Summer 2023 The American Scholar

Citation preview

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Ann Beattie X Bill Roorbach X Sarah Ruden X Tamara Dean X Vidyan Ravinthiran X David Owen

Summer 2023 / $9.95 / Published by PHI BETA KAPPA

The Spying

Dutchman Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s observations more than 300 years ago remain vital in the age of Covid-19 L AU R A J . S N Y D E R

We are honored by your commitment. The Phi Beta Kappa Society is grateful for the support of our members. We extend special thanks to members of The Secretary’s Circle for your generous commitment to the liberal arts and sciences, and to the work of the Society. We thank you. For more information on how to join The Secretary’s Circle, please visit our website at PBK.org under the tab “Get Involved.”

Gold Laureates

Silver Laureates

$10,000+

$5,000 - $9,999

Mr. Ronald D. Abramson Ms. Patricia Bauman Mrs. Madeline H. Caviness Carl F. Cranor Denise & Gary David Ms. Julie Jarecke Gebauer Dr. Judy Genshaft & Mr. Steven Greenbaum Mrs. Ethel Caro Gofen Jon & Mindy Gray Family Foundation Ms. Linda Greenhouse Mrs. Judith L. Hardardt Neil Ann Stuckey Levine, Ph.D. Jonathan E. Lewis Simon Michael Lorne David G. Oelberg, M.D. Dr. Peter H. Quimby Jeanette and Eli Reinhard Richard & Lesley Stone Family Fund

Mr. Edward Reeves Adams Ms. Patricia Bauman Ms. Margret A. Beekel Leonor Sherman Chernila Mrs. Valerie Edwards Mr. Robert M. Falzon Mr. Kent Brian Graziano, Jr. Ms. Lise Marie Liddell Mrs. Judith C. McDowall Harry & Macey Reasoner Ms. Lillie T. Robertson Dr. Judith Rae Shapiro Dr. Jasvinder Singh Sidhu, MD Mr. Erik Ryan Simpson Dr. Madelyn Gonnerman Torchin Bruce & Irmgard Willock Mr. Robert Zauper

Continued on the inside back cover.

CONTENTS

Features

18 A Kingdom of Little Animals By Laura J. Snyder

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms made possible the revolutionary advances in biology and medicine that continue to inform our Covid age

30 The Whole World in His Hands By David Stromberg

What a digital restoration of the most expensive painting ever sold tells us about beauty, authenticity, and the fragility of existence

40 Night Vision By Tamara Dean

On finding comfort and purpose in the dark

52 The Lives of Bryan By Jennifer Sinor

My brother often eluded death, but the many trials that he endured could not prepare us for that awful moment when he finally left us

63 Last Dance By Julian Saporiti

At a World War II internment camp, George Igawa entertained thousands of incarcerated Japanese Americans—while teaching a band of novices how to swing

72 The Color of Dust By Patrick Tripp

Sometimes even a team of radiation oncologists and neurosurgeons can be mystified by the strange workings of the human brain

82 Projections of Life By David Owen

Memories of a Midwestern childhood and the stories only pictures can tell

“Darkness made equals of poor and wealthy, servants and masters, women and men. … For the less powerful, darkness and the ability to navigate celestially meant freedom.”—Tamara Dean, “Night Vision,” p. 40

Departments

2

EDITOR’S NOTE TUNING UP

3

6

7

False Prophets By Sharon Sochil Washington Freud Airlines By Judith D. Schwartz and Tony Eprile Putting the Story Back in History By Robert Zaretsky

9

Dancing With Deneuve By James Conaway

12

A Room for the Ages By Colin Dickey

14

Get Me Rewrite! By Eric Wills

P O E T RY 48 In the Aftermath of Civil War By Langdon Hammer 49 Six Poems By Vidyan Ravinthiran FICTION 90 One Look Back By Ann Beattie 101 Epithalamium By Bill Roorbach BOOKS 112 ES SAY: Will the Real Vergil Please Stand Up? By Sarah Ruden Making sense of the life of a poet about whom we know so little R EV I E WS :

O N T H E C OV E R:

Illustration by Doug Chayka

115 Frontline Oracle By Elizabeth D. Samet

117 We Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet By Priscilla Long 119 Family Tatters By Jon Zobenica 120 Don’t Forget Intuition By Sam Kean 122 Shell Shock and Awe By Henry Allen 123 Notes and Outtakes By Robert Wilson 124 Someone’s Gotta Do It By Lydia Moland

126 C O M M O N P L A C E BOOK Collected by Anne Matthews

128 A N N I V E R S A R I E S Remembering Lady Snowblood

SUMMER 202 3

1

EDITOR’S NOTE

TH E

SUDIP BOSE Editor

Editing Ted

BRUCE FALCONER Executive Editor

STEPHANIE BASTEK Senior Editor

JAYNE ROSS Associate Editor

DAVID HERBICK Design Director

SANDRA COSTICH Editor-at-Large

LANGDON HAMMER Poetry Editor

SUDIP BOSE

SALLY ATWATER Copy Editor

PETER QUIMBY

e recently learned that Edward Hoagland’s “On Aging” (Spring 2022) will be included in this year’s Best American Essays anthology, edited by Vivian Gornick. It’s a lovely honor for Hoagland, a Scholar contributing editor whose career has spanned nearly seven decades, as well as for Robert Wilson, our long-time editor, for it was in Bob’s final issue before his retirement that “On Aging” appeared. I had the opportunity to edit an essay of Hoagland’s more than a decade ago, but because he had, by that time, lost nearly all of his eyesight, our usual process had to be adapted significantly. The only way for us to go over the edit was for me to read the manuscript to him on the phone; he would tell me what changes he wanted to make, and I’d mark them on the page. This turned out to be something of an ordeal—slowly reading 6,000 words (punctuation too), all with a miserable cold that had me coughing and sneezing throughout. Often, after I’d read a sentence to him, Hoagland would repeat it back to me, as if he were measuring it, judging the weight of each word, before

W

2

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

making subtle changes when the rhythm wasn’t quite satisfactory to him. And when he rewrote sentences, sometimes even whole passages, they always seemed to emerge note-perfect—his occasional stammer barely slowing him down. It was a master class in style, voice, and nuance. When I told him how much I enjoyed the lilt of a particular sentence, he responded, “Yes, that is pretty good, isn’t it.” Our work took the better part of the day, mainly because Hoagland’s memory so often went scampering, and much of what he’d written reminded him of one story or another from his past. He told me of his experiences in the circus, of his many trips to Africa, of the time he’d ridden a boxcar on a cross-country jaunt. Though taxing, the experience was one of the most instructive and memorable of my professional life. Before I hung up the phone late that afternoon, I mentioned the title I had come up with for his essay: “The Gravity of Falling.” He paused for several seconds and then said, “I like that.” Thus did our long day end, with a simple affirmation, laconic and firm. O

Consulting Editor

Contributing Editors

Ann Beattie, Emily Bernard, Lincoln Caplan, Clellan Coe, William Deresiewicz, Allen Freeman, Adam Goodheart, Anthony Grafton, Edward Hoagland, Ann Hulbert, David Lehman, Thomas Mallon, Anne Matthews, Cullen Murphy, Patricia O’Toole, Phyllis Rose, Neil Shea, Wendy Smith, Jean Stipicevic, Jay Tolson, Charles Trueheart, Ted Widmer, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Robert Wilson, Brenda Wineapple FREDERICK M. LAWRENCE Publisher

STEVEN ANDERSON Associate Publisher

Advisory Board

Allison Blakely, Fred H. Cate, Andrew Delbanco, Joseph W. Gordon, Donald S. Lamm, Judith R. Shapiro, Ayanna Thompson THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR® is published quarterly for a general readership by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1606 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20009. Our offices are currently closed; please contact us at [email protected]. To subscribe or to order single copies, call (800) 8214567 or visit theamericanscholar.org. Subscription rates: for individuals, $29 one year, $55 two years; for institutions, $30 one year, $58 two years. For Canadian subscriptions, add $10 a year for postage; for other international subscriptions, add $25 a year for postage. Single copies, $10 (Canada, $12; other international, $15). For advertising, contact: Steven Anderson, [email protected], (202) 7453247. Newsstand distribution through Disticor Magazine Distribution Services. For information: Dawn Cresser ([email protected]); phone (516) 837-0832; fax (516) 825-8290. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright ©2023 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. ISSN 0003-0937. Periodical postage paid at Washington, DC, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to: THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, P.O. Box 460430, Escondido, CA 92046-9843. Opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. To raise additional revenues, we may make our mailing list available to select organizations. If you don’t want your name included, contact: THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, P.O. Box 460430, Escondido, CA 92046-9843.

Tuning Up False Prophets A recent film about a Black megachurch is often hilarious, but its flaws reside in the story it doesn’t tell | SHARON SOCHIL WASHINGTON

SECTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY MATT ROTA

6

Freud Airlines Judith D. Schwartz and Tony Eprile

7

Putting the Story Back in History Robert Zaretsky

9

Dancing With Deneuve James Conaway

12

A Room for the Ages Colin Dickey

14

Get Me Rewrite! Eric Wills

he way my mother told the story, my birth was a miracle. Diagnosed with terminal cancer six months into the pregnancy, she was not expected to live to the end of the nine-month term. Doctors told her that if she were to have an abortion, she might live an additional 18 months. She declined, and the doctors sent her home to die, unable to do anything further. My mother called for her pastor to come and lay hands on her in a prayer of healing. The following Sunday, she entered the little white church across the street from our house, where, she said, the Holy Spirit told her to play the piano. My mother was a classical pianist before joining the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, where the music was fast, uninhibited, and sensational. She had never quite learned to play it—the music was not written down—but on that day, the church needed a musician and Momma was there, so at the urging of the Holy Spirit, she made her way to the piano. A woman began singing one of the fastest songs in the church’s repertoire, a calland-response number that can be never-ending. God’s not dead, the

T

SUMMER 202 3

3

Tu n i ng Up

song leader calls out. He’s yet alive, the audience responds. As the story goes, my mother then lifted her hands—her arms leaden, her muscles weak, her body wracked with pain—and began to play that old piano, for 10 minutes, 20, maybe more. And somewhere in the middle of that service, my mother, who had barely been able to walk, suddenly rose from the bench and began to run around the circumference of the small church in ecstatic praise, as was customary among the congregants imbued with the spirit. The following week, my mother returned to the doctors and learned that her cancer was in remission. She would live another 24 years. Whatever the truth behind her recovery, my mother’s story is the kind of experience common to that distinct American institution known as the Black church. For enslaved people and their descendants, the Black church became a substitute for the cultural, spiritual, and religious institutions that had anchored West African communities for thousands of years. The Black church is intimately connected to family and to one’s identity, providing a strong centering mechanism for a people historically deprived of justice and well-being. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, African Americans took the religion of their “masters” and “made it their own through a flowering of denominations that [ran] the gamut from the AME Church to the Church of God in Christ to so many storefront sanctuaries that remain a key refuge for many in hard times.” It isn’t surprising that the civil rights movement, one of the most important episodes in 4

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

American history, was born in the Black church. But the evolution of this institution, from the smallest houses of worship to the megachurches of the present, has come with its share of hypocrisy and scandal. Take Eddie Lee Long, who in the 2000s faced allegations of sexual misconduct and financial impropriety during his tenure as senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in DeKalb County, Georgia. I was thinking of Long (who died in 2017) as well as my mother’s story of healing as I watched the 2022 comedy Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. Jordan Peele is an executive producer of this daring film, which stars Sterling K. Brown as Lee-Curtis Childs and Regina Hall as Trinitie Childs, the pastor and first lady of a Black megachurch that sees most of its congregation flee after the pastor’s sexual liaisons with several young men come to light—the film is indeed based on the story of Eddie Lee Long. Honk for Jesus is an important film—the first of its kind. And only now, at a time when Black filmmakers are finally able to tell a range of stories about Black Americans, could a film exploring such a subject have been made. That Jordan Peele’s name is attached to the project doesn’t hurt. With his ability to mingle elements of different genres (he’s as comfortable with horror as he is with comedy), Peele has the audacity to question everything associated with the establishment. Adamma Ebo, who wrote and directed Honk for Jesus, and her sister, Adanne, who produced it, skillfully examine the self-delusion of people who feel

compelled—and in their minds, divinely inspired—to rise to seemingly untouchable positions of leadership. They depict what some people responsible for the spiritual well-being of thousands of others will do to stay in power and justify their calling. This, then, is the conundrum: the Black church—as a cultural icon of uncritical devotion—must survive if it is to continue to be the safe harbor it has always been. Somewhere along the way, however, the job of leading a congregation becomes soured by devastating hypocrisy, and a Sunday morning service turns into showtime, a word that Lee-Curtis uses before every service. That doesn’t mean that Honk for Jesus isn’t sympathetic to the Black megachurch—far from it. “A lot of the times when this subject is approached,” Adamma Ebo has said, the treatment is “judgmental and demonizing. … The reality for a lot of people, including myself [is]: you hear some of these folks speak and you’re like, ‘This means something to me, this moves me.’ And I feel like that sort of perspective hasn’t really been shown, how lovely it is and can be.” The style of the film is mockumentary, and within the first 15 minutes, Lee-Curtis and Trinitie are introducing us to the people they call “our real followers … they stuck by us even with all the awfulness.” Cut to a portrait of four adults and one child sitting in a huge edifice meant to hold more than 20,000 people—a moment at once heartbreaking and hilarious. The scene that follows only intensifies those conflicting emotions. A caption on screen reads, “Wednesday Church Service,” and we see

those same five church members, with Lee-Curtis laying hands on the youngest among them, Aria Devaughn (brilliantly played by Selah Kimbro Jones), the spirit supposedly channeling through him. Aria responds by falling backward, the spirit now supposedly coursing through her. Cut abruptly to Aria talking to the mockumentary filmmakers. “I love the theater!” she exclaims. Scenes such as this one offer a brilliant critique of the performative aspects of the Black church, but it falls short in one crucial way: it doesn’t provide any understanding of why these theatrical aspects have been so much a part of Sunday service. Without helping the viewer understand certain aspects of the Black church’s iconography and cultural significance, humor and satire can easily fall flat. How do we protect the legacy of an institution that continues to perform necessary civil rights work while also exposing the harm it has inflicted on its members? This is the essential question that the film largely ignores. The church to which my mother attributed my miraculous birth is also the church that refused to ordain her (or any woman) as a minister. Its members were coerced into making the church paramount in their lives, even at the expense of their families and households—many of our neighbors couldn’t pay their utility bills because they gave their money to the church. When my mother spoke up and refused to accept these traditions, she was kicked out. There is a scene in Honk for Jesus that epitomizes the pain that can come out of such coercion.

How do we protect the legacy of an institution that continues to perform necessary civil rights work while also exposing the harm it has inflicted on its members? This is the essential question that the film largely ignores.

Lee-Curtis is shown persuading Trinitie to put on whiteface makeup and perform a mime dance on the street—to get cars to honk for Jesus, which she does because that’s what she’s supposed to do as the pastor’s wife. The film cuts to Trinitie telling the filmmakers how humiliating it is for her, the first lady of the church, to don that mask and dance, all to save face for her husband, while he is perfectly willing to see her reputation and self-esteem put at risk. Trinitie and her mother (Avis-Marie Barnes) represent real women in the church tradition, women who have often had to accept what was dictated to them by men, without question or compromise. I once worked as a consultant, helping top-level executives at nonprofit and governmental agencies sort through various crises. One organization, a housing corporation that sought to help Houston’s homeless population, was founded by the church to which I belonged. Because I was offering advice to the man who was also my pastor,

I initially did not charge a fee. But the work evolved into an extensive two-year project, and during that time, I drew from my bank account to help reconcile the organization’s debts—I took neither a salary nor benefits with the understanding that I’d be reimbursed later. I never was, in full. Of course, the church is hardly the only American institution capable of taking advantage. But my deep spiritual connection to the church—a connection that pre-dates my birth, stemming from the story of my mother’s miracle—had allowed me to enter into a decidedly bad relationship. After that experience, I left the church, though I am no less interested in its enduring influence in people’s lives. As an anthropologist, I am able to place the church’s flaws in context. Some people might witness a congregant running in ecstatic circles, moved by the Holy Spirit, and wonder why in the world any intelligent, thinking person would participate in such a farce. I know, however, that these rituals evolved from Yoruba practices brought to the Americas by enslaved West Africans. I am acutely aware of the Black church’s connection to my past—the spiritual, cultural, and historical gravity of what it represents. This is ultimately what’s lacking in Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, despite its laughout-loud moments of comedic genius. Without the perspective of what the Black church has meant over the centuries, all we have is empty farce. O SHARON SOCHIL WASHINGTON has a PhD in cultural anthropology and is the author of The Educational Contract as well as the novel The Blue Is Where God Lives.

SUMMER 202 3

5

Tu n i ng Up

Freud Airlines Now boarding, all passengers, Flight 1900 to Vienna | JUDITH D. SCHWARTZ AND TONY EPRILE

elcome to Freud Airlines. Your psyche is our highest priority. Do not accept any personal baggage from someone you don’t know. If anyone tries to give you an unsolicited diagnosis, please alert the gate attendant. Be advised that frequent-flyer miles from Air Jung are no longer accepted at Freud Airlines. We will be boarding our fivestar analysands first, the order determined by the number of years spent in psychoanalysis. Any unaccompanied inner children should get in line now. We will next board our paranoid passengers. (We know who you are.) If you have multiple personalities, you may now all board together. A list of upgraded passengers can be found on the monitor. If your name is not listed, you will have to tolerate your envy or find a more adaptive defense, like sublimation or dark humor. Sarcasm toward the gate therapist will be recognized as transference, and will therefore be analyzed ad infinitum. Narcissists seated in the main cabin may not use the first-class cabin, even if you think you belong there. Superegos too large to fit in the overhead bin will need to be gate-checked before boarding and may be claimed upon arrival. Please wait until we are at our snoozing altitude and the seatbelt

W

6

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

sign has been turned off before stretching out on your couch. If you happen to fall sleep, feel free to press the service call button upon waking so that a steward with a notepad and illegible handwriting can interpret your dream. The cabin attendants will be serving sacher torte and cocaine shortly after takeoff. Passengers are requested not to let their particular phobias disturb other passengers. Smoking and other solitary vices are not permitted anywhere on the

plane. Fantasies are allowed, as are fetishes, although anything violent or creepy—like the desire to have sex with your mother and murder your father—should remain carefully stowed in the unconscious, now located in the compartment above you. Be aware that contents may shift during the flight. Our journey will last precisely 50 minutes. Make sure that your seatbelt is properly fastened and snug around your waist. If you happen to be obsessive-compulsive, you may want to check it again. And again. And again. We are anticipating some unsettled weather. In case of turbulence, be sure to take your Xanax pill yourself before offering pharmaceutical assistance to those sitting near you. We will be landing in Vienna

shortly. Raise your egos to their full uptight position. Please check the seat pocket for any personal defenses you might need. The stewards will do one final runthrough to collect all remaining neuroses, compulsions, and inadvertent slips of the tongue. Upon arrival, please head to the baggage claim area, where your guilt, fears, and complexes

will be waiting for you at Carousel Sechs. Be careful to identify and retrieve yours, because many cases look alike. Thank you for flying Freud Airlines. We know you have the illusion of free will when it comes to choosing a carrier. And a final, friendly note from your cabin crew: some may find the notion of a sleek aircraft jetting through

Putting the Story Back in History Hayden White on truth, facts, and the allure of a well-told tale | ROBERT ZARETSKY

ne afternoon 40 years ago, soon after beginning graduate work in history at the University of Virginia, I was sitting at a study carrel with a pile of books and a stack of index cards. The latter, I had learned, was one of the historian’s most important tools—so important, in fact, that a renowned professor whose specialty was the Austro-Hungarian army devoted an entire class to telling us how to fill one in correctly. Now this strikes me as comical, but back then it struck me as comforting: having studied philosophy as an undergrad, I yearned for the kind of clarity custom-made for a three-by-five card. Whereas philosophical questions led only to more questions, historical questions led to the archives, where answers waited to be unearthed. Deep down,

O

I believed what my professor believed—that we could know the past as it really was and depict it accurately in our writing. Yet my unquestioned faith in history began to erode that day in the library. Among the books I had stacked in the carrel was Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. If I really wanted to be a historian, White’s book suggested, I needed to care less about facts (though they remained important) and care more about fiction. It was time to put down the index cards and pick up, well, novels. In doing so, White promised, I would discover that fiction is the writing of history by other means—the best means. This year, Metahistory turns half a century old. Its appearance was hailed as revolutionary, at least

virgin space as symbolic. But before you get too worked up about this, recall the insight of our illustrious father figure: “Sometimes a plane is just a plane.” O JUDITH D. SCHWARTZ is an environmental journalist whose most recent book is The Reindeer Chronicles and Other Inspiring Stories of Working with Nature to Heal the Earth. TONY EPRILE is the author of Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories and the novel The Persistence of Memory.

in certain quarters. In an early review, the philosopher of history Louis Mink anointed it the “book around which all reflective historians must reorganize their thoughts about” the subject. More recently, Brian Fay, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, declared that the book “marked a decisive turn in philosophical thinking about history.” Meanwhile, academic historians hardly gave it a glance. They continued to do what I was learning to do: assemble, analyze, and arrange their source material into a causal narrative that captured the truth of past events. As for the author of Metahistory, he was shunned—in the words of Allan Megill, a historian at UVA, as a bête noire, less a historian than a literary critic. White was not some outsider crashing into the historians’ guild without the proper credentials. He was a practicing, if relatively obscure, medievalist, and his background proved apt. In effect, White cast his fellow historians as modernday alchemists who thought they could transform the dross of ancient documents into the gold of historical reality. Instead, he argued, there is no reality to be made or found. Reality goes no further or deeper SUMMER 202 3

7

Tu n i ng Up

than the stories we shape about the past. “The differences between a history and a fictional account of reality,” White announced in one of his many essays, “are matters of degree rather than of kind.” After all, when historians write history, they deploy the tropes of the novelist: metonymy, irony, and what White called, rather clunkily, “emplotments”—that is, the arrangement of past events into organized structures that come in a variety of flavors: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. Without such tricks, historians could never make their accounts take flight from the page. For White, Jules Michelet’s account of the French Revolution rivaled Victor Hugo for its romantic rhetoric, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s rendering of that same event was a tragedy worthy of Racine. “Neither the reality nor the meaning of history is ‘out there’ in the form of a story,” White declared. Instead, history “is a work of construction rather than of discovery.” If this assertion carries the whiff of existentialism, there is good reason. In the early postwar years, as he himself often mentioned in later interviews, White was conquered by the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. In one interview he gave soon after turning 80, he observed that Sartre “was one of my intellectual heroes.” And just as for Sartre, for whom there was no universal or transcendental basis for the moral choices we must make, so too for White: though we have no objective basis for preferring one vision of the past over another, it remains for each of us to choose and commit to one. As White wrote in his 1966 essay “The Burden of 8

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

History,” we “choose our past in the same way that we choose our future.” Indeed, each individual must determine “how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future.” Historians who instead insist that the past should be studied for its own sake are not innocent of bias but instead guilty of bad faith, “fleeing from the problems of the present into a purely personal past.” But what happens if such an expansive and seemingly relativist conception of history leads a scholar into dangerous terrain? What if, for example, historians of the future sift through the events leading to January 6, 2021, and end up questioning whether the Capitol insurrection took place? Where do we find the epistemological footing to resist such a reading? For one thing, White insisted that moral relativism tends to lead to tolerance rather than totalitarianism, a conviction that strikes me as dubious. Nevertheless, White

The enrollment drought scorching the groves of academe risks turning history departments into dust bowls, while our endless culture wars have turned the teaching of history into a struggle over competing meanings of our common past.

would have warned us about the dangers of assuming that the facts are always on our side. Yes, we have the facts—mountains of them—but they are a wobbly rampart to the powerful and persistent currents of denialism. Like his friend Richard Rorty on moral truths, White argued that no one person or group has dibs on historical truths. To frame any claim about the past as neutral or objective is, as Sartre would say, an act of mauvaise foi, or bad faith, that prevents us from assuming responsibility for our ethical choices. More important, though, White’s writings have much to say about some of the problems confronting academic historians today. The enrollment drought scorching the groves of academe risks turning history departments into dust bowls, while our endless culture wars have turned the teaching of history into a struggle over competing meanings of our common past. The reflex of most academic historians is to fall back on roundtable discussions at professional conferences, where young PhDs present papers that are often as uninspiring as their job prospects. What, then, are professional historians to do? White’s answer is blunt: write better histories, ones that offer compelling stories—fictions, in a word—based on facts, of course: “The best counter to a narrative that is supposed to have misused historical memory is a better narrative, by which I mean a narrative, not with more historical facts, but a narrative with greater artistic integrity and poetic force of meaning.” This is the reason why Jill Lepore, an academic historian

who writes wickedly well, recently blasted the January 6 Committee’s report on the insurrection. It is, Lepore notes, full of important facts. But that hardly matters, she concluded, because they are larded into a plotless narrative so leaden as to make for “miserable reading.” Most young people today no doubt find equally miserable many of the history texts they are assigned to read. There are, of course, many reasons for this response, ranging from shrinking attention spans and deepening engagement with visual media to the growing unfamiliarity with the act of reading and an unwillingness to make the effort. But some of the responsibility must fall with us, the storytellers. We need to be willing to make the effort to turn our mounds of research into gripping stories. How many graduate programs in history require classes that teach students how to write well? To read White is to remind ourselves that history, like literature, provides insight into the great questions that we all face: love and loss, life and death, meaning and purpose. These existential questions should concern historians no less than novelists. But a more pressing existential matter is the fate of the discipline itself. Unless we fight for our profession by writing for those outside our profession, our profession will itself become history. O ROBERT ZARETSKY teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston. Author most recently of Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague, he is now writing a book on Stendhal and the art of living.

Dancing With Deneuve A young writer observed a failure in the making while watching François Truffaut in action | JAMES CONAWAY

n 1969, I was living in London, paying $40 a month for a flat near Notting Hill Gate, wearing a secondhand pea coat against the damp, and trying to write my first novel. To earn some money, I was dashing off profiles of aging movie stars for United Artists. The studio used these pieces to promote its European films in the United States. I hated the profile business and was in the process of renouncing it when, as sometimes happens to a writer, along

I

came an offer I couldn’t refuse: to write a series of articles about François Truffaut’s latest film, starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Truffaut had been a hero of mine since I saw The 400 Blows as a freshman in college. That lyrical study of a boy’s evasions of the conventional adult world and his doomed sprint for freedom had a literary flavor, and my admiration for it had been inspired by my own impatience to get life going. SUMMER 202 3

9

Tu n i ng Up

Truffaut’s new film, the preposterously named Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi—with one p), would be shot on location in Nice, Aix-en-Provence, and the Alps. Some filming had already been done on Réunion, the French island in the Indian Ocean. Writing for United Artists had been pitched to me as a quasi-journalistic enterprise, but the work was both crass and commercial. The idea of watching Truffaut put together a film and then writing about it, however, was exciting, full of possibility. My pieces would be placed in American newspapers, and my approach was to be “intellectual.” Truffaut, a former journalist himself and a respected film critic, was known as a man of ideas. He had high standards, disliked publicity, and barely spoke any English. My French was minimal and only slightly improved by a week with Berlitz in London, paid for by United Artists, but no matter, I thought. Jean-Paul Belmondo didn’t speak English either, but his constant traveling companion, the actress Ursula Andress, spoke it well, and so did Catherine Deneuve. Mississippi Mermaid had been adapted from Cornell Woolrich’s 1947 novel Waltz Into Darkness, about a coffee merchant and his mail-order bride who get involved in murder and fraud. Truffaut’s weakness for suspense and poetic criminality was reflected in his adulation of Alfred Hitchcock, and he had said that Mermaid would be about “love and adventure” but would also be “a study in degradation—how a man goes to pieces under a woman’s enigmatic influence.” I met Truffaut in Nice, just after 10

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Christmas, in the lobby of the Hotel Negresco. The film’s publicist, Christine Brierre, introduced us. The director was shorter than I’d imagined and looked younger than his 37 years, suntanned from filming on Réunion (the substitute for the Gulf Coast of Woolrich’s novel). Black button eyes, flared trousers, a tailored topcoat, and a yellow silk cravat. I had half expected a disheveled director with newspapers under his arm and nicotine stains, à la Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut’s friend and fellow founder of the French New Wave. Truffaut made it plain that I was not welcome and that I was to limit myself to the role of observer. So instead of joining an intimate French film unit, I was cast as the de facto Philistine. I would still be working, but Truffaut had seemingly invested me with everything he resented about the press, United Artists’ financing of his new film, and Americans in general. It all seemed rather petty. Then Brierre explained that

I was cast as the de facto Philistine. I would still be working, but Truffaut had seemingly invested me with everything he resented about the press, United Artists’ financing of his new film, and Americans in general. It all seemed rather petty.

Truffaut was displeased with the relationship between stars Belmondo and Deneuve. On Réunion, there had been no “fire” passing between them, largely because Ursula Andress was always on the sidelines. “In this film,” Brierre said unhappily, “it is very important for the hero and the heroine to be in love.” Then she wept a bit, tacit acknowledgment that this wasn’t going to happen. On New Year’s Eve, Truffaut threw a party for the cast and crew at a small restaurant near the port. After much champagne was consumed, tables were pushed against the walls and people danced. Belmondo and Andress weren’t there, but Deneuve was. She seemed to be enjoying herself. I didn’t talk to her then, but I had a chance to do so a few hours later. Around two in the morning, I went into the hotel bar for water and found Deneuve drinking coffee. “I’ve always wanted to work with François,” she told me, with little prompting. “It will be a beautiful film, and Jean-Paul is very competent.” She was unpretentious and willing to engage but, she said, habitually withdrew from inquisitive people. A samba record went onto the spindle, and she asked, “Do you dance to this?” I didn’t, but I tried. Eventually she drifted off to dance with her hairdresser, and I went to bed. The next day, Brierre said, “François and Catherine,” and held up two fingers side by side. “Haven’t you noticed?” She said that when Deneuve and Truffaut had looked at some contact-sheet photos taken during filming, the actress had “censored all those of herself and Belmondo

embracing. I have never known it to happen so quickly with François.” In a letter, Truffaut had referred to Deneuve as “the blonde siren whose song would have inspired [Jean] Giraudoux.” She had a glacial prettiness and a mysterious aura. When the unit moved to its next location, Aix-en-Provence, an American writer came down from Paris to do a story about her for Cosmopolitan. After two days of following the actress around, he was utterly frustrated. “I ask how she felt when her sister was killed, and she says she was sad,” he told me. “I ask her about her childhood, and she says it was happy. How can I make a story out of that? If only she was bitchy. Then I could carve her up.” As I wrote my stories for UA, scrounging for insights, I was reminded again how boring filmmaking could be, even with a renowned director and seasoned actors. There were constant difficulties with lighting—in Provence! Truffaut refused to use a studio, so bars, cafés, and pavements had to be prepared. “I’m always forced to sacrifice something,” he complained. “I don’t know why we go through all this.” Directors were supposed to be modern-day Leonardos with scripts, but Truffaut did not work from one. Every night, he wrote his stars’ lines on bits of paper. Final scenes were shot when the “script” was still incomplete, which meant more fragmentation. The imagined BelmondoDeneuve relationship still lacked fire, so Truffaut announced that the film would now be based on sex and would have scenes of great intimacy, something he had never

One of the journalists fainted while walking back from the loo but saved face by getting up and blaming jet lag. I got them all over to the filming location, where they sat on their briefcases and promptly fell asleep. Truffaut was not amused.

before tried. It was a sign, I thought, of desperation. He was not being a “sensationalist,” he added, but a “realist. I want the spectators to realize how much they resemble the people on the screen.” He didn’t consider himself an intellectual, he now insisted, but a lover of “police films and films of passion.” As silly as all this sounded, at least it provided something to write about. My nonexistent relationship with Truffaut got worse. He thought that since I wasn’t providing him with copies of the pieces I was sending to United Artists, they had to be scurrilous. I would have handed them over had he asked. But Truffaut never asked for anything. He started referring to me as l’Américain. Then, in Lyon, we became further estranged. The United Artists office in Paris had called and asked me to intercede on the part of three journalists from Tokyo wanting to visit the set. To my surprise, Truffaut agreed. They would be allowed to watch the shooting of a

night scene because Truffaut was popular in Japan. The three men flew down from London with matching metal briefcases. I played host, though I spoke no Japanese; they spoke neither French nor English. Through the consulate I found a French-speaking Japanese diplomat who was willing to come along. This was a comedy in the making. We had dinner in one of the best restaurants in Lyon, a city famous for them, and drank too much Bordeaux Supérieur. One of the journalists fainted while walking back from the loo but saved face by getting up, blaming jet lag, and drinking some more. I got them all over to the filming location, where they sat on their briefcases and promptly fell asleep. Truffaut was not amused. The next location was the mountain town of Le Sappey-en-Chartreuse, outside Grenoble. No one had prepared for the snow, and the pine woods surrounding the location were suddenly full of visitors snapping photos. Deneuve and Belmondo stalked around in city clothes, he in a houndstooth suit and she in a feathered coat. Andress, meanwhile, sat unperturbed on the sidelines in her red fox hat and scarlet ski suit, upstaging Deneuve. One night, the crew gave a birthday party for Truffaut at the hotel. Deneuve danced with a woman friend down from Paris, as well as with the girlfriends of crew members and camp followers, but never with Truffaut, who sat morosely in a corner. He did get up to blow out the candles on his cake. Belmondo danced with Andress, her feet dangling above the floor, then insisted on blowing out some candles of his own. SUMMER 202 3

11

Tu n i ng Up

A photographer hired by United Artists later sold a photo depicting the moment to the news magazine Jours de France, and Belmondo threatened to sue the studio because the photo was unflattering (distended cheeks). Belmondo’s chauffeur said that the actor was also unhappy with the close relationship between Truffaut and Deneuve, calling it “unprofessional.” A pall had settled over the unit. Soon, everybody

decamped for Paris, the final location, knowing that the film was a mess. Truffaut’s apparent inability to write a script was being cited as the culprit when in fact the whole affair had been a disaster. On the final day of filming, I rode out to the Paris suburbs to say goodbye to the crew, the actors, and Truffaut. He didn’t offer to shake my hand. Because I had danced with Deneuve? Because the Japanese journalists had fallen

A Room for the Ages Oglethorpe University’s time capsule was meant to last thousands of years, but will it? | COLIN DICKEY

n an early spring day in March, I drove 800 miles, from Brooklyn to Atlanta, to see a room I knew I could never enter. In the basement of Oglethorpe University’s Phoebe Hearst Hall lies a locked room—20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 10 feet high—that’s been closed for more than 80 years. The Crypt of Civilization, as it’s known, was sealed on May 28, 1940, and inside are artifacts—Artie Shaw records, a plastic Donald Duck, and a bottle of Budweiser, among myriad other items—that attempt to tell the history of human civilization. Hundreds of books on microfilm—on law and history, botany and ornithology, the Boy Scouts and Freemasonry—lie in stainless steel tubes. There are voice recordings of Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and a champion hog caller, along with a device designed

O

12

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

to teach the English language to future societies. They may very well need it: if all goes according to plan, the Crypt of Civilization will not be opened until the year 8113. The man behind the crypt was Thornwell Jacobs (1877–1956), president of Oglethorpe University from 1915 to 1943. Inspired by Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, Jacobs conceived of a sealed chamber that could provide a snapshot of early-20th-century culture for the future. After he published the idea in Scientific American in 1936, the Westinghouse Company built an early version for its pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The name “time capsule” stuck, and soon, others of its kind followed. Why 8113? There’s a short answer, and a more complicated

asleep? Or was it because he knew that the film itself was so bad? (Mississippi Mermaid would run in New York for only a couple of weeks.) Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. The experience had been interesting, lucrative, and even great fun. O JAMES CONAWAY is the author of numerous books, including the bestselling Napa: The Story of an American Eden. He is at work on a memoir about his many years as a freelance journalist, Searching for Mata Ji.

one. Jacobs pointed to 4241 BCE, then understood to be the year the Egyptian calendar was established. That was 6,177 years before 1936, so he added another 6,177 years to reach 8113. The longer answer, though, has to do with Oglethorpe’s history as a university, Jacobs’s history as an individual, and how we think of history itself. Oglethorpe was founded in 1835 in Midway, just outside of Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia. Unable to sustain itself during the Civil War, it closed in 1862, then reopened in Atlanta in 1870, but failed again just two years later. Its current incarnation in the Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven is due mainly to Jacobs, who rebuilt the university in 1913. In an Atlanta Constitution article, Jacobs wrote that the men behind its rebirth were “determined to build a new life on a ruined life; to make the future nobler than the past; to make the past appear a troubled dream.” Jacobs’s conflicted attitude about the past—a celebration of the classical world and ancient

history, a dismissal of the South’s postwar years as nothing more than a troubled dream—seemed to inform much of his work on the crypt. I met with the university’s library director and crypt keeper, Eli Arnold, who explained to me how the project fit in with Jacobs’s larger scheme to rebuild the university. “Everything he did was to get Oglethorpe publicity,” Arnold told me. “We would give honorary degrees out like they were candy— like 10 or 15 a year,” bestowing them on the likes of Amelia Earhart, FDR, and Woodrow Wilson. “All these people would get Oglethorpe in the news, and Thornwell brought them here to campus.” Gesturing to the steel door, Arnold continued: “So this was also to do that … Eighty years later, this is still one of the biggest drivers to our website.” Before Jacobs’s idea launched the modern obsession with time capsules, cornerstones were laid to mark a building’s foundation, but they were not meant to be dug up. The revelation of Tutankhamun’s tomb—a private burial crypt never meant to be unearthed, let alone displayed—gave Jacobs the idea of the buried past, the possibility that you could, at some later date, return to a moment in history with surprise and wonder. Time capsules’ subsequent popularity, perhaps, speaks to a fundamental preoccupation with the anxiety that future generations may not remember us at all, and so we desire something enduring that will tell them who we were and what mattered to us. Most time capsules are meant to be sealed for 10, 50, or perhaps

100 years—nothing like the shelf life intended for the Crypt of Civilization. Jacobs hired Thomas Kimmwood Peters, a photographer and the inventor of an early microfilm device, to serve as its archivist and to assemble its contents, a project that would take three years. Jacobs solicited donations from corporations, publishers, and filmmakers to create, as the text on the plaque welded to the sealed door proclaims, a memorial to “the civilization which existed in the United States and in the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century.” As Peters explained to one potential donor in a typical letter, “We are gathering together here from all parts of Europe and America a complete record of all of our civilization today.” This comment reveals the blind spots and biases of the time, indicating which countries Peters deemed representative of “civilization.” Moreover, at least three of the books in the archive were provided

Time capsules’ subsequent popularity, perhaps, speaks to a fundamental preoccupation with the anxiety that future generations may not remember us at all, and so we desire something enduring that will tell them who we were.

by the Eugenics Publishing Company; in a letter to the company’s president, Peters wrote that this contribution “constitutes one of the most important parts of the Crypt material.” Jacobs himself held shockingly dismal racial attitudes. “It is almost a sure bet,” he proclaimed in a recorded message placed inside the crypt, “that, if nothing is done about it, the United States will, in a few centuries, become a nation of quadroons ruled by an upper class of Jewish blood. … With the single exception of science which is progressing magnificently, all the balance of our civilization—morals, politics, literature, painting, sculpture—seem to be retrograding and, as I prophesied 20 years ago, we are face to face with another world war.” Oglethorpe doesn’t shy away from these issues; when Arnold discusses the crypt in his classes, he brings up Jacobs’s racism. His students understand that history is constantly subject to debate and revision, that nothing can ever truly be kept under lock and key, unchanged forever. “This is Thornwell’s idea,” Arnold said of the crypt, “and he was an uppermiddle-class academic: this is his idea of the world. Which means it’s more the crypt of Thornwell Jacobs, rather than of all civilization.” Though it may have been a publicity stunt, the crypt was a hedge against a world Jacobs saw in decline, a way of preserving what he deemed essential in the culture against what he saw as its impending destruction. Curiously, though, the plaque on the door speaks less to the permanence of SUMMER 202 3

13

Tu n i ng Up

the crypt and more to its vulnerability. It reads, We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the state of Georgia and the government of the United States, and of their heirs, assigns and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the

ity. If Jacobs imagined that sealing the crypt would be the final gesture, he was proved wrong almost immediately. A few years after its installation, someone etched his name on the steel door: Robert Heed, 1944, ’ello folks. This bit of graffiti is a reminder that history is messy and never static, and that nothing can really exist in a pristine state forever. Jacobs and

Peters didn’t intend it, but Robert Heed, whoever he was, is part of the Crypt of Civilization and the human story it tells. O COLIN DICKEY is the author, most recently, of The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained and Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. His next book, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, will be published in July.

year 8113 at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time, we beg of all persons that this sealed door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.

It is a statement filled with pleas, speaking to its own fragility. A recognition that even the most final of all gestures is subject to the whims of time. Now, less than 100 years after being sealed, the crypt may be in peril. When I asked Arnold whether he could imagine its being opened in his lifetime, he quickly said yes. “Space is at a premium at Oglethorpe,” he said, “as with so many colleges our size,” and the crypt, emptied out, could provide valuable space. Plus, he wondered, if we already know what’s inside, and we know in detail how it was built, do we still need the crypt itself? Part of the allure of a time capsule is that we don’t know what’s inside. The act of opening it is what offers wonder and awe. But despite the best-laid plans of academics and university presidents, randomness and chance always leave their mark for poster14

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Get Me Rewrite! The relationship between a renowned author and a consummate editor can sometimes make for high drama | ERIC WILLS

ven after all these years, I am still amazed at the seemingly magical process by which a skilled editor can transform a manuscript—how, after a draft or two (or sometimes more), your prose somehow becomes seamless and your narrative propulsive, the best version of your ideas somehow emerging from the page. The finest editors have an ear like a concert musician, anticipating what you intended to say even before you yourself have said it, and the structural sensibilities of an engineer, capable of creating the architecture required of a piece. At its best, the editor-writer relationship can be transformative, euphoric even. At its worst, in the hands of an ax-wielding butcher, it can feel like losing a limb, no sedation. Compelling stuff, yes, but not exactly suitable for the big screen. Or so I had thought before watch-

E

ing the recent documentary Turn Every Page, which explores the longstanding collaboration between Robert Gottlieb and Robert Caro. Gottlieb, 92, editor extraordinaire at Alfred A. Knopf, and Caro, 87, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Power Broker, had no desire to appear together on screen, at least not initially. Their partnership, now more than a halfcentury long, has been a marriage of expediency, one that unfolded over reams of marked-up manuscripts. But because the filmmaker happened to be Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, and because both men are hyperaware that the actuarial odds, as Gottlieb puts it, are stacked against them, both finally submitted to a close-up. The result is a charming and intimate portrait of how two men gave rise to a series of beloved books—two men, it’s worth noting,

who can argue over a semicolon as if it were a potential violation of the Geneva Conventions. In 1970, when Caro was shopping around the manuscript for The Power Broker, his biography of the New York master builder Robert Moses, he had lunch at the Four Seasons with three prominent editors, each of whom made a similar pitch: I’ll make you a star. No surprise, then, given his aversion to the trappings of literary celebrity, that Caro gravitated toward Gottlieb, who, over sandwiches at his desk, focused on the book: It’s good, but it needs work. Here’s how we’ll fix it. Fixing it entailed chopping some 350,000 words, which sounds like some deranged version of death by a million paper cuts. (Note to Caro and Gottlieb: Publish the discarded material, before it’s too late.) More than a mere biography, The Power Broker was also an inquiry

into political power: how Moses amassed and wielded that power in helping to reshape New York City. Caro’s next intended subject—Fiorello La Guardia, the former mayor of New York—offered little chance at this kind of political vivisection. Gottlieb anticipated this and floated an alternative subject: Lyndon Baines Johnson. As it happened, Caro had already considered the idea himself. From this moment of editorial kismet flowed the rest of Caro’s life’s work: four massive volumes numbering more than 3,500 pages in total. Gottlieb now awaits the writer’s fifth and final book on the former president’s life and legacy, as does Caro’s devoted, cultish following. Unhurried, and with a diligence bordering on the pathological, Caro gives form to his subjects. In Turn Every Page, we learn that he moved to the Texas Hill Country for three

years to better understand Johnson’s childhood. (“Can’t you write a biography of Napoleon?” quipped Caro’s wife, Ina, who doubles as his research sidekick.) After a year of not getting much of use from Sam Houston Johnson, Lyndon’s younger brother, Caro finally cornered him at the house where the boys had grown up. As Sam sat at the dining table, the fading light casting the same shadows as during his childhood dinners, he finally opened up about Lyndon’s fights with their father, who dismissed the future president as a failure. And he acknowledged that the mythical tales that locals told about his brother were just that—mythical. The documentary covers other mysteries that Caro unraveled, including the controversy that colored Johnson’s victory in the 1948 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Some 200 ballots had mysteriously appeared days after the election—the infamous Box 13—that gave Johnson the victory by just 87 votes. Had there been fraud? Many scholars thought that the truth had been lost to history, but none of them had Caro’s investigative gumption. The trail led him to Houston, where he found Luis Salas, who had served as a Democratic strongman in Texas politics and was thought by locals to be dead. When Caro knocked on his trailer door, Salas knew his moment had arrived. Like a Lonestar Deep Throat, he pulled out a manuscript titled “Box 13,” his account of how he helped steal the election. Mainly, however, Turn Every Page is a forensic study of the editor-writer relationship—a “service job,” as Gottlieb describes his role, SUMMER 202 3

15

Tu n i ng Up

one that differs depending on the author. For some writers, he offers emotional support, playing therapist to the sensitive artist; for others, he refines deficiencies in plot or characterization; and for the heavyweights, or at least those who regard their prose with all the inviolability of the word of God, he might only quibble with punctuation. Which is not to suggest that Gottlieb is without ego—he practically vibrates with self-assurance, forever giving voice to his editorial instincts. (It takes a certain self-possession to reveal, on camera, as Gottlieb does in the documentary, that he collects plastic purses, a fact that his wife did not dare mention to her psychiatrist.) Gottlieb’s relationship with Caro, for all it has bequeathed to the reading public, appears to have been collegial but lukewarm, punctuated by frequent spats. Once, Gottlieb cut a section about the grass in the Hill Country and “wrote something insulting in the margin,” Caro recalls, the start of “a tremendous battle … an angry, angry battle.” Caro strove to make things obvious to the reader; Gottlieb eliminated excessive handholding. Gottlieb frowned on Caro’s overreliance on the verb to loom. As for the semicolons, a standalone film could be made about them (Caro for, Gottlieb against, at least when used in excess). In the documentary, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, fields a question about this divisive punctuation mark, and the way he stumbles and gathers himself, you’d think he’d been asked about race relations in America. For the record: I revisited Gottlieb’s recent memoir, Avid Reader, which has its fair share of semicolons. Why not deploy all of one’s available 16

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

He practically vibrates with self-assurance. (It takes a certain self-possession to reveal, on camera, as Gottlieb does in the documentary, that he collects plastic purses, a fact that his wife did not dare mention to her psychiatrist.)

tools? Imagine a golfer forgoing a 60-degree wedge, or a trucker refusing to use third gear. In the film’s final scene, Gottlieb and Caro are shown editing together—something they consented to on the condition that Lizzie film them without sound. In the Knopf offices, the two men search for a pencil to revise Caro’s latest pages, a scene that devolves into a Monty Python skit, as the other editors, ensconced behind the glow of their screens, go in search of this mythical object. After finding a new one, Caro, like a knight tending to his lance, slides it into an electric sharpener, and the two men retire to a room to do battle yet again. It is a paean to a fading world, one in which someone like Caro could take a monumental fivebook swing at an ex-president, and editors and writers labored cheek-by-jowl over the printed page. My actuarial odds are such that my first formative editing experience occurred under the

tutelage of a mentor who marked up first drafts with a pen. Slowly, as you made your way through the changes, you’d begin to understand the motivation behind them, the way those changes stripped away the infelicities and the excess and began to give shape to the story half buried on the page. But the skilled editor is attuned to more than pace, rhythm, and narrative tension. As Gottlieb well knows, editors are in the business of managing the writerly ego, which can fluctuate wildly between despair and arrogance, fragility and indomitability. Much of the gig requires coaxing and cajoling, and in some cases, dispensing hard truths, maybe staging a come-to-Jesus intervention. Of all the stories I’ve heard over the years, one looms large: of the famed critic who corresponded by fax only, resisted all but the most essential editorial changes, and once filed such an abomination of a book review that a total rewrite was necessary. What to do? The editors sent back the draft as a page proof, ready for publication, betting that the critic would realize he had misfired and would submit a revised version. Which is exactly what happened. I’m not sure if that critic ever warmed to the editor’s touch, but in Turn Every Page, one senses that Caro has arrived at a greater appreciation for Gottlieb, now that their struggles are largely behind them: here is someone who cares as much about the writing as he does; here is someone who intends to see him through to the very end. O ERIC WILLS has written about history, sports, and design for Smithsonian, The Washington Post, GQ, the Scholar, and other publications. He was formerly a senior editor at Architect magazine.

N E V E R M I S S A S T O R Y,

NEVER MISS A SOUND.

S U B S C R I B E T O D AY

OxfordAmerican.org/Subscribe

A Kingdom of Little Animals Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms made possible the revolutionary advances in biology and medicine that continue to inform our Covid age LAURA J. SNYDER

LAURA J. SNYDER is the author, most recently, of The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World and Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing. She is at work on a biography of Oliver Sacks, for which she has been awarded a Public Scholars Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

18

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

O

ne night in 1677, a grizzled man in a wrinkled linen nightshirt rushed from his bemused wife’s bed with a candle in hand to examine the “remains of conjugal coitus, immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse.” Using the candle to cast a pool of light in his dark study, he put a drop of the liquid into a tiny glass vial he had blown himself, attaching it to the back of a strange-looking device he had also constructed. Two rectangular brass plates, about three inches tall and one inch wide, had been riveted together and held a tiny glass orb between them. He lifted this object up into the light of the candle, closed one eye, and watched, for hours, until finally: a shiver of movement at the edge of his vision. Was it merely a mirage? Were his eyes too tired? He blinked, looked away from the light to rest them, and then resumed his careful observation. He was soon rewarded with the sight of a swarm of tiny eellike creatures wriggling into view. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—who died 300 years ago, on August 26, 1723—had just discovered spermatozoa. It was not the first time that he had made the invisible visible, nor would it be the last. Leeuwenhoek was a pioneer, discovering a whole realm of living creatures that included bacteria and other “germs”—“little animals,” he affectionately called them. By doing so, he made us aware that the world contains more than meets the eye, and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, in a circa his crucial contributions to the field of microbiology remain 1680 painting by as relevant as ever. the Dutch artist Jan During these past three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, Verkolje, famous for his portraits of which has caused at least seven million deaths worldwide prominent members (more than one million in the United States alone) and which, of Delft society

SUMMER 202 3

19

according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has left one in 13 adults, or 19 million people in our country, with the disabling conditions caused by long Covid, my thoughts have returned often to Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries and what came after. As we carry on through these interminable Covid days (and ready ourselves for epidemics and pandemics to come), we should understand and celebrate the person who made it possible to discover the invisible causes of—and possible cures for—so many of the illnesses that plague us. X

If stronger lenses could be used to extend sight into the far reaches of the universe, could they not be used to enlarge the very small parts of it?

20

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

XX

Baptized as Thonis—but always called Antonij or Antoni—he was born in Delft, Holland, in 1632, the same week as his neighbor Johannes Vermeer. His family took the surname “Leeuwenhoek” for the location of its home, “The Lion’s Corner.” Only after he had achieved worldwide fame in the 1680s did he add the aristocratic-sounding “van” to his name. Leeuwenhoek was not an obvious candidate for upending the received view of the universe. The son of a basket weaver, he had no schooling beyond reading, writing, and some arithmetic, and he was expected to follow in his father’s profession—an important one in Delft, where a thriving export business required wellmade baskets for overseas transport. But when his widowed mother remarried, he was sent to Amsterdam and eventually became apprenticed to a cloth merchant. In those days, a clever haberdasher, needing to determine the fineness of the fabric being offered to him, would use a magnifying glass to count the number of threads used in the weaving—the thread count, as we say today. This period was Leeuwenhoek’s apprenticeship in lenses as well as cloth. When he returned to Delft after his six-year apprenticeship, Leeuwenhoek married Barbara de Meij, the daughter of a weaver, and in the front room of their house opened a successful shop that sold fabrics, buttons, lace, and other sewing supplies. Since the population of Delft numbered only about 20,000 people at the time—more than half of them women and children—a prosperous businessman was bound to become acquainted with other local grandees. His conversations with one of these, the physician Reinier de Graaf, generated his interest in science. De Graaf showed him that advances in how lenses were produced had created optical instruments with far stronger visual powers than the magnifying lens that Leeuwenhoek used for examining cloth. Sometime around 1600, a Dutchman (not Galileo Galilei, as many believe) had made the first telescope by putting together two kinds of lenses on the opposite ends of a tube: a convex lens, fatter in the middle like a lentil (from which the word lens derives), and a concave lens, narrower in the center. This telescope was able to double the vision of the naked eye. Galileo quickly improved the device, producing a telescope that was 20 times stronger than natural vision. Turning it to the heavens, he grasped that the blotches we see on the moon’s surface are shadows made by mountains and craters, like those that exist on Earth. He later used his telescope to see that the planet Jupiter had its own moons. These observations supported Copernicus’s radical view that Earth is merely a planet like all the others, revolving around the sun. Because Galileo continued to write books asserting the truth of Copernicus’s theory after the Inquisition authorities in Italy had

forbidden him from doing so, he was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life under house arrest—in a comfortable villa staffed with servants. After the invention of the telescope, natural philosophers (as scientists were then called) took note. If stronger lenses could be used to extend sight into the far reaches of the universe, could they not be used to enlarge the very small parts of it? The idea of microscopes was born. Though Galileo was not the inventor of the telescope, he may have constructed the first microscope: a small inverted telescope (with the objective lens on top, the eyepiece below) placed on a stand. He called it an occhialino, “little eye.” British instrument makers promptly went to work creating and improving double-lens microscopes of this kind, not so different from the one I recall using in my high school biology class, bending over the eyepiece lens while moving the objective lens up and down to focus it on a specimen fixed on a glass slide or in a petri dish. In the Dutch Republic, however, natural philosophers preferred singlelens microscopes. These instruments could not only attain higher magnification, they also minimized the major optical problem with the double-lens microscopes of the day: chromatic aberration, an effect in which the viewed image is distorted by multicolored “fringes.” Not until 1672 did Isaac Newton explain why this happened, by showing that the surface of a lens, like a prism, disperses white light into its constituent colors. With two lenses, the problem was compounded, making it especially difficult to discern the smallest and most complex parts of a subject. Unlike the double-lens microscope, the single-lens generally required you to look upward, with the specimen behind the lens, “as though you had a telescope and were trying to look at the stars in the sky,” Leeuwenhoek wrote. His method was to point his microscope at a beam of light streaming through a single hole in his closed shutters during the day, or at the light of a candle at night. The tiny lens of this type of microscope could be made in several ways. Leeuwenhoek began with the simplest method. Since a candle’s flame is hot enough to melt glass, he would place a thin glass rod over the flame and allow glass droplets to fall onto a sheet of smooth metal. When cooled, some of these minuscule beads—those not scorched and blackened from the flame—could be slightly ground, polished, and placed between the brass or silver plates of his microscopes. Another method Leeuwenhoek used was to grind and polish glass shards in a cup-shaped mold using a succession of finer abrasives to shape the glass, often finishing with a piece of soft leather or felt to polish the lens—a time-consuming and delicate process, especially for lenses only one to two millimeters in diameter. To speed up the process, Leeuwenhoek began to employ a pedal-powered lathe, similar to those used by jewelers. He may have learned this method from the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who was earning his living as a lens grinder after receiving a writ of herem, a kind of excommunication from his Jewish community for espousing “heretical” beliefs. In the summer of 1665, the two men were living only four miles apart and had mutual friends. But though the single-lens microscope reduced chromatic aberration and was relatively easy to make, it was exceedingly difficult to use. Imagine holding up a small device the size, weight, and top-heaviness of a coffee spoon and staring into a tiny lens in its center through an aperture barely larger than the head of a pin, for SUMMER 202 3

21

hours at a time. Whether your specimen was a tiny vial of liquid or a solid object attached to a pin behind the lens, any motion—even from the quivering of your pulse—could move the subject out of view. At first, microscopes were used like magnifying lenses, to enlarge parts of nature that were small but visible to the naked eye. Insects made obvious subjects because they were everywhere: bees, aphids, and slugs in gardens; fleas, lice, and bedbugs indoors. The first published study using a microscope was Francesco Stelluti’s meticulous 1625 examination of the different parts of a bee. The early microscope users were fascinated by the eyes of creatures, in the belief that using this new “artificial eye” would yield special insight into sight itself. In 1644, Gioanbatista Hodierna published an elegantly precise study, L’Occhio della Mosca (The Eye of the Fly). Twenty-one years later, Robert Hooke brought out a thrillingly detailed illustration of the “Eyes and Head of a Grey drone-Fly” in his magisterial 1665 book, Micrographia. Leeuwenhoek began to make and use microscopes sometime in the early 1660s, and he, too, was fascinated by sight. He studied the eyes of flies, lice, and dragonflies. He methodically examined the optic nerves of cows, obtaining the eyes from the local butcher at the Vleesmarkt, “not more than 100 feet” from his house. When he was 81 years old, he persuaded the captain of a Greenland whaling ship to bring back a giant whale’s eye pickled in brandy. As a bonus, he received the whale’s enormous penis—between eight and 10 feet long—so that he could study its sperm. X

XX

At that time, the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, was the main scientific society in the world, and natural philosophers from all over wrote in to have their discoveries officially recognized. The Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, was so besieged by letters that he requested some of his correspondents to address them to “Mr. Grubendol” to keep the authorities from noticing his contact with such a large number of foreigners. England, Spain, and the Dutch Republic had been at war with one another intermittently for decades, and spies abounded. Oldenburg later shuddered at the memory of the time in 1667 when, with Dutch ships thundering up the Thames, he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London under suspicion of “carrying on political correspondence with parties abroad.” By the early 1670s, Leeuwenhoek was no longer a merchant but a civic leader and a licensed surveyor, spending much of his time making discoveries with his microscope. But he was ashamed that he knew no Latin, the lingua franca of the scientific world, and hesitated to write to the esteemed Royal Society. In the spring of 1673, Reinier de Graaf sent Oldenburg a sheaf of papers scribbled by Leeuwenhoek, along with a cover letter vouching for him. Oldenburg was a polyglot, fluent not only in his native German but also in English, Latin, French, Italian, and Dutch. As he casually leafed through these papers, not expecting to find much of interest, he quickly grasped that this unknown and untrained Dutchman had seen things that even Robert Hooke had not. Oldenburg had an inkling that the scientific world was about to change. 22

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

X

XX

In the summer and early fall of 2012, I spent nearly every day in the shadow of the Empire State Building at what used to be the Science, Industry, and Business branch of the New York Public Library, located in the former B. Altman and Company department store. The branch closed in 2016, its materials moved to the newly renovated Mid-Manhattan Library or to offsite storage, but in 2012, the 15 published bilingual volumes of Leeuwenhoek’s letters—an immense project begun in 1939 and not yet completed—were accessible to anyone with a library card. On my first day there, none of the helpful staff members could find this set of books. No one even remembered seeing them, but a persistent search through the closed stacks turned up the first two hefty volumes: each 12 inches high, nine and a half inches deep, and at least 500 pages long. The books had been so hard to find because they had never been entered into the computer system; cards were still attached to the inside back covers where the date of use was stamped. The stamps indicated that no one had requested the books for decades. It amazed me that these dusty tomes—in this case not merely a cliché but an accurate description, as my blackened clothing and worsened asthma attested at the end of each day—had been ignored for so long, given that the letters constitute the foundation of modern microbiology and medicine. Leeuwenhoek never wrote a scientific treatise. All he left us was his correspondence: more than 350 letters written over a period of 50 years, some 20 to 30 pages long, most of them addressed to the Royal Society, and nearly all of them translated and published in the Society’s journal, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. More than just detailing his scientific work, they are a window into the mind of a brilliant and obsessive man. I was entranced. Reading all of them, I felt I got to know him and his daily habits. By the time he began to write to the Royal Society, Leeuwenhoek, then a widower, had married his second wife, Cornelia Swalmius, who came from an educated and distinguished family. She was eager for her husband to gain the respect of the Royal Society and gladly took part in his studies, not only by indulging his semen observations but also by carrying a small box filled with silkworm eggs “in her Bosom night and day,” as he reported, so that he could scrutinize the larvae the moment they emerged. His growing confidence was exemplified by the change in the way he addressed members of the Royal Society—first as a humble supplicant and later as a man who expected, and deserved, respect. I saw how he delighted in showing off what could be seen with his microscopes to all who knocked on his door, until he was so hounded by visitors that he could not work. He had to ask his only child, Maria, to turn away anyone without a letter of introduction. He did, however, make exceptions, consenting to see a tutor who turned up one day with an excited young charge. Perhaps the enthusiastic boy reminded Leeuwenhoek of his younger self and the glee he felt on seeing the invisible for the first time. And of course, being a vain man who would crow about the plaudits he received, he also made exceptions for royalty. Peter the Great chatted with Leeuwenhoek for hours (the Russian czar could speak Dutch) and inspected the circulation of blood in the tail of an eel. Leeuwenhoek also boasted of showing James the Duke of York (the future King James II) the sperm of a dog. If only Leeuwenhoek had been home

His growing confidence was exemplified by the change in the way he addressed members of the Royal Society—first as a humble supplicant and later as a man who expected respect.

SUMMER 202 3

23

when Queen Mary II (on her way to England with her husband, William III, to depose her father, James II) stopped by to see his wonders. I could distinctly hear the voice of a man in a hurry, who couldn’t wait to put down his quill and pick up the microscope again. Leeuwenhoek often admitted that he had not ordered his thoughts but conveyed his results as he saw them, “unarranged promiscuously as put down during my observations.” It was as if Leeuwenhoek were excitedly describing his discoveries to a friend, and as I read on, I became that friend. His first letter described the spores of mold, suggesting—before anyone else— that they contained seeds. He agreed with Hooke’s description of the “lowse” as having “a short tapering nose, with a hole in it, out of which … it thrusts its sting” to feed. Leeuwenhoek’s next letter described how he proved this: by “several times” putting a “hungry lowse upon my hand, to observe her drawing blood from thence.” As the louse sucked on his blood, he watched it with the microscope in his other hand, noticing how the blood first moved to the head of the louse and then was propelled to a sac at its back. I shivered to think of the kind of attention and scientific devotion it would take to sit still while observing a louse sate itself on my blood. It was not long before Leeuwenhoek broke through to the invisible realm. In April 1674, he wrote to his friend Constantijn Huygens (the elder)—a diplomat, poet, art collector, and science enthusiast who always carried a microscope with him and took a great interest in Leeuwenhoek’s work. He told Huygens that he had pricked his thumb and drawn some of his blood into a tiny glass pipette. Observing it carefully, he found numerous “red globules” floating in what appeared to be a clear and crystalline fluid. He had discovered red blood cells. Although others had seen something in the blood, Leeuwenhoek was the first to observe that these cells were round, red, and gave blood its color. Soon he even measured them, finding that 100 red blood cells were the size of a coarse grain of sand measuring about 1/30th of an inch. That means he estimated each red blood cell to be 1/3000th of an inch, or 8.5 microns, in diameter, which is impressively close to the modern measurement of 7 to 8 microns. His most extraordinary discovery, though, was yet to come. X

XX

It happened at the Berkelse Lake, about a two-day’s journey from Delft. Passing by in the summer of 1674, Leeuwenhoek noticed that the water looked particularly murky. He took a clean vial from his pocket, knelt down, filled it with a sample of the liquid, and stoppered it tightly. Back home in his study, he closed all the shutters except part of one, through which the light of the sun beamed. He put a drop of the cloudy water into the glass tube affixed to the back of his microscope. Raising it to the light, he turned the specimen pin attached to the tube this way and that, to focus the view. When the initially blurry image became clear, what he saw startled him so much that he may have cried out, perhaps even spilled the water and had to try again. Taking a deep breath and steadying his hand, Leeuwenhoek looked once more. Yes, it was true: the drop of water contained a multitude of tiny particles of different shapes, sizes, and colors. They were moving themselves by the use of minuscule legs and fins and hairs. Moving themselves! These particles were living beings! Some have argued that when Copernicus’s theory flung Earth from the center 24

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

of the universe and took away its special status, making it just one of a number of planets, it resulted in the most radical transformation in our view of the world. I disagree. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery showed not merely that the universe had a different structure than had been thought before, but that it contained within it a hidden universe of diverse living creatures, a world within a world. Leeuwenhoek verified his observations many times over the next three months. Finally, he was ready to make his world-altering announcement. He sharpened his quill, took a deep breath, and began to write to Oldenburg in September 1674. Perhaps he was nervous: he did not come right out and announce his incredible discovery. Instead, Leeuwenhoek wrote, and wrote, and wrote: more than 20 pages about all sorts of experiments, ending with a bizarre passage on the difference between the chalk in English soil and the dark clay of Delft, and how Delft’s clay had to be mixed with Flemish dirt to make Delftware porcelain. Only then did he finally describe his visit to the lake and the “little animals” he had found in its water: Some of [them] were roundish; those that were somewhat bigger than others, were of an Oval figure: On these latter I saw two legs near the head, and two little fins on the other end of their body. Others were somewhat larger than an Oval, and these were very slow in their motion, and few in number. These little animals had diverse colors, some being whitish, others pellucid; others had green and very shining little scales: others again were green in the Middle, and before and behind very white …

According to modern microbiologists, Leeuwenhoek had seen rotifers (strange parasites with body cavities filled with fluid), ciliates (including Paramecium species), and a type of protozoan called Euglena viridis. The Royal Society’s reaction was as strange as the letter itself: there was no response at all. Apparently, that was fine with Leeuwenhoek. For the next two years, he continued to write, keeping the Society apprised of his work: further investigations into salt crystals, tiny vinegar eels (a type of nematode), the leg of a louse, the roe of a cod, blood serum, the veins of connective tissue between muscles, and more. He cut thin slices of a cow’s optic nerve with his shaving razor (his own red blood cells can be seen on them with a microscope even today), dried them, and sent them with one of his letters. These specimens remain at the Royal Society, among a set of frail little packets labeled by Leeuwenhoek more than 350 years ago. Under the careful eye of the Society’s librarian, I was allowed to examine the one on which Leeuwenhoek had written (in Dutch), “Pieces of the optic nerve of a cow and cut into transverse slices.” With trembling hands, afraid of damaging the treasures inside, I unfolded the packet to find 12 to 14 fawn-colored, hand-cut sections, slightly curled with age. They reminded me of desiccated slices of parmesan cheese. Leeuwenhoek continued his observations of his little animals, sending his precise notes to the Royal Society. He found the animals everywhere: in rainwater, in his own well water, in saltwater, in melted snow, in water from Delft’s famously clean canals. He infused the water from these different sources with pepper, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg, labeling each concoction with the type of SUMMER 202 3

25

I’ve always wondered why Leeuwenhoek used teacups rather than flasks. Did he occasionally sip from the cups to see whether certain tastes corresponded to the number of little animals he found in them?

26

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

water, the spice, and the date when he combined them. He put these infusions in china teacups and stored them on shelves and tables all around his study, leaving little space for his dissections and observations. He checked the teacups periodically to see what little animals might appear, taking extensive notes each time. I’ve always wondered why Leeuwenhoek used teacups rather than flasks or beakers. Did he occasionally sip from the cups to see whether certain tastes corresponded to the number of little animals he found in them? In December 1675, now growing impatient, Leeuwenhoek reminded the Royal Society of his world-changing discovery. Still no answer. He shrugged and left for vacation in August. Leeuwenhoek had continued recording his observations of the little animals in the teacups right up until the moment of departure. He must have been thinking of them the entire time he was away, because one of the first things he did when he returned after eight days was rush to the teacups and observe how the little animals had fared in his absence. Now that he was back, he wrote, “it was pretty to behold the motion, quivering and trembling all the time.” These little animals had apparently taken the place of his beloved “little dog, which was much admired by everybody for its long and purely white hair.” His dog had died in 1674, right around the time Leeuwenhoek found his new pets. He wrote again to the Royal Society, and again received no response. It was time to compose a letter that he knew would grab its members’ attention. In October 1676, Leeuwenhoek informed the Society that he had measured the little animals by comparing them to a grain of sand. The ones he found in the pepper-infused water were so astonishingly small, he estimated one million of them would not equal the dimension of a grain of sand. He had now seen bacteria. X

XX

Oldenburg and the members of the Royal Society could no longer ignore Leeuwenhoek’s claims. When they printed his letter in the Transactions, they prefaced it with a disclaimer that they could not give their approval to his findings without being informed of how he had made his observations. The Society demanded that Leeuwenhoek reveal his method of making microscopes, of observing with them, and of calculating size so that his results could be replicated by their own members. Scientific conventions were starting to change. It had not previously been expected that a discovery be replicated in another laboratory for it to be accepted by the scientific community. But suddenly the Royal Society demanded that Leeuwenhoek do just that. And like many scientific innovators even now, Leeuwenhoek wanted to keep his trade secrets—he needed to earn a living selling his microscopes without other instrument makers copying them. Inevitably this led to conflict. Leeuwenhoek tried to appease the members by inviting them to Delft; after all, as the Royal Society’s own motto instructed: nullius in verba, “take nobody’s word for it.” It is unclear why they did not come to see the little animals for themselves, since England and the the Dutch Republic were not at war, and it was only 272 nautical miles (503 kilometers) from the port of London to Rotterdam and a further 15 kilometers to Delft. To verify such a world-changing

discovery, surely several members could have spared a week or so. After his invitation was refused, Leeuwenhoek sent to Oldenburg affidavits by such witnesses as the pastor of the English congregation in Delft, two Lutheran pastors, and a doctor of medicine at the University of Montpellier. Each attested that he had observed the little animals, that they moved on their own, and that, as one Englishman noted, when Leeuwenhoek added vinegar to the water, the animals stopped moving, “being killed by the vinegar.” The Royal Society remained dissatisfied. The English, it seemed, would not believe Leeuwenhoek’s discovery until English eyes had seen the little animals on English soil in an experiment conducted by an English natural philosopher. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were upset that Leeuwenhoek—a Dutchman—had beaten their own compatriot Hooke to the discovery. Exasperated, Leeuwenhoek gave Hooke a few hints, and then, finally, on November 1, 1677—a full three and a half years after the first sighting—Hooke observed Leeuwenhoek’s little animals. Even that was not enough; Hooke had to show them to the Royal Society’s gentleman members. This he did on November 15. The next issue of the Transactions announced: “The [little animals] were observed to have all manner of motions to and fro in the water and by all who saw them they were verily believed to be animals.” Hooke stressed the attendance of “Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Hoskyns, Sir Jonas Moore … and divers others so that there was no longer any doubt of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery.” Perhaps feeling abashed, the Royal Society named Leeuwenhoek a fellow, an honor usually reserved for British natural philosophers. He was so pleased that when his portrait was done around 1680, he made sure that the fellowship certificate with its distinctive red ribbon and the silver box in which it was sent were featured beside him in the painting. It was around this time that he added the “van” to his name. He lived a long life, never ceasing his investigations. After his discovery of spermatozoa in his own semen, he went on to try to find the source of sperm. While dissecting a hare, he found the answer while observing sperm oozing from the vas deferens and testicles. He examined the sperm of 30 animals in all: rats, dogs, several kinds of fish, mussels, oysters, roosters, frogs, and insects of many kinds, including tiny aphids and gnats. On his deathbed, in 1723, he dictated two letters to the Royal Society describing a histological study he had performed on cells of the diaphragms of a sheep and an ox, to disprove his doctor’s theory that he was dying of heart palpitations. He believed, rather, that he suffered from convulsions or spasms in the tendons of the diaphragm that made it difficult to breathe. He was correct, and this rare disorder is now called Van Leeuwenhoek’s Disease. X

XX

Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries did not immediately change medicine. “Germ theory”— the idea that microorganisms cause disease—did not become accepted until there was compelling evidence for it, which Leeuwenhoek lacked. One crucial step was made in the mid-1850s, when the work of Louis Pasteur provided evidence that wine and milk were being contaminated with—and spoiled by—microorganisms. In 1876, more than 150 years after Leeuwenhoek’s death, Robert Koch discovered SUMMER 202 3

27

the anthrax bacillus, proving that a particular bacterium does cause an associated disease. Neither discovery could have been made without the use of microscopes and the knowledge that microorganisms exist. Leeuwenhoek believed that no one during his lifetime could see the invisible better than he could. Yet he suspected that even his own efforts had not penetrated to the very depths of the hidden universe. Writing to Huygens in 1679, he predicted that “all we have as yet discovered is but a trifle in comparison of what lies hidden in the great treasure of nature.” A trifle indeed. Viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, are about 1/100th the size of bacteria, much too small to be seen by microscopes that use light. They are “submicroscopic” and can be seen only with electron microscopes, which use beams of electrons rather than visible light photons as a source of illumination. This and other new technologies for seeing the invisible would have delighted Leeuwenhoek. Whereas the first microorganisms took millennia to find, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was identified in a matter of days, thanks to the work of Leeuwenhoek and those who followed him. But we should also reflect on the relevance today of Leeuwenhoek’s belief that the little animals are not dangerous to humans, that they are instead our friends. Indeed, he resisted the suggestion of Hans Sloane of the Royal Society that little animals might be found in the pustules of smallpox victims. And even when Leeuwenhoek discovered some in his own feces while suffering an intestinal disorder, he refused to blame them for his illness. In his 50s, at an age when most men had lost at least some of their teeth, he proudly described his own full, healthy set. The reason, he insisted, was because he scrubbed his teeth and gums each day with salt. After rinsing with water, he would take a clean, sharp quill and pick between his teeth, finishing up by rubbing his teeth with a muslin cloth. One day, a beggar with rotting and missing teeth told Leeuwenhoek that he had never washed his teeth in his life. Going boldly where other investigators might have quailed, Leeuwenhoek scraped the man’s putrid teeth. He found so many little animals that they were in a tangle and could hardly move. He suggested that they were responsible for the man’s “stanching breath.” He even implied that they were responsible for the man’s decaying teeth. And yet, when he found some plaque on the quill after picking his own healthy teeth, he mixed it with rainwater and some spittle and also found many little animals moving; some had “a strong and swift motion, and shot through the water like a pike,” while others “spun around like a top.” He realized with glee that “there are more living animals in the unclean matter in the teeth in one’s mouth than there are men in a whole Kingdom!” If the little animals were everywhere—in our drinking water, inside our bodies, even on healthy, clean teeth—how could they be dangerous? He was, it turns out, partly correct. Scientists now recognize the importance of “the microbiome”: the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that reside on our skin and inside our gut. Studies have shown that the microbiome plays a critical role in our well-being. A healthy gut microbiome helps us digest our food and produce vitamins crucial to our health: B12, thiamine, riboflavin, and vitamin K (which helps clot the blood). Some studies have concluded that the specific microbiome with 28

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

which we are born also helps shape our future life by making us more or less likely to develop autoimmune illnesses such as Crohn’s disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. Researchers are working on how we can manipulate the microbiome to prevent—and possibly even cure—these chronic and often debilitating diseases by introducing certain “good” bacteria to counteract the “bad.” Using good bacteria to cure disease caused by bad bacteria is not merely a dream but a reality. Clostridioides difficile (C. diff ) is a bacterium in the intestines that can cause life-threatening diarrheal infections. It is harmlessly present in many peoples’ microbiomes but can become virulent when antibiotics prescribed for another ailment kill off the bacteria that were keeping C. diff in check. When other antibiotics are then used to control C. diff, they often cause only temporary remission. The overuse of antibiotics has led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains. In 2005, the CDC warned of an emerging strain of C. diff with epidemic potential. But another treatment was found that did not rely on antibiotics. This treatment, a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), filters the stool of a healthy person and transfers its good microbes, including fecal bacteria, into the patient’s lower intestine. FMT restores the bacteria that prevent C. diff from causing illness. This treatment has a high success rate with almost no relapses. Although it was already being used by doctors under what the FDA calls “discretionary enforcement” or as part of clinical trials (both of which limited its use), the FDA placed FMT under a “special guidance” rule in 2013, allowing all patients with C. diff who were unresponsive to antibiotics to receive it. In 2022 and earlier this year, the FDA approved two pharmaceutical products for the treatment. FMT is also being tested as a treatment for other gastrointestinal diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome and colitis. Research suggests that it may help patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and additional neurological conditions. Leeuwenhoek’s “little friends” are already succeeding in curing serious, even deadly, illnesses, and in the future may cure more—perhaps even Covid-19. Recent research at the National Institutes of Health, using both animal models and human subjects, has suggested that the SARS-CoV-2 virus disrupts the microbiome in such a way that bacterial infections can take over the gut and alter the gut lining—allowing pathogenic (or bad) bacteria to spread to the bloodstream and leading to the serious secondary infections that are often fatal to Covid-19 patients. And scientists at the University of Chicago found that an analysis of personal gut microbiomes can predict the outcomes of patients with severe Covid-19. Such discoveries raise the hope that someday we will be able to create personalized probiotics that can introduce good bacteria into a patient’s microbiome to limit the damage of the virus, perhaps even destroy it, and prevent the disabling sequelae that cause untold suffering even after an initial “recovery.” Research on how to use good bacteria to help Covid-19 patients continues. Microorganisms make up about half of our total cell count. One of Leeuwenhoek’s contemporaries, the natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, wrote a poem called “Of Many Worlds in This World,” a paean to the new discovery of an invisible realm of “creatures.” It ends: “And if thus small, then ladies may well wear / A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.” It turns out that this world of worlds exists not merely on our earlobes but inside of us—acting as friends as well as foes. O

If the little animals were everywhere—in our drinking water, inside our bodies, even on healthy, clean teeth—how could they be dangerous?

SUMMER 202 3

29

The Whole World in His Hands What a digital restoration of the most expensive painting ever sold tells us about beauty, authenticity, and the fragility of existence

DAVID STROMBERG

DAVID STROMBERG is the editor of In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times as well as two volumes of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work. His recent writing includes “A Short Inquiry into the End of the World,” the first in his “Mister Investigator” series of speculative essays. He lives in Jerusalem.

30

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

YANAI SEGAL

I

got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I’ve known for years, asked me whether I’d heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005. I told him that I’d heard something of the story but that I didn’t remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and wanted to tell me about it. I was eager to hear more, but first I needed to remind myself of the basic facts. We agreed to speak again soon. As I refreshed my memory in the following days, I learned that although there was considerable controversy about the history and legitimacy of the painting, there was some general consensus, too. The Salvator Mundi—“Savior of the World”—was most likely completed at the turn of the 16th century. An oil painting rendered on a walnut panel, it depicts Jesus offering a blessing with his right hand while holding an orb that represents Earth with his left. Studies made in preparation for the painting had been authenticated as genuine Leonardos, and at least 30 copies were believed to have been produced by Leonardo’s disciples directly from the original. Records show that the painting was in the collections of various British aristocrats and royals, including King Charles I, but sometime at the end of the 18th century, it effectively disappeared. When the work turned up at a New Orleans estate sale in 2005—heavily damaged, poorly restored, and painted over in several places—two veteran art dealers, Robert Simon and Yanai Segal’s digital Alexander Parish, thought it might be significant and pur- restoration of the painting believed to chased it for around $10,000. They hired Dianne Modestini, be Leonardo’s Salvaa scholar and master art restorer, to clear away the restorations tor Mundi

SUMMER 202 3

31

and repairs that the painting had undergone over the centuries to produce a definitive version. What emerged was an artwork that some experts believed to be the genuine Salvator Mundi. Others were not convinced. Beginning in November 2011, the restored painting was displayed as part of a large exhibition of Leonardo’s works at London’s National Gallery, which had authenticated the painting. In 2013, it sold for about $80 million in a brokered deal that saw it resold the following day for $127.5 million. In 2017, it went up for auction again, this time selling for more than $450 million—the highest price ever paid for a work of art—to an unknown bidder who turned out to be a Saudi prince reportedly acting as a proxy for Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. The work was supposed to be part of a landmark 2019 exhibition at the Louvre commemorating the 500th death anniversary of Leonardo, but the painting never went on display, the reasons for its exclusion never made public. And though scientific examinations done by the museum had confirmed that the painting was genuine (at least according to a secret book prepared, but never published, by the Louvre), questions about its authenticity have lingered. The entire saga of the painting’s travails through the contemporary worlds of art, wealth, and politics was traced in the 2021 documentary The Lost Leonardo, which portrayed how the superrich are able to hide their wealth in the form of high-end art. I was surprised that so many discussions of the painting had focused more on these financial aspects, and the controversial nature of how it changed hands, than they did on aesthetics. To me, the bigger question was whether this artwork had the effect of a Leonardo. And when I looked at an image of the restored painting, I could not be sure. I saw a hint of the master before me, but something seemed to be missing. I was curious about the kind of project Yanai had undertaken. His efforts lay mainly in the realm of contemporary art, which he usually exhibited in large-scale installations. He had studied academic drawing as a teenager and then visual art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He was a founding member and curator of the Barbur Gallery, a collective art space that has hosted both local and international artists since 2005, and has worked as an illustrator and a designer, creating everything from animated videos to children’s books. His studio, which I’d visited regularly over the years, was full of large-scale abstract paintings and conceptual sculptures made of such materials as hand-mixed concrete and Styrofoam. But there were often small oil paintings, too, scattered around, many of them still lifes of flowers. For as long as I’ve known him, Yanai has investigated the tension between figurative and abstract art, combining 20th-century modernist patterns with a contemporary aesthetic language. I had never known him to take an interest in the work of the Old Masters. When I asked Yanai about his project, he told me that he had come across two images of the Salvator Mundi—the restored version that the world had come to know and an earlier, damaged iteration, with many of the original artist’s brushstrokes still visible. Wondering if a digital restoration would yield a different result, he decided to draw on his many years of computer experience and attempt to restore the painting himself. He had accomplished a great deal, he said, and though he wasn’t yet done, he sensed that his work might provide a clearer view of the artist’s original vision. 32

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

When I saw a photo of the damaged Salvator Mundi, I had an immediate idea of what had inspired Yanai. Looking at the half-tattered canvas, with the figure of Jesus bearing a haunting expression, I experienced an emotional reaction that had been absent when I’d seen an image of the physically restored version. Although I was not sure whether a digital restoration could be called legitimate, I was curious whether the emotion of the original—which, to me, was missing in the physical restoration—could be better captured using digital means. If so, it would raise a whole new set of questions about the painting and its authorship. When Yanai invited me to his studio in Tel Aviv to see the work in progress, I told him that I’d be there in a couple of days. X

XX

I got on the train from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on a hot July afternoon. When I arrived at Yanai’s studio, he made me a cup of strong black coffee, sat me down in a chair, and opened up a laptop, revealing an image of a half-restored Salvator Mundi. This was nothing like the painting that was famous the world over. This one had more gravitas, more power. It had the kind of arresting presence I associated with Leonardo. Yanai began to explain to me how he had performed his restoration. With extremely close-up zooms into a photograph of the damaged original, he was able to pick up pixel-resolution pigment traces adjacent to the damaged areas. Whereas a typical art restorer would, at this point, add new pigments to the painting, Yanai used digital impressions of the surviving work to fill in the missing sections. He looked at images of every known copy of the Salvator Mundi to determine what might have been on the original walnut panel. He constantly zoomed in and out, looking at the overall image, then going back in to fill in the pixels, watching as, step by step, a new version of the painting emerged. I thought Yanai had a powerful image on his hands, and I asked him to tell me more about how the project came into being. He shrugged and said it was sort of by accident. During the pandemic, he began listening to podcasts while working on illustrations and book covers. One of those podcasts was about the Salvator Mundi. Intrigued, he searched for the painting online and came upon the image of the damaged work. It moved him. It was totally ruined, he said, but really like gazing at a figure behind a beaded curtain. If he could just reach out and move the curtain, he said, he could see what lay behind. He’d never attempted anything like a digital restoration of a painting, but the idea stayed with him. It wouldn’t leave him alone. Yanai did a preliminary test, and the result turned out better than he’d imagined. It didn’t look like an artwork yet, but slowly he could see a new version of the painting appearing on the screen. As I looked at the image he had created, something about it tapped into a deep emotional well in me. Sure, the physical restoration had been historically researched. It had material integrity, dutifully bringing back to an optimal state a painting that had been badly damaged and inexpertly conserved over the centuries. I also understood that the motivation of the restorer was different: to preserve a physical object that could later be sold at auction. But for me, that object lacked feeling. And no matter how many times it

Yanai did a preliminary test, and the result turned out better than he’d imagined. It didn’t look like an artwork yet, but slowly he could see a new version of the painting appearing on the screen.

SUMMER 202 3

33

No matter how many times it was attributed to Leonardo, it could never be a true Leonardo if it didn’t also have emotional force. It could be a Leonardo painting, but not a Leonardo artwork.

was—or wasn’t—attributed to Leonardo, it could never be a legitimate Leonardo if it didn’t also have emotional force. It could be a Leonardo painting, but not a Leonardo artwork. Yanai was heartened by my response, but he was still concerned about the significance of his undertaking—in particular, how it related to the ongoing debate about the physically restored painting. He was also wary of the fine line between the project of re-creating an image by Leonardo and the possibility of its being seen as an artwork of his own. He was not invested, he said, in creating a Yanai original. He was pursuing a vision that squarely belonged to Leonardo. But he couldn’t totally take himself out of the equation, either. Which left him with a lot of questions. Still, he said, the project had become a compulsion. He’d sit down to create 34

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

The Salvator Mundi in its damaged state (opposite)— cleaned but not yet restored—and after the restoration performed by Dianne Modestini. Although experts at the Louvre authenticated the restoration as a genuine Leonardo, questions about its

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

authenticity remain.

an illustration or design a book cover, feel compelled to take a quick look at the Leonardo, and then end up working on the restoration for hours. His initial aim had been to fill in the missing sections using information gleaned from the damaged original. Once he took this as far as it would go, however, he saw that some areas lacked sufficient data for him to finish the painting using simple digital deduction. In those sections, he explained, he had to think like an artist and re-create the missing areas in accordance with what he believed Leonardo might have intended. He was no longer fixing a painting, he said, but working on an interpolation. It was hard to move into this space, and that was why he’d stopped. He was looking to get some perspective on the project as it stood. Yanai asked what I thought about his restored version so far. I told him the SUMMER 202 3

35

truth. That I didn’t quite know yet what to make of it, and that I needed to think some more. Since he was only half done, it was hard to make any final judgment. All I could say was that his version felt closer to what might have been the original. We agreed that I’d return once he’d worked on it some more. And I repeated that the main issue, for me, was the emotional element—there was something uncanny about the damaged painting that was missing from the physical restoration, something that seemed better preserved in Yanai’s image. X

XX

On the train ride home, I began to reflect on some questions that had been on my mind since Yanai first told me about his project—for reasons that had nothing to do with him or the Salvator Mundi. A decade earlier, during a trip to Paris, I had met a retired-businessman-turned-philosopher named Hervé Le Baut. I had been seeking information on the life of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of France’s foremost philosophers in the period after World War II. Merleau-Ponty had been a close friend and colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who all together founded Le Temps modernes, one of the best-known postwar journals. In the early 1950s, not long after Albert Camus’s falling-out with Sartre over their political differences, Merleau-Ponty also cut ties with Sartre. Researching any direct links between Camus and Merleau-Ponty, I had sought out Le Baut, who had written a book on the French philosopher. When we met at his home, Le Baut said he knew little of Merleau-Ponty’s connection with Camus, but he then revealed to me something that was common knowledge to people with an interest in Beauvoir but was mostly unknown to everyone else. It was a story of legitimacy. The story appears in Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), in which she describes the death, nearly 30 years before, of her beloved friend Zaza, who, she reports, died after being spurned by a man named in the book as Jean Pradelle. In reality, this man was Merleau-Ponty. What Beauvoir didn’t know—and what she learned from Zaza’s sister only after her memoir was published—was that MerleauPonty had turned Zaza away for the simple reason that her parents, who’d hired a detective to look into his family’s past, had discovered that he was an illegitimate child. They told him to either halt his pursuit of Zaza or be publicly exposed. And so he ended the relationship. Zaza died not long after the breakup. Zaza’s sister supposedly showed Beauvoir letters suggesting that Zaza herself knew of the whole debacle—that the tragedy had indeed been fatal to her, killing her first in spirit and then in body. Merleau-Ponty would have been 21 when this took place and seemingly hadn’t known of his own illegitimacy before it was revealed to him by Zaza’s family. It’s chilling to think of how he learned of his provenance, from people who were hardly more than strangers, crushing not only his love for his fiancée and his plans for the future but also his entire understanding of his own past. The moment was powerful and deeply traumatic, and perhaps that’s why, years later, sitting down to write an essay on Paul Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty found himself veering into the personal history of Leonardo—one of the most famous illegitimate children of all time. As soon as I got home, I reread “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Merleau-Ponty first raises 36

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

the matter of Leonardo’s illegitimacy as part of an argument about the relationship between childhood and adulthood—between the powerful feeling that our lives are determined by our births and the similarly powerful feeling that we can determine our future by our actions. And though the argument is first built on Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty makes a sudden pivot, referencing Sigmund Freud’s book on Leonardo and refocusing his discussion on one of the only times Leonardo ever mentioned his childhood: when he described the memory of a vulture coming to him in the cradle and striking him on the mouth with its tail. With this sleight of hand, Merleau-Ponty turns an essay ostensibly about the role of doubt in creativity into a meditation on origins—in this case, the origins of arguably the greatest master of all time. Continuing to lean on Freud, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that Leonardo “was the illegitimate son of a rich notary who married the noble Donna Albiera the very year Leonardo was born. Having no children by her, he took Leonardo into his home when the boy was five”—the same age when Merleau-Ponty experienced the death of the man he thought was his father. Merleau-Ponty then adds, in a tone that takes on a subtle lyricism, that Leonardo “was a child without a father” and that “he got to know the world in the sole company of that unhappy mother who seemed to have miraculously created him.” Those lines changed how I read Merleau-Ponty’s essay. When he writes about Leonardo’s “basic attachment” to his mother, “which he had to give up when he was recalled to his father’s home, and into which he had poured all his resources of love and all his power of abandon,” I imagined Merleau-Ponty refracting his own attachment to his mother through the Renaissance artist. When he later writes that Leonardo’s “spirit of investigation was a way for him to escape from life, as if he had invested all his power of assent in the first years of his life and had remained true to his childhood right to the end,” MerleauPonty seems to be mirroring his own sense of curiosity and wonder as a thinker. Elsewhere, when he writes that Leonardo “paid no heed to authority and trusted only nature and his own judgment in matters of knowledge,” I couldn’t help but think of Merleau-Ponty reflecting on his own moment of truth—when he discovered his illegitimate origins and, still young and insecure, succumbed to the social pressures exerted on him. He is writing about Leonardo, but he could well be writing about himself. I was curious about the source of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on Leonardo, so I turned to Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. “In the first three or four years of life,” writes Freud, “impressions are fixed and modes of reactions are formed towards the outer world which can never be robbed of their importance by any later experiences.” The impression that Leonardo would have had of himself as a fatherless child would have likely haunted him throughout his life. And, it occurred to me all at once, his circumstances would also have helped him identify with the most famous of “fatherless” boys—Jesus. And that’s when it all came together. What better way to create an everlasting emblem of your most consequential childhood impression than to paint yourself as the Salvator Mundi—the savior of the world? What could be more audacious than to turn your illegitimacy into one of the most powerful religious symbols ever created?

I couldn’t help but think of MerleauPonty reflecting on his own moment of truth—when he discovered his illegitimate origins. He is writing about Leonardo, but he could well be writing about himself.

SUMMER 202 3

37

It wasn’t a totally wild idea. Lillian Schwartz, a visual artist working with digital media since the 1960s, had made a claim back in 1987 that the Mona Lisa was a self-portrait of Leonardo. But it was one thing to turn yourself into a woman, and quite another to paint Christ in your own image. It took Leonardo’s penchant for games and riddles into the realm of blasphemy. Yet on another level, it was also a simple and perfect way to expose something about yourself that was otherwise difficult to address—to get an emotion across without having to identify the emotion itself. Merleau-Ponty, writing about Leonardo, had done the same thing. He had told his personal story through a figure so grand that no one had ever guessed he might have been talking about himself. He had done to Leonardo what Leonardo had done to Jesus. I was tempted to call up Yanai and tell him about my hypothesis. But I realized that he first had to complete his image without knowing of my thought experiment. Then, once it was done, I could put his Salvator Mundi next to other portraits of Leonardo—and compare. X

XX

Six months passed. It was a busy time—a new coronavirus variant was rampant, and obligations ballooned. I seemed unable to catch up with anything. By the time I talked to Yanai about his project again, he told me that he had gone as far as he could with the image. Finally, in early winter, I found a moment to visit him again at his studio. As we settled into our chairs and he reached for his laptop, I sensed that I was sitting next to a changed person. He hadn’t just stopped work on the digital restoration. He’d come to some sort of understanding. Yanai opened his laptop and revealed the image. I was struck by how final it looked. I still had the damaged painting in mind, with its haunting rips and scratches, and it was somewhat jarring to see the apparent magic trick that Yanai had performed—as if he’d resurrected the original image. The digital process he’d used had evolved during those months. At some point, he thought he had finished, but the image had looked too smooth, too new, lacking any of the mystique or allure of a 500-year-old painting. The damaged work, he said, gives you a mental image that’s difficult to unsee. It has a kind of fuzziness, a softness around the eyes and face, from all of the scratches and erasures. He realized that to restore the image properly, he also had to preserve the damage it had suffered over the centuries. So he removed the most recent layer altogether and started putting the painting back piece by piece. Many of the sections he thought he’d “fixed,” he said, had turned from interpolations into interpretations, so that, slowly, the painting had also become his, which had never been his intention. Having fully restored the image, he began scaling back his work—but this time with the knowledge and experience of having examined every single pixel and pigment. He stopped “fixing” the painting and started reclaiming the parts that were lost. And as he did, he discovered that the sections that looked “lost” were not lost at all. They just needed a little push to make them more clearly visible. I asked Yanai what he made of his effort, and he said it was hard to say what it was all about. It wasn’t just about the methodology of digitally restoring the painting, though he had invested a great deal of time in that, and it wasn’t just 38

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

about satisfying his curiosity about what such a restoration might look like, though that was also a part of the story. It also wasn’t about putting his own mark on a Leonardo, as Marcel Duchamp had done when he famously added a mustache to the Mona Lisa in a 1919 print. Whatever Yanai had done, its meaning was somewhere at the crossroads of these things, though it was also about the painting itself. The digital restoration, Yanai said, brings us closer to the original. In the middle of the process, as he became intimate with its every corner, its every color and texture, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the painting had also become his own. Now, at the end, he no longer saw himself in the process. When he looked at the painting, what he saw was a contemporary artwork—a representation of all humanity holding a fragile world in his hands. It’s a beautiful image, he said. People had been so busy talking about its authenticity that they had missed this essential aspect of the painting. In the end, he said, had he known the road he’d need to take to arrive at this point, he wasn’t sure he would have started. He likened the whole process to standing at a chasm with only enough raw material to build a bridge halfway across. You start building and get to the middle, but then you have to take the bridge you’ve built, while suspended in midair, and use the same raw material to build the second half. Then, having reached the other side, you have to build the bridge again in the opposite direction to get as close as possible back to the original. All other matters aside, I asked, had the experience given him any new insights about himself as an artist? He chuckled and said that it had actually reconnected him with his roots. He’d gone back to his old notebooks, to the drawings he’d done as a teenager when first starting to paint, and found copies he’d made of Leonardo’s drawings. He pulled a few of these out to show me, and I recognized one image at once—the head of an old man believed to be a self-portrait. It felt like a sign. I finally shared with him my own thoughts about Leonardo and the possibility that the Salvator Mundi was also a portrait of the artist. I suggested we put his final image next to images that were believed to be portraits of Leonardo—including the drawing he had copied as a teenager. He opened some tabs up on his computer. It was hard not to be moved. The sharp nose. The penetrating eyes. The delicate eyebrows. The unique curve of the mouth. Even a split beard. It was uncanny. It was all there. It was, without a doubt, Leonardo. I cannot overstate the power of the moment. The symbolism of the painting disappeared, and I saw before me a person all too aware of the fragility of the world in which he lived and from which, unlike the immortal figure in his painting, he would one day have to depart. I looked over at Yanai, who had given years of his own life to resurrecting the dead, and had another thought. If Leonardo painting Jesus was really Leonardo painting himself, and Merleau-Ponty writing about Leonardo was in reality Merleau-Ponty writing about himself, was it possible that Yanai’s restoration of the Salvator Mundi was in reality Yanai’s restoration of himself? Perhaps. But Leonardo had also painted Jesus, and Merleau-Ponty had also written about Leonardo, and Yanai had, regardless of anything else, also restored the Salvator Mundi—endowing it once again with the most important element lost along the way, something that could never be reproduced by technical means alone. Emotion. O SUMMER 202 3

39

Night Vision On finding comfort and purpose in the dark

ILLUSTRATION BY XXXXX

TAMARA DEAN

40

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

TAMARA DEAN has written for The Guardian, Orion, and The Southern Review, among other publications. The author of the book The HumanPowered Home, she recently moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Her essay “Slow Blues,” published in the Autumn 2020 issue of the Scholar, was a National Magazine Award finalist in feature writing.

JUSTIN MULLET/STOCKSY

F

or American farmers, life changed dramatically in 1937. That year, electricity began flowing to hundreds of thousands of rural households, including some 12,000 in Wisconsin. The Rural Electrification Act (REA), which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed into law the previous year, provided stimulus for utilities to install poles and wires where, until then, it hadn’t been economical to do so. Most farmers were thrilled. One who lived near Janesville, Wisconsin, said of the power company crew, “I thought sometimes that they weren’t ever goin’ to get here. The organizers told us we’d have juice by spring. But we finally did get it, and, by golly, I’m goin’ to shoot the works.” He showed a city reporter every electric light in his barn. His newspaper profile reads like REA propaganda, and it might have been. To persuade skeptical farmers—who were still feeling the effects of the Great Depression and balked

SUMMER 202 3

41

at the prospect of a monthly electric bill—REA advocates mounted a forceful public relations campaign. Agents traveled across the country demonstrating electric appliances. Theaters presented a popular film, Power and the Land, which touted the benefits of electricity for agricultural operations and concluded with the line, “Things will be easier now.” Part of the campaign focused on convincing women. Electricity would give them lights, refrigerators, ovens, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and irons they could plug into an outlet. It would end their drudgery, the government promised. But Jennie Harebo, a 64-year-old woman from central Wisconsin, wasn’t having it. After her town’s rural electric cooperative set eight poles and lines on her property, she sawed down one of the poles and parked her coupe on the downed wires. She stationed herself in the car, armed with a shotgun and a hoe. Newsmen called it a “sitdown strike,” a “vigil,” a “blockade.” Her husband, an “invalid,” brought her food. At dusk, she gathered blankets around her shoulders and lap and cradled the shotgun. One night, two nights, three nights she stayed. A sign on the windshield read, NOTICE: NO TRESPASSING. Harebo allowed no negotiating, entertained no tit-for-tat. Months earlier, she and her husband had won a case in the state’s supreme court that saved a riparian corner of their property from being seized by men who wanted to build a dam. The government’s lawyer must have suspected that his client’s case was doomed. I imagine that Jennie Harebo, a woman of a certain age, was fed up with men’s impositions. Now they were trying to force lines through her vantage, light into her dark. Maybe she wanted to hold fast to twilight powers—the wonderment, the wisdom, the privileged views. Maybe she was simply cantankerous in the original sense of the word, which is rooted in the notion of “holding fast.” What could she have seen in her three nights’ vigil? North Star, both dippers, crescent moon’s shine on the pump handle—the fixtures of haiku masters. Also, quotidian country lurkers and skulkers. Her night vision undefiled by electric shine, she surely saw scavenging raccoons, ambling possums, scuffling skunks. Maybe a lynx’s glassy gaze. She heard more, too, than her city relatives in their wired homes with their humming lights and fans and blathering radios. She could have made out the lawyer’s Pontiac approaching from a distance of 10 miles. She had plenty of time to aim her Remington out the driver’s side window.

I imagine that Jennie Harebo, a woman of a certain age, was fed up with men’s impositions. Now they were trying to force lines through her vantage, light into her dark. Maybe she wanted to hold fast to twilight powers.

X

XX

Eighty years after Harebo’s stand, I took up wandering my rural Wisconsin property after nightfall. I longed for whatever sights diurnal living denied me. Trail cams mounted in the forest or by the creek had offered only glimpses: beavers adding branches to their dams, stock-still deer staring straight into the lens. The cameras, 42

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

I was sure, didn’t reveal a fraction of the night’s secrets. On clear nights, I stood under the Milky Way’s sprawling, splotchy canopy. I saw planets, constellations, comets, and once, a meteor afire and dying as it plummeted to Earth. The darkness of my rural township, an hour’s drive from the Harebos’ farm, was rare for modern times. In 2005, our town board passed a dark sky ordinance (whereas, whereas, whereas … and so, lights must be shielded, directed downward, calibrated, kept modest). Nevertheless, a yard light down the road, a sign at the corner bar, and the glow of a distant city interfered. I sought deeper darkness. I found it at the nature preserve halfway between my place and the Harebos’ farm. One night, a self-made astronomer and his telescope met me and others at the preserve for a moonlit hike. Inside the visitors center, I discovered my friend Liz in the crowd, and we sat together. The occasion was a penumbral lunar eclipse. The astronomer began his program with canned, corny jokes. He introduced his two assistants, women who knew the trails and would guide us on the night hike. He must have mentioned the alignment of heavenly bodies, how Earth’s shadow would fall on February’s full moon, the snow moon, once it rose. But I’ve never retained stargazing facts. I’m slow to make out asterisms. I can’t recall which planets appear where and when or what temperaments the ancient Greeks assigned them. I merely love to bask under them. We were all traipsing outside into the snow when, unexpectedly, the astronomer announced that hiking would be too dangerous because of ice. Instead, he would talk to us during the half hour before the moon rose. The group groaned, and Liz and I looked at each other. Like the astronomer’s assistants, we knew the preserve’s trails, at least the main ones. We backed away from the others and stole into the darkness. We padded slowly and quietly over the glazed snow, keeping our eyes on the ground, gathering scant reflected light from unknown sources. The woodland trail was icy only on rocks or railroad ties. In those spots we braced ourselves and reached out to steady each other. Soon we joined the wider trail, formerly the old state highway. There, the snow was ridged from snowmobiles’ belts. As we walked on the crusted ridges, Liz told me about living in Dharamshala a few years earlier. I pictured her humid quarters in the mountains of northern India, the buildings’ bright colors, the Buddhist pilgrims surrounding her. I sensed the peace she had felt there and nowhere else. I shared her desire to return to Dharamshala, although I’d never been there. While visualizing that faraway place, I kept my eyes on my surroundings. Moving in the dark was a balancing art. I felt most adept when I looked out with a broad, allowing awareness, when I didn’t fix on fine details or make assumptions about the terrain. Liz and I arrived at the path’s apogee precisely when the clouds parted, the full moon rose orange, and as if cued by the shifting light, coyotes began howling. X

XX

What I have seen by the light of celestial bodies: rabbit prints as lavender shadows in the snow; bare, black elm branches waving; the red glow of varmints’ eyes at the compost heap; stars in puddles and brooks; my lover’s silhouette moving beside mine. What I have not seen in the night and been surprised by: knee-deep muck; a snorting, thundering herd of deer; a frog on a door handle that I smashed under my SUMMER 202 3

43

palm as I hurried to get indoors during a rainstorm; a pickup truck without headlights barreling down the road—and the drunk young man at the wheel who, after nearly running me over, reversed and asked, “Are you okay? Geez, are you okay?” in a tone that told me his real question was, What are you doing walking out here after dark? To be moon-eyed is to keep your eyes wide open and to be awed. But to be moony is to be absent-minded, loony, or at least naïve. With better night vision, I thought, I could steer my life toward more moon-eyed moments than moony ones. Maybe I could take in more good surprises than bad and live with heightened awareness, less delusion. Seeing what I’d been missing all along might grant me new, original insights. X

XX

Humans are born with the ability to see in low light. But compared with that of other animals, our night vision is feeble. We lack the nocturnals’ giant pupils (think doeeyed) and their tapetum lucidum, a structure at the back of the eyeball that acts as a mirror, amplifying starlight into floodlight and reflecting it back onto the retina. Our natural night vision can be eased into—it takes a while for our sight to adjust to dimness—but in general, it can’t be enhanced. Using lubricating eye drops or eating more beta carotene, for most well-nourished Americans, won’t improve it. Other habits, such as staring at computer screens or the sun, can degrade it. Unfortunately for Harebo and me and others past their physical prime, night vision also diminishes with age. To compensate for human deficiencies, engineers developed night vision goggles during World War II. Now every optics store sells them. Some years ago, craving a clear view of the outdoors after sunset, I bought a pair. I stood on our deck, held the goggles to my face, and scanned the horizon. Deer in the field glowed an unnatural phosphor green. Nothing more. No portal opened to a secret world. No mysteries were revealed. In the years following my purchase, I rarely picked up the goggles when I set out in the dark. What I really wanted was something innate and unencumbered, a better version of what I was born with. Scientists have researched ways of improving human night vision. A chlorophyll derivative called chlorin e6 has shown promise in mice. In 2015, Gabriel Licina and Jeffrey Tibbets, self-styled biohackers with a group called Science for the Masses, gained notoriety for trying the substance. A solution of chlorin e6 was dropped into Licina’s eyes. Two hours later, he and others, acting as controls, were taken to a place where “trees and brush were used for ‘blending’ ”—presumably, an attempt to create a uniform backdrop for all participants. Licina and the control subjects were asked to identify letters, numbers, and other symbols on signs. The experiment appeared to have been successful. Controls correctly identified the objects a third of the time, while Licina did so 100 percent of the time. Afterward, he acknowledged to a journalist that the experiment was “kind of crap science.” Without knowing the potentially harmful effects of chlorin e6, the biohacker had been willing to risk his everyday vision for the possibility of gaining night vision, if only for a few hours (the drops’ effects wore off by sunrise). But Science for the Masses lacked sufficient funding to conduct the sort of extensive, ethical trials that more esteemed researchers require. 44

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

In photographs from that night, Licina stares at the camera like some mad alien, his eyes watery and opaque with their larger-than-life black irises—a consequence not of the chlorin e6 but of the oversize light-dimming contact lenses he wore. His creepy appearance and the report’s description of him roving in a dark wood made me think that the young men had especially enjoyed the homemade horror-film aspect of their experiment. Maybe they lusted after superpowers that would allow them to recognize and slay the dark’s monsters. After all, night vision is one superhuman capability that’s nearly achievable. Unlike time travel or leaping tall buildings, it’s only just beyond our grasp. X

XX

“Darkness, pitch black and impenetrable, was the realm of the hobgoblin, the sprite, the will-o’-the-wisp, the boggle, the kelpie, the boggart and the troll. Witches, obviously, were ‘abroad,’ ” journalist Jon Henley wrote of life before artificial lighting in a 2009 article in The Guardian. Real monsters coexisted with the fantastical. In the London, Munich, and Paris of the early 19th century, thieves, rapists, and murderous gangs roamed freely. According to Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close, humans were never more afraid of the night than in the era just before gaslights illuminated the cities’ streets. Murder rates then were five to 10 times higher than they are today. And yet, Erkich adds, “large numbers of people came up for air when the sun went down. It afforded them the privacy they did not have during the day. They could no longer be overseen by their superiors.” Darkness made equals of poor and wealthy, servants and masters, women and men. Past sunset, oppressors needed artificial light to point out their symbols of country and religion, to run factories and enforce conforming behaviors. For the less powerful, darkness and the ability to navigate celestially meant freedom. X

XX

Jennie Harebo’s vigil attracted reporters and photographers from across the state, their cars lining the roads near her farm. The visitors, she said, treated her courteously. A deputy sheriff persuaded her to put down the shotgun. And the REA’s lawyer finally relented, having decided to circumvent the Harebo farm after neighbors agreed to accept the poles and lines on their properties. The utility paid Harebo $25 for her trouble and removed the eight poles that it had installed on her land. “With nothing left to fight for,” a newsman wrote, Harebo ended her vigil after about 96 hours. “Storing her formidable hoe in the woodshed, [she] claimed victory today.” She abandoned her coupe, “her husky frame sagging a little with weariness.” The crowd that had gathered to watch the three-day standoff dispersed. “Ultimately,” another reporter mocked, the family’s “need for kerosene lamps continued.” In opposing electricity, Harebo was a rare exception. Some farmers didn’t even wait for the REA. Two decades before her blockade, men who once lived along the road between my home and the nature preserve were so eager to have electricity that they collected their own poles and wire. They used tractors, shovels, and muscle to run lines from the nearest village. Theirs was the nation’s first farmer-led electrical cooperative. It functioned independently for 20 years, disbanding only in the early 1930s, when the state butted in and began interfering in its operations. SUMMER 202 3

45

Although she opposed lines on her own property, I imagined that Harebo would have admired the farmers’ refusal to comply with state regulations. As one farmer remarked on the public service commission’s successful attempt to set his cooperative’s prices, it “was a good example of the chair-bottom warmers’ insatiable desire to run everything.” In the years since I learned about Harebo’s vigil, she’d become a minor heroine in my eyes. Here was a tough woman who had fended off the establishment. She had battled for her rights—to the darkness and the freedoms it brought her, to the preservation of her night vision—even if she was weary and sagging. X

XX

Standing on the groomed snowmobile route, Liz and I watched the full moon fade to yellow and shrink behind clouds. Then we left for the narrow forest trail. We picked over rocks and logs and a trickling, perennial creek. Farther on, we listened to our breathing and footfalls, nothing more. We found the meadow next to the parking lot of the visitors center. Ahead, clustered around the telescope, stood the astronomer and part of the group we’d started with. The clouds disappeared again. I looked up to watch the space station dash a diagonal across the sky. The astronomer invited me to view the moon in the telescope. “Lean into the eyepiece,” he told me. “Don’t touch anything.” Singled out in close-up, the moon nearly blinded me. The penumbral eclipse, a subtle shading on the moon’s surface, was too faint for me to detect. I kept my eye to the telescope only long enough to assure the astronomer that I’d made an effort. I didn’t like the way the instrument isolated the moon. Without its complement of stars and planets, it was a flattened, vapid object. I felt as if I were ogling it but not really seeing it. Liz took a brief turn at the eyepiece, too. Then we walked to our cars, agreeing to meet again for more nighttime hikes. X

XX

People soon will be able to choose better night vision like they can choose to eliminate forehead wrinkles. Professional scientists—not only biohackers—are working on it. In 2019, Gang Han and his fellow researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced that they had enabled mice to detect near-infrared light by injecting nanoparticles into their eyes. After the injection, the mice could see phosphor-green shapes in the dark, as if they were wearing night vision goggles. Not surprisingly, safety and security, national or personal, are often cited as reasons for such research and its funding. What if soldiers, for example, could see enemies after dark without the hassle and weight of equipment? In one article, Han suggested testing the eye-injected nanoparticles on dogs next. “If we had a ‘super-dog’ that could see NIR [near-infrared] light,” he told a reporter, “we could project a pattern onto a lawbreaker’s body from a distance, and the dog could catch them without disturbing other people.” As if criminals wouldn’t dodge behind obstacles; as if police with their natural night vision could make out the perpetrators well enough to project shapes onto them; as if dogs wouldn’t be distracted by all the marvels their new night vision revealed and dash away from their handlers. 46

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

The delivery method—an injection into the eye—also makes this night vision technique impractical. Recently, though, when I spoke with Han, he told me that his lab might soon begin testing a wearable device, such as a patch or contact lens, on humans. He imagined an application in which a security agent wearing a night vision patch could see details in facial recognition software that others could not. But for this, more funding would be required. Of the lab’s many projects, night vision research has received the most attention in the media. But not from industry or government. People at the big granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, Han told me, “can’t recognize its importance in daily life.” X

XX

We claimed our right to be safe from monsters in the dark—symbolically, of course. The real, human perpetrators were always about, day or night, visible or not. Who knows if our stand changed policies. But it changed me.

Months after fixing Jennie Harebo’s image in my mind, I found an article about her that I hadn’t seen before. It included a photograph, likely taken after she ended her vigil. She looked nothing like the newsmen’s descriptions. Although the image was dim from age and poor scanning, I could tell that her hair was curled and styled. She wore a buttoned-up overcoat with a contrasting collar, maybe fur. She struck a movie star’s pose beside the coupe—jaw set, chin lifted, face turned slightly, gaze fixed on the middle distance. She was beautiful. Her frame was upright, not sagging. She showed no sign of weariness after 96 hours in the car. Shotgun held at her side, she looked ecstatic and carefree. Seeing the photograph chastened me. I had allowed the newsmen’s descriptions of Harebo to deceive me. I’d been willing to accept that she was crabby and exhausted from her ordeal. But the word vigil, after all, is rooted in “lively” and “strong.” Maybe she didn’t consider it an ordeal at all. Maybe she relished the standoff. Harebo’s proud posture reminded me of when I lived in Lansing, Michigan, during college and joined friends to march down the middle of the street. We held posters or candles and shouted, “Women unite, take back the night!” We claimed our right to be safe from monsters in the dark—symbolically, of course. The real, human perpetrators were always about, day or night, visible or not. Who knows if our stand changed any policies. But it changed me. Marching to reclaim the dark brought me a sense of solidarity among women that school, work, and family had not. Even so, I thought as I studied Harebo’s photograph, my efforts hadn’t gone far enough. I hadn’t fully imagined what we would do with our freedom after we won the night. During the summer after our first moonlit hike, Liz and I took more late-night excursions to the middle of nowhere. What I saw with my natural, flawed night vision: shooting stars, swooping bats, slumbering farm machinery, and the lift and dip of a rare, blue-glowing firefly. What I felt, as I listened and shared more stories with my friend: a keener attunement, an ease among shadows, and the assurance of being fully seen—so much of what daylight’s glare had been hiding. O

SUMMER 202 3

47

P O ET RY

In the Aftermath of Civil War THE ART OF OBSERVANCE IN THE LYRICS OF VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN

he palmyra palm is revered by the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, where it is known as a celestial tree, a symbol of fertility, every part of which can be used. In Vidyan Ravinthiran’s “The Burnt Palmyra,” one of these trees speaks. Although it has been “burnt,” the tree has survived the savage violence of the Sri Lankan civil war, unlike all “the other ruined trees” along the road where it stands, which were cut down so that their “charred and telltale” condition would not call the world’s attention to manifold war crimes. Unaccountably, this tree is left to bear witness. It has been stripped of its “crown” of leaves, leaves that were traditionally used to make things both everyday and elevated, from “baskets and hats” to the manuscript scrolls of the ancient Tamil poets “whose works burned, with the library in Jaffna.” Ravinthiran is referring to the destruction of the vast library in the Tamil capital by police and a governmentallied mob in 1981. Today, the war is over. In a museum curated by the government, the exhibits try to portray the insurgent Tamil Tiger forces as “a joke.” But the burnt palmyra tells a different story. Most Americans know little of the brutal Sri Lankan civil war, which raged from the 1980s to 2009, when government forces finally gained a military victory over rebel troops. The war was rooted in a political and religious conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority beginning in the late 1940s. Mass dislocation, suicide 48

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

bombing, assassination, famine, child soldiers, land mines, summary execution, rape—these were some of the horrors of the conflict. Estimates of civilian deaths, overwhelmingly suffered by the Tamil population, range between 40,000 and 100,000. Ravinthiran, a poet, literary critic, and Harvard professor, grew up in Leeds, the child of Tamil immigrants to Britain. In “Eelam,” the Tamil name for Sri Lanka, he considers his parents’ justified “belief in perpetual crisis” and their strategy of “playing dead” in order to survive. Will it ever be possible for their son to be “at peace,” to “sleep well and not brood,” and not at the same time “betray my parents and my dead, / discard forever all they did?” The slant-rhyme couplets of “Eelam” convey not only Ravinthiran’s unease but also his probity and precision, his care and craft as a writer. These are poems of aftermath in which he returns to his parents’ homeland as an observer. He responds to the places and people he encounters with a rhetorical modesty that avoids handwringing and self-display and instead makes for complex sympathies and quiet ironies. In “Leaving Jaffna,” he takes us to a place run by “war widows” who depend “on no one” but themselves. He puts their cooking before us in words so vivid that we want to taste it, even while he declines to translate the Tamil name for the dish, making it harder for the tourist to consume it. Or, in “Yes,” think of the man cutting open a coconut. Like “The Indian Jugglers” in William Hazlitt’s essay of that title, he demonstrates “skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty / triumphing over skill.” Ravinthiran accomplishes something very similar in these poems. —LANGDON HAMMER

The Burnt Palmyra They felled the other charred and telltale trunks turned black from brown and missing their crown of leaves used to make baskets and hats, and as paper by the ancient poets whose works burned, with the library in Jaffna; those leaves made, too, into umbrellas which may be why when the shells came down on these now cratered, lunar badlands innocents hid beneath my boughs, hoping bombs might bounce off like rain … So why is it those who took an axe to all the other ruined trees that would remember their crimes to the world left me and me alone standing, the voiceless lingam you drive past down the tank-ruined road to the war museum with its spalled propeller and piffling, homemade submarines—arranged to paint the Tigers as a joke —where a troop of monkeys with a crash of leaves leap along rusted, bathetic bulkheads drooping apart in slices like carved meat?

Hillside temple Schoolgirls in white blouses and with long, blue-black braids stream down the road alive, once, with dappled, leaping deer —before they were shot by soldiers like this bloke in his lucent boots swaggering past the artillery centre whose mural reads: “when the going gets tough, the tough get going …” Fancying himself an action hero walking in slow-motion away from a coolly disregarded explosion he leads the eye past the bars that keep suicidal couples from Lovers’ Leap, where the sea’s brilliant, soft-hard tremor flashes a code through the boulder it’s said Ravana slashed with his sword. SUMMER 202 3

49

The last train to arrive in Jaffna during the war 30 years ago rusts on the tracks the unimaginable touch of time has turned it the colour, exactly of this land’s ferrous soil —of blood that is four men round a fire purple smoke slants upward—trunks form the bier

Leaving Jaffna everyone prays at the Murugan kovil. A thumb paints your brow with thiruneeru, vermilion, sandalwood paste. Later, you find yourself sat on a concrete block at a table of concrete. The place war widows run, depending on no one: dhal, rice, bangles of cuttlefish afloat in bronze —wild chicken, more bone than meat.

50

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Yes, “it is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill.” The fluent machete gleams into xanthous exocarp, the blade corner levering a divot out—hole for a straw—suck and suck then give the king coconut back: with a stroke it’s halved, he hews of its side a rudimentary spoon to scrape out the white flesh with —shimmering like uncooked squid.

Eelam If my parents were, are, nervy, camouflaged against carnivory; if, at day’s end, their choice is a belief in perpetual crisis; if this autotomy and playing dead (a jettisoned tail, ink squirted) is the only language they felt it safe to bequeath; then, to smile today with unclenched teeth, to sleep well and not brood—an ingrate— over trivially frictive grit till the pearl of nightmare is fished; to be at peace—wouldn’t this betray my parents and my dead, discard forever all they did? SUMMER 202 3

51

The Lives of Bryan My brother often eluded death, but the many trials that he endured could not prepare us for that awful moment when he finally left us

JENNIFER SINOR

All that is not given is lost. —Indian proverb

X

JENNIFER SINOR is an essayist and a professor of English at Utah State University.

52

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

XX

I had just handed the passports to the Delta agent when my other brother, Scott, called. My husband, Michael, our two teenage children, and I were on our way to Costa Rica for 10 days. For a moment, I considered not answering the phone,

ILLUSTRATION BY KAROLIS STRAUTNIEKAS (FOLIO ART)

‘‘W

e lost Bryan,” my father says into the phone, his voice breaking in the cavernous space between each word. He is talking to an old friend of his, someone I knew as a child, one who also lost his adult son. Sitting at a wooden table carried across the prairie in a wagon, my father cradles the phone with one hand and his head with the other. His elbows rest on wood seeped in dailiness and grief. Silence fills my parents’ kitchen as my father either weeps or receives condolence. I don’t remain to find out. I do not stay to learn what can be said next. Upstairs, I close the door to the guest bedroom. The walls have been so recently repainted in Breezy Beach that the pictures have not been rehung. They remain stacked against the baseboards. That feels right to me. Tracts of emptiness. It is 10 in the morning on the second day after my 46-year-old brother died alone in his bed. We are all new to the language of death. I have heard my parents tell others that their son has died, or has passed away, but this is the first time I hear my father say that we have lost my brother. Like a sock or a wallet. He is not dead, only missing.

but Scott is often in the mountains and out of service, so I took the call. Pragmatic and a lawyer, Scott did not tell me to sit down. He did not lead with reassurance and love. He did not tell me everything would be okay. “Bryan is dead,” he said. Three words. In the middle of the recently renovated Salt Lake City airport, where benches double as artwork and an iridescent glass sculpture cascades from the ceiling, I went to the floor. I just wanted to be near the ground, as if a tornado were in the area, or lightning on a mountain ridge, a grizzly on the trail—make yourself small, bring yourself low. The black granite was cold, hard against my knees. “Stop checking in,” I sobbed to Michael. “Bryan’s dead.” The agent held our passports in her hand, suspended. The line of passengers pulsed to move forward, roller bags leaning hungrily against legs level with my eyes. I wanted out. This would become a familiar feeling over the next two weeks, the desire to step outside of my life, shed it like a jacket, leave it behind. But grief has no edges; it is only center. Surrounded by strangers all eager to be somewhere other than where they were, I stood up, the phone still to my ear, and threaded between bodies in search of an outside I would never find. “I’m driving to Texas,” Scott told me. He would be at our parents’ house in 48 hours. The phone line was interrupted, and my mother’s name appeared. Hold and Accept. End and Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept. “Mom,” I cried. “Mom, what’s happened?” My parents were stuck in traffic between Southlake and Denton, trying to get to their son to confirm he was dead. They sat gridlocked. I could hear my father in the background saying there shouldn’t be traffic at this time of night. This was not right, made no sense, was not supposed to be. The friend who had found my brother— curled on his side, hand beneath chin, like a baby, Death, a mother rocking him to sleep, or was that a lie, wishful thinking, for we would never know, we would never see his body again, maybe contorted in pain, arms flung, legs bent, hand reaching for the phone, for help, for a way out—thought he was dead but wasn’t sure. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe he would be found.

The line pulsed to move forward. I wanted out. This would become a familiar feeling over the next two weeks, the desire to step outside of my life, shed it like a jacket, leave it behind. But grief has no edges; it is only center.

X

XX

The first time we lost Bryan was at his birth. I was six but felt like 60 when my father, then a lieutenant commander in the Navy, called from the hospital to tell me that my baby brother wouldn’t be coming home. I had never heard my father cry before. It’s a sound a child does not want to hear, the sound that marks, like a hatchet fall, the end of childhood. A negligent nurse, a human being who 54

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

made a mistake, the worst mistake, the kind that alters another’s life forever, had placed Bryan, minutes old, in a bassinet so that she could bathe him and then accidentally pressed the pedal for scalding water before leaving the room. Dear Lieutenant Commander Sinor, I am writing to offer my sincere apologies for the most unfortunate accident that occurred at this Medical Center in which your son was injured. … After learning … I directed a new bathing routine for newborn infants … immediately … facts … evaluated … investigating … perhaps … provide relief … such an event will not recur … very much regret … sincere concern. … Rear Admiral Earl Brown. Bryan arrived in this world in a cauldron of boiling water. Perhaps that is when he slipped from us, before I had ever held him. I realize now that I never knew his original face. Only my parents, the doctor, and the negligent nurse saw Bryan whole and perfect before he was burned. For his first several winters, Bryan’s tiny feet would turn blue in the cold, the vessels unable to regulate the blood flow, or maybe his skin was afraid of warmth. If flame is what greets you as you enter the world, the smell of your own body singed, how do you learn to trust? X

XX

The following day, I returned to the Salt Lake airport, alone. Bryan was dead. The police had roped his home like a crime scene and never allowed my parents to see him. Perhaps, a gift. As I made my way to the plane, I wondered who grieved alongside me. That man holding his phone to his chest like an oath? That woman yelling at her children to keep up? Or maybe that man in front of me on the escalator, muscled calves, wearing Nikes in pink? At first I felt angry at all those rushing along the concourse to make their planes to Bali or Disney or their lake house in the mountains. How dare they be happy? But then I realized I was wearing the same clothing I had worn the day before—before the call, before the news, before my knees knew granite. Dressed for Costa Rica or dressed for death, I looked the same. Tiny wheeled suitcases trundled behind everyone in the terminal, holding what was important enough to carry on. What could not be left behind. At the moment of hearing that Bryan was dead, what I could not carry was the knowledge that he had died by his own hand. Standing with my children, Aidan and Kellen, as Michael remained at the Delta counter trying to cancel our tickets, I begged the ceiling—face up, palms offered, out loud—that his death not have been by suicide, a possibility that had stalked him since his teens. Strangers avoided our tiny island of luggage, some of them checking in, some of them headed for security, some of them making sure they had their sweater or boarding pass or water bottle emptied, while I implored the ceiling, Please, God, don’t let it be suicide. Please, God. Please don’t let it be suicide. Perhaps another mother would have reassured her children that everything was okay. Perhaps another human would have contained that pain and saved it for later. But somehow, within seconds of hearing of Bryan’s death, I realized that there were degrees of loss, and some versions would break us more than others. It was a strange kind of bargaining: I can accept this loss but not that loss. But maybe lost is lost. SUMMER 202 3

55

X

XX

The second time we lost Bryan, it was not to fire but to water. Unwatched for a moment, he fell from the deck of our back-yard pool and sank. Not yet two, barely talking, he lay face up at the bottom of the pool, just as I remembered seeing him for the first time in his crib, arms above his head, blond curls haloing his face. I hadn’t even seen him fall. My mother was inside the house answering the telephone while Scott herded inner tubes toward me. I had been standing on the wooden deck, preparing to jump through that stack of inner tubes, when I saw Bryan’s tiny body shimmering in a forest of sunlight on the floor of the pool. He wore only a diaper. I had not known he was missing. Were the crows in the oaks so loud that I could not hear the splash when he fell? Or was I too consumed with play to notice the residual waves lap at my feet following his descent? At the age of eight, I could stitch a sit-upon in Brownies, make my own cereal in the morning without spilling the milk, read books devoid of illustration, but I had not known he was gone. Bryan died sometime before his friend found him, possibly up to two days before. He left the world, and I did not register his absence. I went to yoga. I ate a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. I slept in the June sun. Waves of loss met my body, but I failed to notice. Was he lost to me in those two days? Or only the moment I found out? Did my brother die the moment Scott called, or did he die two days earlier, alone in his bed, his dogs whining to be let out? He was dead when my mother pulled him from the water. It never occurred to me to dive down and save him. Perhaps I recognized the limits of my reach. Or maybe I knew I couldn’t carry him to the surface. There are moments in your life that are ambered, so ancient, that you are no longer sure that they happened to the same person. I stood on the ground and watched my mother, clad in shorts and a T-shirt that ran wet with chlorinated water, as she begged God to save her baby. She offered my brother like a sacrifice, his limp body resting on her forearms, her head thrown back, the sounds coming from her mouth not words but sorrow made manifest, serrated and raw. The terror of the moment was complete. I could not move. She placed Bryan on the deck and began to suck the water from his lungs. His lips would have been cold but probably still soft. Baby smell replaced by chemicals. Would his eyes have been open or closed? Were they closed when his friend found him alone in bed? I want them to be closed. I did not see his original face. I did not see his final face. I ran to the neighbors for help because that is what she kept yelling for me to do every time she came up from Bryan’s mouth to inhale. When I returned, Bryan was alive. I have always held that memory as one of horror and trauma, and I have always felt alone in the experience. Scott was too young to remember, and my mother carries a version all her own. What I have never considered, until this moment, is the joy and relief my mother must have felt when Bryan began to 56

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

breathe again. I have long thought that the happiest my mother has ever looked was when I came home from school and she told me that my scalded baby brother had come home from the hospital. That was the first time I saw Bryan, the first night he slept outside an incubator. Her smile that afternoon has forever remained with me because it revealed the cloud of grief she had lived under for those many months. The initial days of waiting for him to die, followed by the months of driving to the hospital every day to touch her baby through plastic. I imagine that if I had been there at the moment she brought Bryan back from the dead, the relief would have pulsed through the humid air. Instead, the second time we lost Bryan remains tangled in sorrow and silence. It feels like a story not of resurrection but rather of the frost of the future. My mother waited until my father came home from work to tell him what had happened that day in our back yard. I remember that he brought brand-new mask and snorkel sets for Scott and me and handed them to us before he went with my mother to the kitchen, where I heard her cry once again. The gift crumpled my stomach. X

XX

When we walk out of the Texas sun and into the thin air conditioning of Bryan’s mobile home, two days after he has died, we arrive to a mess. The floor and the counters are covered with the remnants of his life.

Although we lost Bryan, he never lost anything. He might not have been able to find things right away, but they were never lost. As a child, his room was always a disaster, Legos and books and clothes piled everywhere. By the time he reached high school, my mother had given up and asked only that he keep the door closed. Which means that when we walk out of the Texas sun and into the thin air conditioning of Bryan’s mobile home, two days after he has died, we arrive to a mess. The floor and the counters are covered with the remnants of his life. There is an entire room devoted solely to boxes inside boxes inside boxes inside boxes. Every piece of junk mail he has ever received, every single receipt, every bill, every matchbook, every card anyone has ever sent him, every letter, every present, every photograph, every school paper, every textbook, every movie ticket stub, every free gift from McDonald’s, from Coca-Cola, from Home Depot, every plastic grocery sack, every empty Amy’s burrito box, every pen, pencil, screwdriver, nail, every key to an unknown lock—all of it remains. “Everyone take a room,” Scott says, handing black contractor bags to each of us. The house smells of dogs, urine, and pot. “Just decide what to keep, what to toss, what to give to Goodwill,” he continues. “Use your best judgment. The dumpster will be here in a few hours.” The concern is that Bryan’s place will be looted if we don’t clear it now. He lives in the north Texas countryside. Word travels fast. The following day a guy named Larry will stop by with his pickup and say he’s heard that you can come here and take whatever you want. Worried about time, we set to work.

SUMMER 202 3

57

I stand on the dirty tile of the kitchen, the overhead light dimmed by grime. My brother was a private person. He never traveled, he never brought a girlfriend to my parents’ house, he did not go to the dentist or the doctor, he had guns and knew how to use them. His dogs and his music and his cars made him happy. I do not want to go through his drawers. The house stands as he left it before going to bed on whatever night it was that he went to bed and never woke up. This is only the second time I have been in his house since he graduated from high school. Before we are finished, I will know the brand of condoms he preferred as well as the greatest regret in his life, but the first time I open his cabinets with the contractor bag yawning at my feet, I can only whisper, “Please forgive me, Bryan.” This becomes my mantra. X

XX

The third time we lost Bryan, it was to the earth. He was maybe 13 years old—it was the summer we flew from Hawaii, where my father was stationed, to Colorado for our first backpacking trip. My uncle Jerry planned to take us into the Mount Zirkel Wilderness, though if he had known how unprepared we were for such a trip, he probably would have suggested car camping instead. Although we would come to embrace backpacking every summer as a family and learn to travel with lightness and economy, that August we might as well have been toting canned tuna and portable radios. I wore blue jeans. Heavy denim with rivets that dug into my hip bones and grew 10 pounds heavier every afternoon when the thunderstorms rolled through. We all carried neon-orange backpacks that had been salvaged from Goodwill, with belts that left our jeans-covered hips raw and cracked. None of us had waterproof hiking boots. We barely had hats. And it rained. Every day it rained. Some days the lightning sent us running for our tents. But what hurt us the most was something we couldn’t see: altitude sickness. Bryan threw up first, out the car window as we drove to the trailhead. He also threw up second and third. By the time we had loaded ourselves with weight, his face had lost its color. We all had headaches that stabbed the backs of our eyes. My throat was dry, and no amount of water could wet it. We no longer peed. Instead, we climbed the trail, dizzy with effort, cotton tube socks chafing our heels. For whatever reason, Bryan was the sickest. Within a mile or so, he was sitting down on the trail. My uncle Jerry and cousin Shara, well acquainted with the rigors of backpacking, took weight from him. Soon my dad and Scott helped as well, so that Bryan carried an empty pack. Still, he kept stopping. Sometimes to throw up, more often to cry. He wanted to go home. We trudged on. My uncle had probably chosen a short and easy trail for us, but it felt like climbing Everest. Our party of eight stretched along the mountainside, no one talking. My head throbbed in rhythm with my step. I slid my hands beneath my hip belt to protect my skin, but soon the backs of my hands were red and sore. At some point, we realized we had lost Bryan. He had simply disappeared. Taking our packs off, we called his name. A faraway hawk answered, then the wind, but not Bryan. “What about the fork in the trail?” my dad asked. 58

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

“Did he take it?” “Did anyone see him take it?” “Who was hiking with him?” “Bryan! Bryan!” We made a plan. Some would go back on the trail and look for him; others would fan out into the alpine meadows to look amid the paintbrush and columbine, penstemon and yellow cinquefoil the color of the sun. Released from the weight of my pack, my legs seemed to float above the ground as I walked. Sweat soaked my shirt and made the denim grab my knees and thighs. It was late in the day. Thunderheads gathered overhead. The Mount Zirkel Wilderness stretches 160,000 acres. I walked the meadows calling for my brother. Pikas chirped from rock piles, and vultures circled the trees. At the time, my ignorance protected me. I knew nothing of exposure or dehydration or lightning strikes. Still, I also understood that losing Bryan in the mountains was not the same as losing him at Safeway. I only had to look around at the glacially carved peaks and the seemingly endless swath of firs to know that the only ones who could find Bryan were the ones right here calling his name. I don’t remember who found him, my father maybe. Bryan had passed out in a meadow not unlike the one I had been searching. His body had been hidden by the tall grasses, so my father discovered him only when he came upon his sleeping form. Altitude sickness, for the most part, is a temporary condition. Your body acclimates. By the following morning, we were all feeling much better. By the end of the week, we were ready to do it all again. And we would return every summer for the next 10 years to backpack as a family. Except for Bryan. He would remain home, where oxygen is not scarce and you can keep more than what you can carry. X

XX

By Sunday, my father is angry. On his way to Bryan’s house, he calls from the road to tell us that we are to stop and do nothing until he arrives. Scott and I are sitting in the parking lot of Home Depot, two more giant boxes of contractor bags in the trunk, when we get the call. I can hear my father’s anger from my place in the back seat. The car vibrates. As does my father’s body, a half hour later, when he arrives at Bryan’s house. It is the kind of anger that consumed him when I was a child but has dimmed with age. I immediately become 10 again, scared and full of shame. My father’s anger has always been physical. Like fire, it takes the air from the room and sears what remains. “Get in the house,” he orders as he storms past my brother and me. At 10 in the morning, it is already 100 degrees. Crickets saw in the scrub nearby, the sound electric and grating. Sweat soaks the waistband of my shorts, runs in drops down the sides of my face. We gather in the room just off the kitchen, where the strongest air conditioner wraps cool tendrils around our sweaty bodies. My mom sits across from my father on a drum stool, my aunt on the floor, Scott and I in office chairs with blown-out backs, and my father in a ratty armchair. SUMMER 202 3

59

“I have been talking with my brothers and sister,” my father begins. His voice is quieter already. Something about being inside Bryan’s house, or the cool, or the fact that we all did exactly what he said. Or maybe he’s just so very tired that even his anger craves rest. “They all say we shouldn’t be throwing anything away. We should have an auction. There is someone out there who is missing an old issue of Workbench magazine and will want it. We can’t just throw it away.” I was in charge of the shelves containing the magazines. He is speaking directly to me. “I have Bryan’s voice in my head,” he continues. Now his words mix with tears. “Why are you letting them do this? Why are you letting them do this? Why don’t you care?” “But Dad—” I start. He holds up his hand. “Every time we throw something away, we are throwing away a piece of your brother. Every. Single. Time.” The day before, I had cleared shelves and shelves of Golf Digest, Forbes, National Geographic, Playboy, Workbench, Mother Earth News, motocross magazines, dirt bike magazines, Mustang magazines, random car part catalogs, a Sunset guide to building a deck, another guide to building a tennis court, one dedicated to repairing quartz watches, Spanish textbooks, chemistry textbooks, pamphlets on succeeding as a student with ADHD, University of North Texas course catalogs from the early ’90s, a McDonald’s training manual. None of the magazines were addressed to Bryan except for a series on motorbiking. They were addressed to subscribers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana. Bought, I would assume, in auction lots. Soon, Scott and I would discover that the most recent lots Bryan purchased were still wrapped in plastic in his giant workshop. It was so full that we could not get through the door. I had filled bag after bag with these heavy magazines and carried them to the dumpster. Tree to paper to earth, I said. “You are throwing Bryan away,” my father now says. “Dad,” I try again, this time kneeling in front of him on the floor, crying. “You have to move Bryan from your head to your heart.” I could be speaking Spanish. Auction has become the life preserver that my father will cling to amid the tsunami of grief. Auction will transmute Bryan’s hoarding into treasure. Redeem him. From that moment on, we decide that everything will pass through my father before being discarded. We designate “auction rooms.” My father stands at the front of the dumpster. Very little gets past. I haul out torch lamps with broken bases and am told a screw is all that is required. A chair that sinks into itself just needs wood glue and clamps. After a few attempts, I take everything to the auction rooms. My father is right: the chair probably could be repaired and reupholstered. But we are doing triage, not plastic surgery, and there is simply no way we are going to find the one person on the planet who is seeking the June 1980 issue of Workbench in order to complete a set. My dad suffers from the same illness that my brother did, a fear of losing, a fear that this AutoZone receipt from 2005 must be saved because bad things will happen if it is lost. A baby might get burned. A tiny body might plunge into the water, unwitnessed. 60

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

You cannot know what you might need in a world that is untrustworthy. Save everything. Save it all. Save it all. Save it all, save it, save it, saveit, saveit, saveit, savesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesave. We are going down. X

XX

Air took my brother the fourth time we lost him. Sixteen years old, Bryan was hanging out with a friend in Hawaii Kai while my parents worked downtown. Bored on a summer day, the two of them had decided to make Drano bombs and then throw them from the lava rock pier. Drano bombs require simple household items, specifically Drano, foil, and a container. Once trapped, the hydrogen chloride in the fluid mixes with the aluminum foil to create hydrogen gas. Quickly, often within seconds, the pressure builds to a point where the container bursts, throwing lye everywhere. Most Drano bombs are made in plastic bottles. My brother and his friend chose glass. The second before the bomb exploded in Bryan’s hands, he realized the danger. That flit of understanding saved his life because he was in the midst of hurtling the bomb into the ocean when the Gallo wine jug exploded. The shrapnel entered the left side of his face, neck, shoulder, and chest. If he had held the container, it would have found his heart. When my father arrived at the ER, he says, he knew Bryan was dead. The blood alone was too much. Bryan’s cheek flapped open. The tendons in his neck shone white amid the red. Bryan was not conscious, did not move, and my father began to mourn the death of his son once again. By the time I saw Bryan a few weeks later, having flown home from college, his skin was starting to heal. Reconstructive surgery on his face would repair much of the damage, but angry red welts would populate his body for the rest of his life. For months, shards of glass worked their way to the surface, a strange kind of birth, where his skin would be pierced from within. At the age of 16, Bryan retreated. Into the house. Into his body. Away from the world. He refused to have his picture taken. He walked with his head down and grew his hair long to curtain his scars. He assumed everyone was looking at him, mocking him, pointing to his disfigurement. Rather than trust another with his pain, he became a recluse. Held onto every piece of paper. Chose dogs for family because they never withheld their love. It was like he vanished.

Bryan retreated. Into the house. Into his body. Away from the world. He refused to have his picture taken. He walked with his head down and grew his hair long to curtain his scars. He assumed everyone was looking at him.

X

XX

The night before my brother’s back-yard memorial, I sit with my father under the setting of the solstice sun. The longest day of the year, the longest day of my life. Ends that come too quickly or never come at all. He slumps in his chair, gazing at SUMMER 202 3

61

his hands in the growing darkness. For the first time in the day, being outside does not mean being sunburned. Winds play in the field behind my parents’ house; airplanes, like far-off fireflies, make ready to land at DFW, their path across the sky reassuring in purpose. “I’m so tired,” my father says. These are words I have never heard him utter. He does not mean he needs to go to bed. He means he is tired of being alive. “I thought he was dead,” he continues, “when I came to the hospital. He was so bloody and pale. I didn’t think there was any way he could be alive. I thought we lost him then.” “I know,” I say, “that’s why this is so hard. I think we all thought we had made it through.” “I worry about what the coroner’s report will say. Maybe he was murdered?” “No, Dad.” I reach out for his hand. “It was a heart attack. Just a massive heart attack. There was nothing we could do.” The silence settles, and the summer sky darkens on the day we move toward fall. “I love you so much,” my father says. His voice is thready and thin. “I know,” I say. “And Bryan knew that, too.” “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” We look across the field, empty of cows, empty of horses, full, though, of life we cannot see. Tomorrow a white tent will be erected, and we will set out 50 chairs. But that won’t be enough. Because a hundred people will come to honor Bryan. Most of them I will not know. Other than my extended family, I will never have met any of the dozens who show up. I will open the door again and again to strangers who will say how much they loved my brother, how my brother would stop whatever he was doing to help them. They will speak of his generosity, his kindness, his love. “He helped me lift a door.” “He fixed my car.” “He fed my animals.” They will stand up and bear witness to my brother’s enormous heart. Many will cry. Poetry will be read, “Amazing Grace” sung. All under a sun that will beat down with a ferocity that most of us only want to flee. But we will remain, feeling a sun that never withholds. X

XX

The fifth time we lost Bryan it was to the ether, the space between the atoms. It might have been a Monday night, or possibly the Tuesday of June’s full moon. Maybe his final moments were painful and scary. Possibly he knew that Death was coming for him. Or maybe he never woke from the dream he was having, a dream about my father driving the old Porsche Bryan bought for him, its engine finally rebuilt, every single part lovingly restored. Maybe he was sitting next to my father as they raced along a freeway unfamiliar with traffic. Nothing to stop them. Perhaps his last two dogs sat in the tiny back seat or maybe all six of his dogs gathered there, and Bryan could feel their hot breath as they panted over his shoulder, unwilling to miss a single second of the ride. The car speeds down the road, and Bryan looks over to my father with a smile that shows no teeth but lights his eyes, the hazel eyes he shares with my father, and with me. And they ride the road like they used to ride the waves at the beach, joyful in the moment, sun warming their skin, nothing in their hands. Carried. O 62

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Last Dance At a World War II internment camp, George Igawa entertained thousands of incarcerated Japanese Americans—while teaching a band of novices how to swing

JULIAN SAPORITI

I JULIAN SAPORITI is a musician and scholar whose No-No Boy project tells many stories of the Asian-American experience through songwriting and multimedia works. He completed his PhD at Brown University, and part of this article is adapted from his dissertation.

n 2012, I decided to retire from touring as an indie rock musician and enter a graduate program in American Studies at the University of Wyoming. I’d been living in my hometown of Nashville and, having been to Wyoming only once—on a day trip to Yellowstone many years before—I imagined my new home to be a large and empty place. The idea of emptiness appealed to me. Wyoming was a blank page, and I pictured myself reading books and climbing mountains, engaging in a scholarly pursuit of knowledge in a tranquil natural setting. After settling in Laramie, I realized, of course, that even a place as sparsely populated and expansive as Wyoming is hardly blank and empty. Wherever my boots trod, they fell upon many deep layers of overlapping histories. I immersed myself in my studies, doing archival research and oral history work. I continued to play gigs, and I took every opportunity to embark on outdoor adventures. For three charmed years, I came to know the state well. I marveled at its geology, animals, and plants. I heard old hunting tales, stories from the rez, stories of homesteaders, settlers, and outlaws. Most revelatory were the stories I heard of people who looked like me: that is to say, with origins on the Asian continent. When one of my professors heard that I was trekking around every weekend, he told me to check out a place called Heart Mountain in the northwestern part of the state. During World War II, he told me, Heart Mountain was home to one of 10 concentration camps established in the United States following the attack on Pearl Harbor. A total of 120,000 Japanese Americans—most of them U.S. SUMMER 202 3

63

The George Igawa Orchestra, shown here in rehearsal, performed big band standards as well as pioneering arrangements of traditional Japanese music.

64

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

citizens—were removed from their homes on the West Coast and held without regard to their constitutional rights. There were no trials, no juries, just an atmosphere of wartime hysteria that followed a history of anti-Asian economic jealousy and prejudice dating back to the 1800s. Heart Mountain had 14,000 prisoners; if it had been a city or a town, it would have been the third largest in the state. Growing up in Tennessee in the ’90s, I had never heard about JapaneseAmerican incarceration, or Japanese internment, as it’s more frequently called. In fact, I’d never learned any Asian-American history in schools. I wish I had, because as an Asian American (my mom is Vietnamese), I always felt a bit like I was on an island. I often joke that Wyoming, one of the whitest states in America, is where I actually became “Asian American,” but it’s true. Out west, I visited

TOM PARKER

the largely forgotten sites of former Chinatowns and joss houses (another term for Chinese temples). I saw where massacres once took place. I learned the histories of Chinese miners and rail workers and read about the Asian sailors and slaves who had come to this country as early as the 1500s. My travels became the basis of my scholarly work, and my trips to Heart Mountain played perhaps the biggest role of all. Getting to Heart Mountain is easy enough. It’s between the towns of Cody and Powell, and a simple turn off Highway 14 brings you to the sparse ruins of the camp. Where once stood a square mile of hastily constructed tarpaper barracks, you now find a single original barracks, a replica guard tower, and a few interpretive signs tucked into sprawling fields of farmland. For a while, the farmer who took over the surrounding land grew sunflowers in the summer, a stark, beautiful sight against Heart Mountain itself, which cuts its silhouette into the expansive blue sky. The grounds also house a small museum that attempts to tell the complicated story of what life was like for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. You learn who the prisoners were and what they did, as well as how they endured harsh weather in so desolate a setting, in quarters surrounded by barbed wire, surveillance spotlights, and guards wielding machine guns. The stories of their endurance still haunt this landscape, and if you listen carefully enough, you just might hear them whispered through the sage. Other stories, however, are more easily discerned, if only you know where to look. One day, I stumbled across a photograph of the George Igawa Orchestra, a jazz band consisting of a dozen or so Japanese-American guys playing horns, drums, bass, the works. I had gone to a music college, a jazz college at that, but I had never learned of any Asian-American popular musicians. I certainly hadn’t heard of George Igawa. Intrigued, I pored over archives and old government maps, filled notebooks with my research, and began to stitch together the story of this band, even interviewing its last living members—one of whom, vocalist SUMMER 202 3

65

Joy Teraoka, now 97 years old, has become like family to me. It turns out that the George Igawa Orchestra, made up of prisoners at Heart Mountain, was not only the best swing band in Wyoming, it was also the only swing band in Wyoming at that time. The ensemble performed both inside the camp and outside it, at war bond rallies and community events throughout Wyoming. How could I have never heard of this band before? As a scholar of music and sound, I find that history tends to leave out certain auditory details. We can read the words of the Gettysburg Address, but what were the tone and timbre of Lincoln’s voice on that November day in 1863? How did it sound to a soldier 10 rows back? Did the wind kick up at any point? Did a bird call in the distance? If so, what kind of bird? A musician’s ear, perhaps, is more attuned to the silences in our history books. So when I felt ready to tell the story of George Igawa and his band, I knew that I had to do more than simply write a paper that I could present at an academic conference. I wanted to share it with more people, especially my fellow Wyomingites, many of whom had never learned about the concentration camp in their state. The best way I knew how to do that was through music—and so my folk song “The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming” was born. Under starlight they danced behind barbed wire Under the mountain, it meant something to sing Stuck between two countries in a fire The best god damn band in Wyoming … Ten years after my first visit to Heart Mountain, the song has been heard by thousands of people around the world. While in Wyoming, I started writing other songs about hidden Asian-American histories, and that work has evolved into a hybrid scholarly and musical practice, further developed during my PhD work in American Studies at Brown University and culminating in a dissertation that pushed beyond the typical boundaries of academic writing. The last chapter of that dissertation, in fact, is a vinyl record called 1975, on which “The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming” appears. The album was commercially released through Smithsonian Folkways in 2021. I have also told the story of George Igawa’s band through other media: documentary film, podcasts, and an immersive multimedia concert project called No-No Boy, named for those internees who dared respond no to two questions on the “loyalty questionnaire” demanding their allegiance to the U.S. government. To get there, though, we must first go back in time. X

XX

Our setting is Heart Mountain in the spring of 1944. The war rages on. It’s dusty and cold. There is a lot of shame experienced by those incarcerated in camp, a lot of boredom. Life, for most, has never been grimmer. And yet it goes on. Farmers till the land, teachers teach, students learn, sports are played, music is made—and at the center of all that music-making is George Igawa. Igawa was born in Los Angeles in 1908. Prior to his arrival at Heart Mountain 66

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

in 1942, he had established himself as a tenor saxophonist in a Los Angeles swing band called the Sho Tokyans, which played up and down the West Coast and even had a brief residency in Japan. After being forced from his home and detained in Pomona, California, where he awaited news of where he’d be incarcerated, Igawa sought other instrument-carrying detainees and formed a band called the Pomonans. At Heart Mountain, they added several more musicians to their ranks, transforming into the George Igawa Orchestra and rapidly growing in popularity throughout the region. Igawa did an admirable job of transforming a group of novices—including untrained high schoolers, such as Joy Teraoka and trumpet player Yone Fukui—into a formidable big band. Between relocations and work leaves, high personnel turnover routinely shifted the ensemble’s lineups, but by the end of his time in Wyoming, Igawa had delighted dancers with dozens of performances and given many young people what felt like the musical opportunity of a lifetime. For its first two years there, the band developed a repertoire of popular big band songs, performing often at dances held at the camp. But in 1944, Igawa guided his young musical disciples through an innovative and challenging program of transpacific musical fusion, consisting of swing arrangements of traditional Japanese tunes. This took them into a new musical space, and not just by the standards of the camp—no band in America was exploring this artistic terrain. As an older nisei (second-gen Japanese American) with a deep cultural connection to both Japan and the issei (first-gen), Igawa made these arrangements not only to do something artistically interesting but also to appeal to those in the older generation who did not attend the dances held at camp. He bolstered his ranks with issei singers and instrumentalists who performed on traditional instruments such as shamisen (akin to a banjo), koto (plucked zither), and shakuhachi (wooden flute). He also added traditional Japanese dancers and incorporated his frequent collaborators, Al Tanaka’s Surf Riders, who had performed popular Hawaiian music during intermissions at most of the Igawa Orchestra’s concerts since the fall of  ’42. This musical revue, which had six performances, mustered all of Igawa’s musical skill and drew on his background performing jazz on the West Coast and from his time touring Japan with the Sho Tokyans. Japanese musicians had been putting their spin on American jazz since the early 20th century, but before this revue, no American popular musician had seriously considered arranging traditional Japanese songs—the music many issei would have connected with—for a swing orchestra. This was not a commercially driven novelty performance, like many of the pop hits released by the Japanese divisions of the Columbia and Victor recording companies in the ’20s and ’30s, nor was it akin to earlier American minstrel performances that took up “oriental” music and subjects for comedy. Igawa wanted to create a show that combined the distinct but overlapping cultural influences of his Japanese-American identity while providing joy and escape for several generations of people locked inside a concentration camp. It is one of the most extraordinary American musical performances that almost no one knows about. By April 1944, Igawa had secured work leave in Chicago. (After 1942, the U.S. government encouraged Japanese Americans to resettle in the Midwest, a lukewarm attempt to right the wrong of incarcerating so many innocent people.) And so, the George Igawa Orchestra’s last official gig took place at 7:30 p.m. on April 22, 1944,

It was common for young folks to hold jam sessions in the recreation or mess halls. The teenagers would often sprinkle Cream of Wheat on the floor to facilitate sliding and jitterbugging.

SUMMER 202 3

67

Heart Mountain looms behind F Street, the main thoroughfare cutting

TOM PARKER

through the camp.

at a sports awards dance held at the Heart Mountain high school gym. The school was in the center of the project, occupying an area of two blocks. It had been completed the previous year to provide education for the 1,500 high school students in the camp, and the gymnasium, to the envy of some Wyomingites, was one of the nicest facilities in the state. At least 16 musicians would have participated in the performance that evening, and one can only imagine how excited they must have been. I love to think of young Tets Bessho, one of the high school musicians Igawa had shepherded from Pomona to Wyoming, now Heart Mountain’s most talented musician. The young clarinetist and sax player had blossomed in these difficult circumstances, performing at multiple social events each week. I can picture that April evening, a crowd of 400 expected at the high school, and Tets making his way from the barracks in the northeast section of camp, walking the half mile with his sax in one hand and his clarinet in the other, probably missing dinner in the mess hall to set up and soundcheck with the band before the gig. This performance was not an East-meets-West musical revue, but rather a straightahead swing music affair, the kind of performance Igawa’s young band members— and the hundreds of teenagers gathered at the high school—adored. Indeed, the big band music of Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Glenn Miller, and others was hugely popular with the nisei. Teraoka said that hearing the pop hits of the day in camp “was the thrill of a lifetime.” It was common for young folks to hold jam sessions in the recreation or mess halls, where they would play recordings of the day’s most popular songs on a phonograph borrowed from the recreation department. The teenagers would often sprinkle Cream of Wheat on the floor to facilitate

68

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

sliding and jitterbugging. Like trumpet player Walt Hayami, who blared Gene Krupa on the radio in his family’s cramped quarters, many younger nisei, especially those in Igawa’s dance band, dived deep into swing music. No full set lists survive from any of the Igawa gigs in camp, but we have a good idea of the band’s repertoire from newspaper clippings, interviews with former members, and the work of musician-historian George Yoshida. From these various sources, I have been able to reconstruct what likely took place on that boisterous and momentous spring evening. When the George Igawa Orchestra took the stage for the last time, to rapturous applause, the band probably began with its theme song, “Moonlight Serenade,” a down-tempo number whose famous opening strains evoke an ethereal, almost haunting romance. Igawa had deftly altered stock sheet music to replicate Glenn Miller’s standard-bearing arrangement, familiar to the audience from recordings and radios played around camp. Bessho would have brought forth the choice clarinet lines as the dancers took to the floor, easing into the evening with a slow dance. The band then would have picked up the tempo with a number like “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” and jitterbugging would have ensued, at least among the L.A. kids familiar with the music of the Black and Mexican communities—sweat beads forming, young women spinning out, brave but less coordinated attendees stumbling and losing track of their steps, ace dancers enjoying athletic, physical catharsis and impressing those on the sidelines. During the fast numbers, the strictly slow-dance crowd would join the wallflowers on the edges of the gymnasium, perhaps munching on meager refreshments and providing a bed of chatter underneath the band’s performance. Feet tapping, shoes sliding, an out-of-tune note or missed entrance here or there, laughter, smiles creasing faces, sexual anxiety, off-color comments, zoot-suited posturing: this was the vibe, as the grim reality of concentration camp life remained well outside the gymnasium’s double doors. After an hour or so, the band finished the first set and left the stage for intermission. During the intermission, while sports awards were handed out to the camp’s best basketball teams and outstanding individual players, some of the band members probably grabbed a cigarette and some gossip outside. The young ballers accepted their awards to the applause of the crowd, and community activities supervisor Marlin T. Kurtz would have closed the intermission with some uplifting words about the merits of athletic pursuit, or some other such boilerplate, before reintroducing Igawa and his band. Once again, the musicians took their places behind their stands and a few RCA microphones, and the music resumed. As the evening wore on, feet grew sore. Four hundred different energies mingled together and synced up to the rhythm of drummer Jimmie Akiya as the big band echoed through the cavernous auditorium. Favorites such as “In the Mood” and “At Last” were likely performed, providing opportunities for frivolity, romance, and connection. Standout trumpeter Yone Fukui took a few solos. Bessho switched between sax and clarinet as needed. Igawa improvised a bit over the sounds of his musical wards. The music, though nowhere near perfect, did its job and carried the night. And then it was over. The attendees applauded. Igawa smiled his picture-perfect smile and took one last bow. The crowd lingered and then filed out into the cool SUMMER 202 3

69

Small groups entertained at socials, but the big band dances were done, and gone were the improvisations, the mistakes, the thrilling dynamics and tempo pushes.

spring night. The dance was done. That was it. The voices gradually dissipated. The soft ripping of tape and the crinkling of crepe paper could be heard as dance chairman Mas Morioka and members of the athletic department tore down the decorative streamers and put away the refreshment tables. Onstage, the trumpet and trombone players blew swift bursts of air through slightly numb lips to remove spit from their horns. Bessho took apart his sax and clarinet, packed them away, and latched his cases shut. The custom “GI” music stands that camp carpenters had made were carried off the stage. The temperature outside had dipped down into the 40s by the time the band left the gym. Bessho shuffled along the dirt roads back toward Block 24. What would he do next? Was he thinking about the fact that his mentor, George Igawa, the musical engine of the camp, was slated to leave him and his bandmates not long after? Did Bessho feel that typical mix of gratitude and betrayal so many musicians have experienced when a band ends? There would be no more daily rehearsals. Igawa would spend the next weeks making arrangements for his relocation to Chicago and for his wife, Kimiko, to eventually join him there. High from the gig, Bessho probably didn’t reckon with any of these anxieties. It’s doubtful he registered the bittersweetness of the moment. He probably didn’t even go back to the apartment where his parents were likely sleeping. No, the way I imagine things, the members of the band would have kept the good times going, roaming Heart Mountain’s dirt roads in the moonlight, swigging some contraband whiskey that’d been snuck in through the barbed wire. Jimmie, Yone, Tets, and the crew stirring things up, squeezing as much life from the desolate northern Wyoming landscape as they could, dancing in the glow of the searchlights. For the next nine months, dances at the camp were accompanied by recordings played through tinny PA systems, a thin substitute for Igawa’s irreplaceable blend of horns, piano, live drums, and thumping bass. Before his departure, Igawa had handed over leadership of the band to Bessho. The young clarinetist made a bold attempt to reform the big band, but the task proved too tall. Small groups entertained at socials, but the big band dances were done, and gone were the improvisations, the mistakes, the thrilling dynamics and tempo pushes. In their place? Records that always sounded the same, spinning around and around on a phonograph. Igawa’s departure left a gaping hole in the sonic landscape emanating from below Heart Mountain, and one of the greatest musical acts in Wyoming history would disappear from the record—except for one black-and-white photo in a small museum. X

XX

In the years after finishing my initial research on the George Igawa Orchestra, I started the No-No Boy project, an immersive multimedia concert work blending original folk songs, storytelling, and archival images, all in the service of illuminating hidden American histories. When I perform live, I project curated archival images that sync up with folk songs I write about those stories. Many of these songs are inspired by my own family’s history during the Vietnam War, the experiences of Asian Americans who lived through the Chinese Exclusion Act and JapaneseAmerican incarceration, and our present-day refugee crises. My goal is to use mul70

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

HIKARU IWASAKI

timedia art to reach large audiences, to connect with a public increasingly skeptical of “experts” and “facts.” I think of my performances primarily as ways to engage diverse audiences with difficult conversations through deceptively simple songs. Whether performing at Lincoln Center or for rural high school kids in Oregon, I approach each gig the same, using music and moving images to invite audiences to sit with the mess of history. Additionally, by turning my research into art, I can regularly revisit and revise my work. A book represents a kind of finality, whereas each of my concerts is a chance to defend and reconsider what I’ve learned. The story of George Igawa and his Asian-American musicians remains at the heart of my project. In an era of scholarship obsessed with the traumas of American history, I’ve found it important to provide a fuller picture of dark times, to bring a higher fidelity to what has typically been a mono record. This I can do by celebrating the joy cultivated amid tragedy and injustice. The last time I hiked up Heart Mountain and looked out at where the camp used to be, there was—as with many vistas in Wyoming—a whole lot of nothing below. But I closed my eyes and listened deeply. I thought back over the archives I’d searched and the oral histories I’d collected, summoned forth in my mind the barracks and the barbed wire, tried to feel the exhilaration and the pain and the erasure of the past. I heard thousands of faint overlapping histories. I heard George Igawa saying “Thank you” for the last time. I heard the strains of “Moonlight Serenade” swelling in the distance. No place is empty. O

Laverne Kurahara dances the jitterbug with Tubbie Kunimatsu, who sang with Igawa’s band.

SUMMER 202 3

71

The Color of Dust Sometimes even a team of radiation oncologists and neurosurgeons can be mystified by the strange workings of the human brain

PATRICK TRIPP

X

PATRICK TRIPP is a physician and an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.

72

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

XX

The medical oncologist at the VA called. “Mr. A is back in the hospital,” he said. “They’re calling recurrence, on the brain MRI, in the left temporal lobe, exactly where he was treated with radiation last year.” “That stinks,” I said. “We can see him.” I could picture Mr. A in front of me, with his handlebar mustache, its tips twirled into points. He always wore a white T-shirt, a black leather vest, and an army-green “boonie” hat with the sides turned up to display three small enamel pins: one with

MAN ON BED: VIACHESLAV IAKOBCHUK/ALAMY; DUST CLOUD: IMAGE SOURCE/ALAMY; MRI SCANS: A ROOM WITH VIEWS/ALAMY

I

n 1967 and ’68, in the hills and valleys of Quang Tri Province, U.S. Marines established positions along the demilitarized zone that separated South Vietnam from the communist North. The Marines did not know the terrain—the jungles, ridges, and ravines of the Annamite Range, where the 60-foot tree canopy and dense undergrowth limited visibility to just a few yards. There, in the far north of South Vietnam, the cold, steady monsoon rains, called the crachin, from the French word for “drizzle,” continued for months. The land and climate were suited to the ancient military strategy of the Vietnamese, used in turning back the Mongols, the Ming, and the French: violent, close-quarters combat. Hundreds of Marines and thousands of their Vietnamese allies died in month after month of intense fighting. In the Situation Room in the White House basement, President Lyndon Johnson followed the Battle at Khe Sanh on a sand-table model. When the Marines finally withdrew in July 1968, the North Vietnamese, bloodied but still formidable, seized control of the area. Nothing had been achieved.

the “M.I.A.” logo, white letters on a black shield; next to it, the eagle, anchor, and globe insignia of the Marines; and a miniature South Vietnamese flag, with its yellow and red horizontal stripes. He had a welcoming, wide-open grin that he flashed easily and often, and that made him less daunting to talk to, especially in those moments—we’d had many of them—when we discussed matters of life and death. Eight years earlier, he’d been operated on for an early-stage lung cancer. A year after that, he developed an inoperable recurrence, which was treated with radiation combined with chemotherapy. Since then, each of his surveillance CAT scans had looked alike—there was a small chance that he had been cured. After together reviewing the images from the five-year scan, I walked him and his wife out of the exam room. “We’ll see you next year, with new scans,” I said. “I’m blessed,” he replied. “Every day.” He nodded to his wife, who had continued walking down the hall. That’s when I first noticed the gold chain he wore, with three small gold trinkets. When he saw what I was looking at, he said, “This one’s a bayonet,” and he showed me the little figurine. “And this one’s a map of the island of Puerto Rico,” he said, turning over a second trinket. The third piece hanging from the necklace was a three-dimensional representation of the eagle, anchor, and globe. “You have the same pin on your hat,” I said. “Marine Corps,” he said. “It’s why I got PTSD.” After a pause, he continued, “I was 19 years old, just out of high school. I was bad … baaaad. After my girlfriend broke up with me, I didn’t care about nothing.” “That’s who they wanted.” He nodded. “On the plane over there, we were hugging each other, crying, yelling. We knew we were going to kill or be killed. When it was time to land, the airfield was under attack, and the plane was diverted. That’s when we knew this was a real war going on.” “Unbelievable.” “Right when the hippies said, ‘It ain’t our war,’ and Muhammad Ali said he wasn’t going. I was only in country a month when a grenade went off in my face. We came upon an NVA camp. The guys were placing satchel charges, to blow it up. I was moving a woodpile, and when I picked up a stack of wood, I heard click.” “How many guys were you with?” “Platoon. We got out of there. One guy was giving me a bear hug.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I said, ‘Motherfucker, don’t give me a hug, let’s get out of here.’ VC was all around. We could hear them. “For the next 30 years, liquor was always on me. I was freebasing cocaine, walking around the house with a machete. ‘Get me my rifle,’ I said to her.” He motioned to his wife. “We have to go,” she said from down the hall. “What about work?” I said. “Got high on the job,” he said. “I worked at a chemical solvents plant.” I shook my head. “Now it’s 19 years clean,” he said. “Free of alcohol, drugs, and work.” He smiled. “I’m leaving,” his wife said. She was at the door, ready to exit the clinic. 74

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

He nodded toward her. “She gave me an ultimatum. I went in the psychiatric hospital, got therapy for PTSD. She saved my life two or three times. I couldn’t go to the Wall before that. I saw my cousin’s name on the Wall, broke down crying. Even now, if I get sad, I find a place to be alone in the house to cry.” He took a breath, gazed past me. Five years previously, he’d been in the radiation oncology department every day for six weeks, receiving radiation treatment for lung cancer. I had not known that a grenade had gone off in his face, or that he’d walked around the house with a machete. “I’m blessed,” he said. X

XX

One morning, six months later, Mr. A woke up with problems finding words. Was it a stroke? His wife took him to the closest hospital—not to the VA, where he’d been treated for cancer—and a brain scan revealed what looked like a brain tumor in the left frontal temporal region, the neuroanatomic area responsible for language. A neurosurgeon removed the tumor, and a week later, the pathology report returned: lung cancer metastasis. After this type of surgery, the chance that the metastasis will return in the very same area in the brain is at least 50 percent. Cancer care guidelines recommend radiation to the surgical region to reduce that risk to about 10 percent. Just after Mr. A was discharged from the hospital, his wife passed away. He skipped his follow-up appointment, and his attendance became unpredictable—consistent with his years-long approach to medical appointments, many of which he missed without explanation. This was not unusual at the VA, where many of the patients lead complex lives, or live in ways accountable to no one, whether by affected pride or bona fide iconoclasm. For the past five or six years, Mr. A had followed medical recommendations most of the time—enough of the time, apparently: he was alive more than five years after a diagnosis of recurrent advanced lung cancer, which, at the time, fewer than 20 percent of patients survived. Yet by the time he made it to a rescheduled appointment in the radiation oncology clinic, almost six months had elapsed since the operation. Updated scans of his brain and body showed that the tumor had not returned, either in his brain or anywhere else. When I asked him about what had happened—the emergency rush to the other hospital, the urgent operation—he wasn’t sure of the details. In particular, I wanted to know about the radiation—where and when did he receive it? “You would remember it,” I said. “It’s usually just one day of radiation treatment, with your head locked into an immobilization device—not like with us years ago, to the chest, daily radiation for six weeks.” “I remember that,” he said. Although he’d presented with word-finding prob-

Just after Mr. A was discharged, his wife passed away. He skipped his follow-up appointment, and his attendance became unpredictable—consistent with his years-long approach to medical appointments.

SUMMER 202 3

75

lems, since the operation and the intervening several months, his language fluency had returned to almost normal. “That’s what I mean.” He smiled and shook his head. “The brain, I really don’t remember. I wasn’t feeling so well. Then my wife died—she used to take care of all that stuff.” Eventually, records from the other hospital indicated that Mr. A never underwent radiation after the brain operation. It was an example of a common problem, for patients at the VA or any hospital: when the care becomes fragmented, pieced together from too many physicians, too many hospitals, with no synchronization of the overall plan or goal, important parts can be missed. As he’d still not received the recommended treatment, he was referred to the university hospital across the street for a specialized radiation procedure called stereotactic radiosurgery, which was not available at the VA. “The data to support radiation in this situation say treat within six months,” said my colleague who saw Mr. A. “He’s now almost eight months out from surgery. It’s also atypical that he developed brain metastases but no metastases anywhere else, almost five years after his chest was treated. I don’t know if he’d still benefit. Plus, his language fluency has returned to just about baseline. Why put him through the risk? Maybe, this far out, he’s proven he won’t recur.” “Maybe he’s in the 50 percent who don’t recur, even without radiation,” I said. “Right,” he said. “We could watch it. If it comes back, we could treat it then.”

It was a common problem: when the care becomes fragmented, pieced together from too many physicians, too many hospitals, with no synchronization of the overall plan or goal, important parts can be missed.

X

XX

It came back three months later. In the left frontal temporal lobes, exactly in the region of surgery, a surveillance MRI showed “enhancing nodules,” as the neuroradiologist described them: on the images, white flecks against the gray of the brain, adjacent to the surgical region. “I had thought we might get lucky,” said my colleague from the university hospital. “Still, it’s not so bad. We can treat him now.” Stereotactic radiosurgery is typically given over just a few hours. Most of that time the patient waits, with his head immobilized to the treatment table, while the treating physicians select the appropriate radiation dose and target and use computer planning to deliver that dose. Mr. A had no neurological sign or symptoms from the tumor—this time, his speech had remained intact; recurrence was detected on an MRI. In the days and weeks after radiosurgery, he had no side effects from the treatment. “We’ll get another brain MRI in three months,” I told him. Three months later, the MRI report merely recommended continued surveillance—a promising sign. But at the next three-month scan, the MRI’s intravenous contrast “enhanced” in a way suggestive of cancer recurrence. “Increased vascu76

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

larity,” apparent as white enhancement on an MRI because of relatively increased contrast uptake, can signify a tumor; it can also be a sign of the inflammatory effects of treatment. Indeed, on this scan’s report, the radiologist wrote, “May represent treatment effect. Cannot rule out recurrence.” I called my colleague who’d managed the radiosurgery, asked him to look at the MRI with the radiation oncologists and neurosurgeons who’d treated Mr. A. Their impression was that the area of increased vascularization, concerning to the neuroradiologist, likely was not a recurrence. “Maybe get another MRI in two months, instead of three,” my colleague said. “It looks like radiation necrosis.” This problem—complication—means death of the soft tissues. The appearance of radiation necrosis on the MRI, and even the signs and symptoms in the patient, can look very similar to tumor recurrence. Radiation necrosis can even be a life-threatening complication. If the patient is symptomatic, the treatment is a course of steroids, to reduce inflammation, and if that doesn’t work, an operation is required to remove the necrotic tissue causing the symptoms. X

XX

Six weeks later, Mr. A woke up one morning and, once again, could not find the words to say anything. His wife gone, his caretaker was now a friend, Tom, who accompanied him to all his appointments and helped him keep those appointments straight. If all patients had medical friends like him, none of them would miss appointments. “It didn’t seem like a stroke to me,” Tom later told me. “But he was out of it. I knew I had to get him to a hospital. And I knew all his care was at the VA, so I brought him here.” Tom could have been a public health expert, I thought, or a health services researcher—he knew the value of continuity of care. When Mr. A arrived at the VA emergency room, a brain MRI was obtained. This time, the neuroradiologist was more certain. “Recurrence,” he wrote, “in the left temporal region, at the site of surgery and radiation.” This was when the medical oncologist called to alert me to Mr. A’s hospital admission. He’d already been in the hospital a day and a half when I saw him in his room, where he greeted me with a buoyant wave. Steroids had been administered after his brain MRI report had called recurrence. Almost always, metastases are accompanied by surrounding edema—an inflammatory reaction, the brain’s response to a “foreign body.” Steroids work immediately to decrease the swelling, and many patients improve right away. I asked Mr. A to walk back and forth, stand on his toes, and touch his fingertip to his nose. I pushed and pulled on his arms and legs. Nothing was wrong with him—except that he couldn’t speak. “This is how it’s been,” said Tom, who was sitting in the corner. “He’s gotten much better with the steroids. He cooperates with the doctors, and I can tell he follows what they’re saying.” Mr. A nodded and smiled. The loss of capacity to speak while maintaining the capacity to understand, and even communicate with gestures, is known as expressive aphasia, or Broca’s aphasia, after the 19th-century French anatomist who first identified it. Paul Broca inferred that language is localized to the brain’s left frontal temporal region—something he arrived at in the course of taking care of Monsieur Leborgne, who came to be called “Tan,” the one word he could articulate; Tan SUMMER 202 3

77

understood language perfectly well and could communicate with gestures, but he could not produce fluent speech. When Tan died in April 1861, Broca found that his patient’s left frontal temporal region was atrophied—the effects, apparently, of chronic vascular injury. In his published report, Broca wrote, “It is … incontestable that this man was intelligent, that he could reflect, and that he had preserved, in a certain measure, his memory for things past.” “He can say a word here or there,” Tom said. “Maybe it’s better today than it was yesterday.” Again Mr. A nodded, and smiled. Then Tom looked around the room—to the ceiling, the windows, the baseboard from one corner to the other. I thought he was about to say how dark the room was, or that he’d lost his wallet. Instead, he said, “I guess it was almost 50 years ago, I was in this hospital for a month, with infectious hepatitis, from malaria. I was yellow.” He stopped his head from wandering the room and returned his gaze to me. “I didn’t know it because all of us were the same color: dust. In the dry season, you couldn’t tell the Black guys from the white guys—everybody was covered with dust. The only way you could tell the Black guys was by their hair. I went from the MASH unit to Fort Bragg to here. In the MASH unit, everybody was trying to get out of there. It was a bad place. Shooting themselves in the foot, or just skinning the leg. My eyes were yellow.” I looked to Mr. A. “Did you guys know each other?” He shook his head. “No, he was two miles away,” Tom said. After a pause, he continued, “He was in a monumental bad place, a memorably bad place, in the history books a bad place.” “Khe Sanh,” Mr. A said. They were the first words I’d heard him say that day. “We were a few hills away from each other,” Tom said. “Thirteen months of dust,” I said. “Five months of dust, and eight months of mud,” he said. “Tanks would get stuck in it.” He shook his head. “Ugh.” Mr. A shook his head from side to side. I took a breath. “This time the MRI says recurrence. Treatment for that is surgery again, or radiation again. Either way, it’s very high risk, including the risk of death from complications from either approach. Let me talk with my colleagues who managed the stereotactic radiosurgery. I’ll get in touch with you next week. Meanwhile, stay on the steroids. Whether it’s recurrent tumor or radiation necrosis, an inflammatory effect of the treatment itself, steroids is the first treatment. Let’s talk next week.” Tom said, “Sounds good.” Mr. A nodded his head. On my way out of the room, when I turned from the threshold to look at him, he brought two fingers to his forehead, snapped them forward, and broke into his trademark smile. X

XX

A few days later, I talked with my colleague who’d managed the stereotactic radiosurgery. “We looked at it with the neurosurgeons,” he said. “This is radiation necrosis.” “I don’t see how the neuroradiologist last week sounded so certain, in his report,” I said. “We see this all the time,” he said. “It may be something that a general neuro78

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

radiologist may not have experience with. It’s also a somewhat new phenomenon, that people are living long enough to get this complication. We used to say three to six months for brain metastases. This guy’s been alive two years. That’s in addition to the five years he was alive after inoperable recurrent lung cancer. It’s an unusual story. Let’s keep him on steroids, see what happens.” I called Mr. A to let him know. The week before, when he’d been in the hospital, we had recommended a second course of radiation to his brain—a highly risky proposal, I’d said, but without it, he could die from recurrent tumor. Now I wanted to tell him he could die from the treatment. Neuroradiologists and neurosurgeons, radiation oncologists and neuro-oncologists, experts in their fields, could not agree on what the images from the MRI meant. Perhaps we, the patient’s physicians, were no more certain than if we were moving pieces around a sand-table model back in LBJ’s Situation Room. Treatment, no treatment, risk of death either way—what was real, and what did any of it mean? We presumed to know what we were doing, but did we even know the terrain? Aristotle regarded the brain as less important than the heart—the place where spirits gathered, he said, as aisthesin koinen, “common sense.” The Roman physician Galen, connecting brain injuries with changes in cognitive ability, inferred that the brain, not the heart, was the organ for mental activity. He taught that the rete mirabile, the “wonderful net,” in the base of the brain, was where the vital spirit transforms into the animal spirit, which in turn is stored in the brain ventricles—the open spaces under the layers of white and gray matter where the cerebrospinal fluid circulates. “I have dissected more than a hundred heads,” wrote the anatomist Berengario da Carpi in 1521. “I believe that Galen imagined the rete mirabile but never saw it.” His contemporary Leonardo da Vinci created a cast of cerebral ventricles by injecting hot wax into the ventricles of an ox’s brain, then peeling off the brain matter. The anterior, middle, and posterior ventricles were seen as the places for common sense, cogitation, and memory, respectively. More than 300 years later, around the time Broca ascribed language localization to the left side of the brain, a contemporary wrote, “Memory is seated in the posterior part of the eye socket.” What is language for? What is the Wall for? What does it mean, and how does it feel, to see a cousin’s name there? Where is common sense? Where was common sense at Khe Sanh? What does it mean to remember a place where it rained for months, where tanks were stuck in the mud, where soldiers shot themselves to get out? In the Iliad, at the death of Patroclus, “glorious Achilles’s faithful friend,” his

The week before, we had recommended a second course of radiation to his brain—a highly risky proposal, I’d said, but without it, he could die from recurrent tumor. Now I wanted to tell him he could die from the treatment.

SUMMER 202 3

79

fellow soldiers are overcome with grief: “appalled and sick at heart, Antilochus lost for a time his power of speech: his eyes brimmed over, and his manly voice was choked.” What does it mean to be a friend? “A black stormcloud of pain shrouded Achilles. ... In the dust he stretched his giant length and tore his hair with both hands.” Why would a man wear the insignia of the U.S. Marines, after his war experience and its aftereffects almost killed him? When I called Mr. A, Tom answered. He said Mr. A was feeling well, had no pain, was in a good mood. “We thought he couldn’t talk, couldn’t understand us, and he seemed to be getting frustrated. Then a funny thing happened. When he was in the hospital, a few days after we met with you, physical therapy was requested. And the physical therapist, she happened to speak Spanish. When she talked with him, suddenly he became more engaged. I didn’t understand any of it, because I don’t speak Spanish, but up and down the hall, he talked with her. He seemed to have no problems at all. Over the last few days, I’ve been using Google Translate. When I have a question for him, I’ll say it into the phone, and the phone will say it to him in Spanish. Then he’ll reply. I have no idea what he’s saying, but it seems to work.” I told him that the radiosurgery treatment team had determined that the MRI showed radionecrosis—not recurrent brain metastases but merely a known complication from radiation. The treatment was steroids. “That’s good news,” he said. I asked Tom to hand the phone to Mr. A. In another life, during a summer away from medical school, I’d traveled in Mexico and South America. Now I summoned my best accent, imagining myself a hapless traveler trying to find the correct bus. “Buenos días,” I began. I asked him whether he found Spanish words easier than English ones. “Yes.” And in every other way he felt fine? I already knew from the scans that there was nothing else wrong with him, at least nothing in the way of lung cancer. He felt well, he said. Then I told him the same things that I’d told Tom: this was a complication, not a recurrence. He had an appointment with neurosurgery in two weeks. He should keep the appointment. I’d given Tom instructions for how he should take the steroids. “Entendiste?” I said. “Entiendo,” he said.

During a summer away from medical school, I’d traveled in Mexico and South America. Now I summoned my best accent, imagining myself a hapless traveler trying to find the correct bus. “Buenos días,” I began.

X

XX

My mind traveled back to medical school, to the neuroanatomy professor’s first slide, which showed one sentence: “When a song is running in your head, where is it running?” Principles of language organization in the brain follow the broader principles of neuroanatomic localization: for example, the left frontal lobe’s “motor strip” controls right-sided strength and dexterity—handwriting, arm wrestling, swinging a tennis racket, playing the melody line on the piano. 80

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

That said, neuroanatomic regions subserving one function or another don’t operate so neatly. Writing a postcard isn’t merely moving the hand to write the characters, and returning a tennis ball or playing piano music from memory doesn’t rely only on the motor strip. Neuroanatomic regions typically have multiple functions, which overlap with other neuroanatomic regions. Moreover, neuroanatomic regions are capable of “remodeling.” They are flexible, able to adapt and relearn. A right-handed basketball player can learn to make a lay-up using her left hand. And so it is with language. Although language is classically placed in the left frontal and temporal lobes, since Broca’s time it has been found that multiple regions contribute to language function—to remembered language, spoken language, understood language. Neurosurgical mapping studies of bilingual speakers have been inconclusive on whether a second language is supported by multiple brain regions or an isolated, localized one. Either way, hypotheses tend to be inconsistent when applied to particular patients. I didn’t know whether Spanish was Mr. A’s first or second language; my guess was that he used it while growing up in Puerto Rico, or maybe Spanish was the language he had shared with his wife. However he had learned it, the phenomenon of “selective aphasia”—losing the capacity to speak in one language but not another—has been reported in stroke patients and others with neurological problems. When Tom returned to the phone, he sounded charged, almost exuberant. “That was amazing,” he said. “That’s just how it was when he was talking with the physical therapist.” Because of the uncertainty of his diagnosis, Mr. A had been treated with steroids to reduce inflammation. And with steroids, at least one of his languages had begun to return, slowly. The doctors taking care of Mr. A were convinced that he was getting over a complication from radiation, but the diagnosis was supported only by how well he was feeling. If he again lost the capacity to speak within the next several weeks or months, the team would need to reassess its impression of the MRI. I reviewed with Tom the time for the upcoming appointment with the neurosurgeon on the radiosurgery team. “You’ll get a call to confirm,” I said. A physician friend has told me that talking with patients about appointment times or scheduling tests with PET scan technicians may not be the best use of my time as a physician. Yes and no. Perhaps E. M. Forster was correct—we physicians need to “only connect,” instead of me trying to explain to the nurse the calls I wanted her to make. Besides, she doesn’t speak Spanish. Fragmented care had gotten us into this situation to begin with. If I could do anything to reduce the risk of missed appointments, lapses in care, I wanted to do it. Before we hung up, Tom said, “Wait—he wants to say one more thing.” Mr. A returned to the phone. It was something, to realize I’d known him for so many years, known him with and without his wife, through illness and health, and states in between. Ever since he’d told me stories about freebasing cocaine, driving to the Bronx to buy drugs, carrying a rifle around the house, out of his mind, trying to live down the experiences he’d suffered in Vietnam, I’d felt like I was his secret friend. “Thank you, doctor,” he said in English. O SUMMER 202 3

81

Projections of Life Memories of a Midwestern childhood and the stories only pictures can tell

DAVID OWEN

T DAVID OWEN is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor of Golf

hirty-five years ago, my father gave me a box that had sat in his attic for 20 years, and I put it in my own attic and mostly forgot about it. I knew what it contained: slides taken by my father’s father, who died in 1967. I even vaguely remembered the slides because my grandfather used to put on shows for my sister and me. But his ancient projector and his screen were long gone, and so was his battery-powered handheld viewer. I had no way of looking at the slides other than holding them up to a light, so I didn’t open the box. Not long ago, I bought a scanner that can digitize images from transparencies, and when I finished doing what I’d bought it for, I remembered the slides. There were maybe 800 of them, some in rusting metal magazines and some in an old shoebox on which I (at the age of seven or eight) had written my grandfather’s name several times in pencil and my little sister, Anne, had written her own name in green crayon. Most of the slides turned out to be pictures that my grandfather took during trips with my grandmother between the early 1940s and the early 1960s. I ignored those at first because I was interested mainly in pictures of myself, but eventually I got around to digitizing everything. When I did, I was amazed. Although my grandfather was self-taught and his camera wasn’t much more than a Brownie, he definitely had an eye.

Digest and Popular Mechanics. His most recent book is Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World.

82

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

X

XX

My grandfather was born in 1883 on a farm in Princeton, Missouri, almost all the way up by the Iowa border. The most famous thing about Princeton is that the

ALL PHOTOS BY LOYD CYLVEN OWEN/COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

frontier scout, sharpshooter, and trick rider Martha “Calamity” Jane Cannary was born there, or near there, in 1852. Each September, the town holds a celebration called Calamity Jane Days, and the festivities have sometimes included a parade hosted by the hog production division of Smithfield Foods. In her autobiography, Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane by Herself, Jane mentions Princeton in the second sentence and never again. I visited for the first time a couple of years ago. I looked up old property maps in the local history room of the public library, found the graves of my great-grandparents in the huge town cemetery, walked around the empty town square, and spent the night 35 miles to the southwest, in a motel built by Amish carpenters. So many Amish live in that part of Missouri that signs on the highways warn you to watch out for their horse-drawn buggies, which they drive mostly on the shoulders. I passed several, including one from the back of which two little girls were dangling their bare feet. I waved as I went by, and they waved back. Later, I drove past a big white house. Some older Amish girls in long dresses and white bonnets were playing croquet in the yard; just beyond them, between the house and a barn, bearded elders were sitting in a circle beneath two big umbrellas. My grandfather’s name was Loyd Cylven Owen. The fact that Loyd has only one l is the result of either semiliteracy or stubborn Missouri common sense; no one knows where Cylven came from. Loyd’s father, Risdon Marion Owen, whose own father’s middle name was Bloodsaw, had local relations named Fleeta, Orvall,

The author’s grandfather on a 1950s trip to Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California

SUMMER 202 3

83

The fact that Loyd has only one “l” is the result of either semiliteracy or stubborn Missouri common sense; no one knows where Cylven came from.

84

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Olin, Melton, Ermal, Buena Vista, Armilda Saphroney, and Lucy Orah Van Vacter. Few of those names were spelled the same way in consecutive censuses. Loyd graduated from high school in 1899 or 1900 and was hired as the teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, where some of the students were bigger than he was. In 1901, Princeton’s superintendent of schools wrote for him an enthusiastic letter of recommendation, addressed “To who it may concern.” He attended the Chillicothe Normal School, which trained teachers and also offered classes in shorthand, telegraphy, elocution, music, and penmanship. He graduated in 1904 and took a course in “the science of business building” from a popular correspondence school based in Chicago. (The motto of the school’s founder, Arthur Frederick Sheldon, was: “He Profits Most Who Serves Best.”) He moved to Kansas City in 1905. His penmanship got him a job at the Kansas City Life Insurance Company, where he filled in the handwritten parts of insurance policies, wrote letters to agents and policyholders, and eventually became the head of policyholder relations. When he retired, in 1954, the year before I was born, he had worked at Kansas City Life longer than any other employee. He was married briefly to a woman whose name no one in my family kept a record of; they had no children. In 1923, he married Mary Helen Evans, who worked at Kansas City Life as a secretary and was seven years younger than he was. She had grown up in Independence, Missouri, a few houses down the street from Bess Wallace, later Bess Truman. She never liked Harry Truman, whom she knew slightly. In 1952, after Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, she wrote to a friend, “Well, we finally got that nit wit out of the White House—now I think things will begin to get straightened out. We are all delighted about Ike, and I am sure at least he will know where to get the answers if he does not have them, and not just guess at things like has been done for so long.” The last name or middle name of many of Mary Helen’s relatives was Boone, including her father, Jerome Boone Evans. That branch of the family was from Kentucky, and when I was young, she told me that I was related to Daniel Boone, a point of pride for me all through elementary school, and maybe still. Jerome Evans was a newspaperman, first in Petersburg, Indiana, and then in Independence. He went broke and later got sick, and my grandmother had to abandon her plan of attending the University of Missouri. She went to secretarial school instead, and Jerome died when she was 20. Some of his problems—perhaps all of them—were related to his drinking, which is probably also what led Mary Helen and her mother to become Christian Scientists. In the May 1932 issue of The Christian Science Journal, in a regular feature called “Testimonies of Healing,” Mary Helen wrote, “A short time after Christian Science had been brought into our home I became very ill with tonsillitis. ... A practitioner was called, and within a very short time, possibly fifteen minutes, I was completely healed; and this healing has been permanent.” She credited Mary Baker Eddy (and Jesus) with curing my father’s childhood chicken pox and measles, as well as her own influenza. I had mono during my junior year in college, and while I was sick, she paid a practitioner $3 each for 13 long-distance healing sessions. In a note accompanying her check, she wrote, “Thank you, Mrs. Walker, for the splendid work you did for my Grandson, David, from May 6 to May 18, inclusive.” I knew nothing about this intervention at the

time; I know about it now only because I found a rough draft of her note to Mrs. Walker and the strip of paper on which she double-checked her arithmetic. The death of Mary Helen’s father left her mother destitute; she lived with my grandparents for 33 years, from shortly after they were married until the day she died, a year after I was born. The three of them lived at first in a small apartment in a Kansas City building popular with newlyweds, and then in a small house that my grandparents built in 1925. Mary Helen had kept copies of her father’s newspaper articles in boxes in the basement of their apartment building, but the basement flooded in a rainstorm and everything was ruined. As a consequence, she made sure that the lot on which they built their house was at the top of a hill. My father, Loyd Cylven Owen Jr., was born in his parents’ bedroom two and a half months after they moved in. “A baby’s cry was heard—loud and clear—Little Sonny had come to town,” Mary Helen wrote shortly afterward. “ ‘Perfect and plenty of hair.’ Those were the answers to my first questions. With this, I closed my eyes and rested. There seemed to be so much peace everywhere.” Two years later, in the same bed, she gave birth to a stillborn son—my almost-uncle. X

Gaga takes in the action at one of the racecourses that she and Dada visited in Florida.

XX

Anne and I called our grandfather Dada and our grandmother Gaga. During Dada’s slideshows, Anne and I would lie on the floor, close to the screen, on an Oriental SUMMER 202 3

85

I can still hear the satisfying crunch of the lever that advanced the slides, and I can still feel the sparkly grit on the surface of the screen.

86

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

rug that’s now on the floor of my own living room. I can still hear the satisfying crunch of the lever that advanced the slides, and I can still feel the sparkly grit on the surface of the screen. While we watched, we ate candy that Gaga kept for us in a big pot on the bottom shelf of a cabinet in her tiny breakfast room. The pot was always full of Milky Ways, Chuckles, Bit-o-Honeys, 3 Musketeers, Paydays, Tootsie Rolls, Slo Pokes, malted milk balls, and rolls and rolls of Life Savers, and there were so many big hollow gumballs that I usually chewed two at a time and spat them out, into the kitchen wastebasket, as soon as their candy coating was mostly gone. There was also a drawer, higher up, in which Gaga kept three kinds of stick gum you never see anymore: Beemans, Black Jack, and Clove. We drank 7-Up and Coke from bottles so tiny that nowadays they’d seem like jokes. There were no rules about how much of anything we could have. For breakfast, Gaga allowed us to drink the same instant coffee that she and Dada drank, and she often served us something that I still sometimes make for myself: a soft-boiled egg stirred up with bits of bacon and a piece of toast cut into little squares. Gaga read to Anne and me on her living room couch, and we took turns twanging a fawn-colored, gumdrop-shaped mole on her forearm: her most fascinating feature. Her skin was extraordinarily smooth and soft. She almost always wore a cardigan. Her perfume smelled like roses, very different from our mother’s perfume. She hung her reading glasses from a cord around her neck. Her washing machine, down in the basement, next to the incinerator, looked like something from a museum, even then. When she spoke of the parts of a chicken, she used the terms that people used to use when they didn’t want to sound lascivious—second joint, white meat, drumstick—and when she made fried chicken for my family, she always served herself the back. She was the first adult I was taller than. She wore open-toed shoes of an old-fashioned type that an ancient babysitter of ours, Mrs. Kruger, also wore. I got my first loafers at the beginning of third or fourth grade, and when I outgrew them, Gaga asked my mother if she could have them for working in her garden. Dada played Monopoly with me—my version, in which all you did was roll the dice and move your marker around the board, with no thought as to what the deeds, houses, hotels, Chance cards, Community Chest cards, and cash, all untouched in the box, could possibly be for. When I pictured God, at Sunday school, I pictured Him in the usual way, with a long white beard and a long white robe—but always standing at a workbench that was exactly like the workbench in the back of Dada’s one-car garage, and assembling babies from baby parts that He took from an old wooden box that was exactly like the old wooden box under Dada’s workbench. When I began scanning his slides, I discovered that he and Gaga had traveled much more than I would have guessed. There are pictures taken in Colorado, Las Vegas, California, Mexico, New Orleans, Miami, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and at Monticello and along the Blue Ridge Parkway. I learned later that they also took many car trips with my father, almost all of them before the era of the slides, and that the three of them visited all 48 states, plus Mexico and Canada— a major undertaking before interstate highways. In a slide that Dada took in the Ghost Town at Knott’s Berry Farm, in Buena Park, California, probably in the early ’50s, Gaga and the widow of one of her brothers are posing on a bench next to

comical plaster statues of two grizzled old prospectors. Gaga is laughing and very tentatively resting her right hand on the hand of Whiskey Bill. As always, she is dressed as if for church, on that day in a navy blue dress with big white lapels and white buttons. One of the few slides in which Dada himself appears, presumably taken by Gaga, is also from Knott’s Berry Farm. He’s sitting on a different bench, with one hand on one knee of each of two “Calico Belles,” and he looks more at ease in his pose than Gaga does in hers. He is dressed as he is in every memory I have of him, in shades of brown and tan. Like other men of his generation, he pulled his pants several inches above his navel and used his stomach as a ledge to hang them from. (The father of a friend of mine once described such pants as “a little tight under the arms.”) Pants in those days weren’t cut the way pants are today. Because men wore them so high, the zippers had to be almost as long as jacket zippers, and the pockets were big enough to carry groceries. In just about any slide in which Dada appears, you can see his watch chain, the top of his fountain pen, and part of his light meter. I know what the light meter looked like because he let me play with it. It had a brown leather case, a brown leather neck strap, a white domed sensor, and a dial with numbered markings. In those days, you couldn’t take pictures the way you can take them now, by clicking away and checking later to see if you got anything good or at least something you might be able to fix with Photoshop. Dada’s camera had no autofocus, no auto-exposure, no built-in flash, no zoom lens, no high dynamic range. Kodachrome wasn’t cheap, either. Eight hundred slides works out to just a few rolls of film a year—and with slides there are no second chances: no cropping, no dodging, no burning in. Gaga is an element in many of Dada’s compositions, although she isn’t always easy to spot: in some of the shots she’s off in the distance, off to one side, sitting at a table in the shadows, looking at something in her lap, standing with her back to the camera. Dada must have posed her in the shots that aren’t obviously candids. In numerous pictures, she is wearing or carrying something red—an artistic idea of his or hers, maybe, or just a lucky accident. There are many slides of Gaga’s garden, her main interest after us. She grew flowers, tomatoes, and Kentucky Wonder pole beans, which she prepared, with bits of bacon, in a pressure cooker. An article about her in The Kansas City Star in 1942 said, “We would not refer to Mrs. Loyd C. Owen’s roses as a rose garden, but as a buxom rose bouquet twelve feet in diameter. Sixty-five husky bushes, compactly planted in a round bed, buds as big as your thumb and blooms four and one-half inches across, give that effect.” Dada took several hundred slides in Florida, where he and Gaga spent parts of many winters between the early 1930s and the early 1960s. Gaga kept records of everywhere they stopped and everything they spent. Her notes show that Dada occasionally smoked a five-cent cigar, that he was a generous tipper (50 cents on a breakfast check of $1.39), that she sometimes spent $2 on a visit to a practitioner, that they got 11.75 miles to the gallon on their Florida trip in 1932 and 15.4 in 1958, and that they were interested—perhaps very interested—in horseracing. Probably my favorite of all the slides is one of Gaga sitting in a red chair on a broad lawn at what looks as though it must be Gulfstream, Hialeah, or one of the other Florida racecourses they visited. She’s wearing red shoes and she has a red purse in her lap and she’s looking through binoculars at something far away. She’s surrounded SUMMER 202 3

87

The author as a boy of two or three, in the late 1950s, playing in front of his grandmother’s backyard rose garden

by dozens of blue, orange, yellow, white, brown, and red chairs and benches, all empty and standing at odd angles to one another. In the background are palm trees, hedges, and blue-and-white-striped awnings. My guess is that Dada spotted the chairs, conceived of the composition, and told Gaga where to sit. There are many slides of me in the box, and there are almost as many of Anne, who is two years younger, but there’s only one of our younger brother, John. He was born in 1962, and by then Dada was beginning to show signs of dementia. In 1964, he and Gaga decided, regardless, to take their regular winter car trip to Florida. My parents worried about that, and their anxiety was increased by the fact that if anything went wrong, Gaga wouldn’t be able to take over the driving, since she’d never learned how. In their motel room at the end of their first day on the road, Dada asked, “Where are we and where are we going?” Gaga explained and gently suggested that they postpone their trip. The next day, they drove home. Dada died three years later, at the age of 84, of esophageal cancer. I remember almost nothing about his funeral—I was 12—but I do remember that friends of my parents dropped by our house with things for us to eat, mostly casseroles. One casserole contained ears of baby corn, which I had never seen before. At dinner that night, I put one in my mouth and comically spat it out, like a cartoon double take. I got in trouble and, in penance, decided that to honor Dada’s memory, I would permanently stop clowning around at school. But my resolve didn’t last long—probably not all the way to the end of the next school day, or even to the beginning. X

XX

After Dada died, Gaga lived alone for several years, then engaged an old-lady livein companion, Mrs. Dalby, who moved into the small upstairs bedroom in which my great-grandmother had once lived. Mrs. Dalby was a toad-shaped farmer’s widow. She was or had been a deacon or a pastor in some apocalyptic sect, and she spent most of her waking hours studying dire religious tracts and making yogurt. She was succeeded by Mrs. Noble, who was nicer. 88

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Later, Gaga had housekeepers who were more like nurses. She got into an argument with one of them and called my mother to settle it: “Carol, was Harry Truman president?” She began wrapping small items in Kleenexes and rubber bands and hiding them among mothballs in a drawer of her dining room sideboard. “Gaga fixed herself the strangest hairpiece the other day,” my mother wrote to my wife and me in 1981. “It was a bit of the bottom of a slip cut off, with lace on one side, tied around her head with two ends hanging down to her shoulders. She said it was the latest thing, and everyone was wearing them. She’d seen it on the TV (although she said ‘the telephone’).” She began signing her letters to me “Mary Helen” or “Mary Helen and Loyd,” even though my grandfather by then had been dead for a dozen years. She complimented my mother on her acting in a play she’d seen on TV that morning, and my mother wondered which charming television personality Gaga had mistaken her for, until she realized that the only thing on at that hour had been cartoons. One of Gaga’s most cherished possessions toward the end of her life was a photograph that I myself had taken, of a dachshund puppy that my wife and I bought shortly after we got married. Gaga repeatedly told slightly different versions of a story about a week that she had supposedly spent in a New York City hotel, during which our dog crossed the lobby toward her, the cutest little thing she’d ever seen—and then it looked up into her eyes and said, “Yip, yip, yip!” She was so attached to that photograph that my mother told me I might as well stop writing to her myself, and just let the dog do it. One day, Gaga found a photograph of a cat that had once belonged to Anne, and she told the same story about the New York hotel, but now featuring the cat, who “looked right up into my eyes from her little pillow”—here my mother held her breath—“and said, ‘Meow, meow, meow!’ ” (“Good for Gaga,” my brother said.) Gaga lived to be 92, despite never having had much conventional health care. She spent the last year and a half of her life in a nursing home. Moving there from her house confused her, and on her first night she pushed another resident up and down a hallway in a wheelchair. By then, she had stopped wearing her false teeth, which no longer fit. She had to be given a permanent Foley catheter. “That worried us because we were afraid it would bother her, but she doesn’t seem to be aware of it,” my mother wrote. During one visit, my mother found Gaga sitting in her wheelchair, in an exercise class. “She was paying close attention and even trying to lift her arms and legs. Then an aide gave her a Halloween noisemaker, and cheerily told her how to swing it, and she finally said no.” For some time that day, my mother said, Gaga had been moaning, “Help me.” My mother asked her what kind of help she needed, but couldn’t hear her over the noisemakers. “Finally, I heard her say, ‘Help me to be mature; help me to be grateful’—two good Christian Science words.” Then she pointed to a man across the room and said, “That’s my husband.” My mother asked the aide if she could wheel Gaga over to him, and the aide said she could—that sort of thing happened all the time. Gaga began to introduce my mother to the man, then stopped and said, “You already know him,” and patted his hand. “He smiled at her, then went on shaking his tambourine,” my mother wrote. “I slipped out and wasn’t missed.” O

My mother wondered which television personality Gaga had mistaken her for, until she realized that the only thing on at that hour had been cartoons.

SUMMER 202 3

89

FICTION

One Look Back

ANN BEATTIE, a contributing editor of the Scholar, has published 20 novels and short story collections. She is the recipient of the PEN/ Malamud Award and the Rea Award for the Short Story. Her work appears in five O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies as well as in Best American Short Stories of the Century.

90

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

ucretia was eight when she took the walk with her mother in Staunton, Virginia, where they’d moved after her mother’s job in Norfolk ended. Now they lived with her mother’s favorite cousin, Riley Prall, who was 52, and in a weakened condition, though he’d painted a room of his apartment lavender for Lucretia, because it was her favorite color. Her mother, Edith, had been amazed that he’d been so thoughtful—though why that should have surprised her, when he’d expressed delight at their moving in temporarily, Lucretia couldn’t understand. Cousin Riley had gotten pneumonia the previous July and never bounced back, so two health aides alternated making visits twice a week, on his non-dialysis days. Both aides were women: Arna Mae and her friend Marilyn, who’d been sober for 13 years and worked for the same agency. Marilyn parked on Beverley Street and climbed the front steps, rather than driving up the steep driveway rutted with potholes and scattered with stone, as if the sky had opened and one of the gods, in an angry fit, had thrown down boulders. (Lucretia was learning about the gods in school. “This is what education’s become?” her mother often complained to Cousin Riley, who tried to calm her.) Arna Mae, Lucretia’s favorite health aide, drove right up the steep incline, her tires skidding on the stones, and parked with the hazard lights flashing while she visited Riley. She’d recently brought a heart-shaped, red plush pillow with a padded arrowhead sewn to look like it was popping out one side, its pleather tail protruding from the other. She was re-gifting a present her husband had bought her for Valentine’s Day, because she’d thought Lucretia would like it more: her husband was a generous man who approved of spreading happiness. Arna Mae had also recently given Lucretia two potholders made of quilted fabric, made to look like vertical pigs wearing white aprons and hats. Chef ’s attire now occupied a large part of

ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE CUSHMAN

ANN BEATTIE

Lucretia’s imagination; she’d requested for her ninth birthday an apron just like the pigs’, though Cousin had bought her one on eBay well in advance of that day, just because. It was so long that it had to be folded after it was raised to her armpits, the strings fastened in back, then brought forward to be tied in a bow. On the day she and her mother took the walk, they were following Arna Mae’s instructions on how to find the log cabin. This was a small house made from timber, which meant wood, and you could see the cement, or whatever it was, that oozed like frosting between cake layers. Arna Mae told them to be sure to notice the funny sign beside the side door. Lucretia really wanted to go there. She was bored. She was too young for real homework, though sometimes she had to bring in things like autumn leaves, as if she was still in kindergarten, or a family knickknack, otherwise known as a tchotchke, and tell its story. There was a handout list her third-grade teacher often revised of things still to be shown and discussed. She’d just moved a book written and autographed by Michelle Obama to the top of the list, because, she told the class, she was afraid it might be banned. Next up for discussion would be: a chunk of wood that fell off a railing because of extreme squirrel gnawing; a blue bathmat that smelled like feet even when it was dry, on which somebody’s brother had painted clouds that had started to flake; the lace collar a girl’s mother had detached from her wedding dress; a dead dog’s plaid winter vest that fastened with Velcro and remained hanging on a hook beside the coats (Corey Benvanista’s mother sometimes buried her nose in it and sobbed); a little box containing three Mexican jumping beans that had actually been bought in Guanajuato, Mexico, but that never jumped. Lucretia held her mother’s hand, the one that had been scalded when soup splashed up like a geyser from a big vat the second her mother and another man had dropped it on the tire-size burner in the school cafeteria. Her mother insisted the purple spot was not a burn but a bruise. It was really better not to bring up the accident, so Lucretia just linked pinkies with her. Lucretia also knew not to ask questions about her father. All she knew was that he’d been the captain of his football team, then a pilot, though Cousin said he was about as much a pilot as Snoopy the dog. (He was a flight attendant for United, her mother said. “For a week,” Cousin snorted.) A white-haired lady whose dog had a nose pointed like a party hat passed by and said hello, and Lucretia wondered if she’d been at the log cabin, and if that was why she was smiling. Lucretia wasn’t afraid of dogs, but she knew to ask before she touched one. There’d been a big dog named Anthony that lived in apartment #4, but in July he went to summer dog camp and never returned, because he was very big and it was better for him to live outside of town. Then, in the fall, his owner went to bed and never woke up. Lucretia wasn’t supposed to know that, but she’d heard Arna Rae talking to Cousin about it. There’d been a gathering on the steep hillside behind the apartments, with someone’s phone playing music, while Mr. Bettius’s wife said a nonreligious prayer (“More like a poem, very inoffensive,” Cousin explained). Mrs. Elber’s son drove to Staunton from Buena Vista. Six or seven other people struck matches and held them up, though it didn’t quite work because there’d still been daylight, and the point had

92

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

been to light the darkness. Lucretia had not been allowed to join her mother. Cousin stayed in his apartment because he felt poorly. Lucretia had put on her chef’s apron, to see whatever she could through the window. Now, after days of asking, she and her mother were finally five minutes away from the cabin. Ivy grew up so many trees, they’d eventually be strangled to death. Cousin had a phobia (which meant he was afraid) about ivy, kudzu, and honeysuckle. They passed by somebody’s birdbath. Her mother said that it was another 50-50 situation: When the birdbath was filled, the birds would have a way to sit nearby to wait their turn, but at the same time, the neighborhood cats could lurk behind the clumps of tall grasses and attack them. It was February. Her mother liked to say that any winter day that wasn’t freezing was “pleasant as a pheasant.” The sky was blue, there was only a little wind. Edith said, “I hope this place lives up to your expectations. If nothing else, I guess it’ll make Riley’s look luxurious, though it was kind of Mrs. Elber’s son to give Riley his mother’s wood stove, so we don’t have to rely on that expensive baseboard heat.” Heat, which was a utility, was not included in Cousin’s rent. In his unit (#3), there was an alcove off the living room that could have been used as a dining area, though after Cousin gave Edith his room, he slept in there on a twin bed behind a bamboo blind dropped to the floor. The bed was placed sideways, so it wouldn’t stick out into the room. Lucretia’s room had no door, but beads hung there, and she had a shelf for important things, with a basket that held her dirty laundry and two baskets that held her clean, folded clothes. She very much wished that once they got to the cabin there’d be a hidden key under a cement lawn angel, or on the ledge above the door. Maybe there’d be one! Then they’d be able to go in and look around. The cabin was empty, Cousin had told her mother. It was in a gully, so you could barely see it until you got right up to the iron railing along one side of the sidewalk, above it. There was an outdoor seating area, sort of like the one Mrs. Elber had set up in front of her apartment, with a lawn chair and a folding chair. This outdoor area, though, was huge, with real furniture, chairs you’d have in a living room, and an iron bench and a folded umbrella that looked like half of a big white popsicle. Arna Mae hadn’t even mentioned the outdoor living room. Instead of a ceiling, there was sky. It was really nice, even if there wasn’t a barbecue grill (their neighbors in #7 had taken theirs in for the winter, too, though Mr. Bettius cooked on a hibachi he put on the fire escape outside his kitchen window; he stuck tongs out the window to cook the meat.) “Can we go down there?” she asked. “There are NO TRESPASSING signs. See that sign? It means there’s a hidden camera,” her mother said. “What if we just looked in the windows?” “You can see fine from here. One day you’ll believe me: things can be much more interesting at a distance. Like a house that’s falling into the ground.” “What does that say?” “That says … it must be what Arna Mae told us to look at … what do you think it says, darling?” “BEWARE PILEPOCKETS AND LOOSE WOMEN.” She was corrected: “Pickpockets. People who steal your money,” Edith said.

SUMMER 202 3

93

“It certainly looks deserted.” Edith rummaged in her coat pocket. “The mice are running!” she squealed. This was a joke she made when Lucretia saw her feeling around in her pocket, out of habit, for long-gone Tic Tacs. “You know why they hung up that sign?” her mother asked. “To be funny,” Lucretia said. “Because they’re assholes,” her mother said. “Though when I think about it, they’re admitting their own house looks so disreputable that if you went anywhere near it, you might get robbed, and if that’s not bad enough, Oooooh, look out! Bad women are in there. If the robbers don’t get you, the women will.” “It’s depressing,” Lucretia said. She’d learned this response from Cousin. Whenever he said it—he often did, watching the six o’clock news—her mother brightened; she’d immediately agree, then there’d be no further discussion. “It certainly is,” her mother said. “It’s 2023, and we still have the same old sexist remarks. You don’t see a sign saying LOOSE MEN because there are no loose men, they’re just men. They demonize women because they’re ashamed of their own desire.” A car drove by. Sometimes she and her mother played the Subaru game, counting only Subarus. This car was something else, though. A dog’s head poked out the window. Lucretia thought about asking again if they could go to the SPCA and get a dog, but she didn’t really want one, and her mother only liked birds, or at least the ones in Cousin’s Audubon book that he’d paid a dollar for at the library sale. At the SPCA, you had to agree to send your pet to surgery when you took it away, after you’d already paid a lot of money to get it. Sometimes SPCA people even came to see where you lived and said no, because your apartment wasn’t good enough. “If we lived there, we could take the sign down. And we could plant flowers and make the outdoor area even prettier.” “Well, hold that thought, and when you’re an adult, volunteer for the planning commission.” “Can’t we do anything?” “What do you mean, anything? We walked a mile and a half to get here. That’s doing something. I hate it when the temperature drops this fast.” “I can tell you something you don’t know,” Lucretia said. Her mother considered this. “Tell me something I do know,” she said. “You might have a better grip on that than I do.” “Okay, you know that Cousin always feels poorly. And you tell me to call Arna Mae ‘Mrs. Cummings,’ but she says to call her Arna Mae.” “True,” her mother said. “Can’t you think of anything a little less humdrum?” “What does that mean?” “Less ordinary. Not the same old, same old.” “I’d be telling you all day what I know you know.” “Is that right? You can read my mind? Maybe I should accept that. Okay, go ahead, tell me something I don’t know. I shouldn’t have interrupted. I might have found out you’ve tried fentanyl, or something.” “I’m nine, Mom! Nobody’s even asked me to do drugs.” “That’s a relief. You aren’t nine, though. You’re eight years, four months and a few days old. What is it I don’t know?”

94

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Lucretia smiled. She said, “In Norfolk, Kyle’s mother put us in a double stroller, and she wore earbuds and sang along with Tammy Wynette and we’d sing, too, then we went to a bakery and a man handed her pizza dough out the back door.” “What?” “They spoke Spanish.” “Jessica Stuple speaks Spanish?” “Hola!” Lucretia said. “She put you in that ridiculous stroller and wheeled you to a bakery to get dough that was handed out the back door? Kyle would agree to sit still in a stroller?” “We pretended to be babies.” “You did this more than once?” Lucretia nodded. “If we sang too loud, she’d shush us. We didn’t know most of the songs, so we sang, ‘Oh beautiful for spacious skies.’ ” “Unbelievable! It’s actually sort of wonderful, Jessica jogging and singing and pushing that stroller. You know, her husband makes a lot of money. He’s a big lawyer.” The one time Edith had gone back to visit after moving, Ned Stuple had walked in and slid his hand down her hip as she stood at his kitchen sink drinking a glass of water, and had told her, in response to her having told him earlier about the vat of soup erupting, that she definitely had a case against the school, and maybe the stove’s manufacturer, but that he only represented criminal cases. Nonetheless, he’d be happy to meet at the Hilton bar the following evening to discuss it. “It’s cold. We should start back,” she said. “I’m going to be very very happy when Toyota calls and says the Corolla’s repaired. They must be shipping the part from China. Or Ukraine, with my luck. Darling, did Jessica tell you not to tell me about going to the bakery?” “No. But Mom, can you take a picture of me down there? And get the furniture in?” “I already told you: that property’s posted.” “But there’s a sidewalk.” “It’s not a sidewalk, it’s a path that belongs to the people next door.” “Yeah, but they don’t say, NO TRESPASSING. I won’t even touch their stupid grass, I’ll stand right there”—she pointed—“and you can get the furniture behind me, and please please please get the cabin in.” “Then make it snappy. I didn’t raise you to go traipsing down a stranger’s private walkway.” Lucretia tilted her body the way she had when she’d leaned into her first steps, intent on propelling herself forward before she fell. Sometimes it had been all Edith could do to look encouraging. Not to crack up. Lucretia stood with her arms spread, gesturing to suggest that everything in the photograph was hers. Her daughter should want a bicycle and nag her more about getting a dog, but instead she wanted to pretend (“Don’t worry, I won’t put even the toe of my shoe on their precious lawn”) this dilapidated furniture was hers, that the rotting mess was wonderful. “Move over so you can get it all in,” Lucretia said, turning to stand in profile.

SUMMER 202 3

95

She turned the phone horizontally, tilting it to include the sign, and the missing board below it, as well as the rusted sink near the door, sprouting weeds. The cement path Lucretia stood on was no wider than an ironing board, with chunks heaved up. Behind her, a bird dove and rose, clutching something in its beak. A squirrel, another bird? That had happened with breathtaking speed. “One more,” Lucretia insisted, trying to prolong their time outside, oblivious to the fact that they’d be walking back at twilight. They had no car—it was so frustrating, Edith thought, having to ride the bus to Kroger, which was exactly what she should have been doing; at Riley’s, they were down to frozen burritos, and frozen peas in a bag so big, they’d been eating out of it since Christmas. Lucretia would be sad there’d be no guacamole and chips, which they always ate first on Mexican dinner night—that she’d just be eating a burrito with a squirt of cheese on top, and peas rolling around beside it. Lucretia deserved better. Maybe she really should keep the appointment with HR and think about suing, especially since her hand was worse. A flash in her peripheral vision got her attention. Another creature was flying through the air, darting sideways, then rising straight up. A drone! So who was controlling it? She looked around and saw only an elderly man in a helmet and Lycra pants, panting, rolling his bike uphill—who could bicycle up such an incline? He sounded like Cousin on a bad day. The drone hovered just off the pathway on which Lucretia skipped, pretending she was hopscotching. She had no idea the drone was there. It was almost invisible from such a height. But no more did Edith think that than it dropped lower. Then it shot sideways and disappeared through the window of the house next door. “Do you want me to take your picture, picture, picture?” Lucretia called, hopping on one foot, then running to Edith’s side. “No thanks.” No, she didn’t. Who’d want a picture of some middle-aged woman laid off for getting burned, apparently unemployable elsewhere, whose daughter’s imagination had been so warped by the way they lived that discarded furniture and a crappy umbrella were interchangeable with a doublepage spread in House Beautiful? “Yes!” Edith said, changing her mind, “but let me go ahead so you can take it from behind. I don’t want a camera pointed at my face. Wait until I’m really small,” she said, handing her daughter her phone. She turned away, glad to be wearing Riley’s second best jacket, the warm one he’d said more than once could simply be hers, stuffed with goose down, its sharp little feathers occasionally stabbing her. You paid a price for everything. Jogging uphill in the dwindling light, she tried to shake the thought that her hand throbbed because of something worse than the burn. They’d soon be back at Riley’s. He was probably already sitting in the kitchen with an ice bag plunked on his head (“My crown,” Riley called it), the ice bag he’d rescued from a pile of things Mrs. Elber’s son discarded the day he cleaned out her apartment. He almost always had headaches on Sunday nights, after a weekend without dialysis. She decided to run up the hill really fast, impress her daughter with her unpredictability, as well as speed. This was the daughter she’d become pregnant with when she was returning from her mother’s funeral in Eau Claire. She’d had a little

96

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

fling with a male flight attendant who’d also been snowed in at the airport hotel. I will run like the wind, she thought—a cliché, but it was true. In fact, at the crest of the hill, it was easy to think she could lift off to become a drone, awaiting whatever signal would redirect her: Shoot off into someone’s yard? Zoom over the empty lot? It had been too sad, the visit to the log cabin. What had Lucretia expected? Now that she thought of it, Lucretia never made up stories like other children, she never pretended or invented things. Was she damaged forever by not having a father? Edith had to slow down; her heart was leaping in her chest. Snow hadn’t been predicted, but big snowflakes had begun to fall. The street glistened. She ran faster, moving closer to the curb after a car swung widely around her. She got so little exercise. She didn’t have a Peloton. Bully for everybody who did. When she was stopped by a spasm of coughing and looked back, she couldn’t see Lucretia. Already, the funny story about the time Mom flipped out began to crystallize in her mind. She coughed again. Her hands were trembling; otherwise, she’d have zipped the jacket. Lucretia had read so many myths in school—those weird, sadistic stories, taught to third graders! Stories of rape, women turned into shrieking swans, morphing into trees, their near escape ruined for eternity because of one look back. She glanced over her shoulder, but didn’t see her daughter. Surely she wouldn’t have returned to the cabin? Well! Maybe by the time she saw Riley, she’d have to tell him that Lucretia had changed herself into a tree. If she hadn’t felt faint—god; why was she choking, like someone had forced an ear of corn down her throat? She was sweating. Even her tears were hot, and when she was reunited with her darling daughter—because surely, once she caught her breath, she could run downhill even faster—Lucretia would simply be an eight-year-old who hadn’t changed into anything. And there she was! Lucretia, beneath a street light, looking … quizzical, if Edith had to choose one word to describe that expression. She nearly collided with her daughter as she reached out to pull her close, whispering into her hair that she was sorry for being such a terrible mother, all the while knowing that Lucretia would protest, even if it required lying. A white lie, perfect for a snowy night. Maybe the sharp, weird vibration wasn’t in her chest. Maybe the ground was rumbling. Maybe they were standing on a fault line, and depending on which way it broke … But no, she was catastrophizing; that was way too dramatic, as was the image of two people floating away from each other on chunks of an iceberg, the way the two penguins had in that book that had made four-year-old Lucretia cry. “Show me,” Edith said, as Lucretia stood unmoving, like the folded umbrella, arms at her sides. “Did you get a picture of silly Mama, disappearing?” “You were really small,” Lucretia said. “You were a dot. But you’ll never see it, unless you find your phone.” “My phone?” “I threw it in the trees,” Lucretia said, gesturing behind them. “I called Cousin, and he said he’d borrow Mr. Bettius’s car and come get me, to stay right where I was, under a light.” Across the widening gulf, Lucretia said, grudgingly, “You can ride with us if you want, or you can run all the way home.” Thus was a rift created, though the daughter still loved the mother. There was

SUMMER 202 3

97

also good news: The mother had not, after all, been having a heart attack. Many years would pass before that happened. Edith wouldn’t die for years after Riley did, after she’d met and married Frank. They’d move to Chicago, where, 12 years later, she’d fall to the ground after skipping a stone across the lake, where it hit six times before sinking. That, too, would happen on a snowy day, as Lucretia walked along the shore with her mother and stepfather. She’d die without knowing her daughter had been secretly engaged. When Lucretia married Carl at City Hall, her mother was already gone. Then began the fairy tale: she and her husband moved into their new apartment—a gift from Carl’s father—on the 16th floor of a glassy building with a roof deck, and a view of Lake Michigan. “I was kidding, darling, just pretending to be making a big escape. Here I am! Now we’ll go back, warm up, and eat dinner.” If Riley offered, she might take one of his pain pills. Meanwhile, she rocked the collapsed umbrella that her thin, rigid daughter had become back and forth, back and forth, thinking, The hell with my cellphone, as they waited for their ride. X

X

X

“What are they saying?” Axel asked Porter, who disliked the new earbuds and was listening through his old Bose headphones to the conversation between a mother and her daughter. Axel was the one who’d insisted they keep the drone in the air outside the cabin to keep an eye on them. “The usual shit. How much the mother loves her. She deserved to have her phone thrown away; the kid shouldn’t worry—the phone can be found later. May I inquire: Does it remain your considered opinion that they wanted to score drugs? That woman, and that kid?” Axel leaned over to see the drone’s position on the screen. It was high above the people on the street. “May I remind you,” Axel said, “that stranger things have happened. What about that jockey in Saratoga? You lost 20 bucks to me on that one, didn’t you? Why do you think they were taking pictures? A selfie or two, sure, real Americana for backdrop: some crappy cabin. But they were there a long time. Hopscotch? C’mon. A little too cute, don’t you think? Or maybe the kid was oblivious, and the mother was checking the place out.” “Listen yourself,” Porter said, holding out the headphones, though Axel waved them away. Porter said, “I thought the mother was bitching at the kid, but she’s mad at herself. The mother’s bawling because they aren’t, I kid you not, having guac and chips for dinner. Whoa! Now the daughter’s talking, saying it’s all her mother’s fault, her cousin said it was. The mother’s bawling. What the fuck!” “Since when did you have so much curiosity about family life, Port?” Porter frowned in concentration. The voice levels had dipped. The new, improved directional mics were worse than the originals. “Oh, bring it in,” Axel said. “I can’t stand endless chitchat.” “The mother’s having a meltdown,” Porter said. “This is wild. Says she’s a terrible mother. Daughter’s saying nothing. I grant your point about the mics, by the way. If we both complain, but do it separately, they’ll do something.” Axel sighed. After almost two weeks in Staunton, they’d made exactly one bust, and it involved only a small amount of coke. If nothing happened by Mon-

98

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

day, they’d be sent back to the boarded-up gas station in Waynesboro to watch the parking lot outside Vape Vibes, which was the most boring job imaginable. D.C. had real action. Real problems. What was with the new head of the division, exiling them to Siberia? The guy didn’t like them. He just plain didn’t. “What now?” Axel asked. “They’re crying because somebody named Riley isn’t there. The mother should get a grip. The kid’s really upset. It’s killing them that they don’t have a phone. Jesus: Verizon should hire them for an ad! You take over; I’ll go down the street, all casual, and ask if everything’s okay. I haven’t seen one car in the last five minutes, and the snow’s really coming down.” “I believe intervening’s not part of the job description,” Axel said. “I know, but it’s 24 degrees out there. Feels like 16.” Porter’s head was close to the screen. He was perusing the drop-down information. “You know, Port, if you really want to go ride up on your white horse? I think I was wrong and we should bring it in, but for you, I’ll handle the drone and the mics. It’s my strong suspicion no one else is going to show up at the cabin while you’re gone,” Axel said. “On second thought, I don’t know,” Porter said. “I’m a guy. I’d probably just scare them, they’re so hyper. You’re right. They can knock on somebody’s door and use their phone. I’m not bucking for a humanitarian award.” “Good call, bro. Super Bowl’s on in 20.” Porter clamped the headphones back on. He listened, frowning. “I’d bring it in,” Axel said. “But keep listening, because you know what? We might miss something, otherwise. Constant vigilance. That’s the job description.” “They’re just standing there. The mother’s still panting from running up the hill and running back, after the kid threw the phone into the bushes. Weird. Hard to follow; we’ve got crap audio. The bugs on the targets don’t like getting wet.” “So, remind me, Port. You thought you were going to be a forest ranger when you were in grade school? Back before everything started burning?” “You should talk, Mr. Ship Captain. What’s the last time you were out on the water? Wait: headlights! The kid’s whatever, six maybe? She must have been freezing.” Actually, there was something strange about how unhinged the mother and the girl had become. Porter heard the car doors close through his headphones. “What now?” Axel asked, cracking his knuckles. “They got in the car.” “There we have it,” Axel said. “When people aren’t dealers or users—or dealers who use—things turn out fine.” He walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and removed the last two Diet Cokes. He set them on the counter, took a big sip from each, then removed a flask from his jacket pocket, and poured a dose of bourbon into each can. “Lost ’em,” Porter said. “Car drove off.” “Hey, bro, serious for a minute,” Axel said, carrying the Diet Cokes into the other room. “You had a good impulse, to go see if they needed a phone.” Porter reached for the can. He looked at Axel. “How long do I have to wait for the but?” he asked.

SUMMER 202 3

99

“Don’t go cynical because you can’t accept a compliment. Let’s bring our buddy in, what say? This is about the third time I’ve asked you.” Porter got up and opened the window. Once before, a drone had been destroyed because they’d left a window closed. It fell to the ground and bounced around trying to get airborne, but the corner had been damaged and something protruded that looked like an old-fashioned spring. After that their exile began: Charlottesville—that wasn’t bad; then Waynesboro—grim, grim; then Staunton, which was basically a ghost town. At this rate, if the new guy didn’t come around, they’d end up in Mobile, and that sure as shit would give them the Memphis Blues Again. Lake Charles, monitoring crayfish. Tuscaloosa. “Hello, my little friend,” Axel crooned, as the drone flew in. He pushed the wand, proud of how he could get it to land in its box, like a dog returning to its crate. “Who came for them?” “Old piece of shit car. White. I don’t know. Family. It’s the South,” Porter said, thumping down in the broken La-Z-Boy that—as Ax liked to say—listed to starboard the minute you sat down. “Eight minutes to game time,” Porter said. “Ready, Ax? Got any of that famous intuition of yours about who’s gonna win?” “I’m philosophical. Winners, losers, we still get Rihanna at halftime.” Axel’s was the more comfortable chair. He had a passing thought that maybe it was time to change jobs, move on, though he’d miss working with Port: James Porter Winters III, from Redding, Connecticut, who’d gone to Middlebury and majored in environmental studies. On graduation day, Port had been recruited by his own uncle! Until that moment, his life plan had been to follow his girlfriend back to her home in Aspen, meanwhile keeping the Old Man happy by applying to Georgetown Law. Life was funny, Axel thought. Anybody in their line of work would agree. He poured another splash of bourbon into the remains of his Diet Coke, took a sip, leaned back, and closed his eyes. In a few minutes: Super Bowl. Porter had been thinking: Why are Ax’s eyes closed—did he fall asleep? He was holding the remote, which meant a lot to him, so let him have it. Then Porter had another thought: those people, whoever they were, would have made up. They’d be sitting in front of their fireplace, and in the absence of guacamole, they could eat brie on Triscuits. Macadamia nuts. Their little dog would be pawing somebody’s leg, begging to be lifted onto their lap. The mother would have dried her tears. She’d be setting the table with white china, like the plates his Aunt Judy inherited from her mother, and the girl—most kids were cute, but when he’d first seen her through the window that looked out on the cabin, she’d been so plain and gawky, so ordinary in every way, he’d felt sorry for her. Now, though, she’d be curled up in a chair, scrolling on her iPad, looking for fleece-lined tights, or coated elastic bands to gather back her hair. She’d wonder if it was true that Neutrogena hand cream was absorbed quickly, and whether her mother might finally give in and let her order Maus. Because her mother would definitely want to make it up to her: that long time waiting as the sky darkened and the snow fell and the wind blew, numbing their hands, feet, ears, and noses, the father coming so late, they’d pretty much abandoned hope. O

100

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

FICTION

Epithalamium BILL ROORBACH

am Fulton DeMarco, DeMarco Photography: NOTHING ESCAPES US. Or so it says on the van. Which I parked the other day in town and debarked only to be greeted by a dog on his own, tough little guy with blackened divots taken out of his brindle head in likely altercations. Not a pit bull, but stocky like that, handsome big jaw and the best grin, friend to man if not to dog. I gave him my hand to sniff but he was easy, couple of quick licks, and so I scratched his hard-knocks head a while: contented grunting noises, his ribs pressed hard into my knee. He torqued his neck back to grin up at me, this guy who ate well even on the mean streets of Wellspring, Florida, my kind of man’s best friend. No collar, no human thing, all dog. I had business, lunch with potential clients, a bride and her mom. Yes, that kind of photographer, pretty jaded, formerly would have said artist, but make a hell of a living snapping drunks and nodding grandmothers, later sortBILL ROORBACH ing scans and making memories, your greatest day. They don’t generally call is the author of 10 me for the divorce. books, including the I was halfway up Palmetto Street to the cutesy coffee shop there on memoir Summers with Juliet, the novthe corner when I realized the dog was following me, 10 paces back like els Lucky Turtle and a slighted husband, humbly following but claiming me at the same time. Life Among Giants, “Not so fast,” I called. Just kidding, but the dog stopped and sat, just kept and the Flannery O’Connor Award– sitting as I continued on pitiless—later for you, toughie. In the coffee shop, winning collection the bride and her mom were efficient, just 30 brisk minutes, already on the Big Bend. His work same page, nice, some good gentle laughter at the expense of her groom, has appeared in Harper’s, The New who was clueless military if you believed them. But you weren’t meant to York Times Magazine, believe them, not at all. What they were conveying was that the groom was The Atlantic, and a good guy who could take a joke and who loved her with all his heart and Granta, among other publications. medals and swords and would sit still for anything we asked of him. We

SUMMER 202 3

101

signed my standard contract on the spot, one of the more deluxe packages. They were meeting my pal the wedding planner next, right there at the same coffee shop, and after her arrival and some professional hugs and handshakes, I was out the door and onto the next shoot, a commercial thing at a former factory space now a carpet showroom, pleasant, quiet work and well paid. Yes, Dear Universe, I hurried out the door of the coffee shop, nice two-toned bells, and there on the busy sidewalk was that scruffy dog, just waiting for me. He followed me to the van, and, no way around it, I opened the side door and let him hop in, zero hesitation on his part. He leapt easily through the gap from the back seat onto the passenger seat up front and sat erect, ready to navigate, keen eyes forward. X

X

X

It was as if there had been a dog-shaped void in my house and not only a wife-shaped void and a daughter-shaped void. Mick Jagger stepped into the dog void and filled it, even started to fill the others, all on his first night home. He responded to k sounds and m sounds and seemed to brighten at the name Mick, also he had the Jagger swagger and the comically wide mouth and that Carnaby Street clothing sense, not really. We watched TV together and he didn’t sleep at all, watched the screen and snuggled up to me, both of us alert. A walk at night? I’d never done that from this house, not in this neighborhood, but off we went, no leash required, Mick those respectful paces behind me but closing the gap, especially as I kept up the chatter, plenty to say, and feeling safe in his company. We walked an hour, a leisurely couple of miles, both of us stopping to pee, though I didn’t mark as many things as Mick did. And then home again to this bright and hopeful mood I hadn’t known for how long? A long time, that’s how long, since Natalie went off to college in Colorado and her mom decided to follow her across the country, eight years back if we’re counting. And now Natalie about to marry. Or so her mom had just informed me in a blunt text, no invitation for me, my own fault as I’d been pretty bitter around the divorce and Momma Rita’s new college-professor husband, all that, and had said a few things I now mostly regretted, though one or two were funny (I still called the new guy Curious George, couldn’t stop). In my sadness as we walked I played a game with myself that Mick was good at advice and I asked him what I should do. And in the game my best thoughts were his answers, and he said, You idiot, call Natalie and tell her you love her, that’s all, just that, and then in the next call tell her you’re so proud of her, and then in the next call after that, call three and no sooner, tell her you’d like to come to her wedding, no pressure, wise dog.

102

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES HEIMER

We walked an hour, a leisurely couple of miles, both of us stopping to pee, though I didn’t mark as many things as Mick did. And then home again to this bright and hopeful mood I hadn’t known for how long?

And in the morning another walk before my first meeting, which wasn’t till noon. Mick and I rambled clear to Thompson Hill, five miles roundtrip at a guess, looked out at the ocean a long time like two wise men, the dog modeling a kind of quiet contentment that I adopted, including the smile. We were happy people, and we made the people we passed happy, smiles rippling behind us like wakes. I thought, Why not? And Mick hopped in the van and became my assistant, attended my shoot with me, a bridal shower with some foundation-encrusted young ladies who must’ve done their makeup in the dark bathroom, exposed here and in my lens like vampires to the sun. Of course I’d perform my usual miracles and fix things in the digital fashion. But we’re not here to talk about bridesmaids and their multitudinous flaws. The important thing is that Mick was such a hit, staying at my side grinning and not even huffing and puffing, a perfect gentleman as those ladies changed in and out of various bodices and petted him, holding him to their bosoms, each more ample than the next, I doing my best not to see but only notice, document. Like I wasn’t there. And in a way, of course, I wasn’t there. I was already deep in the phone call Mick had suggested, and which I planned to make early evening. And early evening I did call, dialing the old cellphone number and getting Natalie’s voicemail, easy as that, six years? Seven? “Natalie, hunny, hi, it’s Daddy. Long time. I’ve made a new friend who’s advising me wisely and he has said to call you and say just one thing: I love you. I want to add one more thing, however, and say as well that I’m sorry. For being absent. And one more after that, which is, I miss you. You know my number, sweetie, if you’d like to call. And I understand if not.” Well, she didn’t call. X

X

X

Dog and man walked all over this small city, and tried out all the beaches once the tourist-season pet restrictions were lifted. Handsome Mick was not a biter, not a popper of beach balls, but not strictly at my heel at all times, and no perfect angel. Pretty simple: he did not like other dogs. Still, at my command he’d leave the fray, return to my side, panting at whatever injustice he’d just righted, or might have had I not intervened. We both liked those deep-summer beaches, but he wasn’t a dog to run ahead or scurry after children, or jump in the surf, none of that, just brief and stiff canine hellos, owners always tugging their purebreds away from him. But we had gotten close, had started to profess our love for each other. It was quite easy between us, and we were pals like no pals had ever been, that kind of feeling, meals, walks, work, sleep, sports on TV, always side by side, the months peeling past. I counted my lucky stars. So did Mick, I’m certain of that. He got steak, he got burgers from Five Guys, he got sliced turkey from the deli. He liked certain vegetables, too, and never got fatter or thinner, a lot like me. I played the advice game with him about nearly everything, and he continued to be wise. You can charge more, he kept saying, and so for my next series of photo estimates, I went high, very high. And people, you could actually see their eyes pop with the blistering heat of those prices. And then, you know what? They hired me. Because most expensive must be best, that’s what Mick Jagger told me. It was dog psychology. Great references, good reputation, dazzling website, blisteringly high

104

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

estimates, and bang, I doubled my work. Mick advised tucking away 25 percent for taxes, so I did that, and 10 percent for equipment, and soon I had the nasty new 24mm lens I’d been coveting so long, and a new camera bag to replace the ratty one. And I got a collar for the boy, a nice leather number with steel studs that made him look a touch mean and inspired me to get myself a steel-studded camera harness, and off we’d walk, miles a day between jobs. I took snaps like I hadn’t done for years, artsy-snaps, I called them so as not to take myself too seriously, but they were seriously good, at least Mick said so, and as it happened—spoiler alert—in years to come they would bring me immodest fame. But that was later, quite a bit later, new wife and all, even grandchildren. Oh, and it was Mick who advised that I learn to text. I mean in the Mick-advisingme game. I was not delusional. Texting is not difficult, Mick said, but does require a better phone than I’d been using. Write it off to business, Mick said, that huge smile, get a Samsung this or that, the guy at the store sets it all up for you, immediately functional. And it came true. The guy at the store, sad penitent with a mullet, set me all up and showed me how to text, showed me how to set up my contacts, asked for a sample number to plug in, so I picked Natalie’s of course. Home again after a top-dollar family portrait session—funny, pleasant people all getting along beautifully—I stared at the phone a long time. Mick wanted a movie with dinner, and so we started a long one, but after we’d eaten and the movie was far from done, I turned it off. Dog got excited thinking it was time for a walk, but instead I picked up the phone and wrote my first text ever: DEAR NATALIE I’M SORRY FOR ALL THE TROUBLE. I LOVE YOU AND MISS YOU AND WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND YOUR WEDDING. NOT GIVE YOU AWAY OR ANYTHING, JUST ATTEND. LOVE DAD. Well, I stared at that a good long time and remembered something I’d read about old people texting, and so I Googled that phrase OLD PEOPLE TEXTING and got some apparently hilarious examples, and they looked like my text, all caps. So I fixed it. I’m no Luddite. I fixed it and warmed up the language a little and actually used an emoji for the first time, an embarrassed but apologetic and game smile. Dramatic pause, and: SEND. And in mere shocking seconds my phone rattled in some way I’d have to fix and there was my first text reply:

And I got a collar for the boy, a nice leather number with steel studs that made him look a touch mean and inspired me to get myself a steel-studded camera harness, and off we’d walk, miles a day between jobs.

dad omg of course come to wedding, what? i love you too Three red hearts! Good dog.

SUMMER 202 3

105

X

X

X

One upshot of the better feeding and miles of walking was that I was losing some weight. Maybe a lot of weight. I didn’t have a scale, but noticed my clothes were getting slack and belts too long; also the hills were easy to walk and the dog miles piled up effortlessly. Mick was looking good too. He attended an enormous wedding as my assistant and everyone was good-humored about it because he was so good-humored, tight at my calf and feet on the ground at all times, nose poked nowhere, shaking hands and accepting high-fives soberly even from the drunks, all at one of these over-the-top ocean estates. The enormously cheerful and self-assured owner of the place (it wasn’t his kid getting married!) pointed out a cliff walk up the inlet we could try between the dressing photos and the actual ceremony and so here we went, three free hours, very civilized, Mick fascinated by the roar of the waves below, running down to sniff at the seaweed sucked in by the rocky estuary, later a dead large fish to inspect at length, the first time he’d ever left my side for so long, hunched down there in an impossible nook where I couldn’t reach him if I wanted to, ignoring my whistles and imprecations, a good 20 minutes, frustrating. Which I explained to him perhaps too calmly when we finally continued on, a spring in his step, the dog three steps ahead of me now, his dog hips full of humor and life, that stubby tail expressive as a conductor’s baton. Back at the wedding we went to work, polite dog capturing genuine and revealing and unguarded expressions from even the most camera shy. Family group photos, boring even for a dog, and somewhere in there, my having at last taken his attention for granted, he went missing.

Which I explained to him perhaps too calmly when we finally continued on, a spring in his step, the dog three steps ahead of me now, his dog hips full of humor and life, that stubby tail expressive as a conductor’s baton.

X

X

X

I searched, I investigated. I made phone calls. Everyone who’d been at the wedding remembered the dog. The bride especially had loved him, very generously shot out a group email to her guests and extended family, and a lot of stories came in reply, very cute, but. An uncle had been coming back from the cliff walk and saw the dog marching the other way, very purposeful, smile and all. Toward that fish, of course. Time and tide wait for no dog. I worried he’d been swept away. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I didn’t function, except to answer the phone, in case it was about Mick, or to look at email, notes and dog-finding advice from the wedding, diminishing returns. But the phone rang one afternoon. “Tell me your name,” a woman’s voice said angrily. Not every bride is happy, believe me. “DeMarco,” I said. “Fulton DeMarco Photography. Nothing escapes us. I

106

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

am called Phil. What’s the problem?” “You stole our dog. You stole Monk. You pig. You stole our dog. And you put your own collar on him. And this is the phone number on the collar, stupid man. Stupid Phil DeMarco.” “No ma’am, I didn’t steal him. Please. I took him in. He was collarless and beat up and very hungry and wet and had no way to tell me who he was. I got close though, ma’am. I named him Mick. I loved him. I love him.” “I saw that. Mick, ha. On the collar. If you steal a ship and paint a new name on the stern, you’ve still stolen the ship, mister.” “I didn’t steal a ship. I didn’t steal anything. I took in a stray. I know how you must have missed him. He’s a precious animal.” “You stole Monk, that’s what you stole. And now I know who you are and you’d best expect trouble. I have rough friends and so does Monk.” “I’m already in trouble, ma’am. My heart is in trouble. I miss Mick that much. I miss him so much. Monk I mean. Monk, I’m sorry. How was I to know? I grew to love him so much.” “Don’t try that on me!” “Try what?” “Those crocodile tears, that’s what. You think we weren’t crying over here when you stole him?” “I didn’t steal him, ma’am.” Sob! “I didn’t steal Monk.” Sniffle! “I only loved him.” Now she was crying too. “You say you loved him. But I loved him. I love him. I love him right now. I put posters up all around the neighborhood. I put them everywhere. At Tribble’s Store, I know you saw that one. You’re telling me you don’t go to Tribble’s? It’s the only store in the neighborhood, Phil DeMarco.” “I don’t know Tribble’s, ma’am. Apparently it’s not the same neighborhood. Apparently Mick, Monk, was more lost than you might think.” “But that poster was everywhere. With that photo? Monk with the smile and the two little girls? Broken hearts, those two. You didn’t see that, huh?” I wasn’t trying for drama, but wailed, honestly: how I wailed, struggled for words: “No, I did not see that. I would have called. He arrived beat up and without his collar. How was I to know? Ma’am, I asked around. I asked at the vet’s. I asked at the dog park.” She cooed suddenly. “I’ve been too harsh,” she said. “I understand,” I said. She said, “Want me to put him on?” “Yes, yes if you could.” And I heard Mick’s unmistakably slobbery breathing, the rattle of the wrong dog tags, wrong collar, mine having been replaced. “Mick,” I said. And Mick woofed, unusual for him. “He does know you,” the woman said. “Of course he knows me.” “His name is Monk. Call him Monk.” “Monk, Monk.” “Aw, he loves you,” the woman said. “He brightened right up at the sound of

SUMMER 202 3

107

your voice! More when you said Monk than Mick. Next you’ll ask to FaceTime and the answer is no. I’m in my robe and not beautiful at the best of times if that’s your plan, buster.” I laughed through my sobs, and she laughed through hers, and Mick let out a woof that was a laugh and I knew he was grinning. I missed that grin so much! “Okay,” the lady said. “Wait,” I said. “Wait-wait. Can I have your name? Your phone?” “You may not.” And with that, she hung up, fuck. Unknown caller, was all my useless new phone would tell me. X

X

X

Natalie, my daughter, as it turned out, was a dear one and gave good advice. “Dad,” she said. How I loved that simple salutation. “Hunny,” I said. “The dog is someone else’s. The dog is not coming back. But you can be proud. You were a good dog Samaritan. And most important, you proved something to yourself: you can love unconditionally. You can love unto tears.” “Is that from the Bible?” “No, I’m just saying it right now.” Unto tears: “It just sounds so old-fashioned.” “Dad. You’re crying?” “I’m crying.” “Oh, Daddy. What I’m saying is. Daddy? You’re okay. What I’m saying is that the dog came into your life for a purpose and the purpose was to open your heart and now I hear proof, proof that your heart is open. In fact, I am proof, that you have come back for me. That you’ll be at my wedding.” “I’ll be at your wedding.” And now she was crying too. “Daddy?” “Yes, hun.” “I want you to give me away. That goes without saying. Mommy can just suck it up. But Daddy?” “Yes sweetie.” “I want you there with a new doggie. A sweet new doggie you find at the pound. Is there a pound where you are? A shelter, I mean? Get a new sweet doggie with a sweet doggie smile like you admire so much and name him just as you see fit and bring him to my wedding. Maybe an older dog. A dog who knows some tricks. A dog who’s been ’round the block, okay Daddy? And bring him to my wedding and we’ll all fall in love with him, and he will be a dog with a family so big, his beautiful dog heart will break! Promise me, Papa.” She called me Papa! “Sweetie, I promise.” “And this promise you’ll keep?” “Your wedding on the 21st with a dog in tow.” Might be Mick, I thought elated. Let it be Mick. But if it couldn’t be Mick, the Dade County Animal Shelter and some strong dog who’d lived hard.

108

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

X

X

X

But before that, one more devoted search. I put on my best dog brain and thought my way through what he might do. Well, he’d go down and work on that fish some more, that’s what he’d do. I wasn’t able to climb down into the grotto where we’d seen it, but what did that matter? The dead fish was, of course, long gone. So I turned, channeling Mick, and reached the path. From there perhaps I’d heard the wedding band getting louder, the party heating up, action a little too intense for my dog ears and a little scary, people acting like people don’t act, loud laughter and shouting, lots of flinging themselves around, fragrant hems flying. So instead of rejoining my photographer master—and not meaning to lose him, only to catch a break—I marched toward town, a long mile or two, the path widening, my spindly legs hurrying. Because, suddenly, my inner doggie knew where Mick was. The cliff walk ended at a main thoroughfare, and if Mick were going home to his old place, it wouldn’t be down the hill, to where there was only an endless parking lot along an endless beach, the state park. And so upwards, and left again, and sure enough in two short blocks, there was Tribble’s Store. My own neighborhood was far distant to a human’s thinking, more than 10 miles by the loop road, further by the bridge, but using back yards and culverts under highways and swimming the creek and using every secret known to dog, not more than two or three miles, nothing for a dog athlete. Only to be confused later by what? The smells, the traffic, the culvert not quite where you thought? And so, lost. In Tribble’s the owner was smiling graciously at his TV set, the smile meant for me, his attention all on an indecipherable cricket match back in Kolkata. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Greetings. Call me Mukherjee and shop at your pleasure.” I got right to it: “Mukherjee, do you know the lady with the lost dog?” “Oh, Mrs. Crate, yes, yes, I know her as a good friend. The dog is found. Cheerful Monk!” And he pointed to the bulletin board, where a poster still hung, the word FOUND scratched across the surface. I said, “Yes, the lovely Mrs. Crate. I’m so happy that dog was found. I’ve followed the story very closely. Doesn’t she live near here?” “Yes, yes, of course she does. On Parker Street over there. That rather grand house. Dog should never have been out in that busy street alone! The only dog I’ve ever liked! The only one! Dogs being racists!” We laughed pretty hard and long, the truth being funny, Mr. Mukherjee a

I put on my best dog brain and thought my way through what he might do. I wasn’t able to climb down into the grotto where we’d seen it, but what did that matter? The dead fish was, of course, long gone.

SUMMER 202 3

109

comedian. Then suddenly there came a cheering on the tiny TV set. “Jai! Jai!,” said my new friend. “A golden duck! A golden duck!” Cricket talk. “Capital!” I cried. “Haha, don’t make fun!” So of course I said it again. Mr. Mukherjee tilted his head merrily. As for me, Mick Jagger. X

X

X

On Parker Avenue I walked very slowly, taking snaps with my big older Nikon film camera, looking professional and cheerful, thus avoiding suspicion. Every single house was grand at the very least, with generous back yards and front yards and porticoes and cast-iron gates and driveways black as the heart of a jealous man, or (leave me out of it!) hanging like plague-killed tongues (my photos would later reveal) from open garage-door mouths, open doors one after the next, not a high-crime area, service personnel everywhere you looked, pool cleaners, groundsmen, HVAC men, one last desperate gambit before the animal shelter out on Old Farm Road, where surely a good dog waited. But I had a feeling about the blue house. And so I sat in the shade across the street from it on a bench kindly provided by some dead man’s loved ones, a full hour, not wasting time but getting out my laptop and editing the previous day’s wedding. And waiting, watching. Quite confident: this was Mick’s place, Mick’s original place. And sure enough in due time, the grand door opened and here came a lady, and then two little girls. If she was my lady, the one on the phone, she had lied. Because this lady was very beautiful. The little girls too. Extremely fit and handsome like catalog models too gorgeous for the clothes they were selling. And finally Mick, now and formerly known as Monk, last in line, lordly little thug. I clacked my tongue in our manner and Monk shot a look, found me on my bench across the street, sharpest notice, no mistaking his attention, his recognition of me, those eyes bright as spring planets. “Mick,” I cried, like Marlon Brando calling for Stella. I didn’t care who might hear. “Micky!” The lady and her girls ignored me: yet another Florida crazy. But my beloved animal—my old friend, my good-night’s sleepmate, my tenderest man, my Sugar Ray, my guardian angel, my lost brother, my crewcut boy, my combat-bitten baby, my rockstar, my muse, my adviser, my heart—Mick the Monk took several steps in my direction, pulled up short, maybe torn, maybe only nostalgic, pulled up short and gave me his dog-steady gaze as the beautiful woman with her giant wedding-ring set and her girls in their designer kids’ togs and shining health sashayed off in the other direction, this long frozen moment. But at last my boy offered me that huge Jagger smile, which fell from soul warmth into see-ya-later cool so hard it was like an angel falling from grace. Audibly my boy heaved a dog sigh, a little growl in there, a little moan, then turned heel, no tentative steps, not Mick Jagger, instead just the usual resolute trot, quickly caught up to his people. O

110

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

The Life of the Author:

Nathaniel Hawthorne

WILEY BLACKWELL LIFE OF THE AUTHOR SERIES

 978-1-119-77181-4 | November 2022 | Paperback

The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne LVWKHȴUVWPDMRU+DZWKRUQH biography to be published in two decades. It presents a rich and nuanced portrait of one of America’s greatest writers, exploring the thoughts and ideas of a man whose profound insights about the human condition continue to resonate in the modern day.

THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE by

Dale Salwak

About the Author DALE SALWAK is Professor of English and American Literature at Citrus College, California. His 28 books include Living with a Writer, Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature, Writers and Their Mothers, Writers and Their Teachers, and studies of Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, and Carl Sandburg, amongst others. He is a frequent contributor to the (London) Times Higher Education magazine and the Times Educational Supplement. A magisterial work of scholarship that may inspire greater interest in its subject’s ZULWLQJV:KDWHPHUJHVIURPKLVH[SHUWODERUVLVDPDJQLILFHQWO\QXDQFHG portrait, one that deftly illuminates both the man and his writing. ²Kirkus Reviews Available wherever books and e-books are sold.

REVIEWS 115 David Chrisinger’s “The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II” Elizabeth D. Samet

Books

117 Emily Monosson’s “Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic” Priscilla Long 119 Alexander Stille’s “The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune” Jon Zobenica 120 Giorgio Parisi’s “In a Flight of Starlings: The

Wonders of Complex Systems” Sam Kean 122 Charles Glass’s “Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War” Henry Allen 123 John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume 1” Robert Wilson 124 John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s “Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living” Lydia Moland

E S S AY

WILL THE REAL VERGIL PLEASE STAND UP? Making sense of the life of a poet about whom we know so little Sarah Ruden

reat works of literature are sly and powerful beasts that pounce on their readers, grabbing them by the neck and shaking them back and forth. The young Augustine looks like a typical victim of Vergil’s Aeneid. The schoolboy being brought up as a Christian in fourth-century CE North Africa found the first-century BCE epic poem of pagan Rome the most impressive thing in his cultural life to date. Tellingly, his reaction shows no interest in the poem’s theme of individual sacrifice in the name of imperial destiny; rather, into middle age, the great theologian and founder of institutional Catholic monasticism remembered weeping for Dido, who commits suicide after her lover, Aeneas, abandons her at the end of Book IV. When we react as intensely to a work of literature as Augustine did, we may feel compelled to know what events in the author’s life could have informed his imagination. There has to be, we are convinced, something about the author himself that is vital to that thing called literary achievement, some reason he brought into being a work so communicative and congenial. The lack of detail concerning ancient lives has led biographers to make up what they cannot find in their research and to overinter-

G

112

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

pret what they do find. For Vergil, who lived from 70 to 19 BCE, the biographical tradition started to veer out of control from the first and never corrected itself. In the ancient world, rumor, folklore, prejudice, whimsy, and inference from fictional works were habitual sources for biographical “fact.” The Athenian tragedian Euripides, a legend states, was torn to pieces in the woods by hunting dogs belonging to his patron, the king of semiwild Macedonia. The literary inspiration for this story might be the dismemberment of Pentheus at the hands of feral women in Euripides’s Bacchae, or the death of Hippolytus, dragged by spooked horses in the play named for him, though Euripides’s unpopularity in his native Athens no doubt helped the story along. As for Vergil, we know a great deal less about him than about the second most important poet of his era, Horace; Vergil was a private man by preference, but he also seems to have been accorded—no doubt with the help of powerful imperial patronage—a most un-Roman respect for his privacy. Since then, Vergil’s distance and blurriness as a human being have enticed people to read his life and his thinking so as best to suit their own lives and their own thinking.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The consequent distortions go far beyond the political—many are distortions related not only to Vergil’s life but also to how his greatest poem, the Aeneid, can most basically be read and used. Through the long period of late antiquity and for centuries after, the Aeneid was a school text. The poem is ostensibly “about” the establishment, accomplished at high cost, of the Roman nation through the providential survival and triumph of the refugee Aeneas. (The first Roman emperor, Augustus, claimed Aeneas as an ancestor.) But for centuries, the epic was mined for oratorical fuel, even though the author was, by all evidence, the quintessential anti-orator, living and creating in intense inwardness. And the classroom presentation of Vergil’s work tended to be more moralistic than purely literary, setting up the complex, flawed hero Aeneas as a model for little boys and teenagers. As to language, Vergil’s Latin is inimitably beautiful but in some ways idiosyncratic. His style provoked attacks in his own time yet was later emulated. Also in the classroom, the elements of natural science, geography, history, myth, and legend that blend so vividly and tellingly in the sweep of Vergil’s scene painting and narration were reduced to isolated facts for memorization and thereby leached of interest. But Vergil was anything but a dry scholar; he was an opportunistic borrower and probably an ebullient innovator, expanding a certain quantity of old material with great verve and inventing whatever else he felt he needed. I became a Vergil fan largely on my own, but if I had not, I would have absorbed from my instructors that both studying Vergil and worshipping him as an omniscient, godlike creator were chores. The thought of simply reading him, liking what he wrote, and wondering about his day-to-day life would not have occurred to me. In the ancient world, information about authors’ lives was sometimes added to texts of their work, as it is with modern introductions. Freestanding biographies, meanwhile, honored great men and illustrated political and moral principles, without coming any-

where near today’s standards of accuracy or balance. Suetonius, active in the late first and early second centuries CE, was the first extant Vergil biographer. His Life of Vergil (thought to depend on an account by Varius, who was a member of Vergil’s circle and had access to his documents) does not stand out sharply from the other authors’ lives that Suetonius wrote.

This first-century CE bust of Vergil depicts an idealized version of the Roman poet.

SUMMER 202 3

113

Book Essay

True, Vergil is given a blessed birth, but it is typical for such mythologizing to creep into an account of an important man. By the fourth century, the Life appearing under the name Donatus, a scholar and teacher, has become a function of Vergil worship. Narrative influenced by the Bible has seeped in, and Vergil appears like Joseph to Pharaoh: a divinely gifted husbandman and prophetic counselor to the emperor Augustus. Later biography even wanders into verse, as if completing a circle back to Vergil’s own calling of fictive artistry. An authoritative and yet almost oblivious mode of depicting Vergil thus took root, which was convenient for a variety of strange purposes. In the Inferno and the Purgatorio, Vergil is the guide for Dante’s persona, the Roman poet knowing everything that matters about the universe, human history, and the divine will. Though he doesn’t enter into paradise— his death having come before the advent of Christianity—his exemplary role in revered ancient Roman

Activist readings of Vergil presume coded protests that only people at a mammoth cultural, political, and linguistic distance from the author can decipher.

civilization, and what certain Christian thinkers of a later time styled “pagan virtue,” made him an ideal mentor for a Christian. Let me be completely clear, however: the living Vergil was an ordinary, functional pagan; the only alternative in his time and environment would have been conversion to Judaism. The puppetlike nature of the Vergil persona lent itself to further nonsense in later eras. Vergil has been presented as a suitable apologist for empire in its modern Western style; he has also been touted as a sly anti-imperialist. But in Book V of the Aeneid (and there is a wealth of similar evidence), a young 114

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

slave woman, a skilled weaver who is nursing twins, figures among the prizes in the pious and patriotic funeral games. Is she a war captive? Did her captor sire her children? How does she feel about her situation? What is her future? We care, we wonder, but the poet obviously does not; it is his story, with his themes, not ours. The same goes for the antitotalitarian and anti–Vietnam War Vergils of a few decades ago and the queer Vergil of today. Such activist readings have to presume coded protests that only people at a mammoth cultural, political, and linguistic distance from the author can decipher. We need to make our own peace with our own histories and leave Vergil out of them. X

X

X

The most important moments in most authors’ lives are those of quiet work, and the authors themselves may not even suspect the real mechanisms of their breakthroughs. Biographers tend to concentrate on relationships, those loud, visible moving parts of any life, and it took the generally insulting attitude exhibited in early biographies of Sylvia Plath (which tended to grade her performance as daughter, girlfriend, object of charity, friend, wife, mother, and hostess) to shake the genre into better sense: a writer—whether we are talking about Plath or Vergil—is first and foremost a writer. Though much that Shakespeare—and Vergil, and other authors of equal éclat—experienced must have been stressful, little of it was unusual. The ways such writers processed their experiences through language were unusual, but they also included enough of the common touch that the words come across as emblematic. How does this happen? The actual “process,” that great object of audience curiosity, must amount to a powerful secret even in the case of far less secretive authors. One trick to drawing a defensible life story from this secret is to concentrate on how the work may have shaped the life, rather than vice versa. Influential authors do influential literary work, obviously, but literary work is not only what these authors do but also who they are. Their subtlety and adaptability in respect to their work can be inferred from their pages as well as from their lives. Seemingly private

REVIEWS

things they seek or avoid (employment, marriage, children, travel, friendships, a certain kind of home or friends or clothes or manners) tend to be connected to their hope to impress the world permanently and publicly with their words. Writers game their lives out for literary purposes, or they are out of the game before we have a chance of knowing anything about them. Vergil, with such conspicuous negatives for his time and class (no wife, no children, no settled home, extreme reserve, a chief patron he pushed to the edge of his tolerance for delay), looks very good at this gamesmanship. In that sense, he is the first truly modern author, an extraordinary individual whose work swallows up his identity. He was, at the very least, an unusual writerly persona in the ancient world, where civic and professional duty and public performance in an authoritative forum tended to define literary roles. Even stars such as Plato, Cicero, and Horace appear anxious to depict their own literary achievements as situated among or fostered by others. Vergil started as they did, on the evidence of the chummier Eclogues. But so different was his mature mood that on his deathbed, he defied the regime that had made him rich and famous: he demanded that the draft of the Aeneid be destroyed because he had not polished it to his satisfaction. We are living in a golden age of literary biography. If the more careful, more balanced treatments of the most prominent authors’ lives reveal one thing, it is that these authors are dizzyingly different from us, but more knowable if we repress our envious condescension and concede that they knew what they were doing. Many things about Vergil’s life made more sense to me once I dared to grasp that this shy young man from nowhere, who struggled from line to line as he composed and revised, sensed in some part of his mind that if he tried hard enough, he could cause the world to welcome millions of copies of his work. It seems very wrong to ignore the real, living passion through which Vergil testified to the transcendence of the mind and spirit over material power. O SARAH RUDEN is a translator, poet, and journalist whose books include The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible and translations of Augustine’s Confessions and Vergil’s Aeneid. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, Vergil: The Poet’s Life, to be published in August by Yale University Press.

FRONTLINE ORACLE A new biography of America’s most beloved grunt reporter Review by Elizabeth D. Samet

avid Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth is a road book suffused with a spirit of discovery and adventure. Perhaps no genre is better suited to its subject, the World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, who could not stay home. Chrisinger asked himself what he might learn if he “roused the hibernating nomad buried deep inside me, and retraced Ernie’s steps through the war.” In the acknowledgments, he reveals his model: Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. Horwitz’s wonderful book is, as many readers will recall, an odyssey through the landscape of Civil War memory. It took root in its author’s childhood encounters with a book of war sketches owned by his greatgrandfather and with The Photographic History of the Civil War, a multivolume pictorial extravaganza from which his father read to him each night. The elders’ fascination catalyzed the boy’s curiosity; Horwitz’s The Soldier’s Truth: book marked the culminaErnie Pyle and the tion of a lifelong obsession. Story of World War II Chrisinger’s connecBy David Chrisinger tion to Pyle seems a prodPenguin Press, uct less of destiny than 400 pp., $30 of happy accident. Pyle’s name meant almost nothing to Chrisinger before a 2016 trip to Okinawa, where a tour guide invited him to make a tracing of the most famous name etched on the island’s Cornerstone of Peace memorial. The guide’s gesture prompted Chrisinger to pick up Brave Men, one of several collections of Pyle’s wartime columns. And here a great enthusiasm was born. Pyle comes into his life just when Chrisinger, the executive director of the writing workshop at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and the author of two previous books, most needs someone to reveal to him, humbly and plainly, “the hell that war brings.” Chrisinger had traveled to Japan because of an agonizing family history shaped by his grandfather’s wartime service in the Pacific:

D

SUMMER 202 3

115

Book Reviews

I know what it looks like when a man comes home from war and never finds that path that could lead him to a life of peace. I know about the alcohol and the rage, the depression, and the thoughts of suicide. I know what it feels like when trauma reverberates throughout the generations of a family. … I know about bitterness and hopelessness. I know about silence. And lies.

The need to understand his grandfather’s debilitating war experience spurs Chrisinger’s decision to trace Pyle’s footsteps: “to uncover the stories beneath the stories Ernie told his readers.” The ensuing narrative shuttles between Pyle’s life in war

To what extent was Pyle a propagandist? What were the stakes of his unwillingness to grapple with the war’s political, ideological, and strategic dimensions?

and the author’s tracking of his newfound oracle. Footstep books often begin fortuitously, and they run on a delicate mechanism, demanding both plausible pretext and thoughtful planning. Freya Stark’s Alexander’s Path and Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between come readily to mind. In The Soldier’s Truth, two worthy narratives—the public story of the most influential war correspondent in American history and the private tale of a family damaged by war— don’t fully cohere. The narrative switches back and forth with what struck me as unnecessary abruptness. Unfortunately, it is the latter story that suffers most. The deep satisfaction Chrisinger derives from his pursuit of Pyle is evident—he describes himself as “giddy” at finding himself where the correspondent once stood—but the family tragedy resists illumination. Chrisinger is at his best when discussing Pyle’s craft: on the subtlety of his celebrated piece “The 116

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Death of Captain Waskow,” for example, or on the tonal shift in the columnist’s work after the D-Day landings. Historian David Nichols has shown how Pyle developed the style that would characterize his war reporting in the columns he wrote while traveling across America in the 1930s, in which he carefully cultivated his authorial persona: “a Chaplinesque character forever beguiled by faulty zippers, lingering colds … and snake phobia … with an uncannily good ear for American idiom.” In counterpoint to this unmistakable public mode, Pyle’s uncensored private voice also finds its way into The Soldier’s Truth through Chrisinger’s excellent use of archival material. Chrisinger draws on earlier studies of Pyle—including Nichols’s two collections of columns, Ernie’s America (1989) and Ernie’s War (1986); The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950), by Pyle’s editor, Lee G. Miller; and James Tobin’s more recent biography, Ernie Pyle’s War (1997)—in portraying his subject as a restless, hard-drinking hypochondriac who was burdened by the ongoing mental illness of his wife, Jerry, often depressed himself, and uncomfortable with a celebrity cemented by a war he found simultaneously repulsive and seductive. As Tobin writes in his conclusion, “In regarding him [Pyle] as a secular saint who only paid homage to the suffering soldiers, Americans misread his basic ambivalence.” Chrisinger takes that ambivalence into account, yet his admiration abbreviates his consideration of the various professional and ethical cruxes Pyle’s career presents: To what extent was Pyle a propagandist? What were the stakes of his unwillingness (or inability) to grapple with the political, ideological, and strategic dimensions of the war? How did Pyle’s exclusive commitment to human-interest stories contribute to Americans’ selective and distorted remembrance of the war? Chrisinger focuses instead on the psychological injury done to Pyle by prolonged frontline reporting. Ultimately, the book returns readers to the Pacific, where an exhausted Pyle spent the final months of his life as a guest of the Navy and where, after bearing witness to an inordinate amount of suffering and death, he was killed by a round from an enemy machine gun on the Okinawan island of Ie Shima in

April 1945. Chrisinger quotes Pyle’s searing, elegiac, unsent last dispatch to great effect: In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead. … Dead men by mass production in one country after another, month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

In an admiring essay published during the Korean War, New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling praised the candor of Miller’s 1950 biography of Pyle: “It is better for Ernie to be remembered as a man than as a hick character in a movie.” Pyle endured, Liebling recognized, as “the most imitated writer in America.” Chrisinger’s new book reminds us that, whatever else he may have been, Pyle was a writer whose complex legacy continues to demand our attention. O ELIZABETH D. SAMET is a professor of English at West Point. Her latest book is Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.

WE AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET After Covid-19, what might be next? Review by Priscilla Long

onsider fungi. They are their own kingdom, more closely related to animal than to plant. They grow and search for food with threadlike hyphae. They feed by excreting digestive juices onto their dinner, living or dead, to help break down nutrients before ingesting. There are more species of fungi (as many as six million) than there are known animal species (about two million, mostly insects) or plant species (about 400,000 terrestrial species). Fungi (except yeast) reproduce by putting out spores. Chemists estimate that in any given year, 50 million tons of fungal spores are blowing about in the air. Most fungi are harmless; some are essential for our survival. We savor the fruiting bodies of portobel-

C

los and other mushrooms. Yeast gives us bread and beer. Fungi live in our gut microbiome along with bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. In soil, mycorrhizal fungi colonize plant roots and break down nutrients, good for trees. Saprobes (fungal decomposers) consume dead matter that otherwise would pile up. Penicillin comes from a fungus (a mold). So what’s the problem? Fungal pathogens. Collectively, writes Emily Monosson in this well-researched, revelatory book, “infectious fungi ... are the most devastating disease agents known on the planet.” Fungal threats, she elaborates, “are big, continuing, diverse, and potentially catastrophic.” Take Candida auris (C. auris), a yeast that first appeared on the radar of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016 and that is currently spreading around the world. It already has four genetically distinct populations and is evolving resistance to all three existing classes of antifungal drugs. In a New York hospital, after a patient died of it, the hospital’s president recounted the level of contamination: “Everything was positive—the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump. The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling.” To get rid of it, the hospital had to rip out floor and ceiling tiles from the patient’s room. Today, more than a thousand patients across the United States have it. At least 30 percent of them will die. The threat of fungal pathogens is exploding. “Each year nearly a billion patients [worldwide] struggle with fungal infections,” Monosson writes. For “150 million it will be life threatening, and of those, more than 1.6 million people around the world will die.” This is practically the same number of deaths as from tuberculosis, and nearly three times as many as from malaria. Fungal pathogens such as C. auris tend to kill people who are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed. This is no small club. It includes people with organ transplants (40,000 in the United Blight: Fungi States alone in 2021). It and the Coming includes several million Pandemic HIV-AIDS patients. It By Emily Monosson includes cancer patients. W. W. Norton, 272 pp., $28.95 It includes some people SUMMER 202 3

117

Book Reviews

who take high doses of steroids for conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It includes people hospitalized for Covid19. It includes people whose immune systems are not what they used to be—people who are aging. Other pathogenic fungi infect people in perfect health. Such is the Coccidioides infection known as Valley fever. More than 20,000 cases were reported in the United States in 2019, and on average the infection kills two hundred people per year nationwide.

So far, we humans have been spared this level of pathogenic devastation. Will we be spared forever? Monosson’s answer is unequivocal: Get ready.

Why now? Fungi like it cold—and our very existence as a species likely came about because of this. Sixty-six million years ago, in the so-called Chicxulub Impact Event, an asteroid smashed into Earth, wiping out non-avian dinosaurs along with three-quarters of all other plant and animal species. Afterward, fungi began covering everything, feeding on the dying and the dead. Small mammals survived, eventually evolving into primates, eventually evolving into us. Why did they survive? Besides being small, which helped, they were warm-blooded. Fungi like it cold. But Earth is warming. And fungi may be evolving to like it warmer. Fungal pathogens also proliferate as we stir and remix nature on a grand scale, allowing them to be transported to novel places. Away from their native habitat, which had kept them in check, pathogens find new hosts and thrive. Every year, for example, 200 million captured animals are imported into the United States. These birds, fish, monkeys, reptiles, amphibians, and spiders find their way to restaurants, research labs, and especially pet stores. For 118

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

most of these animals, no requirements exist for identifying or controlling pathogens. This legal traffic is a conveyer belt, some scientists say, loaded with viruses, bacteria, and fungi. We humans have not yet experienced a fungal pandemic, but the same cannot be said of animals and plants. Monosson devotes several gruesome chapters to fungal infections that have devastated other species. The great frog die-off of the past 20 years saw several species (blue poison dart frogs, White’s tree frogs, green and black tree frogs, mountain yellow-legged frogs) decimated by the skin-eating chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. White pine blister rust (caused by Cronartium ribicola) has killed millions of pine trees. In the early 1900s, the American chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) reduced perhaps four billion majestic trees to stumps. And white-nose syndrome (Pseudogymnoascus destructans) has, since 2007, killed millions of bats (little brown, big brown, northern longeared, tricolored, and Indiana). So far, we humans have been spared this level of pathogenic fungal devastation. Will we be spared forever? Monosson’s answer is unequivocal: Get ready. Ways to do this include increasing crop and seed diversity, reversing the trend of breeding grains and other food plants for desirable qualities, in the process drastically reducing genetic diversity. More plant diversity would improve the likelihood that some individuals would be able to develop resistance to a pathogen, thus saving a species from extinction. Extensive inspections at border crossings and more effective testing and disease monitoring are also imperative. The Covid-19 pandemic made abundantly clear our vulnerabilities. The good news is that scientists and others are working (struggling might be a better word) to put into place systems and policies to head off a new pandemic that could make Covid look like child’s play. In this terrifying book, Monosson gives us the opportunity to wise up and join their efforts. O PRISCILLA LONG’s latest book is Dancing with the Muse in Old Age. She is also the author of two books of poetry, a collection of essays, and the how-to guides Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators and The Writer’s Portable Mentor.

FAMILY TATTERS A social experiment gone wrong Review by Jon Zobenica

t’s almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkin’s most (in)famous line of poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the communal Sullivan Institute, a rogue psychotherapy outfit on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that—over the course of its more than 30-year existence, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s—grew into a sex cult committed to abolishing within its midst the nuclear family, on the grounds that close romantic and familial bonds were psychologically harmful to adults and children alike. But Stille has equally pungent material to work with. One Sullivanian is quoted saying of his own forebear, “It’s easy to be an anti-Semite when you grow up with a father like that.” Another’s mother is referred to as “that old womb with a built-in tomb.” The latter quotation comes from painter Jackson Pollock, who’s among a small parade of notables who wander like oddballs through this strange milieu. (Others include art critic Clement Greenberg, singer Judy Collins, and novelist Richard Price.) Dishy as it is, however, Stille’s book is hardly an The Sullivanians: exercise in name dropSex, Psychotherapy, ping. The true heroes and the Wild Life and villains in this story— of an American Commune most individuals, children By Alexander Stille excepted, take turns being Farrar, Straus and both—are everyday people Giroux, 432 pp., $30 whose dramas are sometimes darkly amusing but more often heartbreaking. These are real members of nontheoretical families who found themselves at once the victims and willing enforcers of disastrous social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily. Through all phases of the story, from the kinky, freelove eccentricity of the early years to the insularity, paranoia, and criminality of the later years, Stille

I

maintains an admirable, almost tenacious sympathy for his subjects—a sympathy some of those subjects, in retrospect, aren’t sure they deserve. But as the cognitive dissonance grows, so too does the tension, making the book an improbable thriller, propelling us from chapter to chapter to see how these unfortunates will extricate themselves (if they can) from a Gordian knot of their own creation. Will anyone make it out emotionally intact, reasonably functional? Will they be reunited with their own blood, whom they’ve been

The members of nontheoretical families found themselves at once the victims and enforcers of social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily.

conditioned to regard with indifference if not hostility? One cavil: Stille places the origin of his story in a typically caricatured version of 1950s America, an unsophisticated place marked by little more than stifling convention (Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), but with a hint of rebellion on the horizon (Rebel Without a Cause, On the Road). The implication being that the Sullivan Institute was part of that incipient rebellion, a harbinger of the revolutions to come in the ensuing decade. This is misleading on two fronts. First, 1950s America was not some sheltered national virgin whose inaugural orgasm awaited in the mind-blowing, consciousness-raising ’60s. The conventionality we associate with the ’50s was partly a return to normal after the 1940s, a decade that—owing to war-related domestic upheavals— saw myriad social and sexual pathologies rise, some drastically. (Jack Kerouac’s dionysian On the Road, it should be remembered, was a chronicle of journeys taken mostly in the late ’40s, though the book wasn’t published for another decade.) Given this recent SUMMER 202 3

119

Book Reviews

anomie, the return to conventionality in the 1950s was akin to what Stille observed among former Sullivanians, who left behind the commune’s deliberate parental chaos and loveless promiscuity to find shelter in the old-fashioned romantic and family structures the commune had forbidden. Second, the ideas that animated the Sullivan Institute weren’t born in reaction to 1950s American convention. They were a proactive (if kooky) extension of theories that had emerged partly from the Frankfurt School in the prewar years. One of the Sullivan Institute’s founders claimed to have learned at the feet of, among others, the social psychologist Erich Fromm, who himself had participated with a Frankfurt School colleague, philosopher Max Horkheimer, on Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). That publication is a heady mix of Freudianism and Marxism that placed the family—its dynamics, dysfunctions, sublimations, and pathologies—firmly within a web of larger social and historical forces that acted on it. Those forces chiefly related to capitalism, under which fathers were seen to enact a kind of small-scale ownership and exploitation of their own families. If the surrounding society could be made more just and egalitarian, it might, in Horkheimer’s words, “replace the individualistic motive as the dominant bond in relationships,” giving rise to “a new community of spouses and children,” in which children “will not be raised as future heirs and will therefore not be regarded, in the old way, as ‘one’s own.’ ” That’s a pretty fair approximation of what the Sullivanians fancied themselves pursuing. How did it go? “There was a feeling of pressure,” said one cult member, “that was really unpleasant, of having to conform in a certain way to unconformity.” Women endeavoring to get pregnant were required to sleep with multiple men while ovulating, to obscure paternity, which—said one male Sullivanian remorsefully—made it “easier to dissociate from the possible offspring.” Maternal bonds were broken as well, as children were taken from their mothers and raised in other parts of the commune by groups of men or women, with biological mothers being granted ruthlessly limited interactions with their offspring—and those offspring ultimately being denied knowledge of their origins. Per Horkheimer, children were not, in the old way, one’s own. Many of the children themselves came to regard their parents 120

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

as “insane,” “basically a bunch of zombies.” In the long aftermath, one remarked, “I’ve thought three different men were my father in the past three years. I’m exhausted by having to relive the mistakes of my parents.” Another felt that he had been treated like an “experimental subject”—his childhood and his tender, developing psyche deformed by others’ commitment to validating a theory. The Sullivan Institute insisted that every family—categorically—was a source of Larkinesque psychological damage. Then the institute became a scaled-up version of one and proved it. O JON ZOBENICA lives in Carmel Valley, California. His writing has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, Quillette, The New York Times Book Review, and the Scholar.

DON’T FORGET INTUITION The art of doing science Review by Sam Kean

s unlikely as it sounds, we’ve entered the age of the physics beach read—a breezy stroll through some branch of the science, with alternating touches of profundity and whimsy. Recent exemplars include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The latest aspirant is In a Flight of Starlings, a slender, uneven collection of essays by Giorgio Parisi about his life in physics, from his student days in Rome to the work that won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics. The title refers to Parisi’s research on the eerily amorphous flocks that starlings form each night at dusk, flocks that twist and shape-shift like something conjured by a wizard. Parisi wanted to understand why starlings form these flocks, called murmurations, and what rules govern their behavior. He took inspiration from work in statistical physics that In a Flight of Starinvolves scaling up from lings: The Wonders simple atoms and moleof Complex Systems cules to complex collective By Giorgio Parisi phenomena like boiling, Penguin Press, 144 pp., $24 melting, and superconduc-

A

tivity. Part of the title essay focuses on the technical struggles involved with tracking thousands of individual birds, especially in three dimensions. Computing power also hindered him. Although the project was conceived in 1990, his team had to wait until 2005 to start because cameras simply weren’t able to capture high-resolution digital images. Parisi concluded that starlings form murmurations both to signal other starlings that they’ve found a warm roosting spot for the night (starlings are sensitive to cold and often drop dead overnight if not protected) and to help the birds protect themselves against hawks and other predators (it’s much easier to pick off stray starlings than to snatch one out of a jumbled mass). Alas, aside from the obligatory declarations of wonder, Parisi doesn’t get very lyrical in describing the beauty of flocks of starlings. And this lack of a poetic register hobbles other essays, too. It’s not that Parisi cannot escape the mindset of a scientist—he offers several sharp, everyday analogies throughout the book. (My favorite involves how the simplified models of reality that scientists build can nevertheless reveal profound truths about nature, in much the same way that playing Monopoly can illustrate certain truths about capitalist economies— that it takes money to make money.) It’s more that Parisi’s prose never soars. I never got a sense of awe or wonder—no wows. Even when writing about the work that won him the Nobel Prize—on so-called spin glasses, a complicated magnetization state in metals—Parisi doesn’t really explore why the topic grabbed him, beyond noting that it was “interesting.” Moreover, he won the Nobel in part because the underlying principles that explain spin glasses can be broadened to illuminate the behavior of any system in which disordered individual agents interact in complex ways. Possible applications, Parisi writes, include analyzing “websites, financial traders, stocks and shares, people, animals, components of ecosystems, and so on.” I suddenly perked up, hoping he’d expound on the deep connections between all these disparate things. Instead, he simply drops the topic and starts talking about another “very interesting problem,” one that involved packing different-sized spheres into a box. It made me hungry to see what, say, physics writer

Alan Lightman might have done with these subjects. As someone who writes about science history, I have long grumbled about how misleading modern scientific papers are. I understand the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way, but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys, broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers fail to explain how science really gets

It’s refreshing to see a scientist discuss the fuzzy side of scientific thinking, and not just during the early, groping stages but in the technical phases of a project, too.

done. Parisi raises a related complaint—that scientific papers omit all sense of intuition. Indeed, the best sections of the book explore the role of intuition in scientific thinking. He quotes a friend who says that “a good mathematician understands immediately which mathematical statements are true and which are false, whereas a bad mathematician has to try to prove them in order to know.” The same applies to science: the early stages of any project are chaotic, and the data can be confusing and even contradictory. Scientists need intuition to cut through the mess and focus on the most promising explanations. Much of this intuition is unconscious and, while still grounded in physical brain processes, remains murky and hard to reconstruct. And for whatever reason, that vagueness makes scientists uncomfortable. “In almost all texts written by scientists,” Parisi notes, “these themes are taboo.” So it’s refreshing to see a scientist, especially one of Parisi’s stature, honestly discuss the fuzzy side of scientific thinking, and not just during the early, groping stages but in the technical phases of a project, too. “The physicist sometimes uses mathematics ungrammatically,” he SUMMER 202 3

121

Book Reviews

admits, “a license that we grant to poets” as well. In the last pages, Parisi compares writing his book to translating Chinese poetry. In Chinese poems, especially older ones, the words are both words and pictures—poetry and painting fused. As a result, attempts to translate those poems into another language inevitably lose something. But in a good translation, we can still glimpse the underlying lyricism, however imperfectly. Parisi says that writing for a popular audience about physics is something like that. He has to omit the mathematics and other technical aspects that give the work its aesthetic pleasure and power. But in good translations, laypeople can still catch a glimpse of the underlying wonder. Flight of Starlings, Parisi writes, “is my attempt to convey to a wide readership something of the beauty, importance, and cultural value of modern science.” Does he succeed? At times, yes. But the book ends up stranded between different genres—not quite a beach read, not quite a memoir, not quite a popscience primer on modern physics. Perhaps it’s not unlike the hodgepodge of science itself, then—or even a shifting, amorphous murmuration of starlings. O SAM KEAN is the author of six science books, including The Disappearing Spoon and The Icepick Surgeon.

SHELL SHOCK AND AWE The enduring terror of the trenches Review by Henry Allen

lways, in wars, there are the things we don’t see coming. World War I had a lot of them: airplanes, machine guns, barbed wire, tanks, flamethrowers, and super-high-explosive artillery shells— the blooming, booming fruit of 19th-century scientific progress. So much had progressed except, alas, the nervous systems of the soldiers, many of whom met the challenge of the new, improved warfighting with nightmares, paralysis, trembling, mutism, hallucinations, terror, stammering, and blindness. Shell shock. What we now call posttraumatic stress disorder. This, too, no one saw coming. By December 1914, only five months into the war, Britain’s frontline army had lost 10 percent of its officers and four percent

A

122

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

of its enlisted men to “nervous and mental shock.” They went mad. The title of long-time war correspondent Charles Glass’s new book, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, is an ironic line from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. Along with another lieutenant, Wilfred Owen, Sassoon is one of a number of Britain’s poet-soldiers whom Glass describes. Sassoon was a product of Cambridge with passions for poetry and cricket, as well as a decorated and wounded war hero nicknamed “Mad Jack” for his daring. When he issued a public statement against the conduct of the war, the military dodged the outrage of court-martialing a winner of the Military Soldiers Don’t Cross by declaring him Go Mad: A Story insane and committing of Brotherhood, him to Craiglockhart, an Poetry, and Mental Illness During the aristocratic health spa near First World War Edinburgh that was taken By Charles Glass over by the military for the Penguin Press, treatment of shell-shocked 352 pp., $29 officers. From there he wrote verse about his comrades: “I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, / And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain …” He also campaigned to return to them in combat. In 1918, he succeeded and was wounded again. Owen was a middle-class shell-shocked hero and a poet with a gift for Keatsian surprise. When on leave from Craiglockhart, Sassoon introduced him to the wonders of upper-class bohemian social life in Edinburgh and edited his poems—the ones that made Owen famous were written in just over a year. They included this description of a gassed soldier hauled away in a wagon: If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

The Latin is from Horace, meaning, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” At Craiglockhart, the battered officers met with

psychiatrists and struggled through a jumble of therapies. One psychiatrist, a classicist, based his practice on a drawing of Hercules wrestling Antaeus. He prescribed cold swims and work. Another shared Freud’s theory that dreams were wish fulfillment— until he heard the recurring horrors of shell-shock nightmares. The patients also raised vegetables, played golf and cricket, developed photographs, and published a journal. Evenings, they put on plays and concerts. After lights out, the hallways rang with screams from their nightmares. One theory held that the severity of the psychological damage these officers sustained was a side effect of war in the trenches—positions where soldiers felt trapped. Even when on leave in Edinburgh, they still felt trapped enough to dive for cover when buses backfired, and a signal cannon every day at one p.m. was a particular terror until Craiglockhart had it silenced. The reward for successful recovery was a return to the trenches. Craiglockhart excelled at this, returning 42 percent of its officers to combat, compared with 7.1 percent of soldiers treated at Royal Victoria Hospital on England’s south coast. One of the successes was Owen, who was returned to combat and killed a week before the war ended. Glass eschews easy ironies, but in so doing he heightens the reader’s awareness of them. The casual assembly of copious research seems at odds with the horrible chronology that unfolds. There’s a passivity here. Psychiatric regimens get mentions rather than analyses, and Glass seems not at all exhilarated by the wonderful and moving poetry these soldiers left behind. He lets the history speak for itself. “Many of the ‘cured’ officers from Craiglockhart suffered trauma for the rest of their lives,” he writes in an epilogue. “One, Captain John ‘Harry’ Burns of the Cheshire Greys Regiment, trembled so much that he could barely hold a cup of tea.” His daughter recalled: “I will always remember horrific shouting and screaming in the night and my mother trying to calm him down.” Ultimately, tragically, ironically, the war succeeded only in provoking World War II, where even more people would die, maybe too many for poetry to make the same mark. O HENRY ALLEN won the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism in The Washington Post. A Marine veteran of Vietnam, he is the author of Where We Lived: Essays on Places.

NOTES AND OUTTAKES Good writing never gets old Review by Robert Wilson

t the age of 92, John McPhee would seem to have earned a rest. The author of more than 30 books, he has been writing for six decades for The New Yorker, where the reporting in many of those volumes first appeared. The John McPhee Reader has been a staple in nonfiction writing classes ever since it was published in 1976. Born in Princeton, where his dad was a doctor for the university’s jocks, he has lived in the town for most of his life, graduating from high school and college there. In 1975, he began a second career teaching “factual writing” part time at the university. His tabula is anything but rasa. But despite the laurels that have accumulated from this activity, McPhee chooses not to rest, at least this side of the grave. Because eternal rest is something he also wishes to defer, he decided, as he launched this new book four years ago, that what was called for was an “old-people project,” defined as “a project meant not to end.” Why? “Old-people projects keep old people old. You’re no longer old when you’re dead.” In search of a suitably endless and death-defying subject, then, McPhee turned to the notes he had made over the years on promising topics, and soon realized that the notes themselves were the answer: “I could undertake to describe in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written.” An uncharitable reviewer considering the work of a lesser writer than McPhee might describe this prospect as a notebook dump. But if like me you’ve grown up, and old, on McPhee’s writing, following him to the ends of the earth if not beneath its surface (even though he won a Tabula Rasa: Pulitzer for Annals of the Volume 1 Former World, which colBy John McPhee lects four of his patienceFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pp., $28 trying books on geology),

A

SUMMER 202 3

123

Book Reviews

then these 50 miscellaneous scraps, some consisting of only a few paragraphs and some as long as a few pages, will appeal. The randomness with which they are presented is a strategy, one counseled by no less a writer than Mark Twain, whose old-people project was his autobiography. The “right way to do an Autobiography,” Twain explained, is to “start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; [and] drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.” Tabula Rasa is not an autobiography, even by Twain’s definition, but McPhee does refer to it at one point as a “reminiscent montage.” Teaching via Zoom, after the Covid lockdown began, is among the most contemporary items he includes, but McPhee ranges way back to 1943, when he was 12 and his mother saved his life by preventing him from skipping church to skate up the Millstone River with a couple of boys who fell through the ice and froze. A less tragic riverine tale is of a Fourth of July ride decades later, on the Hudson and the East rivers, aboard Malcolm Forbes’s 150-foot yacht. Among the guests: “Mick Jagger. People like that. People from all over the news, the media, the world, the city. Lobsters. Smoked salmon. Caviar by the kilo.” McPhee has always been the perfect New Yorker writer, and not only because of his sterling prose style and his ability to dig a story out of terrain that others might overlook—firewood, for instance, or oranges. As a Princeton townie who is both enamored of and slightly superior to New York and its excesses, he falls within the magazine’s long tradition of starry-eyed outsiders, starting with its first editor, Harold Ross. Several of McPhee’s entries here are about pitching stories to Ross’s successor, William Shawn, including this: I uttered the single word “oranges?” He answered right back. He always answered quickly. It seemed impossible to propose any subject to him that he had not thought about before you had. When he turned down an idea, he was usually protecting the interests of some writer whose name would never be mentioned. “No. I’m very sorry. No,” he would say typically, his voice so light it fell like mist. To my question about oranges, though, he said, “Yes. Oh, my, yes.” 124

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Early in his New Yorker career, McPhee pitched Shawn a story about Outward Bound, the program teaching “self-reliance and survival in extreme predicaments.” His focus would be its school on Hurricane Island in Maine. It would have been a McPhee story through and through, given his interest in somewhat preppy activities in the great outdoors. But “Shawn was having nothing of Outward Bound. He compared it to the Hitler Youth.” A flaky response, given that the program’s founder, Kurt Hahn, was a Jew forced out of Germany in 1933 because of his public opposition to Hitler. McPhee jokes that if only Twain had stuck with his old-person project (which the University of California Press eventually published in three volumes totaling more than 2,300 pages), “he would be alive today,” 113 years after his actual death. McPhee’s calling his own book “Volume 1” is, if not another joke, then perhaps merely a whimsical expression of optimism. Since Tabula Rasa begins and ends in the middle of things, future volumes seem more than possible. May we all live to read them. O ROBERT WILSON’s most recent book is Barnum: An American Life. He was the editor of the Scholar for more than 17 years.

SOMEONE’S GOTTA DO IT On transforming monotony into meaning Review by Lydia Moland

n their new book, Henry at Work, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle offer a surprising source of wisdom for the working world: Henry David Thoreau, infamous for shirking work by beating a retreat to the woods. Kaag and van Belle correct this cliché by reminding us that Thoreau did work—he taught, wrote, built, surveyed, and gardened. He even babysat for Ralph Waldo Emerson. More important for later generations, he reflected broadly on the worth of that work. Indeed, Thoreau was no quiet quitter but positively noisy about labor and its value. “He gave work,” as Kaag and van Belle put it, “a good Socratic grilling,” probing it from all sides, demanding that we, too, examine this thing that dictates our identities and guzzles our time.

I

Given the combined effects of the Great Resignation, mass layoffs in the tech industry, and the advent of ChatGPT (which already makes a pretty good executive assistant), it’s time, the authors suggest, that we do the same. Socrates suggested that if we examine life, it might be worth living. Similarly, Kaag and van Belle posit that the examined job might be worth keeping. Over several excellent books, including American Philosophy: A Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche, Kaag has honed a trademark style of synthesizing philosophy and autobiography. Together, he and van Belle continue that trend. They remind readers that Thoreau’s understanding of “economy”—a central concept in Walden—implied “the ability to dwell in the world as a flourishing human being.” The extent to which employment often fails to achieve this today is clear in the authors’ early job histories—van Belle a parking attendant shuffling cars in a kind of “horrible ballet,” Kaag toiling in a retail store where a coworker covers for his tardiness until she doesn’t. They also report from the wider world, relating as one example the story of a floor worker at Home Depot who survives humiliating drudgery by getting high. “It is just easier that way,” he says before quitting two weeks later. No love lost for labor here. But work need not drain our souls. Some of us could work less if we were willing to buy less. Unsurprisingly, Thoreau’s Socratic needling is especially sharp when it comes to the consumerism that drives so much of our “need” to work: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,” he writes; Thoreau’s own “willingness to go without certain modern luxuries” made him a “frugillionaire,” write Kaag and van Belle, or “someone who lives richly on very little.” Still, even frugillionaires must eat. So the authors remind us that if quitting is not an option, thinking “differently about the work that you do sometimes is.” They also write movingly about work’s potential to anchor us in moments of existential anxiety. “This may be the sacred nature of meaningful work,” they speculate, “that it keeps us afloat and carries us on as the skies darken and the floods gather.” Nice work if you can get it, some might say; indeed, Kaag and van Belle acknowledge that there is a risk of romanticizing here. For millions of humans around the globe, there is nothing

redemptive about work. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to feel cynical about exhorting people to value work if the actual value of that work accrues to others. (When the authors introduce us to Gloria, whom they describe as thriving in the corner store job that requires her to get up at four a.m. to minister to others’ needs, what I really wanted to know was whether she was paid a living wage and had health care.) Insisting that we love our work risks obscuring the fact that sometimes we should hate it: hate it enough to change the system that drains it of its meaning and then faults us for finding it meaningless. In exploring this darker underbelly of employment, Kaag and van Belle introduce us to Brister Freeman and Zilpah White, two of Thoreau’s lesser-known neighbors. These fellow inhabitants of the Walden woods were not frugillionaires but people who lived in poverty as a consequence Henry at Work: of past enslavement and Thoreau on Making present prejudice. Even a Living if slavery had not rouBy John Kaag and tinely included physical Jonathan van Belle torture, sexual assault, Princeton University Press, 232 pp., $27.95 and family separation, the simple fact that it stole a lifetime of labor from millions of people would render it an atrocity. Freeman and White remind us that the early-American economy was built on stolen labor made possible by racism and that our economy still produces poverty, too often along racial lines. The wealthier we are, the harder it is to see this, the authors warn. Justice demands that the privileged among us ask ourselves “whether we are part of the tortures” that the Freemans and Whites of our day endure. It would have been a painful question for Concord’s inhabitants, and it should be a painful question for us now. Kaag and van Belle are right to raise it. Henry at Work makes an elegant and heartening case for parsing the perennial American obsession with work through one of our most discerning writers. The Thoreauvian world that the authors envision is both thoughtful and sweaty, more egalitarian and more meaningful. If we want to actualize this ruddy utopia, we’d better get to work. O LYDIA MOLAND is a professor of philosophy at Colby College. 

SUMMER 202 3

125

Commonplace Book Collected by ANNE MATTHEWS

Soft, to your places, animals,

and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—

The seashore is a sort of neutral ground. … The waves forever rolling to the land are too fartraveled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime. It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it.

and which, after infinite attempts, he had

—Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, 1865

Your legendary duty calls. —Thomas Kinsella, Another September, 1958

—Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown [fly] which had buzz’d about his nose,

caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,—I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me. —Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tris-

Therefore see to it that the variations Keep faith with the plain statement of the oboe. Entering quietly, let each chastened string Repeat the lesson she must get by heart. And without overmuch adornment. Thus. —Donald Justice, “Thus,” The Hudson Review, Spring 1957

tram Shandy, Gentleman, 1759–67

I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts

It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything. —E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, 1952

you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way. —Ernest Hemingway, “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” Life, April 10, 1964 126

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Although the foragers of one harvester ant species in the Southwest region of North America, Veromessor pergandei, are less than 8 mm long, they travel up to 40 meters each

day to harvest seeds. At a modest egg-laying rate of 650 eggs per day, colonies of this species collect enough seeds to produce 3.4 kg of dry worker biomass per hectare of suitable Sonoran Desert habitat each year, equivalent to the biomass of a live human infant, or twenty-seven giant kangaroo rats. —Bert Hölldobler and Christina L. Kwapich, The Guests of Ants: How Myrmecophiles Interact with Their Hosts, 2022

If it does not upset, it is not philosophy. —Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic, 1961

hats, large long-haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, ups, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy. —Susan Sontag, journal entry, February 21, 1977

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. —T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”

What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith. … Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.

1919

—Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, 1980

One day, riding the subway, I saw this empty black panel where an advertisement was supposed to go. I immediately realized that this was the perfect place to draw. I went back above ground to a card shop and bought a box of white chalk, went back down and did a drawing on it. … I kept seeing more and more of these black spaces, and I drew on them whenever I saw one. Because they were so fragile, people left them alone and respected them; they didn’t try to rub them out or try to mess them up. It gave them this other power. It was this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of all this power and tension and violence that the subway was. … I was arrested, but since it was chalk and could easily be erased, it was like a borderline case. The cops never knew how to deal with it.

Human beings have persistently searched for the ideal environment … seeking for a point of equilibrium that is not of this world. —Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, 1974

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no. I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is. The props are surprisingly precise. The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer. The farthest galaxies have been turned on. Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere. And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done. —Wisława Szymborska, “Life While-You-Wait,” Map: Collected and Last Poems, 2016

Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top

It was very tempting; all horsepower corrupts. —Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 1977

—Keith Haring, Rolling Stone, August 1989

The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed. —Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 1849 SUMMER 202 3

127

ANNIVERSARIES

blood, which turns 50 this year, has the distinction of being one of the few Japanese exploitation movies archived in the Criterion Collection. Set at the start of the Meiji era, when Japan first began opening itself to the West, the film features Meiko Kaji as the beautiful killer Yuki—named for the snow falling outside the prison where she was born—who seeks vengeance for the rape of her mother and the death of her family. Nicknamed Lady Snowblood (a twist on the Japanese name for Snow White), she whirls across the screen in operatic fight sequences that send blood splashing across silk and snow. Anyone who has seen Kill Bill will notice Lady Snowblood’s influence on Quentin Tarantino. But nothing beats the original ice queen, whose slicing and dicing offer commentary on Japan’s postwar rehabilitation. O

128

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

EVERETT COLLECTION

Director Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 revenge thriller, Lady Snow-

Bronze Laureates $2,000 - $4,999 Dr. Charles H. Adams Ernest Adelman Mr. Michael Stuart Allen Mr. Kenneth B. Armitage Mr. Paul Arnhold Dr. Joan E. Goforth Baumer Professor Michael D. Bailey Mr. Foster Bam Mr. Andrew Ellingson Beck, III Dr. Gretchen Rous Besser Elizabeth S. Blake, Ph.D. Dr. Allison Blakely Ms. Danuta Boczar Mr. Stephen S. Bowen Mr. Mitchell Bowlus Dr. Mark S. Box Ann Amer Brennan Mr. John Douglas Carter Ms. Diane Cary Fred H. Cate 0U6WHYHQ-DPHV&R̆H\ Fern & Hersh Cohen Crisanne M. Colgan, Ph.D. Mr. Robert William Cort Phyllis Abegg Crane, Ph.D. Dr. Ronald Andrew Crutcher Dr. Daniel W. Dodgen Dr. John Elliott Doner Mr. Joshua Dressler, J.D. Jennifer L. Eccles Mr. David Egger Alyssa C. Ferguson Dr. Jerid Martin Fisher Mr. Christopher S. Forman Frances Rouse Gaver Gregory Herman Gibson, MD Mr. Scott R. Glendinning Dr. Philip A. Glotzbach Dr. Lisa J. Gould George D. Greenia Dr. John A. W. Harkless Mr. Jack W. Hawkins Ellen B. Holtzman Esq. Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III Dr. Esther L. Jones Mr. Gary Locke Kaplan Mr. Joseph Edward Kasputys Ms. Pamela Jean Keefe Mr. Joseph S. Kennedy Mr. Donald Lamm Mrs. Nana W. Landgraf Frederick M. Lawrence Dr. Michael L. Lomax Edith M. Lord Michael F. Lubin, M.D. Mr. Patrick Lyn Dr. Stephen Gordon Manifold Mr. John A. Mazzarino

Dr. Marcia P. McGowan Deacon Michael A. Meyer Dr. Jon D. Miller William Frank Monroe Professor Amy Beth Mulnix Robert H. Mundheim Howard D. Neal Mr. Frank Al Nicolai Charles John O’Byrne Dr. Susan M. O’Shaughnessy David G. Oelberg, M.D. Dr. Lida Atkin Orzeck Dr. Lynn C. Pasquerella Mr. Perry Robert Pero Larry Pike Edgar A. Pimentel, D.O. David & Elin Poneman Pinckelope Foundation Dr. Edward J. Ray Ms. Joan Reese Dr. Pamela Trotman Reid Mrs. Lucy Howard Reynolds Mr. Richard Rothschild Mr. Paul Sack Dr. John Williams Saultz Ms. Carol Jones Saunders Ms. Susan T. Schellenberg Mr. William H. Schlichting Mr. Carl Frederick Seastrum Paula Myrick Short Kate Shuster Dr. Robert F. Silverberg Dr. Ruth J. Simmons Mr. Douglas C. Smith Ms. Vilja K. Stein Mrs. Judi Strauss-Lipkin Mr. Cecil W. Talley Mr. Robert Walker Templeton Mr. William Mark Thompson Susan Tomasky Dr. Antoinette Trembinska Mr. Robert D. Uher Calvin Van Niewaal Steven Scott Walker, M.D. Janet Riggs Waterman Sandy & Steve Waters Dr. Jerrell Richard Watts Ret. Justice Howard B. Wiener Mr. John Carroll Williams Jason Paul Wilson, M.D. Ms. Peta Jena Wyllie Dr. H. Annita Zhong

Mr. Kevin Eugene Baird David and Nancy Bass Mr. Edward Joseph Behrman Dr. Catherine White Berheide William A. Bradnan, M.D. Dr. Marilyn Berg Callander Ms. Susan Welden Carlisle Marcia & David Chapman Dr. Barbara Z. Couture Mr. Dale DeLetis Ms. Cristel Anne De Rouvray Thomas E. Dunigan, Esq. Dr. Dolores Durán-Cerda Alan S. Feiner, M.D. Mr. Warren O. Groves Dr. William H. Harris Ms. Kathleen Ann Henkel 0U-H̆UH\++LOO Dr. Jean E. Howard Ms. Naomi H. Janowitz Mr. Jonathan Seth Kahan Bridget Mary Keegan, Ph.D. Esther Kletter Mr. Steve Klugman Dr. Michael Jay Koren Dr. Karen Lee Koster 'U-H̆UH\'HDQ.RYDF Mr. Munson A. Kwok Daniel R. Levinson Professor David L. Lewis 0U-H̆UH\$ODQ/LSSV Mrs. Janice Nadine Livingston Mr. Dean Michael Maki Dr. Paul Rodney McHugh Mrs. Karen Gill Meyer Mr. Anthony James Mohr Dr. Suzanne Oparil Mr. Richard J. Parrino Mr. Peggy C. Payne Dr. Marvin W. Peterson Ms. Karen A. Popp Ms. Haydee Rodriguez-Pastor Bonnie Elyssa Gould Rothberg Mr. Randall Evan Sarfan Stephen J. Shapiro, Esq. Ms. Mary Alicia Sikes Mrs. Emily E. Slaven Mr. Mitchell S. Spector Professor Barry Sullivan Mr. Marc Albert Ullman Mr. Steven L. Wardinki Dr. Ralph Wilcox

1776 Laureates

We would also like to thank our Anonymous Donors

$1,776 - $1,999 Mr. George C. Anders Miss Valerie J. Armento Mrs. Abbe Kahn Aron Ms. Amanda Axsom Mrs. Ellen Agnor Bailey

Scholar Program

Award competition deadline: September 15, 202

For application information, visit

IXOEULJKWVFKRODUVRUJ The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S. Government and administered by the Institute of International Education. eca.state.gov/fulbright