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Volume LXXI, Number 6 April 4, 2024

Jason DeParle: Why Can’t America House Its Homeless?

Christian Caryl: Alexey Navalny’s Lessons for Russia
Margaret Scott: Indonesia’s Fateful Election
Sophie Pinkham: Jennifer Croft in Poland’s Primeval Forest
Eric Foner: Taking Jim Crow to Court
Miranda Seymour: Wild, Reviled, Heroic Byron
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THE TALE OF A WALL

Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom
“Nasser Abu Srour doesn’t allow his long
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He turns to the wall of his cell that is intended to
confine him into his path to freedom, and in the
process, out of the darkness of his cell produces
A LUMINOUS MEMOIR.”
—RAJA SHEHADEH, author of We Could Have Been
Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

“ FIERCE AND LYRICAL,

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and that of the Palestinian people.”
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“A UNIQUE, LYRICAL
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and the complicated struggle for liberation of
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“The infuriating fate of being a refugee, and then a prisoner,

in one’s homeland is the subject of this brilliant memoir.
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for life in a maximum-security prison. A rich living story borne, in the author’s words, ‘of iron and concrete.’”
—MICHAEL GREENBERG, author of Hurry Down Sunshine

OTHER PRESS otherpress.com

Contents April 4, 2024

WITH
6 ....................................... Erin Maglaque Wings of Desire
They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos M. N. Eire FRIENDS
8
12
.............................................

....................................
Callie Siskel
Christian Caryl
Poem
Mourning Navalny
The Dissident: Alexey Navalny, Profile of a Political Prisoner
LIKE THESE
by David M. Herszenhorn
Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future? by Jan Matti Dollbaum,
Morvan Lallouet, and Ben Noble
Navalny a film directed by Daniel Roher
16 ............................... Miranda Seymour A Hectic Life
Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer
Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Regency Relations by Christine Kenyon Jones
18 ...................................... Jason DeParle Sisyphus on the Street
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing
to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder
21 .................................... Daphne Merkin The Way She Was
My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
24 ............................................. Eric Foner A ‘Wary Faith’ in the Courts
Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
by Dylan C. Penningroth
28 ................................. Sophie Pinkham Becoming One with Genius
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft ADAM E. CASEY
29 ................................ Michael Robbins Poem
30 ................................... Trevor Jackson The Crash Next Time
Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization by Harold James
UP IN ARMS
The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns and How to Prevent Them How Military Aid Stabilizes—and
by Linda Yueh
33 ........................................ David A. Bell Piety & Power
Destabilizes—Foreign Autocrats
La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten
Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France by Bronwen McShea
35 ...................................... James Quandt An Anatolian Chekhov “Up in Arms is a must-read for
About Dry Grasses a film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
ReFocus: The Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan edited by Gönül Dönmez-Colin anyone interested in the sources
37 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phillip Lopate ‘Thus I Lived with Words’ of authoritarian durability or
The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
edited by Trenton B. Olsen
the geopolitics of the Cold War.”
40 ................................... Margaret Scott Indonesia’s Corrupted Democracy — S T E V E N L E V I T S K Y,
The Coalitions Presidents Make: Presidential Power and Its Limits New York Times –bestselling
in Democratic Indonesia by Marcus Mietzner
coauthor of How Democracies Die

“A brilliant and timely book....

Up in Arms is a powerful reminder
of the limitations of military
assistance to dictatorships.”
— O D D A R N E W E S TA D,
author of The Cold War: A World History

“Adam Casey’s groundbreaking

book turns conventional wisdom
on its head, showing that
American aid to dictators during
the Cold War often destabilized
and shortened rather than
prolonged autocratic rule.”
nybooks.com Amjad Iraqi: The Decimation of Gaza
Sean Wilentz: How the Court Betrayed the Constitution —SHEENA CHESTNUT GREITENS,
Catherine Coleman Flowers: The Struggle Over IVF in Alabama University of Texas at Austin
Joe Bucciero: Budd Hopkins’s Close Encounters
J. Hoberman: A Jewish Bad Boy in Brussels basicbooks.com
Jake Nevins: When the Super Bowl Came to Vegas

Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews
at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at
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3
4 The New York Review
Contributors NEW FROM
LIBRARY OF AMERICA

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department Editor
Emily Greenhouse
of History at Princeton. His latest book is Men on Horseback: The Power of
Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Deputy Editor
Michael Shae
Christian Caryl is an author and journalist. He has worked as an Opinions Executive Editor
editor at The Washington Post, a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, and Jana Prikryl
an editor and columnist at Foreign Policy. Senior Editors
Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Hasan Altaf
Jason DeParle writes about poverty for The New York Times. He is the
author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in Contributing Editors
Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
the 21st Century.
Art Editor
Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia. Leanne Shapton
His books include The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, Managing Editor
which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Reconstruction: America’s Lauren Kane
Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Online Editors
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Trevor Jackson is an economic historian at the University of California at
Berkeley. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Associate Editor
Daniel Drake
Financial Crises, 1690–1830, was published in 2022.
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Phillip Lopate’s most recent book is A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman
Essays. He is the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay. Copyeditor
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Erin Maglaque is a historian at the University of Sheffield. She is writing a
history of the female body. Fact-Checker
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the novel 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love, and she is working on a book Elisabeth Koyfman, Mia Mikki
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Sophie Pinkham teaches at Cornell and is the author of Black Square:
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on Robert Bresson, Shohei Imamura, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Publisher
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a biography of Mary Shelley. Rights
Patrick Hederman, Alaina Taylor
For
Callie Siskel’s first book of poems, Two Minds, will be published in April.
She is a Poetry Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Production Designer Frost’s 150th
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Production a keepsake
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April 4, 2024 5
 Wings of Desire
Erin Maglaque

ment. Saints and their miracles were

physical evidence of the workings
of supernatural grace in the natural
world. They flew, they hovered, they
teleported; their hands and feet bled
like the wounds of Christ; their bodies
glowed with brilliant light; they could
smell the sins of others. They survived
with barely any food—a Eucharist wafer
a day, perhaps—and were supernatu-
ral insomniacs, defying the body’s need
for sleep. They moved objects by tele-
kinesis; they were mind readers. They
could see things happening elsewhere
and received divine messages in their
dreams. They commanded animals and
the weather. When these unusual people
died, their bodies refused to decompose;
their corpses oozed a pleasant-smelling
goo that had healing, miracle-working
properties when smeared onto the bro-
ken bodies of the faithful.
There were hundreds of these flying,
sleepless, starving people in premodern
Europe: one Spanish writer complained
that “it seems as if one had wished
to reduce these kingdoms to a repub-
lic of enchanted beings, living outside
the natural order of things.” Some of
the levitators were famous: Ignatius of
Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, who was
observed glowing and “raised up in the
air, with his knees bent, weeping and
sighing”; or Francis of Assisi, “raised
so high in the air and surrounded by
such radiance” that people lost sight of
The Ecstasy of Saint Joseph of Cupertino; unknown artist of the Italian school, 1700s him. When Giotto painted the scene he
showed Francis levitating above swirl-
ing, parting clouds, a kind of medieval
They Flew: perched there like birds. They flew at He would probably call this a style. I human rocket ship. But so many people
A History of the Impossible the slightest provocation—a lamb that would call it evasion, even a kind of started to fly in early modernity that
by Carlos M. N. Eire. reminded them of Christ, the perfec- professional dishonesty. It’s hard not to there are hundreds more whose names
Yale University Press, 492 pp., $35.00 tion of a tidy flower, the reedy music of feel that he’s written the book in such have now fallen into obscurity, part of
a flute blown by a shepherd. All enough a way that, if pressed, he could plausi- what Eire aptly calls the “inflationary
Have you ever bitten into a piece of to rend the veil of nature and send bly deny that he ever said “they flew.” spiral” of Catholic sanctity.
fruit so delicious, so ripe and perfect them up—up—up. In one such stream of baffling ques- Did they fly? It was a question that
in its flavor and sweetness, that you In They Flew, Eire offers what he calls tions he asks: bore the pressure of a fracturing con-
vibrated, just a little, with pleasure? a “history of the impossible”: a history tinent. The boundary between the su-
The Franciscan beggar Salvador de of the early modern men and women Why do we have high-speed mag- pernatural and the natural was a major
Orta did. He sliced into a pomegran- who levitated and of those who bilo- netic levitation trains but feel the point of contention in the Reforma-
ate and—seeing in the multitude of cated, that is, who were in two places need to bracket all reports about tions that transformed Europe in the
tiny seeds a microcosm of everything at once, whether inside isolated cham- hovering saints or witches? How sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
beautiful in God’s perfectly ordered bers within convents and evangelizing can millions of us humans be in Eire argues that the Protestant re-
world—rose into the air in ecstasy. indigenous communities in New Mexico multiple locations simultaneously formers radically reconfigured the
God was there in the fruit. or on their knees before altars in re- via the internet, day after day, but relationship between the two realms.
He was in the kitchen, too. Teresa of mote Spanish churches and in Japan, still feel the need to scoff at bilo- They sealed off the supernatural world,
Ávila told her spiritual daughters that giving spiritual succor to missionaries. cation? Why is the only fact that made it inaccessible, and “rejected the
“God walks amidst the pots and pans, More than other forms of the miracu- we can accept about human levita- commonplace irruptions of the sacred”
helping you with what’s internal and lous, Eire argues, levitation and biloca- tion the fact that others, long ago, that had characterized medieval Chris-
external at the same time.” So when the tion force us to confront the status of thought it was possible? tianity. For the reformers, there were
nuns found Teresa suspended in the the supernatural in history writing. So no miracles after the biblical period of
air, transfixed in ecstatic union with far, our feet remain on firm scholarly Under the slightest pressure, these in- church history: all accounts of flying,
God, a frying pan still clenched in her ground. For all of Eire’s protests that sinuations collapse. Is Eire claiming healing, glowing were falsehoods, ma-
hand above the cooking flames, they his subject is professionally “eccentric” that magnetic levitation trains are sus- nipulations, superstitions. The mirac-
may not have been surprised. It was or “risky” or even deemed “incompati- pended in the air by God? Or is it rather ulous became a theological weapon in
God, helping her with both the internal ble with seriousness,” the history of the that Joseph of Cupertino had magnets the confessional arsenal. Protestants
(lifting her soul up to heaven) and the supernatural in early modernity—of in his shoes? Did bilocating saints have argued that so-called miracles were
external (the frying of, perhaps, an egg). miracles, witchcraft, magic—is a per- access to a celestial Wi-Fi connection? evidence that the Catholic Church was
They flew. They flew! That is Car- fectly normal field of inquiry. Is the Internet God’s immanence, too? rife with demons, or that they were a
los Eire’s claim, in this deeply unse- What is more incompatible with seri- (In which case, a follow-up question: bunch of swindlers; Catholics argued
rious book. Salvador and Teresa; the ousness is Eire’s contention that these Are we in hell?) To read Eire’s book is that miracles proved God really was
idiot savant Joseph of Cupertino, pa- miracles actually happened. These peo- to experience a profound disorienta- on their side, that Protestantism was
tron saint of airplane travelers; Saint ple flew. At least, I think that’s what tion. He would probably take that as a a heresy.
Francis of Assisi, who with flames of he argues; it’s hard to tell, through the compliment. Is God a magnet? I won- But what sent these enchanted peo-
love pouring from his face and mouth irony. (The closest we get to a thesis is dered, and then had to put down the ple into the sky? Was it God—were
lifted his friend Masseo up in the air this: “The assumed impossibility of cer- book and get some air. they saints? Or were they animated by
BONHA MS L ON DON

with his breath, uttering “Ah! Ah! Ah!” tain events deserves closer scrutiny and demons, flying in an evil sort of way,
These enchanted men and women some challenging.”) His reasoning is not like witches? Worse, were they com-
rose to church rafters and to cruci-
fixes, they flew so high that roof tiles
had to be removed; they flew to the
so much advanced as danced around: in
jokes, in suggestion and coincidence, in
bizarre counterfactuals, in hypotheti-
I n early modernity, the membrane
that separated the natural world
from the supernatural was gossamer
mitting fraud, concealing their stilts
or suspension by ropes, bouncing from
an invisible premodern trampoline?
topmost branches of the trees and cals, in torrents of rhetorical questions. thin; it might be ruptured at any mo- The Catholic Church was reforming

6 The New York Review

 Luhring Augustine
congratulates

SALMAN TOOR
on his inclusion in
La Biennale di Venezia 2024
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa

LUHRING
AUGUSTINE
luhringaugustine.com Photo by Lauren Silberman

April 4, 2024 7
itself, too, and they had to be sure they whip, wore a chain wrapped so tightly was thinner for him, ripped hundreds these levitations were outside, Joseph
weren’t allowing the faithful to pray under his hair shirt that it embedded and hundreds of times. He was held in couldn’t possibly have used trampo-
to a charlatan. The writings of holy into his skin—he levitated. He would the palm of God. When he flew, it was lines or ropes to fake it. “Why,” he asks
people were examined for evidence shriek loudly and rise up into the air. “as if an invisible hand wrapped itself in another one of those rhetorical ques-
of their sanctity, and even Teresa of Crowds of people came to see the around him at those moments and ad- tions, “has he been relegated to the
Ávila wasn’t immune from the Inqui- spectacle. Pilgrims would poke at him, justed his clothes according to what- history of the ridiculous rather than
sition’s suspicion. She wrote her spir- catatonic in his flying state, prick him ever his position was.” to the history of the impossible, or to
itual autobiography knowing that the with needles, try to burn him with Joseph understood his body as his the science of antigravitational forces?”
text would be vetted for orthodoxy and flames, but his soul was already up, his medium. He starved it, whipped it, According to this line of reasoning,
authenticity. Her descriptions of how body insensate. So many came to see abused it violently for decades. Did he Joseph’s flights would necessarily
it felt to levitate give us a sense of him that the friars had to remove tiles starve himself into lightness, with his change our understanding not of his-
what it was like for a woman to ne- from the roof so the masses could watch diet of beans and rotting vegetables? tory but of gravity. But gravity is its own
gotiate such pressures. She describes him fly during the liturgy. He levitated According to hagiographers, when he black hole, if one can bear the mixed
becoming insensate, “as if the soul has constantly, understandably annoying his was dying he called his body asino, metaphor. “Antigravitational forces” is
forgotten to animate the body.” Her fellow friars—what with the shrieking, or “jackass.” During his final illness: a kind of bluster, a way of bludgeoning
eyes were open but unseeing; “I come the soaring, the streaming crowds. He “The jackass has now begun to climb the reader into faith through science, a
close to losing my pulse altogether.” eventually annoyed the Inquisition, too, the mountain.” On the brink of death: cynical appeal to secularism on behalf
And then: she flew. Teresa described and was charged with feigned sanctity. “The jackass has reached the top of the of faith. To say that Joseph flew and
an out-of-body experience, a “new He levitated on the way to his trial. The mountain. He can no longer move. He that our understanding of the laws of
estrangement”: “I must confess,” she examiners gave him a stern warning, will have to leave his hide here.” Sanctity physics therefore must change (how,
wrote, “that it produced an exceedingly and the Inquisition would monitor him made the flesh over into pure meaning. exactly?) is to explain precisely noth-
great fear in me at first—a terrible for the rest of his life, hiding him away The Congregation of Sacred Rites had ing: nothing about the early modern
fear, in fact—because one sees one’s in ever more isolated friaries so as not come to emphasize medical evidence world, nothing about our own, and
body being lifted up from the ground.” to attract crowds to witness the spec- of sanctity, and they performed an au- nothing about the vexed relationship
Not that she enjoyed breaking the tacle. It wasn’t that he was faking it, topsy on his corpse; they found the sac between the enchanted past and our
laws of nature. Teresa begged the other necessarily, but that his flying was so enclosing Joseph’s heart dried up, the disenchanted present.
nuns to grab her habit when she started frequent, so disruptive, so attention- blood burned away. Proof that his heart
to float up; she reached for anything grabbing that it was better to let him had been inflamed by God’s love.
nailed down, she prayed that God would
put an end to her levitations. This was
a winning strategy for holiness, because
fly alone than to deal head-on with the
problem of his extreme sanctity.
A Jesuit returned from speaking
Joseph of Cupertino’s case seems
to have brought Eire to the edge of
his explanatory powers. Joseph, in
M aría de Ágreda, a bilocating saint
from northern Spain, had an
equally extreme approach to the flesh.
the best way to become a saint was to with Joseph and related: “He is very his words, was “so impossibly other- She took a vow of celibacy at eight. At
prove that you never wanted to be one intensely united to God and his heart worldly as to defy rational analysis.” fifteen she became an ascetic, starv-
in the first place. When God eventually is more disposed to this union than Eire claims to have assembled eye- ing herself, wearing a girdle set with
did stop lifting her into the air, that was gunpowder is to ignition by the tiniest witness accounts to Joseph’s flights, spikes, wrapping herself in chains.
yet more proof: she’d even managed to spark.” What did it mean to be so in- but really he’s read hagiographies—a She wore a crucifix hammered with
strike a deal with him. Eight years after tensely open, so intensely vulnerable to genre that hews toward narrative con- needles and pressed it into her breast
she died, Teresa’s miracles were already the divine that every holy word, every sistency and an insistence on its own while she prayed. Soon enough she too
wielded against reformers. One of her ordered and beautiful flower or bird- fidelity to what really happened. What began to levitate; she was so light, so
hagiographers wrote that “God willed song would send him flying? “Every is this hagiographic evidence meant weightless, that the nuns could blow
at this time . . . a lone, poor woman, to natural thing served Joseph as a stair- to be evidence of? I think we’re meant her body here and there “with just
sound her challenge and raise the bat- way to the supernatural,” one of his to believe that these “eyewitness tes- one puff of breath.” While cataleptic
tle flag,” to humiliate the “throngs of superiors remembered. The veil be- timonies” suggest that Joseph, indeed, in Ágreda, she doubled: in 1620, accord-
infidels” and “heretical nations.” tween this world and the supernatural flew. Eire writes that, since most of ing to her, she appeared in northern
The question of sanctity generated
a lot of paperwork. In 1588 the Vati-
can created a new office, the Congre-
gation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies,
to take charge of canonization. Saint Intention to Return
making was complicated. To collect the
accounts of miracles, to verify them; to
interrogate witnesses, seek opinions of In a past life I was not defined by his death.
medical and scientific and theological ... I was not rerouted like a plane through Charlotte.
experts: Church bureaucrats were ver- ... I was part of a “nuclear family,” the phrasing
ifying the supernatural with new evi- of which appears first in 1924 as “the nuclear family complex.”
dentiary standards. This was where the ... I did not have a complex.
promotor fidei, better known as the dev- ... I smiled for the camera.
il’s advocate, came in. But he wasn’t re- ... Love accumulated like debt—mindless, habit-forming.
ally in the pocket of the devil. He was a ... Similes were balanced equations.
professional doubter, a Church bureau- ... I had my father’s face, not “you have your father’s face.”
crat who neither denied the existence
of miracles nor believed in them but al- In a past life I am on the basketball court behind our apartment
lowed instead for a subtler third thing: when I hear his footsteps on the asphalt.
not knowing. Just because some phe- (Does it count as a past life if it happened?)
nomena—a flying friar, a stigmatic and
bleeding nun—couldn’t be explained “In a past life” is not supposed to mean your life before tragedy
didn’t mean it was God at work. but an existence altogether unrecognizable, which is maybe
the same thing: my having been a fir tree.

T he seventeenth-century friar Jo-

seph of Cupertino flew so often,
so extravagantly, so publicly, that he
In a past life

In a past life
the stanza above is nonsensical.

as a fir tree my identity was also pine.

forced everyone around him—peas-
ants and princes, Protestants and in- In a past life that broke off from this one as I watched
quisitors—to confront the boundary a woman walk off of a plane before the doors
between the inexplicable and the im- were armed, I almost followed her.
possible. Joseph was a kind of holy idiot,
called Bocca Aperta (“open mouth”) in In a past life as that woman, as someone who refused
school, who did everything wrong: he to comply, as a passenger without baggage, without a story
read poorly, was kicked out of a mon- she answers to exclusively, no one would know me.
astery for breaking pots and spilling
food. Accepted into a new friary, he was In a past life the allure is not who we were but who we are not.
put in charge of the mule because he
couldn’t do anything else right. After —Callie Siskel
two years of intense mortification and
starvation—he ate only herbs, dried
fruit, beans, and rotting vegetables; he
barely slept, scourged himself with a

8 The New York Review

April 4, 2024 9
New Spain (present-day Texas and New nor now was I, or am I capable of Ascensión, her contemporary in north- of They Flew is that Eire’s re-enchanted
Mexico), evangelizing the indigenous knowing the way it happened. ern Castile, bilocated to all of the most history leaves the past less clear, less
Jumano people, baptizing them, and action-packed spots of the early modern real, and less vivid than the secular his-
teaching them the Gospel. She came Did María diminish her claims upon Catholic world: to Philip III’s deathbed, tories of the miraculous that—precisely
back with detailed knowledge of the the supernatural for the benefit of the to a martyr’s side in Japan, even to the because of their secularism—have to
local weather. It took a long time for Inquisition, or had the intervening Battle of White Mountain near Prague, work harder to understand early mod-
later missionaries there and María’s years brought on a certain doubt? “I to cheer the Catholics to victory. But ern faith on its own strange terms.
superiors in Spain to get their stories have always questioned the idea that some of her fellow nuns saw her se- I am sympathetic to some of the
straight, but eventually they confirmed it happened to me in my body,” she cretly eating more than just the com- problems Eire identifies in our dom-
it: the Jumano had been visited by the told them; she had her own theories: munion crackers she had claimed to be inant approach to the study of early
Lady in Blue, who had baptized them sustained by—and she was eventually modern religion. But they do not mean
and taught them the rudiments of If the number five hundred is denounced as a fraud by the Inquisition. we need to become re-enchanted, were
Catholic faith in their own language. taken to represent all the times I such a thing even possible; or that, as
The frequency of María’s biloca- became aware of those kingdoms, other historians have suggested, we
tions—more than five hundred of
them, she guessed—and the great
distances she traveled raised the
in one way or another, or all the
times I prayed for or wanted their
conversion, in that sense it is true.
H ow should we interpret these sto-
ries of flying and bilocating, of de-
mons and chapped nipples? Of the body
might fracture into two academies, the
secular and the nonsecular. There is
room to become more critical, though,
suspicions of the Inquisition. Years and its impossible desires? Eire’s ap- of the way that “truth” and “atheism”
afterward they came to her convent Truth was capacious, flexible, could proach is idiosyncratic. Across his schol- have become synonymous. We might
and interviewed her, over ten gruel- encompass considerable doubt. María arship he has aimed to “re-enchant” take a cue from María de Ágreda’s
ing days of questioning about matters longed to be with the Jumano, and her history, in the words of Ronald Rittgers. comfort with unknowing, her ability
physical and metaphysical. “Since the intense wanting was a kind of truth, too. Eire understands modern secularism as to transform the longings of the imagi-
regions she visited were so barbarous The isolation of the convent and this its own kind of methodology, with its nation into their own form of truth, and
that the people have no language and desire for the divine was a potent mix own interpretive shortcomings. Athe- so to make truth itself more expansive.
can only grunt, how did she preach to for holy women. In sixteenth-century ism, as much as faith, shapes the ques- I agree, too, that recent histories of
them and teach them?” Did she mount Córdoba, Magdalena de la Cruz claimed tions we ask of our sources and limits religion that understand early mod-
a platform? Did she take rosaries with that she was impregnated by the Holy the possibilities of interpretation. In ern beliefs and practices as a set of
her? “Did she get wet when it rained Spirit, that she gave birth to a baby on his award-winning memoir Waiting for discourses, ideologies, and repre-
on the way to those other kingdoms or Christmas, breastfed him, and swaddled Snow in Havana (2003), Eire conveys the sentations can be unsatisfying. This
when she was there, and, if so, did she him in her hair. The baby vanished, but immediacy of the supernatural during approach risks reducing belief to some-
return to the convent [with] her habit she challenged skeptics to look at her his childhood in revolutionary Cuba and thing discursive, to a text the histo-
still wet?” Did American rain drip onto raw nipples as proof. She finally con- as a child refugee in the United States. rian can untangle and cleanly interpret
the floor of the convent in Ágreda? fessed that her miracles had been the He has written that the “doctrinaire without ever having to truly confront
María reflected on her flights. work of two demons, Balban and Pa- Marxist-Leninist totalitarian regime” what was real and radical about belief.
tonio. In the same century María de la shaped his understanding of history. The distancing effect of this kind of
Drawing on the better understand- Visitación in Lisbon slept with a life- Religious belief shouldn’t be explained cultural history is frustrating, with its
ing of things I have now that I am size cross in her bed every night and away as a symptom of something else, unexamined conviction that we, with
older, it seems to me that either called it “my wife.” She claimed she had as a functionalist response to politi- our lack of belief, can make belief make
it was all the work of my imagina- received the stigmata but was found, on cal violence, say, or economic scarcity. sense. But to do so is to misunderstand
tion or that God showed me those closer inspection, to have used a mix of Faith—and especially lived faith, not what it means to believe. There is an
things by means of abstract im- paint and her own blood to create intri- abstract theology—can make history, irreducible quality to Joseph’s flight:
ages of the kingdoms and what was cate trompe l’oeil wounds on her palms too. “Belief is the immortal soul of the something unnerving, excessive—not
going on there. . . . Neither then, and the soles of her feet. Luisa de la imagination,” Eire writes at the close a cold discourse but a fantasy of the
of They Flew, and the power of belief to body’s possibility. “Flight is also a pos-
make history “can be limitless.” itive course,” the historian Joan Scott
As Eire and others have argued, has written, in a meditation on the
secularism involves its own, often place of fantasy in history: “a soaring;
unacknowledged assumptions about it traces the path of desire.”
historical interpretation. But for all How might we approach the early
that Eire makes himself out to be a modern world as absolutely real? How
lone wolf howling against the secular can we navigate between the dogmas of
status quo, the field of early modern unconditional faith and unconditional
religious history has long been riven secularism? A flying saint is neither a
by these questions of faith, secularism, rebuke to gravitational physics nor a
and how we interpret the beliefs of the cultural script to be read for rational
past. Brad Gregory’s The Unintended meaning. Both approaches subordinate
Reformation (2012) mounted an intense all that was strange and extravagant
attack on the secular academy, arguing about the early modern past to our own
(as he put it later) that dull preoccupations. Is there another
way? Like the promotor fidei, I am drawn
some religious truth claims are to the realm between belief and unbe-
consistent with all possible find- lief, of not knowing. I want to take the
ings of the natural sciences, that devil’s side: the side of the inexplicable.
the denial of the possibility of mir- We might follow the instincts of the
acles is an unverifiable dogma, and Congregation of Sacred Rites as they
that some religious claims are in- sliced open the corpses of saints, looking
tellectually viable today and there- for answers to the problem of the super-
fore might be true. natural in the oddities of the flesh. In
Philip Neri’s enlarged heart, thought to
But does that mean unbelieving his- be so swollen by the fervor of his prayer
torians can never understand the past? that it broke apart his ribs; in Carlo Bor-
A faithful friend Does belief offer special access to the romeo’s divine absence of a penis, said
elements of early modernity—faith to have withered away from virginal
and the supernatural—that exceeds neglect. In the dripping juice of a really
Vitsœ’s 606 Universal Shelving System “rational” or secular attempts at inter- good pomegranate running between holy
has now been in continuous production pretation? These are serious questions, fingers. What could be a richer site of
for 63 years. Our customers come to and Eire does not approach them with fantasy than the sore nipples of Magda-
rely on its dependability. the rigor and care they deserve. Rather lena de la Cruz, aching for her vanished
than deeply involving himself in the baby, born on Christmas Day? Or the tiny
Collar our friendly team and we’ll walk
you through the process.
faith of his early modern subjects, he paintings that decorated the palms of
rationalizes their beliefs in the terms María de la Visitación, those miniature
of the same scientific epistemologies realist illusions of Christ’s own wounds?
he claims to criticize: the irruption of These oozing, luminous early modern
New York
Los Angeles the supernatural into the natural world bodies remind us of what we can’t ex-

.
bears an “eerie resemblance to the mul- plain. Of the desires and excesses and
vitsoe.com tiverse cosmology proposed by some fantasies irreducible to blind faith or to
astrophysicists in our own day and age,” blind reason; of a time when you could
for example. One of the strange ironies starve yourself until you flew.

10 The New York Review

 “Intimate and lyrical.”
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about the perils
and promise of
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—Ѐ஗ЄϽசϸச஝சϽІ஗ϽЇ
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“One man’s work to

change the meaning
RIIDWKHU֞IRUKLPVHOI
KLVVRQDQGXV֦
—ச஗Ϻ஖ϸசϻ஖ϸசச஗஛Ђ஘
On Not Losting My
Father’s Ashes in the Flood

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April 4, 2024 11
 Mourning Navalny
Christian Caryl

The Dissident: agent in 2020. His well-crafted vid-

Alexey Navalny, Profile eos investigating corruption among
of a Political Prisoner elites have reached tens of millions of
by David M. Herszenhorn. viewers inside Russia and out. Recent
Twelve, 307 pp., $30.00 surveys suggest that his name recog-
nition in recent years reached around
Navalny: 75 percent, in a country where he was
Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future? almost entirely excluded from state
by Jan Matti Dollbaum, media and the president notoriously
Morvan Lallouet, and Ben Noble. refused to say his name.
Oxford University Press, After his death those who wish for
280 pp., $29.95; $19.95 (paper) change in Russia face a daunting chal-
lenge. Navalny is irreplaceable, and
Navalny trying to find a substitute would be
a film directed by Daniel Roher a pointless exercise. Yet it is a poor
politician who fails to create a legacy
On February 16, not long after news of capable of surviving him. In Naval-
the death of Alexey Navalny became ny’s case, he bequeaths a great deal
public, television cameras caught Rus- to those who follow in his footsteps.
sian president Vladimir Putin on a visit
to the industrial city of Chelyabinsk.
He appeared relaxed, businesslike,
at times ebullient. No one asked him
about the opposition leader’s passing,
A bove all else, Navalny—underap-
preciated as a political innovator—
succeeded in finding an approach to
and he offered no comment on it. There democratic politics that would appeal
was no sign of the somber mien Putin to a new generation of Russians whose
assumed in 2015 when asked about the lives have been shaped by Putin and
death of Boris Nemtsov, another prom- who now yearn to imagine alternatives.
inent critic, who had been gunned down The Dissident, David Herszenhorn’s
just a few hundred feet from the gates thoroughly reported biography, does
of the Kremlin. Back then Putin vowed a good job of capturing Navalny’s style.
a thorough investigation to hunt down Its title is a calculated provocation: Na-
Nemtsov’s killers, even claiming in an valny, Herszenhorn argues, made a con-
aside that he and Nemtsov had main- scious effort to contrast himself with
tained “friendly relations.” the prodemocracy activists of the late
Today there is evidently no need for Soviet and early post-Soviet periods,
such pretense. For Putin, the timing of and he rejected the “dissident” label be-
Navalny’s death couldn’t be more con- cause it evoked a class of intellectuals
venient. From March 15 through March and idealists who could be depicted all
17, Russians will cast their votes in what too easily as remote from the concerns
is still referred to as a “presidential Alexey Navalny; illustration by John Brooks of everyday life. Many of those activists,
election,” although it bears little resem- Herzsenhorn notes, also happened to
blance to what is usually understood by Since Putin launched his full-scale ultranationalists and pro-war bloggers be Jewish. That didn’t necessarily help
the term. Putin’s genuine opponents— invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, who have dared to criticize the conduct them build support among a populace
unlike the fake candidates the Kremlin he has used the war as an excuse to of the war from the right, a reverber- permeated by antisemitism. “He, his
allows onto ballots to create an illusion crack down on his critics on a scale ation from the mercenary leader Yev- wife, Yulia, and their children, Darya
of competition—never stood a chance previously unseen during his presi- geny Prigozhin’s abortive mutiny last and Zakhar, look like they could be
of challenging him. But their presence dency. He has imprisoned an entire summer. Just in case anyone didn’t get models in an advertisement depict-
could have resulted in some awkward catalog of prominent liberal politi- the message, when a hitherto little- ing the stereotypical ideal of a Slavic,
moments for the president.1 Now the cians, including Vladimir Kara-Murza known liberal named Boris Nadezh- Russian family,” Herszenhorn writes,
possibility of such disruptions has been (currently serving a twenty-five-year- din recently announced that he had noting that this made it harder to por-
eliminated. Navalny’s death represents sentence for treason in a Siberian collected enough signatures to get tray them as outsiders. Some may find
the culmination of the Kremlin’s efforts prison) and Ilya Yashin (sentenced himself on the presidential ballot, such considerations repellent, but it’s
to push the country into a political deep to eight and a half years, under new the Kremlin swiftly quashed his effort. hard to deny that they are influential
freeze. Russians find themselves inhabit- censorship laws, for allegedly dissem- Yet no other figure in the liberal op- in public discourse.
ing a kingdom of fear reminiscent of the inating fake news about the Russian position has managed to inspire hope Like any other Russian prodemoc-
reigns of Nicholas I, Stalin, or Brezhnev. military). The human rights organiza- quite as powerfully as Navalny. Char- racy activist, moreover, Navalny had to
tion OVD -Info says that 19,855 activ- ismatic, fit, and young (in telling con- contend with the legacy of the 1990s,
1
Modern-day Russia maintains certain out- ists have been detained for protesting trast to the gerontocratic leadership), when the country’s brief experiment
ward appearances of democracy aimed at against the war. Thousands of others— he demonstrated remarkable physical with liberalism coincided with hyperin-
giving the political system a sheen of le- including those members of Navalny’s courage, political acumen, and organi- flation, crass inequality, high unemploy-
gitimacy. For this reason, election ballots team who were able to escape—now zational skills. Most important of all, ment, open gang warfare, and political
often include candidates from multiple live in exile abroad. They are part of a he created a distinct public voice—I chaos. While the country did indeed
parties (aside from United Russia, the rul- much larger group of Russians, num- shudder to use the word “brand”—that enjoy many vital freedoms during the
ing party). The catch is that those parties bering in the hundreds of thousands, avoided many of the weaknesses of 1990s, very few Russians who lived
are almost always part of what is called the who have left the country to avoid con- previous opposition leaders and of- through the period are likely to look
“systemic opposition”—referring to tame, scription or complicity with the war. fered the promise of genuine gener- back on it with fondness. Navalny ex-
Kremlin-approved parties that are sup- Many of these emigrants, even if not ational change. plicitly distanced himself from this
posed to offer an appearance of pluralism. active supporters of Putin’s critics, are Navalny deployed that voice to legacy by criticizing some of its most
What I call the “real opposition” (or per- members of the younger generation punch a gigantic hole through the obvious injustices. “I fiercely, madly
haps “authentic opposition”) encompasses working in knowledge-intensive in- official myth that Russians are uni- hate all those who sold, drank away,
the various figures who, as Navalny did, gen- dustries—the kind of educated, urban fied in worshipful obeisance to their wasted the historic chance our nation
uinely offer criticism of the Putin regime and voters who helped Navalny make an supreme leader. In the process he ef- had in the early 1990s,” he wrote from
propose alternative policies. Navalny realized impressively strong showing against fectively succeeded in breaking the re- prison last year. I have no doubt that
that the election system gave voters an op- the officially approved candidate for gime’s monopoly on public life. During he was sincere in these beliefs, but they
portunity to register their discontent with mayor of Moscow in 2013. the 2018 presidential campaign he also happened to be shrewd positioning.
the system. He developed a clever strategy he Nor has Putin restricted his attacks created a political organization that It was striking how consistently Na-
called “Smart Voting,” which urged Russians to prodemocracy activists. Oligarchs encompassed thousands of enthusi- valny avoided lofty appeals to abstract
to give their votes to the candidate from the and business leaders have either been astic activists and dozens of cities, an principles when making his case for
systemic opposition who had the best chance cowed into silence or driven out of achievement that shocked the Krem- democracy. He liked to stress that the
of winning. In several cases this caused con- the country. The authorities have lin and may well have precipitated its world’s most developed countries were
siderable embarrassment for the Kremlin. also been arresting and silencing the attempt to poison him with a nerve wealthy precisely because they were

12 The New York Review

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April 4, 2024 13
free; even though he sharply criticized rancor. He once described Putin as a learned a great deal from the Popu- dream can take valuable lessons from
the war in Ukraine, he usually cast his “naked, thieving king” who “doesn’t give lists) and his cousin Franklin. his example. His successors should em-
opposition in the language of economic a damn about the country.” Another time By stirring up powerful collective ulate his pragmatism, and they should
scandal rather than pacifist principle. he took aim at one of Putin’s friends, emotions, however, populism always embrace his model of democratic pop-
(Daniel Roher’s 2022 documentary Vladimir Yakunin (then the notoriously runs the danger of smothering rational ulism, channeling his sense of outrage
Navalny shows him doing a call-and- sleazy head of Russian Railways), by debate and vilifying opponents as less and his intense yearning for justice into
response at a rally: “Do you want to pay launching a website called “The Adven- than human. Navalny was not immune political positions that resonate with or-
for war?” “No!” yells the crowd.) Such tures of Piglet Yakunin.” In a 2011 in- to these dangers. In 2006, in the early dinary people, not only the intelligentsia.
pragmatism resonated with a popula- terview he famously coined a new label stages of his political career, he began For anyone who wants a sense of the
tion steeped in the profoundly cynical for the widely despised ruling party, taking part in the Russian March, an an- possible path forward, I suggest watch-
world of modern-day Russia, where any United Russia: “the Party of Crooks nual procession of various ultranation- ing the heartrending video released
appeal to exalted values is likely to be and Thieves.” The name has stuck. alists, including skinheads and Nazis. a few days after Navalny’s passing by
dismissed as a scam. Even when Na- In 2012, in a typical polemic, Navalny (This resulted in his expulsion from the his wife, Yulia, who vowed to continue
valny sang the praises of democracy, took on an archconservative lawmaker liberal Yabloko party.) One of his 2007 the struggle:
he rarely sounded like Václav Havel or named Sergei Zheleznyak, who despite videos depicts him gunning down a
Nelson Mandela. his screeds against the West was re- hijab-clad terrorist, who is equated with We must use every opportunity:
Neatly dovetailing with this practical vealed to be sending his children to ex- cockroaches and flies. In 2008, when fight against war, against corrup-
approach was his persistent campaign pensive private schools in Switzerland Russia launched an invasion of Geor- tion, against injustice. Fight for
against corruption, an issue with a vis- and the UK, paying fees far beyond the gia, Navalny tacitly approved, infamously fair elections and freedom of ex-
ceral impact on every Russian. Navalny, reach of his official salary. “I’m sure equating Georgians with “rodents.” And pression, fight to take back our
who began his career as a shareholder you hate this lying, hypocritical scoun- when the Kremlin sent troops into east- country. I know what I’m fighting
activist, gradually came to see the bra- drel as much as I do,” Navalny wrote. ern Ukraine in 2014 and seized Crimea, for. I’m fighting for a new future
zen venality of the regime as its great- His team has specialized in exposing he didn’t clearly side with the principle for my family and my children.
est weakness. He combined this insight this kind of hypocrisy among Russia’s of Kyiv’s sovereignty over its own terri-
with a knack for leveraging the power elite, who proclaim their “patriotism” tory. While acknowledging that Russia’s She may well prove adept at filling his
of the Internet, and soon his team was and rail against the West even as they annexation of Crimea was “a flagrant shoes. But she confronts a harsh reality.
producing a steady stream of incendiary fund their children’s glamorous lives in violation of all international norms,” he Her husband’s remarkable political or-
videos for YouTube (the one major social London (Foreign Minister Sergei Lav- also urged Ukrainians to accept its loss. ganization, which we see him boasting
media platform that remains uncen- rov) or Paris (Putin’s press secretary, “Crimea will remain part of Russia and about in Roher’s documentary, has been
sored in the country today, probably be- Dmitry Peskov). Nor has Putin been ex- will never become part of Ukraine again almost entirely smashed, its members
cause so many people remain dependent empt. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foun- in the foreseeable future,” he said, and arrested or driven into exile. A number
on it for commerce and entertainment). dation published evidence that one of added that he would be unlikely to return of his lawyers are now imprisoned.
The videos are beautifully produced, the president’s daughters owns a villa it if he became president. “Is Crimea a Navalny embodied hope. That hope
cleverly scripted, and great fun to in Biarritz, while his ex-wife Lyudmila sandwich, or something, to be passed cannot be allowed to die with him.
watch, which helps explain why they acquired properties in Spain. back and forth? I don’t think so.” The situation is grim, but if the past
have found such an astonishing audi- This sort of frontal attack on the The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, in a two years have shown us anything, it
ence. Navalny’s team flew drones over highest levels of the Russian state re- thoughtful account of Navalny’s polit- is that Russia’s war on Ukraine has
the immense estate of Dmitry Medve- quired extraordinary courage. Navalny ical evolution, notes that this “realist” introduced a new element of unpre-
dev, who served as Putin’s placeholder was unabashed. “Of course, we under- position angered both Ukrainians in- dictability into the Eurasian political
in the presidency from 2008 to 2012, stand that the more crooked, thieving censed by the seizure of their land and landscape. Throughout Russian his-
and caught a deputy prime minister and criminal an official is, the more chauvinist Russians who objected to his tory, military disasters have triggered
cavorting with prostitutes on an oli- stable his position in Putin’s system emphasis on the illegality of the annex- coup attempts, shake-ups, and revo-
garch’s yacht. They released their most of power is,” he wrote. “I personally un- ation.2 He publicly apologized for his lutions—a pattern well known to the
devastating exposé of all, on Putin’s derstand that the more I piss on this or comments on Georgia, and Ukrainians president and his minions. Prigozhin’s
alleged billion-dollar vacation home that swindler, the dearer he is to Putin.” were somewhat mollified by his sub- Wagner Group forces were hailed as he-
on the Black Sea, in January 2021, just In his court appearances, Navalny sequent criticisms of Putin’s war. But roes by the citizens of Rostov-on-Don
days after Navalny’s last arrest. Ac- frequently lashed out not only at the a certain mistrust has lingered. The before they set off on their ill-fated
cording to YouTube, “Putin’s Palace” president and senior officials, but also Kremlin has seized the opportunity to march to Moscow last June, offering
has been viewed 130 million times; it at his judges, prosecutors, and jailers. run disinformation campaigns casting yet another reminder of the volatility
is likely that a quarter of the Russian He couldn’t resist taunting his cap- Navalny as an unrepentant ultrana- of seemingly quiescent public opinion.
population has watched it. tors in the most personal terms. This tionalist (reminiscent of its efforts to Ukraine’s military effort may be running
If Russians find the excesses of their may have helped to hasten his death, depict Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis”). into trouble at the moment, but it is
leaders infuriating, that is precisely though his guards certainly didn’t This is rather rich, coming from a gov- worth remembering that two years ago
the point. Anger was a Navalny trade- need an additional reason to abuse ernment that looks more fascist in its very few outside observers anticipated
mark. He inhabited, Herszenhorn says, him. During the last month of his life, actions and rhetoric every day. that Kyiv was capable of thwarting a
a black-and-white world in which Putin in the Arctic prison to which he was In his film Roher asks Navalny point- full-scale Russian invasion, much less
and his minions stood clearly on the transferred in December, he was se- blank about this issue. “If I want to be retaking large swaths of territory, in-
side of evil: “He is driven by outrage, verely punished, again and again, for a leader of a country,” he responded, “I flicting debilitating losses on the Rus-
and what he has described as ‘hate’—a various minor infractions. He ended cannot just ignore [a] huge part of it,” sian military, or effectively driving most
personal, visceral animus toward his up spending much of his last three noting that many Russians were “na- of the Black Sea Fleet out of its home
opponents. He hates being lied to, hates years in solitary confinement. tionalists” and that he intended to build port in Sevastopol. The Russian econ-
feeling like he is being ripped off, hates a coalition that included them. Promi- omy may have recovered from its initial
being taken for a fool.” Herszenhorn’s nent liberal oppositionists have spoken difficulties in the early phases of the
book evokes this quality well. Proba-
bly because of the inaccessibility of his
subject, Herszenhorn seems to have
R ighteous rage at the powers that be
is a prominent ingredient in many
populist movements, and I doubt that
up for Navalny over the years, arguing
that he had evolved away from his more
blinkered views and that his commit-
war, but its foundations remain shaky.
I have no doubt that Putin is con-
gratulating himself over the demise of
made an effort to compile just about Navalny would have shied away from the ment to genuine democracy couldn’t his hated enemy. He is now cruising
every public statement made by Na- label. Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lal- be doubted. Gessen credits him, a bit into the March election without a sin-
valny over the past decade and a half, louet, and Ben Noble, in their otherwise more cautiously, with trying to imagine gle notable rival. Never has he looked
and he quotes from these sources ob- skillful analysis of his politics, Navalny: “a post-imperial Russian national iden- so impregnable. Yet he shouldn’t get
sessively—to an extent that sometimes Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future?, are tity.” There is no question that such an too comfortable. Time and time again
makes it hard to follow the narrative. keen to defend him against those who effort is urgently needed. When Putin we have witnessed the fragility in-
Yet Herszenhorn’s approach does would define him as a populist, but their leaves the stage—hopefully sooner herent in autocratic systems. Today
convey a vivid sense of Navalny’s public efforts are misdirected. Since the US rather than later—prodemocracy ac- Russia has reached a point where ev-
persona: smart, obstreperous, contemp- presidential election in 2016, “populism” tivists will succeed only if they can fill erything depends on the whim of a
tuous of those in power, unbelievably has often been identified with the au- the void with a new brand of Russian man who has repeatedly demonstrated
brave but also funny in a way that thoritarian, far-right tendencies Trump patriotism founded on healthy civic that he is trapped in a bubble of self-
contrasts with the joylessness of ear- and many other contemporary leaders institutions rather than destructive delusion, reliant on information sup-
lier generations of human rights de- embody. The term refers more generally, chauvinist myths. But finding the right plied by servile courtiers, and flattered
fenders. His self-deprecating sense of though, to any politician or movement balance will be a challenge. by his entourage even as disasters
humor was a huge asset, and his love that professes to defend the interests multiply. Navalny got under Putin’s
of American pop culture conveyed a of the “people” (however broadly or nar- skin precisely because he was so blunt
sense of approachability. (It’s hard to rowly defined) against the machinations
N avalny’s loss is a shattering blow about revealing this fundamental vul-

.
imagine Alexander Solzhenitsyn or An- of an entrenched elite. In the US the to the dream of a free Russia. nerability. And there is something that
drei Sakharov proclaiming their love of People’s Party (aka the Populist Party) But those who continue to pursue that Putin doesn’t understand: Navalny may
Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rick and at the end of the nineteenth century be gone, but his followers are many.
2
Morty.) Yet there is also something au- embraced this position to great effect; “The Evolution of Alexey Navalny’s Na- And they will not forget.
thentically Russian about his earthy so, too, did Theodore Roosevelt (who tionalism,” February 15, 2021. —March 7, 2024

14 The New York Review

 FRI APRIL 5 9/8C
PBS.ORG/AMERICANMASTERS

April 4, 2024 15
 A Hectic Life
Miranda Seymour

Byron: A Life in Ten Letters “Provocative and Provoking: Fifty

by Andrew Stauffer. Shades of Byron.” In Missolonghi,
Cambridge University Press, where he died of fever and excessive
401 pp., $29.95 bleeding by his nervously assiduous
doctors, the 48th International Byron
Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Conference is more soberly titled
Regency Relations “Byron: The Pilgrim of Eternity.” In
by Christine Kenyon Jones. London, meanwhile, a handsome late-
Bloomsbury Academic, Victorian statue by Richard Belt of a
244 pp., $90.00; $26.95 (paper) meditative Byron, perched high upon a
red-and-white marble plinth bestowed
“I go forth to be recognized,” Lord by grateful Greece, is due to be moved
Byron’s reluctant military leader an- from a dusty, inaccessible traffic is-
nounces in Sardanapalus, a verse land on Park Lane to a leafier spot in
drama about the enigmatic Assyrian Hyde Park. Andrew Stauffer and Jon-
king that he intended to dedicate to his athan Sachs have edited a handsome
admirer Goethe. The play was begun but far from comprehensive selection
in 1821, when the self-exiled poet was of Byron’s work for the bicentenary.2
living in Ravenna with his lover Te- Stauffer’s impressively concise Byron:
resa Guiccioli and her compliant hus- A Life in Ten Letters stresses his least
band, while discreetly supporting the controversial aspect—the heroic link
Carbonari, a secret revolutionary so- to Greece’s war for independence—by
ciety that aimed to liberate Italy from closing with the presentation of Mis-
Austrian domination. Two years later, solonghi, proud repository of Byron’s
having scuppered a plan to join Simón heart (“or maybe it was his lungs, re-
Bolívar’s far more successful battle to moved for embalming”), as “this or-
free South America from Spanish rule, phan’s final adopted home.” Kenyon
Byron threw himself into the cause of Jones, a noted Byron scholar, prefers
liberating Greece from the Ottomans. to identify this troublesome figure as
After selling his elegant cruising yacht, Jane Austen’s Regency contemporary,
the Bolivar, to the fathomlessly rich both of them brilliant satirists of the
Lord Blessington, he sailed on July 24, paradoxical mores and politics in an
1823, for Cephalonia. Traveling with era of rampant poverty, loose morals,
him on a chartered brig, the Hercules, and fiercely defined class codes.
were Teresa’s idealistic brother, Count All bodes well for a thoughtfully pre-
Pietro Gamba, and the late Percy Shel- pared bicentenary, and yet it’s unclear
ley’s devoted admirer Edward Tre- just what the “mad, bad and dangerous
lawny, a swaggering impersonator of Lord Byron; illustration by Grant Shaffer to know” Byron (as his excitable lover
the hero of Byron’s wildly popular The Lady Caroline Lamb described him3), a
Corsair, ten thousand copies of which engraved plates showing his handsome Phillips’s glowing portrait of a saber- witty dandy with the flamboyant atti-
were sold on the morning it was pub- creator visiting those same exotic lo- carrying Lord Byron in Albanian dress, tudes of a raucously chauvinistic age,
lished in 1814. cations) to the mocking, chattily trans- which was purchased by the future can contribute today. A famous hatred
It’s uncertain whether any of these gressive narrator of Don Juan, Byron Lady Byron’s admiring mother, would of “cant,” by which he generally meant
three bold musketeers ever donned maintained an extraordinary ability resonate with his leadership ten years hypocrisy, doesn’t necessarily equip
the theatrical helmets that Byron to convince his readers that each one later of a band of similarly kilted Al- Byron to ridicule an epoch that, while
had designed so they might emulate of them had a secret hotline to his banian Souliotes in the cause of Greek prudish and often dull, is also more
Homeric heroes. In his static drama attentive ear, if not to his generously independence?) The publisher’s much- enlightened than his own.
(one the author rightly never wished shared bed. criticized decision—initiated and sup-
to see performed), Sardanapalus in- Murray, a shameless toady who “mi- ported by Byron’s increasingly prim
spects his helmet in a mirror before
rejecting it as unfit for battle. Byron
might have found it faintly funny that
lorded” his proudly aristocratic writer
as much as possible—Christine Ken-
yon Jones, in Jane Austen and Lord
friend John Cam Hobhouse—to host
a posthumous bonfire of the allegedly
scandalous memoirs that Byron had
T he change of attitude toward sex-
ual ethics since the last major cele-
bration of Byron (the 150th anniversary
his funeral rites at Missolonghi, the Byron: Regency Relations, counts given to Thomas Moore, their dedi- of his death in 1974) has been great.
small Greek coastal town where he twelve squirming “my Lords” and “your cated editor, for private circulation Introducing the first volume of his let-
died in the spring of 1824, included Lordships” in the opening thirty-six did no harm to his client’s book sales ters in 1973, Leslie Marchand evidently
the ceremonious placing of his own lines of the publisher’s first letter to by adding to the mystery.1 felt no qualms about describing his
showy headgear upon the coffin, be- his new client—was frequently ap- uninhibitedly promiscuous subject as
side a sword. The tribute was, how- prehensive about the impact of the the “ravished” victim (“Poor dear me,”
ever, in keeping with the melancholy
wish Byron expressed in the poem that
ended his final journal, “On This Day
volatile author’s personal life on book
sales. Murray’s worries about Byron’s
scandalous and much-discussed love
B yron today is more famous than
read. Despite his literary influ-
ence—Pushkin and Stendhal, for
Byron sighed to a male friend) of a
pack of obsessed women “who forced
their attention on him.” After the public
I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” for affairs were reasonable. But despite example, are unimaginable without exposures of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey
“a soldier’s grave.” his concerns, Byron’s Turkish narra- him—his reputation is up for assess- Epstein, and sundry other tarnished
Nobody understood better than John tive poems (The Gaiour, The Corsair, ment and strategic repositioning in figures, that argument feels as awk-
Murray, the canny Scottish publisher and Lara) seemed not to cost him the bicentennial year of his death. ward as Marchand’s chilling denunci-
who made a fortune from selling By- readers—quite the opposite—with In Nottinghamshire this summer, a ation of Claire Clairmont, the mother
ron’s works to an adoring public, the their strong hints of an incestuous conference at Byron’s ancestral home, of Byron’s lively, short-lived daughter
commercial value of the poet’s know- relationship with his married half- Newstead Abbey, is jauntily headlined Allegra, as the sole instigator of “an
ing identification of himself with his sister, Augusta Leigh. Murray took unfortunate and unwanted affair.” How
1
subjects. Hard though the going some- fright when Blackwood’s Magazine But were the memoirs inflammatory? would Byron fare today with the de-
times proved to be, it was worth the criticized Don Juan in 1819 for por- Moore wanted to publish them, and on De- fense that he sheepishly submitted to
shrewd bookseller’s time and patience traying the irreproachably virtuous cember 31, 1819, Byron had even invited his loyal friend Douglas Kinnaird: “A
to stay on excellent terms both with Lady Byron as Juan’s humorless and his estranged wife to read them, assuring man is a man—& if a girl of eighteen
his most successful author—even after moralistic mother, Donna Inez, but Annabella that he had omitted “the most comes prancing to you at all hours—
he refused to publish the final, buoy- over a million copies of Don Juan were important & decisive events & passions” of there is but one way”? Really, m’lud?
antly scurrilous cantos of Don Juan— sold—largely in pirated form—before his life, while telling the candid truth about
and with Annabella Milbanke, Byron’s Byron’s death. their marriage. Lady Byron declined the 2
Lord Byron: Selected Writings (Oxford Uni-
devoted but incurably self-righteous Murray’s task grew simpler when the offer. Moore incorporated much of what he
versity Press, 2024).
wife and widow. From the gloomily exiled, disgraced, and vociferously im- recalled from the memoirs, including By-
3
aloof hero of Childe Harold’s Pilgrim- penitent Byron redeemed himself as ron’s first ravishing of his bride on a sofa, See my review of Antonia Fraser’s Lady
age (whose far-flung travels were ac- a champion of freedom. (Who in 1814 in his admirable The Letters and Journals Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (Pegasus, 2023)
companied from edition to edition by could have guessed how richly Thomas of Lord Byron, published by Murray in 1830. in these pages, November 23, 2023.

16 The New York Review

 Marchand’s magnificent edition of her daughter-in-law, Caroline Lamb— a visit to a monastery. After scream- rified Percy Shelley (not yet her hus-
the letters reflected a carefree, pos- in his careful elevation of him as a ing at the alarmed abbot, the recently band) into a visionary fit.
turing age that had grown as cal- writer for our time: a rootless genius arrived guest darted into a side room The plot thickens. Kenyon Jones
lously nonchalant about sex as Byron’s who recovered his sense of self-worth and, tearing off his clothes and hurl- points out that in December 1815 John
own. Back in the dourer days of 1937 as the faithful cavaliere servente of Te- ing a chair at the door, began to rave: Murray chose to send a copy of Emma
T. S. Eliot, revisiting the Romantic resa Guiccioli and hero of the Greek “Back! Out of my sight! Fiends, can I not to the increasingly unhappy Lord
poets, sternly condemned Byron as Revolution? have no peace, no relief from this hell?” and Lady Byron at their Piccadilly
the one “most nearly remote from the Stauffer’s verdict on Byron’s “strange home, but to Byron and Augusta Leigh.
sympathies of every living critic” be- behaviour” as “likely triggered by ex- Murray knew that the only person in
fore denying prurient readers even a
peek at his “private life, with which I
am not concerned.” By 1974, opinions
B etter, perhaps, to set the ques-
tion of Byron’s posthumous rep-
utation to one side and view Stauffer’s
haustion, alcohol, and overexertion in
the heat” feels inadequate. It is, how-
ever, in keeping with this gentle biog-
Piccadilly Terrace who had previously
expressed a “very strong interest” in
Austen’s work was Lady Byron. So why
had changed. An immense and well- agreeable combination of letters and rapher’s observation of Augusta Leigh, did he go out of his way to ask only, and
attended Byron-fest at the Victoria narrative as what it claims to be: a the intrusive, tactless half-sister who insistently, whether “Mrs Leigh & your
and Albert Museum included lovelocks, successor to Thomas Moore’s admira- saw no harm in linking her initials with Lordship admire Emma”? The answer,
ringlets, old razors, toothpicks, and bly judged use in 1830 of Byron’s own Byron’s on a Newstead tree the day consistent with his firm’s almost de-
even (loaned by my father from a Not- inimitable voice to illuminate a hectic after his engagement to Annabella ceitfully protective curatorship of By-
tinghamshire house with strong Byron life. It’s not always a nice voice—By- Milbanke, that she “was not good at ron’s reputation well into the twentieth
connections) a square of crimson, fig- ron’s first reference to his illegitimate drawing boundaries.” Quite. century, was that the prudent Scottish
ured damask snipped from the heavy daughter Allegra calls her a “brat” and publisher knew more about Byron’s in-
bed-hangings that closeted the amo- airily blames her birth on his habit of timate relationship with Augusta Leigh
than he ever publicly chose to admit.7
rously bisexual Byron with his inno-
cently accommodating bride on their
first honeymoon night at a snowbound
“putting it about”—but it’s witty, vivid,
and immediate: “I have read the Corsair, mended
my petticoat, & have nothing else
to do,” Jane Austen wrote to her sister
Wit, absent from most Romantic po-
etry, sparkles in the work of Regency
northern mansion belonging to the It is four, and the dawn gleams over Cassandra in 1817. If it’s a surprise to writers as brightly as it did in that
Milbanke family. the Grand Canal, and unshadows find Austen talking about Byron in the of Byron’s favorite predecessor, Al-
Back in those heady 1970s, Byron the Rialto. I must to bed; up all last sentence of her very last letter, it’s exander Pope. In 1821, while living in
the earnest champion of Greece’s free- night—but, as George Philpot says, not one to learn that such a discern- Ravenna, Byron read and enjoyed (“It
dom—very much on display in 2024— “it’s life, though, damme, it’s life!”5 ing reader had his measure. Described is diabolically well written—full of fun
interested the new romantics less than by Kenyon Jones as “a favourite form & ferocity”) a sharp skit that showed
Byron the recklessly candid libertine. Byron has had some splendid biogra- of Austenian bathos,” that carefully him in his public persona as Childe
At a time when even his dandyish phers. None of them can better convey placed petticoat has—as she shrewdly Harold being discussed by a group of
style of dress was being imitated, the what the fondly exasperated Irish nov- points out—only one intention: to de- Austen’s characters:
family-owned firm of John Murray de- elist and literary hostess Marguerite flate Byron’s swaggering hero.
cided to release a long-withheld stanza Blessington—who in 1834 published The idea of setting Byron beside Oh! Yes, this is the true cast of face.
of Don Juan that Byron had included her Conversations of Lord Byron— Austen, his older contemporary, as a Now, tell me, Mrs Goddard, now
in one of his best and funniest letters called his “chameleon-like character Regency figure enables Kenyon Jones tell me, Miss Price, now tell me,
to his publisher. Written in Venice in or manner” than the swift-moving let- to remove him from the conventional dear Harriet Smith and dear, dear
January 1818, the letter and poem first ters in which his emotions can switch Romantic grouping. While a few of her Mrs Elton, do tell me, is not this
appeared (without comment) at the from love to hate without warning or connections between the two feel a bit just the very look, that one would
front of volume 6 of Marchand’s Let- apology. Stauffer has chosen his sam- limp—a distant family connection, the have fancied for Childe Harold?
ters and Journals: ples well. Ten chronologically arranged laying out of Byron’s body in a London Oh! What eyes and eyebrows! Oh!
letters escort us through the life. In mansion from which its seemingly un- What a chin!—well, after all, who
Now, I’ll put out my taper the first, the shy, lame owner of a ru- informed owners (Austen’s niece and knows what may have happened.
(I’ve finished my paper ined abbey confronts a growing moun- nephew) were absent—much of the One can never know the truth of
For these stanzas you see on the tain of unpaid debts—seemingly the book works brilliantly, shedding new such stories. Perhaps her Ladyship
brink stand) main reason why the twenty-one-year- light on both writers from rewarding was in the wrong after all—I am
There’s a whore on my right, old peer hastily left England in 1809 angles. sure if I had married such a man, I
For I rhyme best at night for a two-year tour of Portugal, Spain, Central to Kenyon Jones’s intriguing would have borne with all his little
When a C—t is tied close to my Malta, Albania, and parts of Greece. In project is the fact that both authors eccentricities. . . . Poor Lord Byron!
Inkstand.4 the last, humiliatingly rejected by the were published by John Murray—Aus-
Greek page with whom he has fallen ten described Murray as “a Rogue of The anonymous author was not, as
In 1976 nobody blinked at a raun- in love, Byron remains committed to course, but a civil one.” Late into the Byron suspected, Thomas Love Pea-
chy poem rattled off by Byron with the a cause—Greece’s liberation from Ot- field of female novelists (Austen was, cock but Walter Scott’s clever son-in-
plain intention of shocking his uxori- toman rule—whose outcome was still astonishingly, the first he published at law, John Gibson Lockhart.
ous, churchgoing publisher. Not a sin- dishearteningly uncertain. a time when most novels were being Byron’s avowed favorite among Aus-
gle critic—and Byron has attracted a Writing for the general reader, written by women), Murray began with ten’s women contemporaries was Fanny
legion of erudite editors and interpret- Stauffer uses his selection of letters Emma (1815–1816), carried on with a Burney, very much a Regency figure,
ers, including Jerome McGann and the to create a narrative in which Byron’s second edition of the previously pub- and one whose Evelina was much ad-
late Peter Cochran—reproached the private life looms larger than the work. lished Mansfield Park, and concluded mired by Austen. It is still widely sup-
long-dead poet for claiming to have Less fixated than Byron’s most recent with the posthumous twins, Nor- posed that Austen’s work passed him
enjoyed two hundred or more lov- biographer, Antony Peattie,6 on the thanger Abbey and Persuasion. From by, unread. Reading of his delight at the
ers during his three years in Venice. impact of his physical disability (a de- these, Austen’s family received £668: pamphleteer’s squib (Lockhart’s parody
Doris Langley Moore’s immaculately formed foot and consequently withered not much when we consider that appeared in John Bull’s Letter), can we
researched Lord Byron: Accounts Ren- calf led this intensely self-conscious Byron, who rightly thought himself doubt any longer that Byron was thor-
dered (1974) didn’t outrage her read- man to adopt loose-fitting panta- underpaid by his thrifty publisher, net- oughly familiar with the deftly comic
ers by revealing that Byron, while loons and shun the dance floor) and ted almost £20,000. writer whose haughtily Byronic Mr.

.
capriciously generous to friends and an enduring, obsessive battle to keep It’s not news that both writers, living Darcy had inspired a misguided and
hard-up writers, seldom showed the his weight down, Stauffer has more at the time of Edmund Kean, adored very innocent Annabella Milbanke to
same concern for his carriage makers, to say about what he calls the “dark theatricals: Jane and Cassandra even think that she, too, like Elizabeth Ben-
boatbuilders, and tailors. So should side” of Byron: the “gothic episodes took part in a home-produced play net, could bring a proud man to heel?
we follow the scholars’ lead and ac- of depression” and “continual acts of shortly after their father’s death. Aus-
7
knowledge that libertinism and stiffing sabotage” that caused his increasingly ten’s niece remembered that her aunt Fiona MacCarthy’s excellent biography
creditors were normal for the aristo- apprehensive wife to wonder if he was had “a very good speaking voice.” Eliza- Byron: Life and Legend (Farrar, Straus
cratic dandy in Byron’s era? Or should mad. beth Pigot, the young woman to whom and Giroux, 2002) cites a striking exam-
we ask why Andrew Stauffer doesn’t Was he? All Byron himself was will- the first of Stauffer’s ten Byron letters ple of the firm’s attentive stewardship of
censure Byron—beyond a subdued “let ing to admit, while living in Venice, is addressed, went further, remark- Byron’s posthumous reputation. In 1923,
this sink in” in reference to his flirta- was that his temper, when provoked, ing that Byron the actor had “a charm four decades before homosexuality was de-
tiously intimate correspondence with was said to be “rather a savage sight.” which is very rarely to be met with criminalized in Britain, Sir John Murray
Lady Melbourne while sleeping with At Cephalonia, his capacity for rage even in the greatest comic performer learned that his archives contained a let-
was memorably demonstrated during on our public stage.” That devoted ad- ter from Pietro Gamba expressing concern
4
Byron’s apparent spontaneity here sounds mirer did not exaggerate: Mary Shelley, about Byron’s “weakness” for his disdainful
a note strikingly close to a letter he wrote to 5 recalling for Thomas Moore the cele- Greek page, Lukas. Asked by Harold Nic-
Omitted by Stauffer, Byron’s letter to
a young clergyman in 1808, while living— brated summer of 1816 when Byron olson whether to include the letter in his
Moore (June 1, 1818) quotes Philpot’s The
so he claimed—with a mistress aged six- was her neighbor on Lake Geneva, de- forthcoming centennial biography, Murray
Citizen to a fellow lover of the theater.
teen and four attendant “nymphs,” one of scribed the bewitching power of his responded, “I certainly do not think that ei-
6
whom “is now on the sofa vis-à-vis, whilst The Private Life of Lord Byron (London: voice and how his dramatic recitation ther of us is bound to disclose this letter: it
I am scribbling.” Unbound, 2023). from Coleridge’s “Christabel” had ter- is no dishonest concealment to decide thus.”

April 4, 2024 17
 Sisyphus on the Street
Jason DeParle

cident. Sitting with the injured biker

while others summoned help, he felt an
“intimate contact with life,” a kind of
communion, and realized it was what
he’d been seeking. He attended Har-
vard Medical School and was finishing
his residency at Mass General when he
was awarded an oncology fellowship at
Memorial Sloan Kettering. A golden fu-
ture was assured. Then leaders at Mass
General asked a favor. The mayor of
Boston was starting a health care pro-
gram for the homeless; would O’Connell
defer the fellowship for a year to run
it? He couldn’t think of a way to say no.
A hazing followed. On July 1, 1985,
O’Connell reported for duty at the Pine
Street Inn, a shelter with a clinic run
by nurses unimpressed by his résumé.
“You’ve been trained all wrong,” said
Barbara McInnis, the lay Franciscan
who became his mentor. To treat the
homeless, she warned, doctors needed
to talk less and listen more. She made
him stash his stethoscope and soak pa-
tients’ feet. With listening skills honed
by tending bar, O’Connell proved a
quick study. His patients included a
A dormitory for homeless men at the Pine Street Inn, Boston, Massachussetts, January 2018 schizophrenic man whom O’Connell
recognized from Mass General, where
he’d been famously noncompliant; after
Rough Sleepers: aid for his legal defense. After nearly a that can stretch to a hundred hours several weeks of footbaths the patient
Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent decade of decline, homelessness began harm his personal life, and patients ig- took his meds. To ensure that alcoholics
Mission to Bring Healing rising in 2016 and last year leapt by 12 nore his advice. The more he sees, the took their tuberculosis pills, O’Connell
to Homeless People percent to the highest level since the less certain he becomes of solutions. got a bartender to dispense them before
by Tracy Kidder. federal government started its count Kidder casts O’Connell as a hero, but the first beer. As TB and AIDS washed
Random House, 299 pp., in 2007. The growth was especially he’s a hero without answers, which is over the clinic, O’Connell’s sense of
$30.00; $22.00 (paper) sharp among chronically homeless part of his appeal. He perseveres by mission deepened. He deferred Sloan
people sleeping outside of shelters, savoring small victories and because it Kettering for a second year and then
When a blizzard hit Washington, D.C., whose numbers have risen three quar- is the decent thing to do. With public said he wasn’t coming, sacrificing con-
one evening three decades ago, I ters over the past seven years. These discourse so marred by angry certi- siderable pay and prestige.
grabbed a notepad and walked down rough sleepers are the focus of Rough tudes, O’Connell’s modest steadfast- O’Connell doesn’t expect grati-
K Street to see how the homeless were Sleepers, Tracy Kidder’s latest and im- ness is an example to commend. tude, which is good, since, as Kidder
faring. I was, with no special original- portant book. makes clear, he rarely gets it. Sur-
ity, looking for a metaphor, a snapshot Kidder is an accomplished writer of rounded by difficult patients, he shows
of the nation’s fallen state. K Street is
the city’s power corridor, a downtown
canyon where lobbyists eat expensive
narrative nonfiction whose books are
generally built around characters with
special passion for their work. In The
K idder met O’Connell through Paul
English, who is a supporter of the
Boston homelessness program. The
a gift for what a colleague calls “pre-
admiration”: he assumes that the pa-
tients’ virtues will eventually appear.
lunches and lay expansive plans while Soul of a New Machine, for which he program operates an outreach van, and When one clogs the toilet by flush-
the homeless panhandle and sleep in won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, the pro- a ride-along got Kidder hooked. He ing her clothes, he embraces her as
doorways. On the street with solutions tagonists were computer engineers. was especially intrigued by the rela- “complicated.” O’Connell takes pains
to every problem sprawled a problem Among those chronicled in subsequent tionships O’Connell had built with his to find a nursing home for a man dying
that defied solutions. “It’s not that we books were a group of Massachusetts marginalized patients. of cancer, only to discover him back
don’t care about the homeless,” ex- house builders; Paul Farmer, an Amer- The book opens on the streets of in the alley with his buddies, pour-
plained an international consultant, ican doctor and anthropologist who South Boston with the van’s driver ing vodka down his feeding tube.
hurrying past the slumped figures to worked in Haiti and other countries; approaching a man under a pile of Rather than judge, O’Connell salutes
get home. “But because we have some- and Paul English, a Boston tech en- blankets whose response to a well- the man’s agency in choosing to die
thing to do, we walk around them.” trepreneur and philanthropist who ness check is “Get the fuck outa here.” among friends. The program rarely
As the snow fell, the scene grew cofounded the travel website Kayak, O’Connell tries next, kneeling next tries to forcibly hospitalize the men-
bleak. “Joke! Joke! I ain’t no joke!” a dis- among other companies. The star of to the would-be patient and greeting tally ill, arguing that doing so earns
turbed man howled. Another had bur- Rough Sleepers is Dr. Jim O’Connell, him by name: “Hey, Johnny. It’s Jim their spite. But not hospitalizing them
ied himself beneath a pile of cardboard the founder of the Boston Health Care O’Connell. I haven’t seen you in a long can earn spite, too, as O’Connell tells
boxes and blankets that a well-wisher for the Homeless Program. time. I just want to make sure you’re colleagues. “Fuck you,” says a woman
had topped with a sandwich. An as- The book has two great virtues. Most all right.” A face pops through the blan- who had rejected his help when living
tonished tourist from Albania snapped important, it offers personhood to kets: “Doctah Jim! How the fuck are on the streets but got well after the
pictures of the public destitution to people many Americans have trained ya!” A half-hour of banter ends with police arrested her and took her to a
show friends that “this is America.” themselves not to see, or to see only O’Connell’s gentle invitation to visit mental hospital. “You left me out there
I filed a dark story for The New York through the lens of fear. Kidder cap- the clinic at Mass General. for ten years and did nothing.”
Times and wondered if in a half-century tures the mental illness and addiction O’Connell didn’t set out to save the Other thorns lodge in his side. The
Americans would look back on the era that bring many rough sleepers to the world. As a flashback early in the book job pays so little at the start that he
with disbelief, “the way schoolchildren streets, but also their resilience, gen- explains, he was a working-class kid is forced to moonlight as medical di-
react to Dickens’s London.” erosity, and genius for survival. It is from Newport, Rhode Island, whose rector of a detox center, and the long
BRIAN S N YDER /R EU TE RS / RE DU X

Thirty years on, that doesn’t seem not easy to write with both empathy childhood was colored by his mother’s hours help destroy a marriage and
likely. The Dickensian plight of the and candor about people whose de- episodes of severe mental illness. Fol- another relationship. Over four de-
homeless continues, and the pub- mons leave them complicit in their lowing his graduation (as salutatorian) cades, the program grows to employ
lic may be less sympathetic. When a suffering. Kidder does so masterfully. from Notre Dame, he studied philos- four hundred people (with help from
former marine named Daniel Penny The book is also a meditation on a ophy at Cambridge, taught school in Medicaid, a crucial part of the story),
was arrested for killing a mentally life of service. O’Connell was the found- Hawaii, tended bar in Rhode Island, but O’Connell chafes at the financial
ill homeless man, Jordan Neely, on a ing physician of the program in the and laid plans to become a Vermont pressure to practice efficient medi-
New York City subway last May, he at- 1980s and built it into a national model. country lawyer. cine, which he considers an oxymo-
tracted a conservative cheering squad The work is gratifying but taxing and Then, while on vacation on the Isle ron. Unlike most of the staff, O’Connell
and nearly $3 million in crowdfunded filled with frustrations. Workweeks of Man, he witnessed a motorcycle ac- gives cash to patients, on the theory

18 The New York Review

that they need it and that it incentiv- Tony’s journey provides the narra-
izes compliance with follow-up care. tive arc for the rest of the book, and his
The crisp bills—fives, tens, and twen- literary purpose is clear: he is there to
ties—cost him a few thousand dollars humanize the dispossessed, which he
a year. But another member of the staff does unforgettably. If Kidder had li-
complains that the practice creates a cense to invent a character, he couldn’t
hostile workplace, since patients favor have conjured one more captivating. In
O’Connell. The board asks him to stop, Kidder’s resonant phrase, Tony lingers
and he does, more or less. in the mind like “an unfinished chord.”
Despite the frustrations, O’Connell At forty-four, Tony has spent most
connects with those he treats and oc- of his adulthood in prison. Though
casionally helps transform their lives. he was convicted of “assault with in-
He receives near-weekly visits at the tent to commit rape,” Tony denies any JOAN C. BELL PRIZE
clinic from a middle-aged man who sexual crime—he was just robbing a
held the record for drunken trips to
the emergency room (216 in eighteen
drug dealer, he says. His array of pre-
vious diagnoses include bipolar disor-
2024 Winner
months) but got sober, housed, and der and possibly schizophrenia, and
employed. Four members of the board he has been using cocaine along with
were once patients. One of them, Jo- heroin, partly to numb knee and back
anne Guarino, gives an annual lecture pain. He didn’t finish high school, has
to first-year students at Harvard Med- no apparent work experience, and is a
ical School, recounting her recovery street fighter capable of great violence.
from thirty years on the street, where He is also charming, insightful,
she survived rape and AIDS . Her pluck, energetic, resilient, and bearing the
grace, and affection for O’Connell draw weight of a victimized childhood in
an ovation. the Italian North End, where his father
Service to the poor is often sus- was a low-level gangster who blood- Paul Cezanne painted his wife Hortense more than
tained by faith, but O’Connell has little ied the apartment by beating his wife
to say about God. His finds a model in and kids (though, Tony says, not him, any other person. Georgia is writing a novel about
Sisyphus—or Sisyphus as imagined by as the youngest and favorite). Among Hortense. The two women, born more than a century
Camus, who converted the tale of futil- the childhood experiences Tony casu- apart, exist together in a hotel in Paris at the beginning
ity into a parable of purposeful striv- ally mentions is being kidnapped and
ing. Although Sisyphus is condemned raped—when he was twelve, or maybe of the pandemic.
forever to watch the rock he pushes fourteen, he says with odd vagueness.
uphill tumble back down, “the strug-
gle itself toward the heights is enough
Rough Sleepers doesn’t dwell on it,
but Tony’s victimization may be part
ANGELA O’KEEFFE’SÀUVWQRYHONight Blue, was short-
to fill a man’s heart,” Camus insisted. of a larger pattern. Several of O’Con- listed for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” nell’s patients allude to childhood and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Ameliorative work has its critics— sexual abuse, including Joanne, the
on the right, some say it rewards indo- board member who draws the students’
lence; on the left, some warn it masks applause. “I was sexually abused as a
injustice. O’Connell, the former philos- child, and that went on for years and WWW.ZEROGRAMPRESS.COM
ophy student, just carries on. “This is years,” she says, explaining how her
what we do while we’re waiting for the journey to the streets began.
world to change,” he says. In my own reporting on people in
chronic poverty I’ve found that sur-
prisingly large numbers volunteer that

A bout a quarter of the way into the

book, a second major character ap-
they were sexually abused, sometimes
in casual asides meant to explain other
ZEROGRAM PRESS
pears. O’Connell is preparing to leave problems, like depression or addic- announces 2025’s
the clinic at Mass General one day in tion. In Charleston, South Carolina,
September 2016 when a new patient last year, I met a school bus driver who
arrives. He is larger than life in every had been evicted and was living in her
way: six foot four, loud and muscular, car; she said childhood molestation had

JOAN C. BELL PRIZE

with an “odor of sweat and slightly rot- left her unwilling to form relationships
ten fruit.” Tony Columbo (a pseudonym) with her children’s fathers or seek their
has spent two decades in prison. He is financial help—one of many reasons
living on the street and needs Suboxone she cited, in addition to low wages and
to quiet his craving for heroin. He is high rents, for her awful predicament.
agitated and digressive. “When he said As a source of other destabilizing con-
‘Make a long story shawt,’ he tended to ditions, childhood sexual abuse may
do the opposite,” Kidder notes.
At this point in his career, O’Con-
nell is sixty-eight and on his second
marriage. He has an infant daughter
be more common and more damaging
among the deeply disadvantaged than
is generally understood.*
$5,000
and has told his wife he’ll be home
early, knowing she would need relief
from childcare. He doesn’t have time to
see Tony but sees him anyway. O’Con-
T ony can be extraordinarily kind.
He is a protector of weaker people
on the street, and watches over sleep-
for the best
nell hesitates to prescribe Suboxone
without a urine test, but after a tense
ing women to keep them safe. When
he fights, it’s often to punish other
unpublished
back-and-forth he bows to Tony’s des- homeless men he views as predators.
peration and issues the script. One of the people he cares for is BJ, a
Complications ensue. Tony has dis- fifty-year-old double amputee with the
carded his ID so can’t fill the prescrip-
tion. O’Connell accompanies him to
the CVS and vouches for his identity,
ability to consume startling amounts
of vodka. Kidder writes: NOVEL
but Medicaid refuses to pay. The drug Over the years, many rough sleep-
costs $120. O’Connell pulls out his ers had tried to take care of BJ,
credit card, and Tony raises a protest but none, Jim thought, as consci-
of uncertain sincerity. The pharmacist entiously as Tony. In the evenings Agents are also welcome to submit on
resubmits the request, and this time as winter loomed, the pair would behalf of any authors they represent
Medicaid approves. O’Connell leaves make their way down Cambridge
the store, then realizes that Tony Street, tall dark Tony striding Submission information on our website
hasn’t eaten all day. He returns, buys
him a sandwich, and puts a twenty- *See Jason DeParle, “Early Sex Abuse Hin- WWW.ZEROGRAMPRESS.COM
dollar bill in the bag. He is only three ders Many Women on Welfare,” The New
hours late getting home. York Times, November 28, 1999.

April 4, 2024 19
 along beside BJ in his motorized percent of the people who experience butt-numbing” waits and byzantine
wheelchair, heading for one of homelessness are quickly rehoused and procedures strike Kidder as another
James B. Whisker the outdoor sleeping spots with stay housed for many years. Shadowing injustice to the poor, and he snaps at
an overhanging roof. Tony would a school social worker in rural Texas a public defender who shows up hours
Doctor of Humane Letters lift BJ off his chair and lay him not long ago, I met a homeless stu- late. The lawyer snaps back but per-
Mellen University down in one of the sleeping bags dent who wrote her college applica- suades the judge to clean the slate.
he’d scrounged from some charity tions from six addresses, including a Kidder embraces the hope that Tony
or Good Samaritan. . . . shelter, and went to Harvard—that’s has found a new start.
BJ would sometimes tip over homelessness, too. For those trying to help Tony, a lin-
onto the sidewalk, and Tony One debate that Rough Sleepers does gering puzzle is his nonchalance about
would set his chair upright and inform is that over Housing First, an his experience of childhood rape. Was
put him back in it. Tony kept an approach to helping the chronically he feigning indifference for emotional
Allen wrench in one of his many homeless that is under conserva- protection? Did he invent the tale? Dis-
pockets for making small repairs tive attack. Housing First programs traught after another spell of rough
when the little red vehicle broke provide subsidized apartments to sleeping, Tony takes O’Connell aside
down. He cleaned BJ up when he homeless people and offer—but do and pours out the real story: he was re-
soiled himself. not require—treatment for mental peatedly raped by a priest. (Kidder con-
health and substance abuse. By con- firms that the priest Tony names was
The program operates a medical trast, previous programs required cli- a sex abuser.) The suffering from grief
shelter where ailing clients can stay ents to meet benchmarks like sobriety and shame has never ended, and Tony
for a few months. As an off-and-on res- to get housing, leaving many people is convinced it never will. “I knew back
ident, Tony becomes a self-appointed back on the streets. Several studies then when I was a little kid, there’s no
Publications caretaker—part social worker, part found that Housing First programs such thing as God.”
triage nurse. He tells O’Connell who raised the odds of keeping people A strength of Kidder’s portrait is
James Wilson, Father of the among the patients is lonely, who’s re- housed, and federal grants favor the his respect for Tony’s intelligence, a
American Constitution lapsing, and who’s getting ready to flee. approach. Housing First’s supporters trait that affluent, educated people
ISBN: 978-1-4955-1219-3 276 pgs.* Tony fantasizes about becoming a peer say the programs save lives. But critics often overlook in the poor. Armed
counselor, so that others might learn see liberal permissiveness and would with a prison library card, Tony has
Anna Ella Carroll (1815–1893): from his mistakes. He is sufficiently redirect the money to rescue missions read Maslow, Freud, and Jung and
American Political Writer empathetic and gifted that O’Connell and other groups that impose treat- admires the artist “Martisse.” Kid-
ISBN: 978-1-7734-1220-9 272 pgs.
considers giving him a formal job. But ment mandates. der arranges a visit to the Museum
The Supremacy of the State his periods of stability alternate with O’Connell agrees that housing is a of Fine Arts and brings his wife, Fran,
in International Law abrupt returns to the street. human right, but he has found limits an artist and teacher. Tony is dirty and
ISBN: 978-1-7734-1221-6 280 pgs. The story of doctor and patient has to what it can achieve for the espe- smells bad, and Kidder is “embarrassed
its symmetry, each an introspective cially troubled population he serves. for feeling embarrassed.” The unease
Piracy: Past, Present, Future man searching for purpose. What pro- In 2005, as part of a state experiment spreads when Tony scoffs that an ab-
ISBN: 978-1-4955-1222-3 262 pgs.* pels the rest of the book is whether to test Housing First, his program stract painting looks like “the face of
O’Connell can save Tony—from ad- acquired twenty-four vouchers that a dude I beat up.” But he gets drawn
Famous Extradition Cases diction, mental illness, street ene- provided clients the ability to rent into a discussion of technique, and
ISBN: 978-1-4955-1223-0 260 pgs.*
mies, and his status as a registered private apartments. Some could find his curiosity blossoms. He compli-
Capital Punishment in sex offender, which disqualifies him units only in far-flung neighborhoods, ments Maurice de Vlaminck’s use of
Religion and Philosophy from most housing aid and makes it where they felt uncomfortable. Some color and compares the posture of an
ISBN: 978-1-4955-1224-7 360 pgs.* all but impossible to rent an apart- caroused and got evicted. One was Egon Schiele nude to Michelangelo’s
ment. Even when the program finds so disoriented by indoor living that David, which delights the teacher in
Great Replacement Theory: a subsidy, landlords won’t accept him. he pitched a tent in his living room. Fran. “I just can’t help thinking what
The Proliferation of an Idea Though Tony has served his prison After a decade, the vouchers had been he could have been,” says O’Connell,
ISBN: 978-1-4955-1225-4 296 pgs.* term, a life sentence of homelessness issued and reissued to seventy-three who joins the tour.
lingers on. He reappears from weeks patients; of them, nearly half had died, A few months later, Tony is dead. He
Hunting in the Western on the streets filthy, strung out, and and of those living just one in eight dies on a sidewalk, with cocaine, alco-
Tradition, 2 vols. paranoid. “My fear is the call that says had housing. hol, and fentanyl in his blood, beside a
ISBN: 978-1-4955-1227-8 176 pgs.
he’s dead,” O’Connell says. One lesson seems to be that deeply woman he often protected. O’Connell
U.S. and Confederate Arms disadvantaged people like Tony and BJ sees the death as a kind of suicide, a
and Armories During the need more accompanying services than way to silence the hurt and shame. The
American Civil War, 4 Vols.
ISBN: 978-1-7734-1226-1 244 pgs. K idder is interested in character,
not policy—Rough Sleepers has
little new to say about why homeless-
even a program as good as O’Connell’s
can provide. After four decades of
Sisyphean struggle O’Connell doesn’t
program staff cry at the news, and a
group of rough sleepers gathers in a
park to praise him as a protector. “We
Virginia Clockmakers and ness exists or how to reduce it. A brief sound like a man who thinks the end call him the Night Watchman,” one says.
Watchmakers, 1660–1860 history covers familiar ground: the of homelessness is within reach. “Cau- A mystery remains: the truth of the
ISBN: 978-1-7734-1228- 5 192 pgs. destruction of cheap boardinghouses tion was one of Jim’s themes in these crime that had sent him to prison and
where men like Tony once slept and later days of his career,” Kidder writes. branded him a sex offender. Tony had
Pennsylvania Silversmiths, their replacement by luxury build- “He wanted to temper expectations.” denied committing a sex crime, but
Goldsmiths and Pewterers,
ings; the emptying of mental hos- Kidder tracks down the police report.
1684–1900
pitals without adequate community It says that when Tony was twenty-
ISBN: 978-1-4955-1229-2 332 pgs.

The Devil in Literature

ISBN: 978-1-7734-1230-8 220 pgs.
care; the weak safety net for the dis-
abled. But there’s not much about the
broader inequality from which home-
F or much of the three years Kidder
follows him, Tony’s trajectory is
unclear. One day, he’s the social direc-
six, he held a knife to a man’s throat,
pulled down the man’s pants, and tried
to rape him—the childhood victim, it
lessness springs and almost nothing tor, crisp and empathetic. The next, seems, became a victimizer. Kidder
The Anti-Christ in Theology about politics or the paucity of housing he’s sleeping outdoors, disheveled and is glad not to have known this while
ISBN: 978-1-7734-1231-5 276 pgs. aid. To connect the policy dots, read- despairing. What triggers his falls isn’t Tony was alive, because it might have
ers might consult Marybeth Shinn and clear, but the ratio of good days to bad changed how he saw him. But O’Con-
Jill Khadduri’s In the Midst of Plenty: worsens. Tony deftly defuses a fight, nell has learned to ignore his patients’
Homelessness and What to Do About It potentially saving a life, then lands in pasts. The man he knew tried hard
NYRB Price (2020), a clear-eyed journey through a
rich academic literature.
the ER “in florid, thrashing paranoia.”
He returns not long after with a knife
to overcome the traumas that had
stalked him and did so while looking
$39.95 Kidder makes clear that the home- wound and broken ribs, probably from out for others. “There was nothing
less population is extremely diverse— a collision with a baseball bat. If the about Tony that I could ever dislike,”
[email protected] it includes veterans, runaway teens, story teaches us anything, it’s that liv- he tells Kidder.
and survivors of domestic violence, ing on the streets is life-threatening, O’Connell displays pictures of pa-
(716) 754-2788 among other groups—and that the even to someone with Tony’s excep- tients in a gallery outside his office.
6ɈLY]HSPK[OYV\NO problems of rough sleepers (chron- tional size and strength. Tony’s is quickly framed. For a long
ically homeless people largely living As Tony’s condition worsens, Kid- time, O’Connell resisted the tempta-
*V(\[OVYLK outdoors) like Tony are extreme. What der, who is drawn to him like everyone tion to photograph patients, for fear of
Kidder calls the “hardcore rough sleep- else, abandons his position as fly on being intrusive. Then one asked him to,
ers” account for only three hundred to the wall and tries to help. When Tony’s and many others followed. Accustomed

.
four hundred of the eleven thousand failure to register as a sex offender to invisibility, they were grateful to be
patients O’Connell’s program serves. threatens to send him back to prison noticed. That’s what this impressive
As Dennis Culhane of the University in 2019, Kidder accompanies him to book achieves—it allows these over-
of Pennsylvania has shown, about 80 a court hearing. The “mind-numbing, looked people to be seen.

20 The New York Review

 The Way She Was
Daphne Merkin

My Name Is Barbra
by Barbra Streisand.
Viking, 970 pp., $47.00

Although we have been counseled

for decades now that “less is more,”
sometimes more isn’t enough. This is
decidedly the case with Barbra Strei-
sand’s 970-page, indexless brick of a
memoir, My Name Is Barbra, an item
heavy enough to throw at someone in
a fit of pique and injure them. In my
own case I had a shoulder replacement
right before receiving the book and
read it in pamphlet-like segments that
my daughter had created by tearing out
clumps of pages at the spine. (Viking,
please forgive this desecration.)
Streisand, who is now eighty-one,
spent ten years writing the book. In
1984, when Streisand was forty-two,
Jackie Onassis, then an editor at
Doubleday, suggested she write a
memoir, and the two met for tea. But
Streisand felt she was too young and
too involved with other projects. “The
thought of isolating myself in a room
[to] write . . . wasn’t appealing,” she
comments. Still, the idea was planted.
The memoir she finally came up with
is peppered liberally with ellipses, sug-
gesting that its author might have had
even more to impart if she hadn’t exer-
cised a modicum of restraint. Indeed,
it’s easy to laugh it off as an exercise in
undiluted narcissism, driven by a vault-
ing ego. What’s the point, one might
ask, of so much elaborately detailed
selfhood spilling all over the place, even
if Streisand is a celebrity—a phenome-
non of sorts? There is something par-
odic about the scope of the enterprise,
as if its author had lost sight of her
own significance—or, rather, her rel-
ative insignificance in the scheme of
things: she quotes Goethe out of the
blue and invokes Alan Watts’s Spirit
of Zen and recounts instructing Bill
Clinton on how to savage an opponent
in a debate. Barbra Streisand; illustration by Vivienne Flesher
A reader can do little but gawk at
the magnitude of it all, the glamorous
people and the meeting with Queen ness, and her unabashed Jewishness, including her skill, especially in the rumors of an eight-figure advance and
Elizabeth and the lavishly decorated whether expressed in her overarticu- early films, such as The Owl and the sotto voce discussions of whether the
residences and the beautiful men with lated Brooklyn accent or her unfixed Pussycat (1970) and What’s Up, Doc? book was ghostwritten. To my mind
good teeth. (Teeth are very important nose or her fetchingly insecure form (1972), as a natural comedienne, or her the biggest faux pas of the entire ven-
to Streisand, so much so that one of of self-confidence. (“I’ve always been pointillist comprehension of the mak- ture—and there is no denying that
the reasons she seems to have married proud of my Jewish heritage,” she ing of movies. (There is something of parts of the book are very absorbing—
James Brolin was his “great teeth”; writes. “I never attempted to hide it the autodidact in her, attuned to aes- is the discernible lack of an author-
when she met Barack Obama she was when I became an actress. It’s essen- thetics in general, whether Mahler’s itative editor, or perhaps Streisand’s
“impressed” by, among other things, tial to who I am.”) For readers who long Tenth, Art Nouveau glass, or the paint- disinclination to listen to an editor’s
his “beautiful teeth.”) Not to over- to catch glimpses of her, the book has ings of Egon Schiele.) advice. It seems that her instincts
look the endless descriptions of the photos galore of Streisand in a dizzy- Then there is the fact that even in have been allowed to prevail to the
food she indulges in, especially Brey- ing panoply of hairdos and outfits and her youth she stood her ground, refus- point where other people’s opinions
ers coffee ice cream, Swanson fried falling into the arms of various un- ing to collude with Hollywood’s many don’t count, even when they should.
chicken, rice pudding without raisins, likely amours, such as Pierre Trudeau, deracinated Jews. I can only admire She announces, “I never really felt
and brownies with walnuts. The em- then the prime minister of Canada. her insistence on making Yentl (1983), intimidated by anyone.” It’s both her
phasis on food—beginning with the based on a story by Isaac Bashevis strength, one might argue, and her
“great piece of kosher cake . . .yellow Singer, the Polish-born author whose Achilles’ heel.
cake with dark chocolate icing” that
was served at her Jewish summer
camp in the Catskills and that she’s
I must admit right off that I have
never warmed to Streisand’s larger-
than-life persona or her frequently
writing was translated from the Yid-
dish, about a young Orthodox woman
who yearns to be a yeshiva boy. Strei-
There does not seem to be a single
piece of praise or adulation that Strei-
sand fails to quote, whether it’s from
“been searching for ever since,” like a schmaltzy singing style, in which she sand had to pitch the project over and her early days as a performer or later
down-market Proustian madeleine— wears the song instead of letting the over again, meeting resistance from in life. It’s hardly surprising that her
endeared her to me, given our national song lead her; I am more a devotee of everyone around her, including her ex-husband, Elliott Gould, with whom
obsession with thinness. dejected crooners with less lush voices soon-to-be-former agent, Sue Mengers. she had a son, Jason, told Rolling Stone
The memoir was presumably writ- and a repertoire of stripped-down lyr- “Everybody in Hollywood was so afraid in a 1974 interview that “at her best,
ten for Streisand fans, those millions ics, singers like Patty Griffin and Iris to be Jewish,” she writes. Barbra Streisand is probably the great-
in love with her unmatchable, tensile DeMent. I realize I am probably in the The prepublication hullabaloo that est singing actress since Maria Callas”;
voice, which soars and soars, filling minority, particularly for readers of surrounded the appearance of My what else is an eclipsed if admiring
the room to the point of obscuring the this book. Yet there is no gainsaying Name Is Barbra was predictable, be- spouse to say? But that’s a tiny drop of
presence of the listener, and her brash- Streisand’s often astonishing artistry, ginning months ahead of time with flattery in a cascade of homage: Frank

April 4, 2024 21
 Sinatra, Ingmar Bergman, George Bal- flirted with the possibility that she audience’s expectations, “Who’s Afraid
Books by anchine, Princess Diana, and Stephen
Sondheim vie in their admiration for
was. From adolescence, she writes,
she “began to believe in the power of
of the Big Bad Wolf?”
She was unafraid of standing out—“I

Rocco Di Pietro her voice and cinematic gifts.

There are unending tributes to her
the will.”
When Streisand wanted to go to
don’t like to imitate anybody,” she ob-
serves—including by dressing uncon-
jolie laide beauty (Robert Redford and an apprentice summer stock pro- ventionally. Every outfit and pair of
YOURS IN BEETHOVEN Cecil Beaton) and smoldering erot- gram at the age of fifteen, she defied shoes she wore over six decades is
A Memoir of My Musical Journey with icism, which ensnared Omar Sharif her mother’s wishes by using some of meticulously chronicled. Either she
Julius Eastman when he was filming Funny Girl (1968). the five hundred dollars her grandfa- has a memory to rival that of Stalin,
Bewteen 1978 and 1980 a He told one reporter, “The first im- ther had left her when he died. Her who is said to have been able to recall
colorful reaction to Min- pression is that she’s not very pretty. background sounds somewhat bare- every detail of the enormous number
imalism occurred cen- But after three days, I am honest, I bones—“My family never had fun . . .we of books he read, or she kept a con-
tered around Monody. found her physically beautiful, and I didn’t go on outings . . . we never went tinuing record, assuming prospective
This Memoir is a chron-
icle of that period when start lusting after this woman!” Ryan anywhere”—and she seems to have readers would want to know about the
Contemporary music bi- O’Neal and Jeff Bridges were caught been left largely to her own devices: 1930s honey-colored lamb coat with
furcated. off guard by Streisand’s offbeat sex “There was no routine and no rules.” an embroidered lining of flowers she
“What follows is an al- appeal when they costarred with her in Her favorite memories of her adoles- bought for ten dollars at a thrift shop
most Elena Ferrante-esque tale of a brilliant The Main Event (1979) and The Mirror cent years were “reading movie mag- and wore to the audition for I Can
friendship . . . we catch a glimpse of a friend- Has Two Faces (1996). The then Prince azines and eating Breyer’s coffee ice Get It for You Wholesale. She decided
ship of two composers who clearly respected of Wales had a long-standing crush cream.” She had a weakness for pea- to drop the middle a in Barbara be-
and influenced each other a great deal . . . on her, inviting her to Highgrove and nut M&M ’s and Good & Plenty (“It was cause she thought it was “different and
Finally “Yours in Beethoven” offers up a por-
trait of Julius Eastman that comes across as
showing her around his beloved gar- like eating jewelry”) when she went to unique” and resisted, unlike the epon-
intense and as rambunctious as his music.” dens, while Prince himself had a poster the movies. ymous Jewish American Princess Mar-
—Robert Barry, The Wire of the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born Despite Streisand’s excellent aca- jorie Morningstar in Herman Wouk’s
978-1-66789-309-9 • Paper, $20.95 that Streisand did with Kris Kristof- demic record at Erasmus Hall High 1955 novel, getting a nose job, despite
168 Pages • Memoir ferson hanging on his bedroom wall— School, where she had a 93 average (she being advised to do so by a number of
but was too shy to meet her. Not to previously attended an all-girls yeshiva people around her. She was fearful of
THE NORMAL EXCEPTION overlook Bob Dylan, who wrote to her and PS 89), her mother wasn’t convinced what it might do to her voice. Besides
Life Stories, Reflections and Dreams that she was his “favorite star.” (Who which, she writes, “I liked the bump
from Prison would have thought?) The preening on my nose.” She says she didn’t trust
A collection of Prison continues until the reader—at least, anyone “to do exactly what I wanted
Inmate writing twenty this reader—finds herself wilting, and no more.”
years in the making from looking for some shade, some bit of
New York, California droll modesty, but there is none to
and Ohio, including
Attica and San Quentin
Prisons.
be had.
O ne of the things that most inter-
ests me in this story of Streisand’s
life is gleaning how her granite will,
“Here is a composer who
defies any attempt at
categorization . . . Di Pietro’s humanistic con- S till, My Name Is Barbra can’t sim-
ply be written off as a sales pitch
or a shallow excavation of how one
even more than her musical gift, de-
veloped. She attributes some of it to
her mother’s lack of attention and ap-
cerns of those on the fringes of society echoes
Harry Partch . . . his art somehow manages shy, skinny “marink” with asymmet- proval, which fits in nicely with psycho-
to connect, while remaining mysterious and rical features—close-set eyes, a large logical theories about the irritant of
elusive.” —Keith Moline, The Wire mouth, and a nose on its way to becom- deprivation producing the pearl of tal-
9798218200435 • Paper, $21.00; ing legendary—who shared a bed with ent. But in Streisand’s case the theory
e-Book, $10.00 • 210 Pages • Nonfiction her mother in a one-bedroom apart- doesn’t strike me as completely fitting,
ment on Pulaski Street in Williams- if only because she paradoxically al-
RAJAS FOR JOHN CAGE burg, Brooklyn, that accommodated ways seems to have had the imperme-
Stories, Incidents, Reports, Parables five people (including her grandparents able defenses of a well-nurtured child.
and Fables and her older brother, Sheldon) grew Perhaps that is the mystery of genius
Using the Zen-like story up to be world-famous. It serves as a college was as important as learning to (which doesn’t seem like too strong a
telling for which Cage lesson in what Streisand has learned type, “so I could work as a secretary in term for her, even if she isn’t exactly
was celebrated, Di Pietro over the years, including such pieces the school system and get paid vaca- my kind of genius): you are born with
challenges the conven-
tional wisdom about of accrued wisdom as “Don’t worry if tions. (That’s why I grew my nails so it, like a caul, untraceable except to
Cage: what has become you’re scared. Everybody who’s really long . . . so I’d never have to type.)” Her itself, like the five-year-old Mozart
for music lovers both con- good is scared.” talons indeed became her signature, commandeering the keyboard.
venient and sacrosanct. Streisand describes herself as “a even when they clashed with the char- Although she never learned to read
“A hypnotic exercise misfit in high school” and a “loner,” acter she was playing, such as the “sen- music and had precisely one voice les-
in listening . . . The stories frequently took both of which seem credible, except sitive and dedicated” psychiatrist in son (“So, what’s this singing thing you
on a parable vibe . . . A lot of them had an for the fact that almost everyone The Prince of Tides (1991). I might note teach?” she demanded of the vocal
irresistible, puckish humor. A drag queen who achieves fame seems to claim that all of my female therapists have coach she went to see), there was mu-
freaking out in a San Francisco Chinatown
restaurant, a crafty driver finding an innova-
those distinctions. She craved the had neatly clipped, unmanicured nails. sical ability in the family. Her mother,
tive and somewhat cruel way to quiet a noisy spotlight—her first ambition was to Not to mention Streisand’s wardrobe who worked as a secretary, had a beau-
busload of school kids, and a small handful become a famous actress. Even at six- choices: Dr. Susan Lowenstein looked tiful voice; her grandfather used to
of wartime references that would have been teen, standing in the bedroom door- more like a corporate executive dressed sing in shul when the chazzan was ill;
as relevant in the Vietnam era as today were way of her first New York apartment, by Streisand’s bestie, Donna Karan, Streisand was “known as the girl on
some of the highlights.” —Flea Theatre, she was aware of the perks that came than a schleppy Upper West Side ana- the block with a good voice.”
New York Lucid Culture
with power: “I have to become famous lyst in flats and a dun-colored pantsuit. The abiding trauma in her life was
9-781312-092006 • Paper, $20.00 just so I can get somebody else to make From these spare beginnings Strei- the loss, when she was fifteen months
130 Pages • Short Story/Poems
my bed.” But fantasizing about becom- sand marched forward, unstoppa- old, of her thirty-five-year-old father,
ing a contender and actually becom- bly. “You see, I had big plans,” she who came from an Orthodox Jewish
THE COMEDY OF THE REAL ing one are two very different things: writes, as though we hadn’t guessed background in Brooklyn and was a Phi
The Dream of a K-Pop Youth—A Novel many little girls dream these days of as much. She seems impervious to re- Beta Kappa graduate of City College,
In this metaphysical no- becoming Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, jection, even when she is turned down and whom she came to idealize. “My
vella the author proposes and their dreams remain just that— by the Actors Studio because of her mother told me that for months after
that the cult of the 19th
century French “dandy”
dreams. Streisand, on the other hand, age (“Maybe I didn’t want them”). She my father died, I would still climb up
—aka Alfred de Musset as she relates it in her book, is almost began auditioning (for MGM ) at nine. on the window ledge to wait for him
—is reborn in certain confounding in her single-mindedness At thirteen she made a record and to come home,” she writes. “In some
Korean K-Pop groups, and persistence. surprised herself with her ability to ways, I’m still waiting.”
who break with inflexible What we get is an extended, com- improvise. At fourteen she read Show After her father’s death, her mother
tradition that limits the plex portrait of a woman gifted early Business and started going to acting married a used car salesman whom
social progress of society.
on with an extraordinary talent com- class. She had an image of herself as Streisand hated, although she liked the
9781312247048 • Paper, $15.99 bined with an unyielding drive, fueled someone destined to become a “big smell of his Pall Malls. She eventually
72 Pages • Novel
by a mixture of insecurity and auda- star,” even before she landed her first taught her mother how to smoke. In
ciousness (although the latter never real showbiz engagement in Septem- addition to her older brother she had a
Available on Lulu Books, Barnes & Noble, seems to have been hampered by the ber 1960 at a supper club on 8th Street younger half-sister, Roslyn. Both sib-
BookBaby.com, Amazon, and Ingram.
former). “I never thought I was great,” called the Bon Soir, where she was an lings merit barely a mention, as though
Author’s website: www.dipietroeditions.com she writes, but the truth seems to be instant success singing ballads, up- she were an only child. As one of six
that for a large part of her life she tempo pieces, and, just to tweak the fractious brothers and sisters, I was

22 The New York Review

struck by their absence—surely they Field shouted, “I can’t deny the fact helped publicize her talent was dis- in her own success. On page 832 she
had some relationship growing up. Or that you like me, right now, you like carded for some wrongdoing or other: writes, “I’m still that girl at the yeshiva
perhaps, if there was any rivalry, she me!” when she won the Academy Award “I just put him out of my life. I can who just couldn’t accept things that
didn’t notice it. for Best Actress in Places in the Heart. do that with people who disappoint didn’t make sense to me.”
She remembered her mother as not In Field’s case one felt a real vulner- me. It’s not one of my finest quali- My Name Is Barbra is not to be dis-
particularly affectionate, although she ability, her sudden sense of her own ties. I can build a wall and shut them missed, even at its astonishing length.
appears to have provided the basics sway over the audience; in Streisand’s out.” It shows a busy intelligence at work
of what Saul Bellow once called “po- the embarrassing pileup of tributes In the decades to come Streisand and a fair degree of self-knowledge. I
tato love,” seeing to it that Barbra seems more like a verification of her became a protean, almost mythic fig- find much to admire about Streisand
ate enough and was dressed warmly. popularity, just in case we have failed ure who inhabited many realms, all in her memoir, including her refusal
Attention seems to have been selec- to take in the extent of her celebrity. the time maintaining her indubitable to play down her own innate power
tively paid to her needs and desires: Perhaps the most intriguing chapter kookiness and earthy Brooklyn accent. in a period when women acted suit-
she was sent to a health camp because in the book, if only because it is un- She chewed up the zeitgeist and spat ably pliant, as well as her ability to
she was anemic, and she went to danc- expected and shows Streisand being it out, always keeping pace. Johnny expound on gender politics without
ing school. From the beginning Strei- open and susceptible, describes her at Mathis was her favorite singer when sounding shrill. It seems to me that
sand was a fiercely resilient creature, twenty-three taking up with Marlon she was young, but her tastes morphed it is her undidactic, nuanced approach
rising above less than optimal circum- Brando, then forty-one—“the man who over the years, and her own allure to sex that clinches the unforgetta-
stances with ingenuity and determi- in my opinion was the most gorgeous, lasted from one era to the next; she ble scene in The Way We Were (1973),
nation. Lacking a doll, for instance the most brilliant, the most talented went from accompanying Judy Garland in which she provides a rare example
(although I found this particular de- human being on earth!” Before they to Donna Summer to the Bee Gees. of the “female gaze” at its most ten-
tail unpersuasive), she forswore self- were formally introduced at a bene- Later in the book she becomes der, looking adoringly upon a sleeping
pity and made one out of a hot-water fit for the Student Nonviolent Coor- friendly with Madeleine Albright and Robert Redford.
bottle for which a neighbor knitted a dinating Committee in April 1965, he with Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia. There is nothing to do, then, but make
pink sweater and hat. kissed her on her back. They didn’t Her political involvements exhibit way for her, this diva who shrewdly min-
Streisand describes herself as a meet often, but when they did clearly her typically West Coast humani- imizes her own uniquely gilded life (a
“very forceful child”: “My mother and “skipped the small talk.” When Warren tarian outlook—lots of bien-pensant Malibu hideaway, stratospheric fees,
I did not have the typical mother- Beatty invited them both to dinner at views, a commitment to feminism and personal gardeners, and film sets that
daughter relationship,” she writes. “I his girlfriend Leslie Caron’s house in Israel, without too much hard thinking. must be wastefully redone according
always had a certain power over her. London, Streisand and Brando got lost She becomes interested in the stock to her vision) by repeating that money
Or maybe I was so relentless that I in conversation for hours, discussing market, for which she shows a natu- doesn’t mean much to her and who has
wore her down.” (One might argue that their unhappy childhoods—“We both ral aptitude, buying and selling eBay, written a book that is a tribute to aspi-
the key to her vast success was that grew up with that feeling of not being Amazon, Apple, and AOL and nearly ration—alternately awe-inspiring, irk-
eventually she wore everyone down.) seen”—while the actor’s wife, Tarita, doubling Donna Karan’s money in five some, and engaging. “As a teenager,” she
a Polynesian actress, was left to her- months. (What are friends for?) She writes, “I wanted nothing more than to
self. (Elliott Gould had stayed back describes herself as “a mass of con- see my name in lights on a theater mar-

A pparently only a handful of peo-

ple have ever resisted Streisand.
One was Walter Matthau, who co-
in New York.)
During one conversation, Brando
told Streisand he’d like to “fuck” her,
tradictions,” which she does seem to
be, half-idealistic and half-ruthless.
She is both a sensation—someone who
quee.” She achieved that, and then she
went on to advise Oprah and clone her
dog Sammie, a Coton de Tulear, and to
starred with her in her second film, which, somewhat inexplicably, she de- shot into the skies like a comet at the officiously inform us about gun safety

.
Hello, Dolly! (1969), playing the crusty clined, possibly because of the lack of age of twenty-one—and someone the legislation, nuclear proliferation, and
romantic lead despite the twenty-two- romantic intent in the blunt wording. average reader can surprisingly relate “the environmental crisis.” The rest, the
year age difference between them. He Some years later they spent a day to- to, because she never fully outruns her “more is more” that is the engine of My
resented Streisand’s novice attempts gether in the desert outside Los An- own demons and never fully believes Name Is Barbra, is in the ellipses . . .
to direct him, graciously telling her, geles, but the exact contours of their
“You may be the singer in this pic- relationship—Do they ever sleep to-
ture, but I’m the actor! I have more gether?—remain foggy, as Streisand
talent in my farts than you have in your seems to prefer it. This deliberate
whole body!” She was also in a con- obliqueness applies to many of her
stant power struggle with the producer trysts, including with Kris Kristoffer-
Ray Stark, who she felt didn’t appreci- son (“perfect white teeth”), Don John-
ate her. And then there was crotchety
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who thought
son, and, over ten years, Jon Peters.
She claims that she doesn’t quite re-
2024
she got his story “Yentl the Yeshiva member sleeping with Beatty—which
Boy” wrong. After the film opened, seems dubious and coy both. Her dis-
Singer told The New York Times, “I cussions of sex tend to be irritating,
never imagined Yentl singing songs. as if she were a chaste schoolgirl lost

Erasmus
The passion for learning and the pas- among a gang of ruffians. Although
sion for singing are not much related she is often self-deprecating about
in my mind. There is almost no sing- her looks, she is not above mentioning
ing in my works.” more than once that she has beautiful
Other than these and one or two
other detractors whose advances she
rejected—like Mandy Patinkin, who
breasts and long legs.

Prize
played opposite her in Yentl, didn’t like
rehearsing, and was initially hostile
to her, only for it to emerge that he’d
A fter her performances at the Bon
Soir, Streisand started to develop
a following. She acquired an agent, who
expected to jump Streisand’s bones booked her at a nightclub in Detroit.
the moment he came on set and was Another client of her agent got her on awarded to
reduced to tears when she told him The Jack Paar Show, where she shared
she had no intention of having an af-
fair with him—the encomiums come
thick and heavy. She does provide a
few derogatory descriptions in the
billing with Phyllis Diller and wore a
dress upholstered in burgundy damask
and a pair of Fiorentina satin shoes
dyed to match before changing into a
Amitav
book’s prologue, describing the recep-
tion of her performance, at the age of
nineteen, as a lovelorn Jewish secre-
tary named Miss Marmelstein in I Can
black sheath for her second number.
She had an instinctive sense of how
to handle an audience: “For me, the
secret is not to reach out. That’s fu-
Ghosh
Get It for You Wholesale. Reviewers re- tile. Instead you have to reach in. And
ferred to her as an “amiable anteater,” I discovered that the more I turned
“a furious hamster,” and “a seasick inward the more the audience was
ferret”—but these genuinely funny drawn to me.”
details get lost in the pages to come. Her post–Miss Marmelstein ascent
Somewhere during my infinitely was rapid—“Working my way up slowly
time-consuming reading (the audio didn’t figure into my plan”—and un-
version, read by Streisand herself,
runs to forty-eight hours and seven-
doubtedly hastened by what she ad-
mitted was a certain cold-bloodedness.
ERASMUSPRIZE.ORG
teen minutes), I was reminded of the One close friend she moved in with
moment at the 1985 Oscars when Sally when she was starting out and who

April 4, 2024 23
 A ‘Wary Faith’ in the Courts
Eric Foner

the basis of an “informal economy”

that allowed numerous slaves to earn
income that would finance the acqui-
sition of land after the Civil War.
Over time, privileges won by slaves
morphed into customs, and customs
into rights. While slavery existed,
property ownership by slaves was
not enforceable in court. That would
change in 1871, in the midst of Recon-
struction, when Congress established
the Southern Claims Commission,
charged with compensating former
southern Unionists, slaves included,
for property appropriated by the army
during the war.
Something similar had transpired
a few years earlier with regard to
Black families. Slave marriages had
no standing in law, but enslaved men
and women married anyway and local
communities, white and Black, recog-
nized the existence of their unions,
though this did not prevent their dis-
ruption by sale. Although Penning-
roth does not draw attention to it, in
March 1865 Abraham Lincoln signed
a law freeing the immediate families
of Black Union soldiers. Slaves’ family
ties suddenly acquired legal standing
in the eyes of the federal government.
One consequence was that the widows
of Black veterans became entitled to
federal pensions. As for Jackson Hol-
comb, in the years after his encounter
with fleeing Confederates, he married,
Spectators and witnesses at the trial for a case involving an automobile accident, Oxford, North Carolina, 1939 purchased land, and paid his property
taxes. He appreciated the importance
of adhering to legal rules.
Before the Movement: gence of the civil rights movement in the South. These were civil litiga- In order to make sense of the vast
The Hidden History rests on a series of misconceptions tions, matters of private law whose archive he and his students have cre-
of Black Civil Rights about Black Americans’ “legal lives.” documentary records long lay unex- ated, Penningroth divides his history
by Dylan C. Penningroth. He sets out to demolish them. Even amined in local courthouses. As has into four parts—slavery, Reconstruc-
Liveright, 465 pp., $35.00 during the days of slavery, he insists, lately become common among histo- tion, Jim Crow, and the “movement
they knew a lot more about legal prin- rians, Penningroth intersperses his era.” For each he delineates how Black
During its heyday in the 1960s the civil ciples than one might imagine. From account with his own family’s experi- citizens used the law and how their ef-
rights movement caused deep divisions experience and observation, they de- ences from the time of slavery to the forts helped to produce an evolution in
in American society. More recently it veloped what Penningroth calls “goat twentieth century’s Great Migration the concept of civil rights itself. Many
has been absorbed into a whiggish sense” (following the coinage of the as a point of departure and reference. readers may find the first chapter, “The
narrative of progress in which a sys- Black tenant farmer Ned Cobb, the Privileges of Slavery,” surprising. Pen-
tem resting on white supremacy was protagonist of the 1974 best seller All ningroth freely grants the incongruity
superseded by one that, while hardly
perfect, is considerably closer to the
ideal of equal justice under law. Par-
God’s Dangers*)—a working knowledge
of legal rules and concepts.
Far from avoiding the courts, they uti-
B efore the Movement begins with a
revealing incident involving Pen-
ningroth’s enslaved ancestor Jackson
of the idea. But he shows that through-
out the South, slaves were able to
wring concessions from their owners
ticipants in what is sometimes called lized all the legal tools at their disposal. Holcomb, who owned a small boat in and to create customary entitlements
the “freedom struggle” included coura- From the late nineteenth century to Virginia. In the final days of the Civil that over time evolved into rights rec-

S CHOMBU RG CE NT ER FOR RE S EARCH I N BLACK C ULT URE / NE W YOR K PUBL IC LI BRARY

geous activists who put their lives on the era of the civil rights movement, he War, Holcomb successfully demanded ognized by “community opinion.”
the line in the Jim Crow South and a writes, “Black people poured out their payent to ferry Confederate soldiers “Slaves owned property in every
cadre of civil rights attorneys, exem- family stories” in legal cases, exhibit- fleeing the Union army across the Appo- legal sense of the word,” he writes, “ex-
plified by Charles Hamilton Houston ing a “wary faith” that the courts would mattox River. Legally speaking, the boat cept that no court would protect their
and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP , uphold their claims to what he calls the and everything else Holcomb claimed ownership as a right.” Readers may
who in a series of landmark cases per- mundane “rights of everyday use”— as property belonged to his enslaver. well consider this a significant excep-
suaded the federal courts that the legal rights that derived from ownership of But the desperate Confederates did not tion, but Penningroth makes a strong
system institutionalized around 1900 in property, the signing of contracts, the challenge his ownership of a boat or his case that their experience with prop-
the southern states violated the con- “associational privileges” of member- right to charge a fee for transporting in- erty ownership and trade equipped
stitutional rights of Black Americans. ship in Black churches, and legal claims, dividuals across the river. Whatever the slaves to become “key players” in the
Before this triumph of the rule of such as inheritance, acquired through letter of the law, custom throughout the South’s “market economy,” and that
law, according to what Dylan Pennin- marriage. Rather than heroic freedom slave South accepted that slaves could as a result many were prepared for
groth calls the “master narrative of fighters courageously confronting re- acquire property of their own. participation in a free labor system.
civil rights,” Black southerners had pression or victims avoiding the courts Penningroth devotes particular at- Emancipation, he writes, was “a much
little faith in the legal system and at all costs, Black Americans emerge in tention to the widespread practice less sharp break” in the lives of the
did their best to avoid contact with it. this telling as ordinary folk using the of allowing slaves to till small gar- enslaved than historians have as-
This makes intuitive sense. Why would law to help make the best of difficult den plots on which they grew crops sumed. (Penningroth has a penchant
African Americans believe they could circumstances. for sale at local markets. He acknowl- for ex cathedra pronouncements like
achieve fair results in courts dedicated Penningroth’s conclusions emerge edges that for slaves, cultivating “gar- this that need more supporting evidence
to upholding white supremacy? Better from an epic research agenda in which den patches” in what was supposed to than he provides, and he sometimes
to steer clear of southern courtrooms he and his students examined some be their free time was a form of “su- fails to make clear which historians
entirely. 14,000 legal cases, identifying 1,500 perexploitation”—the owner shifting he is taking to task.)
Penningroth, who teaches history with Black litigants, most but not all to the laborers themselves part of the Penningroth’s discussion of slave
and law at the University of Califor- responsibility for providing food for property rights brings to mind the
nia, Berkeley, believes that current *Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: enslaved laborers and their families. work of perhaps the post–World War II
scholars’ understanding of the emer- The Life of Nate Shaw (Knopf, 1974). Nevertheless he views such plots as generation’s leading scholar of slavery,

24 The New York Review

Eugene D. Genovese. Current trends in sued to bar the minister from preach- discrimination by public officials, not relatives who reneged on promises of
scholarship about the Old South have ing because he had been performing private businesses. But, Penningroth monetary payments to help them sur-
somewhat diminished his posthumous faith healing services in the sanctuary. points out, the process of redefinition vive old age. As landownership frag-
reputation. The stress now is on the The state supreme court ruled in their continued well into the twentieth cen- mented, generations of Black farmers
institution’s physical brutality and its favor. Black litigants were sometimes tury, as civil rights became more and had no choice but to master the legal
central role in the expansion of modern more willing to trust the judgment of more linked to race. By the time Con- complexities of such transactions.
capitalism, calling into question Geno- local courts than the decisions of other gress and the Warren Court had dis-
vese’s portrait of southern slavery as a family and church members. mantled legal Jim Crow, the right of
paternalistic, precapitalist institution
whose functioning rested on mutual
concessions between owner and slave.
In her memoirs, published in 1898,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled that
Reconstruction
racial minorities to be free of invidious
discrimination had overshadowed the
definition of civil rights as the basic
T he Jim Crow era also witnessed a
proliferation of Black institutions,
including churches, societies for mutual
Genovese was interested in how entitlements of all free persons. This relief, fraternal orders, and schools and
ruling classes acquire legitimacy and involved the reconsideration of the transformation, he speculates, made it colleges. African Americans had to learn
exercise authority. Toward the begin- principles of our Government and more difficult to persuade white Amer- the nuances of laws regulating the pow-
ning of his classic study Roll, Jordan, the natural rights of man. The na- icans that the struggle for civil rights ers of corporations and associations. As
Roll (1974), he included a brief section tion’s heart was thrilled by pro- was relevant to their own daily lives. with family and church disputes, they
entitled “The Hegemonic Function of longed debates in Congress and Despite losing rights of many kinds, used what they learned to file lawsuits.
the Law,” delineating how it serves the State legislatures, in the pulpits Black southerners in the Jim Crow era Finally, Penningroth turns to the
interests of those holding power in and public journals, and at every enjoyed some remarkable achievements. “movement era.” Many readers may
repressive regimes to ensure that the fireside on these vital questions. By 1910, Penningroth relates, more than consider his judgments in this section
legal system operates with a modicum half a million Black families had man- unduly harsh. He agrees with most cur-
of fairness, even if it means that per- Penningroth examines how the nation- aged to acquire land, amounting to more rent scholars that rather than being
sons like them do not always win in wide debate she describes reconfigured than 15 million acres. Yet as time went brought to the South by NAACP lawyers
court. The belief that the courts actu- Americans’ grasp of the concept of civil on, the way they dealt with landowner- and other outsiders, the civil rights
ally dispense justice can help to ob- rights. Before the war, rights were di- ship generated serious problems. Fre- movement drew on a long history of
scure vast imbalances of power. Like vided into three categories—civil, po- quently, property was owned jointly by local legal activism. In keeping with his
Penningroth, Genovese wrote of rights litical, and social—and enjoyment of members of extended families. Any de- emphasis on the vitality of Black tra-
based on custom enjoyed by slaves. them varied from state to state. Civil cision to sell required the agreement ditions, he reproaches the civil rights
rights encompassed those entitlements of all co-owners, causing deep family workers from the Student Nonviolent
necessary for participation in a free- divisions. When individual co-owners Coordinating Committee who coura-

I n the late nineteenth century,

thanks to the laws and constitu-
tional amendments enacted during Re-
labor economy: signing contracts; tes-
tifying in court; owning, buying, and
selling property; and suing and being
died without a will, their portion of the
land was divided into small plots among
surviving children and grandchildren.
geously entered the South to help se-
cure the constitutional rights of Black
citizens for misunderstanding the local
construction, Black men for the first sued. Even in the South, many free Because of the Great Migration, the culture. Offering little direct evidence
time were serving as justices of the Black people enjoyed civil rights, but disposition of landed property in the of their views, he writes that the civil
peace and holding other judicial offices, not the other two. They could own prop- South frequently involved relatives liv- rights volunteers assumed that local
mostly in the South. This helps to ex- erty and testify in court (although often ing in the North, with whom southern people had little experience with legal
plain why more and more Black south- only in cases involving other Black peo- family members had little or no contact. processes and approached the court
erners were inspired to go to court, a ple), but throughout the country voting Land became the subject of intra-family system from behind a veil of “legal ig-
pattern that continued well after the and “social” rights such as equal access lawsuits in which litigants claimed to norance.” These outsiders were under
advent of Jim Crow. But, Penningroth to public transportation, hotels, restau- have been cheated out of their share of the mistaken impression, he claims, that
was surprised to discover, very few of rants, and places of amusement were what came to be known as “heir prop- Black southerners were “ignorant of
the thousands of cases he examined generally restricted to white men. erty,” and elderly family members sued their rights” and in need of intervention
identified the race of the individuals In 1866, over the veto of President An-
involved. In cases revolving around drew Johnson, Congress passed the first
property rights, he says, it made no national civil rights act, which declared
difference if parties were Black or all persons born in the United States
white—race “had no legal meaning.” citizens by birthright, with the excep-
Despite the pervasive hold of white tion of Native Americans (considered ,
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from lawsuits, Black churches were In 1883 the Supreme Court declared 
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Penningroth relates the experience the view that the Fourteenth Amend-
of the Mount Helm Baptist Church in ment’s guarantee of equal protection  
  



Mississippi, “engulfed in controversy” of the law regardless of race applied
in 1899 when a group of parishioners only to “state action”—that is, racial

April 4, 2024 25
to galvanize a movement for change. 17 percent of the civil suits he exam- Whatever the outcomes of indi- unaffordable for most Black clients.
Both Black and white activists, he sug- ined, probably more. vidual lawsuits, the cases handled by Not until the 1980s, Penningroth points
gests, adopted a condescending attitude Such litigation did not directly Black attorneys rarely produced fees out, did white-controlled corporations
toward the people they were seeking to challenge white supremacy—nearly or damages sufficient to sustain a and law firms, able to pay higher sala-
organize; some went so far as to attri- all these lawsuits pitted Black people legal career. This was especially true ries than Black lawyers were used to
bute southern Black poverty, in part, against one another. But even at the of cases litigating civil rights, which receiving, begin to hire Black attorneys
to a “plantation mentality” inherited height of Jim Crow, Black travelers did not produce much income for the in significant numbers.
from slavery. were able to win lawsuits for damages lawyers. With the movement’s legal Penningroth believes that recent
Penningroth’s section on this era against railroads that had subjected successes this changed. For the first scholars of Black legal history have
includes a valuable discussion of the them to demeaning treatment, and time, Black attorneys could make a been studying the wrong cases, paying
evolving status of Black attorneys. white judges ordered whites to pay living as civil rights lawyers, litigating too much attention to national leaders
Drawing on Kenneth Mack’s influen- their debts to Black creditors. Where cases arising from new federal stat- and too little to the communities from
tial book Representing the Race (2012), the white South drew the line was utes and regulations that prohibited which the movement sprang. Their
he notes that before the mid-twentieth at Black lawyers’ practicing cases of racial discrimination. focus on the great constitutional rul-
century most Black attorneys, like legal significance. Nearly all the law- But this development brought sig- ings of the Warren Court slights many
most white ones, worked as general yers in these thousands of cases ap- nificant pressure to bear on Black at- other kinds of Black encounters with
interest practitioners who spent the pear to have been white. One reason torneys to represent the entire “race,” the legal system. Unlike most such
majority of their time representing cited by Penningroth was the creation not simply individual clients or their works, Before the Movement examines
clients of modest means in minor local by prominent white attorneys of lily- own self-interest. Complaints arose very few Supreme Court rulings.
cases. At the turn of the twentieth cen- white bar associations, racially exclu- that lawyers were too aloof from Black Penningroth insists that the stan-
tury, African Americans filed at least sionary gateways to the profession. communities, or charged fees that were dard narrative, what he calls “civil



 

 
 

  
 





  


 

 
 

 


 
 

  

  

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26 The New York Review

rights history,” “has left Black people law was experienced by Black citizens boundaries of exclusion and inclusion ual and social well-being, suggests the
disconnected from our own legal com- and how their “legal lives” changed over in the body politic. Penningroth roots transformation was incomplete.
monsense”—that is, how ordinary peo- time. Inevitably, given the broad scope nineteenth-century definitions of civil Civil rights gained a powerful foot-
ple thought about the law and tried to of Penningroth’s investigation, import- rights in that era’s antislavery politics. hold in the nation’s laws and legal con-
use it in their day-to-day lives. Pennin- ant questions remain to be answered. But as the book progresses, politics sciousness. Yet something was lost,
groth does not hesitate to chide pre- What was the impact of segregation mostly drops out of the picture. Perhaps Penningroth believes, when legal is-
vious historians for what he considers and widespread racial violence—pil- this stems from Penningroth’s convic- sues were turned into moral ones and
mistaken interpretations. But it is also lars of the Jim Crow system—on the tion that the measure of race relations civil rights became a matter of race
true that his work builds on that of re- functioning of the law? What would the may be found in the legal system, not rather than of common citizenship.
cent scholars such as Martha S. Jones analysis of Black political ideologies the ballot box, or his complaint that re- Did the movement itself, as he con-
and Laura Edwards, who, like him, have and practices add to the discussion? cent historians have imposed what he tends, encourage the transformation
expanded the terrain of legal history to The long disfranchisement of Black calls “the politics of the 1960s” on their of “civil rights” from entitlements that
include the role of law in everyday life. southerners was a national scandal that accounts of the civil rights movement. should be available to all citizens into
Like Penningroth, they have argued did much to shape the lives and oppor- Was the movement a victory, a defeat, the narrower concept of nondiscrimi-
that law is created not only by legis- tunities of both Black and white Amer- or something more ambiguous than ei- nation—a shield protecting only racial
latures and courts but also by people icans, as well as structures of power in ther? The legal edifice of Jim Crow was minorities and thus making it more
who have limited representation within the South and the nation’s capital. As dismantled and numerous embodiments difficult to enlist other Americans on

.
these venues yet are able nonetheless Frederick Douglass noted during Re- of white supremacy uprooted. But a look the movement’s side? On this and other
to carve out rights for themselves. construction, in a putative democracy, around our society today, with its stark questions raised by Penningroth’s am-
Before the Movement presents an orig- exclusion from the right to vote is more disparities in wealth, life expectancy, bitious, stimulating, and provocative
inal and provocative account of how civil than an inconvenience—it marks the education, and other indices of individ- book, the jury is still out.


  
 
  


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REVOLUTION AND OFF TELEGRAPH
CONSTITUTIONALISM PROTECTING
YOURSELF FROM A Novel of Berkeley in the Sixties
IN BRITAIN AND by Joseph Rodricks
THE U.S. EMOTIONAL
A tale of scientific fraud that twists
Burke and Madison and their PREDATORS
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Contemporary Legacies Neutralize the Users, Abusers and litical turbulence of the 1960s and
by David A. J. Richards Manipulators Hidden Among Us the wakening rebellion against the
Provocative, illuminating discus- by Steven J. Wolhandler, JD, scientific worldview. These themes
sions—Burke as a liberal and ana- MA, LPC and the novel’s many brilliant char-
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April 4, 2024 27
 Becoming One with Genius
Sophie Pinkham

The Extinction of Irena Rey edge of the primeval Białowieża For-

by Jennifer Croft. est, near Poland’s border with Belarus.
Bloomsbury, 309 pp., $28.99 Their “Author,” whom Emi worships as
a goddess, has the custom of gather-
Most translators are the worthiest of ing them together there to translate
people: gifted, erudite, hardworking, her top-secret new works. Freddie is
and modest in their material needs. a first-timer, but most of the group’s
People who crave money and fame members have long histories with one
choose other jobs. Babysitting would another. For the first portion of the
pay better, though that’s true of many novel, the narration is in the first-
intellectual and creative professions person plural, and the translators are
these days. And even when the work referred to not by their names but by
you’ve translated succeeds brilliantly, their languages: English, Ukrainian,
few readers even notice that it’s yours. Spanish, and so on. Emi describes how
After all, it has someone else’s name they were born “from the foam of a
on it. novel called Lena” the first time they
For most of the history of publish- convened near Białowieża. When the
ing, with the exception of the highest- Author vanishes, they choose to remain
profile works (for instance, Homer), in the house, continuing to translate as
even those who were searching might they try to solve the mystery of her dis-
have had trouble finding the transla- appearance. A baroque, quasi-magical
tor’s name. Paid translation was often realist story ensues, full of surprise
seen not as a vocation but as a quick twists and ironic asides.
source of income, a more intellectual Croft has buttressed her novel
version of taking in piecework. In the with an elaborate metafictional ar-
nineteenth century Russian revolu- chitecture. The book begins with
tionaries earned their meager portions a section titled “Warning: A Note
of bread and tea by staying up all night from the Translator.” Said translator,
translating political tracts and news- who is named Alexis, explains that
paper articles in flea-ridden rented this has been the hardest transla-
rooms in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Lon- tion of her career because she is one
don, or Geneva. Mikhail Bakunin, an of the main characters in the book,
impecunious father of anarchism, was and the author’s nemesis. In transla-
translating Marx’s Capital for 1,200 tion, she writes, “trust is crucial,” and
rubles (around $24,000 today) when “translation is being forced to write
his friend Sergei Nechaev persuaded a book again.” Yet in the book she is
him to ditch the tedious work and re- a monster, though a beautiful one.
turn to the more glamorous business of This was the first of many implausi-
fomenting revolution. When Bakunin ble moments. What editor would allow
protested that he had already spent a book’s villain to be its translator?
his 300-ruble advance, Nechaev sent Jennifer Croft; illustration by Michelle Mildenberg And could there ever be a tornado in
the publisher a threatening letter in forested eastern Poland? Why would
the name of a nonexistent secret rev- once a smooth-flowing text, and a quiet essence of great literature and trans- a parrot migrate across Eastern Eu-
olutionary committee. Leave Bakunin canon of excellent translations that go forms it in her body, speaking in rope? Would a Berlin airport lost and
alone—or else. The publisher wrote unrecognized. Some eager translators tongues. This is translation as séance, found hold multiple Patek Philippes?
off the loss. improve sloppy, repetitious originals. as alchemy. Just as sex can express an What famous writer would choose
Today, translators who are not con- This kind of editing in translation is a impossible longing to become one with her translators based on a combina-
tent to toil in obscurity fight for their crime for those who cherish “fidelity” another person, translation evinces tion of looks and traumatic family
rights with the nearest weapon to above all else. But isn’t translation al- an impossible desire to become one history?
hand: social media. They promote the ways a kind of threesome? with the original. Like sex sometimes The metafictional apparatus con-
authors they’ve translated, and they does, translation produces a new, third tinues with plentiful footnotes from
promote themselves. They muse about being. Some translators fall in love Alexis. Footnote 1: “A sizable excerpt of
the nature of translation, post teasers
from their latest projects, and share
details of their private lives. Some post
C roft is also a writer, though the pri-
mary subject of her fiction is trans-
lation. In her new novel, The Extinction
with their authors; some sleep with
them; some become obsessed, resent-
ful, or jealous.
my translation of Irena’s novel Szara
eminencja first appeared in a Roma-
nian magazine that adopted UK spell-
flattering selfies in states of undress. of Irena Rey, the narrator, an Argentin- Croft is not in the school of trans- ing for all words, including the first
Like everyone else on social media, ian translator named Emilia Martini lation that emphasizes word-by-word word of the title, Grey. Perhaps due
they try to be famous. The most en- (Emi for short), has sex with a hand- fidelity to the original. In a feature to the outsize success of that excerpt,
ergetic translator-activist on social some Swedish translator named Fred- on her efforts in The New York Times, the US publisher made the unusual de-
media in recent years has been Jen- die. While they’re in bed she thinks she referred to her translation of To- cision to preserve that spelling here.”
nifer Croft, an American who in 2021 about Irena Rey, the Polish Nobel fa- karczuk’s Flights as their “love child,” Footnote 8: “In light of the fact that
organized a successful open letter vorite she and Freddie translate: explaining, “It’s Olga’s, but also it has puns are the one category of language
from writers and translators demand- all of these elements that are mine, that is truly untranslatable, I have had
ing that translators’ names appear The stronger her presence became, these stylistic elements and these de- to remove this author’s subsequent
on book covers. As the translator of the harder I fucked him until all cisions that I made.” Croft described examples.” Footnote 26: “Ha, ha.” Foot-
Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 of a sudden I was stunned by my her method as “completely dismantling note 33: “??” Footnote 69: “At this point
Nobel Prize in Literature, Croft had own orgasm, an all-encompassing a book and then completely rebuilding it would be natural for the reader to
unusual authority. When she trans- explosion, so that then when he it from the ground up.” Flights won the wonder why I agreed to translate this
lated Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob turned me over and set me on all International Booker Prize, a prelude book. My editor refused to let me have
(2022), her name was on the cover fours I felt like my body was just to Tokarczuk’s Nobel. “Jenny does not an afterword, as did this author, so I
and she received royalties, unusual a shell that was bursting. focus on language at all, but on what will talk about it here since not even
for translators. is underneath the language and what my editor’s assistant is reading the
Croft was right: translators’ names The next day Emi translates with alac- the language is trying to express,” footnotes at this point.” Her explana-
should always appear on the book rity, feeling “perfectly in sync” with her Tokarczuk said. “So she explains the tion, too long for me to quote, does not
cover. The quality of their work can author. The Swedish sperm, a biological author’s intention, not just the words make this conceit plausible, though it
make the difference between joy and stand-in for the highest literary honor, standing in a row one by one.” contains plenty of clever observations
bafflement, though the reader may has entered her, and her language takes about translation.
never be certain what share of plea- wing. (Though she is the daughter of a Emi describes learning Polish at the
sure or irritation can be attributed to
their efforts. There is a tragic surfeit of
ham-handed translations that make it
condom manufacturer, Emi sometimes
forgets to use protection.)
Here the translator is a spirit me-
T he concupiscent Emi and Freddie
are only two of a group of transla-
tors who are camped out in Irena Rey’s
Polish House on Borges Street in Bue-
nos Aires. (Why no Nabokov Avenue in
The Extinction of Irena Rey, or at least
impossible to lose oneself in what was dium who calls forth the preverbal custom-built Japanese cottage at the a few tongues of pale fire? In keeping

28 The New York Review

with our anti-Russian moment, there unique biological network soaked in Author herself, or with the fungal net- Irena is “not noble, but cheap, thieving.
isn’t even a Russian translator in Ire- the blood of history. This is accurate: work of literature—as a translation Base. Her genius wasn’t hers: It was
na’s squad, though the novel is set be- Białowieża is not only one of the last is a stand-in for the original text. I everyone else’s.” Does this mean that
fore 2022.) The Extinction has many remnants of the primeval forest that was reminded of the story of Push- Alexis was right? Is the Romantic cult
long, eccentric lists, as befits a work of once covered Europe, but for centuries kin’s affair with Calypso Polichroni, a of genius an outdated concept? Is lit-
Latin American–style postmodernism. was the scene of battles, massacres, beautiful Greek woman who was be- erature inherently collaborative? Does
Croft also translates from Argentine and partisan struggles. The forest- lieved, probably falsely, to have slept the translator have the last word? The
Spanish. Her book Homesick was orig- magic part of the novel never quite co- with Byron. Pushkin couldn’t resist Author is certainly (spoiler alert) dead.
inally published in Argentina in 2014 alesces, either, despite the occasional the lure of being one degree of sex- The Extinction of Irena Rey is burst-
as a novel under the title Serpientes appearance of a Slavic wood-goblin. In- ual separation from his literary hero. ing with energy and cleverness, Croft’s
y escaleras (Snakes and Ladders), be- formed by Merlin Sheldrake’s 2020 best abundant linguistic gifts and stimu-
fore being published as a memoir in seller Entangled Life: How Fungi Make lating ideas on display. She is clearly
the US in 2019. Though the characters
had invented names, the life stories
and photographs in the US edition
Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and
Shape Our Futures, the fungal theme,
like the forest and the climate apoca-
A fter Irena disappears, the trans-
lators go through her belongings
and begin to question their assump-
having fun with all her subplots, her
Russian dolls and Easter eggs. There
are mummies and canopic jars. The
were taken from Croft’s life. In The lypse, is significant mainly as a meta- tions about her numinous perfection. translators have a ritual group mar-
Extinction of Irena Rey, Emi knows phor for translation, with Team Irena Emi is disappointed to discover that, riage and talk about making offerings
only a little about tornadoes, from “a imagining themselves as mycological like a human woman, Irena uses reti- to Perun, the Slavic thunder god. A
strange book called Snakes and Lad- networks that “stitch the world into nol and acids to fight wrinkles. Then stern editor could have turned this
ders written for some reason in Ar- a united and communicating whole.” Emi starts smearing her face with into a very funny, compact satire of
gentine Spanish by the US translator Translation is compared to recy- the Author’s serums. By the end of the literary world, but Croft has am-
of Olga Tokarczuk.” cling and mushrooms, but above all the book Alexis—the distressingly bitions to make the novel much more
it is embodied by sex and conception, beautiful translator of this book and than that. Reading it feels like watch-
usually extramarital. It’s not just Fred- the object of Emi’s obsessive jealousy, ing TV with someone who won’t stop

I rena Rey is so great and so famous

that every one of her works changes
the world (at least according to Emi),
die (who has a wife named Bogdana)
and Emi. Ukrainian leaves his wife for
Slovenian. Serbian discovers, to her
which leads her to challenge Alexis to
a nineteenth-century-style duel—is
wearing Irena’s clothes, shoes, jewelry,
changing the channels.
One of the subtler intertextual as-
pects of The Extinction of Irena Rey is
“stitching up the world’s wounds with surprise, that she is pregnant at forty- makeup, and petrichor perfume, and its similarity to Tokarczuk’s satisfying
language.” She bears some resem- two. French hints that she has had a has dyed her hair to look like Irena’s. “I 2009 literary thriller Drive Your Plow
blance to the leader of a cult, with miscarriage. Emi is turning thirty- never tried on purpose to become you, Over the Bones of the Dead. That novel
good dramatic timing and a dictatorial five and worried about her childbear- Irena,” Emi writes. “I don’t even think wasn’t published in English until 2018,
streak. Because she doesn’t drink alco- ing prospects; there are suggestions Alexis did. It was just that our task as in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones,
hol or eat meat, neither do her trans- toward the end that she is pregnant your translators was to fill in for you, Croft’s predecessor in the role of “En-
lators while staying at her house. Her with Freddie’s child. (Croft has talked and even Alexis, in her own, different glish.” Drive Your Plow is itself highly
partner is also a translator, though he about her fertility troubles online; she way, was dedicated to that task.” intertextual, like many of Tokarczuk’s
has disappeared. (Olga Tokarczuk is eventually gave birth to twins.) Half- Emi and Alexis represent two ap- novels, and takes its title from a Wil-
a vegetarian and animal rights advo- way through we learn that Czech, aka proaches to translation. Emi worships liam Blake poem. The narrator is an
cate with a partner who once worked Pavel, had an affair with Irena herself at the altar of sublime genius, seeing eccentric older woman who lives in a
as a translator.) Irena is a kind of and got her pregnant. She was forty- herself as Irena’s humble servant, remote, forested area on the Polish bor-
forest witch—in the Slavic tradition, four, another proof of her semidivine never daring to develop any literary as- der with the Czech Republic. Like Irena
a Baba Yaga, but much better look- nature. But within months she mis- pirations of her own or to break any of Rey, she is witchy, fond of herbal tinc-
ing. She wears a black-magic amulet, carried, banished Czech, and told the Irena’s rules. For her, it is sacrilege for tures and astrology, and obsessed with
and her furnishings include suits of others he had died. a translator to become an author. She animal rights and the need to respect
armor, treasure chests, and a chande- This revelation prompts Emi to re- would never consider deleting even the forest. She was once a teacher and
lier made of skulls. She writes with ink flect, “Pavel had been sleeping with a sentence from Irena’s masterwork; is helping a former student to trans-
made from self-devouring mushrooms Irena” and “could, if I so desired, do anything Irena writes is like a mes- late Blake into Polish. Like Blake, she
she grows herself, and “filaments of the same things to my body that he sage sent from God. Alexis, meanwhile, likes to capitalize nouns: her murdered
strummed silver” seem to hover “over had done to Our Author’s body, an idea feels free to call a whole chapter of dogs, for instance, are her Little Girls,
her dark cascading hair.” (Unlike Olga that took my breath away.” The trans- Irena’s new book “a little overwritten.” whose death she will avenge. She kills a
Tokarczuk, Irena Rey does not have lators in The Extinction of Irena Rey Emi is scandalized when Alexis sub- man with bark beetles, which also play
dreadlocks.) A “centauric goddess long for intimate contact with genius, tweets Irena as she translates, editing a part in The Extinction of Irena Rey;
whose words would staunch calami- this being a novel in which genius is without permission and skewing the at the end, she moves to Białowieża
ties, hold our apocalypse at bay,” she still a thing, at least from Emi’s per- meaning of the text. Over the course of Entomological Station.
smells of petrichor. Like many transla- spective. Irena’s beautiful translators the novel, however, the scales fall from Drive Your Plow includes a character
tors these days, Croft, or maybe Emi, is have sex with each other, but their li- Emi’s eyes. After the thriller-style de- named the Writer, a summer resident
fond of obscure words: lenticels, pomi- aisons are a stand-in for sex with the nouement, Emi comes to believe that in the forest. The narrator expresses
form, myrobalan, caltrop, ruderal. skepticism about the nature of the
Irena’s new novel is about “the Writer’s literary project:
world’s first true climate change art-
ist and the first person to exceed a A suspicion of fakery springs to
billion followers on Instagram, mak- mind—that such a Person is not
ing her a sort of global empress, un- him- or herself, but an eye that’s
precedented in the history of Earth.” constantly watching, and what-
This heroine “was also Portugal’s fore- ever it sees it changes into sen-
most performer of fado, a gold medal- Domme Song 8 tences; in the process it strips
ist in rhythmic gymnastics, excellent reality of its most essential qual-
at baking, and capable of taming the ity—its inexpressibility.
aurochs she summoned back from ex- You said I had to sleep in the cage but the smoke alarm
tinction to revivify Lascaux.” Emi sees went off and wouldn’t stop so I was like fuck this The translator’s task can be under-
the huge novel as “the epitome of art, and slept in the other room, whose love seat stood as a quest to return to this in-
the kind of art that makes a major im- is hardly better than the cage. But you were pissed. expressible core and transform it into
pact, that spends a century or several Let us never again begin the day with an argument new language, a second process of au-
blocking out the sun.” As she reads fur- when I’m wearing a diaper. I’m not a morning person thorship as dangerous and powerful
ther, though, Emi suspects the novel or an afternoon person. I’m not really an evening person. as the first.
is also suggesting that “our current When you hit me, which of us gets enlightened? The Extinction of Irena Rey, then,
extinction event . . . was the direct re- I’m a pair of stripper heels having a bad dream. might be a way of rebuilding Drive
sult of art,” since the creation of art Prayer is a snake in the mind. The mountains are clean. Your Plow, this time with the ad-
requires destruction, art replacing na- You didn’t even ask how I got out of the cage. dition of all the planks and nails of
ture. In this formulation, the category Croft’s own ideas about authorship
of “art” includes plastic waste. —Michael Robbins and translation. Emi observes that
Early in the novel Emi writes, “We “a translation is a new experience of
were book people. We had yet to truly something that is essentially, funda-
concern ourselves with earth.” The mentally the same.” But Drive Your
climate-dread aspect of the novel feels Plow has a structural integrity that is

.
a bit rote, lost in the background like a missing from this frenetic novel. Olga
late addition to a stage set. Białowieża Tokarczuk, a good sport, provided a
Forest is depicted as a magical place noncommittal blurb: “Croft writes with
of teeming life and prolific decay, a a remarkable intensity.”

April 4, 2024 29
 The Crash Next Time
Trevor Jackson

the 1970s, papered over by a variety

of short-term fixes that themselves
have run into crisis or eventually
broken down. Thus, estimates of the
number of economic crises since the
mid-1970s run from one to more than
two hundred. (The National Bureau of
Economic Research counts seven US
recessions in that time span, but not
every recession is precipitated by a
crisis, and not every crisis leads to a
recession.)

J ames is a distinguished economic

historian at Princeton. His first
book, The German Slump (1986), is one
of the best books ever written about
the Great Depression, and since then
he has published many more books,
on individual firms and banks, on the
international monetary system, and
on globalization. He is the official his-
torian of the International Monetary
Fund, and he is a rare economic histo-
rian who sometimes publishes in cul-
tural history journals. In Seven Crashes
he argues that

new institutions—market inno-

vations, but also states that are
stronger and extend their capac-
ities—generally arise out of re-
sponses to a particular kind of
disruption: supply crises. . . . These
supply crises are moments when
fundamental items such as food or
fuel become scarce, prices rise, and
Illustration by Oliver Munday new channels of production and
distribution are required.

Seven Crashes: pecially the locomotive disasters that of sudden change, let alone conscious His focus, then, is on supply crises
The Economic Crises That would have been well known to Euro- decision. Instead they drag on inter- specifically, not currency, banking,
Shaped Globalization pean and American readers in the late minably without resolution. or stock market crises, and he wants
by Harold James. nineteenth century. Since then we have How many economic crises have there to analyze whether they promoted or
Yale University Press, 367 pp., $32.50 added car crashes and plane crashes, been? Each scholar’s answer will depend restrained globalization. His seven
and markets do indeed still crash, as on what they are trying to learn. Some- crashes span from the 1840s through
The Great Crashes: with the “Flash Crash” of 2010, which times it is useful to separate a single Covid-19, and from them he derives
Lessons from Global Meltdowns lasted thirty-six minutes and tempo- crisis into several national experiences, seven lessons.
and How to Prevent Them rarily evaporated over a trillion dollars such that, for instance, there may have Linda Yueh is a fellow in Economics
by Linda Yueh. from global stock markets. been a single event in the 1980s known at Oxford and an adviser and consul-
London: Penguin Business, These terms may seem synonymous, as the Latin American Debt Crisis, or tant to several economic policy entities.
248 pp., £22.00; £10.99 (paper) but they are not. Newspapers of the instead several individual national debt She has spent years as an economics
1890s and early 1900s advertised prod- crises spanning the decade. It may also broadcaster for the BBC and Bloomberg
There are so many ways for an economy ucts at “crash prices,” meaning they be productive to separate a single crisis Television. Her Great Crashes aims to
to go wrong. It can decline, stagnate, were steeply discounted, and that is a into component parts, so that, say, the show that crises follow a set pattern:
slow down, or overheat. We are used hint: prices, whether of stocks or com- events of 1931 in Austria comprised a after a phase of euphoria they require
to the common technical definition of modities, crash. Panics are outbursts banking crisis, a government fiscal cri- solutions in the form of credible eco-
a recession: two consecutive quarters of collective irrationality; slumps sis, and a currency crisis. Most research- nomic policies, and then they produce
of negative GDP growth, as measured suggest something prolonged and in- ers will provide some sort of definition an uncertain aftermath. Yueh sets out
by the National Bureau of Economic volving exhaustion. Montesquieu was of how far any number of things—bank to cover ten “cautionary tales,” aiming
Research. The long nineteenth century probably the first to use the word “cri- reserves, exchange rates, stock prices, to derive several lessons from each
was littered with panics: 1825, 1837, sis” to refer to an economic event. In GDP —must fall in order to constitute individually and from all of them to-
1857, 1873, 1893, 1896, and 1907, at least. his Spirit of the Laws (1748) he looked a crisis or a crash instead of a dip or a gether. The Great Depression fea-
Markets have not stopped panicking back on the monetary manipulations correction. One widely cited study from tures briefly in the introduction, but
since 1907, but nobody calls the Black of 1720, known today as the Missis- 2001 produced a dataset covering 56 otherwise her crashes are all concen-
Monday stock market conniption “the sippi Bubble, and referred to them as countries that enumerated 44 bank- trated in the period from 1980 through
Panic of 1987.” Instead we have moved a crisis for the state. “Bubble” was the ing crises, 156 currency crises, and 33 Covid. She divides the 2008 financial
on to crises and meltdowns. Writing contemporaneous term in 1720, and it “twin crises” between 1973 and 1997.* crisis from the 2010 eurozone crisis,
in 1930, John Maynard Keynes diag- specifically denoted deception. Specu- The number must be far greater today. though many would argue that they
nosed a “Great Slump,” and “slump” lators were known as “bubblers,” and On the left side of the political spec- were one and the same. James puts the
still mostly adheres to what we now to be cheated was to get “bubbled.” trum, critics like Wolfgang Streeck and late nineteenth century all together,
know as the Great Depression. (For a Before the 1740s, “crisis” had either Robert Brenner have argued that there kicked off by the crash of 1873, instead
writer in 1930, the term “Great Depres- a medical or a theological meaning, has essentially been one continual cri- of separating out the various panics
sion” would probably have referred to indicating a turning point when a pa- sis of profitability and capital accu- that followed until 1907. Both books
the persistent deflation of 1873–1896.) tient either recovered or died, or when mulation rolling steadily along since spend time on the Great Depression,
In his new book Seven Crashes, the a person in doubt recovered their faith on 2008, and on Covid.
economic historian Harold James tells or lost it. A crisis was a moment of *Michael Bordo et al., “Is the Crisis Problem Any book that covers seven or ten
us that the German financial disaster change. Despite the proliferation of Growing More Severe?” Economic Policy, complicated historical events is going
of 1873 was the first known as a “crash,” crises today, that sense of the word has Vol. 16, No. 32 (April 2001). I counted the to be better at some than others. Yueh
but does not explain whether that was been utterly lost: crises both economic crises in the underlying data file posted is excellent in The Great Crashes on the
an allusion to the vehicular kind, es- and not have ceased to be moments on Bordo’s faculty website. Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s.

30 The New York Review

James’s chapter on the late nineteenth general history of economic thinkers The Covid-19 crisis was very of deglobalization,” which he views as
century in Seven Crashes is terrific and continually reaching the wrong con- obviously a product of global- the unfortunate result of Roosevelt
has no real rival as a concise, clear dis- clusions, but that is not James’s goal ization—the web of global inter- and Keynes learning the wrong lessons
cussion of those events. He has quite here. He wants to find lessons of his connections—and the challenge from the Great Depression.
a few lively and unusual opinions, for own, with the daunting hope that he was managed through a combina- Widely known as a Golden Age, or
instance that OPEC was not the villain may succeed where (depending on your tion of technology, politics, and “the Thirty Glorious Years,” the post-
of the 1970s oil shocks but rather was politics) illustrious figures like Marx, interconnectedness: or, in other war decades were the era of the Bret-
reacting rationally to the incoherence Keynes, or Friedman failed. words, genius, government, and ton Woods monetary system, which
of American policy. He also acquits The central conceit of Seven Crashes globalization. was assembled by the Allies in 1944,
the Federal Reserve chairman Arthur is that James will consider whether aiming to prevent another Depression.
Burns of the usual charge of being bul- each crash was good or bad for glo- A compromise between Keynes and
lied by Richard Nixon into the wrong
monetary policies—instead, he thinks
Burns had a poor understanding of
balization, which he views as the
main driving force for improvement
in human lives. That choice of framing
E ven if the reader accepts that in-
terpretation of the management
of the pandemic, if globalization is
the US Treasury representative Harry
Dexter White, it secured national pol-
icy autonomy by imposing restric-
the causes of inflation. Even readers both the cause of and the solution to tions on cross-border financial flows.
who are familiar with the economic a problem, either it is not defined very “Globalization had been curtailed,
history will find striking new details well, or no simple lessons can be drawn walled off, by war and its outcome,”
and surprising juxtapositions in each from it. To take an example from an- James writes. “Bretton Woods . . . did
of his chapters. other crash, here is Mervyn King, the not—and was not intended to—re-
The obverse is that nobody is an ex- former governor of the Bank of En- store a world of globalization, which
pert in so many complicated events gland, as quoted by James: was now widely dismissed as a relic
over so much time and space, so there of a nineteenth-century world view.”
are inevitably some evidentiary or in- The origins of the crisis [of 2008] And, as he goes on to say, “there was
terpretive troubles of varying degrees lay in our inability to cope with a logic of deglobalization that brought
of severity. To take a small example, the consequences of the entry into real improvements for workers who
James asserts that the Irish potato the world trading system of coun- were now protected by new restric-
blights of 1845–1848 could not have tries such as China, India, and the tions on international mobility.” Quite
been anticipated, but there had been at former Soviet empire—in a word, a contrast to the return of globaliza-
least eight potato crop failures in var- globalization. tion since the 1970s, when, as James
ious parts of Ireland between 1821 and suggests,
1841. A more startling derailment oc- Or, in James’s summary, “Globalization
curs when Yueh explains the slowdown creates many more problems than it was running too hot.” Here it seems Globalization was often supposed
of the Japanese property market in the solves, because he takes for granted globalization improves lives, unless to act principally on wages and
1990s as follows: “A historically feudal that readers will agree with his con- there is too much of it. prices—producing constant de-
society, Japan equated the possession clusion that “the lesson then [in past Both James and Yueh briefly dis- flation by bringing large numbers
of land with status.” Even after the crises] was as simple as it is now: glo- cuss the historical curiosity that be- of new workers into a global work-
reader recovers from the breathtak- balization improved lives.” Or, with tween about 1945 and 1971 there were force and devaluing the activities
ing cultural stereotype, the analytical more detail from the introduction: no great crashes. The aforementioned of traditional blue-collar manufac-
problems compound. Many societies study on crises found that they hap- turing workers in rich countries.
equate possession of land with status. Globalization pushes up growth pened at about half the rate they did
Can all property booms be traced to a rates (g), while at the same time before that period or after it, and were Global G DP growth rates were
history of feudalism? political modernization, institu- less severe. Those years also corre- roughly double in the 1945–1971 period
Different readers will have different tional reforms, and the growth of sponded to what James calls the “age what they have been since the 1980s,
thresholds for these moments, and for representative governments with
the equally inevitable omissions that property-owning legislatures make
occur in these sorts of books. Your favor- for a greater stock of safe assets,
ite crash may be skipped over; crucial and consequently a lower rate of
pieces of evidence or counterevidence return (r).
may seem missing or minimized. Yueh
especially covers a lot of ground very And to be sure, if it were axiomatic that
fast: The Great Crashes deals with three more globalization always and every-
currency crises in eighteen pages, the where improved lives, pushed up growth
Savings and Loan Crisis in fourteen, rates, and encouraged representative
and the Great Depression in about six. democracy, it would be easy to follow
him in sorting the good crashes from
the bad. But the evidence he provides

W hile The Great Crashes is striking

for its velocity, Seven Crashes is
unusual in several respects. The focus
does not support that assumption.
The first crash in Seven Crashes
is that of the 1840s, when the Irish
on supply-side crises is fresh and wel- potato famine and other agricultural
come; research on these has largely subsistence crises provoked monetary
THE ROBERT B. SILVERS LECTURE

JUSTICE
been neglected, thanks partly to polit- and fiscal crises, which in turn became
ical consensus on Keynesian demand political crises in the revolutions of
management and partly to the associa- 1848. In James’s taxonomy, this was a
tion of “supply-side economics” with the crash that led to more globalization,

STEPHEN
implacable reactionaries of the Reagan in the form of free trade, transport
administration. The supply chain dis- infrastructure like railroads, and in-
ruptions since 2020 have reinvigorated dustrialization, so it was implicitly one

BREYER
thinking on the supply side, and this of the good ones. It was also caused by
is one of the first books to follow that globalization. As he himself notes, in
agenda into a historical and compara- the case of the Irish famine, “the his-
tive frame. The book is also unusual torical consensus explains that British
in that each chapter first walks through doctrinaire laissez-faire liberalism led CHOOSING PRAGMATISM
the events of a crash, then discusses the
ways that a famous thinker or group
to the disaster.” He does not add that
the potato fungus came from Mexico
OVER TEXTUALISM
of thinkers tried to understand it and via Pennsylvania—another contribu-
apply their lessons afterward. tion of globalization. If a crash can
For the most part, these pages show
a litany of failure. Either a thinker
be caused by globalization, propagate
from country to country through glo- Free Event | Tuesday, March 26 | 7 PM
learned the wrong lessons (like Marx balization, and lead to more global-
did from the 1840s), or their lessons ization, while killing about a million The New York Public Library
led to outcomes James thinks were people and igniting a continent-wide Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
deleterious (like Keynes’s from the sequence of political violence, it is dif- Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
1930s), or the lessons were misunder- ficult to agree with the simple lesson
stood or incompletely applied by pol- that globalization improved lives. This event will also be livestreamed and recorded.
icymakers (as with Milton Friedman As with the potato blight in the first Presented in partnership with The New York Review of Books. on.nypl.org/nyrb
after the 1970s). There is something chapter, so with Covid in the last. As
tantalizing about the possibility of a James puts it:

April 4, 2024 31
and even that total figure has been Kindleberger’s influence is still evi- depends not only on the cause ses, but many had different inciting
dragged upward by the phenome- dent, and other books in the genre of the crash but also on how it is causes and transmission mechanisms.
nal growth of China. The “age of de- follow similar patterns: Quinn and resolved. And if too much debt causes all crises,
globalization” also corresponded to Turner’s very careful and detailed but credibility is demonstrated by the
sustained median wage growth, and Boom and Bust has a “bubble trian- Most of this is at an unhelpful level of ability to borrow cheaply, then isn’t
according to Thomas Piketty, it was gle,” which forms when a new technol- generality, insofar as it tells us that debt also the solution? The result is
the only identifiable moment since the ogy or institutional change is easily things have beginnings, middles, and too general: it is good to borrow to do
Industrial Revolution when inequality marketable to a wide audience, whose ends, but the concept of “credibility” credible things, and bad to borrow to
was substantially reduced. If the era of members have access to ample credit, is the more persistent problem. At no do euphoric things.
deglobalization corresponded to GDP and many of whom go on to engage in point does Yueh clarify what she means The problems compound when the
growth, wage growth, equality, and sta- speculation. by credibility, or what makes some set reader tries to take lessons from both
bility, while the eras of globalization Each book draws some general pol- of unprecedented policies credible books, let alone the entire genre. How
devalued the activities of workers and icy implications, like the need for a or not. The closest she comes is in her is a policymaker to know amid a crisis
delivered, variously, the potato fam- central bank to act as lender of last chapter on Covid, when she claims that whether it is one that will be good or
ine, the 2008 crisis, and Covid, then it resort, or for stricter regulation on the ability of the United States, the bad for globalization? Yueh thinks the
is very difficult indeed to accept the speculation and credit. But they also United Kingdom, China, Japan, Ger- lessons of the Great Depression have
simple lesson that globalization has assume that financial crisis is, in many, France, and Portugal to borrow been learned, and that they were to
improved lives. cheaply shows that investors thought provide ample, supportive monetary
There is no going back to the Bret- their policies were credible. So the policy, but James thinks the Great De-
ton Woods system, although there minimum claim is that credible pol- pression began “a new age of deglo-
are sometimes calls to do just that. icies are whatever investors think is balized politics.” Who is right? How
And there are good reasons to think credible, and they can be identified by should a policymaker confronting the
it was always going to unravel, that it low interest rates. next crisis know whether to apply
was always incomplete and unstable, the lessons of the 1870s or the 1930s
dependent on overwhelming Ameri- or the 1990s? Even if central bank-
can economic power that was incon-
sistent with the recovery of Germany
and Japan. But eras without crises
S etting aside the fact that inves-
tors lent readily to governments
during Covid because they were flee-
ers, legislators, and regulators were
all amenable to learning lessons from
history, they might in good faith learn
surely also tell us something about ing to safety during an unprecedented divergent ones, or disagree over the
how and why crises happen, and a global financial collapse, and, as Yueh right fit of lessons to circumstances.
counterhistory to both James and acknowledges, the fact that those Politics would indeed be likely to de-
Yueh would note that great crashes countries pursued very different pol- termine the course of a crisis. And
seem to be effectively prevented when icies, the point remains that the as- even if history could be reduced to
there are capital controls, strong piring policymaker seeking to learn compact, digestible lessons there
unions, high taxes, relative equality, lessons from history will have no idea would still be the risks of learning the
and strict financial regulation, or in Kindleberger’s phrase, a “hardy pe- whether their emergency policies will wrong ones, or applying them in the
other words when capital is weak and rennial”: natural, inevitable, rooted in be credible or not, until they work or wrong situations, or thinking that all
labor is strong. The unfettered power human nature, and thus impossible to don’t. There was no way to know that of them have been learned and none
of capital may well be good for glo- eradicate. In 1862 the French statisti- abandoning the gold standard in 1933 remain to be discovered, revised, or
balization, but it has proven inimical cian Clément Juglar wrote in his book or that engaging in over $4 trillion of overthrown.
to democracy, stability, equality, and On Commercial Crises and Their Pe- quantitative easing after 2008 would Both books assume that crises are
even economic growth itself. riodic Occurrence in France, England, be seen as credible; on the other side, inevitable, and they are both composed
and the United States: Nixon’s price and wage controls when of a history of failures and blunders,
he separated the dollar from gold in but they both conclude with optimism.

W ho are these books for, and what

work are they intended to do?
They are representatives of an entire
Crises, like illnesses, appear to
occur in every society dominated
by commerce and industry. We
1971 were widely praised at the time
but are scorned today. Austerity was
pushed as the only credible response
For James, “learning is the major out-
come of the crises of globalization, and
we need to think of ways in which we
genre of economic writing. Some are may foresee them, we may miti- to the public debt crises after 2008, can learn more effectively,” and for-
written by journalists, like Edward gate them, we may build limited but it wrought ruin and misery for tunately, “we learn most when the
Chancellor’s Devil Take the Hindmost: defenses against them and facil- millions of people over more than a present is most dismal.” Yueh believes
A History of Financial Speculation itate a recovery from them, but decade. that
(1999); some are by and for academic up to the present no one has been The reason is politics. Any policy
researchers, like William Quinn and able, in spite of the most varied agenda is going to come with its own we as individuals have an import-
John Turner’s Boom and Bust: A Global connivances, to stop them. claim to credibility, and debating these ant part to play in executing these
History of Financial Bubbles (2020); competing claims is the heart of poli- lessons from history and recog-
some have a clear policy intention, Some 160 years and several hundred tics. In her discussion of the 2010 eu- nizing that our sustained effort
like Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth crises later, our lessons are still about rozone crisis, Yueh finds that “politics is important, because progress is
Rogoff’s This Time Is Different: Eight how to recognize and mitigate, not how determined its course. This crisis is not linear and there can be back-
Centuries of Financial Folly (2009). The to create structures and institutions therefore rather different from those tracking by governments and
foundational text is Charles Kindle- to eliminate crises entirely. preceding it.” The idea that the course companies.
berger’s Manias, Panics, and Crashes, Both James and Yueh are aware of of the Great Depression, the Savings
first published in 1978 and now in its the difficulty in translating knowledge and Loan Crisis, the Asian financial Examples of playing our part include
eighth edition. There he sets out the into action. Seven Crashes opens with crisis of 1997, and the crisis of 2008 voting for politicians who “address
model of what he calls a “typical crisis,” the Nobel Prize–winning economist (to stick only to those discussed in The climate change and promote equal-
following the theories of the econo- George Stigler complaining in 1976 Great Crashes) were not determined by ity,” discussing the value of recycling
mist Hyman Minsky. In Kindleberg- that economists are always ignored, politics is impossible to take seriously. in public forums, and choosing not to
er’s model, the first step to crisis is while The Great Crashes begins with Yueh concludes that “all financial cri- buy from companies that pollute or
some sort of sudden positive shock, John Kenneth Galbraith, who advised ses are due to too much debt in some mistreat their employees.
often an innovation in technology or several presidents, observing that fi- shape or form,” but not only is that Voting, recycling, and exercising
financial engineering. Those shocks nance never learns from history. claim untrue for many financial crises, choice are all valuable practices, but
are profitable, and profit incentivizes James’s first two lessons are that each it isn’t even true for all of the crises they seem incommensurate to global
investment, and as more people see turning point does not resemble the in her book. The 1992 currency cri- economic crises, the structure of the
other people making profits, they too others, and that the lessons from a sis in the European Exchange Rate international financial system, and the
want to invest, and a euphoria results. previous crisis can stand in the way Mechanism was not caused by too political tenor of the moment. Nor do
These euphorias can be contagious of new solutions. Then he follows with much debt, but rather by a mismatch they address currency crises or stock
across sectors and countries. Since five general lessons drawn from pre- between the inflation rates, interest market crashes, let alone monetary
profits are easy to find, people bor- vious crises. Yueh’s summary of her rates, and exchange rates of differ- policy made by central banks insulated
row to make their investments, and lessons is as follows: ent member countries. The increase from democratic accountability. They
the supply of credit expands pro- in German debt to fund reunification are focused on a limited horizon of
cyclically, so that more growth means An enduring insight from finan- after 1989 was a contributing factor, conceivable change, reveal a compla-
more credit, which fuels more growth. cial crises is the importance of rec- but the trigger was a series of specu- cency about the unequal distribution
But eventually the prices peak as some ognizing the risk posed by rising lative currency attacks on the British of wealth and power, and reflect an
set of ventures fails, some proportion levels of debt fuelled by euphoria. pound—made possible, incidentally, exhaustion of visions for a different,
of loans inevitably goes bad, or some Another is that policymakers can by free capital flows. In the case of better world. But another lesson from

.
policy shift changes the distribution of resolve a crisis only if their actions the Great Depression and the Covid history is that radical transformations
relative profits. The euphoria sharply are viewed as credible. We’ve also crash, the words “some shape or form” seem impossible and unthinkable until
reverses, the supply of credit abruptly seen that the aftermaths of crises are doing a lot of lifting. Some form they happen, and then they seem to
contracts, and prices suddenly decline. vary greatly. How a country fares of debt was present in all these cri- have been inevitable.

32 The New York Review

 Piety & Power
David A. Bell

La Duchesse: seventeenth-century France and our

The Life of Marie de Vignerot, own time, leading us to forget just how
Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten strange it was by our standards and
Heiress Who Shaped the Fate how difficult it is to understand the
of France minds and motivations of the men and
by Bronwen McShea. women who lived there.
Pegasus, 466 pp., $28.95 Fortunately she is on much firmer
ground when it comes to the governing
In the premodern history of women, passion of Marie de Vignerot’s life: re-
few places and times were more re- ligion. The author of an excellent study
markable than seventeenth-century of Jesuit missionaries in early modern
France. It is true that the vast ma- French Canada, McShea has a keen
jority of women there were peasants sense of the period’s religious zeal and
who spent most of their lives helping an excellent grasp of its theological
to scratch sustenance out of a recal- complexities.1 Although her previous
citrant soil. But for a small number of book emphasized the Jesuits’ secular
wealthy, aristocratic women, the pe- activities as empire builders helping to
riod afforded extraordinary opportu- secure French colonial territory, it still
nities. They could exercise substantial took their religious beliefs seriously,
political influence. They could act as arguing for their “simultaneously oth-
patrons of the arts and charitable in- erworldly and this-worldly mission.”
stitutions. If not subject to a father The first half of the seventeenth
or a husband, they could control their century was a period of Catholic resur-
own fortunes. While they could hardly gence, as the Church struggled to win
ever choose their husbands, they might back both territory and converts from
still enjoy a surprising degree of sexual the Protestant Reformation. Catholic
freedom—marital fidelity was gen- clergy encouraged fervor, even reli-
erally expected of neither partner in gious frenzy among the faithful. Before
the highest circles of French society. the Battle of the White Mountain in
They could become writers and engage 1620 outside Prague—a crucial Cath-
in daring philosophical and political olic victory in the Thirty Years’ War—
speculations. In 1622 the prolific Marie the Carmelite friar Domingo Ruzola
de Gournay published a work entitled paraded before the troops with an
The Equality of Men and Women, ar- image of the Virgin and Child suppos-
guing that if given the same educa- edly desecrated by Protestants, send-
tion as men, women could match their ing them into a wild rage.
achievements. At almost exactly the same moment
Yet they were in no sense mod- Marie Guyart, a twenty-one-year-old
ern women avant la lettre. Whatever bourgeois widow (and future saint)
their thoughts on sexual equality, they in western France, had a vision of
mostly took for granted the enormous Christ’s blood washing over her and
social inequality of the day: their ele- purging her of her sins. Her spiritual
gant existence depended on the pos- Marie de Vignerot; portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, circa 1637–1640 director, a priest of the Feuillant order,
session of vast tracts of land and the encouraged her devotions, which in-
exploitation of thousands of servants, few for serious treatment—primarily than any other figure to construct what cluded self-flagellation with nettles
workers, and artisans. Although even royals, royal mistresses, and promi- is often called its absolute monarchy. and wearing chains and a hair shirt
aristocratic women rarely received nent writers. Of course, these are the During his lifetime, she advised and under her clothes. In 1631 she en-
much formal education, they were women who left the most abundant comforted him, and he made her Duch- tered an Ursuline convent, abandon-
drilled from an early age to exercise source material. Gournay wrote es- esse d’Aiguillon. After his death in 1642, ing her young son. Eight years later
tight control over their physical move- says, novels, poetry, and translations she used his vast fortune to defend the she sailed to French Canada to aid in
ments and facial expressions when in from her early adulthood until her family’s interests, to support Catholic the Church’s missionary efforts among
public, to master complex rules of et- death at age seventy-nine in 1645. charities and missionary work, and to Native Americans, writing that she
iquette, and generally to live a part Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, the Mar- patronize artists and writers. longed for martyrdom. As the histo-
of their lives as a conscious, carefully quise de Sévigné, wrote over 1,100 bril- La Duchesse has its flaws. A more rian Natalie Zemon Davis has written,
gauged piece of performance art. They liant, witty, and insightful letters to attentive editor might have saved for women like Guyart (now known as
did so, moreover, in a political world her daughter over a twenty-five-year McShea from describing one charac- Marie de l’Incarnation),
of constant intrigue and frequent ep- period toward the end of the century. ter as a “cheating rapscallion” or writ-
isodes of brutal violence. Observations about France’s queens ing of a courtier that he “learned to Martyrdom was not a passive af-
Perhaps strangest from our point or Louis XIV’s mistresses filled the play [King] Louis like a fiddle.” I am fair, a mere acceptance of meri-
of view, all of this—the privilege, the pages of private journals, memoirs, guessing that an editor or the pub- torious suffering and death. . . .
etiquette, the violence, even the sex- diplomatic correspondence, and se- lisher, rather than McShea, insisted Martyrdom was a prize one sought,
ual freedom—often coexisted with an ditious pamphlets. But even less well on the overblown subtitle “Cardinal a mobilizer for audacious action, a
intense, demanding, passionate reli- known aristocratic women left plen- Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who priming of that flesh already dis-
giosity. Many of the women who took tiful traces in France’s archives and Shaped the Fate of France.” (Why do ciplined by nettles, an enflaming
lovers, plotted at court, and spent for- libraries, and their lives have much so many commercially published his- of the heart . . . already fueled by
tunes decorating their châteaus were to reveal about the period. Historians tory books today have dreadful subti- union with the heart of Christ.2
also deeply devout Catholics. Some should have remedied this lack of at- tles like this?)
dreamed of taking vows, of renounc- tention long ago. McShea has also succumbed to that
ing the world, of shutting themselves
up in convents, or of devoting their
common biographer’s temptation: fall-
ing in love with her subject. At every M arie de Vignerot was born in 1604,
five years after Guyart, and was
lives to charitable work. They had ec-
static visions and spiritual epiphanies, D oing so is precisely the task that
the American historian Bronwen
turn she defends Marie de Vignerot
against her seventeenth-century crit-
likewise widowed before her twenti-
eth birthday. Her husband, a young
FR ANCO M AR IA RICCI COLL E CT ION

and they spoke enviously of martyrs McShea has set herself in La Duchesse, ics, writing that she “endured slander- nobleman selected for her by her
who had clung to their Christian faith her lively and instructive portrait of ous accusations with stoicism” (how uncle, died in combat against French
through gruesome tortures and trials. Marie de Vignerot, a seventeenth- can we know?) and was “measured and Protestants. She then felt a religious
They supported missionaries who set century Frenchwoman of whom the wise beyond her years.” Praising Ma-
out for distant parts of the globe to only previous substantial biography, rie’s financial acumen, McShea calls 1
Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New
save supposedly benighted souls from by an amateur Catholic historian, ap- her an “early prototype of the mod-
France (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
damnation. peared in 1879. Marie was the niece, the ern entrepreneur, philanthropist,
2
While these women have received confidante, and the principal heiress and global businesswoman.” Anach- Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-
copious scholarly attention as a group, of Cardinal Richelieu, who effectively ronistic language of this sort elides Century Lives (Belknap Press/Harvard Uni-
biographers have singled out relatively ruled France for decades and did more the enormous differences between versity Press, 1995), p. 78.

April 4, 2024 33
 calling and retreated to a Carmelite
convent, where she lived austerely
while receiving spiritual direction
O ver the course of the 1630s, Riche-
lieu solidified his control over the
French state, strengthened the mon-
French Louisiana in the early eigh-
teenth century to provide wives for
colonists (famously described in the
from Pierre de Bérulle, one of the archy, and in the process accumulated Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel Manon Les-
leading figures of the French Counter- a huge fortune. He built what is now caut). Marie de Vignerot never set foot
Reformation. She hoped, like Guyart, the Palais Royal in Paris (originally outside France, but thanks to her reli-
to become a nun. But the sly, brilliant, the Palais Cardinal), designed a new gious convictions she did a remarkable
GELS™ MANHATTAN and deeply ambitious Richelieu had town called Richelieu, and expanded amount to promote French colonial-
READING GLASSES other ideas for his niece. He planned the Château de Rueil near Paris. The ism at a time when the French state,
These ultra-lightweight and thin rim reading eventually to make another marriage treasures he owned included a reli- under Richelieu and then Louis XIV,
glasses come in a soft matte texture embellished for her to help his family’s political quary of Saint Louis studded with nine cared more about expansion within
with working rivets and feature optical-quality position. In the meantime, he placed thousand diamonds. Marie benefited Europe.
lenses, TR-90 surgical plastic, and a scratch- her in the household of the domineer- from this wealth—the equivalent of
resistant coating. Cosmopolitan style meets ing queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, hundreds of millions of dollars today—
refined functionality in this eyewear. Choose
among three colors: Black, Blue (shown), and
his principal rival for influence over
the young King Louis XIII.
This was a plunge into a political
but also gave copiously to Catholic
charities. She became the principal
patron of the future saint Vincent de
M cShea, however, doesn’t look
deeply enough into this story.
How did Marie see the non-European
Tortoise
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universe that had more than a little Paul, the founder of the Congregation men and women who were the objects
1.5, 2.0, 2.5, or 3.0 power. in common with Game of Thrones. of the Mission. of the missions she funded? She genu-
Just a few years before, King Louis Richelieu died in 1642, bequeathing inely grieved at the prospect that lack
had had his chief minister, Concino to Marie the major part of his wealth of access to Christ’s word might leave
Concini—the queen mother’s favor- as well as the governorship of the port them damned for all eternity. But she
ite—murdered in broad daylight on town of Le Havre. The next year Louis also clearly hoped that her efforts on
the streets of Paris, after which Con- XIII died, leaving his queen, Anne of their behalf would secure her own path
cini’s wife was tried as a sorceress and Austria, as regent for the five-year-old to heaven. As McShea notes, in the
beheaded. Richelieu became the tar- heir, Louis XIV. There followed years of theological controversies of the day,
get of multiple assassination plots, political turmoil and then a full-scale Marie sharply opposed those so-called
and Marie de Vignerot, as her uncle’s civil war—known as the Fronde—be- Jansenist Catholics who argued that
effective spy within the queen moth- tween 1648 and 1653, as the high court the Church had swung too far toward
er’s circle, ran considerable risks as of Paris and then leading aristocrats the position that salvation depended
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well. In 1630, on the so-called Day of challenged the structure of royal au- on the good works and free will of frail,
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it can be bright enough for you and at the
from office—with his execution the cultivating her close relationship with hospital in Quebec was a large portrait
same time dim enough to not disturb oth- likely next step—only to have the in- Anne of Austria. The family didn’t al- of herself, doer of good works.
ers nearby. decisive king, in a sudden about-face, ways appreciate her efforts, and one Moreover, saving the souls of Asians,
Among its many technical virtues: banish her from court instead. Two of her nephews even plotted unsuc- Africans, and Native Americans hardly
years later the cardinal learned of a cessfully to kidnap her, in the hope meant treating them as equal or free.
• Three color temperature modes: yellow
(general reading), warm white (knitting plot to kidnap his niece and hold her of forcing her to surrender Richelieu’s In the late 1630s Marie took particular
and sewing), and cool white (for repairs). hostage in Brussels until he agreed fortune. During this period Richelieu’s interest in a young Iroquois woman
to bring the queen mother back into successor as chief minister, Cardinal baptized as Anne-Thérèse, whom
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favor. Marie de Vignerot, at no little Mazarin, came to see Marie as a rival she took into her home and taught
independent switch to adjust these settings. danger to herself, allowed the plot to for influence at court, calling her in Christian doctrine and French cus-
develop until Richelieu’s agents had 1651 “the greatest and most danger- toms. She urged the young woman
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never followed through on numerous remained major figures in France for Anne-Thérèse was not Marie’s slave,
possible marriages for her. His en- centuries, with one duke becoming an but how much freedom did she have?
emies spread baseless rumors that eighteenth-century field marshal and Most of the non-European territories
she had become his mistress and even another a nineteenth-century prime where French missionaries went in
borne him several children. While the minister. the seventeenth century had systems
evidence suggests that she played the Throughout this period, and until of slavery, in which they participated.
part of a grand courtier while secretly her death from breast cancer in 1675, When Marie imagined what the mis-
longing for the convent, hostile pam- Marie remained a major backer of sions she sponsored might lead to,
phleteers suggested the reverse: that French mission work and coloniza- it was most likely societies of poor,
beneath the mask of a pious dévote tion. Much of her support was purely pious Catholic peasants and slaves
she gave herself over to all manner charitable, but she also saw herself who would find their reward in the
of lubricious desires. In fact, Marie as promoting French power and in- next world while working in this one
had a passionate but platonic rela- vested substantially in overseas com- for the greater glory of the French king
tionship with the nobleman, soldier, mercial companies. Like the Jesuits as well as the enrichment of the house
and cardinal Louis de Nogaret de La McShea previously studied, she made of Richelieu.
Valette, which lasted until his death little distinction between otherworldly, This is not a reason to sit back in
in 1639. this-worldly, and personal missions. twenty-first-century self-satisfaction
Marie also became one of France’s In Quebec she endowed the hospi- and condemn Marie de Vignerot for
most important literary patrons. While tal where Guyart ministered to Na- her benighted attitudes and actions.
still in her early twenties, she fell tive Americans. She backed Catholic For her, more even than for the men
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Corneille, who dedicated his mas- She was also the major investor in a we might approve of were out of reach.
viding up to 12 hours (Medium-Brightness
mode) of non-diminishing light, the brightest
terpiece, Le Cid (1637), to her. Marie company founded in 1651 to establish But neither do we have any reason to
LED magnifier available. A micro USB cable
defended the play when members of a new French colony in Guyana and treat Marie as a heroine, a model, or
and rechargeable 750 mAh battery is included;
the Académie Française (founded by chose the governor—a theology pro- any sort of precursor of modern inde-
they’re ready to use, no need to buy batteries.
her uncle) attacked it for violating fessor at the Sorbonne who drowned pendent women. Seventeenth-century
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helped to support Pascal, Descartes, In documenting this activity, McShea very few direct lessons for the world
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and female scholars including the pi- has revealed an important and little- we live in today, and we should not
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Prices above do not include shipping and handling. But she never warmed to Molière, alism. Generally, the only women to As one of Marie’s greatest contempo-
TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
who in turn parodied women like her have featured prominently in this his- raries, Baruch Spinoza, wrote: “Smile
646-215-2500 or email [email protected]. in his play Les Précieuses ridicules tory are missionary nuns like Guyart not, lament not, nor condemn, but
(1659). and the convict women sent out to understand.”

34 The New York Review

 An Anatolian Chekhov
James Quandt

About Dry Grasses

a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

ReFocus: The Films

of Nuri Bilge Ceylan
edited by Gönül Dönmez-Colin.
Edinburgh University Press,
208 pp., $120.00

Jury deliberations at the 2000 Istanbul

Film Festival quickly turned conten-
tious. A member who had hitherto re-
mained so reticent that we wondered if
she would ever proffer any opinion sud-
denly erupted with a ferocious denun-
ciation of our choice for the festival’s
top prize. We had narrowed the selec-
tion to two films that could not have
been more dissimilar: Raúl Ruiz’s lav-
ish version of Proust, Time Regained,
with a cast headed by Catherine De-
neuve and John Malkovich, and Clouds
of May, a diminutive rural drama acted
by nonprofessionals, including the par-
ents and cousin of its Turkish direc-
tor, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Accusing us of
orientalism by favoring Clouds of May,
which she insisted would soon be for-
gotten, over a masterpiece destined to Deniz Celiloğlu and Musab Ekici in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, 2023
become a classic, the jurist castigated
our decision as naive and patronizing.
We cowered but held firm. Both sides Vyacheslav Artyomov); and the radical In Clouds of May—obviously influ- deferring his own artistic plans—he
in the dispute eventually proved pre- interplay of figure and landscape, long enced by the Iranian director Abbas is the first of Ceylan’s self-thwarting
scient. Time Regained, an eccentric shot and close-up. (His father’s grizzled Kiarostami, to whom he has acknowl- intellectuals—reluctantly invites his
work of genius that warrants repeat visage and his mother’s imperturbable edged a debt—Muzaffer, a young cousin Yusuf, an unemployed villager,
viewings, is unlikely to be supplanted face receive intense, loving scrutiny.) filmmaker, returns to his hometown to stay with him while the latter looks
as the greatest of all films based on Even a tortoise, a crucial metaphor to coax his parents and other rela- for a seafaring job. Mahmut attempts
Proust, while Ceylan’s prize helped es- in Ceylan’s first two features, makes tives into acting in his first feature, to quash Yusuf’s dreams of sailing to
tablish his reputation. an appearance. One aspect of Cocoon, a work that greatly resembles The foreign cities by asserting that “every
Ceylan, who was born in Istanbul in its total lack of dialogue, remains an Small Town. (The mother and father place ends up looking the same.” Both
1959, came late to filmmaking, after anomaly. Ceylan’s recent films have are again played by Ceylan’s parents.) men are isolated and adrift, yearning
half-heartedly studying to become an become increasingly garrulous; the He promises his cousin, Saffet, who is for women who don’t want them, but
engineer like his father. Having in- non-Turkish viewer spends more time desperate to leave for the city, that he loneliness is pretty much all they have
dulged his passions for photography, reading their subtitles than attending will find him a job in Istanbul after the in common, and they are soon squab-
classical music, and movies in vari- to their painterly images. filming, then exploits the young man bling over petty domestic irritations:
ous campus clubs and at the Istanbul as an unpaid assistant. The two travel smelly shoes, cigarette smoke, a gluey
cinematheque, he spent time in Lon- to an uncle’s home to shoot a screen mousetrap.
don, where his youthful impatience
with art cinema—he admits to once
walking out of an Andrei Tarkovsky
C eylan moved at the age of two with
his parents to his father’s home-
town, Yenice, in the Aegean environs of
test, ignoring the aged man’s physi-
cal ailments and emotional pain—his
wife has recently died—in their heed-
In Distant Ceylan pays homage to
one of his favorite films, Tarkovsky’s
Stalker, but also deploys it as a ci-
film halfway through, bored and per- Çanakkale, where he grew up in a tradi- less determination to finish the film. nephilic joke: Mahmut wields it as a
plexed—gave way to a reverence for tional rural culture; the only music was When it is nearing completion, Mu- psychological weapon, showing it to
the canonical modernist works of Ing- local folk, and the cinema offered Turk- zaffer blithely reneges on his pledge, Yusuf in hopes that it will bore him
mar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, ish westerns and melodramas when- advising Saffet that life is too difficult into decamping, and later uses it as
Robert Bresson, and even Tarkovsky, ever the town’s erratic electricity was in Istanbul and leaving the young man high-toned cover for watching porn.
the directors who would have an en- functioning. With its sere cornfields, stranded in the hinterland. The bleak landscapes of Stalker may
during influence on his own films. serried hillsides, and occasional copse, Another forlorn cousin does man- have inspired Ceylan, connoisseur of
Ceylan resumed cinema studies in the landscape surrounding Yenice pro- age to escape the countryside for Is- the inclement, to take advantage of
Istanbul after his mandatory stint vided the dramatic setting for the Pro- tanbul in Ceylan’s next film, Distant, a rare snowstorm; he shot the roil-
in the army, but like so many of the vincial Trilogy, though only briefly in which was his first feature to be in- ing Bosporus under sullen winter
characters in his movies who never Distant as a place from which to es- vited to compete at the Cannes Film skies with the compositional eye of
complete their projects, he abandoned cape. In his black-and-white first fea- Festival. (It was once again up against Caspar David Friedrich. (The direc-
school to star in a friend’s short film. ture, The Small Town, Ceylan’s abrupt a film by Raúl Ruiz, this time the for- tor’s predilection for dramatic mete-
Having acquired basic techniques, Cey- segue from enshrouded mist and snow gettable The Day.) Acclaimed as the orological effects, which often reflect
lan bought a primitive Arriflex camera to summery sunshine—emphasizing best film at the festival—admittedly the psychic state of his characters,
to make a poetic short, Cocoon (1995), his belief that Turkey has only two sea- the entries were abysmal that year— occasionally edges toward pathetic
which took more than a year to shoot sons, with little transition—set the Distant vaulted Ceylan to the pinna- fallacy.)
and edit. Cocoon opens with a series pattern for his metaphorical use of cle of international cinema. It also
of vintage photographs of his parents, the Anatolian topography and weather. burdened him with the status of the
Fatma and Mehmet Emin Ceylan, who
appear in all his early works, includ-
ing the autobiographical Provincial
From early on, Ceylan cast several
of his male characters as stand-ins
for himself; they are variously self-
premier exemplar of “slow cinema,” re-
flecting his propensity for long takes,
spare dialogue, and constrained cam-
T he young actor who played both
Saffet and Yusuf, Ceylan’s cousin
Mehmet Emin Toprak, died in a car
Trilogy, consisting of The Small Town absorbed, manipulative, callous, or era movement. accident soon after learning that Dis-
(1997), Clouds of May (1999), and Distant merely obtuse. Unlike the caustic auto- A melancholy tale of two solitudes, tant was invited to Cannes and posthu-
(2002). Many of the formal elements critiques of Jean Eustache or Maurice Distant depends on a conventional mously received the Best Actor award
of Ceylan’s subsequent films are ap- Pialat, his reprovals, perhaps because country-and-city schema, though it (which he shared with Muzaffer Oz-
parent in Cocoon: a montage of still of his genial demeanor, rarely betoken leans less on the opposition of inno- demir) at the festival. Toprak’s close
photographs; ambient sound that em- self-loathing. Rather, Ceylan seems to cence and experience than on a de- association with the locale of Yenice
JAN US FILM S

phasizes nature (wind, thunder, pelting employ his solipsistic proxies to mea- scription of parallel states of emotional prevented the distraught Ceylan from
rain, birdsong); the use of doors and sure the extent of his own culpability. privation. Mahmut, a disillusioned Is- returning to that landscape, so he shot
windows as framing devices; the spare (He described his temperament before tanbul photographer who squanders his next film, Climates (2006), in three
employment of classical music (Bach, he became a parent as “quite dry.”) his talent on commercial projects, far-off settings—the ruins of Kaş,

April 4, 2024 35
Istanbul, and a rural village in eastern
Turkey—whose geographic differences
he duplicates, as the title suggests,
The melancholy doctor from Istan-
bul, one of a gallery of Chekhovian
characters in Ceylan’s cinema, con-
Ceylan’s veneration for nineteenth-
century Russian literature, long com-
mon among Turkey’s intelligentsia,
T he title of Ceylan’s latest work,
About Dry Grasses (2023), slyly al-
ludes to the desiccated nature of its
with contrasting weather. (The film cedes that his boredom with rural life induces enervation in Winter Sleep. protagonist, Samet, a schoolteacher
opens in punishing heat and concludes is congealing into emotional impasse. Set among the fairy chimneys and al- in an eastern Anatolian outpost who
in copious snow.) A Bergman-like study The prosecutor dwells on the death of luvial arabesques of Cappadocia, a lo- is in his final term of compulsory ser-
of marital dissolution, Climates stars his wife, which may have been a sui- cale Pier Paolo Pasolini used to fierce vice and hopes to return to Istanbul
Ceylan himself as an egotistical uni- cide. And the volatile policeman keeps effect in Medea (1969), the film por- after four years of what he deplores as
versity professor who incessantly col- returning to, then avoiding, the subject trays a retired middle-aged actor who provincial deprivation. In many ways
lects material for a thesis that will of his young son’s illness. The eventual has inherited a country inn, renamed a compendium of Ceylan’s cinema,
probably remain unfinished, and the unearthing of the corpse at the burial the Hotel Othello, where he spends About Dry Grasses repeats themes,
director’s wife, Ebru, as his spouse, site takes on metaphorical import; his time planning to write a history of settings, and images from as far back
a much younger television art direc- each of the trio exhumes repressed Turkish theater (in Chekhov, the pro- as his first feature, The Small Town.
tor chafing resentfully under her hus- facts from his own past that accumu- posed tome is a history of railroads) Like that film, it opens in snowy des-
band’s indifference. late into a sense of collective loss and when he is not tormenting his divorced olation, the director’s reputation for
Ceylan’s conversion to digital film- trauma. The autopsy of the murder vic- sister and idealistic young wife with “slow cinema” again borne out by the
making in Climates may account for tim reveals that he was hog-tied to fit patronizing advice or dealing with first static shot, lasting over one min-
the increase in visual experimenta- his body into a small vehicle and then his indebted tenants (impoverished ute, of Samet trudging through winter
tion, particularly the startling jux- buried alive, a detail the doctor omits rather than starving as in Chekhov). In drifts in another of Ceylan’s Friedrich-
taposition of intense close-ups with in his final report, as if he cannot bear a state of emotional hibernation, the like compositions of a lone figure set
long vista shots and his (over)use of to acknowledge one more indignity. two women feel trapped by their wintry against a vast, engulfing landscape.
extreme shallow focus. In Three Mon- The film’s widescreen images of the isolation and long for Istanbul—“My Samet considers himself charitable
keys (2008), he desaturated his palette Anatolian countryside in consuming soul is withering here,” laments one— and compassionate, not unlike the cor-
so that the light often appears sallow darkness approach the preternatural; while the supercilious actor, pointedly rupt politician in Three Monkeys who
and sickly, tinging his images with a its obscure interiors are no less effec- named Aydın, meaning “enlightened,” prides himself on his ability to weep at
sense of dread. Ceylan refashioned the tive. When the young daughter of the eventually sets out for the city only to poetry recitations, and believes he is
storyline of a classic melodrama, The local muhtar (mayor) appears out of return, stymied by the weather and bringing progressive ideas to the back-
Father (1971), by the greatest previ- the night with a tray of tea, her pale, by his desire for reconciliation with ward, tradition-bound village. When
ous auteur of Turkish cinema, Yılmaz lamplit beauty, straight out of Georges the wife he has ritually humiliated for two girls, one of whom Samet has in-
Güney, into an elliptical contemporary de La Tour, moves one of the murder- her naive philanthropy. (His repen- dulged as his favorite pupil, accuse the
noir. After a wealthy politician acci- ers to startled tears. tant voice-over is taken almost verba- teacher and his housemate, Kenan, a
dentally kills a man on a nighttime tim from Chekhov.) Ironically, Winter local who is also an instructor, of im-
rural road, he convinces his driver Sleep was awarded Cannes’s top prize, propriety, Samet reveals the limits of
to take the rap in return for a large
payout when he gets out of prison. In
James M. Cain fashion, the driver’s
T he shooting ratio of Ceylan’s
films burgeoned as his career
progressed: the 157 minutes of Once
the Palme d’Or, after Ceylan’s better
films had repeatedly received lesser
awards there.
his liberalism in a bitter tirade un-
leashed upon his drawing class: “None
of you will become artists. That’s clear.
wife falls in love with the politician Upon a Time were condensed from 120 Ceylan has said contradictory things You’ll plant potatoes and sugar beets,
while her husband languishes in jail. hours of footage. Protraction abets about the use of music in his films. At so the rich can live comfortably. . . .
Marital infidelity frequently leads to Ceylan’s penchant for digression and times he has echoed Bresson’s edict That’s reality. Nothing we can do.”
disaster in Ceylan’s cinema, and the colloquy, which unfortunately turn to against it—“music kills things,” Cey- Samet and Kenan vie for the ro-
brief affair occasions a second death, verbosity and bloat in his subsequent lan once warned—but he gilds the mantic attention of Nuray, a leftist
this time intentional, and another deal features, Winter Sleep (2014) and The majestic landscapes of Winter Sleep English teacher from a nearby village
to escape punishment—the postman Wild Pear Tree (2018). The title of the with added sublimity by repeatedly who lost a leg in a terrorist bombing
ringing twice. former tauntingly hints at its sopo- using the andantino from Schubert’s some years before and who has more
Ceylan allows one vibrant color into rific tone; its over three-hour running A Major sonata, which Bresson fa- or less abandoned activism for paint-
Monkeys’ leached monochrome, which time is dedicated largely to dialogue mously merged with a donkey’s bray ing. When Samet realizes that she is
he assigns to the errant wife: her crim- in Au hasard Balthazar (1966) before more attracted to Kenan, his jealousy,
son apron, purse, sweater, and negligee renouncing soundtracks altogether. and his aggrieved belief that it was
suggest suppressed passion, like the In The Wild Pear Tree Ceylan re- Kenan the students were after and not
pop song that plays as her phone’s ring- lies on a Bach passacaglia in another him, impel him to scheme against his
tone: “I hope you love and are never chronicle of futile undertakings and friend to win Nuray’s affection, betray-
loved back.” The director’s strategic unfinished projects (here, the digging ing everyone in the process. To what
use of red might also indicate a debt of a well), youthful drift, familial con- extent Ceylan intends Samet as an-
to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, flict—especially between father and other of his alter egos remains uncer-
whose late films privilege red details son—and betrayal. A college student tain, given the character’s heedless
in their stringent compositions. The returns from Çanakkale to his pro- deceit, but he does share one cardinal
apples pared in one continuous peel vincial hometown, where his father’s aspect with the director: he is a fine
in both The Small Town and Clouds of gambling addiction has left the family photographer, as two montages of his
May are evidently references to the deep in debt and soon to have their portraits, obviously Ceylan’s own work,
end of Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), and electricity shut off. (In a Chekhovian attest. Again Grasses recalls an ear-
Ceylan cites Ozu’s domestic dramas moment, his teenage sister muses that lier film, as a similar montage of still
as one of his greatest cinematic influ- everything desirable is “so far away.”) photos appears near the end of Once
ences. (Ozu’s vexed households, which The misanthropic student, intent upon Upon a Time in Anatolia.
Ceylan claims provided the model for getting his autofictional novel pub- Two-thirds of the way through the
his own familial portraits, hardly re- lished, proves to be one of Ceylan’s more than three-hour film, Ceylan
semble the fractured clans in Three more despicable characters, laugh- stages a protracted dinner discussion
Monkeys and, a decade later, The Wild ing at a friend’s boast about being a between Nuray and Samet in which
Pear Tree.) policeman who gets to beat up left- they debate politics, her call for soli-
Ceylan turned from film noir to po- ists, needling a famous writer he en- darity and advocacy contending with
lice procedural in Once Upon a Time in counters in a bookstore with spiteful his libertarian preference for individ-
Anatolia (2011), its predominant genre questions about the literary scene, ual freedom. “Is this a goodness con-
subsuming many others—ghost story, tossing statuary he has accidentally test?” he demands, then asks, in an
road movie, western, murder mystery, broken on a bridge into the water, and echo of the actor’s remonstration in
nocturne. Transpiring over a single secretly selling his father’s beloved Winter Sleep, “Does everyone need to
night and the following morning, the dog. The ensemble acting is impec- be a hero?” Soon after, Samet suddenly
film, Ceylan’s best, achieves novelistic extensively adapted from Chekhov’s cable—Ceylan’s cinema is known for exits Nuray’s apartment, which is re-
density as it follows a convoy carrying short stories “The Wife” and “Excel- its unerring performances—but a vealed to be a film set, and in a long
soldiers, a medical examiner, a prose- lent People,” with an occasional assist long dream sequence involving the winding follow shot traverses the sur-
cutor, a police chief, and two men who from Dostoevsky. Ceylan, who says he giant Trojan horse left in Çanakkale rounding soundstage, with its huddled
have confessed to a murder but can- has a “Russian soul,” claims his life was from the shoot of the Brad Pitt film technicians and lighting equipment,
not remember where they buried the never the same after reading Crime Troy (2004) appears forced and dis- before returning to Nuray’s bedroom,
body. As the search party traverses the and Punishment in his teens, and he cordant, and Pear’s incessant dia- a Brechtian breach unlike anything
steppes of Anatolia on winding roads told a Turkish film magazine that “no logue, especially in a lengthy debate else in the director’s cinema. Ceylan
reminiscent of Kiarostami’s byways, matter how much we read and write with two imams captured in an ex- was initially unsure about this inclu-
the men’s small talk—about the mer- about Chekhov, we cannot get enough tended ambulatory shot, reminds one sion, though he recently said he felt the
its of buffalo yogurt or the cathartic of him; he has contributed to almost of Hitchcock’s admonition that films shot was “in harmony with the film.” It
effect of target practice—gradually all of my films, and even beyond that, should not be “photographs of people isn’t. Like About Dry Grasses’ overex-
drifts toward confession. he has taught me how to live.” talking.” plicit coda, which reverses the seasonal

36 The New York Review

 and geographic schema of Climates tial commentary on aspects of local tention that topicality quickly dates a sectarianism, state negligence, terrorist
by transitioning from a snowy remote culture and politics and on the reso- movie, especially in a turbulent country bombings, Marxist activism, and guer-
village to ancient ruins under summer nance of certain words, names, char- like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. rilla warfare suggest otherwise.)
sun, the rupture betrays the subtlety acters, music, and locales to which a Presenting About Dry Grasses at the Unfortunately the thickets of jar-
of the rest of this masterly work. non-Turkish critic would probably be Santa Barbara International Film Fes- gon and bizarre neologism in Dönmez-
Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s anthology The oblivious. Published before the release tival, the director insisted, “I don’t like Colin’s anthology, its slavish invocations
Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan is most valu- of About Dry Grasses, the anthology politics, and I don’t like political mov- of Gilles Deleuze, and its use of films to

.
able in bringing a Turkish perspective probes the political themes in Ceylan’s ies,” and he characterized any such de- illustrate theory are dispiritingly com-
to criticism of his work. Only two of films, despite his frequent, perhaps dis- tails in the film as mere “background.” mon in contemporary cinema studies.
its contributors are not originally from ingenuous, denial that his films ever (The film’s sometimes oblique but insis- As Mahmut suggests in Distant, every
Turkey, and the volume offers essen- have a political intent and his con- tent references to Kurdish and Alawite place ends up looking the same.

‘Thus I Lived with Words’

Phillip Lopate

The Complete Personal Essays is no duty we so much underrate as

of Robert Louis Stevenson the duty of being happy.” He took to
edited by Trenton B. Olsen. dressing bohemian, drinking, and vis-
Routledge, 530 pp., iting brothels. In fact he was hardly
$160.00; $52.95 (paper) idle, insofar as he spent every available
moment trying to master his preferred
Known today as a writer of adventure vocation, literature:
stories for youth (Treasure Island,
Kidnapped) or for his horror classic All through my boyhood and youth,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. I was known and pointed out for
Hyde, or even for his light-poetry col- the pattern of an idler; and yet I
lection A Child’s Garden of Verses, in was always busy on my own private
his day Robert Louis Stevenson was end, which was to learn to write.
celebrated equally for his essays. He I kept always two books in my
wrote more than a hundred, of which pocket, one to read, one to write
seventy might be classified as per- in. As I walked, my mind was busy
sonal. Edmund Gosse argued that fitting what I saw with appropriate
these personal essays “reveal him in words; when I sat by the roadside, I
his best character” and that “if Ste- would either read, or a pencil and a
venson is not the most exquisite of penny version-book would be in my
the English essayists, we know not to hand, to note down the features of
whom that praise is due.” Richard Le the scene or commemorate some
Gallienne predicted that “Stevenson’s halting stanzas. Thus I lived with
final fame will be that of an essayist.” words. And what I thus wrote was
Once upon a time his essays were rou- for no ulterior use, it was written
tinely offered as models in American consciously for practice.
college composition courses. Selec-
tions of them—from William Lyon Such a beautiful description of
Phelps’s Essays of Robert Louis Ste- a young author-to-be’s dedication.
venson (1906) to The Lantern-Bearers But wait, there’s more: “I have thus
and Other Essays (1988), astutely as- played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to
sembled by Jeremy Treglown—have Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas
sought to champion his excellence in Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to
the genre. Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Ober-
It has not been an easy sell. In part mann.” (Notice the proliferation of per-
that may be because essays have never sonal essayists in his list of models.)
commanded the interest or respect He catches himself—“I hear some one
that fiction has, but it may also be be- cry out: But this is not the way to be
cause the reading public has resisted original!”—then declares that imita-
relinquishing its settled idea about tion is the royal road to originality,
Stevenson as a romantic fantasist. citing Montaigne’s drawing on Cicero.
Now Trenton B. Olsen, an associate “It is only from a school,” Stevenson
professor of English at Brigham Young says, “that we can expect to have good
University, has pulled together the writers.”
most copious selection so far, repro-
ducing not only Stevenson’s dozen or
so celebrated essays but also his un-
collected published essays and his un-
dergraduate ones. All this gives us the
A t a time when the English essay
had gravitated toward the more
formal, intellectual, stately prose of
chance to assess the range and stature Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold,
of a writer who, according to Olsen, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater, Ste-
was in his day “considered the most venson chose to attach himself to the
successful essayist of his generation.” older, more informal school of William
Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edin- Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. He took up
burgh, Scotland, into a distinguished many of the personal essay’s standard
family of lighthouse engineers. His fa- themes, such as friendship, talk, walk-
ther, Thomas Stevenson, had invented Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima, Samoa, 1894 ing around, elderly relations, child-
an ocular device for lighthouses and hood, the past, and everyday objects.
hoped that his son would go into the mous essays, “An Apology for Idlers,” Rebelling against his Scottish Cal- (See his playful essay “The Philoso-
family business. But Robert showed Stevenson cheekily argued for “certain vinist upbringing, with its narrow em- phy of Umbrellas.”) He was particu-
little interest in engineering, cutting other odds and ends that I came by in phasis on “respectability” (a word he larly enamored of Hazlitt, insisting
classes at the University of Edinburgh, the open street while I was playing always wrote with a sneer), and turning that “though we are mighty fine fel-
and tempered his truancy only when truant. . . . Suffice it to say this: if a away from his family’s religious convic- lows nowadays, we cannot write like
AL AM Y

his father coerced him to pursue a law lad does not learn in the streets, it is tions (to his devout father’s deep sor- Hazlitt.” In his essay “Walking Tours”
degree instead. In one of his most fa- because he has no faculty of learning.” row), Stevenson asserted that “there he cited Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey”

April 4, 2024 37
 as being “so good that there should be lance newspaper pieces. He was espe- elist. As he stated with rueful candor
A dazzling new entry into the a tax levied on all who have not read it.” cially hard up on his travels through in his essay “My First Book: Treasure
imagination of one of the Stevenson’s own essays are more the United States. Having idealized Island”:
genial than those of the combative, America as a land of democracy and
most original and memorable truculent Hazlitt, but he took from egalitarianism, greatly admiring Whit- It was far indeed from being my
writers of modern times. the older writer a liking for ener- man’s brief for the common man, in first book, for I am not a novelist
getic, rhythmic prose. He even toyed 1879 he set off ill-advisedly across the alone. But I am well aware that my
with the idea of writing a biography continent only to have his illusions up- paymaster, the Great Public, re-
of Hazlitt, then gave up the project in rooted by the cupidity he encountered, gards what else I have written with
dismay when he came across Liber Am- arriving in San Francisco an emaciated indifference, if not aversion. . . . I
oris, the astonishingly frank account scarecrow. (The trip is described sar- was thirty-one. By that time, I had
Hazlitt wrote of his unrequited infat- donically in his book-length account, written little books and little es-
uation with an innkeeper’s daughter. The Amateur Emigrant.) says and short stories; and had
(There was a prim, Victorian avoidance got patted on the back and paid
of sex in Stevenson’s writing, despite for them—though not enough to
his appetite for experience.)
One motivation that kept him seek-
ing adventures was his ill health, a
H e was crossing the United States
to join his intended fiancée,
Fanny Osbourne, with whom he had
live upon.

That changed with Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

pulmonary weakness he had suffered fallen in love on earlier travels. Os- Hyde, which made him world-famous.
ever since he was a boy. Few writers bourne was American, ten years his For this classic tale of the divided
have been as consistently aware of senior, the mother of three children self, Stevenson claimed in his essay
encroaching mortality as Stevenson, (one of whom had died from tubercu- “A Chapter on Dreams,” he drew on
and he tried to cheat death or at least losis), and soon to be divorced from the forces of the unconscious, which
stay one step ahead of it, cramming her philandering husband. When they he called “the Brownies” (a Scottish
as much living as he could into his married in 1880, Stevenson found him- term for a household fairy):
brief forty-four years. “It is better to self the head of a household with steep
lose health like a spendthrift than to financial responsibilities, and he could That part which is done while I am
Álvaro Mutis’s fantastical, gripping, waste it like a miser,” he wrote. As the no longer play at being a young man on sleeping is the Brownies’ part be-
unnerving tales of the exploits and ad- biographer-critic Treglown succinctly the loose. In a deliciously witty essay, yond contention; but that which is
ventures of Maqroll, the Gaviero, or put it: “A Letter to a Young Gentleman Who done when I am up and about is by
watchman, an inveterate wanderer both Proposes to Embrace the Career of no means necessarily mine, since
on land and sea, are among the most be- He had always wanted to escape Art,” he warned, “Weed your mind at all goes to show the Brownies have
from the certitudes and compla- the outset of all desire of money. . . . If a hand in it even then.
loved works of twentieth-century Lat-
cencies, religious, moral and social, a man be not frugal, he has no busi-
in American fiction. Like the stories of
of his Edinburgh upbringing, and ness in the arts.” Might not the two halves of his sensi-
Borges and the novels of Mutis’s great had been helped in doing so by the His altered domestic situation in- bility also be seen as representing the
friend García Márquez, they conjure a travelling his poor health necessi- evitably affected the subjects of his fiction writer, exploring half-hidden
strange world of their own which also tated. Visits to foreign spas were essays. In a series titled “Virginibus impulses of desire, and the more
holds up a mirror, disquieting and reve- not only desirable, but required. Puerisque,” he wrote trenchantly about rational-sounding essayist?
latory, to the everyday world we imag- women, love, and wedlock. Taking issue
ine we know. The title of one essay, “Ordered South,” with Victorians putting women on a

If Maqroll eventually found his way into

prose, he began his career in poetry, and
says it all.
He wrote about hanging out with
the Barbizon painters in Fontaine-
pedestal, he wrote:

That doctrine of the excellence of

I n the meantime, his essays had
deepened and grown more complex.
“The Lantern-Bearers” (1888), arguably
it was as a poet that Mutis first made bleau, exploring the mountains around women, however chivalrous, is cow- his greatest essay, begins with a recol-
his name as a writer. the sanatorium in Davos, frequenting ardly as well as false. It is better lection of the “easterly fisher village”
the Latin Quarter in Paris. He freely to face the fact, and know, when where Stevenson spent his vacations
This selection of Mutis’s haunting verse, dispensed advice about the art of you marry, that you take into your as a child:
with its evocations, now lush, now stark, life—polemics that must be read as life a creature of equal, if of unlike,
of the landscapes of South America, reflections of a semi-invalid for whom frailties; whose weak human heart The place was created seemingly
with its prayers to an unknown god, existence itself was never to be taken beats no more tunefully than yours. on purpose for the diversion of
is the first to be published in English. for granted. His Thoreauvian prefer- young gentlemen. A street or two
ence for enjoying the outdoors instead Stevenson biographers are divided of houses, mostly red and many of
“Portentous dreamer, irredeemable of being buried in an office can get an- between those who regard Osbourne them tiled; a number of fine trees
traveler, subtle monarchist and noying, especially to those of us who as a saintly supporter of the writer and clustered about the manse and the
conversationalist extraordinaire, must submit to the daily grind because those who claim that her hypochon- kirkyard, and turning the chief
Álvaro Mutis is the inhabitant of we haven’t had the advantage of par- dria, hostility to some of his friends, street into a shady alley; many
an unique, self-sufficient cosmos— ents who foot the bills. He admitted little gardens more than usually
that his privilege often made him un- bright with flowers; nets a-drying,
endless, without timetables and
easy. Referring to himself in the third and fisher-wives scolding in the
borders.” —Ilan Stavans person, he wrote: backward parts; a smell of fish, a
genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of
MAQROLL’S PRAYER Some time after this, falling into blowing sand at the street-corners;
AND OTHER POEMS ill health, he was sent at great shops with golf-balls and bottled
expense to a more favourable cli- lollipops; another shop with penny
Álvaro Mutis mate; and then I think his per- pickwicks (that remarkable cigar)
Translated from the Spanish by plexities were thickest. When he and the London Journal, dear to
Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, thought of all the other young men me for its startling pictures, and
and Alastair Reid of singular promise, upright, good, a few novels, dear for their sug-
Paperback • $18.00 the prop of families, who must re- gestive names: such, as well as
main at home to die and with all memory serves me, were the in-
ALSO BY ÁLVARO MUTIS their possibilities be lost to life gredients of the town.
and mankind; and how he, by one
more unmerited favour, was cho- This leisurely opening showcases the
sen out from all these others to finesse of a novelist, employing all five
survive; he felt as if there were senses. The description of the village
no life, no labour, no devotion of continues in rich detail, summoning
soul and body, that could repay and the pleasures of memory, until, sud-
justify these partialities. denly, we get a jolt, issuing from the
gothic side of Stevenson:
As a young man Stevenson even de-
clared himself a socialist, and though and mental breakdowns made for There are mingled some dismal
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
he gave up that political affiliation, he endless complications. Regardless, memories with so many that were
continued to brood about the fate of the flowering of Stevenson’s fiction- joyous. Of the fisher-wife, for in-
the poor. In time he would join them, writing gifts seemed to depend on the stance, who had cut her throat at
reluctant to keep accepting money stability of his marriage. Canty Bay; and of how I ran with
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com from his father and forced to eke A family man, by 1883 he had finally the other children to the top of
out an impecunious living with free- succeeded in becoming a popular nov- the Quadrant, and beheld a posse

38 The New York Review

 of silent people escorting a cart, burgh upbringing. He remained in- fed on shorter, more direct sentences,
and on the cart, bound in a chair, tensely loyal, though, to Scottish may find taxing. Under Ruskin’s in- A splendid variety of
her throat bandaged, and the ban- history, dreaming up plots about the fluence, he wrote knowingly enough entertainments devised to help
dage all bloody—horror!—the courage of his ancestors. In the end about flora and fauna to qualify as a pass “the wakeful hours.”
fisher-wife herself, who contin- he and his wife and stepson, Lloyd, nature writer, though sometimes he
ued thenceforth to hag-ride my settled in Samoa, the final destina- would overdo the landscape descrip-
thoughts, and even today (as I tion in his quest for health. He built an tions. He himself noted, “No human
recall the scene) darkens daylight. estate there, Vailima, and became a being ever spoke of scenery for above
revered member of the community, two minutes at a time, which makes
But all this is preamble: “What my me suspect we hear too much of it in
memory dwells upon the most, I have literature.”
been all this while withholding.” It was However we might choose to rate
the boys’ felicitous practice of carry- him, we can situate him as the bridge
ing lanterns hidden inside their coats: between the early-nineteenth-century
giants, Lamb and Hazlitt, and later
The essence of this bliss was to practitioners of the personal essay
walk by yourself in the black night, such as Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf,
the slide shut, the top-coat but- G. K. Chesterton, and George Orwell.
toned; not a ray escaping, whether His sensibility is not skeptically proto-
to conduct your footsteps or to modernist, like Montaigne’s; he is
make your glory public: a mere pil- solidly old-school, with a sweetness,
lar of darkness in the dark; and all kindness, charity, wisdom, and tact
the while, deep down in the privacy that must be appreciated for what
of your fool’s heart, to know you they are.
had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to Every writer, Stevenson said, “should
exult and sing over the knowledge. recognise from the first that he has
only one tool in his workshop, and “A medley of games, riddles, rhymes
Stevenson is here on comfortable that tool is sympathy.” He exercised and number problems, Lewis Carroll’s
ground, celebrating with fondness the who called him the Writer of Stories. his powers of sympathy and detach- Guide for Insomniacs is the perfect
knightly bravery of boyhood. He gathered folktales and took his- ment extensively in his literary crit- companion for the wee hours when
From there he makes a radical shift torical and anthropological notes, icism, and it is a pity that some of sleep won’t come. Adorned with a
as he contemplates various adult fig- which were published in newspaper these essays, like “A Humble Remon- sprightly new introduction by Gyles
ures like the miser, whose outward accounts during his lifetime and ul- strance” and “The Gospel According Brandreth . . . the little volume . . .
form seems wretched but whose inner timately gathered in his engrossing to Walt Whitman” (one of the best features the creator of Alice in
life may be teeming with secret joy, posthumous book In the South Seas. things ever written about the poet), Wonderland as an infinitely resourceful
or others He who had once declared it the mis- could not be included in Olsen’s col- inventor of new entertainments,
sion of the writer “to protect the op- lection, as they were not deemed per- including an early form of Scrabble
who are meat salesmen to the pressed and to defend the truth” wrote sonal essays. Having championed the and a version of croquet that you
external eye, and possibly to an impassioned brief for the islanders, personal essay as a distinct subgenre can play in your head . . . . When Alice
themselves are Shakespeares, Na- A Footnote to History, which castigated in years past, I have come to appreci- wakes up at the end of Through the
poleons, or Beethovens; who have the colonial powers—England, France, ate just how blurry is the line between Looking-Glass, she isn’t even sure
not one virtue to rub against an- the United States, and Germany—for personal and critical essays: Woolf, Or- if she has dreamed her own dream
other in the field of active life, and exploiting them and destroying their well, Beerbohm, James Baldwin, and or been part of someone else’s . . . .
yet perhaps, in the life of contem- way of life. Susan Sontag, as well as Stevenson, Better, then, to stay awake and
plation, sit with the saints. It is customary for literary critics to all wrote both, and their personalities keep busy.” —Christoph Irmscher,
argue that Stevenson, in his Samoan shone as brightly in one form as in the The Wall Street Journal
The hidden lantern is metaphori- years, turned away from the writing other. Were a complete volume of his “[This] lovely bedside companion . . . .
cally transferred to the inner life of of romances and converted to real- critical essays put together, we would features a litany of cures and
seemingly nondescript citizens, whose ism. Certainly he needed specific facts be even better positioned to evaluate distractions for sleepless nights . . . .
imaginative resources we would do well to bolster his descriptions of the is- Stevenson. Brandreth’s arrangement of Carroll’s
not to misjudge or dismiss too quickly. landers, especially as he was writing a As for the “personal” part of the musings, drawn from several of
Then it is but a brief step to Steven- sympathetic account on their behalf. equation, Stevenson, though keenly his published works, is charmingly
son’s attack on the realist school of And his last fictional effort, Weir of self-aware, did not seem particularly formulated to pierce the darkness:
fiction writers, led by Émile Zola, with Hermiston, which remained unfin- inclined to reveal his neurotic quirks ‘Whatever the horrors of the night, day
its emphasis on “cheap desires and ished at the time of his death of a and eccentricities the way Lamb or always comes.’ It’s a thoughtful gift for
cheap fears,” on “that meat market of brain hemorrhage in 1894, does seem Hazlitt did. We learn the rudiments clever night owls.” —Publishers Weekly
middle-aged sensuality” and “on life’s closer than he ever came to psycho- of his life story from his essays, but
dulness and man’s meanness,” which logical realism. On the other hand, there is a sense of propriety that for-
to his mind is “a loud profession of the many essays he had been writing bids further intimacy. Besides, the
incompetence.” For “the true realism, for years had trained him in a flexi- invalid existence he led made him
always and everywhere, is that of the ble style that could well be considered more curious about the people he
poets: to find out where joy resides, realistic, regardless of their defense of met than about himself; many of his
and give it a voice far beyond singing.” Romanticism. essays are portraits of others. “It is
One needn’t agree about Zola to What are we to make, finally, of his salutary,” he wrote in his essay “An
admire the panache with which Ste- contribution to the essay form and Autumn Effect,” “to get out of our-
venson protects a space for the imag- of the popular neglect of that body selves, and see people living together
ination, for dreaming and innocence, of work? Stevenson, worshiping at in perfect unconsciousness of our ex-
associated, characteristically for him, the altar of literature, polished every istence, as they will live when we are
with boyhood. The author of such word and page in his essays. His Vic- gone.”
swashbuckling tales as The Master torian prose style is highly wrought The figure he cuts in these essays
of Ballantrae and The Black Arrow and impeccably smooth, with long, el- is that of a sane, intelligent, compas-
was defending not only his own work egantly turned sentences embedded sionate, observant, and good-humored
but the whole Romantic school of in lengthy paragraphs, and a sprin- man, eager to act morally but unsure
novelists, and fantasy in general. In kling of Latin, all of which dates him, that he will ever be able to. He thought LEWIS CARROLL’S
his essay “A Humble Remonstrance,” alas. He was much admired by Henry a proper epitaph should read, “Here
Stevenson took exception to Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and Jorge lies one who meant well, tried a lit-
GUIDE FOR
James’s insistence that fiction must Luis Borges considered him one of the tle, failed much.” Essays as a general INSOMNIACS
draw its inspiration from life, saying masters of English prose. Though Max rule are exploratory and do not invite Introduced by Gyles Brandreth
that life was too ragged, complicated, Beerbohm greatly admired his stories, perfection, but his humble assertion Illustrations by Phuz
and random to serve as a proper model he found Stevenson’s essayistic prose should be balanced by the statement Linen bound hardcover with a
for literary art. “too much given to manner in litera- of The Cambridge History of English red ribbon marker • $18.95
ture” and “over-fond of unusual words Literature (1916) that he was “the fore-
and peculiar cadences.” most essayist since Lamb.” In any case New York Review Books

“F or to miss the joy is to miss all,” In his day, despite Beerbohm’s ob- let us be grateful for Olsen’s collection, represents selected titles

.
asserts “The Lantern-Bearers.” jection, Stevenson was the most user- which offers more than enough evi- from Notting Hill Editions
Stevenson traveled the world over, friendly of writers, but his packed dence of this profoundly likable prac-
looking for experiences that might paragraphs require a diligent atten- titioner’s achievements in the essay Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
offer him alternatives to his Edin- tiveness that contemporary readers, form.

April 4, 2024 39
 Indonesia’s Corrupted Democracy
Margaret Scott

Power and Its Limits in Democratic

Indonesia by Marcus Mietzner. While
Mietzner, an Australian National Uni-
versity professor and leading scholar of
Indonesia, wrote this important book
long before the election, it offers a road
map of what has happened. His theme
is Indonesia’s never-ending quest for
political stability, and he wonders if
that quest “is itself the source of de-
mocracy’s decay.” Time and again, the
answer is yes.
Mietzner’s starting point is the
chaos that erupted across this archi-
pelago of 17,000 islands strewn along
the equator after Suharto’s ouster. In-
donesia faced the challenge of creating
a new political structure that would
be acceptable to its more than one
thousand ethnic groups, who speak
more than seven hundred languages;
more crucially for the world’s largest
Muslim population, the country had to
resolve its most controversial issue:
the place of Islam in politics.* It took
years and four prodemocracy consti-
tutional amendments for a presiden-
tial system to emerge that relied on
coalitions to govern. In 2004 Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono became the first
directly elected president and, fearful
he would be impeached, insisted on
Indonesian defense minister and presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, right, and his running mate, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, left, ruling by coalition. Mietzner chronicles
the son of departing president Joko Widodo, celebrating their electoral victory, Jakarta, February 14, 2024 how Yudhoyono’s grand coalition ush-
ered in stability for a time, but voters
had soured on him by the end of his
The Coalitions Presidents Make: ging. The meddling that mattered took and fight” belied the funereal mood. second term.
Presidential Power and Its Limits place before election day. The anti-Jokowi resistance was too When Jokowi won in 2014—defeat-
in Democratic Indonesia Two nights before the polls opened, little, too late. By then the polls were ing Prabowo—the scrawny former
by Marcus Mietzner. I attended an event called A Prayer clear that Prabowo would win. Like mayor of Solo was a weak outsider
Cornell University Press, for Truth and Justice, organized by Goenawan, most of those gathered that who was loved by the Reformasi and
285 pp., $125.00; $36.95 (paper) activists and artists from the Refor- night had been exuberant Jokowi sup- prodemocracy contingent and some-
masi movement that in 1998 ousted porters well into the president’s sec- what ambivalently backed by the
The strategy of Indonesian presi- General Suharto after thirty-two ond term. party headed by Megawati Sukar-
dent Joko Widodo—known by all as years of military dictatorship. They Jokowi’s ability to co- opt large noputri, the daughter of Indonesia’s
Jokowi—has worked: his chosen suc- gathered at Utan Kayu, a community swaths of Indonesian society while first postindependence president, the
cessor, Prabowo Subianto, and his own center in East Jakarta that was one consolidating immense power is a re- flamboyant, autocratic Sukarno, and
son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, were of the command posts for the upris- markable and complicated tale. His president herself from 2001 to 2004.
elected president and vice-president ing against Suharto. A procession of success with the Utan Kayu and Refor- Jokowi faced blocked cabinet nomi-
on February 14 in a landslide, with dancers, singers, poets, academics, and masi supporters provided a useful base nations, lack of support from his own
more than 58 percent of the vote. student activists took to the outdoor that he steadily and deliberately ex- party, and recurrent humiliations from
It is really Jokowi’s victory, though, stage to protest what they called Joko- panded. By the time Goenawan and Megawati and, more ominously, from
long in the planning and enormously wi’s rigged election. An éminence grise many others turned against him, Jo- Muslims who rejected his proclaimed
consequential. He has secured power of Reformasi, the eighty-two-year-old kowi had perfected his increasingly au- commitment to pluralism and demo-
for Prabowo and Gibran by oversee- journalist, poet, writer, and painter Go- thoritarian hold on power and had set cratic reform. It didn’t take him long
ing a gradual hollowing out of Indo- enawan Mohamad, was there. He had in motion his plan to secure his influ- to embrace what Mietzner calls coali-
nesia’s hard-won democratic system been one of the president’s earliest ence after his term ended through Pra- tional presidentialism. Within a year
while maintaining his own sky-high supporters and was active in his 2014 bowo and his son. Most importantly, he he had meddled in the leadership of
popularity. presidential campaign, when Jokowi had assiduously built his presidency two opposition parties (which had
Indonesia is the world’s third-largest became the first nonelite politician to and his popularity on three pillars: backed Prabowo in the 2014 election)
democracy, and Jokowi became the win direct election after the repres- maintaining stability, suppressing the so that he controlled the majority of
face of its success in emerging from sion and corruption of the Suharto era. threat of radical Islamists and their parties and seats in the legislature.
decades of dictatorship. Now he has All that has changed, Goenawan demand for political dominance, and
corrupted that success. He couldn’t told me: “Jokowi is a traitor and he delivering development, from count-
run for a third term, so he anointed
Prabowo, a former general who was
once denied a US visa because of alle-
betrayed Reformasi” when he accepted
the Constitutional Court ruling, issued
in October, that the thirty-six-year-old
less new roads to a gleaming high-
speed train to cash handouts from the
state. As the election approached, Jo-
A s Mietzner’s book makes clear,
the crucial milestone in Jokowi’s
road to political dominance occurred
gations of human rights abuses in the Gibran could run despite the consti- kowi’s approval rating hovered near 80 in 2016, when an alliance of conser-
1990s, and Gibran, a businessman and tution’s requirement that candidates percent. He handed out free rice and vative Muslim leaders, hard-line Isla-
the mayor of Solo, who was too young for president and vice-president be at cash on the campaign trail. He never mist vigilantes, and Saudi-influenced
to be on the ballot until a surprising least forty. “The campaign has been explicitly endorsed Prabowo and Gi- preachers accused his close ally, the
Constitutional Court decision cleared rigged to ensure Prabowo’s victory. It bran, but the message was clear: a vote ethnically Chinese and Christian poli-
the way. The losing candidates in the is hubris and against democracy,” Go- for them was a vote for a continuation tician Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known
W IL LY KU RN IAWAN/R EU TE RS

three-way race—the former Jakarta enawan said. “We are here to build up of his rule. as Ahok, of insulting Islam while cam-
governor Anies Baswedan and the pockets of resistance.” From the stage, paigning to be elected Jakarta’s gover-
former Central Java governor Ganjar a young poet read a famous poem by
*Muslims make up 87.2 percent of the pop-
Pranowo—are challenging the results
and claim that Jokowi and his govern-
ment unfairly meddled in the election,
Widji Thukul, a prodemocracy activist
who was kidnapped in 1998 on Pra-
bowo’s orders and has not been seen
H ow Jokowi came to dominate In-
donesia’s sprawling political land-
scape and became the first president
ulation, Christians 9.9 percent, Hindus 1.7
percent, others (including Buddhists and
but the outcome is unlikely to change, since. to determine his successor provides Confucians) 0.9 percent, and unaffiliated
given the large margin of victory and All the singing and the chants of “We an after-the-fact subtext to The Coa- 0.4 percent. It is illegal to be an atheist in
sparse evidence of outright vote rig- were duped by Jokowi” and “Resist litions Presidents Make: Presidential Indonesia.

40 The New York Review

nor. They organized a series of rallies kowi cracked down on Islamists and
that were some of the largest in Indo- banned two Islamist organizations,
nesia’s history. The capital was flooded NU leaders applauded. “Jokowi knew “A welcome peek into the mind of
with more than 700,000 Muslims de- there is a deep fear of the Islamists, the great jazz musician.” *
manding that Ahok be charged with and he knew NU would help him use A turning point in Sonny Rollins’s legendary career
blasphemy. It was a political earth- that fear,” said Ulil. came in 1959, when Rollins stepped back from
quake, and Jokowi acquiesced. Ahok These measures were just the be- performing and recording to begin a new regime
was charged and given a two-year ginning of Jokowi’s use of that fear to of musical exploration, which saw him practicing
sentence. And he lost the governor’s consolidate power. His loyalists were for hours, sometimes all through the night, on the
election to Anies Baswedan, one of the put in charge of Indonesia’s vast po- Williamsburg Bridge. This was also the moment
unsuccessful presidential candidates lice apparatus, which steadily mar- when he started the notebook that would become
this year. ginalized and criminalized Islamist a trusted companion in years to come—not a
The anti-Ahok movement trans- activists. Beyond the banning of orga- diary so much as a place to ponder art and life
formed Jokowi and Indonesia. Joko- nizations, people deemed pro-Islamist and his own search for meaning in words and
wi’s Reformasi supporters, including were removed from campuses and the in images. At once quotidian and aphoristic, the
Goenawan, were horrified, and so were state bureaucracy. Slowly this mar- notebooks mingle lists of chores and rehearsal
some of the leaders of Indonesia’s gar- ginalization broadened to include all routines with ruminations on nightclub culture,
gantuan traditionalist Muslim organi- government critics, not just Islamists. racism, and the conundrums of the inner life.
zation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU ), which The NGO Southeast Asia Freedom of
“Through his notebooks, Rollins emerges as a driv-
considers puritanical Saudi-influenced Expression Network reported a dras-
en, humble, thoughtful, dedicated, persistent, and
Islam an existential threat to its own tic increase in the criminalization of
spiritual soul in search of a higher force through
relaxed, pluralist, local Islam. Jokowi online expression in 2022, with 107
aligned himself with both NU and his people charged under Indonesia’s THE NOTEBOOKS OF music. . . [these are] illuminating diary entries by
a jazz legend.” —Library Journal
prodemocracy supporters. With their Electronic Information and Transac- SONNY ROLLINS
support, he eventually sidelined the tions law, a threefold increase from the Edited by Sam V. H. Reese “Reese. . . delves into the tenor saxophonist’s sub-
Islamists behind the protests, all the previous year. Most were charged with stantial archives in the New York Public Library,
Paperback • $17.95
while strengthening his base. defaming state officials and institu- unearthing these fascinating notebooks. Divided
On sale April 16th
In February I met with Ulil Abshar tions. Much of the incremental crack- into four chronological sections covering nearly
Abdalla, now a deputy head of NU , and down went unnoticed, except by those 50 years, they capture how Rollins’ thinking about
over lunch at Hello Sunday, a trendy seen as threats to Jokowi’s expanding SPECIAL EVENT WITH SAM V. H REESE a wide range of subjects evolved.”
Thursday, April 11th, 6pm • NYC
spot inside a colonial-era Art Deco control. He is a master of knowing his —Kirkus Reviews *
Sponsored by the Center for
gem in downtown Jakarta, we dis- voters, and he tracks polling data to Jazz Studies at Columbia University “Rollins’s undated jottings break down his prac-
cussed NU ’s alliance with Jokowi. It determine what is possible and what Columbia University tice routine in commentary that can be mundane
has been very good for NU , and very will create a backlash. Ethnomusicology Center or surprisingly philosophical. . . a sense of the
good for Ulil. Jokowi understood that 701C Dodge Hall
artist’s complicated internal life and nearly reli-
he could take advantage of the wide- 2960 Broadway at West 116th Steet
gious dedication to his craft comes through pow-
spread fear of Islamists, but he needed
NU ’s backing to suppress them. For
NU , the alliance meant a steady flow
J okowi’s reelection, Mietzner writes,
led to two important turning points
in the consolidation of his coalitional
Register at events.columbia.edu
erfully and poetically. . . This will be a boon for
Rollins’s myriad admirers.” —Publishers Weekly

of state support. For Jokowi, NU ’s sup- presidency. First, under pressure from
port meant a huge pool of voters, es- political parties in his coalition, Jo-
pecially on Java, where more than half kowi failed to stop the wrecking of the
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
of Indonesia’s 279 million citizens live, Corruption Eradication Commission,
and he handily won reelection in 2019. known as the KPK , one of most im-
Mietzner describes how Jokowi, portant institutions established in the
emancipated from his party by this reform era that followed the end of
backing and buoyed by his popular- Suharto’s regime. The KPK has been
ity, “began his second term with a exceedingly popular and effective in
substantially broadened and consol- rooting out widespread political and
idated coalition. Prospects of any business corruption. Scores of local
pro-democracy breakthroughs, how- and national politicians have been
ever, were also much reduced.” The hauled off in front of TV cameras over
president had become a virtuoso of the years, wearing the telltale orange
coalition politics and Indonesia’s pa- vests of KPK suspects. More than five
tronage democracy, refining the give- hundred politicians, businesspeople,
and-take that delivered both stability police officers, and civil servants have
and democratic decline. He rewarded been prosecuted by the KPK . And for
those who did his bidding and pun- years politicians tried to curb its ex-
ished those who did not. The political tensive investigative powers but were
parties, the army, the police, the bu- always stopped by an outcry from civil
reaucrats, the Muslim organizations, society. Then rumors circulated on so-
and the oligarchs all needed to be part cial media and political talk shows that
of Jokowi’s circle. In return, he needed Islamists had infiltrated the KPK . Sup-
to keep them happy. port for it waned, and in 2019 a law No novel divides readers quite like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), a work of fiction
NU became a state favorite once was passed that destroyed the KPK ’s that is as beautiful as it is shocking. In this series of four weekly seminars, Merve Emre,
Jokowi was reelected. Yahya Cholil independence and left it a shell. a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, will guide participants through
Staquf, a Jokowi ally, became its head, The second turning point was Jo- the story of a brilliant, cruel, and obsessive man’s love for a twelve-year-old girl, touching
and his brother, Yaqut Cholil Quomas, kowi’s surprising choice of Prabowo on debates about freedom and morality, high art and mass culture, Old Europe and
became the minister of religious af- as his defense minister. Prabowo had young America, and the entwined fates of comedy and romance in the postwar novel.
fairs. Ulil, Yahya’s protégé, was given been a rising general under Suharto
a job promoting NU ’s version of Islam and had married one of the dicta- Seminar begins April 1, 2024 at 7pm EDT.
with a great deal of state aid. Many tor’s daughters. In the regime’s wan- Sessions will begin at 7pm on April 1, April 8, April 15, and April 22
jobs in the ministry of religion’s enor- ing days he oversaw a special forces Register now at www.nybooks.com/lolita-registration
mous bureaucracy went to NU follow- unit, called the Rose Team, that was
ers. NU also expanded a campaign to accused of kidnapping and torturing Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative
put what it calls Indonesia’s version more than twenty activists, thirteen
Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director
of tolerant, humanitarian Islam on the of whom are still missing and pre-
of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her
global map. (NU celebrates its toler- sumed killed. Prabowo has admitted
books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in
ance, but it did not extend to Com- that there were kidnappings, but he
Postwar America, The Personality Brokers, The Ferrante Letters,
munists or leftists in 1965 and 1966, denies any involvement in the killings
and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the
when, after a failed coup, hundreds of anti-Suharto activists. He has also
Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary
of thousands of them were killed by, been accused of human rights abuses
Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in
among others, NU ’s willing execution- in East Timor during the now indepen-
Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contrib-
ers. And it doesn’t extend to Islamists, dent nation’s long, brutal occupation
Shias, or gay Indonesians today.) Ulil by Indonesia. And he was associated uting writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The
proudly pointed out that more than 50 with a segment of the army that in- New York Review of Books, where she also hosts the podcast
percent of Indonesians identify them- stigated riots in Jakarta in a failed at- “The Critic and Her Publics.”
selves as aligned with NU . When Jo- tempt to prolong Suharto’s rule during

April 4, 2024 41
its last weeks. After Suharto’s over-
throw, Prabowo was vilified as a sym-
bol of the regime’s brutality. He was
B y the time I had lunch with Ulil,
the Prabowo-Gibran campaign had
set its sights on winning over 50 per-
Hasbullah said that Jokowi had done
so much for NU , from creating a na-
tional Santri Day to endorsing a bill
stead they are saying you must vote
for Prabowo.” Athoillah described
pressure on village heads to get out
forced to retire early from the military cent of the vote in the first round and that bolstered the standing of pesant- the vote for Prabowo. He brought up
and spent more than a year in exile avoiding a runoff. Prabowo’s team had ren in the national education system to the case of East Java’s popular gover-
in Jordan. successfully recast him as a cute, cud- adding Hasbullah’s grandfather to the nor, Khofifah Indar Parawansa, who is
Over the years this dark history dly—gemoy in Indonesian—grandpa, roster of national heroes. “And now, also the head of NU ’s powerful wom-
simply faded away. Prabowo became and TikTok was full of images of the just like Jokowi, we want Prabowo,” en’s arm. She had initially refrained
a business tycoon and politician. rotund Prabowo sashaying across he added. from supporting Prabowo, but she
He ran unsuccessfully for president campaign stages, doing his signature The soft-spoken head of a pesantren made a big public endorsement just
twice against Jokowi—in 2014 as a gemoy dance. NU is supposed to be close by also invited me in to talk. He weeks after the KPK searched her of-
nationalist strongman and in 2019 as neutral in elections, but its head, Yahya told me that even though Gus Yahya fice for evidence of alleged misappro-
a defender of the Islamists. After his Cholil Staquf, known as Gus Yahya, had said he would be neutral, it was priation of funds. “This isn’t fair,” he
appointment as defense minister, he was clearly pushing for Prabowo. Ulil clear he was supporting Prabowo. In repeated.
seized the chance to reinvent him- was keen to explain to me why Yahya December Gus Yahya invited about At a women’s gathering one night,
self again. He praised Jokowi as the and NU had no choice but to back him. two hundred pesantren leaders from Muhaimin’s mother, Muhasonah Iskan-
nation’s best president and went out “Prabowo is the bet on the table, and Jombang to the Shangri-La hotel in dar, led the group in prayers and re-
of his way to present himself as Jo- Prabowo is the best bet for NU . We Surabaya and asked them to turn out cited from the Quran. She is a beloved
kowi’s protégé. The US, too, softened have to fight for what is good for NU , the vote for Prabowo. Then the head figure in Jombang, but many of the
its view, granting him a visa once he and that is state support. We have big of the pesantren invoked what I came women whispered that that wouldn’t
became defense minister. Jokowi and plans, and it is expensive,” he told me. to think of as Ulil’s mantra: NU needs stop people from voting for Prabowo.
Prabowo’s reconciliation helped them Prabowo’s campaign has so much
both. Mietzner writes: money, they said as we sat on a car-
peted floor. One woman, a pesantren
Prabowo’s integration into the teacher, told me that Prabowo’s team
presidential coalition not only ac- gave the head of one pesantren a new
commodated Widodo’s archrival car. Another was given funds for a new
and neutralized the threat of him dormitory. Someone else was promised
becoming an anti- government a trip to Mecca.
agitator, but it also sent further In the last days of the campaign, a
signals to the military that it did long documentary called Dirty Vote
not have to fear legal prosecution was released online. By election day
and could rest assured that its of- it had been viewed more than 13 mil-
ficers had opportunities to prosper lion times. It attempted to reveal on
under democratic rule. a broad, national scale the state pres-
sure Ahmad Athoillah had complained
Since Jokowi’s second term was con- of in Jombang. Dirty Vote alleges that
sumed with the Covid-19 pandemic the campaign was tilted in Prabowo’s
and his pet project—building a new favor by a pattern of extensive state
national capital in the jungle in the intervention, some legal and some ille-
province of East Kalimantan on the gal. Dirty Vote went viral, but it didn’t
island of Borneo—the president and alter the outcome.
his advisers started hinting that he The Prabowo-Gibran government
needed a third term to finish all that will not be sworn in until October,
he had started. Megawati, the imperi- leaving plenty of time for a new co-
ous head of the PDI-P , the party that President Joko Widodo voting in Indonesia’s general elections, Jakarta, alitional presidency to emerge. Indo-
had twice nominated him as its presi- February 14, 2024 nesia’s democracy will not improve
dential candidate, refused to go along, under Prabowo, but it won’t necessar-
citing the constitutional limit of two I’m not comfortable, but I have to to be close to the government. At this ily get worse, either. He has no reason
terms. Jokowi, irked by Megawati’s op- help Gus Yahya. He had to make a point, his wife joined the conversation. to blow up the diminished system he
position, had his advisers explore other calculation, and Gus Yahya decided “This is a very bad election. This is a will inherit. He has all the tools he
options for retaining influence. There that only Prabowo—because of Jo- dynasty election. Why choose Gibran? needs to silence dissent and can use
were several, and his strongest asset kowi—can guarantee us a partner- Why him?” she asked. “Because that state resources to consolidate power.
was his consistent 75 to 80 percent ship with the state. That is what is what Jokowi wants, and Gus Yahya But there are risks. Will his alliance
approval ratings, which ensured that NU needs. goes along.” She said she would not be with Jokowi last? What will Jokowi do?
his support would be significant to the voting for Prabowo-Gibran. Would Prabowo prevail in a contest
candidate he backed in the election. I went to Jombang, a town in East between them?
For a while it seemed that Jokowi’s Java considered the heartland of NU , A falling-out is probably inevitable.
choice as successor would be Ganjar,
PDI- P ’s candidate, but his deteriorat-
ing relationship with Megawati helps
to see if the mostly NU voters there
agreed with Gus Yahya’s and Ulil’s as-
sessment. Jombang, a bustling place
E verywhere I went there were young
students participating in English
storytelling competitions and preach-
One cause could be the budget. Con-
struction of the new capital, Jokowi’s
pet project, is very expensive, and
explain why he rejected that option. with no skyscrapers, is known as a kota ing contests. When I asked a few of Prabowo built his campaign around
All the while Prabowo wooed Jokowi, santri—a city of Muslim students— them which candidates they favored, a promise of free lunches to all stu-
even promising that Jokowi could se- because of its thousands of Islamic most shyly smiled and then raised two dents, with a price tag of $28.8 billion
lect cabinet ministers if he won. By boarding schools, or pesantren. De- fingers, indicating Prabowo and Gi- over the next five years, according to
August of last year the Constitutional spite this being the hometown of Mu- bran, who had the number two spot on the head of his campaign. Prabowo’s
Court, the other hallowed reform-era haimin Iskandar, the vice-presidential the ballot. Jokowi’s popularity was a chameleon personality may change
institution, had before it a case chal- candidate on Anies Baswedan’s ticket, huge reason for this support, but there again, and his earlier disdain for de-
lenging the clause of the constitu- nearly everyone I met was voting for was also some not-so-subtle pressure. mocracy may reemerge. He may see
tion preventing Gibran from running Prabowo. In a neighborhood of Jom- Ahmad Athoillah, the head of the the tactics used in this campaign as
for vice-president. On October 16 the bang called Tambak Beras, about fifty Anies-Muhaimin team in Jombang, a precedent for intervention in future
court, whose chief justice was Jokowi’s pesantren, with some 12,000 students, complained that the campaign was elections. Then there is the issue of his
brother-in-law, Anwar Usman, issued are scattered along the winding lanes. not fair. “We were betrayed by Pra- health. He is now seventy-two, and if
a ruling allowing Gibran to be on the Mohammad Hasib Wahab Hasbullah, bowo. There was an agreement that he doesn’t make it to the end of his
ticket. (A few weeks later the court’s the titular head of the area, invited me Prabowo would team up with Mu- five-year term, Jokowi’s son will be-
ethics council removed Anwar from to sit in his garden and talk about the haimin. We worked for a long time come president. So much has changed
ZU LKARNAIN/ X IN HUA/ E YE W IRE / RE DUX

his post as chief justice, but he was campaign. He sounded like Ulil as he and introduced Prabowo to many of in Indonesia, but the sense of uncer-

.
allowed to remain on the court, and the explained why he supported Prabowo: the pesantren here,” he said as we sat tainty that plagued the nation after
ruling was binding.) Prabowo’s support NU must be close to the government. in the campaign offices. “But Prabowo Suharto fell has roared back for many.
went from 37 percent in October to As students walked through the nar- broke that promise, and now even NU Jokowi’s victory has come at a high
47 percent in December. Jokowi had, row streets, the girls in colorful head- is backing Prabowo. NU must say that cost.
once again, correctly read his voters. scarves and the boys in batik sarongs, all citizens are free to choose, but in- —March 7, 2024

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