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The death of Gabby Petito and the uncomfortable intimacy of vocal re-creation software The post The Final Word appeared first on The American Scholar.
In April 2022, one month after my 35th birthday, I was raped. My aggressor did not accost me in an alley; he didn’t slip Rohypnol in my drink. He enacted that night a form of sexual violence so intimate, so egregious, so utterly common that until just a few decades ago, marriage rendered it legally invisible. Before the attack, I was a writer. I don’t know what I became the morning after. Prior to my rape, I’d published two books and several dozen essays and won numerous awards. My books had appeared in bookstore windows; my opinion pieces were discussed on podcasts produced by NPR and The New York Times. I’d built a fulfilling career for myself as a professor, and once, while traveling with my students to Northern Ireland to explore the role of personal narrative in conflict resolution (How do you forgive a man, a country, for blowing up your life? Your wife? Your community? Your home? Your body?), I’d placed an order for 10 baskets of fish and chips for my class and then excused myself to take a phone call for a live on-air interview with a sociologist and the BBC. In the days before my assault, I suppose is what I mean, I had been productive, with much to say. Beginning the morning after, I wouldn’t write anything for three whole years. That evening began in my bedroom. You know how this story goes. In some ways, it doesn’t even matter what happened next—not often in the eyes of the law, much less the eyes of most of America. Because I had had sex with him before. Because I had willingly invited him into my bedroom. Because there was no point in calling it a crime if it was an act I had performed willingly several times prior. I said no; he took me anyway. In the aftermath, I lost myself, my voice. What good are words from women when so many men choose not to listen? And when the law—more often than not—tells those men they have that right? In the days and weeks that followed, I began to perform a sort of linguistic gymnastics, using codified phrases like “consent issues” or “a misunderstanding” to describe the sexual assault that had taken place, because this language—smoothed over, dulled—seemed to allow me, however briefly, to separate myself from my own story. But what I now wish I’d said, nearly four years ago, is that what that man committed that night was rape. All this time has passed between then and now, but what I come back to is largely my silence: how it’s exactly what that man wanted, what he was banking on me to give, and how my body responded—for three whole years—with dedicated muteness in everything. Then, a spring three years removed, and a docuseries that reignited the story of a woman whose life, relationship, and murder an entire nation found itself tethered to. Gabby Petito was only 22 years old the day she left home in a Ford Transit Connect van alongside her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, a man later seen slapping and hitting her outside a co-op grocery store in Wyoming, according to a 911 caller. Her dream was to travel the country with her fiancé and document their experience living off the grid, visiting national parks and pitching tents and stringing hammocks between red rock and canyons. Nearly three months later, however, her body was recovered from a dispersed camping area in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, her death ruled a homicide by strangulation. Her fiancé, meanwhile, was conspicuously missing, until weeks later, when he was found dead in a Florida nature preserve, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In the pages of a spiral-bound notebook found near him: a confession to Petito’s murder, which he called “merciful” and “what she wanted,” alongside a request that police “pick up all [his] things,” writing, “Gabby hated people who litter.” When I was raped at 35, I was initially resistant to calling what happened rape, but it wasn’t my first experience with a violent man. I’d extracted myself just four years prior from a long-term relationship with a man who had often scared me, whose rage and violent outbursts had caused me to involuntarily buckle onto floorboards or cower behind apartment fixtures I hoped he’d hesitate to break. After we separated, I spent the next three years alone, terrified of confirming the statistics that assert the overwhelming likelihood that victims of one violent partnership will find themselves in another. I considered it a risk I wouldn’t take. The summer I began to date again was the summer of Gabby Petito’s murder, and the first thing I thought when I learned of her story was how easily it could’ve been mine. The similarities, at that time, felt striking: both of us blond, white, American women in love with men we thought we’d marry, partners who’d once filmed us running down California beaches and into their loving arms. In the footage—hers and mine—we do cartwheels and lean in to kiss our men. We’re tan, jubilant, our whole lives ahead of us. There’s a road, and we are on it; we see where it ends, and we like it there. The person I was then—and the person Gabby will ephemerally remain—was a woman comfortable being in the outdoors; good at it, in fact. Presumably, we both liked sleeping in tents and building fires and finding flat stretches with minimal inclines so as not to lose circulation as we slept. We were our happiest offline, though the pressure of our work often required us to stay digitally connected. The first time I saw Petito’s footage—her drone rising above her campsite to film a panorama of arid desert and mountains glistening in morning sunlight—I felt a gnawing discomfort at our similarities, but it was the tent that did me in. I would’ve recognized it anywhere. An orange and beige Ozark Trail Dome tent, it was all but identical to my own Half Dome 2 tent from REI, printed in those same two colors. Both feature extra-strong, shock-corded aluminum poles and full-coverage rain flies that promise protection from the elements, if not from the men who terrorized us. I’d pitched my near carbon copy more than a decade before in six minutes flat as the sun dropped from the sky in Mesa Verde National Park, threatening to plunge the campsite into darkness. When, hours later, I climbed inside to sleep pressed against my boyfriend, our sweatshirts smelling of charcoal and smoke, I worried that he might kill me, just as Brian Laundrie would kill Gabby Petito. This, of course, is where the similarities between us stop. Still, I spent three more years beside him, until the day came when we both recognized the danger in our dynamic and permanently separated. Now, nearly 10 years later, I’ve written two books and countless essays on my experience of intimate partner violence, drawing on those three years I spent with that man, whose abuse first began to escalate while we were camping in the American West and in the same national parks Petito and Laundrie would later hike, or had planned to. My boyfriend at the time—a man who drew an uncanny resemblance to Laundrie and was even born close to Laundrie’s hometown—kissed my cheek and forehead in photos we posted to social media. He taught at a private elementary school and played the ukulele. Once, he’d given me 99 miniature giraffes, lining their rubber bodies atop my oven’s range in a cavalry of whimsy. But he also made me worry—first in the American desert and then inside our American home—that I would not survive the escalation, that I would be injured, that I would die, a fear Gabby Petito no doubt felt in the final moments of her own young life. Shortly after her body was recovered near the Spread Creek campground—but 22 days before Laundrie’s own body was found in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park in North Port, Florida, just a few miles from my parents’ home—I wrote about Petito’s murder in an essay for The New York Times. I felt that I was finally finding the voice to talk about my experience and that the violence was in the rear-view, past tense. By the time Netflix released American Murder: Gabby Petito, a three-part documentary on the case, last February, it had been eight years since that abusive relationship ended, and three years since the rape I experienced by one of the first men who followed. I had a lot to say about male violence, and I was doing my best to say it, but there were limitations around my language: I spoke of the first abusive partner, but not the next—the one who heard no and thought yes anyway. The one who counted on the fact that I wouldn’t report the attack and told me I would ruin his life if I did. The one who knew of my history of being abused and abused me anyway, because he could. How to describe the uncanny experience of sitting in my living room, watching never-before-seen footage of Gabby Petito, the past rushing to the present? In the documentary, Petito is once again thrust to the cultural forefront, as executive producers including Dr. Phillip C. McGraw—yes, that Dr. Phil—escort viewers through Petito’s life and final days, complete with photos and videos pulled from Petito’s laptop and interviews with family members and friends. It should come as no surprise to viewers familiar with Dr. Phil, a man whose signature, sensational bluntness earned him a talk show that ran for an impressive—and excruciatingly exploitative—21 seasons, that the documentary pushes the envelope. After all, McGraw—who claimed he never liked traditional one-on-one counseling and once self-identified as “not the … ‘Let’s talk about your mother’ kind of psychologist,” preferring instead to psychoanalyze his clients in front of a live studio audience and millions of viewers at home—was the first to interview Petito’s parents in 2021, after their daughter initially went missing. In a heavily advertised exclusive, McGraw sat with Petito’s parents—her mother, Nichole Schmidt; stepfather, Jim Schmidt; father, Joseph Petito; and stepmother, Tara Petito—and threatened Brian Laundrie, speaking directly to the camera: “I got a big platform and a big mouth, and I am not letting this go away.” McGraw doesn’t feature in the Netflix special, which for nearly two weeks held a spot in the streaming service’s top 10 most-viewed programs, but unsettlingly enough, a vocal clone of Petito does. Twenty-one minutes into the first episode of the series, a caption appears over an animated page from a journal entry: Gabby Petito’s journal entries and text messages are brought to life, it reads, in this series in her own voice, using voice recreation technology. Then, Petito herself, infiltrating. “We bought a van,” she says. Her voice is small and excitable, a morning cartoon, a sunny Saturday. “A 2012 Ford Transit Connect,” she continues. “We are going to have so much fun designing and building this van together.” The process for vocal re-creation, or deepfake voice technology, is not nearly as complicated—or exclusive—as one might think. A simple Google search reveals dozens of websites offering vocal cloning services, which promise to seamlessly produce voices that preserve emotion and subtle intonations and, moreover, will prove “virtually indistinguishable from the original speaker.” Users need submit only five to 30 minutes of clean, authentic audio, which the programs analyze for acoustic features—among them, cadence, pitch, and timbre—before creating a vocal model mere minutes later. Although the documentary fails to describe the process used for its vocal simulation, Petito’s voice—which is used frequently throughout the series, often without any distinction being made between original and clone—was likely developed by extracting samples, with family permission, from hard-drive footage she’d shot but was unable to upload before her murder. Mercifully, this same software is not used to give voice to Brian Laundrie, but Petito’s artificial narration is nonetheless deeply unsettling; at times, there are discernible pauses between her words—a palpable indication, perhaps, of the software’s early limits, but they also seem convincingly organic. My own objection to the film’s vocal cloning was as much to the voice itself—a thing as personal and intimate as a fingerprint, artificially created—as to the gross invasion of privacy it required. Though the use of vocal cloning is not altogether new—the 2021 documentary Roadrunner, on famed chef Anthony Bourdain, used similar voice-over elements—audiences are currently experiencing in real time an escalation of what technology makes possible. Notably, Roadrunner employed vocal re-creation software merely to narrate a few passages Bourdain had written, including an email sent to a friend, the artist David Choe: “My life is sort of shit now,” the Bourdain deepfake says. “You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering: Are you happy?” His vocal clone only gives voice to language Bourdain had already created, and for this reason, the film’s producer, Morgan Neville, insists that there was no manipulation, describing the process instead as a “modern storytelling technique.” “I wasn’t putting words into [Bourdain’s] mouth,” Neville stated in an interview with GQ. “I was just trying to make them come alive.” Nonetheless, critics such as Bourdain’s ex-wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain felt differently, denouncing Neville’s assertion that she’d offered him her blessing, tweeting, “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.” What four years ago Roadrunner gave legs to walk, American Murder allowed to gallop. Here, deepfake technology gives voice to not only Petito’s private correspondences—that is, text messages exchanged with friends and family in the months before her murder—but also her journal entries, which of course were never intended for any audience but herself. My own objection to the film’s vocal cloning was as much to the voice itself—a thing as personal and intimate as a fingerprint, artificially created—as to the gross invasion of privacy it required. That evening, after I had viewed all three episodes of the docuseries, Petito’s voice, both real and fake, kept me awake. I wondered which version of myself might have been given voice had I not escaped my abusive partner, what exactly that voice might say, and who among my friends or family might have dictated—and ultimately consented to—those enormously sensitive ethical deliberations. Petito’s death, after all, was the ultimate crime of control: Brian Laundrie could not control her, so he killed her. Was the posthumous publication of her private text messages and journal entries, and then the artificial re-creation of her voice, not further fueling her exploitation? I couldn’t help but feel that Petito’s parents, however well-intentioned they might have been, had only further exacerbated her mistreatment by consenting to the artificial creation of their dead daughter’s voice. As a writer, I am all too conscious of the way dominant narratives have the power to eclipse and even rewrite the truth; as a journalist and educator, I spend weeks with my undergraduate students discussing the moral and ethical considerations inherent in telling anyone else’s story. I teach memoirist Mark Doty’s seminal essay “Return to Sender,” in which he grapples with the ethics and consequences of writing one’s story when it invariably intersects with others’ stories: “The lives of other people are unknowable. Period. I wouldn’t go as far as a poet colleague of mine who says that ‘representation is murder,’ but I would acknowledge that to represent is to maim.” We owe one another, in other words, more care when we write and publish in nonfiction than we do in any other genre. As journalists, especially—whether our medium is the written word or film—we are tasked with making meaning of the raw material of life, but to do our jobs with integrity, we must also wrestle with what is inevitably blemished in that interpretation, or misinterpretation. But when I woke the following morning, I’d found my way to a new mode of seeing—something that further reminds me of the power of narratives, the way everything can shift with as little as the light. Perhaps it is too generous a read, too empathetic for McGraw’s sensational brand of production, too forgiving, bighearted, magnanimous, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge that hearing Petito’s life in her own voice had proved a wildly effective antidote to my own experience with intimate partner violence, which so often strips a victim of her voice, if not her life in its entirety. Further moral conversations undoubtedly loom on the ethics of vocal re-creation software and who has the right to make one’s private life public, but for now, I can report that it proved haunting to hear Petito’s voice, to listen as she narrates (with what audiences understand to be contrived intimacy) the journal entries she’d penned in her final days, when she believed herself to be behind life’s wheel. Although society continually affirms that women cannot be trusted to tell the larger stories of their lives, Petito’s vocal clone allows audiences to hear aloud the voice attached to the body of a woman madly in love but found in the fetal position anyway, near a riverbed in the northwestern corner of wild Wyoming. “The morning of [September] 19th,” her stepfather, Jim Schmidt, says in part three of the series, “they told us that they had found remains consistent with our daughter Gabby. [She was] laying there on the ground for weeks, in the wild, just left there like she was a piece of trash by someone who was supposed to love her.” Someone who was supposed to love her: This is, in fact, who is most likely to kill American women. The year of Gabby’s murder, more than 1,600 women were murdered by current or former partners. Experiencing domestic violence, and later writing countless essays and a book about it, taught me that it is an epidemic in America, though woefully overlooked, save for the occasional unabashed gawking we give to sensational stories like Petito’s. White, conventionally attractive missing and murdered women often benefit from overexposure in the media, while missing Black, brown, and Indigenous women are painfully ignored. Still, nearly half of all women in the United States will experience intimate partner violence at some point in their lifetime, and the leading cause of death in pregnant American women is the men who fathered those babies. “Even though our plans got pushed back,” the artificial Petito narrates at one point in the film, “like [our] wedding/baby plans, I’m very happy.” The statistics surrounding domestic violence are ones I’m intimately familiar with—owing first to my history and then to my work—but ultimately, what Netflix’s American Murder proved was the value in bringing a story like Petito’s to jarringly intimate life, especially in homes where women live in danger with their men. Nearly a decade out from my own abusive nightmare, and three years out from the rape that followed, I tried to imagine how many women had watched the series inside living rooms with or in proximity to the men who hurt them. I wondered, too, what it might have meant for them to hear her voice, her lilting commentary on her camping, her plan of “downsizing all [their] belongings and moving [their] humble abode on wheels.” I think of my own self-censorship, the silence my body resolutely committed to. And I think of what Jim Schmidt offered in the feature’s final moments. “I can only hope that … she’s looking down on us,” he said, “and saying, ‘Thank you for being my voice when I couldn’t speak anymore.’ ” And though I suspect it will take cultural and ethical discourse a long time to establish professional and legal safeguards around what technology has already made possible, the reclaiming of a narrative—in this case, Petito’s life—is in no small part what makes the docuseries so gut-wrenchingly powerful, at least for me. So notable is Petito’s voice, in fact, that eventually, I came to miss it, for over the course of the documentary, her simulated voice gradually gives way to silent, digitalized re-creations of her final text messages, until even her voice is lost to time and circumstance. By the third and final episode, her voice is absent entirely, replaced by songs reportedly drawn from a Spotify playlist shared by Petito and Laundrie, playing over footage posted in Petito’s final days. The absence of her voice only seemed to mirror the absence of humanity from so many startling statistics. And yet, as with any issue of this magnitude, further nuances begin to emerge: Some aspect of Petito’s life, perhaps, has been reclaimed, not by her own authorship but instead via a robot, her parents, Netflix, and even Phil McGraw, despite the fact that he hasn’t had a license to practice psychology in nearly 20 years. So often, the last word on a woman’s life is eclipsed by the larger narrative of her abuser: his name, his story, his sentencing, the horrible way in which he killed her. Here, Petito’s vocal cadences have been restored, and in this way her voice has arguably succeeded in living on beyond her abuser. Still, the fact remains that it is a man—albeit in the case of the docuseries, her loving stepfather—who continues to speak for her, to even imagine the consolatory, placating words she might offer in support of the invasion of her privacy. And I continue to wonder: Is hearing someone, or the ghost of someone, really the best way to honor one’s legacy in the wake of fatal abuse? Is it worth the moral and ethical discomfort? I have much to say, and I know it is largely owing to privilege and luck that I have survived long enough to say it. But for women like Petito, and the millions of other victims whose voices were similarly stolen, silenced, eviscerated, I hesitate to celebrate this advance, for even if reconstructed through technology, the fact remains: Yet another woman is dead. The post The Final Word appeared first on The American Scholar.
The post Wonderful Life appeared first on The American Scholar.
I knew the song playing on the radio, but that didn’t mean I remembered the name, or could figure it out, especially since I’d caught only one line of the chorus. I was on my way from La Pola to Valladolid for a footrace, listening to KISS-FM, which in Spain, as in the United States, plays ’80s and ’90s hits. I recognized most of the songs, but this one I would go crazy trying to place. So I Shazammed it. Shazam will identify a song in seconds, giving the exact title and performer. Tap the icon, and like magic, the uncertainty vanishes. One day we might be able to Shazam our own thoughts to clarify them quickly, but for now, the app records a snippet of music and compares it to … everything in its archive. It works remarkably well. This is what your brain does as well, only with a smaller backlog and a longer processing time. In a grocery store in Houston, Texas, way back in the early 2000s, I heard a song playing that I knew somehow but couldn’t pin down. I didn’t know the artist or the title, or even where I’d heard it before, and the frustration quickly ate into my pleasure at recognizing it. In the grocery store, all my emotion was concentrated on one question. I was pure focus and determination, trying to delve deeply enough into the multiple layers of my accumulating life to release the memory. Would it come slowly bubbling up to the surface? Or would it burst out, almost with a life of its own? Maybe neither, because after two whole minutes of gritting my teeth in concentration, I had nothing. I found an employee stocking shelves in the next aisle. “Excuse me,” I said, and he paused over his stack of cornflakes boxes and looked up inquiringly. “That song that’s playing, what is it?” His expression changed. Already his brain was working. “Could be Coldplay,” he said, naming a band. The name meant almost nothing to me. “What’s the name of the song?” He concentrated. The music was already dying away. “I’m not sure,” he said. Then after the last notes, “No, I don’t know.” The next time I heard the song, I paid better attention and caught enough of the lyrics to figure out the title. Or maybe my brain was working better. “Clocks” is the name, Coldplay the band. “Closing walls and ticking clocks” are the words to remember. Title, band, and stocker—that pleasant freckled guy in his 20s with smooth pale skin—have all stayed with me. The long empty aisles of the supermarket, too, and my hurried glance down the one adjacent to mine for someone to ask. My mother was around a corner, with the grocery list and the cart. My grandmother, attending church while we picked up a few things. She was still living in her own home but soon moved into a retirement facility, where a few years later, she died. All these elements, including my grandmother’s slow decline—all part of how I remember that morning in Houston, coloring the picture, deepening the shadows, shrinking the frame. Even the song heard on the radio halfway to a footrace these many years later, on a late-winter’s day, all flow into that moment in the past. Who says you can’t step in the same river twice? But time is not a river. It’s a deep lake, an ever-expanding reservoir. As it widens and deepens and brims with new experiences, distances grow, events seem to shift place. Things align differently. The past bunches up, or spreads out. My last visit to Houston to see my grandmother before she moved into the retirement home was several years before Coldplay recorded the song I heard in the grocery store. The stocker probably did not yet work at the store. By the time the song was on the airways, my grandmother was not planning her move into the retirement home—she was already there. Nevertheless, I remember what I remember. It’s all real, though it can’t be. That’s the wonder of it. Black is the stage name of the writer and singer of the song I Shazammed. That song is “Wonderful Life,” from 1987, and it presents a sad and difficult moment of Black’s life that, in his flat melancholy voice, he sarcastically calls wonderful. “Alone again” he intones, and “it’s so unfair.” But he also sings of sunshine, gulls, and dreams. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful life.” It is wonderful, you feel, listening. The song was a hit and turned Black’s fortunes around, for a while. One critic called his lyrics “oddly uplifting.” That is a phrase, paired with melancholy, I hope to remember. Melancholy because the song brought a day in Houston back to me again. The day, like a few notes in a song, suggested the whole visit, even years of visits. And then oddly uplifting? That’s also for the song, the freckled stock boy pausing in his work to listen, and all the rest of my life sunk in that deep lake. The post Wonderful Life appeared first on The American Scholar.
“The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Boy Died in My Alley.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks appeared first on The American Scholar.
After my husband died, why did he continue to haunt my dreams? The post Night Shade appeared first on The American Scholar.
The dreams began in the last weeks of December 1999, soon after my husband, Peter, died at the age of 49. The plotlines were always similar. I would be working in the kitchen, tidying up the apartment, or staring at my computer screen when the front door clicked and Peter would be home, not dead at all, but alive and whole. In these visitations, he was my dream husband, my ghost husband—but never was he my dead husband. Was seeing him this way, even in a dream, the fulfillment of an unconscious wish or the denial of reality? Only gradually was I able to discern the answer. The first few times, Peter’s phantom presence would sweep me away by sweeping away grief itself. He would greet me as he always did, in a manner that my dream self considered perfectly ordinary. Rather than jump out of my skin, as I tend to do at any sudden interruption, I would remain composed at his approach, reassured and calm as his beard grazed my cheek with loving familiarity. Clearly, something odd was going on here. Yet in my muddled state of blissful disorientation, all I could say was, “But you’re dead.” “Am I?” he’d shrug in response. The reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, he contended. (He always had favored Mark Twain’s quips.) He only appeared to have disappeared from the land of the living. And now he was back—from the dead, so to speak, even though he never really was dead. In daylight, my logical, Freud-savvy mind would attempt to interpret his words. Why was he suggesting that he wasn’t really dead? Was he inhabiting this world or another? Why were his words always the same? In my dreams, of course, reason did not prevail. At least not at first. All I knew was that his presence was palpable and that in his ghostly embrace, he was with me—and I with him—still. When the alarm clock rang, I’d find myself alone in my bed, looking forward to nightfall, when the next visitation would comfort me. Part of this comfort derived from the fact that my dreamscape had brought Peter not only back to life but also to health. Peter had suffered from both cancer and chronic illness, and during his final, devastating weeks in the hospital, his pale skin had turned the sickly yellow-green of a Van Gogh portrait. One morning, toward the end, I was shocked to see his cheeks and chin for the first time in decades, no beard or mustache, only splotched razor nicks. It turned out that the nurses had given him a shave in the aftermath of his coughing up a geyser of blood all over himself. How reassuring it was, then, to see him in my dreams sporting once more his neatly trimmed pepper-and-salt beard. How distinguished and dapper he looked in the handsomely tailored business suit he’d barely had a chance to wear before his final hospitalization. And how happily I glowed as I took all this in. By the end of his life, Peter had also become so weakened that he could barely talk. But at night, our repartee flowed as of old, our conversations taking on the familiar patterns of private jokes, shared enthusiasms, gossip, current events. Yet—increasingly, perhaps unavoidably—as time went on, the painful questions of daylight kept seeping through. Where had he gone? Was he back for good—or was this just a ghostly fling? Only after several months of dreams did my apparition finally reveal his secret: Doctors had spirited him off (so to speak) to a clinic where, unbeknownst to anyone, he had been nursed back to health with treatments so high risk, so ethically questionable, and so bizarrely supernatural that they could never be revealed. Interesting. Was Peter, a lifelong agnostic, telling me that he had been miraculously resurrected? This story strained even my dream self’s credulity. Was my overly active subconscious falling prey to a cheesy movie plot? At night, our repartee flowed as of old, our conversations taking on the familiar patterns of private jokes, shared enthusiasms, gossip, current events. Yet as time went on, the painful questions of daylight kept seeping through. Where had he gone? In the months after Peter’s death, I had repeatedly watched director William Wyler’s 1939 classic adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It had been “our” film while Peter lived, and in the immediate aftermath of his death, I became even more obsessed with it. The film condenses the novel’s sprawling plot, narrowing its focus on the doomed romance between the wild-hearted heiress Catherine Earnshaw (played winningly by Merle Oberon) and the ruffian–turned–rich man Heathcliff (embodied with smoldering intensity by the young Laurence Olivier). With melodramatic splendor, he begs her on her deathbed to haunt him: “I know that ghosts have wandered on the earth. Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life. I cannot die without my soul.” I cannot say whether I was projecting my dreams onto the film, but nevertheless, I identified fully with its depiction of raw anguish and ceaseless yearning, and I understood how grief can make our dreams so visceral, we become convinced that they are true. I also knew, however, that I would not, could not follow the fanatical course that Heathcliff’s grief ultimately leads him to pursue. In the film, amid a raging blizzard, the hapless Mr. Lockwood, newly arrived from London, stumbles upon the once grand, now seedy-looking house known as Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff, the dour owner, grudgingly allows Lockwood to stay the night. But Lockwood is awakened from his sleep by the wind’s banging open his window shutter and an alarming echo that sounds like a woman’s voice. He reaches outside to close the shutter—and feels his hand grasped by the icy fingers of a phantom in female form. Heathcliff, hearing Lockwood’s scream, rushes in, casts his visitor aside, and dashes out into the storm, in search of that phantom—his lost love, Cathy, dead for 30 years. The film concludes with a gauzy image of the ghostly lovers roaming the bleak, snow-covered hillside, arm in arm, united in death. Heathcliff’s suicidal plunge is inconceivable—unless you are in the grip of mourning. Then you can well understand how the lure of your soulmate’s presence just outside, calling you, waiting for you, could tempt you to follow. For Heathcliff, to continue to live his life without Cathy was the nightmare—a wasteland of loss and emptiness. But that was not my reality. Despite my flights into dream fantasy, I knew I had to put front and center the raising of our son, Edward, who was just 10 when his father died. I needed to fashion a new life for us as a family of two. I had to nurture Edward’s independence as he grew into manhood and at the same time reclaim my own life as both a single mom and a single self. By now, my ghostly conversations with Peter had turned toward reminiscence. He reminded me how, because of his cancer and his chronic illness, he had always urged me to be self-reliant. He had made sure I was comfortable with paying bills and taxes, weighing investment decisions, and so forth. He had been prepping me to take on the dual roles of widow and single mom. The thought of that future had always made me sad. And now it had arrived. Reality was setting in. I could no longer deny that it was hard work to paste on a counterfeit smile to greet my son each morning and to retreat into a ghostly fantasy each night. I had been diverted from confronting the gritty reality of daily life. I had become caught between the tight grip of the past and the beckoning demands of the future. But I had lost the strength to hold on to both at once. I needed to let go. But of what, and how? Time was the answer. It did not soothe so much as allow me to focus on the altered routines and financial necessities of single parenthood. But my wistful, wishful dreams countered this momentum; they worked against the practical need to adapt, to move on—to literally wake up. And over the course of the next few months, Peter’s phantom visitations began to recede. I was no more aware of willing them away than I had been of conjuring them from the ether of grief. Only as weeks, then months passed without their recurrence could I begin to make sense of the netherworld my dreams had created. I eventually saw that my dreams represented the attempt from somewhere in my being to reconcile the ongoing timeline of the living with the abruptly stopped watch of the dead. The seeming ability of my dream ghost and my dream self to reconcile these disparate schedules was not so much a denial of death as a resistance against grief. I had welcomed this ghostly reprieve from grief as a stay from the unremitting anguish from which I could not shield myself, even with a ghost to guide me. But I was not sorry to have been haunted. Awake and asleep, my dream ghost had been beside me to offer comfort and consolation, to murmur words of love, and, as husbands will, to challenge and disagree. And that has been my dream ghost’s legacy: the undying voice and interior well of memory that have endured alive and at home within me, just as he had promised. Like grief itself, the ache of absence will never entirely disappear. But if I am lucky, this sustaining, on-call presence will help guide me wherever my daylight reality—or my dreams—might land me next. And here I am. The post Night Shade appeared first on The American Scholar.
‘In the Presence of People No Longer Here’
Historians in the Ukrainian city of Lviv are documenting the horrors of the past while living in the shadow of war The post ‘In the Presence of People No Longer Here’ appeared first on The American Scholar.
The city is an architectural gem, almost a stage set. Unlike much of Europe, it suffered no major damage during either world war. Proud rows of 19th-century buildings line cobblestone streets that wind through low hills, past leafy parks and dozens of sidewalk cafés. Modern apartment blocks ring its outskirts, but most of the city looks much as it did when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The walls of a restaurant near City Hall are hung with dozens of brilliant caricatures—profiles captured in a few skillful strokes: a pot belly, an oversize cigar, a long beard, a fastidious hand poised on a tabletop, a preposterously upturned mustache. The subjects were all members of the provincial legislature, which in the last decades of Habsburg rule met here in an august chamber that is now a university auditorium. On the dial of a tall iron radiator in a downtown office building, the writing is in German. A grand opera house is topped with winged statues, and an array of churches and cathedrals—Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Armenian, and Orthodox—still look much as they did when listed in an 1887 Baedeker guidebook. So does the palatial railway station that, for many travelers , was once a departure point for the long journey to Ellis Island. On the heights of these buildings is a wondrous galaxy of turrets, spires, gargoyles, and finials. Below them are wrought-iron balconies, from which one imagines men in top hats and women with parasols looking down through pince-nez or lorgnette at plumed lancers on parade. At the four corners of City Hall (1835) are fountains (1793) with statues of mythological figures like Adonis and Neptune. They serve as rendezvous points: “I’ll meet you at Neptune at five o’clock.” But today Neptune and his companions are boarded up, the cathedrals have sheet metal over their stained glass, and the ground-floor windows of City Hall are sandbagged. For this is Lviv, in western Ukraine. Although an occasional building is scarred by a drone strike, Lviv has so far been largely spared the nightly attacks raining destruction on other parts of this beleaguered country. There is one somber difference, however, between Lviv and similarly well-preserved cities in Western Europe. When you see such splendid older buildings, you assume that many of the people living in them are descendants of those who lived there a century or two ago. But not in Lviv. During and just after the Second World War, almost the entire population was slaughtered, was deported, or fled the advancing army of one side or the other. Over the course of the 20th century, Lviv found itself in four different countries. As part of Austria-Hungary, it was known as Lemberg. Between the wars, it was Lwów in newly formed Poland. In 1945, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements moved Poland (“a country on wheels,” the Poles say) several hundred miles west, and the city was absorbed by the Soviet Union. Since 1991, it has appeared on maps as Lviv, in independent Ukraine. And that’s not even counting its seizure by Stalin’s Red Army from 1939 to 1941, followed by three years of Nazi occupation. Conquerors imposed their own place names (Adolf Hitler Square, Gorky Street) and time zones: The city ran on Berlin time under the Nazis and Moscow time under the Soviets. Some who once lived here had a foreboding. “We were like ants bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised,” wrote the Polish science-fiction novelist Stanisław Lem, who grew up here in the 1920s and ’30s. “Some saw its shadow … but everyone, the uneasy included, ran about their usual business until the very last minute.” When that boot heel came down, the city’s buildings remained, but its people did not. Until Hitler invaded, just over half of its inhabitants were Polish, roughly a third Jewish, and some 15 percent Ukrainian. But after the Nazis arrived in 1941, they killed almost all of the Jews. Lem—himself Jewish but carrying forged “Aryan papers”—later described the streets of a Jewish neighborhood that “one day were empty, silent, their windows open and curtains moving in the wind.” On one street, Jewish bodies hung from those wrought-iron balconies. Once the war ended, millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe were forcibly moved. Stalin expelled almost all Poles from his expanded Soviet Union, and newly Communist Poland did the same for almost all Ukrainians. The Poles who lived in Lviv were sent hundreds of miles away, to a swath of Germany given to Poland after the war, from which Germans were expelled. Meanwhile, Lviv and its surroundings were repopulated with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. And yet, during the time Lviv was part of the Soviet Union—nearly half a century—there was almost no public discussion of all this. “I was born in 1979, so I remember those typical lectures about history in Soviet schools,” says Inna Zolotar, a public history educator in Lviv. “We were told about the great battles of the Red Army, nothing about local history. But between people, you know, very quietly, we understood that something happened that you are not allowed to talk about.” Soviet schools ignored the Holocaust: The Nazis were mass murderers, teachers explained, but their victims were brave Soviet patriots of many ethnicities. And those massive postwar deportations were merely a matter of “repatriating” different peoples to their historical homelands. Much else went unmentioned as well—including, for instance, Lviv’s unusual place in legal history. In his intriguing East West Street, British author Philippe Sands tells how two of the greatest figures of human rights law—Raphael Lemkin, who developed the concept of genocide, and Hersch Lauterpacht, who did the same for crimes against humanity—both began their careers here. “We are living,” says Sofia Dyak, a Lviv historian, “in the presence of people no longer here.” In central Lviv, a 1793 fountain featuring a statue of Neptune, which, since the Russian invasion, has been boarded up (Courtesy of the Center for Urban History) Both Zolotar and Dyak work at Lviv’s Center for Urban History of East Central Europe. In a world full of people actively suppressing history—whether Vladimir Putin’s whitewashing of Joseph Stalin or the wiping of references to the civil rights movement from U.S. government websites—the center’s work of dealing with thorny parts of the past has a relevant echo for us all. Dyak, a thoughtful woman in her mid-40s with immense energy and an infectious laugh, is the executive director. Like many of her colleagues, she is at home in English, Polish, Russian, and her native Ukrainian, and she reads one or two other languages as well. The center’s 32-person staff consists largely of women, since Ukraine’s army has taken many of the men. In its quarters on a quiet side street, a resident cat is curled up in a box at the receptionist’s desk. The center was opened in 2006 by Harald Binder, a Swiss philanthropist, who continues to support it; it also receives grants from Ukrainian and European Union sources. The members of its staff write scholarly books and articles, but they are equally devoted to doing public history. They help design plaques and museum exhibits, prepare lesson plans for high school and university classes, and train guides to lead walking tours of Lviv. Above all, they have put a stream of skillfully presented material on the center’s website. Several hundred thousand people a year visit this online museum, which features oral histories from across the decades, old newsreels, underground poetry from Soviet times, testimonies from veterans of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and 2013–2014 Euromaidan uprising, and a chart of where Lviv’s writers lived in 1939, before they were imprisoned, deported, or killed. There are directories of long-vanished newspapers and magazines and a map that lets you click on hundreds of buildings to see who lived there in decades past and what work they did. You can view all these tens of thousands of pages in both Ukrainian and English. In a world full of people actively suppressing history—whether abroad or here in the United States—the center’s work of dealing with thorny parts of the past has a relevant echo for us all. One electronic gateway into the past, for instance, is a richly layered portrait of the city more than a century ago, as seen through the lives of three women: a post office clerk, a housemaid, and a pianist and conductor. Photographs show streets full of horse-drawn carts, solemn family group portraits, and stairwells in a wealthy household—a wide staircase for the family, a narrow one in the back for servants. Letters, diaries, infant mortality data (the pianist lost a baby), and newspaper pages of the matrimonial advertisements that the postal worker joked about flesh out the lives of the women. The maid left no words of her own, but a picture of her emerges from the diary and letters of her employer, who complains about the “fanatical piety” that makes her neglect her household work to sing in her church’s choir, sometimes twice a day. His mention of the maid’s many “admirers” suggests additional motives for singing in the choir. A map shows her route from house to church. The pianist married into a well-off family and left more of a record; the section about her includes a recording of a piano piece her musician son composed in her memory. All three women probably considered themselves to be Ukrainian, but their lives show how inadequate such distinctions are. The postal worker’s father was a Ukrainian Greek Catholic; her Polish-speaking mother was a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism. The pianist spoke Ukrainian with her husband and children, but her parents were apparently more literate in Polish—the language, under the Habsburgs, of the provincial government and upward mobility. It is no wonder that the novelist Joseph Roth, who was born nearby and lived here briefly, called Lviv a city of “blurred boundaries.” Perhaps, at their best, all cities are that. How else do you remember the “people no longer here”? Some are remembered in stone, a few minutes’ walk from the center. You have to think carefully about what you engrave, Dyak warns, with a smile and raised eyebrow, because it will still be here 50 years from now. The smallest public square in Lviv is a lovely, quiet space where old buildings look down on chairs, shrubbery, and shade trees. At its center is a fountain. More than a century ago, this was a well for people in nearby houses or apartments with no running water. Who were they? Working from city directories from the 1880s onward, researchers gathered the names and occupations of several dozen people who lived within a block or two of this square. These are engraved on a broad stone bench that surrounds the fountain. Just the first name and job: Abraham, theater director; Mykhailo, tailor; Valenty, printer; Marja, laundry owner; Rozalla, midwife. Other professions range from dentist to teacher to seamstress to chimney sweep. Usually, to have your name engraved on a monument, Dyak explains, you “have to be either famous or killed.” Possibly some of these people were later killed by the Nazis or Soviets, but none were famous. Many names are Jewish, since this square is in what was once the Jewish quarter. But some are Ukrainian or Polish—and the latter, too, of course, are no longer here. Strikingly, these names and occupations are engraved in all three languages spoken in Lviv a century ago—Polish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian—which means three alphabets: Roman, Hebrew, and Cyrillic. It is hard to imagine a more graceful, understated elegy to the city’s rich multicultural past. It is a past with dark chapters, however, and not all of them can be blamed entirely on Berlin and Moscow. After Hitler and Stalin divided up Eastern Europe in 1939, the Soviets occupied Lviv. When Hitler attacked his former ally in June 1941, German troops advanced so rapidly that Stalin’s secret police had no time to evacuate the several thousand political prisoners held in Lviv. Before retreating eastward, Soviet forces executed almost all of them. The stench of rotting bodies filled the air. The arriving Germans then forced Jews, at gunpoint, to carry the corpses from the prisons into the street, where local people could identify the dead. The Nazi occupiers blamed “Jewish Bolsheviks” for the killings. Then, appealing to long-prevalent anti-Semitism, they encouraged the city’s Ukrainians and Poles to join them in shooting and beating to death thousands of Jews over the course of several days. And all this happened even before the Nazis set up their usual extermination apparatus: a ghetto and a death camp. These would soon follow. The Center for Urban History has meticulously documented this horrific episode online, with material from victims, eyewitnesses, and perpetrators. The 1941 Lviv pogrom is one of the most abundantly recorded episodes of the Holocaust. The German army was sweeping toward Moscow as Soviet soldiers surrendered by the millions and the triumphant Nazis were eager to demonstrate that people in the areas they conquered shared their venom toward Communists and Jews. Dozens of German photographs and newsreels show civilians abusing Jews on Lviv’s streets, tearing off their clothes, pawing a woman’s breast, pulling another woman by her hair, or laughing at crouching men and women made to clean the street with a handkerchief or toothbrush. The images flaunt an appalling brutality, but in one, perhaps unnoticed by the photographer, something else is visible: While a mass of people jeer at Jews on their hands and knees cleaning the street next to the opera house, a single man in the crowd has covered his eyes with his right hand and turned partly away. The center’s interactive map for smartphones will take you to more than a dozen locations where these events took place. Many of the same buildings remain. The main prison, for instance, Brygidky, a long, low, forbidding structure of tan concrete, a place of execution under various regimes for two centuries, is still there, although no longer used as a prison. For several months after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the center’s pages about Lviv’s 1941 pogrom were the part of its website that received the most traffic. Was it because people wondered what might happen under Russian occupation? Or were they checking Putin’s absurd claims that today’s Ukraine is run by “Nazis”? We do not know. The center also tells stories of rescuers in Nazi-ruled Lviv. Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of the Greek Catholic Church, for example, hid Jews in monasteries, preserved Torah scrolls, and successfully hid a rabbi friend in a concealed space in his own library. The manager of the local railway workshop protected a Jewish employee on false papers by standing in for him when he was called for a medical examination—which would have revealed that the employee was circumcised. A gentile Polish doctor did the reverse, donning a Star of David armband so that he could assist Jewish colleagues in the Lviv ghetto. Part of doing public history is training others. One new center project is a collaboration between its researchers and a class from Lviv’s Catholic university. It documents, in every dimension, daily life in the wartime Jewish ghetto before its occupants were killed. Photographs show buildings as they are today, and from 1942, trolleys pulling gondola cars jammed with Jewish forced laborers. A map pinpoints the factories where they worked. There are official notices from Nazi authorities in multiple languages, as well as paintings by a survivor of her memories of ghetto life. As you look at them, aerial photographs of these districts of the city today transform into maps of exactly the same areas under Nazi rule. Descendants of people who once lived here began visiting Lviv, especially after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and they had memories of an extremely different past from the one taught in Soviet schools. The most extraordinary Holocaust story the center tells was assembled, in part, by two visiting American Fulbright scholars, Jack Wright and Rachel Stevens. Ten Jews, with help from three Poles, braved rats, worms, cobwebs, and dysentery to survive for an astonishing 14 months in Lviv’s sewers. Their chief helper, Leopold Socha, was a former petty thief who hoped that saving them “would redeem him in the eyes of God.” Socha and two friends worked for the sewer system and could direct the fugitives where to go. He knew that an underground pipe feeding the Neptune fountain had a leak; that supplied the group’s drinking water. Through manholes, Socha lowered meager supplies of onions, beans, and other food (often stolen), a small gas stove, and a Jewish prayer book to those in hiding. He thought no one was looking, but one day, Socha was lowering sacks of potatoes through a manhole when a German police officer saw him. “Why are you throwing those away?” he asked. Socha replied, “They are spoiled. I have been instructed to dispose of them.” The policeman then walked away. Suspicious German soldiers sometimes removed manhole covers and dropped grenades. When Soviet troops finally pushed the Nazis out of Lviv in 1944, Socha called through a grating, “Everyone out! You are free!” The story inspired a 2011 film, In Darkness, an Academy Award nominee, by the Polish director Agnieszka Holland. You can follow this story, too, on your phone, across the city from one manhole cover to the next, to the Neptune statue, and finally to that grating. The page on the center’s website ends by asking readers, “What would you have done back then if you were a Ukrainian? A Jew? Socha?” People steer clear of difficult history for many reasons. Sometimes it’s a matter of business. On a hilltop with a panoramic view of Lviv is the Citadel Inn Hotel and Resort. Its five-star accommodations include a restaurant, a hookah bar, conference rooms, a sauna, a gym, and a cellar of “collectible wines from around the world.” The hotel occupies an immense circular bastion of red brick, with ivy climbing the walls. Crenellated ramparts surround the top floor. The structure was built by the Habsburgs, advertisements explain, as part of a 19th-century fortress. The only clue on the hotel grounds that this majestic building might once have had another use is half-hidden in a grove of bushes to the side of a path, unlikely to be seen by anyone not looking for it. On a tiny monument the size of a tombstone is an inscription in Latin and Ukrainian: “In Everlasting Memory.” Nothing indicates who is being remembered. Apart from the Holocaust, the biggest mass murders during the Second World War were of Soviet and Nazi prisoners of war. To be captured by either side on the Eastern Front was usually fatal. Of the more than five million Red Army prisoners taken by the Germans, for instance, some 3.5 million died. An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 of those deaths, between 1941 and 1944, occurred in a Nazi prison called Stalag 328—the old fortress on this hilltop, including the building that is now the hotel. The Nazis worked the prisoners to the point of exhaustion in the fortress, then loaded them onto trucks and drove them, stripped naked, hands tied, to a nearby forest to be shot. Locals called the fortress the Tower of Death. The hotel is not eager to tell its guests about this. Nor, during Lviv’s long decades under Soviet rule, was the Kremlin ready to discuss why such huge numbers of Red Army soldiers had surrendered. The majority of them were captured in the first six months of the war—a direct result of Stalin’s bizarre refusal to believe that Hitler would attack him and of his catastrophic purging of the Red Army’s leadership. The period, therefore, became yet another piece of history discussed only in whispers. There are hundreds of Holocaust memorials around the world, but almost none to those 3.5 million dead POWs. With support from Lviv’s city council, the Center for Urban History has created a virtual one. Photographs show German guards marching POWs through the cobblestone streets en route to the Tower of Death. The men’s ashen faces suggest that they knew what lay ahead. More photos show the searchlights and double rows of barbed wire surrounding the prison camp. There are testimonies from survivors, and from neighbors who saw prisoners eating dogs and cats that wandered onto the Stalag grounds. The center is building a digital map of the camp and a database of all the names it can gather of POWs—Russian, Ukrainian, French, Belgian, and others—who lived and died here. Particularly haunting is a collection of messages scrawled by prisoners on the Stalag’s walls: “I found myself here on 30/05/44. I am from the Vinnytsia oblast, Ilyintsi rayon, village Yablonovytsia. Filimon Artemovych Diatsenko, born in 1922.” “22 people left on 18/06/44 in an unknown direction.” “If you haven’t been, you will be, Once you’ve been, you won’t forget it.” Oral histories remind the viewer that the minority of Soviet POWs who managed to survive German captivity were, after the war, treated as traitors and shipped off to Stalin’s gulag. Those who survived were released only after his death in 1953. Soviet prisoners who agreed to serve in special German army units were given decent food and allowed to live. Can you blame them? History in this part of the world is often a record of impossibly painful choices. “Dealing with the past is difficult, messy, and complicated,” Sofia Dyak reflects, sitting at a table in the center’s library. “Especially when you have a narrative scaffolding around history as something heroic. The problem with the type of history telling [which is] almost like a fairy tale, is that even if it’s a dark fairy tale, it does not necessarily help you to explain the human condition. Truth is a process, and a process with many corrections.” Descendants of people who once lived here eventually began visiting Lviv, especially after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, and they had memories of an extremely different past from the one taught in Soviet schools. Getting at the truth became easier, she says, but the truth was still often contested. Moreover, history is not just what’s narrated by historians and schoolteachers; it’s life as recorded by ordinary people. The center has called for residents to bring in old home movies for digitizing. Parts of these will be posted online with annotations from members of the families they depict. And now, amid a war being fought with social media as well as bullets, the center is archiving posts by both Russians and Ukrainians appearing on Telegram. The Soviet heroic scaffolding may be gone, but Ukrainians sometimes build their own. For example, the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), who for a time collaborated with the Nazis in hopes of forging a Ukrainian state, now has a major street named after him in Lviv. He was, however, an anti-Semite, and he disliked Poles almost as much as Jews. His followers took part in massacres of both. When the local government of Zhovkva, some 20 miles from Lviv, allowed a huge mural of Bandera to be painted on its city hall a few years ago, a town in Poland angrily canceled a sister-city relationship. Such currents still flow below the surface, for Ukraine has a racist far right—although one notably smaller than those in other major European countries. Last September, for example, the center was scheduled to host a presentation of a new Ukrainian book about the Black Lives Matter movement, by a writer who had spent several years in the United States. Then a Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina, Iryna Zarutska, was murdered by a Black man, her killing followed by a blizzard of enraged tweets from Elon Musk. The author and her publisher received a cascade of death threats by telephone and social media. The book presentation was canceled. Across the world, people battle over memory. The Smithsonian has incurred the wrath of President Trump for focusing on “how bad slavery was.” Belgian protestors deface statues of King Leopold II, whose forced-labor regime killed millions in the Congo. Protests in Cape Town have toppled a statue of another colonizer, Cecil Rhodes. New York City saw a fight over the equestrian monument, outside the American Museum of Natural History, to Theodore Roosevelt. The battles rage on, raising the question: How can we remember the past honestly and inclusively, face it squarely, even the ugly parts, without sugarcoating? For Ukrainians, dealing with history takes place in the shadow of war. Lviv may not be near the front lines, but reminders of the fighting are everywhere. For months in 2022, the Center for Urban History repurposed several of its office rooms as refugee housing. Today, every morning at nine a.m. comes a minute of silence throughout the city. Pedestrians, sidewalk vendors, a legless veteran in a wheelchair, cars, trucks, buses—all stop in place. When the minute ends, many people cross themselves. In Lviv’s vast military cemetery, thousands of immaculate graves are blanketed with fresh flowers, surrounded by lanterns with candles, each grave showing, behind glass, a large photograph of a soldier. A middle-aged woman tending one explains softly, in English, “My brother.” History is as much a battlefield in this war as the devastated towns and cities of Ukraine’s east, where most of these soldiers died. Vladimir Putin has justified the invasion with his own view of the past. In 2021, he published a strange, rambling essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The two are “one people—a single whole,” Putin declared. They all are descendants of Ancient Rus, “the largest state in Europe.” He attacked “those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity.” The Ukrainian language evolved as merely one of many “dialects” of Russian. Ukrainians today have been taken away “from their historical motherland.” The “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” Months later, his tanks and troops poured across Ukraine’s borders and the largest conflict in Europe since 1945 was under way. Few Ukrainians have any interest in Putin’s vision of mystical racial unity. After all, President Volodymir Zelensky is Jewish; his national security council chief is Muslim and Tatar; his former ambassador to the United States is part Armenian. Whatever Ukraine’s problems—everyone agrees that corruption remains one—nothing has unified the country as much as Russia’s ruthless invasion. The kinship Ukrainians clearly feel is not a tribal one with Ancient Rus but a political one with Western Europe. In Lviv, you see almost as many European Union flags as Ukrainian ones. And what, after all, is the European Union but one of the most successful multicultural projects of all time? No better image exists of the cosmopolitan future that so many Ukrainians hope for—and of the world we all might hope for—than the engraved names surrounding that fountain: people of different tongues, faiths, and cultures, all sharing water from the same well. The post ‘In the Presence of People No Longer Here’ appeared first on The American Scholar.
The quest to discover the answer to an age-old question The post Who Is Thinking? appeared first on The American Scholar.
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan; Penguin Press, 320 pp., $32 In 1998, philosopher David Chalmers made a bet with neuroscientist Christof Koch about whether, in the next 25 years, any scientist would be able to offer a persuasive and precise explanation for how our messy, spongy brains give rise to the feeling of awareness. Koch wagered that the puzzle could be solved. Four years earlier, Chalmers was a somewhat disheveled postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. He sent an abstract to the first Science of Consciousness meeting, hoping simply to present his research on a conference poster. Instead, he found himself on the main stage, where he delivered a characterization of the problem of studying consciousness that, even today, remains central to the field—namely, that there are many relatively easy problems to solve (how things like perception, cognition, and decision-making work, neuroscientifically), and one “hard problem”: determining why any of those electrical, neural, and molecular stories should lead to what it feels like to be you. In his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, Michael Pollan walks us through the current state of the debate. Pollan is one of our finest science writers and, to judge by this book, a lovely person with deep curiosities and patience and openness. He tells us that he backed into the topic slowly and unexpectedly. He recalls how he once took a dose of magic mushrooms, sat in his garden, and felt that his plants were talking to him. He couldn’t get the experience out of his mind, and now, after literary forays into what exactly was going on with those mushrooms (How to Change Your Mind, This Is Your Mind on Plants), he has turned his attention to the grand, deep puzzle of how to make sense of consciousness itself. What follows is a series of curated Platonic dialogues, with Pollan playing Socrates, the wise fool, posing questions to current experts until they both come to the limits of their understanding. First there is the puzzle of what it means to be sentient. Philosopher Paco Calvo and plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso insist that plant roots make choices, recognize opportunities, solve problems. “I had always assumed,” Pollan writes, “that bean plants simply grow this way or that until, by pure chance, they bump into something to climb.” Calvo tells Pollan that when one lengthens the time scale of observation, plants seem more intentional. Mancuso even thinks that plants sleep. Then Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts, uses bioelectric networks to broaden the definition of sentience. Levin creates “Xenobots,” multicellular organisms not seen in nature, by scraping cells together in a way that allows a new bioelectrical field to emerge. Cells meant to be the skin of tadpoles become something else, and as they do that, they appear to have a kind of intentional, purposive quality. At this point, we are well past plants. “I see an incredibly mindful world,” Levin tells Pollan. Then there are the neuroscientific theorists, like Karl Friston of University College London, who “is responsible for many of the computational tools used to interpret brain imaging.” Friston places inference at the center of his theories. His basic question is how any complex system—from viruses to ecosystems—survives in the face of entropy. Such systems must have a boundary, a sensory apparatus, and some ability to act. The system has to figure out what to do, and then do it. And again, everything now seems at least close to conscious. “Sentience,” Pollan writes, “or something like it—the ability to sense, to infer, to predict—reaches all the way down to the very simplest creatures and emerges when life does, if not before.” From this perspective, we do not see the world as it is; we see the world as our perceptual apparatus predicts it should be in order to allow us to maneuver within it. Sentience is not quite consciousness, but at this level, it becomes harder to tease apart what makes consciousness special. Pollan seems at once most persuaded and most unnerved by cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth, who has taken predictive processing, a newly chic theory about the brain, as far as it can go. Predictive processing theories start from the premise that our brains are prediction machines that have evolved to help us to survive. From this perspective, we do not see the world as it is; we see the world as our perceptual apparatus predicts it should be in order to allow us to maneuver within it. All that we experience is based on expectation, constantly corrected and developed, but expectation nonetheless. Seth goes so far as to call perception a “controlled hallucination.” Our awareness of being a self, he asserts, is a controlled hallucination, too. “I found this hard to believe,” Pollan writes, and he then proceeds to make sense of it. Consciousness is a tough topic. There is a kind of boys-with-big-machines vibe to some of this material, and it is hard not to feel skeptical about how much these theories really explain. What I find moving in these discussions is the intense yearning for a world that is more alive than secular scientists might think it is, a kind of seeking for a god that one suspects these scientists do not, at the same time, believe to exist. It is hard not to notice, at consciousness conferences, the mixture of science and seeking, of seeking scientists and science-minded seekers, wanting what the church would give them but determined not to step inside its doors. It is no accident that interest in this new science of consciousness has exploded as participation in mainstream religion has plummeted. For Pollan, despite his fascination with the science of consciousness, the science itself is not enough. He concludes his book with poetry, with the American Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax in Santa Fe, and with solitary meditation in a cave. You get the sense that for all of them, the satisfaction is in the search. David Chalmers won his wager with Christof Koch. In June 2023, Nature carried a picture of the two of them shaking hands at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in New York City, where Koch then handed Chalmers a case of fine Madeira. Both men seemed chipper. They’ve renewed the bet for another 25 years. The post Who Is Thinking? appeared first on The American Scholar.
The post The List appeared first on The American Scholar.
The morning was still fresh, but my to-do list was burning a hole in my pocket. “Where to start?” I asked myself, and then picked a place, took up my tools, and got going, as tough and determined as any miner or lineman, rancher or cabinet builder. “This is exciting,” I thought to myself. And I thought it again, in one variation or another—satisfying, rewarding, gratifying—as the morning unrolled, items scratched off the list, new ones appearing almost as fast. I lost track of time, and the hours flew by. Pausing between emptying the recycling and making rice, I asked myself, “Who says work can’t be thrilling?” After a quick bite for lunch and checking one last item from the list, I was ready to leave for work. “Goodbye,” I told my son. In a spasm of happiness, one foot out the door, I turned again. “Life is so fun,” I said. He stared at me, then asked, “Why?” “Why indeed,” I thought. All I had done that morning was answer a few emails, hang the wash up to dry, make a meal out of the leftovers in the fridge, prepare rice to go with the assortment, wipe down some splashes of coffee on the white kitchen cabinet doors, and in the midst of all this activity, plan where to fit in the other 10 or 15 tasks of my day. What could be so very good about any of those activities? That was my question on my half-hour drive to work, along the motorway and into the city through light traffic and the 16 stoplights that keep drivers in check. We were like horses out of the chute at each signal. This, too, was fun. It really was. But later, in a more controlled moment, I realized it wasn’t a collection of enjoyable moments that made the day exciting; rather it was the growing excitement of fitting everything into the day that made each moment a thrill. On that particular day, my recipe was how to make a hearty dish of the leftover tasks. First, empty the compost bin into the garden. Second, do the recycling. Third, the shopping. Like steps in a recipe, no single step afforded much satisfaction; it was the accumulation that made it fun. More than a recipe, a day is like a circus act: You’re successful when you keep the balls in motion, the plates spinning. Once upon a time, such a day in my life, full of a million challenges, would have been more stress than success. So why, I wondered, the difference now? I allowed the question to flit across my mind. The answer is obvious: knowing when to toss things in the air like a juggler, and when to sit back and watch it all pass in front of one’s eyes. Put another way, I finally recognize the venue (circus) and extrapolate the meaning (hardly any) and know what rests on success or failure (nothing). Try it yourself. All you need is your to-do list and its 20 balls to keep in the air, knowing that nothing will be permanently broken if you drop any or all of them. And there is always a bright side. “The rice is gummy.” “You don’t know how lucky we are!” “Because the rice is gummy?” “Because it’s not burned! Gummy rice is a spectacular save. It’s stretching and half-stumbling to grab the ball that’s getting away.” “You’re making this all up.” “No, it’s true.” But my son, in utter seriousness, pointed out that when you save the ball, it’s as good as ever. The same was not true of the rice. Is this, though, the moment for such careful, serious thinking? I ask you! The post The List appeared first on The American Scholar.
“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.
The importance of being “painfully earnest” The post Kati Gegenheimer appeared first on The American Scholar.
Painter Kati Gegenheimer doesn’t shy away from the heartfelt or “cringe.” In fact, “that’s exactly where I often hope to land,” she says, “making work that is about love and care, and using energy to sustain those things, even when it seems out of fashion.” Gegenheimer, who studied painting and printmaking at Yale, initially wanted to be a journalist, but her fascination with bright hues and various visual media led her to art instead. “My impulse to record feels really close to what I do now in painting, just a different form,” she says. “I was always trying to find [formats that] … hold information, to hold memory, to keep records, and to then be able to look back, understand, and reflect.” Her works, saturated with vibrant colors, are meant to evoke childhood memories, joy, or other strong reactions. Gegenheimer is constantly pushing herself to play with new, bold pigments—she even painted her first studio a “mermaid teal,” both to resist succumbing to the standard “white cube” gallery space, and to challenge herself to create paintings that would stand out against their surroundings. Now, her first solo museum exhibition, We’ve Only Just Begun, is on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, exploring snapshots in time and new beginnings through riotous, colorful paintings hanging on (and in some cases painted directly onto) the walls. Installation view of Kati Gegenheimer: We’ve Only Just Begun, on view at the Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, April 12 through December 31, 2026. (Courtesy of the Artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Photography by Constance Mensh.) Lighting in a Box (Hope Chest), 2025-2026, oil on shaped panel, 26 ¼ x 47 ¾ inches. (Courtesy of the Artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Photography by Constance Mensh.) Installation view of Kati Gegenheimer: We’ve Only Just Begun, on view at the Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, April 12 through December 31, 2026. (Courtesy of the Artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Photography by Constance Mensh.) The title of the exhibition comes from the Carpenters song of the same name. Gegenheimer herself is not a diehard fan of the duo, but she considers the song “to be almost painfully earnest in a way that I find really special.” The titular painting, among the first that viewers see upon entering the space, is of a few bars of sheet music in bubblegum-pink and white, set against swirling chartreuse and teal iconography. The piece took Gegenheimer almost three years to complete, a testament to the value of starting over, she says, and the hopefulness and optimism that underpins her art. In addition to the works displayed on the walls, Gegenheimer painted rainbow stripes on the baseboards of the room, a nod to the Romanesque-inspired architecture of the historic building (striping, often in the form of alternating red brick and white stone, is a hallmark of high Romanesque architecture), and added chartreuse paneling to create visual harmony throughout the space. The result is a room where joy practically jumps off the canvas and into the physical space itself, where Gegenheimer hopes visitors feel their moods change as soon as they walk in. A group of Girl Scouts attended the opening, she recounts, “and just seeing these Brownies look around and be enthused about the colors in the show was so exciting to me. It’s something I’ll probably never forget.” The post Kati Gegenheimer appeared first on The American Scholar.
Kate Davis gives advice on secondhand scores The post Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing appeared first on The American Scholar.
No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they church rummage sales, yard sales, or online auctions—offer a variety of ways to acquire quality pieces and a little bit of history, with the bonus of saving grandma’s treasures from the landfill. For several years, vintage enthusiast Kate Davis has been writing a popular weekly newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing, that not only spotlights upcoming sales of note but offers a guide for the uninitiated. Her new book, Bring Cash, distills those lessons (the first one is in the title) along with essays about favorite finds and what to look for: dovetail joints in furniture, finished seams in clothing, the sign-in sheet at the front of the line so you’re not the last one admitted into the designer’s midcentury bungalow. Davis joins the podcast this week to talk about what she’s learned from estate sailing, her term for the ritual of trekking out to someone’s house and wandering its halls for treasure—which is almost always sure to include at least one inexplicable maritime tchotchke. Go beyond the episode: Kate Davis’s Bring Cash: A Guide to Estate Sales in the Midwest and Beyond Her newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing For more on the afterlives of secondhand stuff, listen to our interviews with Adam Minter (on global thrifting) and Dana Thomas (on fast fashion) Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! The post Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wilfrid Sheed’s essays pulsed with the energy of midcentury America The post Spreading the Good Word appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. I aspired to be a writer. The prevailing mood in Winona was, let’s just say, sincere. Besides Orwell, Kerouac, and school assignments, I was reading an anthology called 25 Minnesota Poets #2. The cover featured cream type against a brown background on sensible matte paper. It might as well have been printed directly on wheat. A few lines describing an oppressive shop teacher, excerpted from poet Stanley Kiesel’s contribution, give a sense of the tone: “Pop could see—plain as pliers— / poems swimming in my fingers.” The collection included some excellent poets, but it lived and died by the heartfelt declarative sentence. Even the local humor—think A Prairie Home Companion—was about as edgy as a quilt. Without knowing exactly why, I was unhappy with the literary culture that the anthology represented and yearned for something else. Then, in 1978, I discovered Wilfrid Sheed. In an appreciative Rolling Stone review of the novel Transatlantic Blues, Greil Marcus wrote of Sheed that it must be frustrating to be the best book critic in America while having your novels dismissed as brilliant but minor. Wait, what? I’d never heard of Sheed before reading Marcus’s review. Now, in my adolescent way, I wanted to know everything about him. Born in London in 1930, raised in England and the United States, and educated at Oxford, Sheed had published numerous works of fiction and criticism. I sensed that such a critic might point me toward what was lacking in my reading life, which had been limited to the American classics. Fortunately, Northern Lights Books, the new independent bookstore downtown, had a copy of The Good Word and Other Words, a recently published collection of Sheed’s essays. The title referred to the monthly column he wrote for The New York Times Book Review in the early ’70s. This was one of the most prestigious platforms ever offered to a Times critic. The first thing I noticed was the sentences. I’m not sure that, for all my teenage literary enthusiasms, I had ever thought of the sentence as a separate thing, as something that could be crafted, with a value distinct from other narrative components, such as plot or argument. But Sheed’s sentences were engines of insight and something I didn’t recognize at first: joy. A few examples. On Evelyn Waugh’s fascination with the landed gentry: “A writer who would rather be dined by Lord Chowderhead than praised by [Edmund] Wilson is a genius or he’s nothing.” On the disgruntled NFL star Dave Meggyesy’s evocation of fans watching football in a state approaching sexual frenzy: “At my place, aphasic torpor would be closer to it.” I had to look up both “aphasic” and “torpor,” and, when I did, I realized they were perfect. On the Watergate hearings, which everyone I knew had taken very seriously: “And so it went, each man a marvelous specimen of political comedy, which occurs whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of doing nothing; i.e., all the time.” I had never encountered a writer so confident or a tone so elastic. So this is what happens when a Catholic, Oxford-trained mind intersects with a jaunty midcentury American voice. The elasticity didn’t simply apply to diction; Sheed’s syntax inspired envy. In an essay about the novel of manners, he speculates about one set in the counterculture: “And no dowager ever made one more conscious of saying the wrong thing or expressing the not-quite-right attitude as a hippie in full feather. ‘Oh, man, you just don’t know’—the strains of Emily Post still linger in that one.” But there was much more to his work than an agile, charismatic style. There was a brightness to this voice, and a crowded, convivial aspect to these collected columns that reminded me not of a lone poet on a matte prairie but of another touchstone of my childhood: the parties in my favorite sketch comedy TV show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. They were populated with jaunty celebrities grooving to ’60s cocktail music, then freeze-framing to exchange inane quips. It may seem an odd comparison and even a vulgar one. But Laugh-In was a memory of effervescence that I carried into the ’70s gloom. I was witnessing the last flashings of a midcentury energy that Sheed had glimpsed as a young man, coming to these shores during the Second World War. The Good Word was a crucial part of my literary education. Sheed located his book reviewing in the personal, profound process of crafting a self, and it is precisely this grounding in the human journey that made the book so important to me. As he writes in his introduction: This kind of reviewing is imprecise, speculative work like fiction, and its truths are the truths of fiction. The books are events that happened to me and are as open to misinterpretation as my neighbors or the Siege of Chicago in 1968. Along with one’s novels these pieces form a mosaic of someone coming of age at a certain time and place, and what he made of it. I was someone coming of age in a certain time and place, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. And increasingly, books were things that happened to me. The process of encountering the world one book at a time, and of using those books to enlarge the self, is a subjective process. But what does subjectivity mean? It is not a disavowal of standards—far from it—but an acknowledgment of fallibility. As Sheed concludes in “The Art of Reviewing”: “Omniscience is on the calling card, along with the tricks and novelties; but between trash and Shakespeare, there is much uncertainty.” This sentence has informed my understanding of humility—and my disdain for brittle, overconfident opining—ever since. Some sentences have stayed with me because they said something in a way that stays said. When Sheed observed that Edmund Wilson possessed “an extraordinary gift for friendship in all its degrees, from the exchange of funny postcards to the complete opening of his mind,” he defined friendship for me with a precision that, decades later, I still return to. He begins an introduction to a Paris Review Writers at Work volume with a specific confession: “This is partly an act of reparation. A few years back, I wrote a somewhat lofty piece about the second collection of Paris Review interviews, suggesting that the information therein was neither better nor worse than Hollywood gossip.” He then admits that it was “a dishonest piece (I was too young to be honest) in that I artfully concealed how much I had enjoyed the volume—which meant it had some kind of value, if not the kind I was looking for.” Honesty is the crucial idea in that sentence. In my childhood, honesty was the opposite of subtlety, and subtlety was a bad thing, a slippery slope that led to sophistry. Honesty was instrumental: It enabled confession. Either you hit your sister, ate meat on Friday, or smoked dope behind the garage, or you didn’t. In my teenage years, honesty became brutal honesty: the affected grit and seedy posing that I sought in writers like Charles Bukowski. He’s, like, really honest, man. It took me a while to figure out that Bukowski’s honesty was really weaponized self-pity and sideways romanticizing. Reading Sheed, I began to realize that adult honesty was only occasionally brutal. More often it was subtle and required intellectual labor. This subtlety was the opposite of sophistry. It didn’t evade the truth, it sharpened it. The purpose of this honesty was not the admission of guilt or whatever Bukowski was trying to do but the achievement of precision. And that precision had a spiritual aspect. It valued the complexity of creation over the dunderheadedness of the individual human mind with its sloppy categories and half-baked perceptions. Of course, humility is no excuse for being mealy mouthed. Sheed knew the value of clear statement, especially in criticism. Of the critic Cyril Connolly, he wrote, adding italics for emphasis, that “for all his surly independence, he could not make the assertions that criticism requires.” Sheed could. Also of Connolly: “He had never been a good critic, because among other things, he could never pan a friend.” Or of a Walter Kerr study of silent film that Sheed admired: “Such a critic may be fine at good vs. bad, but untrustworthy on important vs. trivial.” When revisionists imputed genius to old studio-extruded movies, he reported what he actually saw: “The thirties, forties were an era of mass-produced junk, and all the auteurs and editors with tongue in cheek cannot alter that much.” Some sentences have stayed with me because they said something in a way that stays said. When Sheed observed that Edmund Wilson possessed “an extraordinary gift for friendship in all its degrees, from the exchange of funny postcards to the complete opening of his mind,” he defined friendship for me with a precision that, decades later, I still return to. The micro-epiphanies of that sentence illuminated what friendship might be and, thus, what life might be. He dropped other parenthetical realizations. Of the tendency of LSD to moot speech: “Writers afflicted with vocation would refuse to enter heaven itself if they couldn’t describe it afterwards.” Or of football players who became authors: “Like all of us, they were raised on at least two completely contradictory moral codes, and can preach from either one interchangeably.” Beneath the jaunty and the jovial lived truth. For me, growing up in the provinces, writers were part consumer brand, part Greek god—at any rate, something more than human. But Sheed understood that we are all flawed, God-sensing, metabolic puddings, and that doesn’t change just because you happen to write a novel. His fellow authors were not the producers of a consumer product but characters in a story he was writing. They could be deluded, trapped within assumptions they couldn’t see—in the case of the Beats, their assumption that writing faster, without revision or premeditation, taps into the subconscious: “It now seems possible that Kerouac wanted to bypass the subconscious by outrunning it. … The words on the top of one’s head do not necessarily come from anywhere near the subconscious.” He suspected that speed writing was a psychological strategy, not a literary one: “Kerouac’s manicness was a necessary strategy for fighting off the forest-dark, French-American glooms.” Earlier in the same essay, he wrote, “I tend to believe he handled his tormented, overloaded temperament as well as it could be handled.” In the space of one essay, he moved between literary insight, psychological insight, and forgiveness. Sheed was thinking as he was writing. I’d never seen that before. To the extent that I had any template for thinking, it was the high school debate model: You gather your arguments, which are a lot like everyone else’s arguments, on index cards and then repeat them with great pimply teenage confidence. In my experience, surprise, growth, qualification, and recalibration weren’t a part of the process. Sheed ends an essay prompted by four new books about Ernest Hemingway with sentences that fold big-hearted praise over damning criticism. The result is a judgment that is not simply complex but also noble: As early as The Sun Also Rises there are signs of potential freedom, of an exit into adulthood, that he never availed himself of. This was his last book before fame settled in to stay and clamped his style into place, where it grew warped and gnarled like a tree in a cave: but that it was a splendid style, and that his pursuit of it was honorable, if muddle-headed, to the end, I have no doubt. When you view writers as humans, sentences distill into epitaphs. Elsewhere, Sheed heartbreakingly summarized Evelyn Waugh’s Catholicism: “He found God where he could, in the sum of what was left when you subtract the twentieth century; but he shouldn’t have tried to name Him.” There is something very humane in saying “they did the best they could.” The first responsibility of the humanist is to acknowledge that we’re human. It is also one of the first worldly responsibilities of the Christian, and Sheed knew his Christianity—he was the son of Catholic publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. I also had been immersed in the church as a boy, spending my first decade in the Catholic town of Rollingstone, attending a Catholic grade school. But after the closure of our school, the death of my father, and our move into Winona, I drifted away. When, in an essay titled “Spock Mugged,” Sheed chastened the English writer Malcolm Muggeridge for mocking Doctor Spock’s protest of the Vietnam war as “something I would have expected a stand-up Christian like Muggeridge to appreciate,” he added this footnote: William F. Buckley raised the Eyebrow high over this one. But the New Testament frequently emphasizes the simple moral test beside which all else shrivels. ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty … sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. A writer who was pointing me toward a greater literary sophistication sounded like my mother, who was a farm wife and nurse, and Sister Maureen, my favorite grade school nun. Sheed connected my emerging literary standards with my childhood values in a way that made both more vital. The central character in the coming-of-age tale Sheed tells in The Good Word is the reviewer, and the reviewer’s central moral challenge is to treat books fairly. “The Art of Reviewing” provides a useful glimpse into Sheed’s mind at work. Book reviews in the United States are overstated, he contends, but there are good reasons for this: Reviewers need to get readers to pay attention. So they throw around sloppy opinions and take shortcuts by ranking authors and books within the author’s oeuvre. These compulsive rankings distract from any meaningful consideration of the book itself—its goals, triumphs, textures, and failures. Although we can, of course, learn about a book by looking at the books, authors, and culture that surround it, ultimately, our obsession with ranking authors diminishes our reading. Any paraphrase of Sheed’s ideas, including the one I offer above, misses the indelible energy of his prose. To read him is to experience the power of idiom, its voltage and adhesiveness. I suspect his work would not translate well. Missing from my paraphrase, for example, is this: “What [the author] will not be called anywhere is probably what he is—‘our most middling author in his most middling achievement.’ … Excessive opinions excite the average reader to madness, or at least to attention. … Still, in the uproar certain decencies should be observed.” And this, which feels especially relevant to our age of listicles and tweets: “To read that Sven Angst may be the number-two Swedish novelist, surpassing even Igmar Klutz, may be O.K. It means we have five minutes to take in the Swedish scene before the guests arrive. But to find this applied to our own writers is to wonder where tourism ceases.” And most powerfully for me, this: All this tends to confirm something cramped and anxious about our reading habits. … Eventually you have to tell your son that this is not the longest ball game ever played or maybe even the best. It is fatally flawed in the ninth inning. However, it’s the only game we happen to have right now, and it fills the moment just as full as a great game would, even sharing some of the same textures. If you don’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t enjoy a great game either, except for its damn greatness. I cried when I reread “The Art of Reviewing.” Why would a nearly 50-year-old essay on book reviews make a 60-year-old man cry? Here’s the best I can do: I was an enthusiastic but clueless teenager who didn’t know how to read books, much less review them. And a stranger had just pointed me to a way of reading that would enrich my life from that moment on. For me, The Good Word also served as a crash course in critical thinking. At Beloit College, the courses I took, while richer than my high school fare, failed to sharpen my critical faculties for a reason that seems obvious now: My professors had selected the best books in their field to teach in their introductory courses. What sane professor would say, “Tell me why the books I’ve shared with you are lazy, sloppy, confused, biased, incomplete, or blinkered”? Of course, Introduction to Economics and King Lear are as subject to critical thinking as anything, but if my 18-year-old self had taken them on, I would have been punching above my weight. College was about appreciation, comprehension, clarity, implication, and integration. Sheed taught me how to read the books that weren’t classics, the vast middle ground between “trash and Shakespeare,” the great tide of uncanonized culture that constitutes my reading life and probably yours. He was especially good at the kind of books that claim to address serious subjects but deliver only platitudes and muddle. The best example of this is “The Subject of Ethnics,” an evisceration of Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics and Peter Schrag’s The Decline of the WASP. Both books, which aim to celebrate ethnic cultures, are guilty of “flattening out our largest and most varied group, all the white Protestants from W. C. Fields to Huey Long.” The unfortunate consequence of this is that the ethnic groups that the authors celebrate “begin to look ominously alike. They are all simply un-Wasp—earthy, passionate, spontaneous, all that great stuff.” He suggested that instead of being simple fountains of joie de vivre, people who crossed the ocean in steerage to escape crushing poverty “did not need lessons in discipline and perseverance from the Whiffenpoofs.” As a Catholic, Sheed recognized a sin winking under the sloppiness: Novak and Schrag diminished complex human beings. Sheed treated authors as human beings, with the limits of human beings, and it’s only fair he be treated similarly. In 2026, I can see how his subjects tend to be “male, pale, and Yale.” His essays on women’s liberation, as it was called then, haven’t aged well, and his review of a James Baldwin book ages much worse. Consider this wince-inducing throwaway: “I assume he is still a black spokesman in good standing.” Besides the snotty tone, there is the failure to think about how being a “spokesman” is a version of something Black people deal with every day—the corrosive pressure of being not simply themselves, but representatives of their race. His list of the great midcentury prose stylists doesn’t mention Baldwin, the most urgent and nuanced essayist since Orwell, or Pauline Kael, the most original and charismatic voice of her time. The Good Word is Sheed at the height of his powers. As the midcentury energy that he loved peaked in the early ’70s, so did he. Transatlantic Blues (the novel that Greil Marcus had reviewed in Rolling Stone) showed the limits of the ironic style. When I tried to reread it, I found the first few pages so cloyingly urbane that I couldn’t go on. Reading In Love with Daylight, his often insightful but sadly defensive 1995 account of his afflictions (including an addiction to pills), showed the limits of the man. Given that my relationship with Sheed partook of mentoring—even though I never met him, he helped me find better ways of doing something very important to me—the book shocked me. The writer who taught me what grown-up honesty looked like was dishonest when it mattered most. But that is the essence of addiction. Sheed’s accomplishment is his voice, which raises the question: What is voice? If my experience is representative, voice is something that writers think about far too much when they are young, and then, embarrassed by their own enthusiasm, don’t think about at all. I believe I actually told one of my creative writing professors that I was working on finding my voice. I’m also pretty sure he winced. As you learn to write, as you break through the received, the affected, and the incompetent, your voice finds you. Voice is the deepest and most unconscious part of style, spiritual in that it reflects whatever makes the self unique. Yet voice is also steeped in one’s culture. It is more closely related to character than my college self ever suspected, which is why you can’t build one in a semester. The characteristics of Sheed that I celebrate—honesty, mercy—are moral qualities. But voice is what I sought, especially as a young man, in authors such as Sheed, Marcus, Kael, and John Updike: the self behind the sentences. The teenage me was not reading to find stories. Stories made me nervous. The teenage me was reading to find friends—fellow travelers making sense of the world. I gravitated to criticism because it is the literary form closest to conversation. A fellow Sheed enthusiast pointed out that his voice is, among other things, breezy—and the canonical Elements of Style specifically proscribes breeziness. But it’s one of those violations that help sharpen what the rule really means. Strunk and White were railing against an affected breeziness—a put-on jauntiness in an alumni magazine that resembled no actual human voice. When rereading the relevant passage in The Elements of Style, I also sensed something else in Strunk and White’s advice: a certain pale preppie classicism. Adjectives aren’t really our kind of people, dear. Sheed’s voice wasn’t fully unconscious, of course. He clearly worried about style. He wanted a prose as big as America or at least as big as American culture. Arriving from England—and wartime England, which is England squared—Sheed encountered the energy of jazz and pop, of wise guys and baseball, and it is this joyful, ironic miasma that influenced his prose more than anything else. Every Sheed sentence is a kind of love song to a version of America. That the English are better than us at irony simply heightened the effects. The painful irony of Sheed’s career is that he is often categorized as brilliant but minor. Sheed himself wrote, “This country is merciless to good small talents.” When he made similarly wistful observations about V. S. Pritchett, he might have been appraising his own career. One of his most trenchant essays, in his first book of criticism, is “The Minor Novelist.” You bleed a little after reading that one. Personally, I’d suggest most so-called big talents are smaller than we think, and they often confuse public relations with subject matter. Faulkner knew Mississippi. Bellow knew Chicago and managed to trick us into thinking he knew America. Twain wrote well of one river, Melville of one ship. Fitzgerald wrote a great American epiphany. But when the subject grows larger, it often overwhelms the writer. Updike’s best writing was in his Talk of the Town pieces, short stories, and reviews. His explicitly ambitious Rabbit novels were so many pounds of anthropological sadness. Norman Mailer increasingly looks like a toxic clown. Sheed’s subjects in The Good Word and Other Words—the voices and concerns of midcentury America, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Watergate, from Cole Porter to Mary Gordon—are plenty big. His consideration of the Beats, extending over two essays, and his brilliant first-person account of the 1968 Democratic National Convention are as vivid a portrait of a time and place as you will ever read. Add to that books about baseball and pop music, his affecting witness to Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, his devastating takedown of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, and well-regarded novels about a presidential candidate and magazine publishing, and there’s a good case for his significance. Sheed changed my life at a time it badly needed changing, when I was an earnest kid in an earnest place in an earnest time. And if changing someone’s life isn’t the definition of a big talent, there’s something wrong with our definition. The post Spreading the Good Word appeared first on The American Scholar.
The post Where Is Wilken? appeared first on The American Scholar.
“It was Wicas,” my son told me. “Or something similar.” We were sitting at a café terrace, waiting for our coffee, and I had just remarked that I ought to stop at the house where the old yellow dog had lived and ask the owner his name. It had been less than a week since I’d walked by one morning and discovered that the dog wasn’t there. The chain was missing from the ring in the cement by the doghouse. Sad, I’d thought, walking on. Sad, but considering how sometimes the dog barely had the strength to stand, not surprising. The first person—the only person—I’d told about the dog’s demise was my son. Both of us had felt sorry for the dog and made a point of stopping to pet him whenever we walked by his home. “Wicas.” I repeated. “You asked the owner?” My son said yes, one day when the owner happened to be outside. Wicas was what he remembered. Wicas sounds like whiskers, I thought. I shouldn’t forget. I wondered aloud if the word meant anything in Spanish. My son didn’t think so. The café was on a corner two blocks from our home, across the street from the high school. We were under the awning, though the day was cloudy, with neither rain nor sun to shelter from. Our German shepherd Toby was under the table, looking his usual mournful self. Once confident and assertive, he was now timid, meek. When the waitress arrived with our coffees, she cooed at him, as you would a baby, but Toby hardly looked up until she asked if she could give him a treat. Sure, we answered, and she produced a small dog biscuit about the size of a penny, and let him take it from her fingers. Then she offered another, cooing the whole time. Wicas, if that was really his name, had lived his life on an eight-foot chain. He could have used some of this gentle attention. Now that he was gone, the occasional three minutes I’d spent rubbing his head and back seemed piddling. I sighed. The waitress ran her hand over Toby’s head. She asked his name, and we told her. “Good Toby,” she said with a final pat before going back inside. Three days later, out on a morning walk with Toby, I was nearing the farmyard when the white van belonging to the yellow dog’s owner drove up. The man was already unloading things when I reached the spot and greeted him, then commented on his dog’s death. “He didn’t die.” The man’s tone was brusque. He stopped his work and stood looking at me. I was taken aback. Before I could ask where he was, the man told me they had stolen him. “They?” I said, stupidly. “Someone.” He told me that first they had reported him for keeping the dog on a chain, so he had moved the dog into an enclosed yard, behind a corrugated metal fence. He indicated with his hand. Then they had stolen the dog from that yard. This seemed unbelievable. “Oh no,” I said. Then I asked how old the dog had been, automatically using the past tense. “Twelve,” the man said. “He seemed so infirm. His legs trembled.” “I was giving him pills for that. He was getting better.” The man sounded very bitter. “But they stole him.” The man was tall and thin with a receding hairline and a beak nose, not handsome but arresting. He had been very curt but was softening with my obvious incredulity. My disbelief was not just for the dastardly interference of people but even more for the tale itself, though the man didn’t know that. I found it hard to believe anyone would steal a feeble old dog barely able to stand on his own legs. How had they even moved him? You’d have to scoop the animal up in your arms, and you’d have to be strong enough to do that. “Poor dog,” I said, meaning it. I doubted very much that the dog had ended up coddled in someone’s living room or enjoying the freedom of a grassy lawn somewhere, doted on by a new family. The man’s strong emotion also struck me as off—I’d considered him more a lackadaisical owner than a conscientious one. There is a law prohibiting keeping dogs on chains, and I had once or twice thought of reporting the owner myself—like the rainy morning I had found the bedraggled dog in front of his doghouse, the chain twisted around his back leg so tightly that he couldn’t move. Bad enough to live on a chain, but one without a chain swivel is pure neglect. That day I had unhooked the chain from the dog’s collar so I could unwind it from his legs. I inspected the swollen leg—no cut or abrasion—and urged him to try and stand. He took two wobbly steps into his doghouse, where he sank back down on the cold cement floor. At least he was out of the rain. I hooked the chain back to his collar. The next day I checked the leg—no longer swollen—and then added a swivel snap to the hook, so that turning would not knot up the chain and shorten it. “No more nights in the rain,” I told the old yellow dog while Toby stood patiently by. I had a chance a few days later to mention my intervention to the owner. I skipped the part about the neglect and went straight to the point: The new swivel clasp was there to keep the chain from twisting and shortening as the dog turned. The man, who had eyed me warily, ended up thanking me. “Yes, that swivel is a clever little gadget,” I commented. I saw no good coming from trying to shame the man. That was about two months before the dog disappeared. So what little I did was done in the nick of time. The trick would be to apply the lesson to my own dog, and gladden his life all I could while I still could. And here I was, on that morning several days after the dog had disappeared, listening to the owner’s tale. He was bitterly condemning whoever had caused this upset in his life. “There are very bad people,” he said, which sounds simplistic in English but not so in Spanish: Hay gente muy mala. I nodded, but I wasn’t sure. About the man, for example, I was up in the air. I asked, “What was the dog’s name?” “Wilkin,” he told me, and I repeated it: “Wilken.” Wilken rhymes with silken. But what did the name really matter now that the dog was gone? “Well,” I said. “Goodbye.” It sounded lame to me, but what else could I say? “I’m sorry,” I added. “Yes,” he said, and repeated that bad people exist. Then he went back to unloading his van, and Toby and I continued down the lane. Maybe, I thought, the man had loved his dog. So I forgave him. And Wilken—Would he forgive the man too? If he’s found a place at the side of San Roque and is looking down from on high, I hope he sees his owner’s woe. A good heart isn’t an excuse, but it makes it easier for other goodhearted beings to forgive us. And who more goodhearted than a dog? The post Where Is Wilken? appeared first on The American Scholar.
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Jane Kenyon’s “Twilight: After Haying.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon appeared first on The American Scholar.
Michael Steinberg’s profound insights on music transcended the ephemeral world of daily newspaper journalism The post The People’s Critic appeared first on The American Scholar.
Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe 1964–1976 edited by Susan Feder, Jacob Jahiel, and Marc Mandel; Oxford University Press, 648 pp., $34.97 New York City at the close of the 19th century thrilled to an early heyday in the erratic history of American classical music. The presiding conductor, Anton Seidl, was a charismatic protégé of Richard Wagner. More than leading American premieres of five Wagner operas at the Metropolitan (and espousing performances of the composer in English), he ultimately presided over a nationwide Wagnerism movement: an arts wildfire. Conducting the New York Philharmonic, he premiered the New World Symphony of Antonín Dvořák, with whom he met daily at Fleischman’s Cafe near Union Square. As director of the National Conservatory of Music, Dvořák in 1893 prophesied that “Negro melodies” would anchor a “great and noble school” of American music. His Black assistant Harry Burleigh would play a pivotal role in turning spirituals into art songs. Seidl, meanwhile, led American Composers’ Concerts. The creation of an American concert idiom, of an American canon, was the presiding priority. The culture of performance that came after World War I, hypnotized by foreign-born conductors and virtuosos, would be a sharp departure. The same fin-de-siècle moment marked the apex of American musical journalism. The big three critics—Henry Krehbiel of the New York Tribune, W. J. Henderson of The New York Times, and James Gibbon Huneker, who mainly wrote for the Sun—were a study in contrasts. Krehbiel was an impassioned Germanic windbag who preached art as uplift. Henderson’s prose was atypically lean; his specialty was vocal art. Huneker was a virtuoso stylist (H. L. Mencken was a disciple) heralding the coming modernist moment. What they had in common was community—with one another, and with the artists whose activities they observed, adjudicated, and shared. Huneker’s responsibilities included doing publicity for the National Conservatory; a fabled raconteur, he once went drinking with Dvořák and declared “such a man [to be] as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon is to a shipwrecked sailor.” Henderson’s musicales hosted the city’s prominent singers and instrumentalists. But it was Krehbiel who knew everyone and did everything. He wrote program notes for the Philharmonic. He composed exercises for the violin. His books, more than a dozen of them, included the most published musical primer for laymen and the first book-length study of “African-American Folksongs.” During World War I, he translated Wagner’s Parsifal into English for the Met. He wrote that “the power of the press will work for good”—and proved it. Half a century later, the big names in New York musical criticism were Virgil Thomson of the Herald-Tribune and Olin Downes of the Times—antipodes. A chronic gadfly, Thomson was also a notable composer who thought nothing of praising conductors who programmed his own music. His first review, in 1940, blithely yet plausibly declared the New York Philharmonic “not part of New York’s intellectual life.” Downes was a populist who embraced mainstream tastes. His turgid prose was doggedly sincere. Compared to Thomson, he stood aloof from the artists and institutions he assessed. When I arrived at the Times as a young music critic in 1976, “objectivity” had become a fetish. We were not to consort with musicians and administrators. We were never to perform. At the opposite extreme stood Michael Steinberg of The Boston Globe—a practitioner of maximum engagement. Steinberg’s range of local acquaintances was more catholic than Thomson’s. So was his knowledge, and not just of music. His prose was impassioned. His decrees, take them or leave them, were fundamentally informed. Oblivious of reputation, he abjured the tug of mainstream taste. He called Olin Downes “a pompous arch-boor.” Preeminent among the American newspaper music critics of his generation, he was also a throwback to another, more culturally assured era. He recalled the virtues of Krehbiel, Henderson, and Huneker. Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1928, Steinberg was one of 10,000 Jewish children who in 1939 escaped via the Kindertransport. He lived in England, then Missouri. He obtained a master’s degree in musicology at Princeton. He was drafted and wound up in Germany. Upon returning to the United States, he headed the nascent music history department at the Manhattan School of Music. He was lured to The Boston Globe by its managing editor, Thomas Winship, and served as the paper’s music critic from 1964 to 1976. The new Steinberg anthology, Defending the Music, collects some 500 pages of Boston Globe reviews, interviews, and essays. Scrutinizing a city’s cultural life, Steinberg is a terrific companion. His many causes included the composer Milton Babbitt and the pianist-scholar Charles Rosen, both of whom he knew at Princeton. His passion for the music of Arnold Schoenberg proved unquenchable. A master of infectious approbation, he raised a banner for Beethoven’s discarded 1805 version of Fidelio (“a work of surging vitality with a life all its own”), for Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (“a masterpiece, one of the nineteenth century’s very great ones”), and for Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina (with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress one of “two twentieth century operas I love most”). These were all unpopular or esoteric enthusiasms, learnedly espoused. On the opposite ledger, Steinberg’s fundamental discontents included “the dry pseudo-Stravinskian crepitations that American neoclassicists were producing so plentifully in the ’30s and ’40s,” “the stupefied routiniers who run most of the world’s orchestras,” and “that claptrap about making concerts casual and friendly.” He castigated the inability of “the Boston public” to deal “even with the least forbidding sides of contemporary music.” He accused Puccini of taking “sadistic relish in the humiliation of his female leads, victims only of their own pitiful combination of passion and brainlessness.” He compared the smooth finish of Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra to the silken pops fare of Mantovani. Steinberg had barely begun his first full season when on September 26, 1964, he threw down a gauntlet: “The 84th season of Boston Symphony concerts began greyly Friday afternoon, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting. The program consisted of the Brahms Academic Festival Overture, the Symphony No. 1 by Shostakovich, and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.” Of the Shostakovich, he wrote “When it is serious, it is merely gross”—and continued: “Neither [the Beethoven] nor the Brahms Overture was at all well performed, and for the reasons that often hamper Leinsdorf in the German classics. In the face of the expressive demands of certain kinds of music he becomes extremely inhibited—and he seems to fight off the inhibition with an irresistible desire to interfere with the natural flow of things.” Citing half a dozen specific passages in the Pastoral Symphony, including an even more specific measure number, Steinberg diagnosed both “technical” and “musical” carelessness. The previous February, in his third Globe review, Steinberg had skewered Leinsdorf’s predecessor, Charles Munch, who was making a guest appearance in his specialty: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique: “He gave it much as he always did, coarse in sonority, frenzied in temper. … All in all, I found it abominable.” It was too much for the orchestra’s president, Henry B. Cabot, who in 1949 had been the man most responsible for hiring Munch rather than Leonard Bernstein, Serge Koussevitzky’s protégé and anointed successor. An outraged letter to the editor ensued. Steinberg replied with an “open letter” of his own, writing in part: You say that “nobody in the field of musical criticism has a right to assume that he alone knows what is right and what is wrong.” I object to your implication that I have assumed that about myself. … You write about the possible “damage Steinberg can do to the musical situation here in Boston.” You and I share deep concern for the musical welfare of the city. … Last September … [y]ou made a speech in which you said … that since you did not wish to brag by claiming that the Boston Symphony was the best orchestra in the country, you would limit yourself to saying that there was none better. Now any musician would like to live in a city that has the best orchestra in the country, and I am no exception. But I do not believe we can have the best orchestra in the country simply by saying that we do. … There was a time, under Koussevitzky, when Boston orchestral playing represented, along with that in Philadelphia and New York, the best in America. That is no longer so. … I very much want Boston to regain the place it once held, but it is not likely to if no one points out what sometimes is wrong and if the only public statements are those which assume that our orchestra is the best around. Steinberg’s subsequent reviews regularly praised and chastised individual members of the orchestra, most notably the concertmaster, whom he esteemed, and the principal clarinetist, whom he accused of “musical vacuity and bad pitch.” The reviews also disclosed personal relationships. When Leinsdorf departed in 1969, Steinberg’s farewell assessment, though not very favorable, was nonetheless fond: “In all, the seven years … are not likely to be remembered as the most glorious in the Boston Symphony’s history; neither, I suppose, will Erich Leinsdorf think of them as the happiest of his career. … His mission now is to rescue the musician in him, to let the musician function without the drain that goes with being a handcuffed administrator as well. In that, in everything else, and with gratitude for the beautiful and enlightening moments he gave us, we wish him the best.” Steinberg’s tenure at the Globe happened to coincide with a historic decade at Boston’s New England Conservatory: the directorship of Gunther Schuller (1964–76). Schuller was a musical polymath—composer, conductor, and scholar—commanding a singular overview of American musical history, including jazz. Steinberg copiously covered the many NEC Jordan Hall concerts that purveyed repertoire unknown at the BSO’s Symphony Hall—an initiative another critic might have considered peripheral. These typically included the 1965 Boston premiere of Elliott Carter’s Double Concerto (1961)—“considered by many as the greatest achievement in American music so far.” The NEC faculty included the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, once a close associate of his brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg; Steinberg was more than cognizant. Another galvanizing Boston fixture, at Harvard, was the composer Leon Kirchner, who was also a formidable pianist and conductor at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. A 1964 Steinberg review of Schubert, Stravinsky, and Kirchner hailed “three ‘classic’ masterpieces revealed as only a composer’s understanding can reveal them.” And then there was Sarah Caldwell, who presided over a renegade Boston opera company. Steinberg’s gratitude for her stagings of rare repertoire, including Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, was intense—and so was his frequent dissatisfaction with the manner in which her performances were realized. In short: Steinberg cut a wide and varied swath. Nothing important was out of the way. Of all the Steinberg reviews and articles here collected, the most poignant are two dealing with Goeren Gentele, who was to succeed Rudolf Bing as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 1972. Steinberg credibly adduced an institution in decline, in need of new repertoire and better conductors, and burdened with a gargantuan Lincoln Center auditorium insensible to a growing shortage of big voices. It was not only Steinberg to whom Gentele seemed a veritable deus ex machina. But Steinberg had also quite obviously bonded with Gentele the man. For his opening night Carmen, restoring the original recitatives, Gentele had lured Leonard Bernstein into the pit. He was to direct that new production, and also very possibly Alban Berg’s Lulu and Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faust—major 20th-century operas never before staged in Manhattan. He appointed a seasoned Central European of high consequence, Rafael Kubelik, as the Met’s music director—a position that did not previously exist. His most fundamentally far-sighted priority was a planned mini-Met. He told Steinberg: Yes, of course we must do contemporary opera, but you know, you really can’t count things like Wozzeck and Lulu and Rake’s Progress as ‘contemporary opera.’ I know it will not draw as well as Verdi and Puccini and so on, and it is depressing to do such things in a one-third empty house …but then why is it necessary to do them in this immense house? We must in any case have a small theater for chamber opera, experimental works, and so on. … Lincoln Center is full of good theaters of different sizes, but of course I cannot yet speak of going to this or that one, to Juilliard or the Beaumont, with this or that work—it is very delicate and we are very early in our conversations. I think it is important that Lincoln Center works as a unit, that we take advantage of the possibilities. Three months later, Steinberg wrote: The death Tuesday night in an automobile-truck collision in Sardinia of Goeran Gentele … was news to hear with shock and incredulity. The shock is perhaps greatest for us in the United States who stood just before the beginning of what we hoped and thought would be a long period of friendship and Gentele-watching. The pain is the greater for the personal tragedy that took the lives also of his 21- and 15-year-old daughters, Anna and Beatrice, like their mother, the former actress Maria Bergson, and their older sister Janet, who survived in serious condition, young women of exceptional beauty and vitality. … Directing was Gentele’s profession, and he had done much of it, in opera, film, and theater, before becoming director of the Royal Swedish Opera in 1963. The Stockholm company was the most distinguished of the European ones—the others included those from Vienna, Moscow, and Milan—that showed their wares in Montreal at Expo ’67. They brought what for many was the operatic experience of a lifetime, Ingmar Bergman’s production of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, but also Gentele’s own productions of Blomdahl’s Aniara and Verdi’s Masked Ball, both profoundly intelligent, imaginative, and musical through and through. … Gentele was a man of many parts. He knew theater and opera, but he also knew people and understood plenty about money. Quietly with tact and superb efficiency … he negotiated contracts with the nine unions the Met deals with, and without precedent, got everything settled before the expiration of the old contract. … Everyone in the music world has seen Gentele’s appointment as a promise of life and excitement. Where the Met will go is impossible even to guess at, either in long range of in immediate terms. Post-Gentele, Schuyler Chapin took over, then Anthony Bliss, Bruce Crawford, Joseph Volpe, and today’s Peter Gelb, not one of whom was or is an actual practitioner of operatic art. A mini-Met, more exigent than ever with ticket sales plunging, is no longer publicly discussed. The hundreds of writings chronologically amassed in Defending the Music track an eventual leavetaking. For one thing, they disclose an impatience for systemic reforms not in the offing. For another, they increasingly question the place of the critic. In “Putting Reviews in Their Place” (June 21, 1973), Steinberg mulled: It occurred to me that artists’ agents must be among the few people who care about keeping the review as in institution alive. It helps them sell, or they think it does. Other than that, who needs it? I submit that nobody does, really. … We must now question the assumption traditional to American musical journalism, the assumption that every concert—or as many as space in the paper and availability of writers permit—is followed by a review. I shall not go to fewer concerts. … I do, however, want to find a new texture for these pages. … The traditional commitment to the review as the chief journalistic and critical form has … locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about. Between the lines, Steinberg’s reviews confide increasing dissatisfaction with his job. In “The Power of Critics” (April 21, 1974), he writes to a disgruntled soprano unhappy with a review: “The critic can’t, for the sake of supporting a good cause, pretend to an enthusiasm he doesn’t feel. I wish it were otherwise. … Of course critics hope and like to persuade. We write to persuade, but even more to stimulate, to interest, to point out, to make people think. It’s a lot like teaching.” Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Koussevitzky’s birth (July 21, 1974), he peruses a career that mattered: “Koussevitzky was the first to see that an orchestra was more than a collection of players who gave concerts regularly, that it could be the nucleus of a musical university.” Steinberg took a leave of absence in 1975–76 to write a book about Elliott Carter—an unfinished project. He announced his resignation on September 19, 1976, in a low-key essay including a barbed aside: “By and large, journalistic criticism continues an irritant and a depressant.” His new job, crossing over, was to write program notes for the Boston Symphony—in which capacity he also became an artistic advisor. He subsequently held the same dual position for the San Francisco Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra. His program notes were also regularly used by the New York Philharmonic. He coached young musicians at festivals in Menlo Park, California, and Round Top, Texas. He continued to write. His entries for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) were typically personal—not really dictionary entries at all. The most notorious was “Vladimir Horowitz,” ending: “Horowitz illustrates that an astounding instrumental gift carries no guarantee about musical understanding.” (The subsequent Grove Dictionary of American Music [2013] carried a substitute Horowitz entry by Harold C. Schonberg.) Steinberg’s Boston reviews bristle with insights into specific compositions—a contribution transcending the ephemera of the daily press. Anyone sensitive to, say, the art of Edward Elgar would want to save and savor Steinberg’s October 4, 1969 review of Elgar’s Symphony No. 2, reading in part: Elgar’s music is of disturbing emotional depth and complexity, and its subject often is pain. The most nearly comparable figure among his contemporaries is Mahler, but Elgar, lacking Mahler’s relish for agony in public, masks his Weltschmerz and allows his music to be outspoken and explicit only in its moments of triumph and of nobility. Those seem to have become almost alien quantities to us today, and their representation in music so patently sincere, not completely purged of doubt, is no easy thing to face. And so, three program note compendiums—The Symphony (1995), The Concerto (1998) , and Choral Masterworks (2005, published four years before his death)—constitute Steinberg’s most lasting achievement. These essays seamlessly combine musical analysis, cultural history, and sagacious personal experience and reflection. Compared to his Globe reviews, they are also less confrontational, more catholic in taste. Though they are (alas) today too sophisticated for what symphonic audiences have become, there exists no superior published guide to the standard symphonic repertoire. Michael Steinberg was never intended to make a career writing concert reviews. He was ever courageously drawn to what would do the most good. The post The People’s Critic appeared first on The American Scholar.
How Angus Cameron, one of the most significant editors in the history of American publishing, responded to being targeted by the McCarthy blacklist The post What He Stood For appeared first on The American Scholar.
I In December 1998, with talk of impeachment disrupting the apricity of a Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., there was (as the Irish like to say) a wonderful commotion taking place at the Cosmos Club near Dupont Circle. Publishers had shuttled in from New York or Boston or come down on the Metroliner. Democratic socialists from the 1940s and 1950s had come, too (along with a smattering of radicals and red-diaper babies), remarking that the witch-hunt atmosphere of Kenneth Starr’s Washington was not unlike that of the McCarthy period years earlier. Fly fishermen had put down their rods and taken off their waders and drifted in from Montana; salmon fishermen had parted company for the moment from the banks of the Restigouche and the Miramichi; hunters had emerged from the Adirondacks full of tall tales; birders temporarily abandoned their binoculars and migrated from near and far. All manner of chefs were there, gourmands, meat-and-potatoes guys, a few westerners with Stetsons, science buffs, historians of various stripes, writers with only one book in them, colorful con men a mere city block ahead of the law, a Scot with a kilt but, alas, without his bagpipes, and a former foreign correspondent who stepped right out of a Graham Greene novel. They, this whole rich stew of generations that formed pieces of a life, had all come to this august establishment on Massachusetts Avenue for Angus Cameron’s 90th birthday party, and they would hear, among other things, a letter from Gore Vidal, faxed from Italy. “Although I cannot say much good about the century Angus Cameron has lived through,” Vidal wrote in his legendarily dyspeptic way, “I have regarded him as a singularly bright paladin, or dare I use the phrase, wise centurion.” I had come to Washington that day, along with my five-year-old daughter, and as I sat there, staring across the room at Angus, at the father I might have chosen had I had a choice, it was not hard, even after all the years, to recall my first memories of him: the walrus mustache, the blue button-down Oxford shirt (or his Safari brown number), the briefcase that was more like a trunk (battered and brown and containing many things you would not expect), the pinkish Santa Claus face, the big Stetson and huge overcoat, the little Dutch cigars, those Schimmelpennincks he loved to draw on as he leaned back in the chair in his office, always keeping his sport coat on, his tie never undone, peering at you, taking your measure, taking an interest in you, and always, with a wry half-smile, dispensing a special form of wisdom, wisdom gleaned over time and through the way life cuts facets on you, as he loved to say. He would often begin his sentences with “By the way” or “Of course,” and say those words in such a manner of folksy authority and Hoosier flatness, shaped in part by the fine loam of the Indiana prairie, that I would forever after associate those phrases with him and no one else. So, for instance, when talking about Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—perhaps the only person he felt any lasting animus toward—he would say, in speaking of his thin physique: “By the way, I don’t trust a man with no ass.” Or of the time he got so exasperated with the New Haven Railroad that he offered this choice piece of advice: “What you should really do, of course, is turn this whole operation over to the Lionel people.” Or on the amorphous subject of disillusionment: “Oh, by the way. You can’t be disillusioned, you know, without having an illusion in the first place.” Nearly 24 years earlier, the invitation had come unexpectedly. I looked up from my desk in my small cubicle at Alfred A. Knopf one March day in 1975, and there he was, saying, “By the way, I was wondering if you were free for lunch on Thursday?” I didn’t know very much about Angus Cameron at that point. I was 23 years old and had only been at Knopf for a month. His office was across the hall from where I sat. I may not have known very much about him, but I could hear him, could hear that resonant midwestern voice that captured and commanded your attention whether you wanted it to or not. He was 66 when we met, and I had heard (and later learned in much greater detail) that he was thought to be a communist sympathizer and had been the first editor in book publishing to be blacklisted in the 1950s, that the FBI had begun a file on him in 1945 (and maintained it until 1968, J. Edgar Hoover himself becoming directly involved at one point), that he had lost his livelihood, and that after nearly eight years of being in exile, Knopf had offered him a job, a way back into mainstream publishing. During that period of time away from what might be considered the prosaic routines of daily life, he never felt more free and unconstrained. He packed up his Buffalo Kaiser and took his whole family to the farthest reaches of Alaska in order to make money fishing for the Inuits. He also returned east to testify before Senate committees, displaying a knowledge of Robert’s Rules of Order and of the Constitution that far surpassed that of anyone questioning him. (It no doubt helped that he had initially thought of becoming a lawyer—as well as a lion tamer.) It was during this period that he and a man named Albert Kahn (and later, Carl Marzani) ran a publishing house that put out books (such as Harvey Matusow’s False Witness) that no one else would dare publish, all the while pushing back against subpoenas and feeling a twinge when many of his friends kept a safe political distance from him. When a reporter at The New York Times asked Mr. Knopf why he was hiring Cameron after this period of exile, his reply was characteristically gruff: “Because he’s the best damn editor around”—only underscoring what Time had written when Cameron resigned his editor-in-chief’s job at Little, Brown in September 1951: that in the aftermath of Maxwell Perkins’s death, Cameron was the “foremost book editor in the U.S.” When Thursday arrived, we headed off to lunch at La Toque Blanche on East 50th Street, a few blocks east of Knopf’s offices, where Cameron had a table, the first one on the left, held for him every day until one p.m. Ordering for both of us, he wasted little time in finding out that I was an impostor, a guy who talked a good game but didn’t really have what it took to back it up. Between bites of salmon, he pressed me, gently but firmly, like the best of prosecutors. “Oh, by the way,” he said, leaning forward, “did you see that piece in Scientific American about …?” No, I sheepishly admitted, I hadn’t. “Why not?” he asked. “I guess because I have very little interest in science,” I said. He didn’t like that answer, I could tell, but he continued on, apparently unwilling to give up on me. “Well, what about that article in Natural History that discussed …?” “Same answer, I’m afraid.” I was being tested, and I was failing, miserably. What, I sat there wondering, could have motivated him to ask me to lunch in the first place? The short answer is that he genuinely believed everyone should possess the same relentless curiosity and appetite for knowledge—not just information, but knowledge—that he did. So when copies of Scientific American and Natural History—the first issues of yearlong subscriptions, I later learned—filled my tiny mailbox not long after that, the picture slowly came into focus. The morning after I received them, I stood at the door to his office and waited for him to look up from his manual typewriter. When he did, I asked (even though I knew the answer) if he, by any chance, had anything to do with all this. “Of course,” he said, face breaking into a grin, then becoming serious again. “If you’re going to get anywhere in this life, you must always be a contemporary of yourself.” II On the Saturday morning of September 8, 1951, Angus Cameron went to the post office in South Lincoln, Massachusetts, and received a letter in Box 105 that almost, but not quite, took him by surprise. The letter, from his employer, Arthur Thornhill of Little, Brown, informed him that he would need to let the firm know of any activities (i.e. political) he was engaging in when he wasn’t serving in his capacity as editor-in-chief. He was being asked to account for his time. Angus had just gotten back from Maine the previous evening, having been delayed by weather and having missed a meeting on the Friday that was not supposed to have been held without him. But the notion of what is, or isn’t, supposed to occur is always tricky, and the tenor of the times only exacerbated all that. The minute you begin to say that certain things “should” or “shouldn’t” happen, you are alone out there in the blue, assuming a uniform logic and rationale that doesn’t exist and never has. An August 31 article in the anti-communist newsletter Counterattack had brought the Little, Brown board of directors to a point of no return. Not only was Angus prominently mentioned in the piece, but the house itself was essentially being singled out as a place where all so-called communist authors could find a soft landing. Nuance was not of interest to Counterattack. Nor were any gray areas. If you were an author, you were your book, pure and simple. The unrelenting hysteria of the period made it even easier and far more conforming to paint everyone with the same brush. To honestly try and figure out the truth of what was actually going on—well, that required too much work. And besides, it didn’t fit with the prevailing wisdom, or more to the point, the lack of it. For six years, Angus had been followed around by the FBI. Agents had insinuated themselves into every aspect of his life. They tapped his phone, tampered with his mail, went to meetings he had attended, and found people within Little, Brown and other places to report back on his movements and what he supposedly said and thought. Anne Ford, the firm’s publicity director, he would discover years later by his careful reading of his own file, had been one of the informants. John Woodburn, who owed his job at Little, Brown to Angus, had been one of them. Helen Jones, who Angus made sure became the juvenile editor, had been one of them. Even Martha, the woman who worked for the Camerons and whom Angus’s wife, Sheila, nursed back to health during an illness—she, too, had been one of them. The irony is that Angus had always told his colleagues ahead of time if he was preparing to make a speech or sponsor a cause that might be potentially problematic to the firm. Always. But for Arthur Thornhill to ask what he was asking was, in Angus’s view, highly improper, the sort of request that “no free-thinking publisher would make and no self-respecting person would agree to.” When Sheila read Thornhill’s letter, she did so without expression, and what she then said reflected perhaps the most important reason Angus had married her 15 years before: “Oh well, Angus, next year at this time we’ll just be somewhere else, doing something else.” This declaration of unconditional love is something one hopes for, but rarely finds. Any immediate worry about financial security was far less important to Angus and Sheila than their deeply shared belief that it was crucial to cling to one’s principles and reject conditions that would restrict their freedom. To do otherwise would have taken something vital from both of them. In a letter to Jim Aldridge (one of his authors who lived in England) a year earlier, Angus had seen what was coming, displaying an uncanny ability he was blessed (some might say burdened) to possess. He could not only see to the end of the block but around the corner as well: I have the feeling that time is running out for me at Little, Brown. The people there have been fine and courageous but the breaking point has to come sometime for men whose ideas are what theirs are basically. Little, Brown & Company is looked upon by all progressive people as the last standout of a free press here and Arthur Thornhill, the President, has been fine and we have some damned good books on the list. But the Westbrook Pegler smear of me [Pegler was a prominent red-baiting journalist] has let the devils loose and the talk is wild and general. Arthur had a bad time in New York last week and since he knows that I will not change my stand (I have come out as a member and officer of the Progressive Party against the [Korean] War), he is now searching for some beyond which nothing point. I feel sorry for him for he considers me his best friend and he also considers that I will someday soon become a luxury. The situation is tense for everyone but me for I have known for a long time that as good as LB & Co. has been, its chief people have a sticking point being good corporation men. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that business men like Arthur and the rest of them here are bringing about their own ruin by not taking a stand on events. He then turned to a much more pleasant topic, all things being relative, of course: I wish you were here to go deer hunting with me. I hope I will get to Colorado but that fell through so I am going to spend two weeks hunting in Nova Scotia and two more in New Brunswick. The limit in each province is two deer so I may get some winter’s meat. Hope I’ll be around to eat it. But first he had some business to take care of, and he wasted little time in doing so. When he went to work that Monday morning, he told Thornhill how disappointed he was that the board had met without him the previous Friday, the implication being that Thornhill owed him more than that. He also could tell that the letter he had received had not been written by Thornhill but by Stanley Salmen, a man Angus considered bright but corrupt and a liar, a small figure (in the largest sense of the word) who worked behind the scenes, a man who was intent on seeing Angus go and had been scheming to bring about his departure. He knew it was Salmen because Salmen had tried to oust him before, back in 1948, while Alfred McIntyre (Thornhill’s predecessor) was still alive, drafting a similar letter for McIntyre to sign. McIntyre didn’t, just as he had never responded to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Gunfight-at-the-O.K.-Corral letter of December 1947 in which he basically said that it was Angus or him (that Angus’s rejection of George Orwell’s anti-communist parable, Animal Farm—which was also rejected by T. S. Eliot in England—only confirmed his communist sympathies). As it happens, Schlesinger was the one who ended up leaving. (When I spent time with him one evening at his Sutton Place apartment in 2001, he remained adamant that “people like me were right and people like Cameron were wrong.”) Angus not only told Thornhill that he could not accept what the letter asked of him, he also told him why, giving voice to the same thoughts he had two days earlier when he received it. (Thinking about this exchange between Angus and Thornhill brought to mind his exchange with J. D. Salinger not long before that, when he assured Salinger that Little, Brown would not do anything shameful or untoward in the promotion and publication of The Catcher in the Rye. He knew that Salinger had walked out the door of Harcourt, Brace upon seeing a reader’s report that referred to Holden Caulfield as “a neurotic little boy,” and the intensely private Salinger had made it clear he did not want his photograph to appear on anything. The agreement he and Angus reached, though, was that Salinger would, painfully and reluctantly, allow his photograph to be on the jacket for the first printing, but that it would be removed for any printings after that—of which there would be many, Angus confidently predicted. Angus called Salinger’s bluff essentially, by saying he didn’t know of an author alive who didn’t want his book to be read by the public as opposed to winding up in some dark and musty space in a drawer somewhere. The refreshingly direct, unvarnished, look-you-straight-in-the-eye way he had of talking with people—the deep trust he was able to engender, the uncanny way he had of sensing, even knowing, your ineffable desire—was only one of the many things that set him apart.) What made this exchange between him and Thornhill both sad and difficult was that Thornhill, on some level, didn’t fully understand why Angus was taking the stand that he was, unable somehow to grasp and accept that the things that mattered to Angus—his bedrock principles, for one—mattered to him a great deal more than continuing to make a relative fortune ($40,000 a year in 1951!) with stock options and having his own restaurant table held for him until one p.m. As Angus had indicated in his letter to Aldridge, it was easier for him to understand Thornhill’s predicament than it was for Thornhill to empathize with Angus’s position. The Depression was—and yet was not—a distant memory. You either were used to having certain things and a certain way of life and were determined to hold onto all that no matter what secret doubts might gnaw at you (if they gnawed at you at all)—or you were prepared to walk away, regardless of the climate. You were either consumed with how you were going to make the next payment on the Buick or you couldn’t care less, secure in the knowledge that you wouldn’t allow yourself to be tyrannized in that fashion. I have never met anyone who convincingly possessed that degree of self-confidence. Still haven’t. III I have had three mentors in my life, and Angus Cameron has been one of them. His was a life steeped in an intimate and overarching knowledge of history and an unwavering belief in freedom of speech and freedom of the press—a staggeringly rich existence lived with moral integrity and dignity, forever guided by flinty principle and, as Jim Aldridge said, “a cheerful fearlessness.” He was a man who never backed down and never backed up. He was equally at home discussing philosophy with Edmund Wilson as he was cooking up squirrel and venison stew with a couple of fur trappers named Didge and Bromey in the Canadian bush. He distrusted godheads, Henry II and Ted Williams chief among them. “A rational person loses interest in the godhead,” he said with conviction, “because they are usually bores.” And he despised bullies, all of whom, he became convinced after much time spent with the famed boxing figure Cus D’Amato, were both scared and worryingly insecure. He had an enduring belief in the importance of the campfire—and a dread of its ever disappearing. Without his wholly intending it to be, given that he could be a terrible procrastinator, the life Angus Cameron lived serves as both a social, cultural, and political companion through the 20th century and as a recurring, emblematic thread through many people’s lives—from Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein to Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Woody Guthrie, it is fair to say, would never have written the autobiographical novel Bound for Glory in 1943 had Cameron not come across a short story Guthrie had published the year before in Common Ground and convinced him of the importance of doing so. The Joy of Cooking might never have become the country’s culinary bible had it not been for the trust and belief in him that Irma S. Rombauer developed. Angus, who worked for Bobbs-Merrill at the time the book was published in 1936, knew she didn’t want to do very much to promote it, if anything. But when he wrote to say he was “counting on your continued cooperation,” she went wherever the publisher asked her to. He would not take no for an answer when a Princeton historian named Martin J. Sherwin did not want to do a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. That book, which eventually needed the help of Kai Bird, became American Prometheus and won the Pulitzer Prize. He waited 20 years for John K. Terres to complete The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, which would sell, as Angus often predicted to the sales force, “more in its second year than it will in its first, and more in the third year than it will in the second.” Were he still alive, it would give him immense pleasure to know that the book he cowrote with his colleague Judith Jones, The L. L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook, remains in print today, 43 years since it was first published. When Angus walked away from Little, Brown in 1951, refusing the request of company executives to keep them apprised of how he spent his time outside the office, he met great resistance—one of those “breaking points” he referred to in his letter to Aldridge—to his belief in and desire to publish Spartacus by Howard Fast. Not only was Fast a target of McCarthy’s blacklist, J. Edgar Hoover also warned Little, Brown that it would be “unwise” to publish the novel. Not long after Angus left, he helped Fast self-publish Spartacus, which became, despite or perhaps because of the controversy, a success, and an even more successful movie. Fifty years later, on an autumn day in 2002 not long before both of them died less than four months apart, Fast insisted on the notion that “Angus was a hero, almost a legendary figure. We both gave up a great deal, but his was a far greater sacrifice. He was faced with never being able to work again in anything but a menial job, but he was willing to set everything else aside for what he believed in. “Courage is a rare ingredient,” Fast said emphatically on the phone. “The only virtue that mattered was courage. And Angus Cameron was stuffed full of it.” He was who he was, and he knew who he was, and the person that he was and knew was afraid of no one. The post What He Stood For appeared first on The American Scholar.