t just tolerated at RKO but welcomed, and he was always the main link between the composers, whom of course he knew personally, and the studio’s musicians and arrangers. In short, wherever you looked in the musical as opposed to the scenic and dramatic process, you found Astaire.

In the connection between tap dancing and swing Astaire seems to have touched a live wire that led straight to the heart of sound-film sensation, and it’s no coincidence that his solos, where he tapped like mad, were also the places where he ventured effects that were only possible on film. For Astaire, these were double-edged innovations. If film could magnify the tap dancer, it could also expose him. If the musical film existed to be set afire by Astaire, it was also his salvation. Beneath the experimentation there was always the fact that he had made his film debut at thirty-four, a dauntingly late age for a dancer. In that one sense, the time for Fred Astaire was out of joint. Ingenious use of the medium became a way of disguising the lessening of his capacities as a virtuoso tap dancer.

It was more than that, of course—any way he cared to entertain us was the right way. I don’t think we realize even now that Astaire was able to make deep connections to the medium in dances that could as well have been performed on the stage, and this is where as a technician he becomes truly uncanny. The title number in Top Hat (1935) was one he actually had done on the stage. With new music by Berlin it became a prized movie moment, Astaire’s signature number.

As with all great dancers, Astaire’s technique was an expression of his imagination. It was the braiding of swing rhythms together with his personal tap technique (which had to have been an extension of his drumming, or vice versa) that made him the great and unique dancer that he was. But as a film phenomenon he was twice as great. Decker is right to insist that Astaire’s persona was a cinematic creation. Graham Greene said much the same thing in a 1936 review when he compared Astaire to Mickey Mouse. Even without movie tricks, against certain musical backgrounds he could seem other than human. (The only good thing in Vincente Minnelli’s 1945 film Yolanda and the Thief is the casting of Fred Astaire as an angel.)

Decker, who wants to move Astaire seamlessly across the divisions in popular music and dance styles from the Twenties to the Sixties, reminds us that by the time of his first television special in 1958 he had long since been doing less tapping and more body movement. The women he partnered had gotten younger and younger and, except for Barrie Chase, his TV partner, less and less accomplished as dancers, and some were virtual novices. In the Fifties and Sixties, aging male stars all had their young female costars. I think Astaire actually may have preferred young partners for their osmotic connection to the youth culture and its dance fads, and also for their malleability; they could be taught. But with ballet-trained Cyd Charisse in “Dancing in the Dark” (The Bandwagon, 1953) he brought off his best romantic duet since the great series with Rogers.

That duet functions beautifully both as pure dance and as plot hinge: Charisse is a ballerina, Astaire is Astaire. Dubiously cast together in a new show, they need to know if they can be dance partners. Tentatively at first, then more decisively, Charisse responds to Astaire’s touch. Decker devotes three pages of approval to this dance, but none at all to the one it is modeled on, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (from Follow the Fleet, 1936). This is recognizably a “seduction” number, of the type that Astaire patented with Rogers, but with one crucial variation: Astaire does not want to seduce Rogers but to bring her back from the brink of suicide and restore her to the living. The whole scene is presented as a drama complete in itself, isolated from the rest of the movie. Although Decker is as impatient as Astaire was with issues of integration and motivation, he accepts “Let’s Face the Music” on its own terms as a book number.

But he is quite wrong to say that Astaire’s treatment of Berlin’s great ballad “lacks any dramatic through line.” The two dancers are distinctively characterized: Astaire is the continually active partner, while Rogers is continually passive, gradually gaining confidence until she is able to join him in that huge burst of a side-by-side exit. The drama is so deeply embedded in the dance that it may take several reseeings to grasp it all, as I was finally able to discover to my regret, years after having published a rhapsodic account of the number; the artist in Astaire simply wouldn’t let him “act” a story when he could dance it. We all love “Never Gonna Dance,” the lyrical climax of Swing Time (1936), but it may have contained too much plot-dependent dancing to suit Astaire. Today, in large-screen DVD viewing, “Let’s Face the Music” stands as the apotheosis of Astaire-Rogers.

In MGM’s Royal Wedding (1951), Astaire and Jane Powell play characters based on himself and his sister Adele, notwithstanding the fact that Adele was nearly three years older than Fred and Powell was thirty years younger. Fred and Adele Astaire are still remembered as one of the greatest acts to play the Broadway and London stage, but compared to her brother, Adele, the star of the act, is now almost forgotten. Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires is the first full-length study of a fantastically charismatic figure. That charisma and the lateness of the hour make it a necessary but problematical book.

Riley, a passionate enthusiast of all things Astaire, is an academic historian engaged in what seems to be an all-out struggle with the limitations of theatrical biography. The question that nags the biographer of performing artists—but what did they do?—appears to have goaded her into injudicious attempts at interpretative description. The dizzying accolades Adele collected in her fifteen years of stardom (1917–1932) seem to call for some authoritative word of explanation. It is not to be had. One may describe actors—after all, they have texts—but trying to describe dancers in motion is a no-go proposition, the more so when they are theatrical wunderkinder, one of whom last performed publicly eighty years ago and was never filmed.

Even at the time, reviewers labored fruitlessly to pin Adele down in print. Her capacity for conquest was apparently limitless. At one end of her range she spread beauty and enchantment; at the other she mugged outrageously, earning the sobriquet Funny Face. She loved to cause scandal; she had a dirty mouth to do it with, and the sweetest of grins. Fred could only shudder and mark time until the riot died down.

Riley enters some new facts in the biographical record and quietly corrects others, such as that the Astaires, born in Omaha, came from a comfortable, “respectable” middle-class family. Their father, Frederic (Fritz) Austerlitz, emigrated from Vienna when he was twenty-four. Their mother, Johanna (Ann) Geilus, was the first-generation daughter of parents from East Prussia. Fritz’s parents were Jews who converted to Catholicism before he was born. In Vienna, Riley writes, Fritz had been “drawn longingly to Vienna’s café society, its artists, writers, musicians, and theater folk, and to life on the Ringstrasse, the elegant apotheosis of Jewish cosmopolitanism.” His desultory pursuit of a living in the New York of the 1890s ended when a business opportunity led him to Omaha, where he eventually became a beer salesman (not a brewer, as is commonly written), a job he kept probably because it favored his incipient alcoholism. Fritz was ineffectual, good-humored, affectionate, ever the cane-twirling dandy. His musical talent was passed on to his children, who adored him, especially Adele.

Ann Geilus was brought up in a strict Lutheran household. Her father was a furnace man in the Union Pacific shop and a drunkard. She was a gentle, retiring, responsible girl, swept off her feet by Fritz’s raffish worldliness and in the end defeated by it. They separated when Adele and Fred were eight and five, after a local dance teacher urged them to put the children on the stage in New York. Fritz saw a child act as the fulfillment of his theatrical ambitions; Ann saw an escape from a dead marriage and a chance to lead an independent, venturesome life. The two never divorced. Fritz stayed in Omaha (where as time passed he may have become a bigamist) and wired Ann money while she shepherded the kids through New York’s dancing schools and boardinghouses. When Fritz visited New York, they all ate at Luchow’s.

In vaudeville, the grinding schedule of rehearsal and performance made a workaholic of Fred and a slacker of Adele. With her huge natural talent, sparkling presence, and spontaneous wit, she could go on stage with no preparation and improvise, to his intense dismay. Nearly a head taller than her brother at that point, she dominated the stage. The children took their opposite personalities from their parents: Adele had her father’s frivolity; Fred, his mother’s reticence and grit. One has to wonder about gentle, sweet-faced women (the mother of Lillian and Dorothy Gish was another) who, from God knows what combination of desperation and ambition, subjected their young children to the frightful ordeal and sordid atmosphere of vaudeville. Maybe when the act went over Ann Astaire could feel justified. When it flopped, the children went to their dressing rooms and cried. Backstage, Adele thumbed her nose at the audience and stuck out her tongue.

Riley’s coverage of the vaudeville years is basically an expansion of Astaire’s own vivid chapters in which recollections of scarifying reviews drove him constantly to bewail his inadequacy as Adele’s partner. The inferiority complex lasted into the big time. Without jiggling Adele’s perch, Riley rights the balance:

The New York opening [of Over the Top] on 28 November 1917 met with mixed reviews, but most critics singled out the Astaires as a rare highlight in an otherwise mediocre entertainment, with the honors divided almost evenly between brother and sister. Louis Sherwin of the New York Globe wrote: “One of the prettiest features of the show is the dancing of the two Astaires. The girl, a light, spritelike little creature, has really an exquisite floating style in her caperings, while the young man combines eccentric agility with humor.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Two hundred and eighteen years ago today, French troops occupying Madrid in support of Napoleon’s bid to install his brother as the king of Spain rounded up and executed hundreds of Spaniards and executed them in the streets. In 1814, with Joseph Bonaparte safely deposed, Francisco Goya painted The Third of May 1808, a commemoration of the victims of Napoleon’s campaign.

In the Review’s June 29, 1989, issue, Robert Hughes wrote about a major Goya show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and included an extended analysis of The Third of May 1808, a painting not in the Met’s show.

The Liberal Goya

Robert Hughes

1.

I think most of us would agree that the Goya exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is the most powerful show in town. We can say this even though it doesn’t give us the whole Goya. We can feel it because he speaks to us with an urgency that no artist of our time can muster. We see his long-dead face pressed against the glass of our terrible century, Goya looking in at a time worse than his.

You can make a proto-modernist out of Goya, just as the nineteenth century made him a proto-Romantic and then a proto-Realist. His dismembered carcasses in the Disasters of War directly inspired Géricault’s. Manet assiduously imitated him—his Parisiennes on the balcony are Goya’s majas transposed to Paris, his bullfight is a direct homage to Goya’s Tauromaquia. Dali constantly invoked him and from L’Age d’Or to The Exterminating Angel Luis Buñuel’s films elliptically refer to Goya and constitute a cinematic parallel to his eighty prints about the sexual and social follies of Spanish society high and low, the Caprichos.

Picasso, of course, meditated on Goya from first to last and was always scared of the comparison. Among Americans, to name only a couple, Goya surfaces dramatically in late works of Philip Guston (so many of which seem like homages to the Caprichos) and in the tragic blacks and humped profiles of Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic.

But you cannot make Goya into a proto-post-modernist. He is never trivial enough for that. It is the wholeness of his fiction, its unremitting earnestness, its desire to know and tell the truth, that our art has currently lost.

This is what used to be meant when a great artist was called “universal.” The term can’t be taken literally—there is no imaginable Goya that could mean as much to a Chinese as to a European—but it does suggest the power of such artists to keep appealing through their imagery to very different people along the strand of a common cultural descent, so that even when beliefs have lost their fervency, when both the oppressors and the oppressed are dead, when the references of religion and popular culture have changed, as they certainly have between Madrid in 1809 and New York in 1989—still we venture to claim Goya as our own. Our ability to describe ourselves is somewhat inflected by this man’s paintings, drawings, and prints.

We could not claim this for any of his Spanish contemporaries. It doesn’t entirely rest on his greatness as an artist either, since other great painters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries don’t have Goya’s ability to project their images from their time into ours. No matter how much we love Watteau, his sense of society is closed to us forever; we will never be able to imagine ourselves taking part in those rituals on the shaven lawns of the paradise garden. But Goya is a different matter.

Two paintings that are not in the Metropolitan show underscore why nobody should call it a Goya retrospective, an event that now will never take place. The paintings commemorate a rising that touched off Spain’s War of Independence against France. On May 2, 1808, in the Puerta del Sol in the very heart of Madrid, a crowd of citizens turned into what authority would call a mob and attacked a detachment of Mameluke cavalry—the predecessors, one might say, of Franco’s Moors—led by the French general, Murat. One painting by Goya records the moment: the Dos de Mayo. A second, the Tres de Mayo, commemorates the next night’s reprisals, in which about forty madrileños found with weapons were summarily shot by French firing squads behind the hill of Principe Pio, outside Madrid.

The Second of May is a fine painting but not a great one; it is renovated Baron Gros with its heroic rocking horse, without the French etiquette of violence, and more abandoned in expressions. The Third of May (see page 28) is not renovated anything. It is truly modern and its newness seems to have ensured that, though a state commission, it remained in storage for the first forty years of its life.

The surface is ragged, for Goya is suppressing his fluency in the interests of a harsher address to the eye. Occasionally the signs of that fluency break through—one is the saber and sheath of the French soldier closest to us—a mere scribble, but what a scribble, of burnt umber, lightened by a swipe of yellow that begins in a round splotch at the tip of the sheath and swings right up the form. Elsewhere the improvised bluntness of his painting is tragically expressive, even—or perhaps especially—down to the blood on the ground, which is a dark alizarin crimson put on thick and then scraped back with a palette knife, so that its sinking into the grain of the canvas mimics the drying of blood itself: it looks crusty, dull, and scratchy, just like real blood smeared on a surface by the involuntary twitches of a dying body. The wounds that disfigure the face of the man on the ground can’t be deciphered fully as wounds, but as signs of trauma embodied in paint they are inexpressibly shocking: their imprecision conveys the sense of something too painful to look at, of the aversion of one’s own eyes.

Signs of past art are there: I suspect that the array of French barrels and bayonets carries a small sharp echo of a more triumphal and chivalrous military piece, well-known to Goya: the palisade of lances in Velasquez’s Surrender of Breda. Above all, there is the man about to be shot, whom we saw dragging the Mameluke backward off his horse on May Second. There he now stands, in his clean white shirt, throwing out his arms in a gesture that irresistibly recalls the Crucifixion. It is a gesture of indescribable power: it takes the spread arms of the passive crucified victim and makes them active, a flinging out of life in despair and defiance. Indeed, he has a face—coarse, swarthy, dilated in its last moment of vitality. All his fellow victims have faces too. By rendering them as national portraits—the faces of the pueblo—Goya grants the living their individually right up to the edge of the mass grave. The landscape, however, is featureless: a bare hill and bare rocks. And so are the soldiers, whose row of backs still strikes us as the first truly modern image of war because it is the first to register the anonymity, the machine-like efficiency, of oppression. Nothing personal.

We see only backs, braced forward into the recoil of those big .70-caliber flintlocks. And without knowing it, Goya piercingly anticipates our sense of modern documentary with that lantern: the minimal cube with its objective white light, presently to be invoked, in homage to Goya, by Picasso’s electric light in Guernica. In sum, this painting is as unlike all previous war paintings as Wilfred Owen’s writings from the trenches are unlike all Georgian and Victorian war poetry. And the difference is that Goya speaks for the victims: not only for those killed in French reprisals in Madrid, but for all the millions of individuals destroyed, before and since, in the name of The People. The Third of May is not a piece of reporting—any more than the Disasters of War will be. Goya didn’t see this scene; he almost certainly wasn’t there, though he was in Madrid. In any case it can’t have looked like this. But we can’t forget what he didn’t see.

I have dwelt on this painting because it exemplifies what is somewhat underplayed in the Metropolitan show. The idea of Goya as a man of the Enlightenment stops a long way short of explaining why his work has such a purchase on our imagination. The light of this lantern is not the light shed by Rousseau’s assumptions about the goodness of mankind, or by the hopes of the Spanish reformers that Goya saw crushed at the very moment in 1814 when he was painting The Third of May. They were crushed when that parody of kingship, Ferdinand VII, entered Madrid and, instead of restoring the rights of the Spanish people that Napoleon and the war had taken away, abolished the Constitution of 1812, and reinstated the Inquisition. To employ Milton’s stunning phrase about the illumination of Hell, it is “no light, but rather darkness visible.” Because The Third of May excites our pity and terror as no other painting of war has done—or, I suppose, will ever do—we incline to suppose that it does so in the name of liberal ideology.

But here our emphasis may be wrong. Perhaps in claiming Goya as a liberal we are only repeating the process by which successive moments of taste have appropriated him. There have been more than a few Goyas in the two hundred years since his birth. There was Goya the Romantic, the creation of writers like Théophile Gautier. We have had Goya the Man of the People, critic of established power and French imperialism, whose work argues for an immutable bedrock of his culture, the ser auténtico. His offspring is Goya the Incipient Marxist, in whose work the class struggle is set forth and predicted from the eye-line of the workers, a view based partly on his own humble birth—though it ignores some of Goya’s opinions of the common people, and creates problems when it comes to explaining his social climbing and canny self-interest. Then there is Goya the Surrealist, whose uncensored access to his own worst dreams would not be approached until the 1930s, with the anxious maturity of Picasso—and will certainly never be equaled.

There are other Goyas too—the existential one suggested by André Malraux’s Saturn, for instance—and in each a culture later than his own strives to locate itself, its own dreams, its own self-image. They are all partly true, and none of them wholly excludes the rest. For Goya’s personality was one of the richest and most various that an artist ever had: a remarkable blend of introspection, opportunism, and relentless curiosity; gluttonously drawn to the social framework but always alone among his fantasies.

He turns in the dark space of Bourbon history like a ball with mirrored facets, immediately casting back whatever pencil of light the specialist directs on him. He demands interpretation, he absorbs it and always seems to want more, because his work is so rich and so variegated.

So the latest Goya—the one the Metropolitan show invokes and to some degree invents—is Goya the Liberal. The use of the word “liberal” in its political sense began in Spain in his time, to distinguish reformers from the serviles, the conservatives who wanted no change in social ranking and the power of the Church and the Inquisition. It only got into English around 1830. Maybe the Spanish today want to stress Goya’s liberalism because they see their present king fulfilling the liberal promise of his ancestor Charles III in Goya’s time—and because Goya was too often claimed as “quintessentially Spanish” during the long Franco years. Maybe we like to hear it because American liberalism has taken such a beating from political speechwriters and TV preachers. That they could so easily turn America’s noblest tradition of political thought into the “L-word” is obscene, and perhaps it’s natural that survivors of this linguistic mugging should want to claim Goya as an ancestor for their own opinions about human freedom and rights. And there is a good deal of evidence for this in his work, especially the Caprichos, brilliantly explicated by Eleanor Sayre in the catalog. But it is not the whole story.

Goya’s liberalism is bound up with his class ambitions. In the late eighteenth century, which also saw the first phase of Goya’s career, Madrid had a thin veneer of ilustrados, whose influence was largely dependent on royal approval—which they got in plenty from Charles III. Their liberalism was safeguarded not by popular movements, but by the direct sympathy of the monarch. Like many of the aristocrats who supported the French Revolution in its pre-Jacobin years, they perceived their king as the caretaker of liberal reform.

But the common people and artisans from whose ranks Goya had risen were far more conservative. There was an immense chasm between popular and elite culture in Bourbon Spain. To the majo on the street, the ilustrado in the salon with his Frenchified ideas was virtually a foreigner. People rarely like the humanitarian plans of their social superiors. The culture of the Madrid pueblo had nothing to do with Beccaria or Diderot—or with Goya’s court portraits, for that matter. It was immersed in folk tales, superstitions, and ferociously dirty jokes. It clung to the bullfight; to flamenco singers and hellfire preachers; to the grotesque pantomimes known as tonadillas; to phantasmagorias full of witches and demons; to crude woodcuts and to a popular theater whose heroes were bandits, smugglers, and other enemies of authority; and to the codes of brash laconic dandyism and male bonding that were signified by the word majismo.

Aged forty-six, Goya painted himself as a majo (see page 29)—a costume which for an established court painter in the 1790s was roughly equivalent to black leather and jeans among New York artists in the Sixties. Populism stood for liberty—of a rough, conservative, intensely xenophobic kind, sentimental and hard-eyed by turns. And it was indissolubly linked to old Spain, black Spain, the Spain the ilustrados hoped to cure with their judicious enemas of liberal ideology. What the majos really thought of their would-be doctors and their medicine became brutally clear to Goya (and everyone else) after the Peninsular War broke out. They thought liberals were French quislings. The title of one plate from the Disasters of War is Popolacho, meaning “rabble” or “mob”—definitely not people; the victim on the ground is a liberal defrocked, and the instrument he is about to get the point of is a media luna, a tool with a half-moon cutter used to hamstring bulls. It was not etched by a man with stars in his eyes about the natural goodness of common folk.

The roots of Goya’s imagination were fixed deep in this world, and its imagery pervades his work. It is in some ways its deepest source. Yet his late work moves beyond purely Spanish concerns, though its dress is Spanish, and its encyclopedic despair and skepticism are just as much to do with his disillusionment at the failure of French revolutionary promises as with his loathing of the return of Spanish absolutism after the Peninsular War. He had followed the liberal blossoming of 1789, and the Paris bloodbath of the 1790s. He was the first great artist to bear witness to the atrocities committed by ideologues in the name of liberty. This was the Gorgon’s head of modern history. David could not look at it. But Goya could. And still he chose to spend his last years in France, and to die there. The developing drama of his work unfolds from his effort to move between these two mental worlds of the ilustrados and the pueblo, even as political events in Spain were tearing them apart. But the view he took of those events was deeply colored by his memories of the French Revolution, which is why no simple view of Goya as either a liberal or as a man of the people fits the late work.

When I first saw the current show in Boston I wanted to accept the Enlightenment view of Goya wholeheartedly, because it promised a way out of earlier stereotypes of the artist. It enables us to reread many of his images, even the most famous, such as the capricho El sueño de la razon, “The sleep of Reason brings forth monsters” (see opposite page). The figure of the artist dozing over the midnight oil and beset by foul imaginings is rooted both in the present and the past. In the present, because it seems to repeat the pose in which, in 1798, he painted the economist, writer, and educational reformer Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, whose Informe or report on agrarian law was the bureaucratic cornerstone of the Spanish enlightenment, and who was made minister of culture and justice by Charles III’s successor, Charles IV, for a brief nine months in 1789–1790 and was then banished to a long and frustrating exile for his liberal views. Goya paints this intellectual meditating on the cares of office in the splendors of the palace, symbolically blessed by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.

In the etching, as Dr. Sayre shows, Minerva’s role is filled by a protective lynx, the symbol of alertness and skepticism—these big cats have night vision and can pierce the gloom of ignorance. The owl is a telling variation of Minerva’s emblem: it is offering the sleeper a pen with which to record error and superstition. And there is no doubt about the meaning of the bats, cats, and other critters that swarm through the sky to take over the man’s dreams. Goya’s owls on the sleeper’s back—one with its wings spread, the others staring at you—come from the similar cluster of owls on a ruined, inscribed tomb-slab which is the opening plate of the Scherzi by Giambattista Tiepolo, who had died in Madrid in 1770.

And then one recalls other and older images that Goya knew from the royal collections, such as those of Hieronymus Bosch, that favorite of the gloomy Philip II; in particular, the theme of Saint Anthony tempted by devils, of which the Escorial had no fewer than four versions. Eleanor Sayre points out that Goya didn’t want to paint “a dreaming artist surrounded by a wild phantasmagoria of bizarre, Bosch-like beings.” Certainly Bosch’s hellish little androids scuttling around the saint and his pig are fantastic in a way that Goya’s owls and cats are not. And yet I find it hard to suppose that Goya’s image is not a recycling of the Temptation of Saint Anthony, and harder still to believe that this was not a partly deliberate choice, signaling his own rootedness in a tradition that predated the Enlightenment by centuries. Indeed, until Goya’s own moment, it would be difficult to name a denser landscape of hysteria than in northern Europe between 1480 and 1550, with its pogroms and religious wars, its flagellants and prophets proclaiming the imminent arrival of the millennium—in some ways like the Middle East today, with priests instead of imams and right-wing rabbis.

Bosch’s importance to Goya can hardly be overestimated. Because of the influence Surrealism has had, inducing us to think of Bosch as though he were a Surrealist, coupled with the extreme difficulty of decoding the actual meaning of Bosch’s images—and the opacity of some of Goya’s as well—we are apt to get this slightly skewed. But it seems likely that Goya was drawn to Bosch not only by the unmatched power of the long-dead painter’s fantasy, but by his reputation as a moral allegorist. Here is Brother Joseph de Siguenca, an early seventeenth-century monk attached to the Escorial, defending his king’s favorite painter against the charges of frivolity and heresy.

I should like to point out that these paintings are by no means farces, but books of great wisdom and art, and if foolish actions are shown in them they are our follies, not his: and, let us admit it, they are a painted satire on the sins and fickleness of men…. Others try as often as possible to paint man as he looks from the outside, while this man has the courage to paint him as he is inwardly.

This is very close to Goya’s own statement for the Caprichos: “The author,” he writes,

is convinced that censoring human errors and vices—though it seems the preserve of poetry and oratory—may also be a worthy object of painting. As subjects appropriate to his work, he has selected from the multitude of errors and stupidities common to every civil society, and from the ordinary obfuscations and lies condoned by custom, ignorance or self-interest, those he has deemed most fit to furnish material for ridicule.

A full study of Goya’s debt to Bosch, and to later demonological painters, has yet to be made, and when it is done it will connect with Goya’s delight in demotic and populist fantasy, and unlock more of him than we now have.

Working from direct observation fixed by incessant note taking, he had the genius to make this symbolism of the body concrete, rather than schematic, so that we are always left feeling that such monsters may be chatting to one another, in darkness or sunlight, just around the corner. It was a thought that occurred to him when preparing to publish the Caprichos. “He who would catch a group of goblins in their den,” he wrote, “and show them in a cage at ten o’clock in the morning on the Puerta del Sol, would not need any rights of primogeniture to an entailed estate.” It was a joke: he meant that they’d be such curiosities that their owner would get rich. But it wasn’t a joke: to cage these goblins, these duendecitos, in the white sunlight of the printed page was to have power over them, more power than mere birth could give you; it was to have dominion over your own fears and society’s as well.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

In the Review’s May 4, 1972, issue, shortly after nearly 75 million Americans filed their income taxes, then presidential candidate George McGovern published his campaign’s proposal for tax reform—an effort to make the American system of taxation “truly progressive.” As the economist Wassily Leontief wrote in his introduction to McGovern’s program, the federal tax code is “one of the most effective means of bringing about a distribution of income compatible with the prevailing standards of social justice.”

Tax Reform

The purpose of taxation

In the United States, taxes pay for those activities which we wish to have carried out by government rather than by the private sector. The costs are supposed to be carried by each income group paying its share and by those within each income group paying a similar amount. The progressive tax system asks those who are better off to bear a greater share of the load than those who have less ability to pay. In general, the progressive system is one of the most positive elements of our tax system.

Individual income taxes

Previous efforts at tax reform have failed to bring our system closer to a truly progressive one. Every effort at reform shows that the cloth of our tax codes is so worn that every patch rips another hole somewhere else. Even more importantly, efforts to promote fairness by giving everyone his own loophole are slowly dismantling the progressive federal income tax.

The actual tax system is just about half as progressive as it is supposed to be, according to the tax rates adopted by Congress. While nominal rates range from 0.1 percent at low incomes to 69.2 percent for those with incomes over $1 million per year, actual rates on average range from 0.7 percent to 34 percent.

Two taxpayers with the same annual income pay quite different taxes. A factory worker or a schoolteacher whose taxes are withheld from his wages cannot take advantage of loopholes. He may expect to pay almost $1,000 in taxes on earnings of $10,000. A wealthy person who receives $10,000 income from state and local bonds will pay no federal taxes at all. Clearly this system is unfair.

And these inequities are not theoretical. On the basis of 1969 tax returns, the last year for which figures are available, some 21,317 people earning more than $20,000 paid no federal taxes whatsoever. That includes fifty-six people with incomes in a single year of $1 million or more.

Because the effort to close one loophole at a time has been a failure and because to do so would still leave a great number of inequities until all were closed, we should shift to a really effective minimum tax. While a minimum tax was created in 1969 tax legislation, it is actually window dressing and is not effective. Recent reports indicate that some who earn over $1 million still pay no taxes.

I propose a minimum income tax so that the rich could not avoid their share of the tax burden no matter what loopholes they used. One possible formula would be a minimum income tax to apply to all those with total incomes in excess of $50,000. The entire income of any person in this range would be subject to payment of taxes at a rate of 75 percent of the current statutory rates at the rate that they would have to pay if there were no loopholes. All income regardless of source would be included. (Of course, if the computed tax exceeds the minimum tax, it would be payable.)

If this minimum income tax were now in effect it would bring in approximately $5 billion during the present fiscal year and $6 billion in fiscal 1973. That would amount to about a 7 percent increase in receipts from the individual income tax. This increase would be paid by the wealthiest 411,000 out of the 76 million federal taxpayers.

This basic tax reform would not unfairly penalize the wealthy just because they were well off. It would simply ensure that they could not dump their tax load onto the backs of already hard-pressed middle-income taxpayers.

Corporate taxes

The strength of the American economy is due mainly to the dynamic growth of the private sector led by corporations and other businesses. It is sound public policy to create the conditions for business to function effectively.

The federal tax system has been used to help the corporation. As Joseph Pechman, one of the leading tax experts in the United States, points out: “A special tax on the corporate form of doing business is considered appropriate because corporations enjoy special privileges and benefits.” In order to stimulate corporate economic activity, the federal government can and does alter tax rates. That is the principal form of assistance that has recently been given.

The present corporate tax rate is 48 percent of the taxable base defined by law. Of this, 22 percent is the normal tax which applies, without the 26 percent surtax, to the first $25,000 of corporate net income. This feature is of special benefit to small businesses—some 77 percent of the taxpaying corporations. It should be maintained.

In each postwar recession, demands have arisen to stimulate the economy through corporate tax reductions. These have taken the form not of overt tax reductions but of covert rate reductions in the form of increased depreciation allowances and special devices such as the investment tax credit. Such devices transfer profits from the taxable category to the untaxable category. In the process, the corporate income tax is gradually being abolished.

Because of steady reductions in the taxable base over the past twenty years, the effective corporation income tax rate has been cut in half. There is a real question about how much farther we can go.

The time has come to end the dismantling of the corporation income tax and to re-establish a fair balance between personal and corporate income tax collections. As a result, I have opposed the new depreciation guidelines and the investment tax credit. Special loopholes, such as percentage depletion, need not be phased out, but a broad balance also needs to be established between taxable and untaxable earnings of corporations. As it is, we have tipped that balance too far in the direction of untaxable earnings.

I propose that the actual corporation income tax be returned to its 1960 level by the elimination of the special loopholes that have been opened since then. (About two-thirds of the gap between the present level and the 1960 level results from Nixon Administration cuts in the last year.)

This reform of the corporation income tax would raise approximately $9 billion in the current fiscal year and about $17 billion in fiscal 1973 (based on Administration estimates of increased corporate activity).

This proposal for increasing the corporation income tax rate does not mean reduced government assistance to business. If the entire McGovern economic program were to be applied, there would be more stimulus to business than is available from the tax privileges now in effect. This program includes an immediate $10 billion fiscal stimulus to create new jobs and use underutilized capacity, economic conversion from a war to a peace economy with the extensive use of government contracting for specific purposes, and the Minimum Income Grant, discussed below, which would greatly stimulate consumer purchases. Nothing spurs profits like a strong full employment economy, which has the highest priority in my economic program.

In short, our corporations must be healthy and growing if our economy is to prosper. But we have a wider range of tools at our disposal than perpetual reductions in the corporation income tax.

Estate and gift taxation

Most Americans subscribe to a fundamental belief of our Founding Fathers that we should be allowed to keep a fair proportion of what we earn but should not be allowed to inherit great wealth. Yet, in practice, the loopholes in our gift and inheritance taxes are much greater than those in our income taxes. Just 9 percent of all families own 50 percent of all private assets. More than a quarter of all private assets are owned by less than I percent of the population. Although some of these fortunes are based on earned income, most are based on inherited wealth.

Estate and gift tax rates are high. But actual rates are a tiny fraction of the theoretical rates.

Estate and gift taxation should be reformed in the same manner as the income tax. Instead of proceeding to close loopholes one by one, a whole new system needs to be constructed.

Gift and inheritance taxes should shift from a tax on the estate or giver to a lifetime cumulative tax on the recipient. This shift would make it possible to prevent tax avoidance and would be more fair, because it would regard the money received as income to the recipient, which it is.

Read the rest for free on the Review’s website here.

After being released in serial for a three months, Gustave Flaubert’s complete Madame Bovary was published as a complete novel 169 years ago today. In our July 16, 1987, issue, in a review of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and ‘Madame Bovary’—“a highly personal work about [Vargas Llosa’s] response to Flaubert’s life and writings”—Roger Shattuck wrote about the slightly ironic vogue for the nineteenth-century French novelist among twentieth-century writers, from Sartre to Woody Allen:

What did Flaubert do to deserve these sidelong tributes from novelists? His writing extends to many positions on the literary spectrum, from detached scientific description through the excesses of romantic yearning to the sassy, spontaneous voice of the wise fool in his incomparable letters.

Below we present an extended preview of the piece. Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Has Flaubert become our Shakespeare? Or because of the modern attempt by prose fiction to dethrone poetic drama, is he simply overrated? We should listen carefully to what novelists have been saying. Henry James called him “a novelist’s novelist.” Conrad, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka left no doubt about how much they admired Flaubert and learned from him. More recently writings by Sarraute and Nabokov have reaffirmed his status as revered Master. Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary, published in 1939, reads more like a novel than like a biography or a literary study. The three thousand pages of Sartre’s effort to settle the score with his literary father take on the compulsiveness of an unfinished pilgrimage. The Idiot of the Family absorbed and recycled Sartre’s considerable novelistic powers into a task already classified as impossible by Roquentin’s aborted biography of Rollebon in Nausea.

While Sartre was still toiling, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa spent over ten years on a highly personal work about his response to Flaubert’s life and writings. La orgía perpetua appeared in 1975 shortly after or just before Woody Allen wrote a story about a successful and disastrous attempt to meet Emma in the flesh by entering a supposedly therapeutic time machine. Most recently Julian Barnes’s “novel,” Flaubert’s Parrot, offers us the notes and fantasies of a fanatic and fetishistic amateur scholar unable to organize a proper book.

Meanwhile certified scholars continue to work strenuously on new studies and new editions. Flaubert’s complete Correspondance is appearing in the Pléiade collection and a two-volume selection in English has been published. The rush of events, reinforced by feminist concerns, has induced the translation, more than a century after its publication, of a novel by Louise Colet, Flaubert’s intermittent mistress and the recipient of his most important literary and personal letters.[^1] In this tale within a tale, mostly about George Sand and Alfred de Musset, Flaubert presides from a distance as the absent lover devoting himself to a great work. Colet portrays herself as being as scrappy as she is beautiful.

What did Flaubert do to deserve these sidelong tributes from novelists? His writing extends to many positions on the literary spectrum, from detached scientific description through the excesses of romantic yearning to the sassy, spontaneous voice of the wise fool in his incomparable letters. This profound versatility—not effortless but earned—has Shakespearean dimensions. One never recovers from Flaubert’s searing ironies on love, politics, beauty, and the bourgeois. The remarks that burst from him day after day about art, the imagination, and the discipline of work have formed our aesthetic attitudes as much as any other source since Hegel and Kant:

What seems to me the highest (and the most difficult) in Art is not to make us laugh or cry, not to arouse our lust or our rage…but to make us dream. Truly beautiful works do this. They are serene in appearance and incomprehensible…. Homer, Rabelais, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe appear pitiless to me. It’s without bottom, infinite, multiple. Through small openings one sees precipices; below there’s blackness, vertigo. And yet something strangely calm hovers over the whole!

(To Louise Colet, August 26, 1853)

Halfway through the five years he devoted to Madame Bovary, Flaubert sent these lines off to Paris without making a copy, with no thought of developing a theory. He was simply responding to the grinding daily labor of planning and writing. Little by little he discovered an attitude toward art that combines the ideal (the classic improvement on nature) and the seaminess of the real. The attitude also rejects Plato’s notion of infection and extends Aristotle’s vague catharsis. “Dream” in the above passage includes think. Art permits us to contemplate and understand life, the representation of which preoccupied Flaubert all his life. And despite legends of misanthropy and ritual grumbling, the hermit of Croisset never abandoned life. His purportedly “uneventful” existence contained enough mysteries and precipices to mark his readers for generations.

Vargas Llosa’s book has now appeared in English as The Perpetual Orgy, with the added subtitle “Flaubert and Madame Bovary.” He starts off by saying that the three parts of the book will be, respectively, subjective and impressonistic, critical and scientific, and devoted to literary history. Not quite. The first forty pages, “An Unrequited Passion,” tell how Vargas Llosa fell in love with Madame Bovary, the book, with Emma, the character and ideal woman, and even with the thirteen volumes of the Correspondance. He loves the novel’s rigorous construction, its sustained attention to material and vulgar facts, and the force of its fantasies and desires that produce in him “a cathartic effect.” He attacks Sarraute’s article and Sartre’s mammoth study, despite their acknowledged brilliance, because they distract us from Flaubert’s devotion to telling stories about life.

The second part, which makes up three quarters of the book, opens with a seventy-five-page section called “The Pen-Man.” Many reviewers have wondered why Vargas Llosa uses the question-and-answer form here to present great chunks of professional information: the point of departure for Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s method of work, his sexual habits during those years, and above all, in answers of increasing length and detail, Flaubert’s models for his characters found in the society around him, among his own family and friends, and in literary works. Assimilating the research of scholars like Jean Pommier and Benjamin Bart, Vargas Llosa pursues the sources (not the keys) with deepening excitement. He even proposes a hypothesis of his own about Flaubert himself having commissioned a maid to write the forty-page Ludovica manuscript concerning a beautiful and extravagant widow. A singularly intense rhetorical paragraph takes the paradoxical position that Flaubert soaked up all this source material not to preserve it but to destroy it:

From these complicated conjunctions and reductions, impossible to reconstruct in their entirety, wrought of fragments, copies, bits and snatches, readings, gossip, contrivances—a fabrication invented in obedience to a throbbing wound that begs to be closed, to a disgust for reality so boundless that it seeks to demolish that reality in order to reconstruct it,…though in truth it is an attempt to annihilate it—from all of this there little by little emerges the plot of Madame Bovary.

If Vargas Llosa can write so powerfully about the provenance of a novelist’s materials, why does he use the question-and-answer arrangement, which makes these pages sound at times like an examination paper (Barnes uses that device in a chapter of Flaubert’s Parrot), a layman’s guide to a difficult subject like cancer, or a how-to book on novel writing? It may suggest a certain laziness in following the categories of his note cards, but I think not. By omitting the numbering used in the Spanish original, the translator has deprived us of the knowledge that there are exactly twenty questions.[^2] Vargas Llosa presents his eager sleuthing as a parlor game, at the end of which he quotes the famous letter to Mlle. Chantepie written after the novel’s publication. “Madame Bovary has nothing true in it. It is a totally invented story.” Twenty questions, having dredged up a boatload of fascinating sources, lead us unexpectedly to what is “really important: how the novel freed itself from its sources, how the fictional reality contradicted the real reality that inspired it.” Along the way the pseudo-Socratic exposition has not tried to suppress the inconsistent statements with which Flaubert surrounded his work. “Everything one invents is true.” And, on another day: “When one has the model clearly before his [sic] eyes, one always writes well.” There is much to assimilate.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

In the 1990s Garry Kasparov’s chess matches against IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue set off anxieties about the encroachment of algorithmic intelligence into the human domain—anxieties surely familiar to anyone who has recently read an essay about artificial intelligence. In the Review’s February 11, 2010, issue, he reflected on his experiences beating and losing to Deep Blue: “It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players.”

Ever a deliberate thinker, Kasparov was, on the one hand, mindful of the effects of the proliferation of chess software—“humans today are starting to play more like computers”—and, on the other, open to the possibilities offered by powerful computers: “What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners?… The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.”

Below, we present a free preview of Kasparov’s essay. Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the “Kasparov” brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess.

Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts—and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power—and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. (”The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.

It was the specialists—the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play—if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations—with godlike perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media’s hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: “a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all other triumphs: Orville Wright’s first flight, NASA’s landing on the moon....”

The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind:

By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.

It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.

My hopes for a return match with Deep Blue were dashed, unfortunately. IBM had the publicity it wanted and quickly shut down the project. Other chess computing projects around the world also lost their sponsorship. Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time. Today, for $50 you can buy a home PC program that will crush most grandmasters. In 2003, I played serious matches against two of these programs running on commercially available multiprocessor servers—and, of course, I was playing just one game at a time—and in both cases the score ended in a tie with a win apiece and several draws.

Inevitable or not, no one understood all the ramifications of having a super-grandmaster on your laptop, especially what this would mean for professional chess. There were many doomsday scenarios about people losing interest in chess with the rise of the machines, especially after my loss to Deep Blue. Some replied to this with variations on the theme of how we still hold footraces despite cars and bicycles going much faster, a spurious analogy since cars do not help humans run faster while chess computers undoubtedly have an effect on the quality of human chess.

Another group postulated that the game would be solved, i.e., a mathematically conclusive way for a computer to win from the start would be found. (Or perhaps it would prove that a game of chess played in the best possible way always ends in a draw.) Perhaps a real version of HAL 9000 would simply announce move 1.e4, with checkmate in, say, 38,484 moves. These gloomy predictions have not come true, nor will they ever come to pass. Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook.

The number of legal chess positions is 10⁴⁰, the number of different possible games, 10¹²⁰. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can’t solve this ancient board game. They are also handy, and I am not above doing this myself, for impressing people with how complicated chess is, if only in a largely irrelevant mathematical way.

This astronomical scale is not at all irrelevant to chess programmers. They’ve known from the beginning that solving the game—creating a provably unbeatable program—was not possible with the computer power available, and that effective shortcuts would have to be found. In fact, the first chess program put into practice was designed by legendary British mathematician Alan Turing in 1952, and he didn’t even have a computer! He processed the algorithm on pieces of paper and this “paper machine” played a competent game.

Rasskin-Gutman covers this well-traveled territory in a book that achieves its goal of being an overview of overviews, if little else. The history of the study of brain function is covered in the first chapter, tempting the reader to skip ahead. You might recall axons and dendrites from high school biology class. We also learn about cholinergic and aminergic systems and many other things that are not found by my computer’s artificially intelligent English spell-checking system—or referenced again by the author. Then it’s on to similarly concise, if inconclusive, surveys of artificial intelligence, chess computers, and how humans play chess.

There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it’s no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top-level opponent at home instead of needing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

The availability of millions of games at one’s fingertips in a database is also making the game’s best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to become an expert” theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell’s earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today’s teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world’s best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he’s no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

It’s Oscar night in America. For the ninety-eighth year in a row, the silver screen’s shiniest stars are assembling in the city of angels to celebrate the year in cinema.

Among the most-nominated films this year is Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, which tells the story of the death of Shakespeare’s son and the subsequent writing of Hamlet. In the Review’s October 21, 2004, issue, Stephen Greenblatt took on the historical facts of the Shakespeare family’s tragedy, endeavoring “to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.”

Alongside Greenblatt’s history, we’ve collected five essays from the last year about some of tonight’s nominees: Nawal Arjini on Marty Supreme, Jonathan Lethem on One Battle After Another, Beatrice Loayza on The Secret Agent, Kevin Power on KPop Demon Hunters, and Miranda Seymour on Frankenstein.

1.

Shakespeare was in the business, all of his life, of probing the passions of his characters and arousing the passions of his audiences. His skill in doing so is almost universally acknowledged to have been unrivaled, but the inner sources of this skill remain largely unknown. Scholarship has tirelessly reconstructed at least something of his wide-ranging, eclectic reading, but his own passionate life—his access through personal experience and observation to the intense emotions he represents—is almost completely mysterious. None of his letters, working notes, diaries, or manuscripts (with the possible exception of “Hand D” in Sir Thomas More) survives. His sonnets have been ransacked for autobiographical evidence, but, though written in the first person, they are baffling, elusive, and probably deliberately opaque.

Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays—preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others—have focused on Hamlet. This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1596 Shakespeare must have received word that his only son Hamnet, eleven years old, was ill. Whether in London or on tour with his company he would at best have only been able to receive news intermittently from his family in Stratford, but at some point in the summer he presumably learned that Hamnet’s condition had worsened and that it was necessary to drop everything and hurry home. By the time the father reached Stratford the boy—whom, apart from brief visits, Shakespeare had in effect abandoned in his infancy—may already have died. On August 11, 1596, Hamnet was buried at Holy Trinity Church: the clerk duly noted in the burial register, “Hamnet filius William Shakspere.”

Unlike Ben Jonson and others who wrote grief-stricken poems about the loss of beloved children, Shakespeare published no elegies and left no direct record of his paternal feelings. It is sometimes said that parents in Shakespeare’s time could not afford to invest too much love and hope in any one child. One out of three children died by the age of ten, and overall mortality rates were by our standards exceedingly high. Death was a familiar spectacle; it took place at home, not out of sight. When Shakespeare was fourteen, his seven-year-old sister Anne died, and there must have been many other occasions for him to witness the death of children.

In the four years following Hamnet’s death, the playwright, as many have pointed out, wrote some of his sunniest comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It. This fact is, for some, decisive evidence that the father’s grief must at most have been brief. But the plays of these years were by no means uniformly cheerful, and at moments they seem to reflect an experience of deep personal loss. In King John, probably written in 1596 just after the boy was laid to rest, Shakespeare depicted a mother so frantic at the loss of her son that she is driven to thoughts of suicide. Observing her, a clerical bystander remarks that she is mad, but she insists that she is perfectly sane: “I am not mad; I would to God I were!” Reason, she says, and not madness, has put the thoughts of suicide in her head, for it is her reason that tenaciously keeps hold of the image of her child. When she is accused of perversely insisting on her grief, she replies with an eloquent simplicity that breaks free from the tangled plot:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

(III.4.93–97)

If there is no secure link between these lines and the death of Ham-net, there is, at the very least, no reason to think that Shakespeare simply buried his son and moved on unscathed. He might have brooded inwardly and obsessively, even as he was making audiences laugh at Falstaff in love or at the wit contests of Beatrice and Benedick.[^1] Nor is it implausible that it took years for the trauma of his son’s death fully to erupt in Shakespeare’s work or that it was triggered by an accidental conjunction of names. For Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare evidently named his son after his recusant neighbor and friend Hamnet Sadler, who was still alive in March 1616 when Shakespeare drew up his will and left 26 shillings, 8 pence to “Hamlett Sadler...to buy him a ringe.”

Writing a play about Hamlet, in or around 1600, may not have been Shakespeare’s own idea. At least one play, now lost, about the Danish prince who avenges his father’s murder had already been performed on the English stage, successfully enough to be casually alluded to by contemporary writers, as if everyone had seen it or at least knew about it. Someone in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with an eye on revenues, may simply have suggested to Shakespeare that the time might be ripe for a new, improved version of the Hamlet story. For that matter, with his high stakes in the company’s profits, Shakespeare was sin- gularly alert to whatever attracted London crowds, and he had by now long experience of dusting off old plays and making them startlingly new. The likely author of the early play, Thomas Kyd, was no obstacle: he had died back in 1594, at the age of thirty-six, possibly broken by the torture inflicted upon him when he was interrogated about the charges of blasphemy and atheism brought against his roommate, Christopher Marlowe. In any case, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries were squeamish about stealing from each other.

Shakespeare had certainly seen the earlier Hamlet play, probably on multiple occasions. When he set to work on his new tragedy, he likely had it by heart—or as much of it as he chose to remember. It is impossible to determine, in this case, whether he sat down with books open before him—as he clearly did, for example, in writing Antony and Cleopatra—or relied on his memory, but he had also certainly read one and probably more than one version of the old Danish tale of murder and revenge. At the very least, to judge from the play he wrote, he carefully read the story as narrated in French by François de Belleforest, whose collection of tragic tales was a publishing phenomenon in the late sixteenth century. Belleforest had taken the Hamlet story from a chronicle of Denmark compiled in Latin in the late twelfth century by a Dane known as Saxo the Grammarian. And Saxo in turn was recycling written and oral legends that reached back for centuries before him. Here then, as so often throughout his career, Shakespeare was working with known materials—a well-established story, a familiar cast of characters, a set of predictable excitements.

If Shakespeare had died in 1600 it would have been difficult to think that anything was missing from his achievement and still more difficult to think that anything yet unrealized was brewing in his work. But Hamlet makes it clear that Shakespeare had been quietly, steadily developing a special technical skill. This development may have been entirely deliberate, the consequence of a clear, ongoing professional design, or it may have been more haphazard and opportunistic. The achievement was, in any case, gradual: not a sudden, once-and-for-all discovery or a grandiose invention, but the subtle refinement of a particular set of representational techniques. By the turn of the century Shakespeare was poised to make an epochal breakthrough. He had perfected the means to represent inwardness.

The task of conveying an inner life is an immensely challenging one in drama, since what the audience sees and hears is always in some sense or other public utterance—the words that the characters say to one another or, in occasional asides and soliloquies, directly to the onlookers. Playwrights can pretend, of course, that the audience is overhearing a kind of internal monologue, but it is difficult to keep such monologues from sounding “stagey.” Richard III, written in 1591 or 1592, is hugely energetic and powerful, with a marvelous, unforgettable main character, but when that character, alone at night, reveals what is going on inside him, he sounds oddly wooden and artificial:

It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes. I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why?
Lest I revenge? Myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no, alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie: I am not.

(V.5.134–145)

Shakespeare is dramatizing his chronicle source, which states that Richard could not sleep on the eve of his death, because he felt unwonted pricks of conscience. But though it has a staccato vigor, the soliloquy, as a way of sketching inner conflict, is schematic and mechanical, as if within the character on stage there was simply another tiny stage on which puppets were performing a Punch-and-Judy show.

In Richard II, written some three years later, there is a comparable moment that marks Shakespeare’s burgeoning skills. Deposed and imprisoned by his cousin Bolingbroke, the ruined king, shortly before his murder, looks within himself:

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts.

(V.5.1–7)

Much of the difference between the two passages has to do with the very different characters: the one a murderous tyrant full of manic energy, the other a spoiled, narcissistic, self-destructive poet. But the turn from one character to the other is itself significant: it signals Shakespeare’s growing interest in the hidden processes of interiority. Locked in a windowless room, Richard II watches himself think, struggling to forge a metaphoric link between his prison and the world, reaching a dead end, and then forcing his imagination to renew the effort: “Yet I’ll hammer it out.” The world, crowded with people, is not, as he himself recognizes, remotely comparable to the solitude of his prison cell, but Richard wills himself to generate—out of what he pictures as the intercourse of his brain and soul—an imaginary populace. What he hammers out is a kind of inner theater, akin to that already found in Richard III’s soliloquy, but with a vastly increased complexity, subtlety, and above all self-consciousness. Now the character himself is fully aware that he has constructed such a theater, and he teases out the bleak implications of the imaginary world he has struggled to create:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king,
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.

(V.5.31–41)

Richard II characteristically rehearses the drama of his fall from kingship as a fall into nothingness and then fashions his experience of lost identity—“whate’er I be”—into an intricate poem of despair.

Written in 1595, Richard II marked a major advance in the playwright’s ability to represent inwardness, but Julius Caesar, written four years later, shows that, not content with what he has mastered, Shakespeare subtly experimented with new techniques. Alone, pacing in his orchard in the middle of night, Brutus begins to speak:

It must be by his death. And for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crowned.
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him: that!

(II.1.10–15)

This soliloquy is far less fluid, less an elegant and self-conscious poetic meditation, than the prison soliloquy of Richard II. But it has something startlingly new: the unmistakable marks of actual thinking. Richard speaks of hammering it out, but the words he utters are already highly polished. Brutus’s words by contrast seem to flow immediately from the still inchoate toing-and-froing of his wavering mind, as he grapples with a set of momentous questions: How should he respond to the crowd’s desire to crown the ambitious Caesar? How can he balance his own personal friendship with Caesar against what he construes to be the general good? How might Caesar, who has thus far served that general good, change his nature and turn dangerous if he is crowned? “It must be by his death”: without prelude, the audience is launched into the midst of Brutus’s obsessive brooding. It is impossible to know if he is weighing a proposition, trying out a decision, reiterating words that someone else has spoken. He does not need to mention whose death he is contemplating, nor does he need to make clear—for it is already part of his thought—that it will be by assassination.

Brutus is speaking to himself, and his words have the peculiar shorthand of the brain at work. “Crown him: that!”—the exclamation is barely comprehensible, except as a burst of passionate anger provoked by a phantasmatic image passing at that instant through the speaker’s mind. The spectators are pulled in eerily close, watching firsthand the forming of a fatal resolution—a determination to assassinate Caesar—that will change the world. A few moments later Brutus, intensely self-aware, describes for himself the molten state of consciousness in which he finds himself:

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in counsel, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

(II.1.63–69)

Was it at this moment, in 1599, that Shakespeare first conceived of the possibility of writing about a character suspended, for virtually the whole length of a play, in this strange interim? Brutus himself is not such a character: by the middle of Julius Caesar, he has done the dreadful thing, the killing of his mentor and friend—possibly his own father—and the remainder of the play teases out the fatal consequences of his act.

If Shakespeare did not grasp it at once, then certainly by the following year he understood perfectly that there was a character, already popular on the Elizabethan stage, whose life he could depict as one long phantasm or hideous dream. That character, the prince of the inward insurrection, was Hamlet.

2.

Even in its earliest-known medieval telling, Hamlet’s saga was the story of the long interval between the first motion—the initial impulse or design—and the acting of the dreadful thing. In Saxo the Grammarian’s account, the murder of Amleth’s father Horwendil (the equivalent of Shakespeare’s old King Hamlet) by his envious brother Feng (the equivalent of Claudius) was not a secret. Glossing over “fratricide with a show of righteousness,” the assassin claimed that Horwendil had been cruelly abusing his gentle wife Gerutha. In reality, the ruthless Feng had simply seized both his brother’s kingdom and his wife. No one was prepared to challenge the usurper. The only potential challenger was Horwen- dil’s young son Amleth, for by the time-honored code of this pre-Christian society a son was strictly obliged to avenge his father’s murder.

Feng understood this code as well as anyone, so that it was reasonable to expect that he would quickly move to eliminate the future threat. If the boy did not instantly come up with a clever stratagem, his life would be exceedingly brief. In order to grow to adulthood—to survive long enough to be able to exact revenge—Amleth feigned madness, persuading his uncle that he could never pose a danger. Filthy and lethargic, he sat by the fire, aimlessly whittling away at small sticks and turning them into barbed hooks. Though the wary Feng repeatedly used intermediaries (the precursors of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern) to try to discern some hidden sparks of intelligence behind his nephew’s apparent idiocy, Amleth cunningly avoided detection. He bided his time, slipped out of traps, and made secret plans. Mocked as a fool, treated with contempt and derision, he eventually succeeded in burning to death Feng’s entire retinue and in running his uncle through with a sword. He summoned an assembly of nobles, explained why he had done what he had done, and was enthusiastically acclaimed as the new king. “Many could have been seen marvelling how he had concealed so subtle a plan over so long a space of time.”

Amleth thus spends years in the interim state that Brutus can barely endure for a few days. Shakespeare had developed the means to represent the psychological experience of such a condition—something that neither Saxo nor his followers even dreamed of being able to do. He saw that the Hamlet story, ripe for revision, would enable him to make a play about what it is like to live inwardly in the queasy interval between a murderous design and its fulfillment. The problem, however, is that the theater is not particularly tolerant of long gestation periods: to represent the child Hamlet feigning idiocy for years in order to reach the age in which he could act would be exceedingly difficult to render dramatically exciting. The obvious solution, probably already reached in the lost play, is to start the action at the point in which Hamlet has come of age and is ready to undertake his act of revenge.

In Saxo the Grammarian’s Hamlet, as in the popular tale by Belleforest, no ghost appeared. There was no need for a ghost, for the murder was public knowledge, as was the son’s obligation to take revenge. But when he set out to write his version of the Hamlet story, either following Kyd’s lead or on his own, Shakespeare made the murder a secret. Everyone in Denmark believes that old Hamlet was fatally stung by a serpent. The ghost appears in order to tell the terrible truth: “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown” (I.5.39–40).

Shakespeare’s play begins just before the ghost reveals the murder to Hamlet and ends just after Hamlet exacts his revenge. Hence the decisive changes in the plot—from a public killing known to everyone to a secret murder revealed to Hamlet alone by the ghost of the murdered man—enabled the playwright to focus almost the entire tragedy on the consciousness of the hero suspended between his “first motion” and “the acting of a dreadful thing.” But something in the plot has to account for this suspension. After all, Hamlet is no longer, in this revised version, a child who needs to play for time, and the murderer has no reason to suspect that Hamlet has or can ever acquire any inkling of his crime. Far from keeping his distance from his nephew (or setting subtle tests for him), Claudius refuses to let Hamlet return to university, genially calls him “our chiefest courtier, cousin, and son,” and declares that he is next in succession to the throne. Once the ghost of his father has disclosed the actual cause of death—“Murder most foul, as in the best it is,/But this most foul, strange, and unnatural”—Hamlet, who has full access to the unguarded Claudius, is in the perfect position to act immediately. And such instantaneous response is precisely what Hamlet himself anticipates:

Haste, haste me to know it, that with wings as swift
As meditation or the thought of love
May sweep to my revenge.

(I.5.29–31)

The play should be over then by the end of the first act. But Hamlet emphatically does not sweep to his revenge. As soon as the ghost vanishes, he tells the sentries and his friend Horatio that he intends “to put an antic disposition on”—that is, to pretend to be mad. The behavior made perfect sense in the old version of the story, where it was a ruse to deflect suspicion and to buy time. The emblem of that time, and the proof of the avenger’s brilliant, long-term planning, were the wooden hooks that the boy Amleth, apparently deranged, endlessly whittled away on with his little knife. These were the means that, at the tale’s climax, Amleth used to secure a net over the sleeping courtiers, before he set the hall on fire. What had looked like mindless distraction turned out to be brilliantly strategic. But in Shakespeare Hamlet’s feigned madness is no longer coherently tactical. Shakespeare in effect wrecked the powerful and coherent plot that his sources conveniently provided him. And out of the wreckage he constructed what most modern audiences would regard as the best play that he had ever written.

Far from offering a cover, the antic disposition leads the murderer to set close watch upon Hamlet, to turn to his counselor Polonius for advice, to discuss the problem with Gertrude, to observe Ophelia carefully, to send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy upon their friend. Instead of leading the court to ignore him, Hamlet’s madness becomes the object of everyone’s endless speculation. And, strangely enough, the speculation sweeps Hamlet along with it: “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth.” “But wherefore I know not”—Hamlet, entirely aware that he is speaking to court spies, does not breathe a word of his father’s ghost, but then it is not at all clear that the ghost is actually responsible for his profound depression. Already in the first scene in which he appears, before he has encountered the ghost, he is voicing to himself, as the innermost secret of his heart, virtually the identical disillusionment he discloses to the oily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

O God, O God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

(I.2.132–127)

His father’s death and his mother’s hasty remarriage, public events and not secret revelations, have driven him to thoughts of “self-slaughter.”

By excising the strategic rationale for Hamlet’s madness, Shakespeare made it the central focus of the entire tragedy. The play’s key moment of psychological revelation—the moment that virtually everyone remembers—is not the hero’s plotting of revenge, not even his repeated, passionate self-reproach for inaction, but rather his contemplation of suicide: “To be or not to be; that is the question.” This suicidal urge has nothing to do with the ghost—indeed Hamlet has so far forgotten the apparition as to speak of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns”—but rather with a soul-sickness brought on by one of the “thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to.”

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

In the Review’s March 27, 2003, issue—one week after the United States military invaded Iraq—Tony Judt wrote about how George Bush’s cavalier charge into war would lead to the dissolution of the international order that had obtained since World War II. Whatever its merits and failures, Judt argued, the postwar order had fostered international cooperation based on “the memory of thirty calamitous years of war, depression, domestic tyranny, and international anarchy, as those who were present at its creation fully understood.” Absent such an accord, “the United States can go out and win not just the Mother of All Battles but a whole matriarchal dynasty of Desert Storms; it will inherit the wind—and worse besides.”

We are witnessing the dissolution of an international system. The core of that system, and its spiritual heart, was the North Atlantic alliance: not just the 1949 defense treaty but a penumbra of understandings and agreements beginning with the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and spreading through the United Nations and its agencies; the Bretton Woods accords and the institutions they spawned; conventions on refugees, human rights, genocide, arms control, war crimes, and much more besides. The merits of this interlocking web of transnational cooperation and engagement went well beyond the goal of containing and ultimately defeating communism. Behind the new ordering of the world lay the memory of thirty calamitous years of war, depression, domestic tyranny, and international anarchy, as those who were present at its creation fully understood.

Thus the end of the cold war did not make the postwar order redundant. Quite the contrary. In a post-Communist world the fortunate lands of Western Europe and North America were uniquely well placed to urge upon the rest of the world the lessons of their own achievement: markets and democracy, yes, but also the benefits of good-faith participation in the institutions and practices of an integrated international community. That such a community must retain the means and the will to punish its enemies was effectively if belatedly illustrated in Bosnia and Kosovo (and, in the breach, in Rwanda). As these episodes suggested, and September 11, 2001, confirmed, only the United States has the resources and the determination to defend the interdependent world that it did so much to foster; and it is America that will always be the prime target of those who wish to see that world die.

It is thus a tragedy of historical proportions that America’s own leaders are today corroding and dissolving the links that bind the US to its closest allies in the international community. The US is about to make war on Iraq for reasons that remain obscure even to many of its own citizens. The war that they do understand, the war on terrorism, has been unconvincingly rolled into the charge sheet against one Arab tyrant. Washington is abuzz with big projects to redraw the map of the Middle East; meanwhile the true Middle Eastern crisis, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, has been subcontracted to Ariel Sharon. After the war, in Iraq as in Afghanistan, Palestine, and beyond, the US is going to need the help and cooperation (not to mention the checkbooks) of its major European allies; and there will be no lasting victory against Osama bin Laden or anyone else without sustained international collaboration. This is not, you might conclude, the moment for our leaders enthusiastically to set about the destruction of the Western alliance; yet that is what they are now doing. (The enthusiasm is well represented in The War over Iraq by Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, which I shall discuss below.)

The Europeans are not innocent in the matter. Decades of American nuclear reassurance induced unprecedented military dystrophy. The Franco- German condominium of domination was sooner or later bound to provoke a backlash among Europe’s smaller nations. The inability of the European Union to build a consensus on foreign policy, much less a force with which to implement it, has handed Washington a monopoly in the definition and resolution of international crises. No one should be surprised if America’s present leaders have chosen to exercise it. What began some years ago as American frustration at the Europeans’ failure to organize and spend in their own defense has now become a source of satisfaction for US hawks. The Europeans don’t agree with us? So what! We don’t need them, and anyway what can they do? They’re feeling hurt and resentful in Brussels, or Paris, or Berlin? Well, they’ve only themselves to blame. Remember Bosnia.

Yet today it is the Bush administration that is resentful and frustrated: it turns out that the French, at least, can actually do quite a lot. Together with the Belgians and Germans in NATO, and the Russians and Chinese at the UN, they can thwart, foil, delay, hinder, check, confound, embarrass, and above all irritate the Americans. In the run-up to war in Iraq the US is now paying the price for two years of contemptuous disdain for international opinion. The lèse-majesté of the French in particular has driven America’s present leadership into unprecedented public expressions of anger at its own allies for breaking ranks: in President Bush’s deathless words, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Worse, it has led to paroxysms of sneering Europhobia in the US media, shamelessly promoted by politicians and commentators who should know better.

Two myths dominate public discussion of Europe in America today. The first, which would be funny but for the harm it is causing, is the notion of an “Old” and a “New” Europe. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proposed this distinction in January it was taken up with malicious alacrity on the Pentagon cheerleading bench. In The Washington Post Anne Applebaum enthusiastically seconded Rumsfeld: Britain, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (the signatories to a letter in The Wall Street Journal supporting President Bush) have all “undergone liberalization and privatization” of their economies, she wrote, bringing them closer to the American model. They, not the “Old Europe” of France and Germany, can be counted on in the future to speak for “Europe.”

The idea that Italy has embarked on “economic liberalization” will come as news to Italians, but let that pass. The more egregious error is to suppose that “pro-American” Europeans can be so conveniently distinguished from their “anti-American” neighbors. In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, Europeans were asked whether they thought “the world would be more dangerous if another country matched America militarily.” The “Old European” French and Germans—like the British—tended to agree. The “New European” Czechs and Poles were less worried at the prospect. The same poll asked respondents whether they thought that “when differences occur with America, it is because of [my country’s] different values” (a key indicator of cultural anti-Americanism): only 33 percent of French respondents and 37 percent of Germans answered “yes.” But the figures for Britain were 41 percent; for Italy 44 percent; and for the Czech Republic 62 percent (almost as high as the 66 percent of Indonesians who feel the same way).

In Britain, the Daily Mirror, a mass-market tabloid daily that has hitherto supported Tony Blair’s New Labour Party, ran a full-page front cover on January 6 mocking Blair’s position; in case you haven’t noticed, it informed him, Bush’s drive to war with Iraq is about oil for America. Half the British electorate opposes war with Saddam Hussein under any circumstances. In the Czech Republic just 13 percent of the population would endorse an American attack on Iraq without a UN mandate; the figure in Spain is identical. In traditionally pro-American Poland there is even less enthusiasm: just 4 percent of Poles would back a unilateralist war. In Spain, voters from José Maria Aznar’s own Popular Party overwhelmingly reject his support for the war; his allies in Catalonia have joined Spain’s opposition parties in condemning “an unprovoked unilateral attack” by the US on Iraq; and most Spaniards are adamantly opposed to a war with Iraq even with a second UN resolution. As for American policy toward Israel, opinion in “New European” Spain is distinctly less supportive than opinion in the “Old” Europe of Germany or France.

If America is to depend on its “New” European friends, then, it had better lower its expectations. Among the pro-US signatories singled out for praise by Mr. Rumsfeld, Denmark spends just 1.6 percent of GNP on defense; Italy 1.5 percent; Spain a mere 1.4 percent—less than half the defense commitment of “Old European” France. The embattled Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has many motives for getting photographed next to a smiling George Bush; but one of them is to ensure that Italy can hold on to its American security umbrella and avoid paying for its own defense.

As for the East Europeans: yes, they like America and will do its bidding if they can. The US will always be able to bully a vulnerable country like Romania into backing America against the International Criminal Court. But in the words of one Central European foreign minister opposed to US intervention at the time of the 1999 Kosovo action: “We didn’t join NATO to fight wars.” In a recent survey, 69 percent of Poles (and 63 percent of Italians) oppose any increased expenditure on defense to enhance Europe’s standing as a power in the world. If The New York Times is right and George Bush now regards Poland, Britain, and Italy as his chief European allies, then—Tony Blair apart—America is leaning on a rubber crutch.

And what of Germany? American commentators have been so offended at Germany’s willingness to “appease” Saddam, so infuriated by Gerhard Schröder’s lack of bellicose fervor and his “ingratitude” toward America that few have stopped to ask why so many Germans share Günter Grass’s view that “the President of the United States embodies the danger that faces us all.” Germany today is different. It does have a distinctively pacifist culture (quite unlike, say, France). If there is to be war, many Germans feel, let it be ohne mich (without me). This transformation is one of the historic achievements of the men of “Old” Europe. When American spokesmen express frustration at it, they might take a moment to reflect on what it is they are asking—though at a time when Saddam Hussein is casually compared to Adolf Hitler, and the US defense secretary can call Germany a “pariah state” along with Cuba and Libya, this may be too much to expect. But should we really be so quick to demand martial enthusiasm of Germany?

A second Europhobic myth now widely disseminated in the United States is more pernicious. It is the claim that Europe is awash in anti-Semitism, that the ghosts of Europe’s judeophobic past are risen again, and that this atavistic prejudice, Europe’s original sin, explains widespread European criticism of Israel, sympathy for the Arab world, and even support for Iraq. The main source for these claims is a spate of attacks on Jews and Jewish property in the spring of 2002, and some widely publicized opinion polls purporting to demonstrate the return of anti-Jewish prejudice across the European continent. American commentary on these data has in turn emphasized the “anti-Israel” character of European media reports from the Middle East.

To begin with the facts: according to the American Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has worked harder than anyone to propagate the image of rampant European anti-Semitism, there were twenty-two significant anti-Semitic incidents in France in April 2002, and a further seven in Belgium; for the whole year 2002 the ADL catalogued forty-five such incidents in France, varying from anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish-owned shops in Marseilles to Molotov cocktails thrown into synagogues in Paris, Lyon, and elsewhere. But the same ADL reported sixty anti-Semitic incidents on US college campuses alone in 1999. Measured by everything from graffiti to violent assaults, anti-Semitism has indeed been on the increase in some European countries in recent years; but then so it has in America. The ADL recorded 1,606 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in the year 2000, up from 900 in 1986. Even if anti-Semitic aggression in France, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe has been grievously underreported, there is no evidence to suggest it is more widespread in Europe than in the US.

But what of attitudes? Evidence from the European Union’s Eurobarometer polls, the leading French polling service SOFRES, and the ADL’s own surveys all point in the same direction. There is in many European countries, as in the US, a greater tolerance for mild verbal anti-Semitism than in the past, and a continuing propensity to believe longstanding stereotypes about Jews: e.g., that they have a disproportionate influence in economic life. But the same polls confirm that young people all over Europe are much less tolerant of prejudice than their parents were. Among French youth especially, anti-Semitic sentiment has steadily declined and is now negligible. An overwhelming majority of young people questioned in France in January 2002 believe that we should speak more, not less, of the Holocaust; and nearly nine out of ten of them agreed that attacks on synagogues were “scandalous.” These figures are broadly comparable to results from similar surveys taken in the US.

Most of the recent attacks on Jews in Western Europe were the work of young Arabs or other Muslims, as local commentators acknowledge. Assaults on Jews in Europe are driven by anger at the government of Israel, for whom European Jews are a convenient local surrogate. The rhetorical armory of traditional European anti-Semitism—the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Jews’ purported economic power and conspiratorial networks, even blood libels—has been pressed into service by the press and television in Cairo and elsewhere, with ugly effects all across the youthful Arab diaspora.

The ADL asserts that all this “confirms a new form of anti-Semitism taking hold in Europe. This new anti-Semitism is fueled by anti-Israel sentiment and questions the loyalty of Jewish citizens.” That is nonsense. Gangs of unemployed Arab youths in Paris suburbs like Garges-les-Gonesses surely regard French Jews as representatives of Israel, but they are not much worried about their patriotic shortcomings. As to Jewish loyalties: one leading question in the ADL surveys—“Do you believe Jews are more likely to be loyal to Israel than to [your country]”—elicits a consistently higher positive response in the US than in Europe. It is Americans, not Europeans, who are readier to assume that a Jew’s first loyalty might be to Israel.

The ADL and most American commentators conclude from this that there is no longer any difference between being “against” Israel and “against” Jews. But this is palpably false. The highest level of pro-Palestinian sympathy in Europe today is recorded in Denmark, a country which also registers as one of the least anti-Semitic by the ADL’s own criteria. Another country with a high and increasing level of sympathy for the Palestinians is the Netherlands; yet the Dutch have the lowest anti-Semitic “quotient” in Europe and nearly half of them are “worried” about the possible rise of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, it is the self-described “left” in Europe that is most uncompromisingly pro-Palestinian, while the “right” displays both anti-Arab and anti-Jewish (but often pro-Israel) bias. Indeed, this is one of the few areas of public life in which these labels still carry weight.

Overall, Europeans are more likely to blame Israel than Palestinians for the present morass in the Middle East, but only by a ratio of 27:20. Americans, by contrast, blame Palestinians rather than Israel in the proportion of 42:17. This suggests that Europeans’ responses are considerably more balanced, which is what one would expect: the European press, radio, and television provide a fuller and fairer coverage of events in the Middle East than is available to most Americans. As a consequence, Europeans are better than Americans at distinguishing criticism of Israel from dislike of Jews.

One reason may be that some of Europe’s oldest and most fully accredited anti-Semites are publicly sympathetic to Israel. Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz in April 2002, expressed his “understanding” of Ariel Sharon’s policies (”A war on terror is a brutal thing”)—comparable in his opinion to France’s no less justified antiterrorist practices in Algeria forty years earlier. The gap separating Europeans from Americans on the question of Israel and the Palestinians is the biggest impediment to transatlantic understanding today. Seventy-two percent of Europeans favor a Palestinian state against just 40 percent of Americans. On a “warmth” scale of 1–100, American feelings toward Israel rate 55, whereas the European average is just 38—and somewhat cooler among the “New Europeans”: revealingly, the British and French give Israel the same score. It is the Poles who exhibit by far the coolest feelings toward Israel (Donald Rumsfeld please note).

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

In the May 4, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the lives and work of the Brontë sisters on the occasion of Winifred Gérin’s then-new biography of Emily (preceded by Gérin’s biographies of Anne, Branwell, and Charlotte, and followed in 1973 by her group biography The Brontës). Below, we present Hardwick’s essay read by Kathleen Chalfant, an actress who has appeared in television, in film, and in stage productions on and off Broadway. She is currently performing in New York in the Playwrights Horizons production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs, and she recently starred in Sarah Friedland’s film Familiar Touch (2024).

This reading serves as an accompaniment to the Private Life episode featuring Darryl Pinckney discussing his close friendship with Hardwick. You can also read an excerpt of “Working Girls: The Brontës” below.

The careers of the three Brontë sisters—Anne, Charlotte, and Emily—conferred a sort of perpetuity upon the whole family. The father's eccentricities, once brought under scrutiny by the fame of the daughters, proved to be rich enough in detail to provide a good store of anecdote. There is, as with all of the family, always some question about what was truth and what fancy.

The Reverend Brontë was a failed writer. He had published Cottage Poems and The Rural Minstrel, and he certainly had the sedentary habits and wide range of peculiarities that might have assisted a literary career, but perhaps the Reverend was not able to take in enough from the outside to nourish his art. He carried a pistol around with him and sometimes when he was angry found relief by shooting through the open door. It was rumored that he cut up one of his wife's silk dresses out of regard for his strict standards of simplicity and seriousness. For his own part the Reverend Brontë disowned claims to flamboyance and said: "I do not deny that I am somewhat eccentric…. Only don't set me on in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs off chairs and tearing my wife's silk gowns."

There were five daughters and one son in the Brontë family, and the father unluckily placed his hopes in his son, Branwell. It is only by accident that we know about people like Branwell who seemed destined for the arts, unable to work at anything else, and yet have not the talent, the tenacity, or the discipline to make any kind of sustained creative effort. With great hopes and at bitter financial sacrifice, Branwell was sent up to London to study painting at the Academy Schools. The experience was wretched for him and he seemed to have sensed his lack of preparation, his uncertain dedication, his faltering will. He never went to the school, did not present his letters of introduction, and spent his money in taverns drinking gin. It finally became necessary to return home in humiliation and to pretend that he had been robbed.

One story has poor Branwell visiting the National Gallery and, in the presence of the great paintings there, despairing of his own talents. This is hard to credit, since the example of the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre. In any case, nothing leads us to think Branwell lacked vanity or expansive ideas of his own importance. Also, the deterrent of Branwell’s own nature made any further impediments unnecessary. His nature was hysterical, addictive, self-indulgent. Very early he fell under the spell of alcohol and opium; his ravings and miseries destroyed the family peace, absorbed their energies, and depressed their spirits. He had to be talked to, watched over, soothed, and protected—and nothing really availed. Branwell destroyed his life with drugs and drink and died of a bronchial infection at the age of thirty-one.

Perhaps the true legacy Branwell left the world is to be found in the extraordinary violence of feeling, the elaborate language of bitterness and frustration in Wuthering Heights. It is not unreasonable to see the origin of some of Heathcliff’s raging disappointment and disgust in Branwell’s own excited sense of injury and betrayal. Emily Brontë took toward her brother an attitude of stoical pity and protectiveness. Charlotte was, on the other hand, in despair at his deterioration, troubled by his weaknesses, and condemning of the pain he brought to the household. It is significant that Charlotte insisted Branwell did not know of the publication of his sisters’ poems, nor of the composition of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey. She wrote, “My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature—he was not aware that they had ever published a line. We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied.”

Still, in spite of every failure and vice, Branwell always interested people. The news of his promise and default seemed to have spread around quite early. Matthew Arnold included him in his poem “Haworth Churchyard,” written in 1855, the year of Charlotte Brontë’s death and two years before Mrs. Gaskell’s biography. About Branwell, Arnold wrote:

O boy, if here thou sleep’st, sleep well:
On thee too did the Muse
Bright in thy cradle smile;
But some dark shadow came
(I know not what) and interposed.

The emergence of the Brontë sisters is altogether a lucky circumstance and nothing is easier than to imagine all of them dying unknown, their works lost. The father lived to be eighty-four, but of the children Charlotte’s survival to thirty-nine seemed almost a miracle. Not even she, and certainly not the other two sisters, had the chance to do what they might have. This is especially distressing in the case of Emily. Wuthering Heights has a sustained brilliance and originality we hardly know how to account for. It is on a different level of inspiration from her poetry; the grandeur and complication of it always remind one of the leap she might have taken had she lived.

They are an odd group, the Brontës, beaten down by a steady experience of the catastrophic. The success of Jane Eyre, the fame that came to Charlotte, were fiercely, doggedly earned. She had struggled for independence not as an exhilaration dreamed of but as a necessity, a sort of grocery to sustain the everyday body and soul. Literary work and the presence of each other was the consolation at Haworth parsonage. There was certainly a family closeness because of the dangers they had passed through in the deaths of their mother and two older sisters. Haworth was a retreat; but part of its hold upon them was a kind of negative benevolence: it was at least better to have the freedom and familiarity of the family than the oppression of the life society offered to penniless, intellectual girls.

A study of the Brontë lives leaves one with a disorienting sense of the unexpected and the paradoxical in their existence. In them are combined simplicities and exaggerations, isolation and an attraction to scandalous situations. Victorian readers of the novels of these quiet, repressed spinsters were immediately aware of a disturbing undercurrent of intense sexual fantasy. Loneliness and melancholy seemed to alternate in their feelings with an unusual energy and ambition.

In the novels of Charlotte and Anne there is a firm grasp of social pressures and forces; they understood from their own experience that opportunities for independence were likely to be crushing to the essential spirit and the sense of self. The central figures in Wuthering Heights are struggling with an inner tyranny. Catherine is nihilistic, self-indulgent, bored, restless, nostalgic for childhood, unmanageable. She has the charm of a wayward schizophrenic girl, but she has little to give since she is self-absorbed, haughty, destructive. What is interesting and contemporary for us is that Emily Brontë should have given Catherine the center of the stage, to share it along with the rough, brutal Heathcliff. In a novel by Charlotte Brontë or Anne, Cathy would be a shallow beauty, analyzed and despaired of by a reasonable, clever, and deprived heroine. She would be fit only for the subplot.

Emily Brontë’s poetry is constricted by its hymn-tune rhythms and a rather narrow and provincial idea of the way to use her own peculiar visions. The novel form released in her a new and explosive spirit. The demands of the form, the setting, the multiplication of incidents, the need to surround the Byronic principals, Cathy and Heath-cliff, with the prosaic, the dogs, the husbands, the family servants, sisters, houses—the elements of fact lift up the dreamlike, compulsive figures, give them life. The plot of Wuthering Heights is immensely complicated and yet there is the most felicitous union of author and subject. There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness.

Wuthering Heights is a virgin’s story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book. Emily Brontë appears in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship that tortured the lives of her sisters. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover as we do with Emily Dickinson because it is impossible to join her with a man, with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal.

The Brontë sisters had the concentration and energy that marked the great nineteenth-century literary careers. When The Professor was going the rounds of publishers, Charlotte was finishing Jane Eyre. The publication of the Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was just barely a publication. A year later only two copies had been sold and the book received merely a few scattered, unimportant notices. Still, it was an emergence, an event, an excitement. Emily had at first resisted publication and was so guarded about the failure of the book that we cannot judge her true feelings. No discouragement prevented the sisters from starting to work, each one, on a novel. The practical side of publication, the proofs, the letters to editors, the seriousness of public authorship were an immensely significant break in the isolation and uncertainly of their lives.

The Brontës had always had a sense of performance, of home performance in their Angria and Gondal plots and characters. And some of them quite early felt their gifts could reasonably claim the attention of the world. Branwell wrote highhanded letters to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine saying, “Do you think your magazine so perfect that no additions to its power would be either possible or desirable?” He sent off a note to Wordsworth suggesting, “Surely, in this day when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward.” Wordsworth noted the mixture of “gross flattery” and “plenty of abuse” and did not reply.

Charlotte posted a few poems to Southey. He was not discourteous but delivered the opinion, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.”

Absolute need drove the Brontë sisters. They were poor, completely dependent upon their father’s continuation in his post, and without hopes of anything were he to die. They did receive a small legacy upon the death of Aunt Branwell and they looked upon the income with awe and intense gratitude. But it was not in any sense a living. The sisters were not beautiful, yet their appearance can hardly be thought a gross liability. Their natures, the scars of the deaths of their mother and sisters, their intellectuality, and their poverty were the obstacles to marriage.

There was also perhaps some disappointment in their father and brother that weighed on their spirits. Branwell’s imperfections were large and memorable; the father’s were less palpable. He was not a rock—at least not of the right kind. When Charlotte finally married his curate he refused to perform the ceremony and indeed gave up altogether the duty of marrying persons. The Brontë household was in fact a household of women, women living and dead. The sense of being on their own came very early. Each sister felt the weight of responsibility in an acute and thorough way.

The worries that afflicted genteel, impoverished women in the nineteenth century can scarcely be exaggerated. They were cut off from the natural community of the peasant classes. The world of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for all its sorrow and injustice, is more open and warm and fresh than the cramped, anxious, fireside-sewing days of the respectable. Chaperones, fatuous rules of deportment and occupation drained the energy of intelligent, needy women. Worst of all was society’s contempt for the prodigious efforts they made to survive. Their condition was dishonorable, but no approval attached to their efforts to cope with it. The humiliations endured in the work of survival are a great part of the actual material in the fiction of Charlotte and Anne Brontë.

It seems likely that there was a steady downward plunge by alliances with the poorer classes on the part of the desperate daughters of impecunious gentlefolk. And some resolved to move upward, like Becky Sharp, the daughter of a dissolute painter and an opera-singer mother. Becky Sharp had “the dismal precocity of poverty” and the heedless shrewdness of the bohemian world. She spoke of herself as never having been a girl: “she had been a woman since she was eight years old.” Becky Sharp is the perfect contrast to Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, two girls with an almost extinguishing sense of determination and accountability. In the Brontë sisters there is a distinctly high tone and low spirit; they retained something of the Methodism of their mother and of the aunt who raised them. Even Branwell, with his flaming indulgences, is a sort of prototypical parson’s son who exchanged every prohibition for a license.

Charlotte Brontë wrote: “None but those who had been in a position of a governess could ever realize the dark side of respectable human nature; under no great temptation to crime, but daily giving way to selfishness and ill-temper, till its conduct toward those dependent on it sometimes amounts to a tyranny of which one would rather be the victim than the inflicter.” To be a ladies companion was even worse for a young woman; the caprice and idleness of the old fell down like a shroud upon the young.

Schools had always been traumatic and even murderous for the Brontë children. The two older daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School, an institution especially endowed for girls like themselves who could expect to have to make their own way. It was sponsored by such well-known people of the day as Wilberforce and Hannah More. But the school was, nevertheless, a cruel place—cold, with inadequate, dirty food, overworked, tyrannical teachers. The children took long, freezing walks to church and sat in their cold, damp clothes all day. There was tuberculosis throughout the school and the condition led to the death of Maria when she was twelve and Elizabeth when she was eleven. Emily and Charlotte were only six and a half and eight years old when they joined their older sisters at the school. They watched with horror and the deepest resentment as the older girls fell ill and were sent home to die.

The mother of the Brontës had died of cancer after bearing six children in seven years. All of these griefs and losses formed the character of the survivors: the religious earnestness of Anne, the withdrawn, peculiar nature of Emily, the stoical determination of Charlotte.

For the sisters, and even for Branwell after his failure as a painter, life seemed to offer nothing except the position of governess or tutor in a private family. This was a hard destiny. The children exploit and torment; the parents exploit and ignore. The social and family position of a governess was ambiguous and led to painful feelings of resentment, envy, or bitter acceptance. The young women who went to work in the houses of the well-to-do were clever and unprotected; one quality seemed to vex their charges and employers as much as the other.

The teacher-governess in fiction is likely, because of the intimate family setting in which she is living her lonely life, to fall into an almost hysterical, repressed eroticism. Henry James noticed the tendency of the governess to be “easily carried away.” Both Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are superior, gifted girls, very much like Charlotte Brontë herself. They are bookish, forthright, skeptical, inclined to moralizing and to making wearisome, patient efforts to maintain self-esteem and independence. They are defenseless, cast adrift, and yet of an obviously fine quality that shows itself in a tart talent for down-putting retorts. Under the correcting surface they are deeply romantic, full of dreams, and visited by nightmares. They feel a pressing, hurting need for love and yet they work hard to build up resignation to the likelihood that they will have to live bereft of the affections so much wanted. Need and sublimation play back and forth like a waving light over their troubled consciousness. By these pains they grew into sharp observers, ever anxious to control and manage a threatening despair.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

On February 19 the Review and the Brooklyn cultural organization Pioneer Works are cohosting the official launch of longtime contributor Dan Chiasson’s new book, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician. The event, which is open to the public, will include a conversation with Chiasson and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as a performance by members of Vermont’s storied Bread and Puppet Theater.

In our September 23, 2021, issue, Chiasson wrote about Bread and Puppet, “the anticapitalist troupe founded in 1963”—the same year as the Review—that to this day produces “spectacles of shock and confrontation” with its menagerie of “smirking, wincing, portly, wizened” puppets. As Chiasson wrote, “the puppets make up a vision of humanity in its entirety: heroes, pests, capitalists, sadists, all of them helplessly locked into their assigned natures and motives.”

Peter and Elka Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, the anticapitalist troupe founded in 1963, occupies several buildings on the former Dopp Farm in a remote corner of Vermont. Shanties built from scrap metal and timber dot the landscape, along with some beached flowerchild school buses. When you approach the property through dense forest on a country road, Bread and Puppet at first looks like any other hardscrabble farm here in the Northeast Kingdom, the poorest and most rural part of Vermont. Seeing its weathered structures, you might conclude that there is a phenomenon called time, and that, as it passes, it ravages things. Otherwise, the place seems more or less frozen in 1975, the year the company first arrived. That it had not changed, and might never, was already part of its mystique in the early 1980s, when I first visited the farm. The doors have always been wide open at Bread and Puppet, but an outsider would have an easier time assimilating into an Amish village.

Though it shares the features of a working farm and a commune, Bread and Puppet is an enormous puppet maker’s workshop: a factory devoted to the manufacture of, mainly, human likenesses. There are too many puppets and masks here to house with any semblance of order: they are strewn about the property, tacked to hickories and maples, piled in sheds and under porches, hung up like deer hides in stalls. The company’s ambitious performance schedule means that some of these effigies do get taken down off their pegs and recycled, bestowed again with life and movement; but for many of these poignant souls, the best that can be hoped for is a kind of grimacing retirement in the museum that fills every inch of a large dairy barn on the property.

The Bread and Puppet Museum, where some of the best and most storied puppets are kept, is often deserted. You turn the lights on when you arrive and stuff some cash, if you have it, into the donation box. The gift store also runs on the honor system. Unlike most museum stores, this one sells original works of art: you can buy limited-edition prints, banners, and posters made in the company’s print shop, all for a pittance. These rather primitive woodblock designs, with stenciled, well-worn slogans of defiance (“Rise,” “Courage,” “Resist”), are a fixture of Vermont kitchens and coffee shops, stapled or taped to the walls. I think I have never seen one framed. Down the aisles from the shop, the former stalls of the barn function like shrines in a medieval cathedral or vitrines in a natural history museum, in which retired puppets and sets are crowded into expressive narrative scenarios.

Smirking, wincing, portly, wizened, the puppets make up a vision of humanity in its entirety: heroes, pests, capitalists, sadists, all of them helplessly locked into their assigned natures and motives, unchanged from season to season. In one painted scene, tiny angels or babies rain out of the sky like something from an acid-trip Blake engraving. Many of the scenes and figures are said to have originated in dreams, where they are certainly destined to return. The museum is in fact a kind of collective American unconscious in which our nightmares of guilt and culpability are heightened and accentuated. Bread and Puppet has produced some of the great visual representations of modern American atrocity, from Hiroshima to Vietnam to covert assassinations and environmental terror; yet as a medium for expressing moral and political anger, puppetry, with its innate connections to innocence and childhood, serves also as a powerful ironizing force. Walking through the museum, it is hard to compose and sustain a single response: jest and genocide adjoin, as they do in the national conscience.

Most of the exhibits memorialize shows from the company’s past. In a downstairs corner of the barn, “The White Horse Butcher” presents an anticapitalist tableau with a frightened, pitiful, tormented horse at its center, a pure being surrounded by expressionless white-faced bureaucrats who have come to sacrifice it to the god of money. Upstairs in the loft, the tall rafters frame the company’s distinctive “giants,” presences perhaps forty feet tall, like primitive gods with an eye on the mayhem below. There, the Founding Fathers hang lifeless and slack from thick beams, as though it was finally their turn to be lynched. In one stall, an enormous effigy of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was assassinated by a CIA-linked group while saying Mass in San Salvador, presides over his last Eucharist. Across the aisle we are faced with the most terrifying exhibit of all, “The Birdcatcher in Hell”: here vivisectionist puppets painted in sickly reds and dark pinks, the color of viscera, oversee the fate of Lieutenant William Calley, the soldier who was charged with 109 counts of murder after the 1968 My Lai massacre.

The company’s uncompromising politics is expressed in spectacles of shock and confrontation, images that “can’t be unseen,” as we say. Decades later it all still has the power to unsettle. But the puppets, mostly made of papier-mâché, cannot really be preserved. And so an extra layer of pathos clings to the museum, a feeling of old battles, old adversities, perhaps even lost causes. A world now vanished, where puppets could serve as countercultural tools, rhetorical weapons, or literal disguises: in 1970 Father Daniel Berrigan, who had been placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for evading prosecution for his part in burning hundreds of draft cards with the Catonsville Nine, fled from the authorities inside an enormous Bread and Puppet figure of an apostle.

Elka Schumann died on August 1, of complications following a stroke. According to most accounts, it was Elka who shaped the farm as a working and living environment, with her husband Peter’s mask-making and their bread-making at the nucleus of a system that included, under her supervision, the profitable and thriving printing press, a cider press, a sugarbush with two thousand taps, and a flock of sheep providing wool for the Schumann family and others. The farm blurs the line between forms of work that produce outcomes deemed necessary for survival (bread) and those derided as frivolous (puppets).

Peter Schumann, aged eighty-seven, is the Geppetto behind all these puppets. The civilization that he and Elka have assiduously tended and elaborated here for nearly fifty years includes not only artwork and performances but an austere code of life, a playfully expressed but fierce moral logic, the coaxing of a rather forbidding and harsh landscape into self-expression, and the quiet management of his large stake in an entire region’s cultural life. Peter’s art is collaborative, with a high degree of freedom delegated to his many and various partners, including spur-of-the-moment volunteers.

What he and Elka created is an approach: a distinct visual and performance idiom, the traces of its making inscribed on its surface, with room for innovation. It can be crude enough to be reproducible by hastily trained amateurs and even by young children. It is above all an ethic of cheapness, never betrayed in all its years. I once overheard some members of the company planning to drive to St. Albans, an hour or more away, to pick up a load of old construction scrap. Neighbors drop off their old house paint and worn bedsheets, which Schumann and his collaborators turn into works of art.

Many of the volunteers at Bread and Puppet are paying tribute to their past. At a Bread and Puppet performance, “one is seized by one’s childhood,” as the poet Barry Goldensohn once put it. Archetypes of causation—a puppet-hammer hitting a puppet-nail, a son saying good-bye to a mother—drive deep into the preconscious mind. Generations of Vermonters were taken as babies and toddlers to these performances. I attribute to Bread and Puppet an important role in my first narrative memory, a sequence with movement and sound: this was July 4, 1976, at the Bicentennial celebration in Battery Park, Burlington, Vermont. I was five. I remember shriners, a band, a parade of drummers. A neighbor hoists me up on his shoulders for a view of the concert and, beyond it, of Lake Champlain. But then I see frightening puppets many times my size.

I shut my eyes to protect myself, and then the memory ends. I have played this clip over and over in my mind and written a long poem (“Bicentennial”) that recasts the moment as a confrontation with my estranged father. The trauma of witnessing those huge effigies ends the memory; the imagination has to take over. My subsequent early associations with Bread and Puppet, which turned up often in Burlington to participate in fairs and parades throughout the 1970s, are of something cruel, sordid, and dangerous, the dream version of the town’s countercultural demimonde that, in a household presided over by my grandfather, a decorated World War II veteran who led the Vermont National Guard, was regarded as an insidious and filthy, an un-American, scene—an occupation.

Since the early 1970s, the main event on the summer program has been the company’s Domestic Resurrection Circus, which this summer celebrated its fiftieth performance year. From the beginning it was a throwback, staging shows that were well known from the company’s earlier work doing traveling shows and street theater. It is a powerful form of ritual, summoning and enacting memory for both its performers and its audience, the boundary between those two constituencies, as always, very porous. One arrives at the farm and is directed by performers to the large natural amphitheater—said to be a drained glacial lake—where the performance unfolds. Sideshows and skits, vaudeville acts, weird Shakespearean bits, Chaplinesque comic fiascoes, jug bands, ragtime, mimes, lute players, what have you: these often precede the main event. The “resurrection” of the title is both enacted by the massive puppets and implicit in the event itself.

If you see the Circus week after week, it starts to function both as a news aggregator and a kind of church service. At a performance this August, a call for relief for Haiti, a few days after its catastrophic earthquake, was followed by antics involving a puppet-zebra and some fleeing children who had been, as always, recruited and assembled the afternoon of the performance. Then, emerging from the background, an iconic Archbishop Romero puppet, his gentle face rendered at enormous scale, presided over cutouts of fallen bodies. The appearance of the martyred bishop was one of many solemn details that gestured toward Elka’s recent death, while reminding us—though who needed reminding, with the news from Afghanistan?—that even in a humid meadow in Vermont, we were all in the belly of a brutal and tragic empire.

Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

Join Pioneer Works and The New York Review of Books for the official launch of Dan Chiasson’s Bernie for Burlington—an epic account of the early days and rise of the young Bernie Sanders, in a bygone time and place that find, in the New York City of 2026, their thrilling sequel.

Register here.

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On August 29, 2017, way back in Donald Trump’s first term, M. Gessen wrote for the NYR Online an analysis of the new president’s autocratic impulses, in particular his “encourage[ment] of extralegal violence.” These sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit incitements included the president’s notorious nod to the “very fine people”—neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far right militias among them—at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist had just killed a woman.

Below we present a preview. Read the full article for free here.

Turn on Russian television any day of the week and you are certain to stumble upon a show in which a group of people who appear to be regular citizens (that is, they have no uniforms or government-issued documents) stage a raid of one sort or another. They barge into a store or a restaurant, for example, and demand to see employees’ identity documents, the storage area, or the cooking facilities. Without fail, they find violations of laws or regulations: the staff, natives of Central Asia, don’t have work permits! The store stocks vodka bottles with no alcohol-tax stamps affixed to them! The cook doesn’t cover her hair! At the end of the show, the raiders often pass their tearful, terrified victims to uniformed law enforcement officers, who sometimes appear less than enthusiastic about the task being handed to them.

These raiders have no official titles or legal powers. What directs their actions are the militant rhetoric and the promise of broad impunity that emanate from the Kremlin—and, of course, the glory and recognition of being on television. YouTube and RuTube contain a trove of other vigilante videos, including of self-appointed vice squads who beat up gay men or suspected drug dealers on camera.

Sometimes these vigilantes get in trouble with the law: occasionally a murderer of gay men is caught and jailed, and once in a while a vigilante-gang leader is reined in, though his partners in crime continue to roam free. But in general, the arrangement is low-risk for the perpetrators and convenient for the Kremlin. Vigilantes work fast. Russian law enforcement is not exactly subject to a lot of institutional constraints, but it can be sluggish, and it carries out violence in a dragged-out, bureaucratic way. The vigilantes, on the other hand, make a spectacle of their work, creating the sort of generalized dread on which autocracies thrive. At the same time, vigilantes, who work in small clumps, do not pose the sort of threat to the autocrat that powerful institutions of state sometimes can.

Putin did not invent vigilantes, of course: autocrats frequently rely on delegating violence to extralegal actors or, as in the case of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, on the willingness of law enforcement officers to carry out extralegal violence in exchange for the promise of impunity. Duterte has made this promise explicit; more often, incitement to violence contains a tacit guarantee of protection.

Over the last two weeks, we have seen Donald Trump send out both kinds of signals to the vigilantes of his own choosing. His refusal to condemn the violent marchers in Charlottesville, in pointed and repeated break with political convention, was rightly interpreted by the white supremacists as a signal of encouragement. And his pardoning of former sheriff Joe Arpaio—before he was even sentenced—protected a law enforcement officer from facing any consequences for a long history of brutal violations of constitutional rights. Trump had encouraged extralegal violence in the past—like when he called on police not to be “too nice” to suspects. But the two weeks bracketed by the violence in Charlottesville and the pardon of Arpaio herald a definite turn away from the institutions of a government he despises.

Unlike an established autocrat like Putin, who delegates violence because he prefers his institutions ineffectual, Trump has been encountering some resistance from within his government. Grownups seem to be taking charge at the White House. Congressional Republicans have become more willing to criticize Trump, and he cannot contain his fury with them. His secretaries of state and defense have distanced themselves from him. In response, Trump now turns toward the gun-toting hoodlums who share his contempt for institutions.

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Alan Alexander Milne was born 144 years ago today. In the Review’s September 20, 1990, issue, Janet Adam Smith wrote about Milne, his halcyon childhood, his mathematical acumen, his work for Granta and Punch, his stifled literary ambitions, and, naturally, his most famous creations—Pooh, Eeyore, Christopher Robin the character, and Christopher Robin Milne the son.

“It is ghastly to think of anyone who wrote such gay stuff ending his life like this,” wrote P. G. Wodehouse in 1954 on hearing that his old acquaintance A. A. Milne had been paralyzed by a stroke. Two years later Milne’s life did indeed end sadly: his only son estranged, his wife aloof, his novels mostly unread, his plays mostly unperformed, himself famous only for his books for children. He had become the man behind Winnie-the-Pooh.

It all began so brightly in 1892. “Everything we are is that way because that was how our parents made us,” he once told his son, and certainly Alan Milne felt he had been lucky in his. His father was headmaster of a small private school for boys in north London, with unusually progressive views for his time. He and his wife aimed to run the school like a happy family: the food was good, the discipline firm but kind, the teaching imaginative. A loutish twelve-year-old who was fascinated by the jelly-graph—a primitive reproducing machine—was set by the headmaster to produce a school magazine, the first step in the the career of Alfred Harmsworth, the future Lord Northcliffe. A young master was encouraged to take his class to examine the strata of Primrose Hill, to botanize on Northwood Common, to rear silkworms. This was H. G. Wells, who taught at Henley House for a few years in his twenties and greatly admired his headmaster: “The boys had confidence in him and in us and I never knew a better-mannered school.”

For Alan and his two older brothers home and school were under the same roof, and they passed easily from one to the other without the trauma felt by Graham Greene in his father’s school. In class, Mr. Wells made mathematics exciting: “We got to fractions, quadratics and problems involving quadratics in a twelve month.” At home there were readings of Alice, Uncle Remus, George Macdonald’s Golden Key, and on Sundays The Pilgrim’s Progress. Alan and Ken, his senior by sixteen months, enjoyed a freedom unimaginable to proper London children today. “We were allowed to go [on] walks by ourselves anywhere, in London or in the country”—and this before they were ten years old! They would get up early and bowl their hoops from Kilburn to the Bayswater Road, a good two miles, and back before breakfast. On holidays in Kent or Surrey they would be off on their bikes, chasing butterflies, exploring mysterious woods and ruined houses, imagining adventures on schooners and desert islands. One long-lasting fantasy was of waking up one morning and finding that everyone else in the world was dead—but there were still animals.

Alan, spotted by Wells as a promising mathematician, was soon outstripping Ken and Barry, who was three years older. Ken won a scholarship to Westminster School when he was twelve; Alan, always compelled “to prove myself the better man of the two,” had the same success next year when he was eleven. This was a pattern that continued: Alan leaping ahead of Ken in lessons and games, and sometimes feeling bad about it; Ken—“kinder, larger-hearted, more lovable, more tolerant, sweeter tempered”—apparently not resentful at being trumped by his younger brother. The two stayed very close: “Throughout his life I never lost Ken, nor he me.”

After the warmth of Henley House, Westminster was a comedown. Breakfasts—Alan’s favorite meal—were awful; washing was done in cold water; junior boys lived in fear of tanning by seniors; there was bad language and smutty talk (which Milne hated all his life). Though he made a brilliant start in mathematics, when an end-of-term report accused him of lacking ambition he stopped working hard and coasted along the rest of his school days. He played for Westminster at cricket and football, he read voraciously, and spent the long hours of weekend leisure—one amenity that Westminster offered—with Ken. They fooled about together, planned their next holiday enterprises, and wrote light verses which they submitted to various papers over the initials A. K. M. Alan’s mathematics remained good enough to win him a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge—and because he had been fascinated by a copy of the magazine Granta, Cambridge was where he wanted to be for other reasons than mathematics.

In the year above him at Trinity were Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey, all then—according to Woolf—“very serious young men.” In the Granta set, to which Milne quickly gravitated, it was bad form to be serious. The magazine was very different from the periodical that bears its name today. It aimed to be an undergraduate Punch: light verse à la Calverley, amusing prose trifles. Milne shone in both genres and one prose piece, “Jeremy, I and the jelly-fish,” caught the eye of Punch stalwart R. C. Lehmann: “a piece of sparkling and entirely frivolous and irresponsible irrelevance,” he called it, and invited the author to send in something to Punch.

Milne became editor of Granta (securing a contribution for a May Week number from the now famous H. G. Wells), and left Cambridge with a poor degree and an urge to try his hand as a journalist. Back in London he wrote Granta-type sketches and poems and fired them off at newspapers and weeklies. Wells was helpful with suggestions and introductions, Alfred Harmsworth was not. Milne began to appear regularly in Punch and in 1906, when he was twenty-four, he was invited to join the staff as assistant editor: in addition to his salary he would be paid for his contributions at double rates.

A staple of Punch humor was the everyday life of the middle classes. R. C. Lehmann’s son John, whose stamp collecting had been the subject of an article, felt that his father “used us all quite shamelessly.” Milne concocted his sketches from things that happened in his digs, on his London outings, on country weekends, or excursions with the now married Ken. Sometimes it was hard going: “I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.” J. M. Barrie praised these Punch pieces for their “gaiety and irresponsibility,” and encouraged Milne to try his hand at a play.

By 1913 he was in a position to marry a vivacious young woman whom he proposed to on a ski slope in Switzerland in a snowstorm. She was Dorothy de Sélincourt, niece of the Wordsworth scholar Ernest de Sélincourt, and goddaughter of Punch editor Owen Seaman. Alan and Dorothy—now called Daphne, or Daff—settled in Chelsea, a bright young couple rather like the bright young couples of his Punch sketches. Daphne organized their apartment and made all the practical decisions while he wrote amusing pieces about their domestic doings. One reason for his choice of wife, Milne claimed, was that “she laughed at my jokes.”

Milne had been much impressed by The Great Illusion (1910), Norman Angell’s exposure of the futility of war, but in 1914 he agreed with Wells that Britain was fighting “a war that will end war.” Early in 1915 he was commissioned in the Warwickshire Regiment and in 1916 was in the thick of the battle of the Somme: a truly hideous experience but at least, as a signals officer, he was not required to kill. Invalided home with trench fever, he spent the rest of the war in staff jobs in England. He expect to go back to Punch when demobilized; but to Owen Seaman, who had take a rabidly patriotic line throughout the war, Milne was now “an unpatriotic Radical” whom he wouldn’t have back on the staff.

By this time Milne had an alternative to light verse and whimsical prose. During the war a comedy he had written some years before, Wurzel-Flummery, was produced at the New Theatre between two Barrie one-acters; a second play Belinda—“a purely artificial comedy whose only purpose was to amuse,” he described it—was staged in 1918; and with Mr. Pim Passes By in 1920 (the first play Peggy Ashcroft ever saw in a theater) Milne became famous and his income shot up. In the same year a further fortune came into his life with the birth of his son, registered as Christopher Robin, known to his parents as Billy Moon. (Leonard Moon, a brilliant Westminster cricketer, had been Milne’s schoolboy hero.) The verses the child occasioned—most of them first appearing in Punch with illustrations by Ernest Shepard—were collected in two volumes which had a wild success in Britain and America, the printers hardly able to keep up with the demand. In 1924 the Milnes bought a weekend and holiday house on the edge of Ashdown Forest in Sussex: the forest and his son’s toys came together to produce Winnie-the-Pooh. Again Shepard illustrated, and readers loved the pictures as much as the stories. (Recently three unpublished Pooh drawings were sold at Christies for almost £60,000.) Henceforth it was Pooh, Pooh, all the way: Milne the playwright, Milne the novelist, was eclipsed by Milne the creator of Pooh. No matter that after 1928 he wrote no more children’s books but went on publishing plays, novels, an autobiography: the label would stick for life.

In due course Christopher departed to boarding school…

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In the Review’s March 27, 2003, issue—a week after the United States invaded Iraq on a mission of regime change undergirded by a desire for control of oil production—Norman Mailer wrote an “attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture”:

There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique to Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. Yes, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. We have our know-how, our can-do. We will dominate the obstacles. Flag conservatives truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must. Without a commitment to Empire, the country will go down the drain.

Below we present a preview of Mailer’s piece. Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.

1.

It is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were minimal. Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other. From Saddam’s point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon, a warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed.

The two were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world—bin Laden, conceivably, for the greater glory of Allah, and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days, in the nineteenth century, when the British had their empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each other. It was the old rule of many a Victorian crazy house: Let the madmen duke it out, then jump the one or two who are left.

Today, however, these aims are different. Security is considered insecure unless the martial results are absolute. So the first American reaction to September 11 was to plan to destroy bin Laden and al-Qaeda. When the campaign in Afghanistan failed, however, to capture the leading protagonist, even proved unable, indeed, to conclude whether he was alive or dead, the game had to shift. Our White House decided the real pea was under another shell. Not al-Qaeda, but Iraq.

Political leaders and statesmen are serious men even when they appear to be fools, and it is rare to find them acting without some deeper reason they can offer to themselves. It is those covert motives in the Bush administration upon which I would like to speculate here. I will attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.

Let me begin with Colin Powell’s presentation before the UN on February 5. Up to a point, it was well detailed and looked to prove that Saddam Hussein (to no one’s dramatic surprise) was violating every rule of the inspectors that he could get away with. Saddam, after all, had a keen nose for the vagaries of history. He understood that the longer one could delay powerful statesmen, the more they might weary of the soul-deadening boredom of dealing with a consummate liar who was artfully free of all the bonds of obligation and cooperation. It is no small gift to be an absolute liar. If you never tell the truth, you are virtually as safe as an honest man who never utters an untruth. When informed that you just swore to the opposite today of what you avowed yesterday, you remark, “I never said that,” or should the words be on record, you declare that you are grossly misinterpreted. Confusion is sown rich in permutations.

So, Saddam had managed to survive seven years of inspection from 1991 to 1998. He had made deals—most of them under the counter—with the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Jordanians; the list is long. He also knew how to play on the sympathies of the third world. He convinced many a good heart all over the world. The continuing cruelty of America was starving the Iraqi children. The Iraqi children were, in large part, seriously malnourished by the embargo Saddam had brought upon himself, but, indeed, if they had been healthy, he would have kept a score of six-year-olds starving long enough to dispatch a proper photograph around the world. He was no good and he could prove it. He did so well at the games he played that he succeeded in declaring the inspections at an end by 1998.

There had been talk before, and there was certainly talk then in the White House that we had to send troops into Iraq as our reply to such flouting of the agreement. Unfortunately, Clinton’s adventure with Monica Lewinsky had left him a paralyzed warrior. In the midst of his public scandal, he could not afford to shed one drop of American blood. The proof was in Kosovo where no American infantry went in with NATO and our bombers never dropped their product from any height within range of Serbian antiaircraft. We did it all from 15,000 feet up. So, Iraq was out of the question. Al Gore was a hawk at the time, ready, doubtless, to improve his future campaign image and rise thereby from wonk to stud—a necessary qualification for the presidency—but Clinton’s vulnerability stifled all that.

So, in 1998, Saddam Hussein got away with it. There had been no inspections since. Colin Powell’s speech was full of righteous indignation at the bare-faced and heinous bravado of Saddam the Evil, but Powell was, of course, too intelligent a man to be surprised by these discoveries of malfeasance. The speech was an attempt to heat up America’s readiness to go to war. By the measure of our polls, half of the citizenry were unready. And this part of his speech certainly succeeded. The proof was that a good many Democratic senators who had been on the fence declared that they were in on the venture now; yes, they, too, were ready for war, God bless us.

The major weakness in Powell’s presentation of the evidence was, however, the evidential link of Iraq to al-Qaeda. It was, given the powerful auspices of the occasion, more than a bit on the sparse side. With the exception of Great Britain, the states with veto power in the Security Council, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians, were obviously not eager to satisfy the Bush passion to go to war as soon as possible. They wanted time to intensify inspections. They looked to containment as a solution.

Not a week later, al-Jazeera offered a recorded broadcast by bin Laden that gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact, even though he called the “socialists” in Baghdad “infidels.” But this last statement was in immediate contradiction to what he had just finished saying a moment earlier: “It does no hurt under these conditions [of attack by the West] that the interests of Muslims [will ultimately] contradict the interest of the socialists in the fight against the Crusaders.”

Bin Laden may have chosen to be ambiguous and two-sided in his remarks, but the suggestion of a common interest, despite all, between al-Qaeda and Saddam was also there. Was it finally happening? Had the enemy of Saddam’s enemy now become Saddam’s friend? If so, that could prove a disaster. We might vanquish Iraq and still suffer from the catastrophe we claimed to be going to war to avert. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could yet belong to bin Laden.

Without those weapons, al-Qaeda would have to scrape and scratch. But if Saddam were to make transfer of even a sizable fraction of his bio-warfare and chemical stores, bin Laden would be considerably more dangerous.

The inner diktat of George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq as rapidly as possible now had to face the possibility that Saddam had come up with an exceptional countermove. Was he saying, in effect, “Allow me to string along the inspections, and you are still relatively safe. You may be certain I will not rush to give my very best stuff to Osama bin Laden so long as we can keep playing this inspection game back and forth, back and forth. Go to war with me, however, and Osama will smile. I may go down in flames, but he and his people will be happy. Be certain, he wants you to go to war with me.”

Since the sequence of these kinds of moves was present from the beginning, it could be asked, as indeed more than a few Americans were now asking: How did we allow such choices in the first place—these hellish Hobson choices?

Meanwhile, the world was reacting in horror to the Bush agenda for war. The European edition of Time magazine had been conducting a poll on its Web site: “Which country poses a greater danger to world peace in 2003?” With 318,000 votes cast so far, the responses were: North Korea, 7 percent; Iraq, 8 percent; the United States, 84 percent....

As John le Carré had put it to The Times of London: “America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.”

Harold Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:

...The American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.

Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen’s declaration—“We are not the doctors. We are the disease.”

According to Reuters, on February 15 more than four million people “from Bangkok to Brussels, from Canberra to Calcutta...took to the streets to pillory Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger.”

2.

A quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election that could best be described as legitimate/illegitimate. America had learned all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting. They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of teflon on their soul. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of course, their descendants won in Florida. The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are large enough.

If Bush’s legitimacy was in question then from the start, his performance as president was arousing scorn. When he spoke extempore, he sounded simple. When more articulate subordinates wrote his speeches, he had trouble fitting himself to the words.

Then September 11 altered everything. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we had been watching maelstrom extravaganzas on the tube, and enjoying them. We were insulated. A hundredth part of ourselves could step into the box and live with the fear. Now, suddenly, the horror had shown itself to be real. Gods and demons were invading the US, coming right in off the TV screen. This may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after September 11. It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.

And, of course, we were not in shape to feel free of guilt about September 11. The manic money-grab excitement of the Nineties had never been altogether free of our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous but we still felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is a grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God didn’t necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren’t supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good Christian psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: beat everybody. One can offer a cruel, but conceivably accurate, remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.

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