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HARPER’S MAGAZINE/OCTOBER 2021

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FOUNDED IN 1850 / VOL. 343, NO. 2057 OCTOBER 2021 HARPERS.ORG

Letters Mindsweeper Easy Chair Continental Divide Harper’s Index Readings The Mourning After Winner Fakes All End Rhymes Heaven or St. Louis Publish or Perish Negative Thinking Pump Action Colored Angel Levine White Serpent And . . . Letter from Pulaski MINOR THREAT MLB puts the farm system out to pasture From the Archive Paradise Lost Report TO BE A FIELD OF POPPIES The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost Annotation THE BIG FRIEZE Cartoonist Ben Garrison’s MAGA in winter Memoir GOOD MOTHER Custody and care in the shadow of colonization Essay “PUT ON THE DIAMONDS” Notes on humiliation Fiction THE REPUBLIC OF LITERATURE From the novel Silverview Poetry THREE POEMS Reviews NEW BOOKS THE LAST CIGARETTE On Italo Svevo STATUS ANXIETY Has Jonathan Franzen found the key? Puzzle Findings

2 Doris Wrench Eisler, Katie Engelhart 5 Thomas Chatterton Williams 9 11 Maggie Nelson body positivity Michael Robbins considers the verse case scenario Patricia Lockwood’s fetal attraction Grand Theft Autofiction Jonas Mekas is lost, lost, lost Ukraine’s new model army John Edgar Wideman Nelly Sachs Andrew Cranston, Julien Nguyen, Emma Webster, and Sophie Calle turns down for what at the voyeur’s hotel 23 Will Bardenwerper 35 A. Bartlett Giamatti 36 Lisa Wells 46 Dan Brooks 49 Sierra Crane Murdoch 59 Vivian Gornick 66 John le Carré 78 John Keene 81 Claire Messud Sigrid Nunez Alan Jacobs 95 Richard E. Maltby Jr. 96

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LETTERS

John R. MacArthur, President and Publisher

Editor Christopher Beha Deputy Editor Matthew Sherrill Managing Editor Stephanie McFeeters Senior Editors Christopher Carroll, Timothy Farrington, Joe Kloc, Katherine Ryder, Will Stephenson Art Director Kathryn Humphries Editor Emeritus Lewis H. Lapham Washington Editor Andrew Cockburn Poetry Editor Ben Lerner Web Editor Violet Lucca Associate Editor Elizabeth Bryant Deputy Art Director Alyssa Ortega Coppelman Assistant Editors Will Augerot, Bindu Bansinath, Megan Evershed, Alex Kong, Leon Pan Production Manager and Designer Stephanie Cuenca Editorial Interns Rebecca Cadenhead, Sara Krolewski, Charlie Lee, Sam Needleman Art Intern Yuqing Liu Contributing Editors Andrew J. Bacevich, Kevin Baker, Tom Bissell, Joshua Cohen, John Crowley, Wes Enzinna, Tanya Gold, Gary Greenberg, Jack Hitt, Edward Hoagland, Scott Horton, Frederick Kaufman, Garret Keizer, Mark Kingwell, Walter Kirn, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Richard Manning, Clancy Martin, Duncan Murrell, Rachel Nolan, Vince Passaro, James Pogue, Francine Prose, Ellen Rosenbush, Jeff Sharlet, Christine Smallwood, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Stevenson, Barrett Swanson, John Edgar Wideman Contributing Artists Lisa Elmaleh, Balazs Gardi, Samuel James, Nicole Tung, Tomas van Houtryve Contributing Designer Sheila Wolfe Vice President and General Manager Lynn Carlson Vice President, Circulation Shawn D. Green Vice President, Marketing and Communications Giulia Melucci Vice President, Advertising Jocelyn D. Giannini Virginia Navarro, Assistant to the Publisher Kim Lau, Senior Accountant Eve Brant, Office Manager Perri Smith, Marketing Assistant Cameron French, Advertising Operations Coordinator Advertising Sales: (212) 420-5773; cameron@harpers.org Sales Representatives Detroit: Maiorana & Partners, Ltd. (248) 546-2222; colleenm@maiorana-partners.com For subscription queries and orders please call:

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Mindsweeper The roster of failed suicide prediction tests that Will Stephenson explores in his essay [“The Undiscovered Country,” Miscellany, August] reminded me of a time in the mid-Fifties when an eager nursing student suggested I take an attitude test. I was a teenager who didn’t believe in the order of things and who tended to hold negative opinions—conditions that prompted psychological evaluation. The test was straightforward: draw a stick figure family of three. I drew the stick figure child between the two parents. Each parent held the child by the hand. The psychologist who analyzed my drawing was astonished. What I produced wasn’t what she had expected. And even then I knew what she expected from me: an image of alienation, perhaps even child abandonment; some evidence of Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response. Please address mail to Letters, Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012, or email us at letters@harpers.org. Short letters are more likely to be published, and all letters are subject to editing. Volume precludes individual acknowledgment.

trauma that could have explained my hardened worldview. From my experience, psychologists and psychiatrists then believed that people like me must have some hidden internal reason for feeling as we did about the world. The world itself could not possibly be at fault. At a group therapy session that I attended in the Sixties, a participant attributed her psychological breakdown to her controlling husband. The psychiatrist leading our session was a powerful man at the university who held regressive ideas of feminine behavior. He replied: “Well, you know, it has always been this way.” That he had nothing good to say about me I now take as a compliment. What was not understood then is that a Panglossian attitude leads to disappointment for anyone with empathy and observational skills. The guru at the end of the article has it right: the meaning of life is life, and what you can make of it. Even at my advanced age, I remind myself regularly that I’m alive, and that it is a privilege not everyone has. Doris Wrench Eisler St. Albert, Alberta

While exploring the implications of suicide prediction, Stephenson asks a stirring question: Are we all suicidal, albeit in a dormant way? He notes that a person might not know he is going to kill himself before he does it. This has implications for the researchers whom Stephenson profiles, people who are working to construct a predictive science of suicide. The potential outcome of the prognostic work is so obvious that perhaps Stephenson feels no need to state it: If we know people are going to attempt suicide, we can stop them, we can save them. And if we can, then we should. But who wants to be saved? As a writer and producer who has written extensively about health care and right-to-die bioethics, I wish Stephenson had considered longerstanding suicidal impulses that follow years of suffering, and that are more tangled than the deaths to which Stephenson alludes: violent and impetuous, the product of false hopelessness and despair. In March, the Canadian parliament voted to expand the country’s law on physician-assisted death to eventually include certain patients who are physically well but suffering from a “grievous and irremediable” mental illness, such as chronic depression or PTSD. Canada’s expanded law will serve a very different kind of patient from the one Stephenson describes. It will apply to people who want to die and plan to die and who tell us so, very clearly. Critics of such legislation have asked how medical providers can know whether a psychiatric condition is incurable. They argue that patients with severe mental illnesses are incapable of making life-anddeath choices. They insist that treating suicidal patients’ lethal longings as medically reasonable, and then helping them to die, is akin to collaborating in suicide—or at the very least, that it confuses the symptoms of mental illness, like despair, with clearheaded expressions of free will. Several European countries already consider mental illness a valid criterion for physician-assisted death in a limited number of cases. Indeed, certain European medical profes-

sionals speak of assisted death as a kind of harm reduction. Some patients are just going to kill themselves; this way, they won’t die alone or in pain. When I visited the Flanders region of Belgium, I heard euthanasia described in exalted tones. It was proof, people said, of Belgian enlightenment— secular humanism and freethinking winning out over religious superstition and cheap taboo. In Antwerp, one doctor told me that he initially refused to assist a patient with a personality disorder who wanted to die. After he turned down her request, she stepped onto the street and set herself on fire. Today the doctor assists such patients. The new Canadian law assumes the existence of a death impulse motivated by mental illness but nevertheless rational. Activists speak of “rational suicides” in contrast to suicides that are sometimes called “deaths of despair” (which, to be clear, are most suicides). Rational suicide presumably operates less like impulse and more like cost-benefit analysis, with sober calculations about dying and living. I wish Stephenson had taken the time to explore what suicide prediction might mean for those suicides, too. Katie Engelhart Toronto

Sensual Flow In her review of Roger Deakin’s Waterlog [“Writ in Water,” Review, August] Leanne Shapton claims that the book “might be the most romantic swimming memoir ever written.” I had previously forgotten the romance of water stories. Shapton’s review reminded me that it’s everywhere: the swims chronicled in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf; the mythical pleasure of entering ponds, streams, and oceans wit h u n fat hom able dept h s i n Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur. Books such as Waterlog beckon us to dive in headfirst, Ledecky-like, with joy in our souls. Jeffrey Susla Woodstock, Conn.

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EASY CHAIR Continental Divide By Thomas Chatterton Williams

ecades ago, my father implored me to get acquainted with James Baldwin. As is often the case with such parental injunctions, I ignored him for a long time, but once I’d acted on the suggestion, I wished I’d done it sooner. When I thought, when I wrote, Baldwin’s work was a constant inspiration. When I moved from New York to Paris in 2011, it was his path I followed. And when I visited his abandoned home in the foothills of the Alps a few years later, I was so stirred that I campaigned, in vain, to save the property from a real estate developer. But until this summer, I had never made a pilgrimage to Leukerbad, the postcard Alpine village of ski slopes and thermal baths to which Baldwin retreated in the early Fifties to complete his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. And so as Europe began to reopen after a long and enervating lockdown, I set off by train to Switzerland. I am not the first to retrace Baldwin’s tracks at this altitude. Many writers of my generation revere Baldwin not just intellectually and morally, but personally. (As Ishmael Reed put it less charitably, today “there are more Baldwin impersonators than Elvis Presley impersonators in Las Vegas.”) Several years ago, Teju Cole wrote about Baldwin’s 1953 Harper’s Magazine essay on Leukerbad, “Stranger

in the Village,” reflecting on how Baldwin thought through “white supremacy from its first principles.” But the racial landscape has been remade since then. The tide of global protest unleashed by George Floyd’s death touched even tiny, landlocked Switzerland. On June 9, 2020, some ten thousand Black Lives Matter protesters massed in Geneva, marching, chanting, and kneeling in solidarity with their American counterparts. Within a week, an additional four thousand marched in the capital, Bern, and ten thousand gathered in Zurich, carrying banners that read white silence is violence. In an open letter published to coincide with Floyd’s funeral, more than sixty black artists and cultural workers from across Switzerland accused the country’s art establishment of “a general reluctance to address structural antiBlackness” and called for “a deeper confrontation with structural blindspots rooted in white supremacy.” Such language carries a particular meaning in the United States, a former slave society where Africans and their descendants have lived and toiled since before the nation’s founding. Less clear to me at the time was its meaning in a European country with four national languages that was never a colonial power and is roughly 1 percent black. Why, I asked myself (just as I

had asked about French protesters who chanted “I can’t breathe” in English), has the highly specific lexicon of anti-racist activism come to Switzerland copied and pasted from the United States?

s the train pulled in to Geneva, I readied my paperwork—a negative COVID-19 test and a handwritten vaccination card from my childhood pharmacy in New Jersey—but the grimacing border patrol agents didn’t even make eye contact with me or anyone else of color. The tiny minority of passengers they stopped all appeared to be white. I climbed into a taxi and headed for the Korean barbecue restaurant where I was to meet one of the signatories of the letter, a twenty-eightyear-old artist named Mathias Pfund. He was not an activist, he had stressed when I first emailed him, but had been moved to sign the letter for reasons he now found difficult to articulate. “On a personal level, I recently found myself questioning my place inside those racial issues,” he said. “I am adopted from Brazil and arrived in Switzerland when I was sixteen months. In the eyes of the others, I am a light-skin racialized person, but inside I deeply embraced occidental views of the world, without really realizing until recently that I’m not white.”

EASY CHAIR

Questions of race figured in his art, he explained, but were seldom prominent, except in one piece he ultimately decided not to exhibit. It was a project two years in the making entitled Couleur locale, which dealt with racist pastries sold in Switzerland and France, such as the chocolate- coated marshmallows known as têtes de nègre. He cast five types in bronze, hoping to highlight their offensiveness. In doing so, he said, “I started to feel the pain and violence of those representations.” I pressed him on these issues over kimchi soup, wanting to understand what the letter signified for him. He was at pains to emphasize that his life had been thoroughly middle class and that he bore an unremarkably Swiss German name. “No struggle,” he said several times, adding that this is what made him fearful of speaking for a whole demographic. That was, of course, precisely why I’d wanted to meet him, I responded. Structures and discourses aside, what was it like for him to be a black man in Switzerland right now? “The elements of the letter are not on a personal level something I share in my own experience, but it’s important to show some support,” he stressed. Then he said something that intrigued me: he confessed he was “afraid of being labeled as a black artist” for want of sufficient hardship. I mentioned the septuagenarian American conceptual artist Adrian Piper, who in 2012 publicly “retired” from being black. As a girl in New York, she was often mistaken for white by black children who demanded she submit to what she calls a Suffering Test. In her extraordinary 1992 essay “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” she describes these encounters as humiliating, but helpful for granting insight into the way whites feel when they are made the circumstantial targets of blacks’ justified and deep-seated anger. Because the anger is justified, one instinctively feels guilty. But because the target is circumstantial and sometimes arbitrary, one’s sense of fairness is violated.

Pfund laughed good-naturedly and shrugged: “My Piper Suffering Test

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

score is quite okay.” After he’d walked me to my hotel near the United Nations office and said goodbye, I checked in and immediately went back outside. It was a sweltering summer day and the banks of Lake Geneva were packed with sunbathers, some of them diving into the freshwater, still and clear as polished glass. I turned away from the waterfront, and found myself in the Pâquis district, in parts a thoroughly multicultural open-air drug market and brothel—more Amsterdam than “Hamsterdam,” but significantly more menacing than anything in central Paris. At a coffee shop run by a Filipino family on the Rue du Môle, I watched a group of five black and Arab teens lethargically mock and roughhouse their weakest member until, while running away, he smashed his elbow into a concrete planter. The boy crumpled to the ground, sobbing, as the others howled in laughter. The exquisite cruelty of adolescence, I couldn’t help thinking, respects no national or cultural barriers.

hat afternoon, I headed to Zurich. Of the three black people I encountered over the next two days, one happened by pure coincidence to be a friend of a friend. The temperature had plummeted and the sky was torrential. I holed up in my hotel reading a 2015 scholarly collection, Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins, which suggests thinking not about the country’s actions or history, but about its larger “colonial imaginary”: The fact that colonial cultures were highly influential in Switzerland while the country did not have to undergo a period of decolonization leads to a peculiar contemporary constellation.

Countries like Switzerland, the editors argue, participated in, profited from, and supported colonial endeavors even if they weren’t directly involved. When the status quo— when reality itself—is white supremacist, they suggest, there can be no such thing as impartiality. The idea echoes criticisms of Switzerland’s famous neutrality, and how, in the face of Nazi atrocities, it came to seem a

lot less morally respectable. Yet this is also a highly specific, highly American way of speaking, a point the editors admit but seem to view as a strength. Their book both fascinated and frustrated me—an elaborate theoretical framework in search of a real-world problem. I longed for the clear and concrete language of experience, for the provocation of those Swiss children that shouted “Neger!” as Baldwin passed. Clouds dumped sheets of cold rain against the bus windows as we made our way up the narrow, winding road to Leukerbad. But the next day, despite my phone’s predictions, the sun appeared. I set out from the Hotel Regina Terme, climbing muddy hiking trails in the wrong footwear—past a solitary cabin flying two American flags—until, looking over my shoulder, I glimpsed Leukerbad spread out in the valley beneath me like one of my daughter’s model cities, an astonishingly tranquil vision. The isolation felt total, yet as Baldwin noted, the people he met there, however unwittingly, still belonged to “the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted.” He would later reject such a blunt contrast, but at the time the wonder with which these natives regarded him was alienating. Yet it is not wonder itself that is crucial, but the animus that can inflect it, I thought, as I watched those flags snapping in the breeze, feeling none of the familiar tension that might grip me when confronted with identical symbolism in the Catskills. I walked for several more hours, only occasionally encountering another human being. At one point, I felt a twinge of unease when a grayhaired white woman approached with a look of grave disapproval, but she stopped me only to say, “Il faut regarder le paysage!”—as in, put your damn phone away. We shared a laugh. I’d been enmeshed in a counterproductive debate on Twitter. Why couldn’t I just ignore it? Tout à fait, I responded, and continued along, past increasingly spectacular gorges roaring with running meltwater. Eventually, I descended the other side of the valley, where I passed a group of truly contented cows grazing, their bells clanking, while above

their heads the sun burned through wispy strips of cloud. On the terrace of a restaurant set by itself amid this Alpine splendor, I ordered sausages and potato salad and took in my surroundings. A dark-skinned black man devoured fondue with his blond white companion. Before my coffee came, another interracial couple arrived. It was all utterly, wonderfully unremarkable. If black people were “a sight” in Baldwin’s time, we’re nothing to write home about now.

ver the next two days, I struck up conversations with the grandniece and the daughter of the hotel’s longtime owner, a white-haired older gentleman I’d seen around named Emil Loretan, one of the few villagers who remembered Baldwin’s visits. He was very tired and couldn’t speak English, but his daughter kindly printed out for me a short list of responses he’d prepared for reporters. “Mr. Baldwin did not cause great excitement,” it begins. “He was underappreciated and did not yet have great renown as a writer.” In his replies (which a friend of mine translated from the German), Loretan seems almost wounded that Baldwin would paint his village as racist. “The hotels closed in wintertime in those days and it was very quiet,” the printout continues. “Around carnival, groups of children would go through the village to collect money for the needy. When someone donated money, a small black girl would nod. This probably shocked Baldwin.” I read the passage several times before I realized the “small black girl” he was referring to was one of the two Baldwin describes in his essay: There is a custom in the village—I am told it is repeated in many villages— of “buying” African natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. . . . During the carnaval which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces blackened—out of which bloodless darkness their blue eyes shine like ice—and fantastic horsehair wigs are placed on their blond heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villagers for money for the missionaries in Africa.

Baldwin’s depiction here had always seemed to me objective, beyond dispute, as factual as the scenery. It felt eerie to encounter one of the circumstantial targets of his justified but possibly misdirected anger— after all, “Stranger in the Village” is about America, and about the fundamentally incommensurate relationship between white and black there. Where Baldwin saw the degrading American tradition of blackface, Loretan saw only a costume within the ma ke-believe world of carnival— an imitation with intentions more philanthropic than pejorative. It was a detail Baldwin had latched onto and used to score a larger, valid point in a different context, Loretan seemed to imply: “This induced him to grade the village harshly. Back then, the village was very poor; he insinuated that as well.” The village today is considerably more prosperous. After checking out, I asked the hotel’s driver to drop me in the old central square, where Baldwin had stayed. It is gorgeously preserved, walled on all sides by staggering peaks, with a clock tower and vividly painted shutters over tightly packed windows. In a small alleyway by an ice-cream parlor is an installation devoted to two famous writers who spent time in Leukerbad: on one side, Goethe, on the other, Baldwin. Three quarters of the space is devoted to the latter, and the text of “Stranger in the Village” is printed in full alongside five portraits (to Goethe’s one). I stood there for a while, rereading Baldwin’s impressions and trying to imagine what he experienced. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” he wrote, but though I could feel his fury, it was almost impossible to own it. I took a shaded seat just across the small sun-drenched plaza, where I noticed a tattooed Portuguese waitress from the hotel at a neighboring table. She shyly waved in my direction. The place was otherwise empty. I ordered a quick lunch and raised a glass of white wine in Baldwin’s direction. Right then it felt like we were a long way indeed from Paris, from Harlem, from Minneapolis. Q

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HARPER’S INDEX Ratio of residents to publicly available bathrooms in New York City : 7,258:1 In Singapore : 197:1 Minimum percentage of federal funds for pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure last year that went to roads, bridges, and highways : 15 Percentage by which the wealthiest neighborhoods in U.S. cities have more trees than the poorest : 65 By which the whitest neighborhoods have more trees than those that are the least white : 78 Number of additional trees needed to achieve an equitable distribution across U.S. neighborhoods : 522,000,000 Estimated portion of the contiguous United States affected by wildfire smoke on July 21, 2021 : 9/10 Factor by which monthly heat records are more likely to be set now than in the preindustrial era : 5 Estimated portion of new monthly heat records attributable to climate change : 4/5 Factor by which the earth’s heating rate increased from 2005 to 2020 : 2.4 Percentage by which average nighttime temperatures have increased more quickly than daytime temperatures since 1951 : 37 Estimated number of Americans it takes to produce enough carbon dioxide to cause one temperature-related death : 3 Minimum amount that FEMA has spent to cover the funeral expenses of COVID-19 victims : $804,000 Percentage of Americans who have “zero confidence” in the health-care system’s ability to handle a future emergency : 45 Portion of Americans who would agree to live in a colony on Mars for the rest of their lives : 1/4 Percentage increase since 2015 in the amount of money raised annually by space startups : 174 Average number of annual spacecraft launches from 2015 to 2019 : 381 Number of launches last year : 1,282 Percentage of Americans who developed a new hobby during the pandemic : 59 Percentage of those Americans who have successfully monetized that hobby : 48 Percentage of U.S. cryptocurrency holders who are men : 74 Who are white men : 56 Chance that an office space in Manhattan is available for lease : 1 in 5 Percentage by which open-plan offices have been found to decrease face-to-face interactions : 70 Factor by which Americans would prefer working four-day forty-hour weeks to five-day forty-hour weeks : 3 Portion of Americans who think their productivity would improve or remain the same if they worked four-day weeks : 3/4 Percentage change in Icelandic workers’ output after they began working five fewer hours per week : 0 Percentage decrease last year in the hours worked by the average European : 4.5 By the average American : 0.6 Percentage increase in the rate of police resignations from April 2020 to March 2021 compared with the previous year : 18 In the rate of police retirements : 45 Chance that a U.S. election official feels “unsafe” in his or her job : 1 in 3 That he or she is concerned about death threats : 1 in 5 Percentage of local U.S. election officials who plan to resign or retire before the 2024 election : 22 Number of state immunization managers who have left their jobs since the COVID-19 vaccine became available : 10 Percentage increase last year in the volume of cardboard used to ship goods directly to households : 38 Weight, in tons, of that cardboard : 23,203,653 Percentage change in the number of babies named Alexa since the launch of the Amazon product : −79 Minimum number of children named Alexa who have legally changed their names because of it : 4

Figures cited are the latest available as of August 2021. Sources are listed on page 44. “Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

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READINGS

[Essay]

THE MOURNING AFTER By Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom, which was published last month by Graywolf Press.

ime and time again, users testify in drug literature to a sense that substances are imbued with things we might call agency, liberty, or desire. As the writer and artist Henri Michaux put it: “Mescaline wanted my full consent.” To convey this sense, writers frequently make recourse to personification: the Mazatec curandera María Sabina refers to psilocybin mushrooms as the “saint children”; Billie Holiday laments the loss of her “lover man,” which some have taken to mean heroin. The frequency with which drugs come alive in drug writing invites us to consider whether drugs are alive, or something other than inert matter—perhaps related to what the ecological theorist Timothy Morton calls “nonhuman people.” In his memoir White Out, Michael Clune obsesses over the talismanic properties of heroin and its signifiers, including the white tops on certain vials: “You might think the whiteness of the white tops isn’t that important . . . but the first stuff I ever did was in a vial with a white top, and its whiteness showed me dope’s magic secret.” There is an idea prevalent in some recovery circles, and articulated in a popular 2015 TED talk by the journalist Johann Hari, that the op-

posite of addiction is not sobriety but human connection. This may be so, or partially so. But the pathos of addiction isn’t necessarily that it displaces a natural love for other human beings with an unnatural love for a cold, mute object. It also has to do with how addiction reveals our porousness to nonhuman people, our appetite for and vulnerability to them. As Clune and Sabina remind us, our heart is human and alien both (Sabina: “I take Little-One-Who-SpringsForth and I see God. I see him sprout from the earth. . . . At other times, God is not like a man: he is the Book . . . a white book, so white it [is] resplendent”). We may root for Clune to leave behind the white tops, but we aren’t exactly rooting for him to exchange altogether his uncommon aliveness to the nonhuman for human relationships. We’re rooting for him to find some way to respect the power of the former without pretending at its mastery. Sometimes, this means learning to let certain nonhuman people be.

eople sometimes think of bottoming out as a place of freedom, if only the freedom of having nothing left to lose. But the addict’s problem is that there is something left to lose: the possibility of getting high. Things may have completely fallen apart, but the voice of addiction counsels that things can be put back together— after just this one more time. One has to become totally fed up with this way of thinking. The Tibetan phrase “ye tang che,” meaning “totally tired out” or “totally fed up,” is relevant here; the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön describes it as “an experience of complete hopelessness”

READINGS

that is “the beginning of the beginning.” Such hopelessness has little to do with regimes of self-denial or abstinence, or with the regulatory form of freedom that some imagine sobriety to be. It involves a kind of freedom one can’t go at directly with an act of will, but must be accessed indirectly, through renunciation, abandonment, subtraction—a subtraction by which one touches a certain bareness, the bareness of one’s own bare life. “Who I am has little to do with addiction and recovery,” Clune writes near the end of White Out. “Who I am isn’t the first thing I need to know to get better, it’s maybe the last thing.”

or whatever reason, sobriety, especially the moment of “deciding” to become sober, granted me more intimacy with this particular form of freedom than nearly any other experience I’ve had—certainly more than any drink or drug I’ve ever taken, no matter how liberating it might have felt at the time (and it did often feel, and often was, liberating). After all, the painful paradox of substances for some people is that they can grant nearly matchless access to feeling free while simultaneously working over time to

[Excuses]

WINNER FAKES ALL From factors professional athletes have invoked since 2000 in explaining why they tested positive for banned substances. Whiskey Ten burgers and two steaks from Mexico Uncastrated wild boar meat Deer musk glands applied as a treatment for being struck by lightning Medical waste splashed by heavy rainfall Testosterone cream applied by a resentful massage therapist Medication taken to get rid of a double chin Cocaine ingested by kissing a woman in a nightclub Sinus medication ingested by kissing one’s girlfriend Menstruation medication ingested by drinking from the same glass as one’s wife Residual foreign blood from a vanishing twin absorbed by the body before birth Ghosts

diminish the space for practices of freedom. This dynamic becomes palpable in the addict’s deepening negotiation between the desire for relief and abandon, on the one hand, and obsessive efforts at self-regulation and measurement— counting drinks, doses, available funds, hours, days, or months spent clean—on the other. Like many drinkers, I spent a lot of time trying to self-regulate: taking restorative reprieves, positively comparing myself to others more saliently out of control. But the simple idea of not ever drinking again seemed impossible, a grim negation of all convivial life. I spent so much time warding off the idea that when it finally breached it seemed to have come from somewhere else. It floated down to me in the form of a single sentence that I wrote down on the back flap of the book I was holding in my hand when it landed: I won’t drink anymore. The relief in writing it down—and meaning it—was so total, I’d never felt anything like it. Lest I’m making this sound like a pleasant feather that wafted down from a benevolent god, I might add that, the day prior, I had awoken at a rural writing residency so dejected and hungover from cheap wine that, while walking to the grocery store (surely to buy more wine), I experienced the nearly overwhelming urge to throw my body into oncoming traffic. In that moment, which also seemingly came out of nowhere, a different sentence floated into my head, one with nearly equal force: I won’t live anymore. It’s clear to me now that the following day’s sentence arrived as a corrective to and displacement of the first. In an interview about sobriety, Clune explains its relation to freedom as follows: “When you’re an addict, if you can imagine life without drugs, it just seems to you like this boring, endless, pleasureless expanse. This desert. But freedom from that grind, freedom from that depression, that despair, is like a high every day for me.” It’s true—at a certain point, it’s using that guarantees monotony, and sobriety that signifies the unknown. As the philosopher Judith Butler writes about mourning— and I consider early sobriety a form of mourning, insofar as it requires letting go of forms of coping that one previously felt unable to go on without—it involves “agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.” It’s difficult to talk about such revelations without making recourse to moral or religious framing, as in: the user sought God but looked in the wrong places, got duped by simulacra, and ended up hooked on a false idol. The lapsed preacher Emerson addressed the matter as follows: The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ALEXANDER BERGGRUEN, NEW YORK CITY

Weltlandschaft, a painting by Emma Webster, whose work is on view this month at Alexander Berggruen, in New York City.

our propriety . . . to do something without knowing how or why. . . . The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. . . . Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men.

I have long loved this passage for its acknowledgment that the desire “to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety,” to do new things without knowing how or why, to live by way of abandonment, is not the problem. The problem is one of method and side effect. Despite his legendary junkie status, William Burroughs reminded us of something similar: “Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways.” The difference between forms of abandonment that vitalize and those that thwart is something one must come to know for oneself. No one can ferret out for us which pleasures are taken in an “experience without truth,” as Jacques Derrida had it, and which have truth-value, or when a strategy of liberation has flipped into a form of

entrapment. As the slogan “may you be blessed with a slow recovery” suggests, such proximities constitute a knot that benefits from patient, perhaps even lifelong, untangling.

[Craft]

END RHYMES By Michael Robbins, from “A Conversation About Trees,” which appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of The Sewanee Review.

set out here to construct an argument about “nature poetry,” in order eventually to suggest that the composition of poems about nature constitutes, in the present moment, a

READINGS

The Courtier, a painting by Julien Nguyen, whose work was on view in August at Matthew Marks Gallery, in New York City.

political act. I had a tidy thesis all set to be defended with the usual feints and thrusts. But reading over what I’ve written, I realize that I don’t believe it. When I was young, Thoreau’s journals made intuitive sense to me: Consider the turtle . . . Perchance you have worried yourself, despaired of the world, meditated the end of life, and all things seemed rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with a turtle’s pace.

Now this passage sounds like science fiction. Nature at the end of the world is not a turtle but a grizzly bear. We’re adding carbon to the atmosphere at a far greater rate than it took

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to produce the end-Permian extinction, 250 million years ago, when 96 percent of marine life was wiped out. Polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the Nineties. American wildfires are burning at least twice as much land as they did forty years ago. The litany could go on—coral bleaching, ocean acidification, species loss, habitat loss, deforestation, coastal flooding, all mutually reinforcing through systemic feedback loops—and the figures would be out-of-date before this was published. The thing is that talking about “poetry” makes me want to fucking scream. And literary criticism feels about as relevant as a fart in the wind. I was invited to write a “craft essay.”

But what if the craft in question is worthless and about to go extinct, along with most other things? I’ve dedicated my life to the study of poetry, and here we are, at the end of the world, and I can recite a thousand different poems that speak to our present condition. In doing so, they console us—that’s the company line, anyway. I’ve parroted it myself. I don’t believe it anymore, if I ever did. (I am never quite sure how much I believe most of the things I believe.) Yesterday I read that North America has lost nearly three billion birds since 1970. Today I learn that giraffe populations have declined almost 40 percent over thirty years. What am I supposed to do with that? What is poetry supposed to do with that? What does poetry have to do with that? Perhaps poetry was once a mouth, in Auden’s phrase, but mouths close.

hen I was in junior high, my family moved to Colorado Springs. Our house sat near a golf course in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain. I could see the entrance to NORAD from our front yard, an imposing tunnel burrowed deep into the heart of the rock. My friends and I once crept up to the barbed wire fence for a closer look, which drew a swift response from a couple of soldiers armed with machine guns. They shooed us away with an insouciance suggesting we weren’t the first teenagers to attempt to infiltrate our nation’s nuclear defense command. We’d all seen WarGames. And we all knew that the place where we were standing was near the top of the Soviets’ list of first-strike targets. I used to say I found that comforting, since if Slim came to Pickens, at least we’d be spared the day after. We wouldn’t see the light that killed us, or feel the heat. The possibility hovered just beyond the edge of conversation. The world is always ending, but now it has ended. No doubt it will go on having ended for some time. Poetry is an artifact of the world that has ended. It lies outside the structure of feeling adequate to an ended world. This is not a novel insight, because the world, as I said, is always ending. But it has never before had such force. The only argument I can offer in support of this claim is: look at the world, what is left of it. Perhaps the true poverty I need to confront is that I continue to read and write poems though I can no longer say what, exactly, they give me or what I want from them. And if the answer is simply “a distraction from the end of the world,” that is a bad poverty indeed. A poem by W. S. Merwin begins: “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.”

[Musicology]

HEAVEN OR ST. LOUIS By Patricia Lockwood, from an essay that considers the album It’ll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil, and is included in the collection Long Players, which was published in August by Bloomsbury.

ull disclosure: I initially purchased this album for gay reasons. There’s a sort of hot PreRaphaelite ghost clutching herself on the cover, and I, a fourteen-year-old girl in suburban St. Louis whose main cultural outlet was the local mall, found myself unable to resist her. Another disclosure: I did not, at the height of my musical listening career, listen to albums in a normal way. My usual practice was to lie down on the floor like a huge fetus, place my ear against the speaker, and pretend I was in a warm aural womb where God was growing me through an umbilicus that could only be described as my own tenuous grip on reality. You might expect this attitude to prepare me to hear Liz Fraser’s voice for the first time. It didn’t. No disrespect to the many other fine musicians who worked on the album, but for me it was about that voice—rooted, aerial, as flexible in its upper registers as it was rich in its middle, revolving around an unchanging axis of pitch, poured into various blown-glass containers of made-up language. It was like what a woman totally alone on a planet, unexposed either to other human beings or traditional forms of music, might decide to do with a nameless substance she had discovered in her own throat: Play with it, stretch it, see what it could become. Toss it away, let it come back to her; teach it tricks, teach it words; drop it into a dry riverbed and let it flow uphill. Was this what was going on in Scotland? I paused after her first song and experimentally hooted like a crystal owl. No, I couldn’t do it. Harder than it seemed. Impossible, actually. When the album was over, I uncurled myself from the speaker and sat up to examine the hot ghost on the jewel case, then flopped back down and pressed play again. Forgive the dramatics, but I had never been so completely the target audience for something before— motionless on the floor, gay, made of gauze, clutching myself against a background of dissolving stars, something valuable in my throat, I could feel it.

READINGS

[Day Job]

CHAMBER OF SECRETS By Sophie Calle. During her time working as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel in 1981, Calle took photographs of the rooms she was assigned to clean. The Hotel, which includes her observations alongside the photographs, will be published next month by Siglio. Translated from the French. ROOM 46

Monday, February 16, 11 AM. I hear a woman’s laugh coming from Room 46. The bellboy knocks on the door, brings in breakfast for two, and leaves. I go up to the room to listen. She says, “Oh! This is lovely.” He replies, “But anybody can make that.” She says, “This is chocolate the way I like it.” He laughs throatily. When I come back ten minutes later, the subject of conversation is still the same. 12:30 pm. The bellboy knocks on their door, takes the tray, and leaves. She says, “Oh! Those Italians!” and “Oh! No, don’t do that! I’ve got problems. I swear! You’re too much!” I hear them kiss. She says, “You shouldn’t do that! I haven’t been to the loo this morning,” whereupon she shrieks, “Oh, I forgot to lock the door!” The key turns in the lock. It’s 1 pm. They’re loudly making love, and I go off my shift.

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Tuesday, February 17, 11:20 AM. I hear the woman say, “I told you when we left . . . ” followed by silence. By 12:40 pm they have gone out. I go in. The first thing to catch the eye is the mindbogglingly huge pair of shoes, under the table, that blocks out everything else. I then find the following items scattered around the room: a carton of Camel cigarettes, a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, a Sony Walkman, tapes (Bernard Lavilliers, The Doors), books: Retour à Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr., Le complot du Caire by Gérard de Villiers, La grande chasse au requin by Hunter S. Thompson, and three comic books. A knife and sheath, a book on aerospace medicine, notes on the same subject. One of them wears striped pajamas at night, the other a black silk slip and pink bed jacket. In the suitcase, there are two pairs of women’s panties, tampons, a pair of men’s underpants, a tube, and a jar of Vaseline. The bathroom is a mess. Wednesday, February 18, 10 AM. The room is empty. They have checked out. On a piece of paper in the wastebasket is the following text, scribbled in pencil: “Ghetto, Court of Malta and gilded mouth. Wooden staircase, street of love, the bridge of wonders. Turk sewer rats. House brickedup windows. Secret courtyard of mysteries. Candelabras. Huntress. Arrow. Bow. Cows. Naked young girl. Names of fallen angels: Samael, Satael, Amabel. Narrow passage of nostalgia.” They have forgotten a pair of panties and socks that are drying on the bathroom radiator. The towels are all over the place, and the water is still running in the washbasin.

ROOM 24

Sunday, February 22, 11 AM. I go into Room 24, the pink room. Two pairs of flannelette pajamas, one red and one yellow, are tangled in a heap with the sheets. I find three suitcases. Two of them are empty. The third contains cosmetics and large amounts of pills and medicine. From the labels I learn that the owners, Mr. and Mrs. D., live in Geneva. The wardrobe and the chest of drawers are full. I’ll look at them later. But I do notice a long, black silk dress, a pair of women’s boots in light suede (in a tiny size 34), and a huge pair of men’s shoes. In the bathroom, a pair of men’s pants are drying on the shower rod; symbolic, they reflect the tedium that prevails in this room. Unless it’s just my own weariness. The sheet on the right-hand bed has a stain. I change it.

Photographs from The Hotel by Sophie Calle, Siglio, 2021 © The artist

Monday, February 23, 11:15 AM. Today, it is the sheet on the left that is stained. I change it. Wednesday, February 25. At half past noon, I walk past the door of Room 24. I hear a man’s cough and a woman’s voice. I go closer and listen: Him: “What did you say?” Her: “No, I want to see the museum near the post office.” He coughs. Him: “I know there’s a museum we still haven’t seen.” Her: “A palace?” Him: “No, it’s a museum. Look under ‘museum.’ ” Her: “I’m starting to feel so fat.” Him: “Oh! The Museum of Modern Art!” Her: “Modern Art! Oh no, not modern art!”

READINGS

[Entrepreneurship]

PUBLISH OR PERISH From game play of Small Press Tycoon, a publishingindustry simulation game released this year by Inpatient Press. The player begins the game with $1,000 and answers a series of multiple-choice questions. game: Which author would you like to publish? player: Your friend Greg, who writes mediacriticism-jazz-fusion in a zany style, and whose cost to print is $60 and some weed. game: Your friend Greg is being canceled! What will you do? player: Say nothing. Remove author from catalogue quietly. game: One evening in the library, where you often find yourself these days, you come across a most marvelous and disquieting tome in the restricted rare books section. Its leather cover and binding are inlaid with prismatic glyphs that seem to shift and warp depending on how you hold it. player: Try to sneak the book out of the library. game: You get caught. You are fined $1,000 and banned for life. player: Some things are best left in dreams . . .

[Correspondence]

NEGATIVE THINKING From a letter written by the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas to his peer and friend Stan Brakhage in April 1966. It is included in the anthology Letters as Films, edited by Garbiñe Ortega, which will be published this month by La Fábrica. Dear Stan: I am thinking. I am still thinking. God, why do I make so many mistakes! Because I am thinking? Probably, badly thinking. Love to all. The trees in the park are all white. Some day . . . I still do not know how to pray. Love Jonas

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game: While locking up for the night, you feel a presence pass over you. The next morning, an envelope awaits you on your desk. Inside is a gorgeous piece of torn parchment that reads 665 ashton blvd. player: Go to the address. game: The taxi drops you off by the side of the highway, across from a barren lot with a tottering manse set upon a hill. It looks hollowed out from an ancient fire. You feel an unwelcome serenity settle over you. player: Ask the taxi driver to wait and approach the estate. game: There is no front door, only a charred opening. You peer in and see that the interior is gutted and the floor is a sea of ash. player: Walk across the ashes toward a mirror. game: The ash swims and congeals around your ankles, as though you’re walking through fog. You approach the mirror. There is no reflection but you can see a book splayed on the other side—the book from the library. player: Reach into the mirror. game: You reach toward the book, but it is frozen on the other side of the mirror. player: Break the mirror. game: Your fist smashes the mirror. An odious blue goo seeps from the cracks. player: Take a dab of goo and lick it. game: The goo tastes incredible and nuanced, like a delicate mushroom. The mirror swirls in front of you, the cracks reassembling into an ornate scripture describing the history and customs of a lost civilization. You learn of a fallen society of readers who valued the book more than the world itself, and who strove to describe the entirety of existence in text. You continue reading the mirror until dawn. The glyphs fade and you begin to weep. As your tears subside, you realize it’s a long way home.

[Color Theory]

TANGLED UP IN BLUE By Benjamín Labatut, from the book When We Cease to Understand the World. The book, a fictionalized retelling of a series of scientific and mathematical discoveries, was published last month by New York Review Books. Translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West.

he effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavor, left behind in the early twenty-first century by an Indian

goldsmith, thirty-two years old, who managed to ica, creatures so fragile that they require even write three lines after swallowing it: “Doctors, greater care than silkworms. Their scarlet blood potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the was one of the greatest treasures the conquistadotongue and tastes acrid.” The note was found in res stole from the American peoples, and it althe hotel room he had rented for the purpose of lowed the Spanish crown to establish a monopoly taking his own life. The liquid form of the poison, on carmine that would last for centuries. Diesknown in Germany as Blausäure, or blue acid, is bach tried to put an end to it by pouring potash highly volatile: it boils at twenty-six degrees Celover a distillation of animal parts, but instead of sius and gives off a slight aroma of almonds, which producing the furious carmine of the cochineals, not everyone can distinguish, as doing so requires the concoction yielded a blue of such beauty that a gene absent in 40 percent of humans. This evoDiesbach thought he had discovered hsbd-iryt, the lutionary caprice makes it likely that a significant original color of the sky—the legendary blue used number of the Jews murdered with Zyklon B in by the Egyptians to adorn the skin of their gods. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Mauthausen Passed down through the centuries and closely did not even notice the scent of cyanide filling the guarded by the priests of Egypt as part of their digas chambers, while others died smelling the same vine covenant, its formula was stolen by a Greek fragrance that would later be inhaled by the men thief and lost forever after the fall of the Roman who had organized their extermination as they bit Empire. Diesbach dubbed his new color “Prussian down on their suicide capsules. blue” to establish a connection between his Decades before, a precursor to the poison emchance discovery and the empire that he believed ployed by the Nazis in their concentration camps would surpass the glory of the ancients. had been sprayed on California oranges as a pesIn 1782, Carl Wilhelm Scheele stirred a pot of ticide, and Zyklon B was used to delouse the trains Prussian blue with a spoon coated in traces of sulin which tens of thousands of Mexican immifuric acid and created cyanide, the most potent grants hid when entering the United States. The poison of the modern era. He named this new wood of the train cars was stained a beautiful blue, compound “Prussic acid,” and was immediately the same color that can be seen even today on aware of the enormous potential of its hyperreaccertain bricks at Auschwitz; both hearken to cyativity. What he could not imagine was that two nide’s origins as a byproduct isolated in 1782 from hundred years after his death, well into the the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian blue. twenty-first century, its industrial, medical, and As soon as it appeared, Prussian blue chemical applications would be such that, each caused a sensation in European art. Thanks month, a sufficient quantity would be manufacto its lower price, in just a few years it all but tured to poison every person on the planet. The replaced the color that painters had used since the Renaissance to depict the robes of the angels and the Virgin’s mantle— ultramarine, which was [Uniform] obtained by grinding lapis lazuli brought up from caves in Afghanistan’s Kokcha River valley. From images released this summer by the Ukrainian military of female Crushed into a fine powsoldiers preparing for a parade celebrating thirty years of independence from der, this mineral yielded a the Soviet Union. lavish indigo that proved impossible to emulate by chemical means until the eighteenth century, when the Swiss pigmenter Johann Jacob Diesbach discovered Prussian blue. He did so by accident: his aim had been to mimic the ruby red made by crushing millions of female cochineals, small parasitic insects that grow on nopal cacti in Mexico and in Central and South Amer-

PUMP ACTION

READINGS

Swede worked with such love and extraordinary rigor that he went so far as to smell and even taste the new substances he had conjured in his laboratory. He was wise enough not to do so with Prussic acid, which would have killed him in seconds; still, his bad habit cost him his life at age forty-three. He died with a ravaged liver, his body covered head to toe in blisters. These were the same symptoms suffered by thousands of European children whose toys were painted with an arsenic-based pigment that Scheele also manufactured: an emerald green so dazzling and seductive it became Napoleon’s favorite color.

[Fiction]

COLORED ANGEL LEVINE By John Edgar Wideman. The story will be published in the collection Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone next month by Scribner. Dedicated to Bernard Malamud.

colored angel named Levine said to him, I have come to help you. But he had only

[Poem]

WHITE SERPENT By Nelly Sachs, from Flight and Metamorphosis, a poetry collection, which will be published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sachs (1891–1970) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. Translated from the German by Joshua Weiner. White serpent polar circle wings in granite pink sorrow in the iceblock forbidden zones around the mystery heartpounding miles from distance wind chains hanging on homesickness flaming shell of fury— And the snail with the ticking pack of God-time.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

half-listened to Levine. The name, the color wrong. Don’t match. Unnatural. Beyond belief. He lost the angel until he desperately needed him and searched desperately for him and searched and searched and at last finds him and pleads for help that the colored angel had once long ago offered. A happy ending to my story, please, Levine. When he steps on the water of the colored angel’s voice, it does not give way. Feels solid as sidewalk, firm enough under him to place his other foot on the water, which could not be water, he was thinking even as he mounted it and stepped again, as if he could walk on water as easily as he crosses the kitchen floor. Accepts the ease of walking on water, accepts the oddness of pushing back in his chair from the table and standing up and no longer being a grownup, old Jewish man. A boy again, surely, as he hears the boy’s mother say his name, or rather say the name for him he hadn’t recalled for years, more years than she’s been dead. But walking on water is impossible because water doesn’t work that way, does it. You can’t just walk on it, there is nothing to it, your feet get soaked, you splash, sink, you drown if water’s deep enough and you are not careful and believe you are that boy again, there again in the morning with your mother in the kitchen, you pushing back from the table and rising up and turning to go get more milk from the icebox to fill you up, fill your cereal bowl that sits behind you now on the table, sitting there still plain as day again after all these years of never thinking of it once, bowl there, you see it with eyes in back of your head, a gleaming white bowl circled by three deep-blue bands, your favorite bowl even though a tiny, spidery crack looked to you sometimes like somebody had nibbled the blue rim and you wondered who, how, why when you had nothing better to think about those mornings before school, only a cereal box to read, a box read so often that nothing happens, words go nowhere, so you sit hunched at the table munching or crunching or just letting milk sog the flakes or sweet crumbles or pops or nuggets in the bowl until you can just about drink them down, going down easy, swallowing them easy as walking on water would be if a person could do it, he thinks, walking on water as solid as the kitchen’s shiny linoleum floor that holds him up this solid moment he walks across it as if his life is not sinking, drowning. He hears his mother’s long-lost voice, and he’s sure she will be waiting, busy moving about the kitchen till he gets back and sits himself down again, finished doing whatever a boy thinks he needs to get up and do. Simple as that, a colored angel promises.

Relationship, a painting by Andrew Cranston, whose work was on view in June at Masterpiece London Art Fair.

READINGS

New Books from Duke University Press Roadrunner JOSHUA CLOVER Singles “Roadrunner is incisive, poetic, and full of life, a beautifully circuitous meditation that mirrors how obsessive music fandom feels. Joshua Clover is in his finest critical form here.” — JESSICA HOPPER

Magical Habits MONICA HUERTA Writing Matters! “Monica Huerta moves readers toward a habit of being captured by objects that mesh one’s own singular and collective histories. We learn to breathe with them and to be dispossessed by them. This fantastic book enchanted me and taught me so much.” — LAUREN BERLANT

Birthing Black Mothers JENNIFER C. NASH “Birthing Black Mothers will generate a wonderfully complex debate in Black feminism. The difficult conversations that Jennifer C. Nash’s arguments will incite are well worth the discomfort. This brilliant book is the most exciting piece of scholarship I have read this year.” — KHIARA M. BRIDGES

No One’s Witness A Monstrous Poetics RACHEL ZOLF Black Outdoors “Renewing the poetics of survival and witnessing, Rachel Zolf asks what it means to witness as No One, where No One is less a position than a form or mode of responsiveness that emerges in the continuing aftermath of annihilation. This No One is not one, yet it offers here a way of bearing witness in forms both monstrous and rife with possible futures. In this book poetics is the interruptive work of philosophy and poetry taken together. No One’s Witness shows in brilliant and moving ways how language must change to come close to registering the living aftermath of destruction.” — JUDITH BUTLER

Maroon Choreography FAHIMA IFE Black Outdoors “With great erudition and deep musicality, fahima ife has written a funky, rigorous, and lyrical investigation of what it is to have been made to have and not have a body. An incredible tempest of a book.” — FRED MOTEN

Amkoullel, the Fula Boy AMADOU HAMPÂTÉ BÂ “Amkoullel, the Fula Boy is an insightful and significant autobiography, an ethnography of communities in transition, and a biography of Francophone colonial West Africa.” — MAMADOU DIOUF

dukeupress.edu

MINOR THREAT MLB puts the farm system out to pasture By Will Bardenwerper

erek Craft, a six-foot-eight right-hander out of east Texas, carefully guided his 1995 Toyota pickup through the final winding miles of his journey to Pulaski, Virginia. Worn-out after a long day driving north from Florida, Craft

Will Bardenwerper is the author of The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid.

felt a spike of adrenaline as the night enveloping Draper Mountain gave way to the bright lights of Calfee Park. Perched proudly above the darkened town of Pulaski like a citadel, the stadium has lit up summer nights there for more than eighty years, immune to the forces that have eaten away at this once prosperous textile and railroad town. It was the spring of 2019, and Craft, a sixteenth-round

Downtown Pulaski, Virginia. All photographs from Virginia and Tennessee, June 2021, by Balazs Gardi for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

draft pick, had been assigned to pitch for the Appalachian League’s Pulaski Yankees. He arrived the next morning for his first day of work dressed, as usual, in jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat. Pulling into the parking lot, he was greeted by the groundskeeper of the 3,200-capacity stadium. “Can I help you, Cowboy?” the man asked. “The field is closed.”

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Craft explained that he was on the team. “The Yankees have a cowboy?” The groundskeeper laughed. “No way.” Five hundred miles from Yankee Stadium, where fewer than 15 percent of Pulaski’s players would ever hit the field, Calfee Park might as well be on another planet. Gerrit Cole signed a nine-year, $324 million deal to play in the Bronx; Craft would make less than $5,000 for the season. Many of his fellow players would teach, drive for Uber, or bartend in the off-season to supplement their incomes. Meanwhile, they were acutely aware that they might have just a few hundred at bats to earn a promotion and keep their dreams alive. But the experience still had its magic. Little kids—and, sometimes, young women—would eagerly wait outside the clubhouse for autographs. This close connection between players and fans distinguished the Appalachian League from more advanced professional circuits. During his one season in Pulaski, Craft later told me,

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he would look out into the grassy pavilions during games and see kids playing Wiffle ball and football: “It took me back to my own childhood and made me feel comfortable.” Admission is six bucks and the promotions are endless: Dollar Mondays, Taco Tuesdays, Thirsty Thursdays. A family of four can purchase parking, two adult tickets, two child tickets, four hot dogs, two sodas, two beers, and a program for around the price of a single nosebleed seat in New York. With a powerful fastball, a trademark victory salute, and his cowboy ensemble, Craft quickly became a crowd favorite. Early in one game, a teammate sitting beside Craft in the bullpen nudged him and said, “Hey, look at that guy holding his son over his head with the boots, jeans, and cowboy hat . . . He’s dressed up just like you.” Craft signed a ball and sent it up to the kid. After the game, he went out of his way to greet the family. The boy, Carson Hamblin, was five years old, and had a twelve-year-old sister named

Carlie. They were there with their mom, Courtney, and dad, Brandon, a firefighter and third-generation Pulaski fan. Craft soon found himself heading to the family’s farm on off days, driving Carson around the pasture on their four-wheeler. Brandon Hamblin challenged Craft to pitch to him on their lawn one afternoon, and after a few whiffs managed a weak grounder— something he’s still proud of. When Craft was promoted to Staten Island later in the season, he left his old pickup in the hotel lot across the street from the firehouse; Hamblin would text him every once in a while to let him know it was still there. After the season ended, Craft returned to Pulaski to pick up his truck. He wound up staying on the farm for a few days, playing with Carson and Carlie and helping take the calves in.

ot long after his visit, word leaked that the Pulaski Yankees’ days might be numbered. Major League Baseball had developed

Fans attend a baseball game at Calfee Park, Pulaski, June 13, 2021

a plan to dramatically pare the number of minor-league franchises. According to rumors, the Appalachian League would be eliminated. Reporting at the time suggested that the plan was the brainchild of Jeff Luhnow, who was then the general manager of the Houston Astros.* (Not long after, Luhnow would be suspended and then fired over a sign-stealing scandal.) Luhnow found an eager champion in the MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred. Luhnow, an alum of the Kellogg School of Management and McKinsey; Manfred, a Harvard Law School graduate; and Manfred’s deputy, Dan Halem, another Harvard Law graduate, embody the league’s new technocratic leadership, forever on the lookout for “efficiencies.” For most of its existence, America’s network of minor-league teams has served as a development system for the majors. At any given time, a big-league franchise has forty players on its roster but more than two hundred others under contract, farmed out to minorleague clubs. These clubs are mostly privately owned but governed by ongoing agreements with the major-league teams with which they are affiliated. Players are moved from affiliate team to affiliate team—as Craft was moved midseason from the Pulaski Yankees to the Staten Island Yankees—according to the needs of the parent franchise. *

In response to questions from Harper’s Magazine, Major League Baseball denied that Luhnow played any greater role than other general managers in developing the plan.

The proponents of contraction argued that the expansive minor-league system was a wasteful anachronism; hundreds of players with no hope of making the majors populate teams just for the purpose of evaluating a few top prospects. Much of this work, the thinking went, could be replaced by a system of quantitative analytics that would allegedly identify the next generation of superstars. “It was crazy to have an entire league set up so a handful of top picks can have real games to play,” a former Appalachian League player said. “It was an elaborate ruse that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” But was it? What about those who considered their time in the Appalachian League the highlight of their professional lives, as well as a source of potential future jobs, not to mention a lifetime of stories told over beers? What is baseball? Our national pastime, an enduring slice of Americana? Or just a business? Does an enterprise that purports to be part of the fabric of America—and one that for the past hundred years has enjoyed a unique federal antitrust exemption— have a responsibility to prevent that fabric from fraying? Or should the league simply maximize value for its owners, as most corporations do? These were the questions that brought me to Pulaski. I was convinced that this was an important story, one that I wanted to tell. I have to admit that, like any writer who comes across an idea that seems

Left: Carson Hamblin at his family’s ranch in Dublin, Virginia. Right: April Martin, the museum coordinator at the Raymond F. Ratcliffe Memorial Transportation Museum, holds the first known photograph of a baseball team in Pulaski

big enough for a book, I could also see the story as a remarkable professional opportunity. Eager to learn more, and to gather material for a proposal, I flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, rented a car, and began getting to know the teams in the Appalachian League, their management, and their fans.

wealthy transplant from Massachusetts named T. J. Wallner opened Pulaski’s first textile plant in 1916. An ardent baseball fan, Wallner recruited men to field a team that would compete in an industrial league against mills and foundries from neighboring communities. Calfee Park was constructed by the Works Progress Administration in 1935. Professional baseball arrived seven years later, in the form of the Pulaski Counts. This was a golden age for baseball in the region; fifty-five semipro teams dotted Alamance County, North Carolina, alone. The Counts soon joined the Appalachian League, founded in 1911, and became an MLB affiliate. Before becoming the Yankees, Pulaski’s club had deals with the Phillies, Cubs, Braves, Rangers, Blue Jays, and Mariners. Pulaski rivaled Roanoke in local importance until I-81 bypassed it in the late Sixties, killing off scores of momand-pop restaurants and motels that lined the now-obsolete Lee Highway bisecting town. Heavy industry had already left for places like Gary, Indiana. After NAFTA, Pulaski Furniture

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moved overseas. As local economies cratered, I-81 became the “heroin highway.” What had been a vibrant downtown was now empty after dark, a warren of boarded-up buildings. Throughout this decline, “baseball was the constant,” John White, a former Pulaski town official, told me. “It was the glue that held the community together.” Onetime mayor Nick Glenn seemed to channel Bowling Alone author Robert D. Putnam as he described the hollowing out of the community’s traditional gathering places—churches and civic organizations such as the Lions Club, Kiwanis, and Rotary. Even the local YMCA is struggling. Glenn’s daughter, Meredith McGrady, reckons she has been to over a thousand games at Calfee Park but has never set foot in an MLB stadium. “We don’t have anything now,” she says. “Baseball is the last thing to draw people in.”

rofessional baseball in Pulaski had faced a crisis once before, when the Seattle Mariners pulled up stakes in 2014, citing substandard facilities. But David Hagan, a successful car dealer from the area, bought the neglected ballpark from the financially strapped city. Hagan is a larger-than-life figure in Pulaski, and his fingerprints are on everything from a boutique hotel downtown to housing developments. He immediately pumped several million dollars into stadium upgrades and coaxed the Yankees to bring an affiliate to town. What had long been among the league’s most dilapidated facilities became its crown jewel. The year that Craft arrived to pitch, Ballpark Digest named Calfee the top rookie-league ballpark in the nation. Having spent years reinvesting in the community, Hagan is something of a small-town Steinbrenner, holding forth on summer nights in what locals call his “cigar lounge” at Calfee Park, where he has not missed a game in five seasons. Though Hagan says he has been invited to Yankee Stadium dozens of times, he has never gone, seemingly content in his own fiefdom. Hagan may have saved baseball in Pulaski, but his general manager, Betsy Haugh, helped it thrive. Haugh,

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who played soccer at Marshall University, was just twenty-five when she took the front-office job. She began aggressively marketing games, regularly putting in eighty-hour weeks during the season. Pulaski has a population of about nine thousand, over two thousand of whom regularly jammed into Calfee Park. The first fireworks night in three decades drew a record crowd of more than four thousand. On military night, young people took their enlistment oaths in center field and veterans were admitted free of charge. Haugh, who lived in a small cottage located just beyond the right-field foul pole (battingpractice home runs would occasionally land in her front yard), went long stretches without leaving this small parcel of Yankees property, a remote embassy of the House That Ruth Built. Despite the challenge of selling tickets in a small, financially distressed market, Haugh managed to turn out the biggest crowds in the league. In 2019, just as MLB was finalizing plans to shut the Appalachian League down, the team was honored with the annual John

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H. Johnson President’s Award for being the nation’s most successful minor-league franchise.

uring my first reporting trip, I spoke not just to Pulaski’s owner and general manager, but to fans such as Jeff Martin, a fiftyone-year-old family services counselor at Highland Memory Gardens Cemetery, who finds at Calfee Park a chance to be with people on the “best days of their lives, instead of their worst.” During one game, Martin saw a video on the Jumbotron advertising the Adopt-a-Player program, in which locals help players acclimate to Pulaski, and agreed to participate. He was assigned a young pitcher named Tyler Johnson. Martin would later learn that Johnson had overcome a congenital heart defect and undergone multiple operations before he was six months old. Now, though, he was mostly worried about his mother, who had been diagnosed with chronic leukemia. A cancer survivor himself, Martin developed a special rapport with Johnson. “The Yankees bring the world to my heart, and my heart to the world,” Martin—who is prone to philosophi-

cal reflection—told me. He came to see Johnson as a second son, feeling protective if someone booed him. At Waffle House after the game, Martin would help Johnson forget about a poor performance with tales of his own embarrassing professional moments, such as when he mistakenly sang “Jingle Bells” to a group of increasingly bewildered graveside mourners who’d requested the Christian hymn “Ring the Bells.” Returning home to Denver with stories like Martin’s, I felt buoyed by the sense that I had gathered powerful material for a book proposal. At the same time, I felt the stress mounting after months of reporting work without earning a dime. My family’s lease was ending, and we knew that we would have to move, but had no idea where. I sometimes woke around 4 am with a pounding headache, worried about our future, trying to shake a sense of unease that my commitment to telling this story—and pursuing my own literary ambitions—was making me an irresponsible father. I was encouraged when my agent told me that several top publishing houses liked my proposal. When he

Previous spread: Calfee Park, June 10, 2021. Above from left to right: Players warm up in Elizabethton, Tennessee, June 9, 2021; Fans at Calfee Park, June 11, 2021; David Hagan at Calfee Park

called one morning that spring to tell me I had a deal to write a book about the Appalachian League’s farewell season, I couldn’t suppress my excitement. The only catch was that there had to be a season; if it was canceled because of the pandemic, the agreement would be void. I wasn’t too worried; the season wasn’t scheduled to begin for months, and baseball is played outdoors, where transmission is rare.

ar away from most of their minor-league affiliates both geographically and culturally, thirty millionaires and billionaires huddle behind closed doors to make decisions about the future of Major League Baseball. There are many theories as to why they chose to target one quarter of minor-league teams for extinction. The decision likely stemmed from a convergence of factors, most notably the sense that there was no need for such a vast infrastructure to assess and groom future MLB players, coupled with a desire to save money and exert more control over baseball at all levels. Manfred, the commissioner, talked about that desire for control—what he dubbed “One Baseball”—in a 2015 speech:

Major League Baseball is committed to the idea that we are going to be more actively engaged with all parts of the baseball community. . . . We want one umbrella effort, with Major League Baseball at the top of it, but involving college, high school, and various youth programs. Going forward, we have to attack the youth and amateur market in a single, unified, and coherent way.

His choice of words is revealing. Rather than publicize the fact that eliminating baseball in forty-two cities and towns would save MLB an estimated $500,000 per team (roughly the cost of one major-league minimum salary), league officials argued that the cutbacks would in fact be beneficial to minor-league players, allowing for modest pay raises for those who survived the cuts, as well as an improved quality of life, including better travel accommodations. (Though with revenues reported at over $10.3 billion in 2019, owners could have easily paid for this without cutting jobs.) The league also suggested that because only a fraction of drafted players ever make the majors, late-round picks would be better off never being teased by the opportunity. Citing the long

odds of making the majors, an MLB executive asked, “Have we really served kids if we convince them to leave college, and they do so because they think they have a chance, and then one day they are taken aside and told, ‘You’re not good enough,’ and are then outside on their butt?” Does a major-league club really need close to three hundred players scattered across more than a dozen leagues? Even most proponents of a robust minor-league system concede this is worth examining. But the former Minor League Baseball president Pat O’Conner bristles at the myopic focus on player development. MLB sees minor-league baseball as being little more than an “R & D lab for future big-league players,” O’Conner says. “There is the game of baseball and the business of baseball, and the business side is winning, which is not always good for the long-term health of the game. . . . For these towns who have hosted baseball for one hundred years to be summarily dismissed is not right and not in baseball’s long-term interest.” Not everyone was overlooking the essence of baseball, though. In fact, by the beginning of 2020, minor-league advocates had begun pushing back. A bipartisan effort in Congress to stop contraction, led by legislators from a number of affected communities, most notably Bernie Sanders— whose hometown Vermont Lake Monsters were reportedly on the chopping block—was gaining steam.

s spring 2020 blossomed in Appalachia, the pandemic showed no signs of abating. Still, fastballs thumped into catcher’s mitts in Florida and Arizona, a reassuring constant as stress mounted elsewhere. Then, on March 13, MLB suspended spring training. This left the Appalachian League’s management in a doubly tenuous predicament: the contraction plan meant that this would likely be their final season; now the pandemic meant that MLB might shutter minorleague ballparks for the summer. If this came to pass, the century-old league might have already recorded its final out. I began obsessively checking the COVID-19 case numbers in Appalachian League communities, monitoring statements from the governors of

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Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia, trying to divine where they were headed when it came to restrictions on large gatherings. Our family started to house hunt in the area, hoping to find a base of operations for my research and writing. I almost felt as though I could expend enough psychic energy following COVID-related developments to somehow will the season to happen. I couldn’t help fantasizing about bringing my own family to the occasional game, and imagining my son’s glee over the crazy antics of the mascots.

ith no games to watch, I began talking with the league’s general managers: Haugh, Zac Clark of the Johnson City Cardinals, and Brice Ballentine of the Elizabethton Twins. Occupying the lowest rung of professional baseball’s executive ladder, these young general managers— all still in their twenties—were cramped into austere offices, working long hours and suffering sleepless nights, preparing for a season that might not happen—all for clubs that could soon be eliminated. Like their players, they weren’t in it for the money. The $35,000 or so they earned in a year equates to what some senior major-league executives make in days or weeks. (Manfred reportedly earns roughly $11 million a year.) But they dreamed of advancing in the fiercely competitive profession they loved, energized by the opportunity to bring families and communities together at the ballpark, and excited to carry business cards that read general manager, embossed with major-league logos. They plowed ahead with their plans for the summer season, despite receiving little guidance on what to expect. Ballentine—who, at twentynine, had already worked for the Quad Cities River Bandits, Burlington Bees, Hickory Crawdads, Hagerstown Suns, Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, and Mobile BayBears—took it upon himself to figure out what safety precautions would be necessary to allow spectators to return. He purchased gloves and masks, installed plexiglass at the concession stands, and drew up

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seating plans for 50 percent capacity. Sitting in his sparsely furnished office adorned with old bobbleheads and promotional jerseys, under a whiteboard tracking local sponsorship deals (dr. enuf—yes, pizza inn— no), Ballentine grudgingly conceded that they probably wouldn’t be able to get a bouncy house for the kids, but were considering buying a $150 rollaway basketball hoop and charging for shots: “That could help us make a few bucks.” As he strategized over how to pull in a few additional dollars, MLB remained focused on getting major leaguers back on the field. Players and owners haggled over how to hold a shortened season with hundreds of millions of dollars in TV revenue at stake. Meanwhile, the minor leagues’ negotiating position weakened by the day, as franchises with already thin margins suf fered through months with no income. The league’s general attitude toward the minors seemed to be encapsulated by one former MLB executive’s diagnosis: “Minor-league baseball hires a few kids to sell tickets and create promotions and keeps all the revenue . . . It’s a good model for them. If someone else is going to pay my labor costs for a new business, I would do well, too.” Never mind that MLB had successfully lobbied Congress in 2018 to pass the shamelessly named Save America’s Pastime Act, which exempts minor-league players from minimum-wage laws under the guise of saving cash-strapped franchises. Though top draft picks are able to pocket large signing bonuses, most selections in the later rounds receive only modest bonuses to accompany a standardized pay scale that comes out to less than what fastfood workers earn. Like so many others dealing with the unpredictable consequences of COVID, my own situation was growing more precarious, as I continued to pay out of pocket for reporting trips in service of a book whose viability was becoming more tenuous. As I ate a McDonald’s combo meal in a roadside hotel outside Johnson City, Tennessee, after a long day of interviews, I had to question what the hell I was doing.

The lack of clarity was beginning to exact a psychological toll on everyone—myself included. “If there isn’t going to be baseball, just tell us, rip the Band-Aid off,” Zac Clark of the Johnson City Cardinals told me. Haugh’s low point came when she tried to eke out a few dollars with a screening of Frozen II at Calfee Park and the audiovisual system gave out. As she scrambled to fix it, I imagine she felt as I had on a few occasions, shuttling drunk millennials around Denver for Lyft in an effort to make a few bucks between reporting trips. With each passing week, the stress mounted. Haugh was concerned that if the Yankees abandoned Pulaski, all her unsold merchandise from the previous year would become worthless, as would the thousands of bobbleheads inbound from China. She worried over the broader consequences of contraction. “Kids used to come with their grandparents, and now all of that could be lost,” she told me. “All they will know is baseball on TV, and that isn’t the same. These memories will disappear.”

n June 30, 2020, it was announced that affiliates would not be provided with players because of COVID concerns, thereby canceling a season for the first time since the establishment of the minor leagues in 1901. Residents of the ten Appalachian League communities were now forced to accept the likelihood that they had already witnessed the last professional ball game in their towns. One morning, while having my first cup of coffee, the beautiful Denver weather contrasting with my anxious mood, I felt my heart quicken when I saw an email come in from my editor. My fears were confirmed: the book deal was terminated, per the terms of my contract, as there was now no season to cover, and my six months of research and writing appeared to have been a waste. We moved to Pittsburgh, a more affordable city that was closer to my wife’s family, but still within striking distance of the Appalachian League communities that I still hoped to write about. On a warm August night, I drove down to the Fatz Cafe outside Pulaski to meet McGrady, the daughter of

the former mayor. As the 2020 major-league season hobbled along with games played in empty stadiums, she expressed her frustration with MLB: “COVID was used by MLB as an excuse to devastate smalltown America,” she said. “I can’t hang out with friends. Concerts were canceled, and now baseball is gone. It’s depressing.” She said that kids now just stayed up all night playing video games. The Scotch-Irish people of Appalachia take pride in their independence

its five thousand residents got sick, and one hundred and twenty-five died. As has been the case throughout the region’s history, though, they took the punch and got back up. McGrady explained the ways in which Pulaski was struggling with the lockdown. As in much of the country, big businesses such as Lowe’s and Walmart were doing well, while momand-pops such as the Blue Ridge Fudge Lady shop had to transition to serving by appointment only. The economic forces buffeting these small businesses

former Appalachian League GM told me. “He deals in leverage, and will wait until the last minute, when these clubs are most desperate, and throw them some nickels.” Hagan, who owns the Pulaski team, bristled at the fact that his club could be recognized as the best franchise in minor-league baseball in 2019 and slated for elimination a year later. “We’re a little town, I got that,” he says. “But look at what we have—the best stadium, great attendance, and great facilities.” He marvels at how

and grit. Just over a century ago, Pulaski’s mayor, Ernest W. Calfee, for whom the ballpark is named, led the town courageously through the Spanish flu. In an eerie foreshadowing of our COVID response, he ordered the closure of what we now call nonessential businesses. The local Southwest Times, in the more flowery language of the era, wrote:

and the Pulaski Yankees were similar, as in both cases multibillion-dollar national brands would weather the storm—if not make a profit—while local vendors offering the same product would get flattened. The season’s cancellation crushed the finances of minor-league operators, putting them on life support and further weakening any negotiating leverage they had with MLB. The pandemic also distracted the public, allowing MLB to avoid the scrutiny the move would have ordinarily generated. Just about everyone I spoke to— fans and management alike—viewed Manfred as the paradigmatic corporate villain. “I doubt he has even been to an Appalachian League game,” one

MLB entered negotiations with a list of demands and emerged having achieved all of them: “If two sides go into a negotiation, each with ten dollars, and one side comes out with nothing and the other with twenty dollars, that’s not a negotiation— that’s a hostile takeover.”

John Crouch, the grave digger, then a young and powerful man, labored long and hard—fortified by an occasional shot of whiskey he managed to fight off the flu and stay on his feet throughout the epidemic.

Pulaski suffered worse than any other town in the state: two fifths of

Left: The dugout at Elizabethton’s Northeast Community Credit Union Ballpark. Right: Brice Ballentine, the general manager of the Elizabethton team, pulls a tarp over the field to protect it from an oncoming rainstorm

drove to Elizabethton’s Northeast Community Credit Union Ballpark through an August twilight. Pulling into the lot, I saw the longtime manager Ray Smith sitting outside the ballpark with Lisa Pearce, a woman with cerebral palsy who had barely missed a game in twenty years. Pearce’s home, where she’d been living alone with her Chihuahua since her husband

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passed away, contained a shrine to her beloved team, a bedroom bureau stacked with Twins baseball cards, uniformed teddy bears, a scrapbook of news clippings, and several bobbleheads. Smith stopped by weekly to clean her sheets and provide the companionship she’d been missing since she lost her stateprovided caretaker. Her family lived on nearby Roan Mountain, a place whose natural beauty is scarred by ramshackle trailers and the occasional meth lab. They didn’t visit often. Smith, who at sixty-four still displayed the lean and athletic frame that earned him a ticket to the big leagues back in 1981, seemed to have stepped out of another age; he was prone to corny expressions, referring to his playing days as “back when dinosaurs were roaming the earth.” In his small office, he reached into his desk and produced a stack of handwritten scorecards from the previous summer, a charmingly antiquated archive. Smith was widely recognized as the quintessential rookie-league manager, with a remarkable record for getting players to the big show. As we took a slow walk across the still well-maintained infield of the empty park, Smith reminisced about old games with near-photographic recall, and with

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an enthusiasm and sense of wonder for the sport that do not seem to have dampened over the years. One of the plans being bandied about by MLB was for an elite league of college prospects to take the place of the Appalachian League’s professional teams. When I mentioned this to Smith, he had no interest. “I’m a bigleague guy,” he said matter-of-factly. Told that MLB cited substandard facilities and long travel times as two of the reasons for cutting minor-league teams, Smith had emailed Manfred and invited him to Johnson City, offering to bring him on a tour. The league’s ten towns were located within short drives of one another, and—with a few notable exceptions, like the chicken-coop lockers and hilly outfield in Bristol— the facilities were more than adequate. Smith applauded Manfred for responding to the message, though the commissioner declined the invitation. Before I pulled out of the ballpark lot on this August evening perfect for baseball, I slowly scanned the empty grandstands one last time. Missing were the smiling kids tugging at their parents’ arms for cotton candy, and the “backrow gang” of mostly older ladies, some of whom haven’t skipped a game in years.

I tuned my radio to the comforting cadences of the Yankees–Red Sox game as I drove into the Appalachian sunset and toward my hotel. Between innings, news broke that Yoenis Céspedes had just quit playing for the New York Mets, ostensibly because of concerns over COVID, though later reporting suggested it was just as likely because of frustration with his contract. Watching this superstar walk away from his team (and fans) in the final months of a four-year, $110 million contract, following months of bickering between MLB players and owners, convinced me that these were not people I wanted to support. Yet a few minutes later, I turned the radio up to better hear the game over the sound of my Jeep. The sport still exerted a hold on me that I couldn’t shake.

n September 28, 2020, MLB released a promotional video announcing the new Appalachian League, trumpeting plans for an elite college summer league to replace the professional teams. Beginning play in the summer of 2021, the new amateur league would include some of the top rising freshman and sophomore college players in the country. The

Left to right: Former minor-league manager Ray Smith in Elizabethton; T-ball trophies at Dino’s Restaurant, Elizabethton; Baseball memorabilia at the home of the late Carmon Dugger, who was instrumental in bringing the Minnesota Twins affiliate to Elizabethton

continue to be gobbled up by MLB as part of its “One Baseball” quest as their valuations drop. It doesn’t take an MBA to imagine a scenario in which MLB could simply say, “We’ll offer you $3 million for an $8 million team, and if you don’t sell, we’ll just cut you out of the next agreement.” Apart from the skill disparity between college players and drafted professionals (which can be debated), just as important to these communities is the pride that accompanies association with a major-league team. There was something magical in seeing the Yankee pinstripes in Pulaski, Virginia, something that transcended the talent on the field and provided a connection to the world beyond Appalachia.

I players would not be under contract and the clubs would not be affiliates, but MLB agreed to provide financial support for the new league. (The exact terms were undisclosed.) The video was expertly produced, featuring the former major leaguer Harold Reynolds saying that the quality of baseball would be even better than before, going so far as to claim that a staggering half of the league’s three hundred amateur players would end up in the major leagues (a contention that prompted eye rolls from most baseball insiders I spoke to). The video had the feel of a Madison Avenue creation, crisp and catchy, a notable departure from the homespun old Appalachian League. Mark Cryan, a former general manager of the league’s Burlington Indians and now assistant professor of sport management at Elon University, described the old league as “a throwback league, a time machine,” whereas this one was clearly envisioned as a step into a more technologically sophisticated future. The MLB press release announced that “analytics and data will also be a driving force behind the new vision for the Appalachian League.” There

was something jarring about seeing the world of spin rates, launch angles, and exit velocities encroaching on one of the last preserves of a simpler game, one closer to its essence. An MLB executive I spoke to touted the new league’s marketing potential, observing how, in the past, outfield fences in the Appalachian League would advertise Joe’s Towing and bail bonds, while now they could sell national rights and oversee them from headquarters. The potential loss of the long-standing connections between these teams and local businesses went unremarked. Joe from Joe’s Towing is more likely to come to the games, spend time with his neighbors, and do things like sponsor local Little League teams than are distant executives at Google.

ince their inception shortly after the Civil War, minorleague clubs have been run by pirates, hustlers, and wheeler-dealers, P. T. Barnums for whom no promotion was too zany if it got people to the ballpark. Cryan fears that MLB is slowly eating away at this treasured piece of Americana, warning that even the clubs that survive contraction will

meet McGrady for a beer one last time at Fatz on a pleasant October evening. She was saddened by the fact that she had attended her final Appalachian League game and hadn’t even known it at the time. She felt bad for her friend Betsy Haugh, who had recently hosted a Duck Derby fund-raiser for the local YMCA, featuring races between floating yellow rubber ducks for the kids. When the skies opened and unleashed a downpour, everyone bought old Yankees gear to stay warm. I tell her about a recent visit to Haugh’s small office overlooking Calfee Park, where Haugh told me that the team’s new name would likely be the River Turtles, in honor of the nearby New River. I recall how she said she hoped it would appeal to kids, attempting enthusiasm that came off a little flat. McGrady knows what we all know: the Turtles can’t compete with the aura of the pinstripes, no matter how well marketed the new brand might be. McGrady tells me that people are stuck at home and desperate to get out and do something. It is no wonder local suicide numbers are up, she says, when people have no social interaction. I recall with a jolt our last dinner, when she volunteered that her husband, Wally, had taken his life in the summer of 2017. The rate of deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and liver failure is 37 percent higher in Appalachia than in the rest of the United States. She and Wally had

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been high school sweethearts, sharing a love of the Yankees. According to his obituary in the local paper, Wally “was best known as the voice of Calfee Park, spreading smiles throughout the stands nightly.” McGrady says that the only games she missed that summer were the day after Wally’s suicide and the day of his memorial service. She was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support she discovered when she returned to the ballpark and her box was overflowing with flowers and wreaths. Wally’s initials were on all of the Yankees’ batting helmets, and a memorial video for him played on the Jumbotron. “David Hagan even gave me a hug that night,” she says, laughing because it was “the only time I will probably ever hug that man.”

n my final visit to Elizabethton, I drive to the ballpark, where I see Smith sitting glumly on the bed of his pickup truck, with Pearce seated next to him in her wheelchair. They are joined by Smith’s assistant coach of nineteen years, Jeff Reed. Still muscular and somewhat imposing despite the twenty years since his final major-league game, Reed teases me for being late, shouting, “Ten minutes late, run ten poles!” They are quick to tell me they have no interest in playing roles in the new college league.

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Smith, aware that this might be my last visit, and recalling my mention of an undistinguished juniorvarsity college baseball career, invites me to take some batting practice in a nearby cage. Deflated when I arrived, he gets energized as he loosens up his arm and I grab a nearby bat. As he begins serving up easy fastballs right down the middle of the plate, I am relieved to make solid contact, twenty years after I last set foot in a batter’s box. Smith’s mood improves by the minute. From outside the cage, Reed tells the story of Nate Hanson, an obscure minor leaguer, who apparently ripped a line drive through the protective net in this very cage and took out one of Smith’s front teeth. Reed says he scooped the tooth off the ground and returned it to Smith, who tried to jam it back in before continuing with batting practice. “Nate the Great,” Smith shouts as he continues pitching to me, “probably the hardest contact he ever made!” Once the stories begin, they flow easily and without interruption. After twenty-seven seasons serving as manager in Elizabethton and fortythree years with the Twins organization, Smith will soon be left with only memories, as the era of professional baseball in Elizabethton comes to an end.

n June 5, 2021, baseball returned to Calfee Park. It was a lovely night, and a healthy crowd had turned out to watch the Pulaski River Turtles take on the WhistlePigs from nearby Princeton, West Virginia. The teams were part of the new Appalachian League. Smiles abounded as ballpark friendships rekindled. Pulaski would ultimately fall to Princeton, 6–3. Most fans stayed in their seats after the final out, though, because Hagan had planned a lavish postgame fireworks show. As “Take Me Home, Country Roads” blared from the sound system, one could almost feel the previous year’s anxieties dissipate into the fireworks smoke. Carson Hamblin, still wearing the cowboy hat inspired by Derek Craft, was all smiles as he rode toward the exit on his father’s shoulders, blissfully unaware that Pulaski’s minor-league team had been replaced by rather ordinary college players. As I joined the crowd streaming out the original Gothic stone gate, I felt a part of a procession dating back to the park’s 1935 opening. Still, it wasn’t quite the same. A young boy seated in the row behind me had mumbled to his father, “The Yankees were a lot better.” Harold Reynolds’s projection that 150 of the league’s 300 players would make the majors was looking to be off by about 145. The cynic in me agreed with Pat O’Conner, the former minor-league president, who suspects that the new league is a short-term effort to appease Congress, and likely to be quietly shuttered in a few seasons after top college prospects prove reluctant to play in places like Princeton, West Virginia. But at least on this night, 648 days after the last professionally played Appalachian League out was recorded there, life had once again come to Calfee Park. The romantic in me hopes MLB’s distant decision-makers will see the magic that can’t be captured on a balance sheet, so that the kids tucked in their car seats, clutching stuffed River Turtles, can someday take their own kids to the park, maybe even to see professional ballplayers on a diamond nestled in the rolling hills of southwest Virginia. Q

Fans rise for the national anthem ahead of a game between the Pulaski River Turtles and the Burlington Sock Puppets at Calfee Park, June 13, 2021

1 9 7 7

PARADISE LOST By A. Bartlett Giamatti

hea Stadium is not Eden, and the picture of Tom and Nancy Seaver leaving its graceless precincts in tears did not immediately remind me of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve in the Brancacci Chapel. And yet, absorbing the feelings generated by Seaver’s departure from New York led me to the kind of inflated cogitation that links Masaccio and the Mets, if only because the feelings were so outsized and anguished and intense. The late Sixties and early Seventies were celebrated or execrated for many things besides someone being able to throw a baseball consistently at ninetyfive miles per hour. Yippies yipped, flower children blossomed and withered, America was being greened, by grass and by rock and by people who peddled them. This was a pastoral time, and it would, like all pastorals, turn sere, but for three or four years, while Seaver was gaining control over a block of space approximately three feet high, eighteen inches wide, and sixty feet six inches long, many other of America’s young were breaking loose. Here are, I think, the origins of the Seaver mystique in New York, in the young Californian who brought control, in the youth who came east bearing—indeed, embodying—tradition. Seaver was authentic; neither a goody two shoes nor a flash in the pan, he matured into the best pitcher in baseball. He was a national symbol, nowhere more honored than in New York, and in New York never more loved than by the guy who seemed in every other respect Seaver’s antithesis, the guy who would never give a sucker an even break, who knew how corrupt they all were, who

knew it was who you knew that counted, who knew how rotten it all really was— this guy loved Seaver because Seaver was a beautiful pitcher, a working guy who got his reward; Seaver was someone who went by the rules and made it. The guy loved Seaver because Seaver did not have to be streetwise. In bars in Queens, in clubs in the Bronx, in living rooms in front of Channel Nine in Suffolk and Nassau, out on

Staten Island, everywhere, but particularly in the tattered reaches of Shea Stadium, they loved him for many things, but above all because he never thought he had to throw at anybody’s head. They loved it in him, and in that act sought it in themselves.

one of this reasoning, if such it is, would appeal to the dominant New York baseball writers, who have used the Seaver trade as a casus belli; nor to M. (for, I think, Moralistic) Donald Grant, chairman of the board of the

Mets, who would quickly tell us that Seaver wanted too much money, meaning by that something he would never say aloud but would certainly formulate within himself—that Tom wanted too much. Tom wanted, somehow, to cross the line between employee and equal, hired hand and golf partner, “boy” and man. He believed in the rules, in this game governed by law; if you were the best pitcher in baseball, you ought to get the best salary of any pitcher in baseball; and money—yes, money— ought to be spent so baseball’s best pitcher would not have to work on baseball’s worst-hitting team. Tom Seaver felt about the Mets the way the guy from Astoria felt about Seaver—he loved them for what they stood for, and he wanted merit rewarded and quality improved. The irony is that Seaver had in abundance precisely the quality that Grant thinks he values most—institutional loyalty, the capacity to be faithful to an idea as well as to individuals. The fan understood this and was devastated when his understanding and Seaver’s principle were not honored. The anguish surrounding Seaver’s departure stemmed from the realization that the chairman of the board and certain newspaper columnists thought money was more important than loyalty, and the fury stemmed from the realization that the chairman and certain writers thought everybody else agreed with them, or ought to. The day after Seaver was exiled to Cincinnati by way of Montreal, a sheet was hung from a railing at Shea bearing the following legend: i was a believer Q but now we’ve lost seaver.

From “Tom Seaver’s Farewell,” which appeared in the September 1977 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 171-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.

ARCHIVE

TO BE A FIELD OF POPPIES The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost By Lisa Wells

migo Bob Cantisano didn’t think he was going to die. But his wife, Jenifer Bliss, who had cared for him through eight years of throat cancer, could see that his condition had taken a turn for the worse. The tumor in his neck had imploded, leaving an open wound that Jenifer kept clean and dressed. Little by little, it was growing toward his carotid artery. The doctors warned he could bleed out any day. “I believe your spirit will live on,” she told him, “but your body isn’t doing so good. It’s important to talk about what you want.” Amigo Bob didn’t know what should be done with his body. To bury toxic embalming fluid in the earth was out of the question—he was a lifelong environmentalist. Otherwise, he hadn’t given the matter much thought. Then Jenifer heard about human composting.

Lisa Wells is the author, most recently, of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, which was published in July by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

A few months earlier, in May 2020, a Washington State bill legalizing the conversion of human remains into soil, known as natural organic reduction (NOR), had gone into effect. A company called Recompose was due to open the world’s first NOR facility that December in Kent, a city just south of Seattle. They named it the Greenhouse. It seemed perfect for Amigo Bob, who had revolutionized the field of organic agriculture—first as a farmer, then as an advocate and consultant—and spent his life building soil and protecting it from the “pesticide mafia.” When he began to accept that the end was near, Amigo Bob called the founder of Recompose, Katrina Spade. He wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. Compost is the basis of organic farming, so he knew a lot about it—he’d even served as an adviser for a few large composting operations. Katrina explained their process, and he seemed to find her account convincing, but it wasn’t until his final moments that he told Jenifer definitively: “This is what I want.”

He died the day after Christmas. His loved ones washed and anointed his body and kept vigil at his bedside. “He looked like a king,” Jenifer told me. “He was really, really beautiful.” She showed me a few photos. His body had been laid atop a hemp shroud and covered from the neck down in a layer of dried herbs and flower petals. Bouquets of lavender and tree fronds wreathed his head, and a ladybug pendant on a beaded string lay across his brow like a diadem. Only his bearded face was exposed, wearing the peaceful, inscrutable expression of the dead. He did look like a king, or like a woodland deity out of Celtic mythology—his gauzewrapped neck the only evidence of his life as a mortal. On the third day of their vigil, Jenifer felt his spirit go. Amigo Bob joined nine other pioneers at the Greenhouse on the cusp of the New Year: the first humans in the world to be legally composted. Reading their obituaries, I learned that they were as old as ninetytwo and as young as forty-eight. One

Opposite page: Clear Cut (detail), by Dustin Yellin. All artwork © The artist. Artwork photographed by Martyna Szczesna ˛

was an “accidental florist,” one a “voracious reader,” another a “skilled baker” and “serious cook.” There was a landscaper, a painter and woodworker, a beekeeper and dog trainer. One taught creative writing to homeless youth, one had a thirty-year career in law enforcement. One man, Ernie Brooks, helped to establish the field of underwater photography and was known as the Ansel Adams of the sea. Each of their bodies was placed inside an eight-foot-long steel cylinder called a “vessel,” along with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Over the next thirty days, the Recompose staff monitored the moisture, heat, and pH levels inside the vessels, occasionally rotating them, until the bodies transformed into soil. The soil was then transferred to curing bins, where it remained for two weeks before being tested for toxins and cleared for pickup. Half of the NOR soil would wind up in a forest on Bells Mountain, in southwestern Washington, near the Oregon border. A composted body produces approximately one cubic yard of soil, which can fill a truck bed and weigh upwards of 1,500 pounds. For many surviving relatives—apartment dwellers, for example—taking home such a large quantity of soil is unrealistic, so Recompose offers them the option to donate it to the mountain, where it’s used to fertilize trees and repair land degraded by logging. But Amigo Bob was a farmer, so Jenifer rented a U-Haul and brought the whole cubic yard of him home. She turned the trip into a kind of pilgrimage, stopping to visit loved ones and the headwaters of their favorite rivers. Over the next few months, their farmer friends came by and filled small containers with the soil to use on their own land. Jenifer used some to plant a cherry tree. I asked her what it was like to have her husband home again, piled up in her driveway.

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“Well, it’s compost,” she told me. “It’s still precious because it was his body. But it’s also compost.”

n my life I have encountered two kinds of people: those who spend time thinking about, talking about, and making plans for their

future corpse; and those who prefer not to. I belong to the former category. As a child, I desperately wanted a Viking burial, an idea inspired by the 1988 Macaulay Culkin film Rocket Gibraltar, in which a group of kids

boost their grandpa’s corpse, load it onto a boat, push it out to sea, and light it on fire with a flaming arrow. If the sky glowed red, the narrator explained, it meant the dead Viking had “led a good life.” By my twenties, I had settled on the more realistic option of cremation. I wanted my ashes scattered on the banks of my favorite river, or cast from a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, or fired into the atmosphere from a cannon. (I was in a Hunter S. Thompson phase.) But after a friend’s ashes were lost in the mail, I reconsidered. I explored sky burial, in which a corpse is left out in the open to be fed upon by raptors; and alkaline hydrolysis, a process in which flesh is liquefied in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide. More recently, I planned to follow the example of Nineties heartthrob Luke Perry and purchase an Infinity Burial Suit: a shroud containing fungi that would consume my corpse and bioremediate its toxins. Like Jenifer Bliss, I think it’s important to talk about what we want, mainly so that our survivors don’t have to guess. But I’m also drawn to the death meditation itself, which can lead to useful reflections on life. The appeal of a Viking burial, for instance, was twofold. There was the beauty and drama of uniting the elements in death; I wanted to float, burning over the ocean, and to have the sky take measure of my life. But I also wanted to live like the kids in the movie; kids who build bonfires, shoot bows and arrows, and defy the authorities. In other words, thinking about the kind of death I wanted taught me about the kind of life I wanted. A willingness to face life’s nonnegotiable realities seems to me one mark of psychological maturation. But it comes at a price—the discovery that the world is not as simple as we once believed. Truth contaminates the dream. The Viking burial, for example, is apocryphal; the

Clear Cut II, by Dustin Yellin

Vikings were known to burn their dead in boats, but kept them parked on land. What’s more, their funerals sometimes involved human sacrifice, in which a female slave was raped by the dead man’s clan, then ritually stabbed and strangled. Other, less sinister realities: both sky burial and the firing of heavy artillery are frowned upon in the city of Seattle, where I live. And even if cannons were permitted, cremation releases about 540 pounds of carbon per incinerated corpse. The carbon output from a year’s worth of cremations in the United States is roughly equivalent to that from burning 400 million pounds of coal. Alkaline hydrolysis has less ecological impact, but like cremation, it wastes the body’s energy; instead of going up in smoke, nutrients are flushed down the drain. Even the mushroom suit, according to critics, adds nothing to the decomposition process that soil itself can’t provide. At the end of such a litany, one is liable to conclude, as Dorothy Parker did, “You might as well live.” Of course, that isn’t a realistic option either. And so I approach the dark wood of the middle of my life intrigued to encounter human composting, a method of final disposition with no apparent downside, a method purported to prevent a metric ton of carbon dioxide per body from entering the atmosphere, and to produce soil capable of fertilizing trees and flowers. Whether these benefits withstand the stress of extended consideration remains to be seen. But to leave behind a net-positive legacy, to grow something beautiful in death, would be a dream. As a series of attractive promotional cards printed on recycled stock informs me: “I could be a pinecone,” “I could be a forest grove,” “I could be a field of poppies.”

atrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, is an architect by training. The idea for human composting first came to her in 2011, when she was a graduate student at UMass Amherst. More precisely, she was drinking a beer in her backyard, watching one of her babies roll around on the grass and marveling at how quickly they grow.

It occurred to her that she, too, was growing quickly. But toward what? Oh, right, her certain demise. And what would become of her body when she died? In retrospect, she now views this revelation as “a little bit trite,” but it inspired her to look for alternatives to cremation and burial, neither of which appealed to her. That’s when a friend introduced her to livestock mortality composting, a little-known agricultural practice in which farmers inter their expired livestock in outdoor compost piles. Katrina’s master’s thesis, “Of Dirt and Decomposition: Proposing a

THINKING ABOUT THE KIND OF DEATH I WANTED TAUGHT ME ABOUT THE KIND OF LIFE I WANTED Resting Place for the Urban Dead,” contained the seeds of what would eventually become Recompose. She conceived of human composting as a solution to the problem of overcrowded cemeteries and the environmental costs of conventional burial and cremation. But her proposal was also a critique of the premise underpinning those methods—that the body is a disease vector to be disposed of, rather than a potential source of new life. She imagined transforming human remains into soil, “ready to nourish new living beings.” In 2014, Katrina was awarded a fellowship to pursue her idea, and the first stories about her vision for human composting began to appear in the press. Around that time, she received an email f rom Tanya Marsh, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law, who, Katrina recalled, said something like, “Hi, I’m Tanya, I wrote the book on funeral law in the United States, and I just want to let you know what you’re proposing to do is illegal. I’d love to talk to you about it.” The following semester, Marsh’s students began studying human composting in class, trying to figure out which states had the most prom-

ising regulatory pathways. It seemed possible that some states’ funeral codes might allow for it, but in the end everyone decided that pursuing legalization specific to NOR would be a more effective strategy. First, Katrina would need to conduct a pilot study with human bodies. She moved her family to Seattle, where she contacted Lynne CarpenterBoggs, a soil scientist who’d authored studies on livestock mortality composting. In 2018, Katrina and Lynne began a “closed vessel” study with six donor bodies, using a composting drum that was originally devised for livestock remains. An outdoor compost pile is subject to the caprices of weather, and breaking down bones can take more than a year. A closed vessel, on the other hand, would speed up the process by allowing for more control over oxygen, heat, and moisture levels. “You are dramatically ramping up microbial activity,” Lynne explained. “You’re creating an environment that promotes extremely high activity and heat production.” Composting isn’t rocket science, but the process requires a precise amount of sustained heat to eliminate pathogens and quickly convert decaying organic matter to soil. At lower temperatures, “you’ll have de-emanation and denaturation,” Lynne said, but not true composting. In this sense, the scabby pile of coffee grounds and cut weeds in my yard is actually a decomposition pile. “In the backyard setting,” Lynne cautioned, “we do not recommend that people even compost their cat.” The pilot study delivered. Pathogens were eliminated, and pharmaceuticals were remediated to levels well under EPA limits. The closedvessel system also accelerated the proliferation of the thermophilic organisms that break a body down, transforming it into soil in just thirty days. In a “green burial,” by comparison, in which a body is buried in an unlined grave in a shroud or a simple wooden coffin, the process can take up to twenty years. In the early days, Katrina called her idea the Urban Death Project. It was as direct a name as she could come up with, a way to refuse euphemism in an industry otherwise saturated with it.

REPORT

But it didn’t quite capture the regenerative aspect of NOR. So when she formed her company in 2017, she named it Recompose. The term is canny branding, but it’s also a fair description of the process, in that the very molecules of the dead are taken apart and reassembled, as the pilot study put it, into a material that is “unrecognizable visually, chemically, or microbiologically as human remains.” Katrina and Lynne had proved that their process worked, but the legality of NOR was still murky. Katrina had been doing outreach, giving talks, and strategizing about legalization with a local lobbyist. Then, as luck would have it, she realized that a state senator, Jamie Pedersen, lived just down the street. She asked him to coffee and explained what she was up to. “Climate change is high on his list, and he knew his constituents were going to be excited about the idea,” she told me. In 2019, Pedersen introduced SB 5001 (“Concerning Human Remains”), the first bill in the country to propose legalizing human composting. “We had six people donate their own bodies to the study before they died—that was their last gesture, and that said something,” Katrina told me. “Some of their friends and family testified to the legislature saying, ‘This was really meaningful for my person.’ ” Governor Jay Inslee signed the bill into law that year. (Since then, similar bills have been introduced in California, Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Colorado. The latter two have already passed.) Meanwhile, Recompose had gained a large following on social media. Its mailing list grew to fifteen thousand subscribers. People all over the world were interested in having their bodies composted. The company had originally leased an 18,500-square-foot warehouse in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood with the intention of installing one hundred vessels. Then the pandemic disrupted funding. An acquaintance offered a deal on the much smaller warehouse space in Kent, and Katrina had to settle for just ten vessels at launch. “My biggest fear was that I’d talk about it for ten years and never do it,” she said. The vessels were

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

booked immediately and a wait list began to form.

vidence of formal hominid burial dates back 120,000 years. Across the ancient world, people interred their dead in large mounds known as tumuli, landforms between three and ninety feet tall, sometimes built in geometric patterns or in the likenesses of animals. Evidence of sky burial dating back 12,000 years was found at the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, but the practice is likely far older. (We don’t know exactly how long human beings have practiced sky burial, or cremation, or burial at sea,

“TURNS OUT IT DOESN’T REALLY MAKE GOOD BUSINESS SENSE TO SELL SOMEONE A PIECE OF LAND FOR ETERNITY” because evidence of the dead vanishes in the process.) The intentional preservation of corpses through mummification was practiced by the Chinchorro of Chile’s Atacama Desert as early as 5000 bc, and has been practiced elsewhere in South America, Asia, the Canary Islands, and of course in Egypt, where priests preserved the dead with oils, plant extracts, and pine resin. Early American families tended to care for the dead on their own, preparing, dressing, and laying bodies out for viewing in basic wooden coffins. The dead were then buried in the local churchyard or in family plots on the back forty of the farm. The professional undertaker and his industry didn’t emerge until the Civil War, alongside the increasingly common practice of embalming, which stalled decomposition long enough for fallen soldiers to travel great distances home for burial. The procedure was both unregulated and profitable, fetching as much as $100 a corpse. Itinerant embalmers began to trail the Union Army, hovering at the edge of battlefields like kettles of vultures. The most famous embalmed corpse of the time, that of President Lincoln, was a national attraction that passed through seven

states before coming to rest in Springfield, Illinois, more than two weeks after his death. By the 1950s, embalming had become standard in the United States, but I wonder if this would have been the case had people understood the violence involved. There is no single method, but in a typical scenario, fluid containing formaldehyde is pumped into the carotid artery, which forces blood and other fluids in the corpse out of a tube in the jugular or femoral vein. An aspirating device resembling a meat thermometer is then repeatedly pushed into the abdomen and chest, where it punctures the organs. The organs are then filled with concentrated “cavity chemicals.” No wonder embalming is considered desecration in some traditions, including among Muslims and Jews, who bury their dead in shrouds or simple coffins, sometimes without nails or fasteners, to avoid obstructing the decomposition process. What constitutes desecration of a corpse is culture-bound; one man’s desecration is another’s honorable final disposition. For some, cremation is the only way to release a body’s spirit. For others, the idea of burning a loved one’s corpse before sending his bones through a pulverizer is the height of barbarism. Ditto the notion of leaving a loved one’s remains on a scaffold to be picked apart and consumed by birds, though for the Zoroastrians, who practice sky burial, burying or cremating a corpse would dishonor the sacred elements of earth and fire. Before the practice was condemned by Parliament in the early nineteenth century, people who died by suicide in England were given a profane burial at crossroads. Among early American Puritans, an honorable burial meant orienting the dead’s feet toward the east, so they’d rise to face Jerusalem when Christ returned, and Muslims are buried facing Mecca. The only characteristic that funerary mores seem to share is intentionality. Disposing of the dead in an arbitrary manner— leaving a body where it fell on the battlefield, or tossing it with others into a mass grave, limbs akimbo—is a universal sign of disrespect. Intention is how

we signal care, whether or not we believe that the soul persists, or whether we believe in a soul at all. Surprisingly, burial customs are rarely rooted in earthly practicalities like public-health concerns. Save for a few infectious diseases that remain active in corpses, dead bodies are not generally dangerous. The traditional six-foot burial depth, it turns out, is unnecessary. It’s said to have originated during the Black Plague, when people mistakenly believed corpses were the cause of its spread, rather than flea-ridden rats. Decomposition brings with it gases and odors and scavengers, which can be disturbing and unpleasant for the living, but putrefaction itself is not a source of disease. In emergencies that result in mass death, the World Health Organization prioritizes allocating resources to survivors ahead of burying the dead. Our concern, the group says, should be for the living. By my lights, this is also the most convincing argument for being composted.

anxieties related to dirt and decay, though it does also invite nervous allusions to Soylent Green. (Recompose discourages the planting of food crops with NOR soil. Not for any scientific reason, but because the idea makes people uneasy.) Katrina Spade greeted me at the threshold. We’d only ever talked on

visited the Greenhouse one gray after noon in April, a couple of weeks after Jenifer picked up Amigo Bob. It’s a modest warehouse, surrounded by office parks and machine shops. Through the open bay door, I could see the “array”: a white wall of interlocking individual vessels. Each vessel rests within a hexagonal frame, so that stacked together they resemble a big white honeycomb. Or some kind of Scandinavian storage solution. Or something out of a Seventies sci-fi film: the galactic travel chambers of the future! This is not just idle comparison. The clean design is a kind of hedge against inborn

Psychogeography #98 (detail), by Dustin Yellin

the phone, and she was wearing a mask, but I had no trouble identifying her. Whereas many others in the alternative death industry style themselves on a witchy continuum of piercings and botanical tattoos, Katrina wears her hair high and tight, and dresses in trousers and button-downs. Her vibe is warm, but sober, so that when she tells one of her handful of death jokes—“Turns out it doesn’t really make good business sense to sell some-

one a piece of land for eternity. Whose idea was that?”—the listener is disarmed. In other words, there is nothing especially woo-woo about her. That afternoon, the array was brightly lit by two auxiliary lights. A camera was trained on a white wall, which was staged with a dozen potted plants. Beyond the array, out of sight, the warehouse rang with activity, reinforcing my impression of being on a Hollywood back lot. “What’s up with the stage lights?” I asked Katrina. She explained that they were preparing for a virtual “laying-in ceremony” that would take place that afternoon. I wasn’t allowed to attend. In fact, because of COVID-19 restrictions, they almost didn’t let me visit the facility at all. But even in nonCOVID times, the warehouse is short on bathrooms and not really set up for public visitation, another reason they plan on moving to a larger facility. For now, if families want a ceremony, they have to do it over Zoom. Katrina called some of the staff over for introductions. Morgan Yarborough, who previously worked as a funeral director in more conventional settings, manages most of the family logistics. She’s also the in-house officiant, and would be performing the ceremony later that day. (Families can submit their own words and music, or they can request that Morgan perform something called the carbon cycle ceremony. A representative excerpt: “The plants we are using today, wood chips and straw, will cover Darby’s body, powering her transformation and releasing her molecules back into the world.”)

REPORT

Megan Circle is in charge of the soil and the vessels. Her surname—like several others in this story—seems to bear the mark of predestination; in this case, the ashes-to-ashes sense of circularity. As noted in her staff bio: Megan is “the very first person in the world to be employed to usher bodies through their transformation into soil.” Many of these details I already knew. I’d scoped out the website that morning and learned colorful factoids about each. I knew, for example, that in Megan’s former life, she worked in the wine industry, trained people in soil regeneration methods, and managed large-scale kitchens. I knew that when she wasn’t busy officiating funerals, Morgan kept rescue animals and made pen-and-ink drawings. I knew that the operations manager, Todd Maxfield-Matsumoto, used to work in bookstores, had a background in machine fabrication, founded a record label, and built droids in his spare time as a member of the R2 Builders Club. If human composting attracted a type, I suppose this was it: they all seemed to have a lot of hobbies. A few days earlier, Megan told me, the team had transported the first five cubic yards of donated NOR soil to Bells Mountain. She loaded their trailer with one yard of compost, but when it came time to load the next, she hesitated. It was the first time the compost would be commingled, which was profound but nerve-racking. “There’s a finality to it,” she told me. It marked the dissolution of the individual and a return to the collective: “Sort of the opposite of a tombstone.” On Bells Mountain, they off-loaded the pile in a clearing in the woods. Morgan Yarborough recited the five names of the dead. Then the living each took up a ceremonial handful of soil and placed it at the base of an alder tree. This wasn’t only symbolic of completing a single cycle of renewal, they explained. Alders are pioneer species and are often the first to colonize a clear-cut, fixing nitrogen in the soil and eventually becoming the source of the life that succeeds them. All the while, as I listened to the staff talk beside the array, the dead

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

were there inside their vessels. And all the while, as I listened, I was listening to something else too: a kind of ur-tone, the room sound underneath the music of our conversation. Later, when Morgan described the array of vessels as a “hotel for the dead,” someone joked that it would make a good band name, and I laughed along. Someone else mentioned a magazine venture: Better Funeral Homes and Gardens. I was hearing and seeing Katrina, and Morgan, and the others. But it was as though I were remembering them simultaneously, remembering their voices, and the biographies I had

IN COLLAPSING THE DISTANCE BETWEEN OUR CONSCIOUS LIVES AND CERTAIN DEATHS, WE MIGHT LIVE MORE PRESENTLY read that morning—texts that bore the same condensed and eclectic color as an obituary. Oh right, our certain demise. That was the sound beneath the song.

t was, of course, impossible to write this essay without reflecting on the dead people I love, and what I know of their final dispositions. Some were buried, some were cremated and scattered. Others were not so lucky. Last I heard, my grandparents’ ashes were stored in my aunt’s closet next to her cremated pets, still packed in the cardboard boxes they’d arrived in. Sean’s ashes, as I mentioned, were lost in transit. Poor Matt was first embalmed, then cremated, then buried in his urn. I did not want to be lost in the mail; or mutilated, burned, and buried; or held hostage for decades in my child’s closet. I began to feel anxious about my eventual fate, and one morning, after a restless night of battling death in my dreams, I got on the computer and signed up for Precompose, the program that allows you to pay off your future composting in installments as low as $25 a month. Most Americans are squeamish when it comes to death, at least when

it comes to considering the prospect for ourselves. This aversion to the realities of our mortal bodies might be a corollary to other historic virtues— vigor, youth, an insatiable lust for the new—but it has had the bizarre effect of stunting innovation in a consumer market that includes literally everyone on the planet. If we broach the subject at all, we do so obliquely, ideally in ways that preserve the option of avoiding death entirely—the apogee of this denial manifest in the cult of anti-aging, the promise of cryostasis and reanimation, in rumors of Walt Disney’s frozen head. My local funeral home pitches grieving families on embalming and heavy-duty caskets as a way to protect corpses from the elements, from the “odors or other unpleasantness that accompany uncared for remains.” Such claims are common in the conventional death industry. But the notion that the dead require our protection from decomposition is a fantasy. With few exceptions—such as the continuously maintained corpse of Vladimir Lenin (going strong since 1924)—embalmed bodies break down, too. They just take longer to do so. And rather than contributing nutrients to the earth, they release carcinogens. It seems to me that the promise of protection depends on an unconscious agreement between surviving loved ones and undertakers to play make-believe. To pretend that death need not have the final word. That though we feel helpless, we are not. That we might keep our dead intact, that they are not beyond our care. I thought paying my Precompose bill every month could serve as a kind of memento mori—a way of resisting death denial. Countless cultural traditions have supplied the living with reminders of mortality, from the baroque bone churches of Europe to the smoke hanging over the Ganges. Theravada Buddhists in Thailand meditate beside corpses as they decompose—all the while reminding themselves: “My body also has this nature.” Our poet ancestors had their refrain, timor mortis conturbat me. But what does the aging, religiously noncommittal American

have? The point of keeping death in mind isn’t to dwell on the macabre. The point is to remember what we are always in danger of forgetting: life ends. I called up a fellow Precompose customer, a seventy-six-year-old practicing psychoanalyst named Linda Wolf, and floated my memento mori idea. She was unmoved. For Linda, it had been a practical consideration, one less thing for her survivors to deal with. She said she hadn’t been very conscious of her carbon footprint throughout her life. She knew she owed “the earth back on that one,” and planned to donate her soil to Bells Mountain. It didn’t matter to her whether her loved ones had a funeral service or not. “I’m not going to be controlling things from the grave,” she said. “I’ll be busy fertilizing trees.” “By donating your soil,” Recompose tells us, “you have the chance to be productive one last time, providing biomass and nutrients to a forest that truly needs them.” Productivity in death might be a selling point for some, but for me (and for others, I suspect) the main appeal of this new method of disposition—which is, in a way, the oldest on earth—is the opportunity to assuage our guilt and anxiety about the ecological cost of our lives. A process through which mortal fear, both for one’s own fate and the fate of the planet, might be sublimated in a single act. The greater implications of human composting are as grand as you want to make them. In collapsing the distance between our conscious lives and certain deaths, we might live more presently. We might resume contact with the plants, animals, waters, and atmosphere we rely on to survive. We might overcome the abstractions of modernity—abstractions that have allowed us, with frightening indifference, to bring the earth and all of its inhabitants to the brink of destruction. Of course, NOR risks the opposite effect, too. As a matter of convenience, one might be deluded into thinking their ecological sins in life could be absolved in death. Recompose claims that each person who chooses composting over conven-

tional burial or cremation will prevent an average of one metric ton of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. According to the EPA’s calculator, that is a modest carbon payback, equal to the consumption of about ten tanks of gas. On the other hand, this is preferable to adding to the debt. To my mind, it’s the perceptual shift that bears the greatest promise. If we begin to imagine ourselves as beneficial contributors to the earth in death, rather than as agents of sickness and damage, maybe we can start to see that possibility for our lives. Put another way: we don’t have to wait to die to make ourselves useful.

n the first warm day of spring, I drove to Bells Mountain. Its primary steward is Elliot Rasenick, a former music-festival organizer with a degree in religion. In 2019, he had been hoping to restore a seven-hundred-acre tract that his nonprofit had recently purchased. It was going to take an incredible amount of compost to rehabilitate a square mile of degraded land, and he wasn’t sure how to get it. At the same time, Katrina Spade was trying to figure out what to do with the massive amount of soil that Recompose was about to create. The partnership seemed fated. When I arrived at Bells Mountain, Elliot emerged from a little wooden cabin, waving. He wore rubber boots and an American flag mask. We exchanged niceties about the good weather and the elk tracks I spotted by the car. He asked what I wanted to see. I said, “Everything.” For the next few hours, we wandered around on foot. We started in the lowland conifer forest, then wound our way through a grove of ancient oaks and up a hill to a defunct rock quarry. He showed me a couple of culverts built into a stream, which he planned to have removed in the coming year, the only barriers to salmon running from the Columbia River. Elliot was a mellow guy, and a bit of a philosopher. He told me that NOR was a fitting acronym, “a way of describing the material as something

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existing in a liminal state.” The soil is neither spirit nor material, he said, or else it’s both/and. Elliot shared my feeling that human composting’s greater promise is its potential to occasion a paradigm shift in our relationship to all life. If we can understand NOR soil as sacred because of its source, maybe we will begin to perceive all biomass as sacred. That might sound like hippie stuff, but it may be what’s required for our species to survive. “The climate crisis is fundamentally a soil crisis,” Elliot mused. “There is a poetry in the possibility that the death of one generation can make possible the life of the next.” We climbed into a kind of allterrain golf cart and began to ascend a narrow gravel road that hugged the sheer side of the mountain and scared the living shit out of me. I’d been reading about the inaugural dead for weeks, and pieces of their obituaries floated back to me, though I couldn’t necessarily remember which story belonged to whom. One painted watercolors, another knitted “clothing for people and dogs.” One spent World War II working to eliminate “social diseases” in men and kept an orange tree alive in Tallahassee “through the worst of freezes.” On earth as in the ether, their individual stories were now collective. They commingled in my mind. We bumped along, climbing through the dense underbrush of a former clear-cut, past reed-skirted ponds you wouldn’t know were man-made. We disembarked in a battered former meadow that had been used for cattle grazing. At its edge, an old burn had cleared the view all the way to Mount Adams and the flattened majesty of Mount St. Helens, still covered in snow, brilliant against the blue. Elliot kindly turned his back so that I could cop a squat, and the hot relief of emptying my overextended bladder while taking in this view filled me with such a love of living! All that afternoon I felt alive. Walking in the shade of trees, over dead leaves and cedar fronds. And then, in that ATV thing, with rolling waves of fear giving way to adrenaline, devouring my peanut

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

butter and jelly sandwich with animalistic fervor. Meditating on the death you want might help you imagine the life you want. But it can also help you appreciate the life you already have. Coming back down the mountain, we stopped in another clearing, dotted with alder saplings, and cut the engine. There it suddenly was: The pile of compost that was their bodies. The first five donated yards of NOR, so unassuming and small, under that dome of sky. We stood before the pile in silence. Then I said, “Wow.” Elliot asked whether I wanted to place some of the soil at the base of an alder, as the Recompose staff had done during the ceremony. At first I thought, No. Strangely, it seemed like an invasion of privacy to touch them. They weren’t compost to me; they were people, with hobbies, and ethical convictions, and loved ones out there somewhere still grieving. They were precious. Then it occurred to me that it was precisely this feeling that equipped me for the task. I dug my upturned hands into the mound and lifted the soil into the sunlight. It looked and smelled exactly like the forest floor. Q October Index Sources

1 Urban Design Forum (NYC); 2 World Toilet Organization (Singapore); 3 Rails-toTrails Conservancy (Washington); 4–6 American Forests (Washington); 7 Nancy H. F. French, Michigan Technological University (Houghton); 8,9 Dim Coumou, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; 10 NASA Langley Research Center (Hampton, Va.); 11 National Centers for Environmental Information (Asheville, N.C.); 12 R. Daniel Bressler (NYC); 13 Federal Emergency Management Agency; 14 Pew Research Center (Washington); 15 YouGov (NYC); 16–18 BryceTech (Alexandria, Va.); 19,20 LendingTree (Charlotte, N.C.); 21,22 Gemini (NYC); 23 Newmark (NYC); 24 Ethan Bernstein, Harvard Business School (Cambridge, Mass.); 25,26 YouGov; 27 Alda (Reykjavík, Iceland); 28,29 Daniel S. Hamermesh, Barnard College (NYC); 30,31 Police Executive Research Forum (Washington); 32,33 Brennan Center for Justice (NYC); 34 Paul Manson, Reed College (Portland, Ore.); 35 Association of Immunization Managers (Rockville, Md.); 36,37 Smithers (Leatherhead, England); 38 Social Security Administration (Woodlawn, Md.); 39 Human Alexas (Atlanta).

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THE BIG

Cartoonist Ben Garris By Dan B

Illustrator Ben Garrison is the Diego Rivera of the MAGA movement; where Rivera had Emiliano Zapata, Garrison has Donald Trump. The “rogue cartoonist,” as he bills himself, is best known for portraying the former president as a brawny Adonis—a choice that has pleased his acolytes and bemused his critics in roughly the ratio of admiration to irony necessary for viral propagation. Garrison rose in popularity with the “alt-right” during the Trump Administration, when his work was regularly featured on Alex Jones’s InfoWars and promoted by such provocateurs as Julian Assange and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich. In 2017, Jones called Garrison “the political cartoonist of this era, hands down.” By 2020, MAGA figures as central as Don Jr. and former Trump communications deputy Dan Scavino had shared Garrison’s images online, and Garrison was invited to a social-media summit at the White House—though he was quickly disinvited, amid controversy over a cartoon depicting former national security officials as marionettes controlled by George Soros, who was himself puppeteered by a giant hand labeled “Rothschilds.” For years, Garrison has provided a window into the worldview of an intense MAGA loyalist. Here, in “Biden’s Dark Winter,” from January 25, 2021, he represents a condition new to the movement: defeat.

Garrison began self-publishing his cartoons online in 2009, at the age of fifty-two, after working as a graphic designer for newspapers. His first effort criticized the federal bank bailout in a sort of inverted “three little pigs” tableau: the wolf, labeled “audit” and drawn with ripped humanoid abs, was the hero of the scene, blowing the roof off the Federal Reserve, where the pigs, “private bankers,” clutched bags of cash. The work has not gained in subtlety since then: in “Dark Winter,” the havoc of a Democratic future is total. A frozen oil derrick and a distant city skyline sit along a rounded horizon, suggesting that we are looking at a good portion of the whole world. About a half dozen conservative anxieties—“socialism,” “police state,” “medical tyranny,” “war,” “election rigging,” “destroy jobs”—all emerge from the same sources, all winds blown by liberal Anemoi. This is the paranoid and apophenic style in American politics made visible: the gusts are like threads connecting newspaper clippings on a conspiracist’s wall.

The political cartoon as a form is well-matched to the MAGA movement: both trade in hyperbole, leavened with an absurdity that discourages one from taking their most extreme claims quite seriously. In the lower left corner, the comfortable circle over the “i” in Garrison’s signature is a familiar reminder of the cartoonist’s sidewise role. One of the pleasures of following a serial illustrator is imagining the person behind the work; the repeat viewer becomes a kind of armchair analyst. Here, it’s easy to envision Garrison chuckling between puffs on a cigar as he works. The public has often psychologized MAGA as a whole in the same way, looking for evidence of some winking over-ego, wondering after the meaning behind what is overtly said and done. The questions raised at the movement’s start have never really faded. How much of the vitriol is trolling? How much of the victory-or-death rhetoric is a game?

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

FRIEZE

on’s MAGA in winter Brooks

Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris were frequent stooges in Garrison’s prior work, with the women receiving particular Mad magazine–style scorn. (He is especially fond of rendering Pelosi as an object controlled by others: a turkey, stuffed with dollars, to be eaten by the Squad; a pencil, held by BLM, China, and Antifa; a huge “Trojan pig,” carrying Schumer and other Democrats.) But here, the trio are world-shaping Mephistos. Some key premises of Garrison’s lexicon have shifted. The Democrats are now the wolf, and the wolf is now bad. What is MAGA in winter, MAGA in defeat, when the movement is— and has been—so slippery? Trump, its messiah, is conspicuously absent from the cartoon—to show him at all would mean showing him as subject to these once-impotent Democratic forces.

Students of Garrisonia will recognize the Tree of Liberty, seen here as an uprooted anthropomorphic trunk muzzled by a blue mask. Garrison invested heavily in “Stop the Steal” rhetoric between the November election and its chaotic certification in January. In a cartoon posted on Christmas Eve, he portrayed the tree as an angry, goateed demigod, outraged by election fraud and shouting at Trump: “I want blood!”—an allusion to Thomas Jefferson’s often-cited remark that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Like Steve Bannon or Louie Gohmert, who made similar calls to arms during this period, Garrison might claim that his rhetoric read figuratively before the assault on the Capitol. But the only metaphor in the Jefferson quotation is the tree. The blood is, famously, literal. Garrison’s was one of thousands of right-wing accounts suspended by Twitter after the events of January 6. (Instagram had already banned the cartoonist in 2019, possibly for a particularly Islamophobic image, though his account has since been reinstated.) Garrison probably felt muzzled himself, like the tree; social media is as close as he’s ever gotten to syndication. But it’s still strange that the carnivorous arboriform—previously powerful enough to command Trump—would be affected by a little cloth mask.

Dan Brooks is a writer in Missoula, Montana.

Finally, we come to the Q phenomenon, represented as a hole in the ice, and a red-hatted everyman— a recurring Garrison figure—on his way to the bottom of a frozen pond. This view of Q as a type of trap, in which some right-wing elements sank, is not “rogue” but distinctly mainstream. And it’s the first time that Garrison has depicted the conspiracy theory in anything other than a positive light. In 2019, he presented Q as a rosy-cheeked toddler that a square-jawed Trump called a “beautiful baby”; in July 2020, it was a Revolutionary War–era fifer, in a play on Archibald Willard’s The Spirit of ’76. Q was explicitly the future and the vanguard. Garrison was all in. But here he sidesteps and avoids any clear claims about the future of the movement. Who has lost here? Maybe the overly committed—those who didn’t understand when it was time to let go and ready the next gag. In the months since this cartoon was published, QAnon has faded, but the lie that prompted the January attack has become an article of faith. Liz Cheney has been ousted from GOP leadership for saying that the 2020 election was fair, and Trump has encouraged the theory that he will somehow be reinstated as president. And though the Department of Homeland Security has warned of potential violence stemming from this idea, top Republicans have not corrected it. A group whose ethos is “winning” doesn’t exactly lose—it redraws the lines. The MAGA hat, we should note, has not simply been left behind: it’s waiting, on ice. Q

Biden’s Dark Winter, by Ben Garrison © The artist

ANNOTATION

GOOD MOTHER

Custody and care in the shadow of colonization By Sierra Crane Murdoch

am alone in my apartment wondering what makes a good mother. Three days ago, on the eleventh of October, a packet arrived from a county social services department in North Sierra Crane Murdoch is the author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Photograph of Lissa Yellow Bird © Kristina Barker

Dakota. The cover letter explained that a friend of mine was applying to be a foster parent. The department hoped I would answer some questions regarding “what you feel they can provide for a Foster Child.” The letter did not say so explicitly, but I understood it was asking me to determine what kind of mother my friend would make.

I use the word “friend,” though this is perhaps the first time I have referred to Lissa Yellow Bird this way publicly. “I came to know her better than anyone I’ve ever known,” I write in response to the second question, What is your relationship to the applicant? To the first, How long have you known the applicant? I reply, “Since November 2014.”

MEMOIR

That was when I first interviewed Lissa, for an article I was writing, before I knew that the article would become a book, and that the book would be, in large part, the story of her life. I am a journalist, and journalists, I have been taught, do not befriend their subjects. Lissa believes this is a dumb, reductive, “colonized” way of going about the work, though she agrees that “friend” inadequately describes our relationship. It is more accurate to say that I am a person who asked for her story and to whom she then chose to divulge her secrets. I don’t write this on the questionnaire. Instead I write, “We speak regularly on the phone, often for hours each week.” It was over the phone that Lissa told me she might become a foster parent. The possibility surprised me. She had raised five children, and when the last recently left home, she vacated her three-bedroom apartment in Fargo, where she had been living when I met her, and moved to White Shield, a district on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, where she is from and where many of her relatives still live. The tribe hired her to work at a women’s sober house, where she led addiction recovery meetings and shuttled new residents to detox and treatment. In the evenings, she kept her grandmother company, relieving her own mother of caretaking duties. Lissa is always taking care of someone. “This is the year I do me,” she had said after she moved home, and I hadn’t believed her, until I visited last winter and found her sleeping a rare eight hours a night, eating avocado toast for lunch and dinner, and drinking, instead of coffee, nettle tea. Then, in March 2020, she received a call from a social worker looking for a home for two boys, twelve and thirteen, whose mother had lost custody. Lissa had met the boys years earlier, in Fargo, while visiting a friend in the apartment building where they lived. The boys were Native, members of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. They acted curious about Lissa, peeking into the hallway when she passed by, so Lissa had asked their mother if they could join her on errands. The boys spent a lot of time with her after that, but when Lissa moved away, she lost contact with them. This was the first she

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

had heard of the mother’s request that the state place her sons with Lissa. “Are you going to say yes?” I asked. “I don’t think so.” Some days later, she called again. “My head said no but my heart said yes, and my heart came out of my mouth,” she said. The boys arrived on the reservation in late August. I met them not long afterward—shy, giggly, one a little more serious than the other. They had been living with a white family until Lissa could take them, during which time the more serious boy had been

THE FIRST WOMAN IN LISSA’S LINEAGE DEEMED UNFIT FOR MOTHERHOOD WAS HER GREATGREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

prescribed antidepressants. Lissa stopped giving him the medication. “Who wouldn’t be depressed going through all that?” she said. “He needs to heal, not numb his pain.” We spent my visit on her balcony, eavesdropping through the windows of a bedroom where the boys were attending virtual school. The school building was two miles away, and Lissa drove there each morning to pick up breakfast and lunch. In the evenings, she made dinner. I realized I had expected chaos; instead, I found her life uncannily in order. When Lissa asked whether I would answer questions from the state so she could become certified as a foster parent, I agreed without hesitation. But already I am stuck, on the second question. What is your relationship to the applicant? I have a feeling this is a bullshit exercise and that I should expect no one will read my answer; yet like every bureaucratic formality that may or may not decide someone else’s fate, it is an exercise that must be taken seriously. I do, and as soon as I answer the question, I notice what I haven’t said: I am white, and Lissa is not. I have no criminal record; Lissa is a felon. I have no children; Lissa has five, all of whom were taken from her and placed in foster care for periods of her life. What

I haven’t said, but what I see is implicit in my careful language, in my selfassurance, is that in matters of the state I have power over her, and for the first time, she is asking me to use it.

tell this to Lissa when she calls one night. I can hear her in the kitchen, the boys washing dishes. I am aware of the emptiness of my own apartment. I say I feel uncomfortable that a state agency has asked me, a white woman who has never been a mother, to judge whether she, a Native woman who has been a mother five times over, is fit to be a mother. “Just say that then,” she says. “If I were you, I would write that in there.” But already, in answering the third question, I have caught myself in a lie. Describe the relationships within the family. “Lie” is not the right word here, actually. Rather, I have selected some facts while omitting others. “She has five children,” I write. But where Lissa would point out that they all have different fathers, I skip over this and add instead, “all of whom have their own particular relationship with their mother.” I continue, “Some of them are incredibly close, some harbor more resentment, but all of her relationships with her children I’ve witnessed to be deeply loving. She is also close to her mother and grandmother, who live nearby.” Then I run out of space. “What do you think they’re looking for?” I ask Lissa. “My guess is that they’re looking for someone to fit into their little corny box of what makes a good parent,” she says. “And who’s that?” “Certainly not someone who talks like I do.” I hear Lissa pull away from the phone. “You’re running with a knife?” she says. “Weirdo. Put the knife down.” Then she presses the phone to her face again and resumes our conversation as coolly as any mother I know. She says that her former addiction counselor also completed a questionnaire on her behalf, and that he assured her he didn’t mention her former drug use. He didn’t think it was “pertinent.” “That says a lot right there,” Lissa tells me. “It says he knows what they’re looking for, and therefore he’s shaping me to fit inside that box.”

Suddenly, I feel guilty for having left out the fact that her children have different fathers. I know this has nothing to do with Lissa being a good mother, but I know also that I left it out because I suspect many people consider having children with five different men shameful, and I know it’s precisely for this reason that Lissa uses every opportunity to mention her kids’ varied origins. She’s honest like that—more honest than I am. Her honesty is political: it has stakes.

he first woman in Lissa’s lineage deemed unfit for motherhood was her great-great-great-grandmother SteštAhkáta. She was born before the Civil War; before her tribe, the Arikara, were confined to the reservation. In 1882, she gave birth to a son, Elk Tongue, who was compelled by federal agents, against his family’s wishes, to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. He was nineteen then, and placed in a school that held children as young as five. I first learned of SteštAhkáta in the papers of a white ethnologist, Melvin Gilmore, who interviewed her in the 1920s about plants that grew in the Missouri River bottomlands, which she gave to women

to induce childbirth and to stanch postpartum bleeding. SteštAhkáta, Gilmore implied, was holy—a keeper of medicine bundles, and the most skilled midwife in her tribe. I don’t know much about her, nor does Lissa, but I have come to think of her as a mother of mothers, willfully delivering women into motherhood even as a government resolved to take their motherhood away. In 1860, federal agents started separating hundreds of thousands of children from their families and placing them in missionary- or government-run boarding schools. These institutions have lately been in the news, due to

the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of children at similar Canadian facilities, known as residential schools.

The ethos of the schools is most often attributed to Richard Pratt, a U.S. Army captain and founder of Carlisle who coined the phrase “Kill the Indian in him and save the man,” but the architecture of that ethos was a woman’s handiwork. President McKinley appointed Estelle Reel as the superintendent of federal Indian schools in 1898, and three years later—the same year agents separated Elk Tongue from his mother—Reel published her Uniform Course of Study, a pedagogical guide to “civilizing” children according to European-American doctrine. Perhaps no bureaucrat so effectively institutionalized the racist falsehood that Native Americans are intellectually inferior to whites as Reel. Instead of mathematics, literature, and social studies, her curriculum prioritized homemaking for girls and manual labor for boys. “Industrial training will make . . . the Indian girl more motherly,” Reel said. “This is the kind of girl we want—the one who will exercise the greatest influence in moulding the character of the nation.” Mothering was the only conceivable role in society for a Native woman, and yet motherhood was at odds with indigeneity, Reel suggested. To become a citizen, a woman had to

Top: Lissa Yellow Bird’s great-great-great-grandmother SteštAhkáta teaches children to make baskets from willow saplings on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota, 1923. Photograph by Melvin R. Gilmore (NO8708). Bottom: Elk Tongue’s figurine. Photograph by NMAI Photo Services (13/2836). Both images courtesy the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution

MEMOIR

become a mother; to become a mother, she had to become less Indian. In 1892, members of the Women’s National Indian Association—a humanitarian group composed of white progressive reformers—met to discuss whether it was prudent to send children back to their families even after they finished their education. “Is it necessary that Indian children should be returned to savage homes?” one member asked. In its literature, the association accused Native mothers of being promiscuous, neglectful, and unloving, in contrast to the members’ own “good families.” The consensus was that Native children would be better off absorbed into white households. At Carlisle, instead of spending summers at home, most children were assigned to a family in the local countryside, for whom they

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

worked as servants. Pratt hoped the children would so assimilate into white

society that they would in a sense disappear, and many did so quite literally. When Elk Tongue’s family wrote to Pratt requesting his release, Pratt refused. But SteštAhkáta got her son back. After three years at Carlisle, Elk Tongue, by then renamed Clair Everett, returned to the reservation and stayed. Every subsequent generation of Lissa’s family attended boarding schools. Her grandmother went to a Catholic school on the reservation; her mother spent two years at St. Paul’s Indian Mission in South Dakota before she ran away with a group of other girls. Not until 1978, with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, did Congress grant Native American parents the right to keep their children out of boarding schools, though by then many families had few other choices, with the reservation schools gutted by lack of funding. Meanwhile, the government had devised other means of denying women their motherhood. Though estimates vary widely, researchers discovered that in parts of the country in the mid-1970s, anywhere between 5 and 80 percent of Native women were forcibly or coercively sterilized. And by the late Seventies, up to 35 percent of Native children were in foster care or privately adopted, the majority living with non-Native families. If you tell a woman she’s a bad mother enough times, she might start to believe you. Guilt and shame, long used to police mothers, are also tools of fascism—and its endgame, a state in which citizens have absorbed and uphold the beliefs used to control them. “Your whole life you hear ‘dirty,

Top: The first students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, October 1879. Photograph by John N. Choate. Courtesy the Richard Henry Pratt Papers, Yale University. Bottom: A 1902 letter from Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, denying Strikes Enemy’s request to release his son Elk Tongue (Clair Everett) from the school. Courtesy the National Archives and Records Administration

drunk, lazy Indian,’ ” Lissa told me once. “You hear that long enough, you’ll start living it.” When Lissa was born, in 1968, her mother gave her up for adoption. She felt she didn’t have the resources for motherhood. Lissa lived for a few months with a great-uncle and aunt, until her mother changed her mind and demanded Lissa back. Lissa’s memory of the separation is opaque, but a conscious mind, scientists submit, is not the only part of us that remembers. In the 1990s, the Lakota professor of psychiatry Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart put forth the theory that the depression, addiction, suicide, and abuse she observed in Native communities had their origin in intergenerational trauma, or layers of “historical unresolved grief”—one of those being the separation of children from their parents. Some epigeneticists have since suggested that trauma alters the expression of our genes, and that these altered expressions can pass from our own bodies into our children’s bodies. In other words, a child’s separation from a parent becomes literally embodied. “You know how people talk about how DNA remembers from previous generations?” Lissa asked me. “I wonder what role that played with me, because I’ve never been a stable person. I could walk out of my life with young kids and everything. I could walk out of my life and not care.” In 1994, when her own children went to foster care for the first time, Lissa gave them over voluntarily. Her husband was beating her, and she feared that her children would witness it, or that he would turn his anger on them. The decision, she has said, was desperate, and one she came to regret. She had intended for her three children to stay with a nearby family for a couple of months, until she found a place to live, but once she turned them over to the state, getting them back became difficult. This is how her addiction began: with shame. A year later, the state returned her children, and Lissa learned that her son’s foster mother had abused him severely enough to inflict a traumatic brain injury. This is how Lissa’s addiction deepened: with guilt. When the state took her children again after that, at least three other times, it did so against her will.

The Indian Child Welfare Act was supposed to impede efforts to separate Native children from their parents and place them with non-Native caregivers. But changing the system doesn’t fix what it broke. Native children are four times likelier than white children to be placed in foster care. One of several reasons may be that Native women are six times as likely as white women to be sentenced to prison. Is it a coincidence that the boarding school Lissa’s uncles attended is today used as a prison, the same where Lissa served her time?

few years ago, I was telling an acquaintance—a white liberal woman in her sixties—about Lissa’s family, and she said, “Someone like that should not be having so many

IF YOU TELL A WOMAN SHE’S A BAD MOTHER ENOUGH TIMES, SHE MIGHT START TO BELIEVE YOU

children.” The “someone like that” in this case was Lissa’s daughter, Shauna, who I had mentioned had four kids. The comment took me by surprise. I believe I replied that I loved Shauna’s children, that they were brilliant and kind, and that Shauna was a “very good mother.” Only later did I wonder what my acquaintance had meant. Prior to her comment, I had said nothing about Shauna’s qualities as a mother. I had mentioned that Shauna’s mother, Lissa, had been addicted to crack. Did my acquaintance assume Shauna struggled in the way Lissa struggled? Did she think that because Lissa had been, at times, an absent mother, Shauna was fated to be one, too? I recall this conversation as I answer the fifth question. Describe any challenges you would anticipate if foster children were placed with this family. I have been asked to imagine what could go wrong in a way similar to how my acquaintance imagined what could go wrong. That is, through some alchemy of what I know about Lissa and my own notions of motherhood, I am to see into the future, divine her mistakes, divine the mistakes of the children she

will raise, children who inevitably will lay blame on her shoulders. If you want to know how a mother has failed, ask her daughter, I’ve learned. When I first met Lissa, she and Shauna were estranged. I spent a year leaving messages for Shauna before she ever called me back. “I thought you were going to make her out to be a perfect hero, and I didn’t want to be a part of that,” she told me. She wanted to talk about her mother’s absences, about the days she spent watching her brothers as her mother got high, about the letters Lissa later wrote thanking Shauna for mothering her own children. She wanted to tell me about the night she witnessed a man beating her mother bloody with a baseball bat, and how relieved she felt years later when Lissa went to prison, because in prison there were fewer ways to die. Shauna had become, she said, a mother to her mother, in that her mother’s addiction reoriented her own life around the purpose of keeping Lissa alive. I think about this definition of motherhood, of one life keeping another life going, and the idea of becoming a mother sounds at once more terrifying and more possible to me than it has before. More terrifying because the stakes are so high; more possible because, stripped of all its material infrastructure, and its smaller material preoccupations—of organic baby food and preschool waiting lists, of the unobtainable gloss that has come to define motherhood for many women of my generation with means, and which I suspect has only calcified the standards by which we have long judged mothers without means—motherhood is, at its essence, perhaps not much more than loving your children and trying your best to keep them alive. I wanted to be a mother, eventually. I told this to Shauna. Maybe because we were the same age—twenty-nine then, born five days apart—or maybe because I was trying to balance the emotional scales between us after everything she had told me, Shauna was one of few with whom I shared my anxieties about motherhood. “What I guess I’m most afraid of,” I told her once, “is becoming a single mother.” I wasn’t single, but for eight years I’d been dating a man who was not sure he wanted children.

MEMOIR

“Oh, that part is not the problem,” Shauna said. She was raising her own children alone, and still she had climbed the corporate ladder to a job as an analyst for a bank, which had afforded her a house on a quiet cul-desac in one of the best school districts in Minnesota. “Kids remember the time when you’re there, not the time when you’re gone, so you just have to try to be as present as you can when you’re there,” she said. I did not feel comforted. I couldn’t say where my fear of becoming a single mother came from, but I could guess. “A child needs two parents,” Clara Savage Littledale said on NBC radio in the 1930s, while the editor of Parents’, one of the first in a line of popular magazines that would suggest that a mother and father were essential components of a family. My own mother read Mothering, which was billed as an alternative to the mainstream, but still she and my father modeled the ideal Littledale put forth. It was my father who first suggested that my parents have children, and my mother responded by nearly dumping him. Of course, she changed her mind, and after I entered my thirties, she took to telling me that nothing had ever been so meaningful as raising me and my brother. I believed her. Then, while I helped her paint a shed one day, as I told her about a friend’s wedding I would soon attend, she sighed and wondered aloud if I would ever marry and have children. I’d never before felt that I’d failed my mom, but that day I cried for having picked a guy who would neither marry me nor leave me, with whom I felt in limbo between my childhood and an imagined motherhood—a motherhood I was trying not to hang my hopes on, but on which my mother evidently hung her hopes for me. What she said was innocent; she was not the first mother to say it; but afterward I resented her more for this comment than I did my partner for years of not making up his mind. This is what I mean about daughters. “What kind of mom were you wishing for?” I once asked Shauna. “Oh, you know,” she said. “The typical sit at home and cook dinner and wash your laundry and iron your clothes and take you to school and show up at conferences. The PTA

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

mom. Whatever they show on TV.” She had wanted the sort of mother society told her she should have, the sort of mother she assumed others had, a mother unlike Lissa. Then she asked what my own mother was like, and I said, a bit apologetically, that she had never been an addict. Still, I told Shauna, in some ways Lissa reminded me of my mom. Both fill rooms with their energy. They always have a mission and enlist you toward its end. They wear their pain and still appear stronger than anyone around them. Their anger surprises you, as does their joy. Their kids are the well from which they draw life’s meaning, and yet motherhood has never defined them. I told Shauna that I had always wanted to be a mother because I hoped to replicate the childhood my parents made for me, but now I knew that women also became mothers to create childhoods they never had. I was conditioned to be the kind of mother who lived in answer to her own nostalgia, who padded her children against the world, and yet the part of motherhood I found myself craving was the part that remains when it is stripped to the raw, to love, joy, and survival, to making mistakes and forgiving them.

made a decision, and my partner left in October, six days before the questionnaire arrived. Three weeks have passed since then, and I notice I am mothering myself. Now, I say, you will wash the dishes. Now you will fold your clothes. I have never liked the internet, but I find I am scrolling endlessly and then punishing myself by deleting apps from my phone. Tonight, I say, you will go to bed before midnight, and tomorrow night, by eleven. I am struggling to find a balance of tone between do as I say and gentle forgiveness, or perhaps pity, for myself. Friends and family call to comfort me, and I let them. Lissa texts me TikTok videos, some serious—women talking about leaving their relationships—and others silly, like one of a hula-hoop dancer named Sammy Sunshyne who struts through her suburban neighborhood in a silver-fringed cape. The gratitude I feel toward Lissa for these videos is overwhelming. I am reminded of a night two summers ago when I ran out

of gas on a remote highway in North Dakota and called roadside assistance, but it never came. So I called Lissa, who fished a jerrican out of her garage and drove two hours to rescue me. What is the word for a person not your mother whom you trust as much as your own mother? Lissa would say the word is still “mother.” In the Yellow Bird family, the words “mother,” “uncle,” “brother,” “grandma” have less to do with a person’s place in your ancestral tree than with their lived relationship to you. Lissa refers to the uncle who helped raise her as “dad,” while the one who cared for her children while she was in prison is called, by her sons, “grandpa.” I am trying to describe this structure, common in many Native families I know, in answer to the question How do you see a foster child fitting into this family? I have mentioned that her mother and grandmother live nearby— across a wheat field from Lissa’s apartment, so close that when I last visited, Lissa had procured a pair of binoculars to spy on her mother as they each drank their coffee on their porches. I write, truthfully, that I imagine the boys will be Lissa’s “primary focus for the next many years, although she will continue to work and so will likely rely on her network of extended relatives to help raise the boys.” It occurs to me as I write this that in the Yellow Bird family, the antidote to intergenerational trauma—to being near the end of a lineage of mothers denied motherhood—is intergenerational love, a piling on of relatives. Lissa was raised not only by her mother, but also by her uncles, her grandfather, and her great-grandmother. Shauna was raised also by her grandmother and great-grandmother, who live in the house across the wheat field, and whom Lissa, when she’s not spying on them, helps care for. They all believe in a certain fundamental circularity, I’ve learned: You keep your child alive, and one day your child will keep you alive. They also believe that when a mother falls short, the solution is not to take the child away from the mother, but to give the child more mothers and fathers. I suspect Lissa sees her role as a foster mother differently from the social workers who might read my answers

to these questions. Perhaps to the social workers, Lissa is a replacement mother; but in Lissa’s mind, she is like any relative whose turn has come to take the boys. I wonder if their mother understood this, that in asking Lissa to become a new parent to the boys—by choosing a caregiver before the social workers chose for her—she had a lesser chance of losing her sons entirely. I am reminded of an article I read about a Diné woman who lost custody of her daughter when a court ruled that the protections afforded her by the Indian Child Welfare Act only applied within the bounds of her reservation, which she had left to move to Texas. Losing her child was the result of a “choice” she had made, a judge said. The majority of Native Americans live off-reservation, thanks largely to federal policies. I think how absurd it is for a court—a court of the same government that designed the diaspora that cleaved so many from their homes—to use the movements of a woman on her original land to cleave her from her child. How easily choice slips into lack of choice. Years ago, as Lissa’s husband was abusing her, she chose to put her children in foster care. And so, was it her choice when the social workers refused to return her kids when she asked for them back? Was it her choice when a foster mother abused her son, giving him the brain injury, or when a foster father molested her daughter? Was it her choice when, after giving up her children to families who hurt them, she smoked crack to dull her shame and guilt? Lissa sends me another TikTok video one night as I’m still laboring over the questionnaire. The video is of a man reading aloud a definition from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which the writer John Koenig has invented words to fill holes in our emotional lexicon. The word is sonder: “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Lissa is moved by the word. She wants me to “fit that in somewhere” in my next writing project, she says. I am moved by the word, too, and by our shared appreciation of it, but when I try to put the word in this essay, all I can think of is its antonym, which, if it

MEMOIR

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SOLUTION TO THE SEPTEMBER PUZZLE

NOTES FOR “POSE”:

D D A L M A T I A N D

T O N A L L A R V A L

O W N W H I P P E T O

T N A Y B A L D R I C

A W L E E S G A T V H

L A B R A D O R E I N

I R K I N G A Z D S E

T D I S S I D E N T S

A F G H A N L I M B S

R A R E L Y B T E A M

I C E C A P A G F R O

A I R E D A L E I B N

N N O P F E L I N E S

I G L O O D Y S E C T

S D L S H I H T Z U E

M O E S O T O L E E R

D G R E Y H O U N D D

The yoga pose DOWNWARD FACING DOG leads to the unclued answers: DALMATIAN, WHIPPET, LABRADOR, AFGHAN, AIREDALE, SHIH TZU and GREYHOUND. Note: * indicates an anagram. ACROSS: 1. tot-alit-arianism*; 16. an-na-[fina]l; 17. rero(lle, rev.)r*; 18. *; 20. po(s)se; 22. *; 25. al(1)as; 27. Edit-h[umble]; 28. two mngs.; 29. go-ad; 31. b(ally)hoo*; 32. D.A.R.[k]; 33. *; 36. hidden; 38. fin-E; 39. hidden; 40. *; 41. bar-be(cue)d; 42. Loch-Ness-mo(n)ster*. DOWN: 1. to-n-a-l (first letters); 2. [t]own; 3. homophone; 5. 1-r-king; 7. ra[ms]-rely; 8. *; 10. I.G.(rev.)-loo; 11. hidden; 13. *; 14. D-issident*-S; 22. bald-[p]ric[e]; 23. feli(n)es*; 24. hidden; 26. la(r)va-l; 29. gat (even letters); 30. [c]limbs; 31. b[aseball]-te(a)m(rev.); 34. s[impl]e-c[ontes]t; 35. re[b]el, rev.; 37. e(1)n; 38. *.

exists, might describe the failure to realize the vividness and complexity of a woman’s grief upon losing her children.

finish the questionnaire in early November. When I call Lissa, it’s the birthday of one of the boys, and she’s icing a cake. His name is Frankie, but she didn’t space the words out right, so the cake reads happy birthday frudie. “What kind of mother do you think I’ll be?” I ask. “Honestly?” she says. I sense she can’t believe I’ve asked this question. “I mean, how would I even gauge it? I’ve never seen you care for a child. I’ve never seen you care for an elder. I’ve never even seen you change a diaper. I would have to think about that one. Seriously. I mean, I can say you’re a good person. Do I think you’d be a good mom? Of course I do. But it would all be gut feeling. Considering the space they leave you on that form, I guess I would write just the answers they’re looking for. She’s an awesome person. I’ve never seen her violent. But who determines what answers are correct? Is there a board? Is it one person? Or does this paper just get pushed through by whatever social worker opens the mail? You know, maybe I’d write, Her chances are good, because she’s white. But as far as nurturing, I haven’t seen you with your family. I’ve seen you with your ex-boyfriend, but he’s not around no more.” Lissa is right. The only thing she’s seen me take care of is her story. I’ve learned this from her too: sometimes we concern ourselves with other peoples’ lives in order to escape our own. One night in February, I call but she doesn’t answer. She returns my call a few days later, crying. I’ve heard her cry only twice, and it scares me. She was in jail—pulled over for speeding, a routine stop, but the officer, she says, searched her car. According to Lissa, she dug some marijuana out of her pocket, and he arrested her. At the jail, she was forced to take off her clothes in front of a guard, who, Lissa says, searched her vagina for drugs, and she was made to walk in her underwear past the other inmates. She was held for three nights, until the complaint against her was dismissed.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

She tells me that during the search, she tried to separate her mind from her body the way she had as a younger woman, but it had been so long since another person entered her against her will that she had forgotten how. She felt the violation fully. Still, the hardest part came afterward, when she was put in a cell with other women, all Native. “You know what those girls told me in jail?” she says. “They told me, ‘Why are you complaining? This is normal.’ ” Lissa is crying harder now. “Do I sound crazy?” she says over and over, and I reply that she sounds traumatized. “I don’t know how to explain what I’m going through. Honest to God. It’s so fucking fucked up how much of this torture our people go through. I think I’m having a meltdown. What if I can’t take it no more? I think about you, you’re so young—” I am in my apartment, panicking. Was Lissa saying she was going to hurt herself? I think of the boys asleep in another room. I think of a Natalie Diaz poem: “When we are dying, who should we call? / The police? Or our senator? / Please, someone, call my mother.” I put Lissa on speakerphone and text her mom. Then I text two of her sons, one of her daughters, a cousin she calls “nephew,” and an uncle she calls “brother.” “I should go,” she says. “No,” I say. “Stay with me a little longer.” She tells me she had believed the book I wrote would inoculate her against the trauma of her past, but in jail, among the women, she saw she was the same body—the same history encapsulated in a body. The book had not mattered. Then she tells me to “write this down.” I am confused, but I go to my computer and type loudly so she can hear, and it occurs to me that it was never the idea of her story being read but the sound of someone listening that soothed her.

had left one question until the end: Are you aware of any violent behavior in this family? If the social workers were to read my book, they would learn that when Lissa was facing fifteen years in prison, she bought a gun. Fearing what would happen if

her sons returned to foster care, she had planned to kill them and herself, but Shauna stopped her. “Lissa is not violent,” I finally wrote on the questionnaire. “She has been the victim of incredible violence and has no patience for it in her home. When her own children were in foster care, her daughter was sexually abused and her son was beaten. Lissa is keenly aware of the abuses common within the system, and I know she has chosen to become a foster parent in part because she has no doubt she can create a safe and loving home, unlike the one her own children received.” Elsewhere on the questionnaire I wrote, “Lissa has the deepest well of empathy of anyone I’ve met. The greatest gift she can give these boys is to help them not be ashamed of who they are and where they come from, and to demonstrate how one heals.” When I finished, I folded the questionnaire in thirds and slipped it inside a return envelope. Then I pulled on my boots and walked out to the mailbox, thinking, still, of what I hadn’t written. I thought of a night in her apartment when her teenage sons mimed for me the ways their mother drove them crazy, and Lissa and I laughed so hard we cried, and she told me she hated teenagers, then tackled her youngest to the living room floor and smothered him with kisses. I thought of an evening two springs ago in Minneapolis, sitting with Shauna on her couch, Lissa wedged between us. Shauna’s son took a photo of the three of us there, Lissa’s head thrown back in giddy laughter, Shauna grinning as she pressed against her mother’s side. I thought of a photo Lissa sent me recently. She took it before one of her sons left for basic training, two weeks before the foster boys arrived. Her son was standing in the doorway of her bedroom balcony, his back to her as he looked across the wheat field. When Lissa took the photo, she had been lying on her bed watching him, and he had been telling her his dreams. I can’t say what makes a good mother, but I know what we keep each other alive for. I stood in the street, watching the day slip off a mountain across the river, before I drew back into the warm, dim light of my apartment. Q

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“PUT ON THE DIAMONDS” Notes on humiliation By Vivian Gornick

heila and I were best friends from age ten to thirteen. I lived four blocks from our grade school and she two. She’d wait for me to pass her house in the morning and then we’d fall in step as we entered the building. From then until five-thirty in the afternoon—when our mothers demanded our presence at home—we were inseparable. After the summer we turned thirteen, something unimaginable happened: Sheila was no longer in front of her house in the morning when I passed, she no longer saved a seat for me in class, and after school she simply disappeared. At last it registered that whenever I spotted her, in the hall or the schoolyard, she was in the company of a girl new to the school. One day, I approached the two of them in the yard. “Sheila,” I said, my voice quivering, “aren’t we best friends anymore?” “No,” Sheila said, her voice strong and flat. “I’m best friends now with Edna.” I stood there, mute and immobilized. A terrible coldness came over me, as though the blood were draining from my body; then, just as swiftly, a rush Vivian Gornick is the author, most recently, of the essay collection Taking a Long Look, which was published in March by Verso.

Reminder, by Henni Alftan. All artwork © The artist. Courtesy Karma, New York City

ESSAY

ANTON CHEKHOV ONCE OBSERVED THAT THE WORST THING LIFE CAN DO TO HUMAN BEINGS IS TO INFLICT HUMILIATION

of heat, and I was feeling bleak, shabby, forlorn, born to be told I wouldn’t do, not now, not ever. It was my first taste of humiliation. Fifty years later, I was walking up Broadway on a hot summer afternoon when a woman I did not recognize blocked my path. She spoke my name, and when I stared at her, puzzled, she laughed. “It’s Sheila,” she said. The scene in the schoolyard flashed before me, and I felt cold all over: cold, shabby, bleak. I wouldn’t do then, I wouldn’t do now. I would never do. “Oh,” I said, and could hear the dullness in my voice. “Hello,” I said.

nton Chekhov once observed that the worst thing life can do to human beings is to inflict humiliation. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the world can destroy the soul as much as outright humiliation. Every other infliction can eventually be withstood or overcome, but not humiliation. Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever. It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives. In Jeanne Dielman, the Belgian director Chantal Akerman demonstrates that exact proposition. The film is deliberately static, seeming to unfold in real time (it runs for three and a half hours). We are present during three days in the life of a thrifty widow with a teenage son. She cooks, cleans, shops for food, polishes her son’s shoes, turns the lights on when she walks into a room and off when she leaves. And, oh yes, every afternoon she turns a trick. The trick is always some respectable-looking burgher whose coat she removes, brushes, and hangs up as though it were her husband’s. Then one day we follow our protagonist and her client into the bedroom for the first time, where we see her lying submissively on the bed while the man on top of her humps away. The camera plays on her face: we see her eyes wandering aimlessly about, as we’ve seen the eyes of many women in the movies enduring unwanted sex. Then, suddenly, without a hint of what’s coming, she picks up a pair of scissors and stabs the trick to death. The End. I remember sitting glued to the seat when the screen went black, shocked but somehow not surprised. In an instant I realized: this is for all of them, including the dead husband. In or out of marriage she’s been turning this trick all her life, lying beneath some man who pays the bills and for whom she has no reality. Why be surprised that such a deal, sooner or later, might produce the twist in the brain that only a stab in the chest can accommodate? There are many things we can live without. Selfrespect is not one of them. One would think the absence of self-respect would resemble much of a sameness, but the circumstances that can make people feel bereft of it are as variable as persons themselves. A psychiatrist who interviewed a group of men imprisoned for murder and other violent crimes asked each of them why he had done it. In almost all cases the answer was “ He dissed me.” On the other hand, I have a cousin, a doctor, who feels humiliated if he’s shortchanged in a grocery store. His wife, too: if another woman is wearing the same dress at a party, she feels humiliated. I once had a mother-in-law whose critical observations amused me; my husband’s next wife felt humiliated to the bone by them. She used to call me up and hiss into the phone, “Do you know what that bitch said to me this

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

Beads, by Henni Alftan

morning?” repeating sentences I had experienced as harmless. Then there is the testimony of Primo Levi in his concentration-camp memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. Levi tells us that given the massive amount of death and destruction going on all around him, it was somewhat remarkable that the humiliation of humiliations, the one that remained ever fresh in his mind for the rest of his life, was the moment when a Kapo, finding nothing to wipe his greasy hand on, turned to Levi and wiped it on his shoulder. That was the moment when Levi understood viscerally what it meant to be seen as a thing. I believe the exaggerated response to humiliation is unique to our species. In feeling disrespected, each of these persons—Levi, the men in prison, my cousin, my ex-husband’s wife—felt they had their right to exist not only challenged but very nearly obliterated. Their inclination then—each and every one—was to crawl out from under the rock that held their prodigious capacity for shame in place, and stand up shooting. When we speak of ourselves as an animal among animals we misspeak. That is exactly what we are not. A four-footed animal may go berserk if attacked by another fourfooted animal and not rest until it kills its attacker, but it will not experience the vengefulness that the walking wounded do when humiliated. In a review by the critic David Runciman of a book written by the cricketer Shane Warne, I learned that Warne had wanted to be an Australian rules footballer but hadn’t been good enough. When it turned out that he was brilliant at cricket—one of the great bowlers (pitchers) of all time—he took that path to fame and fortune. But he played the game “with a sliver of ice in his heart.” He didn’t necessarily hope to inflict injury on the batsman, but he definitely hoped to make him look a fool. “Deep down,” Runciman writes, Warne wanted the batsman “to feel like shit, as bad as he once felt when he got the letter that told him he wasn’t good enough.” What is remarkable here is how tenaciously Warne held on to the memory of having failed as a footballer. Every time he acted viciously on the cricket field he was reliving the moment when he imagined himself being discounted, holding the memory close to his heart, feeling warmed by its live fire, convinced that it energized his talent. Runciman does not say what Warne does with his outsized attachment to the wrong done him now that he’s retired from cricket, but we have plentiful other examples of what happens to those who allow a sense of humiliation to hold them hostage all their lives. When Harvey Weinstein was identified publicly as a sexual criminal, some wondered why he needed to force himself on nonconsenting women when surely there were many in Hollywood who would have slept with him without any struggle. The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni was right when he wrote that Weinstein’s “hotel-room horror shows had as much to do with humiliation as with lust.” The question then was: Whose humiliation did Bruni have in mind, Weinstein’s or the women’s? The answer is both. Think of all the taunting rejections Weinstein must have endured before he found himself in a position of power. How those memories must have traveled daily through his nervous system. How his skin must have crawled every time he looked in the mirror. What recourse did he have, primitive as he was, but to displace all that inner coruscation onto the women he felt free—legally (he thought) and culturally (he knew)—to strong-arm into servicing him? For such a creature no amount of reparations can ever be enough. The only thing that will do is to enact the crime of humiliation again and again in an emotional melodrama wherein it matters not who is the principal and who the supporting actors.

WE HAVE PLENTIFUL EXAMPLES OF WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO ALLOW HUMILIATION TO HOLD THEM HOSTAGE

he first time I understood humiliation as world-destroying was the morning I watched the World Trade Center evaporate from a street corner in Greenwich Village and found myself thinking, This is payback for a century of humiliation. I have subsequently discovered that a

ESSAY

A NATIONAL SENSE OF HUMILIATION IS OFTEN A KEY MOTIVE IN THE DECISION TO GO TO WAR

wealth of scholarly literature argues that a national sense of humiliation is, more often than not, a key motive in a country’s decision to go to war. Evelin Gerda Lindner, a German-Norwegian psychologist affiliated with the University of Oslo, has spent her professional life hypothesizing humiliation’s central role in starting, maintaining, or stopping armed conflicts. A country understands itself (for whatever reason) to be discounted in the eyes of the world at large and passes down that sense of national insult, generation after generation, until a day arrives, however far in the future that day may be, when it requires retribution. Historians have observed that after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, an emotional sense of having been humiliated dominated the politics of France right up to the outbreak of war in 1914; a similar humiliation, doled out to Germany after it lost World War I, led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and a level of vengefulness that nearly destroyed the Western world. On the ground, that devotion to national insult is translated into what passes between the individual persons on either side. It is vital that the soldier refuse to see the man in enemy uniform as a fellow creature, otherwise he might not be able to pull the trigger; the best way to assure this refusal is to destroy the irreducible humanity all persons believe themselves to possess. Primo Levi speaks often of the Nazi practice of “useless violence,” by which he means that even though everyone in Auschwitz—guards, gatekeepers, commanders—knew that all the prisoners were headed either for the gas chamber or a bullet in the head, they were nonetheless beaten, screamed at, made to stand naked and to endure a roll call that kept them at attention for an hour or two several times a week, outside, in every kind of weather. Before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I thought Americans incapable of inflicting such horrors. After Abu Ghraib, I realized that Americans were as willing as the nationals of any other country to inflict the kind of humiliation that would make it a matter of indifference to the prisoner whether he lived or died. In April 2011, The New York Review of Books published a letter written by two law professors, protesting the conditions under which the U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was being held: in solitary confinement, asked every five minutes the question “Are you okay?,” and the very week that the letter was written, forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of her cell. The law professors pronounced this treatment tantamount to a violation of the U.S. criminal statute against torture, and defined the Army’s methods as, among other things, “procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.” Indeed. I think if I were forced to stand naked in public it would definitely disrupt my personality—profoundly. The piece was headed private manning’s humiliation.

umiliation commands the shape and texture of the works in which the following characters appear: George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, Alexandre Dumas’s count of Monte Cristo, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas. Many of these characters are made to suffer materially, but their material pain is as nothing next to the immaterial pain they suffer simply by being in a position that inflames the disgust and anxiety of those who seem to hold all the cards but need the tormented inferior close by—just to make sure. Of these characters, the one whose destiny always stops me in my tracks is Gwendolen Harleth, from Eliot’s 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda. She could pose for a public statue dressed in Grecian robes on whose pedestal is written

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the single word humiliation. Gwendolen is young, beautiful, marvelously selfish, and at the age of eighteen, already knows that marriage for a woman is slavery. But her widowed mother and sisters are on the brink of destitution, so marry she must—the richest man who will have her. Enter Henleigh Grandcourt, a character so broadly drawn he’s a caricature of the evil Victorian aristocrat: remote, possessed of a scorn for humanity strong enough to cut through steel. While courting, Grandcourt is calculatedly patient, considerate, even generous, and Gwendolen is lulled into forsaking her fear of losing her independence, imagining that she will easily manipulate him to her own satisfaction. Once married, however, Grandcourt quickly displays the special contempt reserved for a prize that, now secured, is no longer valued. He never lays a hand on Gwendolen, hardly ever inflicts himself sexually, or even cares much about how she occupies herself. But she is constantly made to be aware (very much like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady) of the prison her husband’s iron will (sanctioned by law and social custom) has constructed around her. Before a year has passed, Gwendolen realizes her marriage is a life sentence. There is a moment in the book that I have always found to exemplify the derangement of the senses that everyday domestic humiliation can lead to. Grandcourt possesses a set of family diamonds meant to be worn in a woman’s hair. Gwendolen hates the diamonds, as she now hates and fears her husband. One evening as the two are preparing to go out to a party, Gwendolen parades before Grandcourt in all her silkand-satin beauty, hoping to put him in a good mood. She asks if her appearance pleases him. He looks appraisingly at her:

FOR YEARS I COULD HEAR THE MENACE IN GRANDCOURT’S VOICE WHENEVER I SAW A WOMAN STRUGGLE TO BREAK FREE

“Put on the diamonds,” said Grandcourt, looking straight at her with his narrow glance. Gwendolen paused in her turn, afraid of showing any emotion, and feeling that nevertheless there was some change in her eyes as they met his. But she was obliged to answer, and said as indifferently as she could, “Oh, please not. I don’t think diamonds suit me.” “What you think has nothing to do with it,” said Grandcourt, his sotto voce imperiousness seeming to have an evening quietude and finish, like his toilet. “I wish you to wear the diamonds.” “Pray excuse me; I like these emeralds,” said Gwendolen, frightened in spite of her preparation. That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her; for her fear of him, mingling with the vague foreboding of some retributive calamity which hung about her life, had reached a superstitious point. “Oblige me by telling me your reason for not wearing the diamonds when I desire it,” said Grandcourt. His eyes were still fixed upon her, and she felt her own eyes narrowing under them as if to shut out an entering pain.

Gwendolen wears the diamonds, and from then on dreams daily of an escape from her life that can be achieved only through death, either hers or his; soon enough she cares not which. The problem is solved when Eliot has Grandcourt fall off a boat while on holiday, and allows Gwendolen to watch, mesmerized, as he drowns, begging her to throw him a rope. She is twenty-two years old; her life is over.

Untitled, by Henni Alftan

ESSAY

WHY DOES LIFE SEEM UNBEARABLE IF WE FEEL DISCOUNTED IN OUR OWN EYES? WHY DO WE HAVE TO THINK WELL OF OURSELVES?

Put on the diamonds. For years, I could hear the menace in Grandcourt’s voice whenever I saw or felt a woman struggling to break free of a despotic husband or lover. The piteousness of her position—that of one born to sanctioned subordination—always seemed emblematic to me of all the sadism allowed to flourish in intimate relations, doomed to end one fine day with a twist in the brain that can no longer bow beneath the yoke. The tales of harassment in the workplace that surfaced when the #MeToo movement erupted in 2017 made my head swim, so wide-ranging were the accusations. From an arm rub and comment about a sexy dress to physical assault, they revealed behaviors that were simultaneously condoned as acceptable and experienced as denigrating. Among these tales I found particularly haunting precisely the homeliest examples of the sort of sexual offenses that have been shrugged off for generations, those that typified the instrumental use men and women commonly make of one another. I imagine a woman walking into her office every workday for years, her throat tight, her stomach in knots, ready to swallow the dose of medicine she has to down if she is to hold this job. She speaks of this vile ritual to no one because she knows the men would laugh and the women roll their eyes, so commonplace is her complaint; but day by day, month by year, it feels as though something vital in her is eroding: some sense of personhood she was becoming aware of at exactly the moment she felt she might be losing it. It is the helplessness of her position that gnaws at her—the shock of realizing she has no agency in a culture that accepts as normal that which she experiences as degrading. In 2017, when such women were coming out of the woodwork, their faces contorted with rage, their voices hissing and spitting, sending out a tsunami of resentment that threatened to drown all of us—women and men alike—they were demonstrating that if the insults go too long unaddressed, they might one day bring down a civilization.

hy does it hurt so much, do so much damage, twist us so horribly out of shape? Why does life seem unbearable—yes, unbearable—if we feel discounted in our own eyes? Or perhaps a better way to pose the question is to turn it around and ask, as a wise woman I know once did, Why do we need to think well of ourselves? Ah yes, I thought, when she put it that way, why is it not enough to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, given freedom of speech and movement? Why do we also have to think well of ourselves? The question haunts every culture: no matter who, no matter where, we crave an explanation for why we are as we are; we manufacture bodies of thought and faith, century after century, that hold out the promise of an explanation that will assuage, if not our suffering, at least our brooding. Sigmund Freud, whose analytic thought concentrated on curing us of the

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Self-Portrait, by Henni Alftan

inner divisions that make us vulnerable to self-hatred, hit upon an explanation that for the longest time offered the greatest hope; out of his empathic imagination arose the therapeutic culture, armed with its encyclopedia of theories designed to address the dilemma. Psychoanalysis explains that from the moment we are born we crave recognition. We open our eyes and we want a response. We need to be warm and dry, yes, soothed and caressed, but even more we need to be looked upon with interest and affection, as though we are a thing of value. Routinely, we get only some small amount of what we need, and sometimes we don’t get it at all. The emotional conviction that we are not worthy sets in. From this condition none of us ever wholly recovers. Mainly, our feelings go underground and we struggle on, in general doing to others no more harm than was done to us. Some of us, however—starting with those born into the wrong class or sex or race, or perhaps those whose physical appearance leads to mockery or rejection—are so damaged we obsess over being made to not think well of ourselves, and we become dangerously antisocial. The effort to overcome this primitive state of affairs is what preoccupies analysis, but all too often the endeavor drags on and on (and on!) while our demons refuse to relent; then therapy begins to feel like a romantic hope of salvation destined to fail. In the 1940s, the social psychologist Erich Fromm asked the same question—in essence, why we succumb so readily to humiliation—and arrived at a place some distance, but not a great one, from that of Freud. Fromm’s thesis in his great work, Escape from Freedom, was a simple one; like Freud before him, Fromm did not hesitate to use the convention of mythic storytelling to make his insight vivid for the common reader. In Freud’s case the story derived from the classics, in Fromm’s from Genesis. Human beings, he argued, were at one with nature until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, whereupon they evolved into animals endowed with the ability to reason and to know that they felt. From then on, they were creatures apart, no longer at one with the universe they had long inhabited on an equal basis with other dumb animals. For the human race, the gift of thought and emotion created both the glory of independence and the punishment of isolation; on one hand the dichotomy made us proud, on the other lonely. It was the loneliness that proved our undoing. It became our punishment of punishments. It so perverted our instincts that we became strangers to ourselves—the true meaning of alienation—and thus unable to feel kinship with others. Which, of course, made us even lonelier. The inability to connect brought on guilt and shame: terrible guilt, outsized shame; shame that gradually developed into humiliation. If there was any stigma that survived the exile from paradise—that is, the womb—any proof that we were unfitted to make a success of life, it was this. How else to explain all the centuries in which human beings have been mortally ashamed of admitting they were lonely? Where Fromm joins Freud is in asserting that the very development— consciousness—that brought about our rise and then our fall is the only one that can release us from this pervasive sense of aloneness. The problem is that the consciousness bestowed on us is just barely sufficient; if we are to achieve inner freedom, it is necessary that we become more (much more) conscious than we generally are. If men and women learn to occupy their own inspirited beings fully and freely, Fromm posited, they will gain self-knowledge and thus no longer be alone: they will have themselves for company. Once one has company one can feel benign toward oneself as well as others. Then, like a virus that had been stamped out, humiliating loneliness would surely begin to wane. This is a proposition we’re required to take on faith. The great Borges thought it best to look upon our broken inner state as one of life’s great opportunities—to prove ourselves deserving of the blood pulsing through our veins. “Everything that happens,” he wrote, “including humiliations, misfortunes, embarrassments, all is given like clay,” so that we may “make from the miserable circumstances of our lives” something worthy of the gift of consciousness. I’ll leave it at that. Q

THE GIFT OF THOUGHT AND EMOTION CREATED BOTH THE GLORY OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE PUNISHMENT OF ISOLATION

ESSAY

THE REPUBLIC OF LITERATURE From the novel Silverview By John le Carré

n a small seaside town perched on the outer shores of East Anglia, a thirty-three-year-old bookseller named Julian Lawndsley emerged from the side door of his brand-new shop and, clutching to his throat the velvet collars of a black overcoat left over from the City life he had renounced two months previously, set off at a forward lean to battle his way along the desolate seafront of shingle beach in search of the one café that served breakfast at this dismal time of year. His mood was not friendly, either toward himself or the world at large. Last night, after hours of solitary stocktaking, he had climbed the stairs to his newly converted attic flat above the shop to discover he had neither electric power nor running water. The builder’s phone was on answer. Rather than take a hotel room, if one was even to be found at that time of year, he lit four kitchen candles, uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured himself a large glass, piled spare blankets on the bed, got into it, and buried himself in the shop’s accounts. They told him nothing he didn’t know. His impulsive escape from the rat race had gotten off John le Carré was the best-selling author of more than two dozen novels, and first wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 1965. He died in December 2020, leaving behind a final, completed novel, Silverview, which will be published this month by Viking.

Illustrations by Darya Shnykina

to a wretched start. And if the accounts didn’t say the rest of it, he could say it for himself: he was not equipped for the loneliness of celibacy; the clamorous voices of his recent past were not to be quelled by distance; and his lack of the basic literary education required of your upmarket bookseller was not to be repaired in a couple of months. The one café was a clapboard shack squeezed behind a row of Edwardian beach huts under a blackened sky packed with screaming seabirds. He had seen the place on his morning runs, but the thought of entering it had never crossed his mind. A faulty green sign flickered with the word ice minus its s. Forcing the door open, he held it against the wind, entered and eased it back into place. “Good morning, my dear!” yelled a hearty female voice from the direction of the kitchen. “You seat you anywhere! I come soon, okay?” “And good morning to you,” he called vaguely in return. Under fluorescent lights lay a dozen empty tables covered in red plastic gingham. He chose one and cautiously extracted the menu from a cluster of cruets and sauce bottles. The babble of a foreign news announcer issued through the open kitchen door. A crash and a shuffle of heavy feet from behind him informed him of the advent of another guest. Glancing

FICTION

at the wall mirror, he was guardedly amused to recognize the egregious person of Mr. Edward Avon, his importunate but engaging customer of the previous evening, if a customer who had bought nothing. Though he had yet to see his face—Avon, with his air of perpetual motion, being far too preoccupied with hanging up his broad-brimmed homburg hat and adjusting his dripping fawn raincoat over the back of a chair—there was no mistaking the rebellious mop of white hair or the unexpectedly delicate fingers as, with a defiant flourish, they extracted a folded copy of the Guardian newspaper from the recesses of the raincoat and flattened it on the table before him.

t is yesterday evening, five minutes to closing time. The shop is empty. It has been empty for most of the day. Julian is standing at the till, totting up the day’s meager takings. For some minutes he has been aware of a solitary figure in a homburg hat and fawn raincoat, armed with a furled umbrella, standing on the opposite pavement. After six weeks of running a stagnant business, he has become quite the connoisseur of people who stare at the shop and don’t come in, and they are beginning to get on his nerves. Is it the shop’s pea-green paintwork the man’s disapproving of—he’s an old inhabitant maybe, and doesn’t like garish? Is it the many fine books on display, special offers to suit all pockets? Or is it Bella, Julian’s twenty-year-old Slovakian trainee, frequently to be found occupying the shop window in search of her various love interests? It is not. Bella is for once gainfully employed in the stockroom, packing unsold books to be returned to their publishers. And now—miracle of miracles—the man is actually making his way across the street, he is removing his hat, the shop door is opening, and a sixty-something face under a mop of white hair is peering round it at Julian. “You’re shut,” an assured voice informs him. “You’re shut, and I shall come another time, I insist”—but already one muddy brown walking shoe is inside the door, and the other is easing its way after it, followed by the umbrella. “Not shut at all, actually,” Julian assures him, matching smooth for smooth. “Technically, we close at five-thirty, but we’re flexible, so please just come in and take all the time you need”— and, with this, resumes his counting while the stranger studiously threads his umbrella into the Victorian umbrella stand and hangs his homburg on the Victorian hat stand, thereby paying his respects to the shop’s retro style, selected to appeal to older customers, of which the town has a plentiful supply.

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“Looking for something particular or just browsing?” Julian asks, turning up the bookshelf lights to full. But his customer barely hears this question. His broad, clean-shaven face, mobile as any actor’s, is alight with marvel. “I’d absolutely no idea at all,” he protests, indicating with a flowing gesture of his arm the source of all his wonderment. “The town may boast a real-life bookshop at last. I am amazed, I must say. Totally.” His position now manifest, he sets off on a reverential inspection of the shelves—fiction, non-fiction, local interest, travel, classical, religion, art, poetry—here and there pausing to fish down a volume and subject it to some kind of bibliophile’s test: front cover, inside flap, quality of paper, binding, general weight and friendliness. “I must say,” he exclaims again. Is the voice entirely English? It’s rich, interesting, and compelling. But is there not a very slight foreign flavor in the cadence? “You must say what?” he calls back from his tiny office, where he is running through the day’s emails. The stranger begins again, on a different and more confiding note. “Look here. I’m assuming that your magnificent new shop is under entirely different management. Am I right, or am I barking up the completely wrong tree?” “New management is right”—still from his office, through the open doorway. And yes, there is a foreign flavor. Just. “New ownership also, one may ask?” “One may, and the answer is emphatically yes,” Julian agrees cheerfully, taking up his former position beside the till. “Then are you— forgive me.” He starts again, severely, on a more military note: “Look here—are you by any chance, or are you not, the young mariner himself? Because I need to know. Or are you his deputy? His surrogate? His whatever?” And then, arbitrarily concluding, with some reason, that Julian is offended by these searching questions: “I mean absolutely nothing personal, I assure you. I mean only that, whereas your undistinguished predecessor christened his emporium the Ancient Mariner, you, sir, as his more youthful and may I say vastly more acceptable successor—” By which time, the two of them are in a silly all-English tangle, until everything is properly patched up, with Julian confessing that, yes, indeed, he is both manager and owner, and the stranger saying, “Mind awfully if I help myself to one of these?” and deftly winkling a get-toknow-us card from its housing with his long pointy fingers, and holding it to the light to scrutinize the evidence with his own eyes. “So I am addressing, correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. J. J. Lawndsley in person, sole owner and manager of Lawndsley’s Better Books,” he con-

cludes, lowering his arm with theatrical slowness. “Fact or fiction?”—then swinging round to observe Julian’s response. “Fact,” Julian confirms. “And the first J, if one may make so bold?” “One may, and it’s Julian.” “A great Roman emperor. And the second— even bolder?” “Jeremy.” “But not the other way round?” “Never on any account.” “Does one call you Jay-Jay?” “Personally, I recommend plain Julian.” The stranger ponders this with knitted brows, which are prominent and gingery, and flecked with white. “Then, sir, you are Julian Lawndsley, not his portrait, not his shadow, and I for my sins am Edward Avon, like the river. I may be Ted or Teddy to the many, but to my peers I am Edward all alone. How d’you do, Julian?”—thrusting a hand across the counter, the grip surprisingly powerful, despite the fine fingers. “Well, hullo, Edward,” Julian replies jauntily and, withdrawing his hand as soon as he is decently able, waits while Edward Avon makes a show of deliberating his next move. “Will you permit me, Julian, to say something personal and potentially offensive?” “As long as it’s not too personal,” Julian replies warily, but in a similarly light vein.

“Then would you mind frightfully if, with all due diffidence, one made an absolutely footling recommendation regarding your extremely impressive new stock?” “As many as you like,” Julian replies hospitably, as the danger cloud recedes. “It is a totally personal judgment and merely reflects my own feelings on the matter. Is that clearly understood?” Evidently it is. “Then I shall proceed. It is my considered view that no local interest shelf in this magnificent county, or in any other county for that matter, should regard itself as complete without Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. But I see you are not familiar with Sebald.” See from what, Julian wonders, even as he concedes that the name is indeed new to him, and all the more so since Edward Avon has used the German pronunciation, Zaybult. “The Rings of Saturn, I must warn you in advance, is not a guidebook as you and I might understand the term. I’m being pompous. Will you forgive me?” He will. “The Rings of Saturn is a literary sleight of hand of the first water. The Rings of Saturn is a spiritual journey that takes off from the marshes of East Anglia and embraces the entire cultural heritage of Europe, even unto death. Sebald, W. G.”—this time using the English pronunciation and waiting while Julian writes it down. “Formerly professor of European literature at our University of East Anglia, a depressive like the best of us, now, alas, dead. Weep for Sebald.”

FICTION

“I will,” Julian promises, still writing. “I have overstayed my welcome, sir. I have purchased nothing, I am good for nothing, and I am in awe. Good night, sir. Good night, Julian. All good fortune with your superb new enterprise—but wait! Is that a basement I see?” Edward Avon’s eye has lighted on a descending spiral staircase tucked into the further corner of the Reduced to Clear department, and partly concealed by a Victorian screen. “Empty, I’m afraid,” Julian says, returning to his takings. “But empty for what purpose, Julian? In a bookshop? There must be no empty spaces, surely!” “Still thinking about it, actually. Maybe a secondhand department. We’ll see”—beginning to tire. “I may take a look?” Edward Avon insists. “Out of shameless curiosity? You allow?” What can Julian do but allow? “Light switch on your left as you go down. Watch your step.” With a nimbleness that takes Julian by surprise, Edward Avon vanishes down the spiral staircase. Julian listens, waits, hears nothing, and puzzles at himself. Why did I let him do that? The man’s as mad as a flute. As nimbly as he vanished, Avon reappears. “Magnificent,” he declares reverently. “A chamber of future delights. I congratulate you unreservedly. Good night, once more.” “So may I ask what you do?” Julian calls after him as he starts toward the door. “I, sir?” “You, sir. Are you a writer yourself? An artist? A journalist? An academic? I should know, I’m sure, but I’m new here.” The question appears to puzzle Edward Avon as much as it does Julian. “Well,” he replies, having apparently given the matter much thought. “Let us say I am a British mongrel, retired, a former academic of no merit, and one of life’s odd-job men. Will that do you?” “I guess it will have to.” “I bid you anon, then,” Edward Avon declares, casting him a last wistful look from the door. “And anon to you,” Julian calls cheerfully back. At which Edward Avon-like-the-river dons his homburg hat, adjusts its angle and, umbrella in hand, sweeps bravely into the night. But not before Julian has been subjected to the heavy aroma of alcoholic fumes on his departing breath.

“Y

ou decide what you wanna eat today, my dear?” the proprietor asked Julian in the same strong mid-European accent with which she had greeted his arrival. But before he could answer,

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Edward Avon’s rich voice resounded over the boom of the sea wind and the creaks and groans of the café’s flimsy walls: “Good morning to you, Julian. You rested soundly amid the turmoil, I trust? I suggest you go for one of Adrianna’s bumper omelets. She does them remarkably well.” “Oh, right. Thanks,” Julian returned, not yet quite willing to use the Edward. “I’ll give it a shot.” And to the ample waitress standing at his shoulder: “With brown toast and a pot of tea, please.” “You want fluffy, like I make Edvard?” “Fluffy’s fine.” And, to Avon, resignedly: “So is this a favorite watering hole of yours?” “When the urge takes me. Adrianna is one of our little town’s best-kept secrets, aren’t you, darling?” The insistent voice, for all its verbal flourishes, struck Julian as a trifle underpowered this morning, as well it might be, if last night’s breath was anything to go by. Adrianna clumped happily back to the kitchen. An uneasy truce reigned, while the sea wind howled and the gimcrack building heaved under the stress and Edward Avon studied his newspaper, while Julian had to content himself with staring at the rainswept window. “Julian?” “Yes, Edward?” “A most amazing coincidence, actually. I was a friend of your late lamented father.” Another crash of rain followed. “Oh, really? How extraordinary,” Julian replied, at his most English. “We were incarcerated in the same appalling public school together. Henry Kenneth Lawndsley. But to his school friends fondly known as the great HK.” “He often said his school days were the happiest of his life,” Julian conceded, not at all convinced. “And, alas, if one surveys the poor fellow’s life, one might sadly conclude that he was speaking no less than the truth,” said Avon. And after that, nothing except the crashing of the wind again, and the foreign gabble of the radio from the kitchen, and Julian discovering an urgent need to get back to the empty bookshop where he didn’t yet belong. “I suppose one might,” he agreed dully, and was grateful to see Adrianna approaching with the fluffy omelet and his tea. “You allow I join you?” Whether Julian allowed or not, Avon had already risen to his feet, coffee in hand, leaving Julian not knowing which to be more surprised by: the man’s evident familiarity with his father’s unfortunate life, or Avon’s reddened eyes sunk into their sockets, cheeks cracked with pain lines and coated in silvery stubble. If this was last night’s hangover, the man must have been on the bender of a lifetime.

“So did your dear father ever mention me?” he asked when he had sat down, leaning forward and appealing to Julian with his haggard brown eyes. “Avon? Teddy Avon?” Not that Julian remembered. Sorry. “The Patricians Club? He didn’t speak of the Patricians to you?” “He did. Yes, he did,” Julian exclaimed, the last of his doubts for better or worse receding. “The debating club that never was. Set up by my father and banned after half a meeting. He nearly got slung out for it. As he tells it—or did,” he added cautiously, since his late father’s accounts of himself did not always stand the test of accuracy. “HK was club chairman, I was his vice. They nearly threw me out too. I very much wish they had”—swig of cold black coffee— “Anarchists, Bolsheviks, Trotskyites: whatever doctrine enraged the Establishment, we hastened to adopt it.” “That’s pretty much how he described it too,” Julian acknowledged, then waited, as Avon did, each for the other to play the next card. “And then, oh dear, your father went up to Oxford,” Avon recalled at length, with a stage shudder, and a lowering of the underpowered voice, and a clown’s lift of the bushy eyebrows to heaven, followed by a sideways glance at Julian to see how he was responding, “where he fell into the hands”—placing his own hand on Julian’s forearm in sympathy—“but perhaps you are of a religious disposition, Julian?” “I’m not,” Julian replied emphatically, his anger rising. “I may go on, then?” Julian went on for him: “Where my father fell into the hands of a bunch of Americanfinanced born-again evangelical mind-benders with short hair and smart ties who carted him off to a Swiss mountaintop and turned him into a fire-breathing Christian. Is that what you wanted to say?” “Perhaps not in such harsh language, but I could not have put it better. And you are truly not religiously disposed?” “Truly not.” “Then you have the foundations of wisdom within your grasp. There he was at Oxford, poor man, ‘as happy as Larry,’ as he wrote to me, his whole life before him, girls galore—yes, they were his weakness, and why not?—and, by the end of his second year—” “They’d got him, okay?” Julian cut in. “And ten years after he’d been ordained into the holy Anglican Church, he recanted his faith from the pulpit in front of his whole Sunday flock: I, the Reverend H. K. Lawndsley, Clerk in Holy Orders, do hereby declare that God does not exist, amen. Is that what you were going to say?”

Was Edward Avon proposing they now dwell on his father’s prolific sex life and other dissipations, as widely aired in the gutter press of the day? Was he pressing for the gory details of how the once-proud Lawndsley family was turfed out of its vicarage into the street without a penny? And how Julian himself, in the wake of his father’s premature death, had to dump his hopes of university and become a runner in a City trading house owned by a remote uncle, in order to pay off his father’s debts and put bread on his mother’s table? Because, if he were, Julian was going to be out of the door in twenty seconds cold. But Edward Avon’s expression, far from salacious curiosity, was the very mask of heartfelt sympathy. “And you were there, Julian?” “Where?” “In the church?” “As it happened, yes, I was. Where were you?” “I wished only to be at his side. As soon as I read what had happened to him—a little late, alas—I wrote to him posthaste, offering whatever inadequate help I could. The hand of friendship, such money as I had.” Julian allowed himself time to consider this. “You wrote to him,” he repeated, in a questioning tone, as the shades of his earlier disbelief returned. “And did you ever get an answer?” “I received none and I deserved none. On the last occasion your father and I met, I had called him a Holy Fool. I could hardly take it amiss when he spurned my offer. We have no right to insult another man’s faith, however absurd it is. You agree?” “Probably.” “Naturally, when HK renounced his faith I was filled with pride for him. As indeed vicariously, dare I say it, I am filled with pride for you, Julian.” “You are what?” Julian exclaimed, laughing out loud despite himself. “You mean because I’m HK’s son and I’ve opened a bookshop?” But Edward Avon found nothing to laugh at. “Because, like your dear father, you found the courage to defect: he from God and you from Mammon.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “I understand you were a highly successful trader in the City.” “Who told you that?” Julian demanded stubbornly. “Last night after leaving your shop, I prevailed on Celia to allow me to use her computer. Immediately, all was revealed, to my enormous sadness. Your poor father, dead at fifty, one son, Julian Jeremy.” “Celia, your wife?” “Celia of Celia’s Bygones, your distinguished neighbor in the high street and collecting point for our overgrowing population of rich weekenders from London.”

FICTION

“Why did you have to go sneaking off to Celia’s? Why didn’t you just come out with it in the shop?” “I was divided. As you would be. I hoped, but I was uncertain.” “You were also pretty refreshed, if I recall.” Avon appeared not to hear this: “I was immediately drawn by the name. I knew only too well there had been a scandal. I had no idea how the drama had played out, nor of your poor father’s death. If you were HK’s son, I could imagine how you had suffered.” “And my supposed defection from the City?” Julian asked, refusing to be appeased. “Celia happened to mention that you had abandoned a lucrative livelihood in the City at no notice, and she was appropriately mystified.” Julian would have liked very much at this point to return to the little matter of Edward Avon’s claim to have offered his father the earth in his hour of need, but Edward Avon had other ideas. He had rallied remarkably. There was a new zeal in his eyes. His voice had recovered its flowery richness: “Julian. In the name of your dear father. And since Providence has twice brought us together in the space of a few hours. Concerning your large and beautiful basement: Have you considered what treasures it might contain, what a work of miracle it might be?” “Well, no, as a matter of fact, I don’t think I quite have, Edward,” Julian replied. “Have you?” “I have thought of little else since we met.” “Glad to hear it,” Julian said, not without skepticism. “Suppose you created—in that splendid space, still virgin—something so untried, so alluring and original, as to be the talking point of every literate and would-be literate customer in the area?” “Suppose.” “Not a mere secondhand books department. Not an arbitrary book depository of no character, but a purposefully selected shrine to the most challenging minds of our time—and of all time. A place where a man or woman may come off the street knowing nothing, and leave enlarged, enriched, and craving more. Why do you smile?” A place where a fellow who has recently declared himself a bookseller, and only afterward realized that such a vocation has its own queer skills and knowledge, might blamelessly and invisibly acquire them, while appearing all the while to provide them from his own stock to a grateful public. But, even as the unworthy thought occurred to him, Julian was starting to believe in the idea for its own sake. Not that he was yet prepared to acknowledge that to Edward Avon.

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“You were sounding a bit like my father for a moment. I’m sorry. Go on.” “Not just the great novelists, who are obvious. But philosophers, freethinkers, founders of great movements, even those we may abhor. Chosen not by the dead hand of the ruling cultural bureaucracy, but by Lawndsley’s even Better Books. And called—” “Called what, for instance?” Julian demanded, off balance. Avon paused, the further to arouse his audience’s expectation: “We shall call it the Republic of Literature,” he declared, and sat back with his arms folded while he studied his man. And the truth was that, even if Julian had started out thinking this the most overblown sales pitch he had ever been subjected to, one that played with suspicious accuracy upon his sense of cultural deficit—not to mention an outrageous presumption on the part of a man whose bona fides he continued strenuously to question—nevertheless Edward Avon’s grand vision spoke straight to his heart, and to the reason he was here at all. Republic of Literature? He bought it. It rang bells. It was classy, but had universal appeal. Go for it. And he might have offered a more encouraging reply than his City man’s knee-jerk “Sounds pretty good, I’ll have to think about it,” had not Edward Avon already been on his feet, gathering up his homburg hat and fawn raincoat and umbrella on his way to the counter, where he now stood deep in conversation with the abundant Adrianna. But in what language were they conversing? To Julian’s ear it was the language of the announcer on the kitchen radio. Edward Avon spoke it; Adrianna laughed and spoke it back. Edward rallied and laughed along with her all the way to the door. Then he turned to Julian and gave him a last exhausted smile. “I am a little down at the moment. I trust you will forgive me. So good to meet HK’s son. Extraordinary.” “I didn’t notice anything. I thought you were great, actually. I mean about the Republic of Literature. I was thinking you might drop by and give me the odd bit of advice.” “I?” “Why not?” If a man knows his Sebald, is an academic of some sort, loves books and has time on his hands, why not indeed? “I’m opening a coffee bar above the shop,” Julian went on engagingly. “It’ll be ready next week with luck. Come in and graze, and we can have a talk.” “My dear fellow, what a generous offer. I shall give it my best endeavors.”

With wings of white hair streaming from under his homburg, Edward Avon once more set off into the storm, while Julian headed for the cash desk. “You not like your omelet, my dear?” “Loved it. It was just a bit much. Tell me something, please. What language were you two speaking just now?” “With Edvard?” “Yes. With Edvard.” “Polish, my dear. Edvard is good Polish boy. You not know this?” No. He didn’t. “Sure. He very sad now. Got sick wife. She gonna die soon. You not know that?” “I’m new here,” he explained. “My Kiril is nurse. He work Ipswich General. He tell me. She don’t speak Edvard no more. She chuck him out.” “His wife chucked him out?” “Maybe she wanna die alone. Some peoples, they do that. They just wanna die, go to Heaven maybe.” “Is his wife Polish?” “No, my dear.” Hearty laugh. “She English lady”—laying a finger lengthways under her nose to indicate superiority. “You wanna take your change?” “It’s fine. It’s yours. Thank you. Great omelet.”

He next embarks on a succession of abortive searches, first for plain Edward Avon, then for Edward Avon, academic, then for Edvard Avon, Polish speaker. He finds no plausible match. The local telephone listings offer no Avon of any kind. He tries an online address service: number withheld. At midday, builders appear unannounced and remain till midafternoon. Normal services are restored. Come evening, he leafs through his predecessor’s outstanding orders for rare and secondhand books, and chances on a dog-eared

afely back in his shop, Julian suffers a severe reaction. He had known a few con artists in his time, but, if Edward were another, he was in a class of his own. Was it conceivable, even, that he’d been hanging around in the downpour at eight o’clock this morning— just on the off chance that Julian would come out of the shop—then followed him to Adrianna’s café for the express purpose of putting the arm on him? Was Avon, by any chance, that huddled figure he’d spotted, sheltering under an umbrella in a doorway down the street? But what on earth was the endgame? And if the worst Avon wanted was company, didn’t Julian have a duty to provide it to his late father’s old school friend, and all the more so if his dying wife had chucked him out? And the clincher—how could Edward Avon or anyone else have known that Julian’s water and electricity had been turned off? Ashamed of his unworthy thoughts, Julian makes amends by haranguing a succession of errant tradesmen on the phone, then takes to his computer and visits the site of his late father’s West Country public school, currently mired in a child abuse investigation. He confirms that an Avon, Ted [sic], is on record as a “late entry scholar” to the school’s sixth form. Period of attendance: one year.

card marked Avon, no initial, no address, no number. The said Avon, male or female, is interested in any hardback work in decent condition by one Chomsky, N. Probably some obscure fellow Pole, he tells himself dismissively, and is about to toss the card away when he relents and searches for Chomsky, N.: Noam Chomsky, author of over one hundred books. Analytical philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, public activist, critic of U.S. state capitalism and foreign policy, repeatedly jailed. Rated world’s top intellectual and father of modern linguists.

FICTION

Chastened, he retires to bed after the usual solitary supper in his resurrected kitchen and finds he is unable to think consistently about any subject other than Edward or Edvard Avon. So far, he reckons, he has met two irreconcilable versions of the man. He wonders how many more there are to come. Falling asleep at last, he speculates as to whether he has discovered in himself a secret need for another father figure. He decides that one has been quite enough, thank you.

he week that follows Julian’s dual encounter with Edward Avon does not lack for distractions. A next-door neighbor’s underhand planning application threatens to rob the stockroom of its only source of daylight. Returning one evening from a conference of local librarians, he is met, not by Bella, but by a locked shop and a flowered thank-you card on the till, declaring her undying love for a Dutch fisherman. And in the precious basement, now firmly established in Julian’s mind as the future home of the Republic of Literature, rising damp is diagnosed. Yet, for all these calamities, he never ceases to reflect on the many faces of his late father’s school friend. Too often he fancies Edward’s raincoated shadow sweeping past the shop window without a turn of the homburg hat. So why doesn’t the wretched man come in and graze? No obligation to buy, Edward, Edvard, or whoever you are. The more he thinks about Edward’s grand plan, the more it grows on him. But does the name still ring right? Is it perhaps too high-hat after all? Might Readers’ Republic have greater crowd appeal? Might Republic of Readers, or New Republic of Readers, or how about Lawndsley’s Republic of Readers? Or how about just calling it Literary Republic? Telling no one—since there was no Edward to tell—Julian makes a dedicated journey to the print shop in Ipswich and has them run up a few tentative drafts for a full-page ad in the local rag. Edward’s first title is still the best. None of which in any way prevents him, in his low moments, from taking Edward to task for his intrusive theories regarding his father and himself: I defected from the City? Utter balls. I was a wide-awake predator from day one, and no kind of believer. I came, I stole, I conquered, I got out. End of story. As to my lamented father: maybe—just possibly—HK was some kind of religious defector. When you’ve screwed half the pious ladies of your parish, maybe you and God do decide to call it a day. And what about that heartwarming offer of friendship, money, and whatever else that Edward Avon had purportedly made to his old pal HK in the hour of his distress? All Julian could say was: Next time we meet, prove it.

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Because whatever else you might say about the Reverend H. K. Lawndsley (retired hurt), when it came to hoarding useless junk, he was in a class of his own. Nothing was too humble to be stored away for his future, nonexistent biographers: no sermon note, no unpaid bill or letter—be it from a discarded mistress, an outraged husband, tradesman, or bishop—escaped his egomaniacal net. And hidden here and there amid the mountain of dross, yes, the rare letter from a friend he’d managed to keep. And one or two of them did indeed offer assistance of a sort. But from his old school pal Edward, Edvard, Ted or Teddy, not a peep. And it is in part this inconsistency, coupled with a great impatience to get the Republic of Literature up and running once the rising damp was fixed, that prompts Julian to set aside whatever scruples he has, and call on his fellow toiler in the high street vineyard, Miss Celia Merridew of Celia’s Bygones, on the pretext of discussing a revival of the town’s defunct arts festival.

he was waiting for him on her doorstep, feet astride, and sixty if a day, smoking a cigarillo in the unlikely sunshine. Her choice of costume was a kimono of parrot green and orange, her ample bosom adorned with strings of brilliant beads, her hennaed hair knotted in a bun and held in place by Japanese combs. “Not one penny, young Mr. Julian,” she warned him jovially as he advanced on her. And when he assured her that it was only her moral support he was after: “Wrong address, darling. No morals worth a bean. Come into my parlor and have a ginny.” A hand-scrawled notice on the glass front door read free cat neutering here. Her parlor was an ill-smelling back room of broken furniture, dusty clocks, and stuffed owls. From an ancient refrigerator, she extracted a silver teapot with the price label dangling from its handle, and poured a gin concoction into two Victorian rummers. Her hate-object of the day was the new supermarket. “They’ll do you in, and they’ll do me in,” she predicted in her rich Lancashire growl. “That’s all the buggers care about: putting us honest traders out of business. Soon as they spot you earning half a living, they’ll open an industrialsize book department, and won’t rest till you’re a charity shop. All right, let’s have it about your festival. I’ve heard about bumblebees that fly as shouldn’t. I’ve not heard about dead ones as can.” Julian made his pitch, by now a practiced performance. He was thinking of getting together an informal working party to explore options, he said. Might Celia agree to adorn it? “I’ll want my Bernard along to hold my hand,” she warned. Bernard, her consort: market gardener, Freemason, part-time estate agent, and

chairman of the local council’s planning committee. Julian assured her that Bernard’s presence would be a boon. Random small talk while Celia gets the measure of him and he lets her. What about that Jones the greengrocer, then, standing for mayor when everybody except his wife knows he’s put his fancy lady in the family way? And those affordable houses they’re putting up behind the church, there: Whoever’s going to be able to afford one of them by the time the estate agents and lawyers have taken their cut? “So we’re a public schoolboy, are we, darling?” Celia asked, appreciatively running her sharp little eyes over him. “Went to Eton, I expect, same as the government.” No, Celia. State. “Well, you speak posh enough, I will say. Same as my Bernard. And I expect you’ve got yourself a nice girlfriend too, haven’t you?”—continuing her unabashed appraisal of him. Not at present, Celia, no. Resting, let’s say. “But the girls are what we like best, are they, darling?” Definitely what he liked best, he agreed— but he was careful all the same, as she leaned suggestively forward to top up his ginny, not to sound overenthusiastic. “Only I’ve heard a thing or two about you, you see, young Mr. Lawndsley. More than I’m letting on, if I’m truthful, which I like to be. Quite the demon trader, you were. A leader in his field is what I heard. And more friends than what he has enemies, which they tell me is unusual in the City, it being cutthroat. How’s custom, darling, or should I not speak ill of the dead?” she rattled on, with a saucy lift of the long skirts, and a crossing of the legs, and a sip of ginny. Which was Julian’s opportunity, by way of a couple of detours to confuse the scent, to arrive by supposed chance on the amusing topic of this oddball customer who’d barged into his shop at closing time, having had a drink or three, inspected it from top to bottom, kept Julian talking for half an hour, not bought a single book and turned out to be—he needed go no further: “That’s my Teddy, darling!” Celia cried in mock indignation. “Over the moon he was! Came straight in here to look it all up in the computer, bless him. Oh, but when he knew your dad had passed away—what with the troubles he’s got already—oh dear, oh dear,” she added, shaking her head in what Julian took to be a combined reference to his late father and Edward’s ailing wife. “My poor, poor Teddy,” she went on, as her beady eyes came back to inspect him yet again. And with barely a pause: “You’ve not had any dealings with him at all, have you, darling, while you were being a City mogul?” she inquired with elaborate innocence. “Direct or indirect, as

we might say? Arm’s-length, as I believe they call it up there?” “Dealings? In the City? With Edward Avon? I only met him a few nights ago and bumped into him by accident at breakfast”—followed by the unpleasant afterthought—“Why? You’re not warning me off him, are you?” Ignoring his question, Celia went on scrutinizing him with shrewd eyes: “Only he’s a very good friend of mine, you see, darling, is Mr. Edward Avon,” she said with innuendo. “Like a special friend.” “Not prying, Celia,” Julian put in hastily, only again to be ignored. “More special than what you might think. There’s not a lot of people know that, apart from my Bernard.” Thoughtful sip of ginny as she continued to scrutinize him. “Only I wouldn’t mind you knowing, you see, what with the impressive City contacts you’ve got, if I knew I could trust you not to blab. I might even cut you in on something, down the line. Not that you haven’t got enough already, from what I hear. Can I, is the point?” “Trust me?” “I’m asking.” “Well, that’s something for you to judge, Celia,” Julian said piously, confident by now that nothing was going to stop her. It was a very long story, she assured him: All of ten years now, since her Teddy first breezed through that door there one sunny morning with a carrier bag stuffed with tissue paper, pulled out a Chinese porcelain bowl, put it on the counter, and demanded to know what she reckoned it was worth on a good day. “Am I buying or selling, I say, because I don’t know him, do I? He walks in, he says, I’m Teddy, like he’s my best friend, and I’ve never seen him in my life. So what you’re asking for, I say, is a free valuation, which is not how I make my living, so it’s half of one per cent of whatever I say it’s worth. Come on, Celia, he says, don’t be like that. Just give me a ballpark figure. If I’m buying, I tell him, ten quid, and I’m being generous. Make it ten grand and it’s yours, he says. Then he shows me the valuation from Sotheby’s. Eight grand. Well, I didn’t know who he was, did I? He could have been any joker. Plus he’s a bit foreign. Plus I know bugger all about Ming blueand-white. Anybody would have guessed that, just looking through the window. Who are you anyway? I say. Avon, he says, first name Edward. Well, I say. Not the Avon that’s married to Deborah Garton down at Silverview? The same, he says, but Teddy to you. Because he’s like that.” Julian needed to get his bearings. “Silverview, Celia?” Big dark house on the other side of town, darling. Halfway down the hill from the water tower, lovely garden, or was. Used to be called The Maples in the Colonel’s day, until Deborah inherited. Now it’s Silverview, don’t ask Celia why.

FICTION

And the Colonel was who? Julian asked, trying hard to imagine Edward in this unlikely setting. Deborah’s father, darling. Town benefactor, art collector, founder and patron of the town library, and hands all over you. My Bernard had a contract with him to supply and maintain his gardens. Deborah still has Bernard up there now and then. And it was the Colonel bequeathed her all his lovely blue-and-white porcelain, Celia went

on with a grim sigh. A truly grande collection, she insisted, grande to rhyme with “horned.” “So when Teddy walked in on you that day, he was hoping to flog you a bit of family Ming on the side,” Julian suggested, only to see Celia’s mouth open and close again in horror. “Teddy? Bilk his own wife out of her inheritance? He wouldn’t ever, darling! He’s as straight as a die, is my Teddy, don’t ever let anyone tell you different!” Suitably chastened, Julian waited to be corrected. No, what Teddy would like to do in his retirement, Celia said, using the funds he’d earned after all those years teaching abroad in places you and

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me wouldn’t be seen dead in—Deborah being away on her quangos and whatever else she was up to—was to raise the quality of the Colonel’s grande collection to the absolute tops, partly by trading up, partly by acquisition. “Plus he’d like his Celia to be his intermediary, scout, purchasing agent, and representative on a highly private and confidential basis never to be revealed, with an annual floor commission of two thousand quid cash in hand for her trouble, and an agreed percentage of the annual turnover, in cash or kind, with nobody troubling the Inland Revenue, what does she think? Well, what would you think?” “All this in one short visit to your shop?” Julian exclaimed, privately recalling the eerie speed with which Edward had become prospective cofounder and consultant to the Republic of Literature, all in the space of a cheese omelet. “Three, darling,” she corrected him. “One the same afternoon, and then next morning, he’s got two grand in tenners in an envelope, he’d got them all ready for the moment I said yes, and there’s a piece for me each time he does a deal, him to decide how much—which I can’t object to, seeing he’ll be doing it all himself anyway behind the scenes.” And you said? “I said I’d have to ask my Bernard. Then I said— which I should have said before if I’d known him better—in heaven’s name, why come to me? Because you don’t sell top-class Chinese blue-andwhite porcelain out of a toffee shop, do you? I said. Or buy it, I said. Plus the fact it’s all computers and eBay these days, and I haven’t even got a computer, let alone know how to work one. We’re Luddites, me and Bernard, proud of it, I said. Everybody in the town knows we’re Luddites. Didn’t bother him a bit. He knew it coming in, he said, he’d got it all worked out in his head. Celia, dear, he says to me, you don’t have to lift a finger beyond being who you are. I’ll be there for you every inch of the way. I’ll buy a computer. I’ll install it and handle it. I’ll locate the pieces to buy, and the pieces to trade. I’ll study the auction prices. All I ask, he said, is you do the talking, you be my front office under my guidance where needful because I like my life in the shadows, and that’ll be my retirement taken care of.” Celia purses her lips and takes a sip of ginny and a puff of cigarillo. “And you did all this, just the two of you?” Julian asked, bemused. “For ten years or whatever it was you said. Teddy trades, you take your retainer and your commission.” Julian’s bemusement was further compounded by the fact that Celia’s mood had blackened dramatically. For ten long years, ever since day one, everything had gone sweet as sugar. The computer duly arrived and was awarded its own little home—over there, darling, on the bowfronted escritoire, not six feet from where you’re

sitting. Edward would drop by whenever he felt like it, not every day by any means, sometimes not every week. He’d sit down in that chair there, with all his catalogues and trade rags, and he’d tap away and they’d have a ginny and Celia would take the calls and front for him. And every month, rain or shine, there’d be an envelope for her and she wouldn’t even count it, which was how much they trusted each other. And if Edward were away on business, which he sometimes was, there’d be the same envelope by registered post, and like as not a billy-doo saying he’d missed her beautiful eyes or something equally daft, because Teddy always knew how to pull out the stops, and he must have been a terror when he was young. “Away on what sort of business, Celia?” “International, darling. Education and similar. Edward’s an intellectual,” she replied loftily. Another sigh, a prudish tug at her neckline in case she was giving Julian ideas by mistake, as she approached the moment that ended her ten years in paradise. It’s Sunday night, a week ago. Eleven o’clock, the phone rings. Celia and Bernard have got their feet up, watching telly. Celia picks up the receiver. Her Deborah Avon voice is part Lancashire, part Her Majesty: “Is this Celia Merridew by enny chance? Yes, Deborah, I say, this is Celia. Well, Ay wish to inform you that Edward and Ay have decided to dispose of our collection of Chaynese blue-and-white porcelain forthwith. Dispose of it, Deborah? You don’t mean your grande collection? Yes, Celia, that’s exactly what Ay mean. We want it out of the house, preferably by tomorrow latest. All right, Deborah, I say. So where are we supposed to put it? Because you don’t shove a grande collection up against any old wall for the night, do you? Well, Celia, she says, seeing as how you’ve made yourself a small fortune out of Edward over the years, and since Edward assures me you have emple space, how about storing it in your beck area? “You store it in your back area, I thought—but I didn’t say it, did I, because of poor Teddy. Next afternoon, four o’clock by royal appointment, we’re up The Maples, all right, Silverview. Bernard’s got his tea chests and wood shavings; I’ve got my bubble wrap and tissue. Teddy’s waiting at the door, white as a sheet, and her ladyship’s upstairs in her boudoir with her classical music turned up loud.” Celia interrupted herself, but not for long: “All right, I know she’s ill. I’m sorry. I’m not saying it’s the greatest marriage ever because it’s not, but I wouldn’t wish what she’s got on my worst enemy. The whole house smells of it. You don’t even know what you’re smelling, except you do.” Julian acknowledged the sentiment, while Celia consoled herself with a sip of ginny. “So I say to Teddy, quietly, what’s all this about, Teddy? It’s not about anything at all, Celia, he says.

Me and Deborah, in view of her tragic illness, we’ve decided to give up acquisition, and that’s all there is about it. Well. It’s past midnight by the time me and Bernard get it all back here into the shop, and all I’m thinking is, what about the insurance, with all the Romanians and Bulgarians roaming the countryside? Bernard makes himself a pile of blankets on the floor. I stretch out on that Victorian divan there. Midday, Teddy calls me up. He doesn’t like telephone as a rule. Our dealers will be arranging transportation directly, Celia. Deborah will be going for a private sale in due course of time, which is her good right. Kindly therefore inform me what I owe you for the removal and insurance. Teddy, I say, I’m not about the money, because I’m not. Just tell me what’s going on. Celia, he says, I told you already. We’ve given up acquisition, and that’s all that needs to be said.” Had she finished? It seemed so, and now she was waiting for him to speak. “So what does Bernard say?” he asked. “She needs the money for the doctors. I say bollocks to that. She’s got her father’s money, her private health, and who knows what else from her quangos. Plus she could buy half of Harley Street with her grande collection and have change left over,” Celia retorted contemptuously, stubbing out the last of her cigarillo. “So what do you say, clever Mr. Julian? Because if you’re the brilliant young gun I’m told you are, and seeing as our Teddy is your late father’s school friend, and is in total denial regarding his former close friend Celia owing to his wife’s unfortunate illness—and me having too much tact to trouble him at such an hour—perhaps some nugget of information will come your way”—very angry now, witness the sudden flush in her face, and the rise in her voice—“be it from Teddy himself, be it from one of your many City friends and admirers regarding the disposal of a certain unique collection of prime blue-andwhite Chinese porcelain. Perhaps one of those Chinese millionaires we read about has snapped it up. Or one of your City syndicates. All I’m saying is”—the crescendo now—“I’ve not received one brass farthing on the sale, so if you’d kindly keep an ear out, I’d be very much obliged, young Mr. Julian, and I will show my appreciation in a businesslike manner, if you get my meaning. Blue-and-White Celia, they used to call me in the trade. They won’t be saying that anymore, will they? Not ever. Bugger! That’ll be Simon, come to buy my gold.” A cacophony of Swiss cowbells had announced Simon’s arrival. With improbable agility, Celia sprang to her feet, yanked the folds of her kimono over her hips, and straightened the Japanese combs in her hennaed hair. “Slip out the back way, will you, darling? I don’t believe in mixing my flavors,” she said, and set course for the shop. Q

FICTION

THREE POEMS By John Keene

vesey on the eve Maybe he should have split every tongue among his fellow Israelites whether they swore on their souls or not. Or gone it alone, based on the signs he read in the cowries and cob wheels, the gris-gris of his motherwit. But that wouldn’t have been practical. How many turncoats’ throats can one man slit, how many ships commandeer, homesteads level to ash by sunup? In his bones he knows a fool or traitor one will step forward to sow his plan like feed among the buckras, and his name from that moment will be blacker than blood. Some know no other way. On the other side of the river of souls the scale will tip in his favor. Men sleep as sure in their skins in heaven as liberated ghosts in Pétion’s nation. Faith alone leaves only a small window to leap through, with his map, kerosene, his dagger, his Bible, the axe. Though his heart is flapping like a mainsail in a hurricane, from South Santee to the Euhaws the silent cry sounds: “Peter, Gullah Jack, gather my children! Our hour of battle is on.”

John Keene is the author, most recently, of Punks: New and Selected Poems, which will be published in December by The Song Cave.

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blackness after Miguel James When I begin a poem I often do so because I love black people. When I choose not to write a poem I still love black people. If I write I love black people it’s because I love black people. If I don’t write I love black people I still love black people. Every metaphor, every simile is rooted in the fact I love black people. Even if I forgo figurative language altogether I still love black people. Whenever I start an essay or a short story or novel I can feel all the way to the very bottom of my soul that I love black people. Those times when I stare at the blank white screen or page I may despair that I cannot show or testify how much I love black people and want other black people and all people to love black people. But it is enough to know deep in my soul and heart how much I love black people and to say and urge others to say publicly that they love black people which is to say I have learned to love myself and to love black people and to recognize that despite all that we face in the world from the moment of our birth to the day we die that even the black period that will end this poem is a sign and seal to me and anyone who cares that I love black people.

portrait of the father as a young gi Orpheus behind the playboy’s gaze, turning mellow youth toward every lens while inwardly roiling, a cauldron of anger. What brother did not wear a mask in those days? In Korea the “battle” was over, Vietnam still undeclared, at home, the endless war. . . . Parisian arcades soon to beckon, wing-roll slowly descending into defeated Deutschland, the “Dutch girl’s” calming touch. Before that, camp, K.P., the shouldered rifle that bows your spine, first flight in a helicopter, your squadron of brother warriors and white folks from far beyond the Mississippi. Prone, in the barracks’ silent mine he hears streetcars clanking toward their slow demise, like swing, his daddy tuning organ pipes while riffing on capacitors, his mama cooling rye in crystal, freedom’s unsteady stagger down Market Street. Soon he’ll father: never forgiven. Soon forgotten he’ll fall in love again. Soon he’ll ride again the roads he passed a thousand times without a thought, recross the rivers left to bridge, deep, unbidden as tunes that rise behind the ears becoming melodies a man must sing aloud. Now one, unceasingly, breaking the dark like a crack in the bone: “Don’t look back.” Q n

POETRY

NEW BOOKS By Claire Messud

he longtime war reporter Janine di Giovanni’s powerful new book, THE VANISHING (PublicAffairs, $30), began, in her own words, as “a way of understanding how Christians in the Middle East, the birthplace of Christianity, have survived in the most turbulent of times.” She has devoted sections to Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Egypt, traveling to each “to try to record for history people whose villages, cultures, and ethos would perhaps not be standing in one hundred years’ time.” But di Giovanni’s book is also highly personal: raised Catholic, her faith recently restored, she frames her introduction and conclusion with moving details about her religious up-

bringing and the circumstances of her pandemic lockdown in the French Alps, where ritual and tradition provided solace. This account of her faith contributes to the force of her reporting, but does not cloud it. She expresses her distress, for example, regarding Trump Administration policies that privileged Christian over Muslim refugees; she is clear about the ways in which national and regional instabilities have frequently superseded sectarian divisions, and about the fact that other minority religious communities have been affected, sometimes even more drastically. Writing of the flight of Iraq’s Jewish population, she recalls a friend of Iraqi-Jewish descent who, at the be-

hest of worried families abroad, found himself scouring Baghdad for remnants of the city’s Jewish community, “showing up unannounced to the homes of these stunned and terrified people, and then [handing] them his phone so they could tell their families they were alive.” But the focus of her book, which grew out of an article published in this magazine, is on Christian communities, and in each country she discovers an inexorable decline. Egypt, which has the largest Christian population in t he region, wa s “a majority-Christian nation until the fourteenth century,” di Giovanni writes, whereas Christians now constitute only 10 percent of the population. In a more recent and swift diminishment, Syria had approximately 1.1 million Christians before the civil war and has reportedly lost more than seven hundred thousand of them. The flight of Christians is in part, of course, about opportunity—in many instances, Christians have found it easier to emigrate, and to find better living conditions for their families in Europe or North America. But the irreversible societal changes in these countries are matched also by the loss of vital histories: the number of monks worshipping at the ancient monastery of Mar Mattai, near Mosul, Iraq, had dropped from more than seven thousand in the ninth century to just five by the time of di Giovanni’s visit. For Christians around the world, the disappearance of some of the faith’s oldest communities is cause for serious concern. (Pope Francis made a trip to Iraq in March to express support for the country’s Christians, and prayed in the reconsecrated Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh, which di Giovanni

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describes visiting after its destruction by the Islamic State in 2014.) Prompted in part by violence and political upheaval, the decline in the Christian population is also, inevitably, an important indication of the intolerance and rejection of religious and cultural diversity in the region. The individuals di Giovanni interviews provide a rich portrait of these threatened communities, and of the wider societies they inhabit. She visits embattled priests in Iraq, genteel aging sisters in Gaza, a Christian zabaleen (“recycler” or “garbage collector”) in Cairo, and his wonderfully nicknamed compatriot, Big Pharaoh, bringing us their voices and the concrete details of their lives. “Nearly every Christian I interviewed for this book,” di Giovanni writes, “used the same word over and over, in different languages, to express why they continued to believe, despite, despite, despite: it is, they said, because of love.”

ove is, albeit complicatedly, the theme of Tiphanie Yanique’s novel MONSTER IN THE MIDDLE (Riverhead Books, $27). Structured as a love story between Fly and Stela in contemporary New York (the last chapters unfold during the pandemic), the narrative explores the tangled family histories that these two people bring to their encounter, the generations of love— both triumphant and failed, both their own and their parents’—that ultimately lead to their meeting on a park bench. The novel opens with a letter addressed to “Loves,” who are, we assume, Fly and Stela, but who might be any of us, signed “Your parents.” Its wisdom is straightforward: “You are not falling in love with that one person . . . you’re bringing it all. You’re bringing us.” The narrative proceeds first with the history of Fly’s African-American father and mother, and then of Stela’s Caribbean parents, including both her father and her beloved stepfather. The latter addresses her directly, and it is he who

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returns to the theme of ancestry, tying it to the novel’s title: “I could tell you more about my mother. . . . For even she is the monster—and her mother, too. . . . It’s a journey, but you’re not alone in it, my love. None of us is.” Among other lingering traumas, Fly’s legacy includes schizophrenia, and Stela’s includes her mother’s childhood loss, by drowning, of her entire family. Grief is counteracted by passion—Yanique writes exuberantly about the pleasures of the body—but that, too, entails difficulties and misunderstandings. Each of the novel’s characters carries the residues of an initial love and its shattered illusions; these go on to shape the relationships that follow. After an early obsession with pornographic images of his father’s first wife, Fly experiences a romantic and sexual initiation that is bound up with religion: Suzanna, who invites him to join her church, seduces him in a variety of ways. Stela, meanwhile, devotes years to her first love, Johann, a white South African–born immigrant to St. Thomas. They expect to marry, until distance and dark experience pull them apart. From California to Tennessee to Georgia; from Puerto Rico to South

Carolina to the U.S. Virgin Islands, from Ghana to Colorado to New York City, the characters lurch from beginning to beginning, always bringing the past with them. Yanique inhabits many of their divergent points of view, among them that of young Earl, who becomes Fly, and somewhat less convincingly that of Mermaid, Stela’s mother, who curses incessantly and veers between relative inarticulacy and unexpected eloquence. Stela is approached only through free indirect style, never voiced in the first person; yet in some ways she is most fully the novel’s protagonist. Themes of race, religion, class, and education appear throughout this ambitious novel, but its abiding focus is on the intimate, and the way broader social forces can impinge upon it. This culminates in a scene from the summer of 2020, when Stela and Fly find themselves catapulted into the particular terror, as black citizens, of being confronted at home by the police: “Stela was dreaming. She must be. She was a high school biology teacher who was spending the summer lear ning Google Classroom and tutoring summer students via Zoom.” While preSeth and Iris, by Raelis Vasquez © The artist. Courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco and New York City

vious generations on both sides had survived more dramatic incidents, we understand that none have faced such an immediate and direct sense of threat. Yanique, the author of the highly acclaimed Land of Love and Drowning and the winner of numerous awards, here retains only echoes of the magical realism that influenced her first novel. Rather, reality assumes a surreal tinge, and the fluidity of narration, across time, place, and characters, imparts an epic register to the intimate encounter between Stela and Fly. Though this episodic mode can, at times, diminish the novel’s narrative tension, the drama of its last fifty pages proves ample compensation.

“A

n epic register” could, perhaps unexpectedly, characterize Rebecca Solnit’s new book, ORW ELL’S ROSES (Viking, $28), which is, on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected. Solnit begins with the roses that George Orwell planted in 1936 in the garden of his rented cottage in Wallington, then moves to the time span of the natural world and the historical importance of roses. She looks in part at the Italian artist and revolutionary Tina Modotti’s famous 1924 photograph of roses (taken in Mexico, where she was friends with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo), and traces the artist’s support of Stalin, whom Orwell fiercely decried. Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to

the heart of the Colombian rosegrowing industry seem inevitable and indispensable. At the core of this intriguing tangle of life, literature, politics, history, environmentalism, and aesthetics, Solnit places the suffragist Helen Todd’s 1910 slogan bread for all , and roses too, which would become a refrain for decades of activism, from the suffrage movement to the radicals of the 1970s and beyond: “Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities.” Orwell himself, Solnit argues, understood this intimately. She cites a letter in which he “made a seamless transition from Old Testament wrath” to an account of a tiny hedgehog that had made its way into his bathroom. “It is often implied (or shouted) that if you enjoy hedgehogs you do not care about the evils of the age,” observes Solnit, “but they routinely coexist in experience and imagination.” Those who view Orwell only as a political writer fail to grasp the

about mining in England, to Homage to Catalonia, about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, to important essays such as “The Prevention of Literature” and “Politics and the English Language.” She elucidates his family history, though she is at liberal pains to distinguish him from his aristocratic ancestors, conceding, with American good cheer, to his own willed deracination with an ease of which his compatriots might be skeptical. She describes, too, the life force that drove him even as his health was in decline—he died of tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of forty-six. And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things. As the protagonist muses in his novel Coming Up for Air: “There’s a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, tench.” Before

complexity of his agenda, which saw in the precise and beautiful deployment of language a responsibility both political and aesthetic. The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker. For those not familiar with the scope of his work, who may know him only as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, she provides the valuable context of his journalism and essays, from his book The Road to Wigan Pier,

and beyond the political, Orwell delights in words themselves, and in the earthly things they signify. Perhaps, in the end, what abides from this exhilarating tour d’horizon is a comment David Wojnarowicz makes to his fellow artist Zoe Leonard, who “was bashful about making beautiful images during the AIDS crisis”:

Left: “Roses, Mexico,” 1924, by Tina Modotti. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Right: Union! Discipline! For Socialism!, an antifascist poster depicting the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, in whose militia George Orwell served © akg-images/Pictures From History

That’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go. Q

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THE LAST CIGARETTE On Italo Svevo By Sigrid Nunez Discussed in this essay:

A Very Old Man, by Italo Svevo, translated by Frederika Randall. New York Review Books Classics. 224 pages. $15.95.

“M

ario Samigli was a man of letters, getting on for sixty years old. A novel he had published forty years before might have been considered dead if in this world things could die even when they had never been alive.” So begins Italo Svevo’s comic novella A Perfect Hoax (1926), written after he himself Sigrid Nunez is the author, most recently, of What Are You Going Through, which was published last year by Riverhead Books.

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had passed the age of sixty. Though a failed writer, Mario has managed to make a life for himself by working in business, but even “at his age he continued to think of himself as destined for glory.” That dream of glory turns out to be precisely what makes Mario vulnerable to the nasty practical joke of a colleague, who pretends to have met a German publisher eager to commission a translation of Mario’s long dead self-published novel. Mario

gullibly swallows the lie, and suffers the consequences. But though his vanity is paid for with humiliation, by a twist he also ends up benefiting financially from the joke that has been played on him. A Perfect Hoax shows an author well acquainted with literary egotism who is also capable of poking fun at himself. Like all of Svevo’s fiction, it is an incisive psychological portrait of a male protagonist whose fate is determined largely by self-delusion. And like all of his fiction, it is partly autobiographical. Italo Svevo was the pen name of Ettore Schmitz, who was born in Trieste, in 1861, to an Italian-Jewish mother and a German-Jewish father who made his living as a manufacturer of glassware. Like his true name, Schmitz’s fictitious one reveals his mixed heritage: Italo Svevo means “Italian Swabian.” Though literature was his passion from an early age, Svevo spent his entire life in business, first as a bank clerk, then, after his marriage to a second cousin, Livia Veneziani, as an employee of his in-laws’ marine paint firm. His duties there required that Svevo sometimes travel abroad. He was already fluent in Italian, French, and German, and when the firm opened a branch in London he decided to acquire a stronger command of English as well. Though he could hardly have imagined it then, hiring an English tutor would prove to be the most advantageous move of his literary career, one that would leave him, like Mario Samigli, tantalized by the prospect of literary fame in his sixties. It all began one day in 1907, when Svevo found his tutor in the twentyfive-year-old James Joyce. Joyce had been living mostly in Trieste since 1904. He had not yet published a book, and teaching English was one of the means by which he had been keeping himself and his family (just barely) above poverty. Svevo was already the author of two novels: A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898), or Senilità. Each had been published at his own expense, and each could be said to have died without ever having been alive. The two men hit it off and, after sharing some of their work, recognized each other as the literary masters they

Illustration by Pierluigi Longo

were. According to his younger brother Stanislaus, Joyce hounded Svevo for details about his Jewish background— material he would use to create the character Leopold Bloom. (Perhaps some readers have been wondering, and the answer is yes: it was from Svevo’s wife that Joyce took the middle name for Finnegans Wake’s Anna Livia Plurabelle—for whom he also borrowed Signora Schmitz’s luxurious flow of blond hair.) But in this case of artistic friendship, it was the younger writer who would play the role of true believer and promoter to the older. Joyce praised Svevo’s two novels unreservedly, laying the blame for their extinction wholly on the stupidity of their critics. When, in 1923, Svevo published his third novel, Zeno’s Con scien ce— again at his ow n expense—and it, too, was all but ignored, he sent a copy to his old friend, now living in Paris. Svevo heard back from Joyce even before he’d finished reading it. “Why be discouraged? You must know that it is by far your best work.” Joyce instructed Svevo to send copies of the book not only to the influential critics Valéry Larbaud and Benjamin Crémieux in Paris, but also to T. S. Eliot and Ford Madox Ford in London, and to Gilbert Seldes in New York. “I will speak and write to them about it also,” he promised. By now Joyce’s own star had risen to ethereal heights, and his efforts on Svevo’s behalf bore fruit. The French response to Zeno was as hot as the Italian one had been cold. By 1926, translations, critical studies, and praise of Svevo’s work—including, apparently, the magic words “Italian Proust”—had made Svevo a celebrity. Now other foreign publishers commissioned translations, and thanks to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale, who wrote admiringly about Svevo’s work and deploringly about the shabby way his own country had treated him, Svevo found himself fêted at home as well. Zeno’s Conscience—Svevo’s first comic novel, and a departure from the realism of his previous books— was recognized as Italian literature’s great contribution to the modern European novel. Though his name would never be as famil-

iar as those of Proust, Joyce, or Woolf, like them Svevo broke with narrative tradition to place individual consciousness and its analysis at the center of his fiction. He also shared the modernists’ preoccupation with the nature of memory, and with the individual’s complex relationship to time. And, like them, he saw the need for an experimental new form, which, in the case of Zeno’s Conscience, would be— audaciously enough—that of a document written in the first person for the narrator’s psychoanalyst. For about three years, then, Svevo enjoyed the glory that he, like his character Mario, had, through decades of neglect and despair, remained convinced he was destined for. But already his health had begun to decline. A lifelong heavy smoker, he had developed a heart condition that left him too frail to survive a car accident that spared the three other passengers involved. He died the following day. Prematurely, we would say. But in the eyes of Svevo himself—one of whose main themes as a novelist was aging— sixty-six was old.

l Vegliardo (“the very old man”) was Svevo’s working title for what was meant to be a sequel to Zeno’s Conscience. Parts of the manuscript were published posthumously, in 1969, as Further Confessions of Zeno, translated by Ben Johnson and P. N. Furbank. A new translation by the late Frederika Randall, with an introduction by Nathaniel Rich, now appears as a collection of five linked stories under the title A Very Old Man. Although the stories stand well on their own, they would be even more enjoyable if read together with Zeno’s Conscience, excerpts of which are quoted here from William Weaver’s 2001 translation. Like his creator, the hero of Zeno’s Conscience, which is set in Trieste during the city’s final years under Austro-Hungarian rule, has never been able to give up smoking. Indeed, we are told that the book itself, an autobiographical project undertaken by Zeno at the age of fiftyseven, was intended to be, in part, “a historical analysis of [his] smoking habit.” A brief preface, signed by a

Doctor S., hints at what mischief lies ahead: “I am the doctor occasionally mentioned in this story, in unflattering terms. Anyone familiar with psychoanalysis knows how to assess the patient’s obvious hostility toward me.” It had been the doctor’s hope that Zeno’s writing about his past would be helpful to his treatment. Instead, to his anger, it has motivated his patient to quit. As for the memories Zeno has produced in writing (a collection of “many truths and . . . many lies,” according to Doctor S.): “I am publishing them in revenge, and I hope he is displeased.” The first chapter of the book is indeed largely devoted to Zeno’s reflections on his addiction, which nothing— not even confinement to a sanatorium—has been able to cure: a story of endless procrastination and countless deeply savored last cigarettes, all told to brilliant comic effect. Though the comedy is sustained through the following chapter, the mood darkens as Zeno looks back at his father’s death. “A great, genuine catastrophe,” Zeno declares it. “At thirty, I was finished.” (No one describes the drama of witnessing a parent’s death better than Svevo; just as powerfully observed and even more affecting than the last days of the father here are those of the hero’s beloved mother in A Life.) Freud famously called the death of the father the most important event in a man’s life. Svevo, who was drawn to Freud’s thinking even as he remained skeptical of the efficacy of psychoanalysis, has Zeno use those very words. But by “the most important event of my life” Zeno is referring not only to his father’s death, but to their hair-raising final interaction: just before he falls dead, as Zeno, following doctor’s orders, struggles to prevent him from getting out of bed, his father tries to slap Zeno in the face. Zeno cannot tell whether, in that chaotic moment, his father actually knew what he was doing, but as a consequence, his “every feeling was to be undermined for years.” In the next two chapters, Zeno recounts the history of his marriage into a rich family whose patriarch has taken him under his wing, and of his long ensuing extramarital affair.

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The Malfentis have four daughters: Ada, Augusta, Alberta, and Anna. Of the three old enough to marry, Zeno immediately dismisses any thought of Augusta, on the grounds of her bad looks, though, ironically, she wants nothing more than to be his wife. Instead Zeno lusts after Ada, the family beauty. Ada, however, loathes Zeno, and is in love with Guido, the handsome and charismatic man soon to be her husband. Zeno moves on then to Alberta, but she too rejects his proposal. And that, absurdly enough, is how he ends up marrying the one Malfenti woman he’d been determined to avoid. From here the ironies accumulate. Zeno ends up loving Augusta after all, and as her love for him never wavers, the marriage turns out to be a happy one (as Svevo’s marriage to Livia appears to have been). But despite this marital contentment, Zeno cannot stop himself from perpetually jeopardizing it. His stricken conscience is never more on display than when we find him agonizing over his enthrallment to his young mistress, an aspiring yet untalented singer named Carla. He is as incapable of breaking the habit of infidelity as he is the habit of smoking, and just as there have been all those last cigarettes, now there are countless last acts of betrayal. In fact, it is Carla who ends the affair, after she falls for her music teacher. Whereupon—what’s a man to do?—Zeno turns, albeit wallowing in remorse, to prostitutes. As it happens, it is the marriage of Ada and Guido that fails—and spectacularly. Quickly tiring of his beautiful wife, Guido, a womanizer and a gambler, all but wrecks her life. She is widowed when his fake suicide attempt (intended to get him out of a financial mess of his own making) accidentally succeeds. A further irony, and a cruel one: a flaw in Augusta’s appearance that Zeno found especially displeasing was that she had a squinty eye. Ada, on the other hand, had lovely eyes, but now a thyroid disease has caused them to bulge hideously from their sockets. Zeno’s autobiography then moves on to tell the long story of the busi-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

ness partnership he enters into with his brother-in-law, and the series of shenanigans, bordering on the burlesque, that lead to Guido’s tragicomic downfall. A final chapter returns us to the novel’s beginning, with Zeno elaborating on his unsatisfying encounter with psychoanalysis. Among other blunders, Doctor S. fails to grasp a crucial point about the pages his patient has written: The doctor “doesn’t know what it means to write in Italian for those of us who speak the dialect and can’t write it. A confession in writing is always a lie. With our every Tuscan word, we lie!” It should be said here that a major reason for the cool reception of Svevo’s work in Italy seems to have been his use of language. The prose of a writer whose native tongue was the Triestine dialect struck some critics as too far from the classic Tuscan to be literary, and his style was disparaged as unpolished and dull. Now Zeno wants his “confessions” back from the doctor so that he can rewrite them, but, as we already know, Doctor S. had other ideas. In any case, while the doctor claims that analysis has cured Zeno, Zeno insists that it has only made him more “unbalanced and sicker than ever.”

ut what exactly is this sickness that Zeno is so morbidly obsessed with, and whose painstaking analysis takes up such a large part of his story? Smoking and infidelity, for which he is supposedly in search of cures (so long as those cures don’t involve actually ceasing those activities), are only symptoms of a deeper malaise. Sickness afflicts his body as well as his mind, though some of his various physical disorders—like the limp he develops after learning that fifty-four different muscles are involved each time a person takes a step—are clearly those of a hypochondriac. Everyone can see that he is neurotic, but some suspect worse. Little Anna Malfenti demands straight out: “Is it true you’re crazy? Completely crazy?” Zeno’s father is so convinced of his son’s mental instability that he takes steps to ensure that the administration of the family business will remain in the hands of its manager,

Olivi, after his death. In the opening story of A Very Old Man, Zeno relates the aftermath of that decision. Deluding himself into thinking that he’d done a fine job running the firm during the Great War (as an Italian citizen Olivi had been forced to leave Trieste), Zeno proposes that he be allowed to continue as boss now that the war is over. Instead, after old Olivi dies of the flu, control of the firm is seized by young Olivi, a hardened veteran of the trenches and highly competent businessman who has nothing but contempt for his buffoonish employer. Zeno soon stops going to the office—and thus is his company saved. Despite (or perhaps because of) the many advantages of his bourgeois background, Zeno has accomplished little in his fifty-seven years. He studied chemistry and law as a young man, but pursued neither as a profession. He learned to play the violin, but (unlike Guido) is not very good. Inept and purposeless, a man with more than a touch of Oblomov about him, Zeno has no idea what to do with himself—except ponder his own consciousness. A craving for adventure leads him to such undertakings as his affair with Carla and his partnership with Guido, but these engender complications and adverse consequences, which in turn are followed by bouts of guilt and self-reproach. In a preamble to his manuscript, Zeno suggests that it is “a good idea to memorize your life, even the large part of it that will revolt you.” W hat might be most revolting about his own history are not his many moral failures, but his often byzantine rationalizations for them (though, it must be said, these are also some of the most entertaining parts of the book). Still smarting from the loss of Carla to a rival, Zeno’s lascivious thoughts turn to Carmen, the hot new secretary Guido has hired precisely in order to make her his mistress: A mistress shared is the least compromising mistress. . . . Becoming Carmen’s lover, I would have contributed to Ada’s well-being and I wouldn’t have harmed Augusta too much. Both

Otter Pendant would have been betrayed far less than if Guido and I had had a whole woman each.

In A Very Old Man, Zeno, now seventy, recounts his most recent affair, which took place when he was sixty-seven, “not yet a very old man.” His mistress then is the twenty-fouryear-old owner of a tobacco stall to whom he pays a monthly stipend for biweekly trysts. Of course, he would not be Zeno if he didn’t have some rich explanation: reasoning that Mother Nature will “keep an organism alive so long as there’s hope it will reproduce,” Zeno decides to trick her into thinking he’s still fit for reproduction by taking a lover. “I didn’t consider it a transgression, or a betrayal of Augusta,” he says. “That would have been peculiar: to my mind, acquiring a mistress felt like a decision akin to entering a pharmacy. “But then of course,” as always with Zeno, “the matter grew slightly more complicated.” Zeno is as anxious as ever about his bodily health, and most of his waking hours are still filled with obsessive introspection. He is still gripped by an overwhelming need to examine his memories, and to keep revising them: “The truth is, my thoughts always turn to the past, as if to correct it—well, falsify it.” He has been reading that “batch of written tales set aside for a doctor” and feels an urgent need to pick up the pen again. (It seems he was also stimulated to write by a surgical procedure involving monkey glands that was intended to rejuvenate him physically but only left him with a bad case of boils.) But whereas the first time around he wrote as a middle-aged man with a past, a present, and a future—the tense, he tells us, that used to cause him the most angst—now he has only his past and present to think about. Zeno’s relationship with Augusta has remained steadfast, though these days, we are told, she prefers “her large company of dogs, cats, and birds.” Apparently, the animals are an escape from the tension surrounding Zeno’s troubled relations with his children, and in particular with his son, Alfio.

Zeno had vowed long ago that any relationship with any son he might have would never resemble the one he had with his own father: “To this end I intended to avoid great shows of affection between myself and my son, and also shy away from playing the patriarch.” The result is that he is no father to Alfio at all. Though he appears mystified as to why Alfio holds a grudge against him, the reader knows better. Alfio is a dedicated painter, and Z eno — s omet i me s i n no c ent ly, sometimes not—tramples all over his son’s “incomprehensible” art. Zeno recalls a day when, as the family was lunching with a guest, he couldn’t resist using a painting he’d bought from Alfio as the butt of a joke. Thus, he confesses, “I offended my poor Alfio quite irreparably.” But why? As Zeno blithely explains, “I just wanted to laugh, and any topic would do.” He describes his daughter, Antonia, as suffering from such virtue as to be a bore. He has even harsher things to say about her husband, Valentino, another bore, an insufferable bureaucrat, and a weakling to boot, whose ugly looks offend Zeno (“worsening my stock, I felt”). After Valentino dies at forty from what is simply called “premature aging,” it’s Antonia’s mourning that irks Zeno, who finds her grief so extreme that he can hardly stand to be near her. Antonia’s habit of exaggeration is all the more irksome to Zeno because he believes she has inherited it from him—just as she has inherited the quality of virtuousness from her mother: “I saw myself in my daughter, twisted as she was, and not very lovable.” Similarly, Alfio’s neophyte stage in his artistic development reminds Zeno of his own early attempts to play the violin. His lifelong proclivity for self-loathing now extending to include his offspring, Zeno cannot bear the fact that “those two fools” have descended from him. He is wrung with selfpity: “It was terribly cruel, intolerable, having to see my worst defects reborn in my children.” For all his flaws, Zeno has always seemed to be an essentially kind

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person, and it is unsettling to see how his own children whet his mean side. But Svevo’s treatment of the father-child relationship is so comically deft that the reader can’t help laughing—and thus being implicated in that meanness. To make things more unseemly, Zeno positively gushes about another family member: his nephew Carlo, the son of Ada and Guido. As usual, he has an excuse: “My great affection for Carlo is partly due, certainly, to how alone my two children leave me feeling.” Zeno praises Carlo’s gracefulness and self-assurance, his success as a doctor, and above all his zest for life. He insists that Carlo is the only person with whom he has ever been able to be honest. (“And honesty is marvelously relaxing.”) It pleases him that Carlo is another womanizer, and when the topic is women, “the two of us, naughty boys, laugh a lot.” It’s a May-December bromance, the way Zeno tells it, and he is as forgiving of Carlo’s faults—which include the arrogance and callousness that characterized Carlo’s father—as he is unforgiving of the faults of Alfio and Antonia. Given the troubling portrait of Zeno as father, it is a relief to hear him expound on the great love he has always felt for his grandson, Umbertino. The boy’s childish imagination and appetite for fun uplift Zeno, and their hours spent walki ng toget her — “t he you ng dreamer and the old dreamer”—are portrayed as the sweetest moments of his old age.

elfish, feckless, self-deluded, weak-willed yet childishly willful, manipulative, slothful, and mendacious: How can such a despicable character also be such a likable one? To begin with, Zeno possesses—in abundance—three of the most desirable human qualities: intelligence, curiosity, and a sense of humor. It helps also that he is so good at being the kind of person Henry James thought a writer must try to be—one on whom nothing is lost. Certainly he is self-absorbed, but Zeno is no malignant narcissist. He knows that other people exist and have their

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

own lives, and he is genuinely interested in them. And, more often than not, other people’s suffering arouses his compassion. Like Kaf ka, whose work he revered, Svevo is a genius at inventing stories that combine the absurd with the most precise and convincing psychological realism. If one has never met anyone in real life quite like the eccentric Zeno, I can’t imagine any honest reader who won’t find in him aspects of her own revolting frailties, meticulously dissected and analyzed— and, in the end, forgiven. That is what makes reading Svevo such a prickly, and yet comforting, experience. For Svevo, life itself is a fatal pathology, the human condition a sickness for which there is no cure. There exists a treatment, however: laughter. Though the miseries of old age and fear of death are central to his late stories, a huge amount of laughter occurs in A Very Old Man. “A good laugh, now there’s something that doesn’t wear out,” Zeno reminds us. It is above all his marvelous sense of humor, along with his willingness to have us laugh at him as much as with him, that makes Zeno such lively and sympathetic company. “An easy-going disposition and a deep, good-natured laugh” is how Stanislaus Joyce described Svevo. The Soviet-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg recalled that when he met Svevo for the first time, at a dinner in his honor, Svevo was laughing—and, alas, chain-smoking. He struck Ehrenburg as “a man who was in love with life” and “an authentic living human” who “could make fun of things with kindness.” Had he been able to quit smoking, Svevo might have been strong enough to recover from the shock of his car accident. He might have finished his novel in progress, and gone on to write more books. Had he lived to be what we would consider a very old man, he might have enjoyed another thirty years of fame and glory. But then he would not have been spared the calamity visited upon his family in the Second World War: the brutal deaths of the three very young men who were his grandsons. Q

STATUS ANXIETY Has Jonathan Franzen found the key? By Alan Jacobs Discussed in this essay:

Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 592 pages. $30.

he first half of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, centers on an improbable church youth group in the near western suburbs of Chicago during the final days of 1971. The improbability is twofold. First, the group’s size: it’s enormous, drawing more than a hundred adolescents—a population one might associate with a megachurch, but not a mainline Protestant congregation in an inner suburb, which is the setting here. Alan Jacobs is the author, most recently, of Breaking Bread with the Dead, which was published last year by Penguin Press.

Second, it . . . well, it’s just not religious. There are no readings from Scripture, Jesus is scarcely mentioned, and the associate pastor who opens meetings with prayer is treated with scorn by many of the young people, and with scarcely concealed contempt by the youth pastor who runs the show. (To be fair, the widespread belief that said associate pastor is horny for at least one of the girls contributes to his low stature— and his eventual expulsion.) I would have found this scenario unbelievable if I hadn’t read Franzen’s 2006 memoir, The Discomfort

Zone, in which he reveals that a significant period of his adolescence was spent as part of precisely such a group. The real-life setting was outside St. Louis rather than Chicago, the group was called Fellowship rather than Crossroads, and the charismatic youth pastor was called Bob Mutton rather than Rick Ambrose; but clearly such a peculiar organization did exist. That said, anyone who associates Christian youth groups with Jesus-is-my-boyfriend praise songs and lectures on sexual purity might well be puzzled by Fellowship and Crossroads alike. In each group, the youth pastor creates—partly through his own self-disclosures, his own confessions of weakness and uncertainty—an environment in which young people feel that they can reveal the secrets of their hearts to their peers without condemnation. I will not say without judgment, because in both the memoir and the novel people are indeed judged when they go astray, for instance by using drugs— in The Discomfort Zone, Franzen relates an incident in which a group of students who had smoked some pot are put through a quasi-Maoist struggle session—but the possibility of reconciliation and restoration is always being held out. It’s a remarkably powerful form of group therapy, but there’s nothing Christian or even religious about it. It’s not clear that this would have bothered Franzen at the time. His interest in Fellowship was social rather than spiritual, and in this he was echoing his parents’ attitude toward religion: one of the first things he tells us about his mother is that she was a lifelong unbeliever, and that however “awkward” it might be “to sit in a church every Sunday and sing hymns to a God” in whom one doesn’t believe, this is “exactly what my parents had done on every Sunday of their adult lives.” But this was not Bob Mutton’s attitude. Mutton was the student of a man named George Benson, who argued, Franzen tells us, that to survive in an age of anxiety and skepticism, Christianity had to reclaim the radicalism of Jesus’ ministry, and the central message of the Gospels,

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in Benson’s reading of them, was the importance of honesty and confrontation and struggle.

Franzen says straightforwardly that Mutton believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and that this belief was the foundation of his ministry, but the fact remained that though the group met in a church, “whole years had gone by in which no Bible had been seen, [and] ‘Jesus Christ’ was the thing you said when somebody spilled soup on your sunburn,” raising the question: “Was this a Christian group or not?” This same question arises in Crossroads. Becky Hildebrandt, a high school junior who gets drawn into the group and for a time finds it deeply meaningful, eventually has (under the influence of her first joint) a close encounter with Jesus Christ—“I’m your girl now,” she says, “I promise”—after which she sees the youth group in a different light. Ostentatiously reading the Bible in her family’s living room, she informs her father that Crossroads is “more of a psychological experiment than Christianity. It’s teenybopper relationship drama.” But she also points out that Rick Ambrose told her that. Ambrose and his real-life counterpart Bob Mutton both seem to realize that they can either be successf ul youth g roup leaders or substa ntively Christian pastors. They opt for the former, but they aren’t entirely happy about it. Their choice is understandable; if the Gospels’ primary message was “the importance of honesty and confrontation and struggle,” then why not leave Jesus and theology out of things? There are, after all, more modern and accessible therapeutic approaches to “honesty and confrontation and struggle.” But what if our problems run deeper than that? What if there is a perversion in human nature too deep and too intractable for therapy to address? This is the suspicion of Becky’s mother, Marion, who is secretly seeing a therapist while growing ever more contemptuous of said therapist—whom she thinks of as “the

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

dumpling”—and indeed of therapy itself. When the dumpling, trying to summarize Marion’s self-image, says, “You feel you’re a bad person,” Marion snaps back, “I know I’m a bad person,” before adding, “It’s not just me, by the way. . . . I think everyone is bad. I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity.” Marion believes that her therapist’s untroubled life has allowed her to avoid facing that hard truth. The dumpling keeps returning to Marion’s feelings, a move Marion finds frivolous. When she suggests that Marion feels guilty about lying to her husband, Russ, and about a youthful sexual encounter with her landlord that the therapist quite accurately describes as rape, Marion tartly replies, “I’ve stopped feeling guilty about Russ. I certainly don’t feel guilty about the landlord. I was guilty, but that’s different from a feeling. That’s an objective fact.” Russ—the father of Becky and of their three boys—also happens to be t he a ssociate pa stor whose openly Ch ristia n a nd biblical prayers, along with his suspected horniness, get him exiled from Crossroads. He was raised in a strict Mennonite community that shunned him after he married Marion, and while he has retained the Mennonite commitment to peacemaking and social justice—he rarely fails to remind people that he went to Alabama to march for civil rights, and makes his relationship with a Navajo community in Ariz on a cent r a l to hi s pla n s for Crossroads—he has adopted a rather looser or more generous theology and moral code. Marion, who has walked this path with Russ to the extent that she even writes most of his sermons for him, nevertheless has doubts. She converted to Catholicism as a young woman, and for a time was quite fervent in her observance. It is her Catholicism that teaches her that the “objective fact” of guilt is far more important than whatever one happens to feel at any given moment: Marion had long been inspired, intellectually, by Russ’s conviction that

a gospel of love and community was truer to Christ’s teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation. But lately she’d begun to wonder. . . . She wondered if good Protestant churches like First Reformed, in placing so much emphasis on Jesus’s ethical teachings, and thereby straying so far from the concept of mortal sin, were making a mistake. Guilt at First Reformed wasn’t all that different from guilt at the Ethical Culture Society. It was a version of liberal guilt, an emotion that inspired people to help the less fortunate. For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God. He’d seen her eat six sugar cookies, and the name of her sin was gluttony.

hristianity, like most of the world’s other religions, promises two things: community and transcendence. Meaningful connection to other people, and meaningful connection to an omnipotent and benevolent God. Crossroads offers the first at the expense of the second. By contrast, more traditional forms of Christianity, like the pre−Vatican II Catholicism of Marion’s youth, offer the second in a strong but potentially unpleasant form. For those who can’t accept these terms and conditions—who are not attracted by a meaningful connection to a God who watches you eat sugar cookies and names your act Gluttony—an alternative means of transcendence is drugs. Franzen has long thought about this exchange: in a funny scene from his 2001 novel The Corrections, many pages after we learn about the Lambert family’s attachment to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books—which feature a talking lion named Aslan who is the Christ of that world—a doctor counsels Enid Lambert to give her husband an anti-anxiety medication called Aslan. (“Named, I’m told, for a mythical creature in ancient mythology.”) Sensing her uncertainty, he comments, “In fact a crippling fear of asking for Aslan is the condition for which Aslan is most commonly indicated.” In relation to the brain’s bad chemicals, “Aslan’s a fierce predator.” In short, “Aslan will help you.” The jokes write them-

selves, or would if Franzen didn’t beat them to it. In Crossroads, the third Hildebrandt child, Perry, is highly intelligent and hyperarticulate, and the sections of the book devoted to him get linguistically torqued in his mind’s direction. When fifteen-yearold Perry recalls his realization from some years earlier that, in the days just preceding Christmas, the family’s presents had to be in the house somewhere, here’s how that memory is described: And yet somehow, long past the age of understanding that presents don’t just buy and wrap themselves, he’d accepted their sudden annual appearance as, if not a miraculous provision, then a phenomenon like his bladder filling with urine, part of the normal course of things. How had he not grasped at nine a truth so obvious to him at ten? The epistemological disjunction was absolute.

Perry is also a pothead shifting into the role of dealer, and therefore, necessarily, a practiced liar. But when he decides to join Crossroads, he’s not initially being manipulative: he just thinks it sounds like fun. And indeed, when he arrives, he discovers that “to be affirmed and fondled by a roomful of peers, most of them older, many of them cute, was exceedingly pleasant. Perry wanted more of this drug.” But, as we have learned, Crossroads is all about community, even at the expense of transcendence, and Perry is a philosophical sort who, though attentive to “epistemological disjunction,” is especially concerned with metaphysics. He reflects perpetually on the nature of the soul, on what it means to have a soul. And Crossroads doesn’t feed that impulse. So while the youth group becomes a “game” for Perry to play, pot remains more central to his life (though maybe other, stronger things will succeed it). Some drugs hold out the promise of putting you in touch with the universe and with your own soul—or, and for some this may be more important, of helping you to forget you have one. Perhaps the most promising substitute for religion is sex, which offers intimate relation to another

and can certainly feel transcendent. When Russ Hildebrandt—who was not really horny for high school students but definitely is for Frances Cottrell, the woman Per r y thinks of as his friend Larry’s “foxy mother”— realizes a couple of days before Christmas that Frances is likewise attracted to him, he naturally (if comically) frames it in religious, indeed incarnational, terms: “Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy— peace on earth among all men.” Could it be that her presence in his life is a fabulously sexy Christmas present? “Wa s she t he second chance that God was giving him?” And isn’t her encouragement to forgive a man he has come to think of as an enemy a sign that God is present in their relationship? Plus, he’s dimly but strongly aware that forgiving that enemy would dramatically increase his chances of getting into Frances’s pants. Nothing in this vale of tears achieves all it promises, or all we think it promises, anyway: not drugs, not sex, not religion. In the middle of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the dying Anna summons her last reserves of energy to effect a reconciliation among herself, her husband, and her lover. It’s a magnificently moving evocation of the power of forgiveness. The only problem is that Anna recovers. The only problem is that life goes on. And after a few days she once again notices how her husband’s ears stick out and is once again annoyed by the way he cracks his knuckles. The scene is in one sense comical and in another absolutely horrifying. Crossroads features scenes like this: beautiful (and beautifully described) reconciliations that prove fragile, ecstatic moments from which the ecstasy slowly, or quickly, drains. But also agonizing experiences that prove not to swallow one’s life whole, that lose at least some of their power over their victims. The good thing, I guess, is that life goes on.

here is one common substitute for religion that you won’t find treated here: nobody in Crossroads—nobody in any of Franzen’s novels, as far as I can tell—sees

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art as a means of transcendence. Nor does Franzen himself attempt to instill in his readers the feeling of connection to something above or beyond everyday reality, even when depicting people who seek such connection. While he gives us tight close-ups of his characters’ crucial experiences— whether beatific or miserific—he always maintains a modicum of distance, just sufficient for compassionate irony. We watch closely, but we do not participate. One way to think about this is as Franzen’s allowance for a range of readerly responses. (Sometimes when a critic says that Franzen “disdains” or “has contempt for” one of his characters, I think, Are you sure you aren’t projecting?) This allowance is an element of what Franzen, in his controversial 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” calls the Contract model of fiction writing, which gestures toward a kind of community involving author and reader, as opposed to the Status model, which treats novels as high art whose aesthetic value cannot be determined by the masses. Franzen would like us to think that these names are neutral and descriptive, but of course they aren’t: they offer novelists a choice between selfinterestedly pursuing their Status in the literary world or, by contrast, descending to the world of the common folk and offering a frank, honest, nofine-print Contract to one’s potential readers. The Status writer thinks that “if the average reader rejects the work it’s because the average reader is a philistine.” The Contract writer, meanwhile, believes that every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader’s attention only as long as the author sustains the reader’s trust.

The kinds of novels Franzen writes aren’t meant to offer transcendence, but rather pleasure. Readerly pleasure for Franzen is an index of community. In that light, it’s noteworthy how much of “Mr. Difficult” concerns Franzen not as a writer but as a reader, and especially how it details his en-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

counters with Status writers of the generation before his: My problem was that, with a few exceptions, notably Don DeLillo, I didn’t particularly like the writers in my modern canon. I checked out their books . . . read a few pages, and returned them. I liked the idea of socially engaged fiction, and I was at work on my own Systems novel of conspiracy and apocalypse, and I craved academic and hipster respect of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie didn’t. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad and Brontë and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading.

But then—and you have to like Franzen for his self-irony here—he describes returning, at some point in the Nineties, to Gaddis’s legendary and massive 1955 novel, The Recognitions. He did so, he confesses, because he needed proof that he was a “serious Artist.” But, to his great surprise, he loved it—so much so that he even chose the title of his next novel, The Corrections, in homage to Gaddis’s book. What’s especially fascinating about Franzen’s encounter with Gaddis in thinking through transcendence is this: Gaddis’s protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, is the son of a minister, and plans to enter the ministry himself—until he is bowled over by an encounter with the art of Hieronymus Bosch, which promotes in him an “articulate imagination,” and enables him to envision “a domain where the agony of man took remarkable directions.” It is for him an experience of transcendence, if of a dark character. People elsewhere in The Recognitions look for, and some think they find, similarly liminal states; one might suspect that Gaddis is, in his Statusy way, offering an anatomy of the myths human beings live by. In any event, much of “Mr. Difficult” concerns Franzen’s frustration with Gaddis’s post-Recognitions career. The implicit argument is that the first novel came accompanied by at least a minimal contract, generated by some attenuated thread of concern for the reader, a thread

that had been broken by the time Gaddis published his second novel, J R, in 1975: In avoiding formal closure Gaddis risked a blunter sort of closure: exhausted readers closing his books. I was halfway through J R when I bailed out. Even then, though, his anger made me wonder: had he betrayed me, or had I betrayed him?

I find myself wondering what “halfway through” means. J R is 784 pages long: if Franzen got a little past the halfway point, say to page 417, he would have encountered a character invoking the nineteenth-century British historian Henry James Sumner Maine: “The whole God damned problem’s the decline from status to contract right Beamish? Whole God damned problem right?”

hree years ago, when he was in the early stages of writing what would become Crossroads, Franzen commented that it would be his sixth novel and probably his last, because, he told an interviewer, he doesn’t know whether any writer has more than six fully realized novels stowed away inside. Given that most of the writers he admires have published far more than six novels, one wonders whom he’s tweaking with such a statement. But in any case, Crossroads, we are now told, is the first volume of a trilogy. (Perhaps if he describes the project, as Tolkien did with The Lord of the Rings, as a single novel broken into three parts, he can still hew to the magic number.) The trilogy is called A Key to All Mythologies, which is the title that Edward Casaubon, the desiccated and impotent scholar manqué of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, gives to the project he thinks of as his life’s work, though of course he doesn’t live to complete it. The title is very much in the spirit of Franzen’s comments about his work, which almost always walk a skinny line between self-regard and self-irony, and in this case, as I have already hinted, may be a tip of the cap to Gaddis’s ambitions in The Recognitions. But it’s a provocative formulation. What might it suggest, as we envision two further

books bringing the story toward the present moment? I think Crossroads—set between December 1971 and the spring of 1974—documents the last breaths of a liberal Protestant cultural synthesis that dominated much of the twentieth centur y in America. There’s a very good reason why the most eloquent chronicler of liberal Protestantism’s best impulses, Marilynne Robinson, sets her version of its story in the Fifties. By the Seventies, mainstream American Christianity was striving, and failing, to incorporate the forces that instead would overcome it. Franzen’s description of the youth group insightfully depicts this dissolution: Crossroads still exists by the end of the book, but one suspects that it isn’t long for this world. Becky Hildebrandt’s performative Bible study suggests one element of the future. In 1976, the Bible-reading Jimmy Carter was elected president, and Newsweek magazine declared “The Year of the Evangelicals.” One character in Crossroads has had an abortion, and while she keeps it a secret, it’s not clear whether it was then shameful in precisely the same way as it would later become, at least within Protestant subcultures. Her secret may have been the price at which a needed reconciliation was purchased, but of course such secrets, insofar as they avoid “honesty and confrontation and struggle,” subvert the reconciliations they enable. Again, life goes on, and chapters of life that we thought were fully written often turn out to have postscripts. Russ and Marion Hildebrandt are, in rather different ways, seriously and thoroughly Christian in their life and thought, but the same cannot be said for their children. Becky’s conversion is deeply felt but shallowly rooted; Perry’s drug-fueled or drugdulled metaphysical explanations are untouched by Christianity; the oldest son, Clem, appears not to have a religious bone in his body; and the youngest child, Judson, remains at this point a cipher to the reader. But none of these positions seem stable: the ready availability of sex, drugs, and endless permutations of reli-

gion and what we have learned to call “spirituality” see to that. Anyone could end up anywhere (which is what the Seventies felt like to those of us who lived through them). All the mythologies were on the table; the possibilities had exploded into what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a supernova of life choices and potential lifeworlds. An important question, for me, is whether Franzen’s novelistic technique is sufficient for the task of exploring these developments. Since The Corrections, he has employed the same basic method with rare deviations. A chapter is told in the third person but from the perspective of a single character, the next chapter centers on another character, and so on. (In Crossroads, each of the five major characters—all the Hildebrandts except Judson—gets several chapters, in strict sequence.) The title of the book is touched on from time to time, to remind the reader of its themes. (“All of her correction had been for naught.” “You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.” A young woman who, though called Pip, is named Purity. Repeated references to Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues.”) As befits a Contract novelist, Franzen has resisted the kinds of formal experimentation and, as we have seen, lack of “formal closure” that characterizes the writers from whom, he says, he has learned the most: Kafka, Gaddis, DeLillo. In sticking with this single method, and writing consistently about characters who, like him, are white and were raised in Midwestern suburbia, Franzen oddly resembles Jane Austen, who commented that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,” and who completed precisely six fully realized novels. That confinement and focus worked out just fine for her, it’s safe to say, and similar confinements have served other writers equally well. But Austen never claimed, even semi-ironically, to offer a Key to All Mythologies. What Franzen’s narrative method suggests is a reality in which relatively coherent and bounded psyches look

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out onto a world that offers them a range of choices for action and meaning; the psyches select from these options, and later on repent of or are grateful for their selections. The best Status novelists doubt that this is how things work. Like St. Paul—whose ideas had considerable purchase in many youth groups over the past few decades—these writers perceive a world ruled by dark “principalities and powers,” forces not so much inhuman as simultaneously subhuman and transhuman: subtle, sinuous agents, always quietly at work, shaping both the mythologies available to us and our responses to them. When the Boston pastor Eugene Rivers said in 2018 that white supremacy can only be understood within the terms established by St. Paul—as the product of demonic powers—he was making a point whose essential character the best of our Status novelists would certainly grasp, and perhaps even accept. The Christianity in Crossroads does not have access to that terrifying vision, or to any other that doubts the basic integrity of our powerconstituted selves. (The question of whether any of our choices is right or true goes, I think, unasked by Franzen, and for that matter by the Status novelists with whom he contrasts himself, with the possible exception of his friend David Foster Wallace. This sets them apart from novelists of the previous century such as Dostoevsky, whom Franzen loves and about whom Wallace wrote with great intensity and acuity.) “Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the bal-

ance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck,” says a character in DeLillo’s Underworld, an artist reflecting on the end of the Cold War: Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.

In such an inscrutable world—one where we neither make nor sign our Contracts, but rather are made and signed ourselves by powers we can’t clearly discern—what mythologies are adequate to our experience and our need? It’s a question that would be well grasped by the protagonists of Pynchon’s recent novels (Doc Sportello, Maxine Tarnow) and by Gaddis’s financial prodigy J R Vansant, but it’s not clear that it’s accessible to either Franzen’s characters or his readers. And this may be the price paid, not so much for the writing of Contract novels, but rather for having defined the contrast between Contract and Status as Franzen has. What if the determination to reject the complexities of Status narratives entails a failure to represent the forces really at work in shaping our lives? I enjoyed Crossroads quite a lot, and look forward to the next installment in the series; but my fear is that Franzen will write a very long and ambitious trilogy that is disabled, by its very narrative method, from achieving what its author wants to achieve. Q

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HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

PUZZLE 1

PLACEHOLDERS By Richard E. Maltby Jr.

inguistically, the eight unclued entries, hinted at separately, might all be considered 1A. Clued answers include four proper nouns and one common medical acronym. The entry at 36D is a logical coinage; 6D is uncommon, as is 19A—but what a great word! As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last month’s puzzle appears on page 55.

6 13

21. 22. 25. 26. 29. 30. 31. 34. 35. 39. 41. 42. 43. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

15 18

17 19 22

20 24

29 32

33 35

40 42

47 49

(See instructions) A dog run—with a twist, on the rocks (7) E.g., rubbers rule where this is what’s heard! (8) (See instructions) One of the birds, each with a broken leg (5) Having entered in, tiptoe, I’ll adeptly look, carrying an invitation (8) Billy Crystal, looking undersized, bypassed leads (4) Twist of fates in a pop singer (7) One full of a lot of hot air can’t end an illness (3) (See instructions) Don’t start work in Grease? (3) Wine gives support—dine out (4) Hug somebody (but not me), sending off American soldiers (9) Nerdiest resident (your choice) might get moved in (8) Criminal admits being in a crowd (6) There’s little room in a satellite for a believer (6) A letter from Einstein redressed meanest right of passage (8) Inroad into command? (6) Howard’s End? (4) Sci-fi performer acted outside, role being cut in half (5) With no help, after dancing around, debutante comes out! (9) Cuts rotations after rotation (5) Maintain dropping names gets you a drink (3, 3) College kid contributes to getting very alienated (5) Something bitter that’s good with everything (4) (See instructions) Killed a lot of people (4)

27 30

across 1. 12. 14. 15. 17. 19.

unclued entries a. Stiffening element in European carpentry? b. Support for Asian streetwalkers? c. European fisticuffs? d. African lunch? e. What’s to come in Eastern Europe? f. Where to park kids in North Africa? g. Is this a policy in Western Europe? h. Bulgogi?

52 54

down 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 13. 16. 18. 20. 22. 23. 24. 27. 28. 32. 33. 36. 37. 38. 40. 44. 45. 46.

Heads for cover, always keeping ecofriendly sun-blocks (5) Hashtag? Don’t get me started! Muddled, I’m afraid (6) (See instructions) One student sounds like a lot playing together (5) Later on, after a number . . . (4) . . . leaders from old royal militia outfit line up for a dazzling finish (6) Card game for a worker in the cooler (3-3) Misfiled background? (5) Entre nous, not one American leaving for church indicates “Dig in!” (8) (See instructions) Afraid, not wanting to start gossip (6) (See instructions) (See instructions) Chat all about a hormone (4) Chianti, with tune playing—it’s not real! (11) Drub Kismet—its diversified elements cause speechlessness (6, 4) Canned fruit—one piece of it put out (5) (See instructions) Show a kind of pluck? This, pet, is a loose woman (5) Clearly a suitable mascot for a two-party system! (4) Solve the mystery of Voldemort’s identity? (8) Covers garbage can with dents (8) More gloomy housing, possibly for roomers (7) Emulate Seurat—drinks too much, last to first (7) Groups of animals having a good time around a cage—nothing odd in that! (6) God! Laid up? You might want this when you retire! (6) Exposition that’s just so-so! (4) Your boyfriend sounds like this? Not! (4) Perfect? Not I! Give me a hand! (4)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “Placeholders,” Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. If you already subscribe to Harper’s, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by October 8. The sender of the first correct solution opened at random will receive a one-year subscription to Harper’s Magazine (limit one winner per household per year). The winner’s name will be printed in the December issue. The winner of the August puzzle, “Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves),” is Scott Richardson, St. Joseph, Minn. PUZZLE

FINDINGS C limate change will benefit rattlesnakes. A 1972 MIT model predicting societal collapse in the twentyfirst century continued to prove prescient, coastal flooding in the 2030s will be exacerbated by the wobbling of the moon, the stratosphere shrank by 400 meters between 1980 and 2018, and the cryosphere shrank by 3.2 million square kilometers between 1979 and 2016. The lead author of a study in The Cryosphere called saving the Greenland ice sheet by injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere “a plan B that is not!” The carbon released annually by feral pigs’ rooting in the ground is equivalent to the emissions of 1.1 million cars. In a fifteen-hour period, pyrocumulonimbus clouds in western Canada produced 710,117 flashes of lightning, including 112,803 ground strikes. The permafrost of Svalbard is becoming less seismically active as the Arctic warms. Scientists warned that we may be approaching an irreversible or poorly reversible plastic-pollution threshold. Easter Island never experienced a demographic implosion. RhGB01, a novel coronavirus, was discovered among British bats, and 15,000-year-old viruses were extracted from Tibetan glacier ice.

F rozen feces in Alaska revealed evidence of sled dog cannibalism. New-world rabbits were never domesticated, though rabbits found in the stomachs of Aztec sacrificial eagles and pumas appear to have been raised by humans and fed a diet rich in corn or cactus. Researchers who gave ayahuasca to a group of Israelis and Palestinians were optimistic about its potential for peace-building. Lisdexamfetamine can treat daydreaming. Multiple rounds of ketamine anesthesia or light flickering at 60 Hz can induce childlike brain plasticity in mice, and a single dose of psilocybin makes them less depressed and creates strong neural connections. An Indian woman presented with multiday visual hallucinations

after being bitten by a Russell’s viper. Ambient environmental levels of methamphetamine are sufficient to cause addiction among brown trout. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service renamed Asian carp “invasive carp,” and Australian experts pushed to rename shark attacks “negative encounters.” A 450-million-year-old trilobite showed signs of having survived a stab in the eye by a giant sea scorpion.

D anes’ ability to smell fried meat, but not vanilla, declines with age. Wisdom tooth extraction results in

a 3 to 10 percent improvement in taste precision two decades later. Researchers concluded that preschool girls’ and boys’ engagement with “princess culture” correlated with “lower adherence to norms of hegemonic masculinity and higher body esteem” in early adolescence. A study of NYPD precincts found that the opening of an adult-entertainment business led to a 13 percent drop in reported sex crimes the following week. Male jackdaws fail to console female life partners who have been subjected to forcible mating attempts. Vampire bats have a highly fluid social order, and place little value on sustained dominance. Being a trash parrot is a learned behavior. Dog puppies can intuit human meanings, whereas wolf puppies cannot. Researchers worried that regionally specific cattle adaptations were being lost amid a nationalized market for bull semen. The Warlis’ belief in the leopard-tiger god Waghoba was found to defuse human-leopard conflict. Wolbachia bacteria make mosquitoes more heat- sensitive. Rat snakes were used to gauge post-Fukushima radionuclide levels in the Abukuma Highlands, and hedgehogs with transmitter backpacks were found hibernating at unexpectedly high altitudes. Storks are attracted to the smell of freshly mown meadows. Mammals about to be born dream of the world to come. Q

Photographs by Thirza Schaap from the monograph Plastic Ocean, which was published in April by 1605 Publishers © The artist. Courtesy Bildhalle, Zurich and Amsterdam 96

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2021

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