Four Poems for Marie Colvin, 1956-2012

    Night Sail

    I dreamt of sailing Spray, grandfather Herrick’s 

    pilot cutter, from its berth in an old black-and-white

    on the kitchen wall, past the docks, the cranes and derricks,

     

    not to some sluggish oil-rainbowed bight

    with pier and prom, in the lee of Gosport or Goring,

    not to the wild side of the Isle of Wight

     

    or even a Winslow Homer Nassau mooring 

    but a secluded cove, where we’d ride at gentle anchor. . . 

    When I woke, you were still snoring

     

    your smoker’s snore; I saw the cliff-face of a super-tanker 

    and, tied up to starboard, someone’s super-yacht,

    flying the flag of Panama, or Casablanca —

     

    this was before the crash, not 

    that the crash would have bothered him —

    motionless behind its oil-rich haze, its hot 

     

    sides gleaming and all its tackle trim;

    a super-model, fresh from her shoot on the Ile Ste. Marguerite, 

    her neat mound cupped in a scrap of scrim,

     

    supine on a sun-deck, inviting him eat —

    A drink first maybe? You choose. . .

    The air pulsed with the steady thresh and thrum, the beat

     

    of her super-engines, super-screws, 

    and suddenly someone had drawn a veil, a pall

    of grape-dark clouds over the plaque for La Pérouse.

     

     ~~~~

    Storm-light on the marina, the harbour-wall,

    and on the sea beyond. The steady thresh and thrum.

    The little pastel boulevards, the palms and all

     

    the quayside bustle and the prosperous hum

    of restaurants in that unfashionable resort, the vines and olive groves

    inland — a sunburst showed me how far I had come

     

    from London, S.E.1 to the purples, mauves

    and deep blacks of that bay, the opalescent blues

    and blue-greens of a thousand inlets, creeks and coves

     

    — but Spray was gone with grandfather Herrick and his muse

    and all that I’d held dear was up for sale, 

    and it wasn’t looking good, for me or La Pérouse.

     

     ~~~~

    You were still snoring. I saw a faded, flapping rust-red sail

    and under it, your head propped on sacks of rice

    in the bows of a caïque. . . Here I draw a veil,

     

    a veil of tears and old malt over thinking twice

    before coming with you across the wine-dark sea to Zuwara,

    for I had drunk the milk of paradise,

     

    I did not keep that appointment in Samarra,

    I could only lie awake and listen for your whimpers to subside

    to snores or read to you from John Grisham, John O’Hara

     

    or John Donne; I did not see the sewer where they died,

    the bloated corpses floating downriver, the villages laid waste,

    the heaps of blackened limbs on each roadside; 

     

    how the lives of others were degraded and debased

    in camps and market squares, in bare-bulbed basement rooms

    at police headquarters, how the nameless and effaced

     

    lingered on the air in airless catacombs;

    how the first bones to surface from mass graves

    were children’s bones, how gas from punctured wombs

     

    alerted those who clawed at rubble, or how a man behaves

    who finds his wife and daughter, headless, in the street,

    how a man sinks to his knees and moans and raves. . .

     

    ~~~~

     

    I would have woken you, inviting you to eat, 

    if I had sailed with you on that caïque

    you took from — where? Not the Ile Ste. Marguerite,

     

    not the Isle of Wight — but the flesh was weak, 

    or I was, and I made some excuse. The old fear,

    of falling short, of being found out, of the yellow streak

     

    that runs through me like the streak on the ‘beautiful fusilier,’

    caesiao teres, on the yellowtail, or on the gilthead bream, 

    sparus aurata, that noses through its still-clear 

     

    blue-green glaze — further glazed by steam —

    on the ancient Persian or Syrian ceramic tile 

    you picked up in Beirut from a Karim or an Ibrahim

     

    and lugged back for me, that I might sit in style,

    in state, under the bathroom shelf 

    where it sits; that I might look at it and smile

     

    as I think of its weight in your grip, of your contempt for pelf

    and perfidy, of your straight dealing and your guts

    and have to get a grip on myself

     

    when I recall how you forgave my Ifs and Buts 

    and brought this back for me, thinking of the bream we ate

    in that Lebanese place I sit in till it shuts. 

     

     ~~~~

    I sit in and pick at the grilled bream on my plate

    and drink the fierce north African rosé, carafe 

    after carafe, on the evening of our ‘date,’

     

    year in year out, imagining the chat, the jokes, the chaff

    that could not keep those rockets from their target, from the screen-

    door of the house you slept in that last night; remembering the gaffe

     

    I made the night we met, and the packed shebeen

    we met in, crushed up close on benches, and the reek of kif,

    of Silk Cut and Gitanes, and all the nights between; 

     

    remembering how you almost came to grief 

    so many times, with your ‘I guess they don’t make men

    like they used to,’ not in a sudden squall or on a reef

     

    like La Pérouse, but ‘in the field,’ and how again and again

    you’d make light of the risks you took,

    ‘on the ground,’ whether Tamil or Chechen 

     

    or Taliban, and how you read me like an open book

    when I made my excuses and instead set off —

    not on a dhow packed with spices for the souk,

     

    not on a fishing smack out of Roscoff

    with Tristan Corbière, bound for St. Peter Port, 

    and not on Spray, but on the Eurostar to Paris, putain, boff. 

     

     

     ~~~~

    Then south to that unfashionable resort

    where I ate a bream and drank a carafe of the local gris,

    thinking of the risk you ran when you first caught

     

    Gaddafi’s eye, when he came on like the Sheik of Araby 

    in his desert hide-out, and how your straight-talking saw you through;

    of that line, This level reach of blue is not my sea

     

    and of the storms that broke over you,

    the wilder, crueller waves, ‘the terror of a child

    that is really pure pleasure’ — which you experienced as crew,

     

    the splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds — and they restyled

    as your USP, your ‘brand,’ those buccaneers

    whose bounty you became, though you were undefiled; 

     

    of the night I was granted the freedom of Algiers

    by some PLO big-wigs you conjured from thin air 

    in a restaurant in Notting Hill — so I’d have to spend years

     

    not writing my Life of Albert 

    (‘Our great Arab writer’) Camus, as you didn’t write

    your Life of Arafat; of your struggles with that hair,

     

    its dense cloud of curls, rich-brown, and how night after night

    you’d started on the second bottle by the time 

    I turned up, and the ‘cascade of butterflies in shafts of light.’

     

    ~~~~

    — In Sri Lanka, that was, where they made you mime 

    Surrender and lie down, and killed you anyway —

    or so you thought, from the pain. Another war-crime

     

    (this one cost you your eye). . . If we’d sailed from Oyster Bay

    to Little Neck, or walked the sands of Zahara 

    de los Atunes together, or drunk arak in Raouché;

     

    if you could have promised, say, a Bedouin tent in the Sahara, 

    or Leptis Magna, al–Khums, Khoms —

    but you kept your appointment, not in Samarra, 

     

    not in Baghdad or Basra, or among the piers and proms

    of the vieux port, and not in Tunis, where you were tailed 

    for two weeks, but in Homs.

     

    ~~~~

    Half-steam ahead by guess and lead, for the sun is mostly veiled…

    Blue and white sails on the river, but one, a faded rust-red,

    was not among them — the dinghy that you sailed.

     

    You held the wheel of Trade Winds, aka African Queen, instead. 

    You’d invited me so many times to join you for a cruise,

    upriver, down; and now that you were dead

     

    you intimated there was ‘no way’ I could refuse —

    your final offer. You laughed your smoker’s laugh

    when I climbed aboard, as if to say, What have you to lose,

     

    what have you ever had? Moper, mooncalf,

    landlubber, pub-haunter…There was dried blood

    on the gunwhales, on the coaming, and down one half 

     

    of your lovely, laughter-lined face! With the flood

    we drifted upstream, through fast-running bends,

    past hollow-eyed dark barges sunk in mud,

     

    past the Ship, the Swan. The luck on which this life depends

    (you said), the stats, the stories that we tell, the roar

    of incoming, and the sudden death of friends. . . 

     

    Here is the slipway where, when you were four,

    you watched your mother slip and almost disappear;

    the cemetery full of south-west London men ‘lost’ in the war.

     

    But all the things that matter happen far from here. 

    ‘England expects,’ the signal sent by sat-phone. . . No more.

    The ferryman was waiting, back at Chiswick Pier. 

     

    Smoke

    All autumn, the chafe and jar

    of nuclear war 

    Robert Lowell, ‘Fall 1961’

     

    My father, who’d had

    ‘about as much as he could take’

    by ‘44, and still woke

    swearing at flies 

    and soaked in sweat,

     

    read the Telegraph

    in dread and disbelief

    over his first cigarette,

    narrowing his eyes 

    against the scroll of smoke. . .

     

    Only half-awake,

    dreaming a bitter,

    penitential cup

    of coffee, we squint

    at a screen instead of print,

     

    swipe through

    and see plump child-men 

    jerked by the strings 

    of Twitter,

    their sad posturings

     

    that could turn us to smoke

    before we can even laugh. 

    A father’s no shield

    for his child — nor 

    a husband for his wife. . .

     

    Nothing now is a joke,

    nothing is so mad or bad

    it cannot happen. 

    To that ‘well-meaning guy’

    outside a club in Paddington

     

    who saw her lighting up

    and told her she should stop, 

    Marie just said: 

    ‘I promise you, 

    this isn’t how I’ll die.’


    Poster Girl

    You were waiting for me in the Underground.

    Larger than life, though less lined or scarred

    by it, by shrapnel, vodka, nicotine. . .

     

    So much more of you than on the screen

    I’d stared at all that day, scrolling through 

    the jumpy phone-footage till I found

     

    you, yes — but faceless, lying under charred

    and pock-marked rubble in your dust-caked jeans,

    your blue sweater caked with dust. 

     

    The S-buckle on your belt, so I knew it was you. . .

    So much more now, and less. I looked hard

    at the face, it was the face I loved and took on trust

     

    or took for granted, the sea-green eye alert

    for danger, lips parted; and where there’d only been 

    that shaky picture, pitiful, unjust,

     

    was another you, so clear, and clean,

    and alive again, so alive it hurt, 

    and lost again, in a hiss of doors, a rancid gust.

     

     

    Siren’s Song

    Remember when you breezed into the Swan,

    The Mermaid or the Dove, and swayed 

    And swaggered like a buccaneer

    Who scented plunder, below decks and above?

    Remember how the crew

    Sat laughing in the stern, how far gone

    The ship’s complement of women were?

     

    Remember that sharp stink in the heads,

    The rocky beds, the calm as you rowed free 

    And the path au bord de la mer — 

    A thin brown arm around the cliff? 

    How you might have made a go of it with her

    But instead watched all your gear

    Go overboard with your learning and your love?

     

    Will you — same old riff — never learn? —

    That you will not find safe moorings here, 

    Or at Chiswick Eyot, or anywhere;

    That you should expect the unexpected turn

    Of the tide that leaves you all at sea,

    That some mistakes are final, that too late

    Is too late, is spindrift, is thin air?

    [END]

    Memory’s Cellar

    You enter the cave of horrors in the basement of an Ottoman-era house that is now a small yeshiva just outside the medieval walls of the Old City. On the one hand, there could be no better encapsulation of Jerusalem than this: disjointed histories piled one atop the other like dishes in the sink, all beneath the shade of Aleppo pines. On the other, there is something immediately decrepit about the place. It is wrenchingly nondescript; it looks like extra storage for folding chairs or even for cleaning supplies. Were it not for a Hebrew plaque on the limestone gate outside that reads Martef HaShoah, or The Holocaust Cellar, next to an arrow pointing in its direction, you would have no idea where you had arrived. Even now, no notice identifies this rough place as the first Holocaust memorial ever built. 

     

    The cellar was inaugurated in 1949 on Mount Zion. It is a monument to the destruction of the Jewish people, yes, but also a monument to the way the destruction was understood in its immediate aftermath by those who had survived, and in the newly established Jewish state. But despite its location, a stone’s throw from King David’s alleged tomb, the cellar is not, nor was it ever, an august institution that sought to stipulate a collective memory of catastrophe or to impose a narrative interpretation of any kind. No museology or mixed media went into the creation of this dark shrine. It is a site of raw memory, and also a kind of Wunderkammer of catastrophe. There are many Holocaust memorials and museums in the world now, but there is no other place quite like this one. To enter it is to confront, without any philosophical or historiographical or aesthetic mediation, in the most startlingly direct way, the unvarnished blinding horror of a vanished moment, before that horror was sanitized into language and meaning. The place is truly terrifying.

     

    The entire space is pitch dark, dank, and smells of mold from years of water dripping on ancient stone. This is a place where survivors brought whatever obscene relics they had salvaged from the camps and had somehow managed to carry to Palestine after the war: lampshades made from Torah scrolls, canisters of zyklon-B, the chemical used in the gas chambers, and bars of soap made from human body oil, all displayed in a candle-lit cave in a prominent glass vitrine with tattered green velvet lining. The soap bars turn out to be fake; there is no evidence that the Nazis ever made soap out of human flesh. But that is entirely beside the point: the soap represents one of the cruelest rumors that circulated in the camps, which these survivors believed to be true — and here, in this cellar, what you come to see is how they understood the catastrophe that they had endured, what they remembered of it and how they began to represent those memories with material objects. The mentality that tortured them and sustained them in equal measure is arguably the most important thing on display. 

     

    Toward the end of the cellar, to the extent that it has an exposition, is a small niche that resembles an oratory. Here you see ashes — called “martyrs’ ashes” — from the concentration camps, brought to Israel in June 1949 in a series of glass jars, painted in blue and white stripes with yellow Stars of David, to mirror the uniform that so many Jews had worn up until their deaths. It is an indescribably desolating feeling to stand there in this putrid cellar, in front of those ashes, and to think of the unnamed bodies whose incinerated remains are blended in these peeling glass vials, to know only how those bodies had died and nothing of how they had lived. In any case, there is no attempt to explain or to tell those stories at Martef HaShoah, which is the source of its power. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these dark rooms were already a commentary on the futility, and even the perversity, of narrative. 

     

    These days, the memory of the catastrophe that we now call “the Holocaust” in English or “the Shoah” in Hebrew — as if there is a single word in any language that will capture it — has been spun over the years by governments and memorial institutions in Israel, the United States, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe into respective “lessons” that apparently teach us about this or that: about human rights, about collaboration with evil, about the necessity of Zionism, about the moral failings of bystanders. But these lessons, no matter how true or well-intentioned they may be, when they try to instruct, to caution, or even to inspire, tend to remove us from the actual details of the catastrophe, which is neither parable nor metaphor but quite simply a fact of extreme facticity — a catastrophe in the literal sense of the term — an epochal tragedy that defies facile explanation, a loss with many reasons and causes but above all a loss, devastating, final, incontrovertible. The most crushing horror of the catastrophe is that it happened at all — that facticity; and what, exactly, “it” was. In that sense, the world’s first Holocaust memorial is also its most authentic. Here there is no narrative. Here there is only shock and stupefaction, frozen in cold stone. 

     

    We do not always get to choose the questions that we ask of the past, or the questions that the past asks of us. But we can ask why those questions are posed in the first place, why they are formulated in the way they are, and perhaps most importantly, what their place in our lives should be. I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of the Holocaust, when its shadow was not somehow a fundamental part of how I understood the world and — as perverse and as sad as this is — of how I understood my own Jewishness. I am Jewish, but I am not descended from survivors. And yet the catastrophe was something of a mediating filter to the entire identity for so many in my generation, the way it was taught to so many of us, the stories we heard as children, the ultimate reason we were told that we had to remain Jewish, as if Judaism was merely a form of resistance and not a thing of depth and beauty that had existed long before — and indeed, long after — those who tried to extinguish it. The first time I read Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, the postwar treatise in which he asserts with zero humility or shame that the anti-Semite “creates” the Jew, I was deeply unsettled, I think because I saw myself in his formulation, and I did not like what I saw. Was this, after all, what Jewish survival was meant to look like, an obsession with reading about the camps, and not, for instance, Yiddish poetry by Avraham Sutzkever and Peretz Markish? 

     

    As I got older, I began to question my own questions about the past, questions I had not chosen, but questions that were nevertheless suspect. Why should an event that essentially had nothing to do with me, that certainly does not belong to me, come to occupy so much space at the expense of so much else? Peter Novick and others have shown that at least part of the answer is cultural: in the 1990s, when I grew up, the Holocaust became a public metaphor for any number of things, not least because the murder of millions of Jews in and of itself never seemed reason enough to rivet people’s attention. What seemed — and still seems — to concern most people are the meanings that we have assigned to the catastrophe rather than the brute horror of the catastrophe itself, the lessons, and even the platitudes, that we teach our children about it. I have long been struck by the reality of this elision — that even in our morbidly identitarian moment, if one is to speak about this catastrophe, one necessarily has to speak about something else. (A fine example is Ken Burns’ recent series on American indifference to Jewish refugees in the late 1930s and 1940s, a film that purports to be a documentary about the Holocaust but is mostly interested in parallels between American immigration policy then and our present-day troubles with immigration at the southern border.)

     

    Maurice Halbwachs, the great French theorist of collective memory, said it best in the essay that introduced the concept. “In each epoch,” he wrote in 1925, “memory reconstructs an image of the past that is in accord with the predominant thoughts of the society.” So it is today. We arrange for the past, especially the calamitous past, to tell us what we wish to hear. Many of the Holocaust museums that now exist in virtually every large provincial American city basically exhort their visitors to be nicer people. In Dallas, where I grew up, the Holocaust and Human Rights Museum — again, it is rarely enough for any of these museums to be only a Holocaust museum — encourages visitors to be “upstanders” in their daily lives, to step up when they see injustice happening. There is also a “Beyond Tolerance Theater” that teaches viewers about unconscious bias on the playground or in the workplace. In Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance, a satellite of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which recently opened another version of itself in Jerusalem, emphasizes mutual respect in all its forms, and features a permanent exhibition entitled “Finding Our Families, Finding Ourselves,” which “showcases the diversity within the personal histories of several noted Americans,” including Maya Angelou, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Carlos Santana. The point is that we Americans are all different, and therefore we are all the same. This is one reason why the Holocaust looms so large in contemporary life. It is so usable. Approaches such as these indulge, and even depend on, an individual and collective solipsism: the murder of millions of others in faraway lands is relevant only insofar as it is somehow related to me, to us. 

     

    That is why I had come back to Israel, a place where I have spent a great deal of time over the course of my life, to see this little cave: this is a relic of the time before collective memory crystallized, before the catastrophe became a fount of moral instruction seemingly open to all. I was interested in its the aftermath from the very beginning, long before the era of platitudes and parables — interested in how, exactly, survivors who emerged from an inexplicable and indescribable hell built a durable memory from the ground up, and also in the sacrifices that had to be made for the sake of that memory, the omissions, the elisions, and the emphases. I took as my starting point a comment by Susan Sontag. “Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory,” she remarked in Regarding the Pain of Others. Instead, “what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened.” I don’t think she was entirely right, in the sense that collective memory is a very real force for many communities, even those who did not experience a cataclysmic event. The mechanisms of collective memory may be mysterious, but the evidence that it works is visible in all our inherited cultures. But Sontag was right to see memory as a construction, as something that was not handed down from on high but actively constructed from below — and sometimes at great personal cost to those who built it. And this is why I had come to Mount Zion: the Holocaust Cellar is above all a chapter in the history of memory in its earliest and most unfiltered stages. To visit here is to return to the source. 

     

    In the beginning — or rather at the end — there was widespread indifference and the constant threat of oblivion. What had happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945 was a catastrophe so immense that its extent could not yet be fathomed, a rupture so profound that it could not yet be named, because naming implies narrative and narrative implies meaning. And who, in the rubble, would have the temerity to pronounce confidently, with the intellectual composure required for the task, on the meaning of what had just happened? Who would dare speak of such a thing? Millions had been murdered everywhere in Europe, gassed in windowless rooms and in the backs of trucks, shot at point blank in wooded ravines, hunted in forests until they lost the strength and finally the will to run. Rich and poor, significant and insignificant, cruel and kind — in certain areas, a whole world was systematically reduced to nothing. The great cities of Yiddishland, an entire civilization between the Danube and the Volga, lay in ruins; smaller towns and shtetls simply disappeared from the map. The great synagogues that had been fixtures of urban landscapes for centuries were desecrated and ransacked and gutted. Jewish homes, even the meager ones, were sequestered, and their contents, even the worthless ones, plundered and thrown into piles — mounds of candlesticks, heaps of inexpensive china. What was the lesson in those piles and piles of teacups in makeshift warehouses? No, this was not a parable. This was an actual calamity of unprecedented scope and brutality, a calamity that in some ways had no religious or historical antecedent even in the experience of a people to whom history had already been merciless. 

     

    But along with the utter disbelief, the incomprehension, and the silent awe before the extent of the destruction, there was also a sense among survivors of the encroaching threat of oblivion, the most painful fate of all — one had seen a hellscape, lived to tell the tale, but emerged into a world in which there was no surviving proof of it and no audience eager to believe it or imagine it, all the photographs notwithstanding. Oblivion is the intersection of ignorance and indifference, and oblivion was always a fundamental aim of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, not only the oblivion of the liquidation of the Jewish people, but also the oblivion of how they were liquidated — the details of their destruction, the means of their murder. The Jews were simply to disappear, along with any and all traces of their disappearance. Martef HaShoah emerged precisely at this moment, when oblivion was at the door. 

     

    In the immediate aftermath of the war, the indifference was instantly palpable. “There was never any mystery about what had happened to Europe’s Jews,” Tony Judt writes in a remarkable discussion of the subject near the end of Postwar. “That an estimated six million of them were put to death during the Second World War was widely accepted within a few months of the war’s end.” Accepted, but not wrestled with. Few were really interested in the plight of the Jews. In the bloodlands of eastern Europe, antisemitism remained, and Jews who returned home after their liberation from the camps were sometimes met with further pogroms, most notoriously in Kielce, Poland in July 1946. In the west, there was less outright violence but just as much elision. The French newspaper Le Monde, for instance, would write, even passionately, of “survivants des camps” and even of “déportés,” but it would never speak of Jews specifically. What began to matter to growing numbers of survivors was to preserve evidence and testimony, without which all would not only still be lost but also forgotten, which would be akin to losing it all again. As the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard observed, decades later, in Le Différend, a treatise that responded to a rising tide of denialism about Auschwitz, the after-effect of precisely this phenomenon: 

    It is the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong…. The perfect crime does not consist in killing the victim or the witnesses…but rather in obtaining the silence of the witnesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of the testimony. You neutralize the addressor, the addresses, and the sense of the testimony; then everything is as if there were no referent (no damages). 

    This was why, even as the destruction was still underway, the fight against oblivion had already begun, the struggle to save the documentary evidence. The astonishing story of the Jewish historian Emmanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabbos project in the Warsaw Ghetto is now well known: trapped in the ghetto, he and his group of fellow imprisoned historians risked their lives to preserve every trace they could find that revealed something, anything, about their own destruction. They collected quite a lot — diaries, posters, decrees, and about twenty-five thousand documents that detailed the extermination camps at Treblinka and Chelmno and the ghettos elsewhere in Poland. “It must be recorded with not a single fact omitted,” read one of their circulars. “And when the time comes — and it surely will — let the world read and know what the murderers have done.” The historical documentation assembled by these historians in extremis was then buried underground in three large milk cans, only two of which have been found. Ringelblum was murdered with his family in March 1944. Only one member of Oyneg Shabbos survived — the writer Rachel Auerbach, who later became the head of the testimonies department at Yad Vashem, an institution whose existence was still unimaginable at the end of the war. 

     

    Oyneg Shabbos was far from the only such enterprise. The documentary impulse was a form of resistance, and it appeared in Jewish circles across wartime Europe. The writers Vassily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenberg, Soviet soldiers at the time, were in the battalion that liberated Treblinka. Grossman was haunted by the gas chambers that he discovered there, which he struggled to grasp: “What are the pictures now passing before people’s glassy dying eyes? Pictures of childhood? Of the happy days of peace? Of the last terrible journey?” But he concluded: “No, what happened in that chamber cannot be imagined.” When the two returned home, they set about compiling The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, a sprawling five-hundred-page collection of memories from Jewish survivors, interviews with non-Jewish eyewitnesses, and dispatches by the authors themselves — a massive undertaking that was published in Yiddish, not Russian. Soviet censors initially ordered that the contents of the book be changed: they wanted to shift the focus away from Jewish suffering, and they wanted certain passages to be rewritten so as to downplay atrocities committed by Ukrainian civilians against Ukrainian Jews. By 1948, the censors took it one step further: they scrapped the book entirely, destroying even the typefaces used to print it. The attack on The Black Book was an opening salvo in Stalin’s war against “rootless cosmopolitans,” a favorite communist term for Jews, and one of the earliest state-sanctioned attempts after the war to condemn the catastrophe to oblivion. 

     

    Much the same was true in Western Europe, far from the slaughterhouses of the east. In occupied France, as early as 1943, Isaac Schneersohn, a rabbi-turned-industrialist from the family of the Lubavitcher rebbes, called a meeting of local Jewish leaders in the small apartment he was renting in Grenoble, then under Italian control. His aim was to document the atrocities that they saw unfolding everywhere around them. “These days, when we evoke the horrible figure of six million victims,” Schneersohn later recalled, “the few Jews we ourselves witnessed being deported seem a little less weighty in comparison, even a drop in the ocean. But at the time, when we thought about what they went through, pushed up against cold walls, left in waiting rooms or in train stations, when we contemplated the sheer number of the elderly, of women, of the sick, we were seized with anguish and submerged in sadness.” Far from the Warsaw ghetto, he nevertheless responded in exactly the same as Emanuel Ringelblum: what mattered was fighting oblivion until the very end. “No one among us believed he would emerge alive from that oppressive atmosphere where it was literally impossible to breathe….And so I had only one desire: to record all these Nazi crimes so that those who survived could transmit the facts to future generations and record, for history, the memory of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jewish people.” Schneersohn did survive, and his makeshift archive became the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC), the foundation for Paris’ Mémorial de la Shoah, the first memorial of its kind in Western Europe, dedicated in 1953. 

     

    Almost immediately, the question became what to do with all this documentary evidence, hundreds of thousands of linear feet of archival material, diary entries, and typeset testimonies that sought to preserve traces of the inexplicable. In time, each of the names that began to emerge for the calamity was inadequate, because, again, names imply narrative, and each narrative somehow reduced the event into a particular frame that diminished either its horror or its totality, and sometimes both. In Yiddish, some survivors almost immediately began calling the Nazi attempt to liquidate the entire Jewish people a “khurbn,” a term that means “destruction” and originally referred to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in approximately 70 CE, the watershed event in early Jewish memory. But the Nazi genocide of the Jews was hardly the same: this time what was destroyed was far more than sacred space — not the “cultic center” of a particular religion but an entire people, many of whom had nothing to do with the religion of their ancestors. By the late 1930s, journalists in Palestine were already using the biblical term “shoah” — Hebrew for “catastrophe” — to describe the great darkness that had fallen over the Jews of Europe. “That day is a day of wrath,” we read in Zephaniah 1:15, “a day of trouble and distress, a day of shoah and desolation, a day of clouds and thick darkness.” (The word shoah appears in a number of places in the Hebrew Bible, always to denote devastation.) For many at the time, that sense of biblical catastrophe, of primal destruction, encapsulated the Nazi assault. After the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, for instance, Davar, a great Hebrew daily now defunct, noted that “a terrible shoah befell the millions of Jews of Poland, a shoah whose scope and sights far exceed anything experienced in recent years.” But shoah means catastrophe merely in the general sense of disaster, as in natural disaster, as if what happened came from nowhere and had nothing to do with human will. 

     

    And then, of course, there was “holocaust,” soon to be the most prevalent of all the names and by far the worst of the lot. The word came from the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the roots holos and kostos, which together meant “totally burnt,” completely consumed by the fire, as in an animal offered for ritual sacrifice. “Holocaust” already had a premonitory valence in English: Nathaniel Hawthorne had used the term in 1844 in “Earth’s Holocaust,” a short story that uncannily anticipated the Nazi book burning at Berlin’s Babelplatz in May 1933. It describes a great conflagration of the books of the world: “Thick, heavy folios, containing the labors of lexicographers, commentators, and encylopedists, were flung in, and, falling among the embers with a leaden thump, smoldered away to ashes like rotten wood.” In 1933, Newsweek had used the term to describe the actual Babelplatz book burning, and in 1943 The New York Times did the same to describe the plight of Jewish refugees in Palestine “surviving the Nazi holocaust.” 

     

    But it was Elie Wiesel who was most insistent that “holocaust” be used to describe the catastrophe that he had witnessed. In the 1980s, he explained his reasoning in an appearance at a Chicago synagogue. The term, he said, enshrined the Jewish religious significance of the catastrophe, because it called to mind the Akedah, or the binding of Isaac, one of the most harrowing passages in the Bible, when God demands of Abraham that he sacrifice his son. “I call Isaac the first survivor of the Holocaust because he survived the first tragedy,” Wiesel said. “Isaac was going to be a burnt offering, a korban olah [a type of sacrifice in the Temple that had to be entirely consumed by the fire on the altar], which is really the Holocaust. The word ‘holocaust’ has a religious connotation. Isaac was meant to be given to God as a sacrifice.” But this is precisely the problem with the term. It paints a picture of Jews being led to their deaths like Isaac by Abraham, like lambs to the slaughter, devoid of agency or will, and it also casts the entire event as something ordained by God to purify the world. It confidently presumes a theology. It perversely sacralizes mass murder. And unlike in the story of Isaac’s crucible, no angel appeared in the sky to prevent the murder.

     

    Although the Holocaust Cellar appeared amid the emergence of these endless debates, it differed from other early attempts to come to terms with the catastrophe in two ways: it sought to show and not to tell — the articulateness of the place is not discursive but physical; and it was established in the nascent Jewish state, a representation of a world-historical event in a new place whose existence represented another world-historical event. Even now, the cellar is an interplay between destruction and redemption. 

     

    The principal architect of Martef HaShoah was Shmuel Zangwill Kahana, the Director General of the new state’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, who served in that office for two decades. Kahana was born in Warsaw in 1905 into a family of distinguished rabbis, and he himself received rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Moses Soloveitchik (the son of the renowned Rabbi Haim Soloveitchik and the father of the renowned Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik), as well as a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Lieges in Belgium. With his wife and his parents he escaped Poland in 1940 and settled in Palestine. Kahana was a religious Zionist, in his ideology and his party affiliation, for whom the Holocaust — or the Shoah, or the khurbn, or whatever the catastrophe was to be called — belonged squarely within the long sequence of disasters in Jewish history, from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE to the massacres by the Crusaders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to the atrocities by the Ukrainians in the seventeenth century to the pogroms in Russia from the 1890s to the 1900s, a teleology of tragedy to which the establishment of the State of Israel was the ultimate rejoinder.

     

    Kahana believed that commemoration should be something of a religious rite, that it should adhere to Jewish religious tradition and its inherited approaches to mourning. This is why the choice of location for the cellar was paramount. “The cellar projects onto Mount Zion,” Kahana wrote shortly after the opening. “And Mount Zion in return projects onto the Holocaust cellar.” (The road that winds up to the top of Mount Zion is named for him.) A verse in Obadiah declares that “upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance and there shall be holiness.” But the choice of Mount Zion had also another significance: it projected onto Mount Moriah, where according to the Biblical account Isaac was bound, further to the east, where the gold-domed mosque now stood, still behind the cease-fire lines and beyond Israeli jurisdiction. That was not just coincidence: for Kahana, as for Wiesel, Isaac was the first survivor. The religious dimension of the cellar is still unavoidable, though it does not interfere with the experience of the place. Nothing could. 

     

    As has been hotly debated for decades now, the Jewish community in Palestine, and later the state of Israel, had an impossible relationship with the catastrophe in Europe, when it was unfolding and especially whenit was over. In the words of the Israeli journalist Tom Segev, the response during the war was “less than compassionate” and, in the uncertain aftermath “a great silence surrounded the destruction of the Jews.” It was only in 1961, with the public trial of Adolf Eichmann, as Segev and others have insisted, that there began “a process of identification with the tragedy of the victims and survivors, a process that continues to this day.” But other historians, most notably Anita Shapira, have convincingly complicated this view of Israeli diffidence or indifference, noting that, among other things, Ben Gurion’s push for reparations from the German government in the early 1950s, as well as the ferocious pushback against that campaign, led by a young Menachem Begin, showed that Israel’s establishment in those early years was not so much “silent” regarding the Holocaust as terrified of its explosiveness. Before the Eichmann trial, after all, there was the Kasztner trial, a major moment in the public consciousness of the new state, when, in 1953, a hotelier named Malkiel Gruenwald, who lost fifty-two relatives in Auschwitz, accused the Hungarian-born journalist and civil servant Rudolf Kasztner of collaborating with the Nazis, and Adolf Eichmann in particular. The government took Kasztner’s side, suing Gruenwald for libel. But the courts acquitted Gruenwald and ruled that Kasztner had “sold his soul to the devil.” When the government attempted to appeal the case, it collapsed under public outrage. Kastner was assassinated by a group of veterans walking into his Tel Aviv apartment in March 1957. (His granddaughter is now the head of the Labor Party in Israel.) This was not silence; it was trauma. 

     

    But if there was not silence, there certainly was stigma. One of the reasons that the bars of soap on display in the cellar are so moving, inauthentic as they may be, is that in Hebrew survivors were often and cruelly called sabonim, which means “soapsters.” Among the Jews of Palestine, there was often an undisguised contempt for the fact that their European brethren had not defended themselves and had, at least in the eyes of some, allowed a terrible fate to fall on them. How could they have let the Germans turn them into soap? In 1944, Davar asked that question in a headline: “Why are the Jews of Hungary not defending themselves?” The Zionist ethos rebelled against the apparent lack of resistance. Likewise, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a Polish Zionist leader who later became Israel’s first Interior Minister, had nothing but disdain for the Jews of Poland who “had not found in their souls the courage” to defend themselves. In his mind, they had preferred “the life of a dog over an honorable death.” These condescending Zionists exaggerated, of course: there certainly was Jewish armed resistance in the Nazi inferno. But there was not, nor could there have been, enough.

     

    So many new citizens of the newly minted state had come from Europe and were stranded, as it were, in trauma and stupefaction. No one has written about this better than David Grossman, whose novel, See Under: LOVE, published in 1989, follows a young Israeli boy, Momik, the child of two survivors, who tries to exorcise what he calls the Nazi “beast” from his family’s life. There is a moving passage early in the novel when Momik tries to get rid of the tattoo on his grandfather’s arm. His grandfather is always muttering, locked in a trance, and Momik is convinced that the tattoo is the problem. “The numbers drove him crazy because they weren’t written in ink and they couldn’t be washed off with water or spit. Momik tried everything to wash grandfather’s arm, but the number stayed fixed.” Indeed, the numbers could never be washed away. 

     

    “The moment it happened it was known here,” Yehuda Bauer, the great Israeli historian of the Holocaust, one of the first to study the subject seriously in any language, told me about the catastrophe. It was a late summer afternoon in Jerusalem, and Bauer, now ninety-seven, kindly received me in the small apartment that he keeps in an assisted living facility above an anonymous shopping center next to the Shaare Zedek hospital, not far from Yad Vashem. I brought a box of cookies from the bakery downstairs, and instantly regretted it: Bauer struggles to walk, and insisted on rummaging in his kitchenette for the right plate to serve the cookies. He and his family had left their native Prague on the night the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, and his father brought the family to Palestine, where he has remained ever since. “We knew about the ghettos,” he said. “What was clear was that if the Germans conquered Palestine we wouldn’t survive.” When he was a Ph.D. student, Bauer told me, there were not yet any scholarly studies of the Holocaust, but he had been influenced by Abba Kovner, the Polish-Jewish writer and partisan leader who had led Nakam, a postwar paramilitary organization devoted to vengeance – to murdering six million Germans in exchange for the six million murdered Jews. Kovner fainted after giving testimony at the Eichmann trial, one of the most memorable moments in that ongoing drama, recorded on live television for all the world to see. “He persuaded me very early that the Holocaust was the most important event in the Jewish twentieth century, and maybe in all of Jewish history,” Bauer said. “When I told him I didn’t know the languages at the time, that I was scared, he said, ‘that’s fine—you should be scared.’” 

     

    It was clear from the very beginning that some edifice would have to be erected in Israel in commemoration of the catastrophe in Europe, but the government could not decide what form, exactly, that commemoration should take. The question became urgent in June 1949, when the Israeli government received a glass coffin containing thirty-one jars of “martyrs’ ashes” from Austria. (Simon Wiesenthal led the group of survivors who brought them to Jerusalem, and their installation in the cellar is regarded as the first public ceremony of Holocaust commemoration in Israel.) But it was the Ministry of Religious Affairs, under Kahana’s stewardship, that took charge of this occasion, not any other part of the government. He devised a major public spectacle: a coffin containing the jars lay in state in Tel Aviv, where thousands of people visited it, and it was later transported to Jerusalem by military convoy, wrapped in an Israeli flag. Kahana prepared for the arrival of the martyr’s ashes in Jerusalem by soliciting many pieces of Judaica that local survivors had brought from Europe — Torah crowns, incense boxes, menorahs. His aim was clear: the cellar, quickly cleared from a basement in an old Ottoman building, was a response to the Destruction of the Temple, however small. The newspaper Hatsofeh put it this way: Kahana’s cellar was “a counterpoint to the removal of the articles from the Holy Temple in Jerusalem to Rome.” The cellar was nothing less than a retort to the Arch of Titus. The symbolism was complete.

     

    Before the Israeli government decreed, in April 1951, that Yom Ha’Shoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, would fall on the twenty-seventh day of Nissan, which was the date in the Hebrew calendar when the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed in 1943, Kahana had his own ideas. In 1949, in keeping with his agenda, and his view of the Jewish past, Martef HaShoah was officially inaugurated on Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, a religious day of fasting that commemorates the day on which the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and many other calamities befell the Jews across the centuries. In this way the Holocaust was fitted into the tragic pattern of Jewish history as enunciated by the great nineteenth-century Jewish historians — Heinrich Graetz, Leopold Zunz, even Simon Dubnow, murdered in Riga in 1941. But no interpretation, not even the lachrymose one, can master what one sees in those dark rooms: what they evoke is beyond a mere chapter in a saga of suffering. I actually thought of Dubnow when I wandered through the cave. “Yidn, shraybt un farshraybt,” a number of survivors recall him saying before his murder—Jews, write and record. This is precisely what Martef HaShoah seeks to do, however humbly, however

    violently. 

     

    In the years that followed the establishment of the state, there were frequent attempts to establish the cellar as a site of political inspiration, as the historian Doron Bar has ably documented. Kahana arranged for Tisha B’Av to be commemorated in the cellar every year, with the ashes of murdered European Jews brought to the nearby synagogue at David’s tomb. In 1950, the year after the cellar was dedicated, the ceremonies of Israel’s Independence Day began on Mount Zion, and with one of the objects in the cellar — the blowing of a shofar that had been brought from Europe. Kahana was hopeful that all of these events would entrench his vision of what the catastrophe would mean in the eyes of the wider Israeli public. “The commemoration in the Holocaust cellar,” he said, “will undoubtedly penetrate wider public circles and bind them to the memory of the Holocaust, as specific dates become accepted. For the time being, we are laying the foundations and making attempts to establish special events. We will see the effects of those actions as time goes by.” Those ambitions alienated some, including Bauer. “I was never religious,” he told me in Jerusalem, when I asked him what he thought about the cellar. “I was never interested in that sort of thing.” 

     

    But this was really as far as “narrative” ever got on Mount Zion, at least in relation to Holocaust memory. Regardless of Kahana’s intentions, the space that he cleared for his terrible chamber never quite became a museum that sought to depict the catastrophe in religious terms. This was because it became a space for survivors to come and grieve on their own terms, in a time when there was virtually nowhere else for them to go. In the north the kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, the Ghetto Fighters’ kibbutz, had not yet opened its famed galleries, known as the Ghetto Fighters’ House, and neither had Yad Mordechai in the south opened its museum. For a few short years, Martef HaShoah was essentially all there was, and it touched a nerve far beyond what Kahana imagined. People came from everywhere, carrying what they had — memories of lost loved ones, treasures from forgotten towns, objects that somehow testified to the destruction that they had survived. They did not come to Mount Zion to “tell a story” as much as they came to ensure that what they remembered did not vanish along with everything else they had known. During Hanukkah, a number of survivors would assemble in the cellar and light candles in lamps that had been brought from Europe.

     

    In 1953, the fourth year of its existence, a local association of Hungarian survivors decided to establish an archive of sorts in the cellar — a beit gnazim, as they called it — that would record the names of the murdered along with any other relevant documents they had. Around the same time, small communities of survivors began to put up plaques with the names of their towns in Europe that the catastrophe had either devastated or eradicated altogether. By 1952, hundreds of these plaques were placed on the walls of the courtyard outside the cellar as well as inside, all over its dark walls. This was why one unnamed survivor told the religious Zionist newspaper Hatsofeh in December of that year that the site should be Israel’s “traditional monument for the commemoration of the Holocaust,” because there were publicly displayed names of “all the lost communities.” In fact there was no room, in this small spot, for the names of all the communities, but the place names that are given are deeply affecting. Each one represents countless graves that were never dug. They even look like gravestones. 

     

    At the same time, on the other side of the city, there was another Holocaust memorial project devoted to memorials and names, to be called “Yad Vashem” for precisely that reason. Its name derived from Isaiah 56:5: “And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (yad vashem) that shall not be cut off.” In August 1953, the Knesset passed the Yad Vashem Law, establishing the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, which was to be Israel’s official national memorial to the Holocaust. Debates had raged since even before 1948 about what the place of Holocaust memory should be in the landscape of the new state, but Ben-Gurion had hesitated until memorials began to crop up all over Europe in the early 1950s. He had been present at the dedication of Isaac Schneersohn’s Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu in the Marais district of Paris in the summer of 1953, and had returned to Jerusalem adamant that the Jewish State, and nowhere else, be the official home of Holocaust memory. And so the purpose of the newfound memorial project, according to the law passed in the Knesset, “is to gather in the homeland material regarding all members of the Jewish people who laid down their lives, who fought and rebelled against the Nazi enemy and its collaborators, and to perpetuate their memory.” 

     

    Martef Hashoah was a humble cellar outside the Old City, on the eastern side of Jerusalem, which derived its gravitas from its proximity to some of the holiest sites in Judaism and Jewish memory. Yad Vashem, which would not open to the public until 1973, very much derived its legitimacy from its position in the west of the city, the “new” city, on the slopes of Mount Herzl, the hallowed ground of secular Zionism. As it grew in size and stature in the decades after its opening, the newer memorial museum and archive became the place where Israel tells the story of the Holocaust — a sophisticated museological exposition of the European events, in various media, that ends with stunning views of Eretz Yisrael, the rightful home of the Jewish people. Point made. The site is now a massive complex with state-of-the-art technology, in a structure that the architect Moshe Safdie boldly cut through a mountain. This is where Israeli prime ministers bring endless delegations of foreign leaders to understand something about the Jewish, and the Israeli, past. The Zionist lessons of Yad Vashem are plain. IDF soldiers are routinely brought through the museum as part of their training. Rest assured they do not visit the cellar on Mount Zion, or even know that it exists. They can be forgiven, as the site is open by appointment only, and even that is irregular. When I visited most recently, I had to beg for access. It was a stroke of luck that I was allowed in. 

     

    How far we have come from the cave on Mount Zion, from its rawness, from its urgency. Today much of Holocaust memory — or much of public Holocaust memory, I should say — is high-minded kitsch. In museums and memorials across the globe, it often seeks to sanitize and moralize in equal measure, to spin the nightmare of Auschwitz into some kind of sermon about the future. Forget, but only for a moment, that the cautionary power of Auschwitz has demonstrably failed: the memory of the past has not stopped or genocides, even in Europe, nor has it impeded antisemitism, which, perhaps especially in the United States, is more than alive and well, and at a time when Holocaust education has never been more mainstream. Beyond all that, Holocaust memory has now become a pixilated performance, and sometimes even a genre of entertainment. This, it would seem, is the future of cautionary memory. 

     

    For many memorial institutions, the reigning anxiety is the impending disappearance of the last generation of survivors, women and men who have been living custodians of memory for decades and who have helped the event come alive for generations of schoolchildren and others by means of memoirs, documentaries, and interviews. There is a manifest belief among the leaders of many of these institutions that survivors should simply not be allowed to die like everyone else, that somehow they owe us more of their time and more of their trauma beyond the grave. Hence the bizarre “Dimensions in Testimony” project, an initiative of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, which has created literal holograms of twenty-five survivors, a technology now available at twelve different Holocaust museums worldwide, from Skokie, Illinois to Sydney, Australia. In the words of the project’s promotional materials: “Now and far into the future, museum-goers, students and others can have conversational interactions with these eyewitnesses to history to learn from those who were there.” 

     

    Holograms! Spielberg was accused of kitsch, and worse, for Schindler’s List, a film that actually dared to depict victims inside a gas chamber. “Dimensions in Testimony” is not nearly as impudent and outrageous as that, but it is cut from the same cloth. I have now seen a number of these spectacles of artificial intelligence in museums in different cities, and it is the “artificial” part of the “intelligence” here that bothers me most. After all, so much of the fight for Holocaust memory was, and remains, a fight for the truth, proving against the violence of denialism that the catastrophe really did happen, that it was not, in fact, a distortion or a hoax. And yet here we are, relying on literal distortion, on a technological hoax, to tell the story. 

     

    “Dimensions in Testimony” goes something like this. You sit down in an auditorium of some kind, the lights dim, and all of a sudden a hologram appears, a pixilated reconstruction of a smiling survivor, who is magically alive again, and gives a brief summary of his or her experience, and then takes questions. You can ask the survivor almost anything you want — their favorite color, their favorite food. In fact, that is the point: to make sure people know that these holograms are real people, which they are not. The docent running the show at one museum I visited told the audience that we should make sure to ask the survivor to tell us a joke. Someone even did, and people even laughed. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. What stupendous disrespect! But this is where Holocaust memory, and collective memory, is headed: insults to decency and insults to intelligence in equal measure. Before you know it, sorrow will be fun.

     

    Martef Hashoah is more or less entirely forgotten in our era of Holocaust holograms. But the cave of horrors bears revisiting, if only to confront anew the stupefaction, the muteness, the shock, the colossal humbling, that it offers. As we progress further and further from the catastrophe itself, that original sense of the smashing of the mind against it is too often forgotten. We think that we can believe that the catastrophe happened — obviously it happened, didn’t it? — and we are no longer even all that afraid of it, because we have allowed it to make sense in some strange way, with all the arrogance of theory and hindsight. We are so familiar with it, when we think about it at all. But on Mount Zion familiarity is out of the question. There we are reminded that there is no narrative, no intellectual or religious or emotional framework, that can adequately capture the hopelessness and abjection preserved in these basement rooms, no lesson they can be said to teach. The ashes are the ashes; the soap is the soap.

    Living by the Roundabout

    “This is Jane calling from central Kenya. Sasa, so, I am in a lesbian relationship, and we are hoping to get married, and I would like to pay bridewealth to my partner’s father, but we don’t know how to bring this issue up with him because he thinks we are just friends.” The voice spills from our taxi’s radio, tuned to one of the FM call-in stations that have recently begun to proliferate in Kenya — perhaps Radio Maisha, Lifestyle Radio, or Classic 105 Kenya.

     

    It is July 2018, and my daughter Ada and I are seated in the back of the taxi. Ours is one of at least two hundred cars stuck in traffic at a major roundabout on one of Nairobi’s main thoroughfares. The four traffic policemen manning the roundabout have let the vehicles in the other three lanes enter and exit the circle twice, but we remain stuck, packed as tightly as kernels on an ear of corn. Three rows of motionless vehicles, as still as a parking lot. All the while we are being assailed by brash vendors, both men and women, selling bottled water, peanuts, bananas, padlocks, tea strainers, and all kinds of plastic merchandise from China or Thailand.

     

    Apparently, it is a common practice for the police to rotate the traffic jam on each of the four roads feeding into the roundabout so that the vendors have captive customers throughout the day. It just happens that it is time for vendors to “eat” from our side of the road. We have been sitting in the traffic for almost ten minutes now, listening to the radio.

     

    “So, are you the husband in the relationship?” The male host of the radio asks with a hint of mockery. Before Jane can answer, another male caller interrupts: “This is interesting. So, you are the husband in the relationship, and you want to pay bridewealth. Instead of wasting money like that, why don’t you give it to me, and I will pay bridewealth for my wife?”

     

    “Sasa, now,” Jane replies bashfully. “You don’t understand, but my girlfriend and I are passionately in love, and we have been living together for three years now and we want to get married and make it official.”

     

    Ada and I exchange glances. “Make it official,” I wonder out loud. “But gay marriages are not legal in Kenya.” The government claims that same-sex relations are a foreign transgression and that they pollute Kenyan religious and cultural values. According to the law, the penalty for those found engaging in homosexuality is fourteen years in prison. George, our taxi driver, smiles but does not say anything.

     

    “What?” Another woman caller interjects. “A woman wants to marry a woman and pay bridewealth for her? You people are showing bad behavior for the young people. And this is a sin.” You can almost see her nose curl and her head shake with disapproval.

    “You don’t realize this but the love between my girlfriend and me is more passionate than that between a man and a woman,” Jane responds.

     

    In the background we hear several phones ringing, but rather than answer them the radio host decides that he is ready to provide a solution: “Take the time and introduce the idea of bridewealth slowly to your girlfriend’s father. And depending on how much money and livestock you are willing to offer, he might be amenable to it.”

     

    I look at my watch. We have not moved for fifteen minutes. “Why are we not moving?” Ada asks me. I redirect the question to George. “The vendors have paid the police to stop the traffic so they can sell their goods.”

     

    Ada still looks a little confused, so I repeat the question. George looks at me and clicks his tongue: “Si hawa watu wamelipa polisi.” These people have paid the police to bring the traffic to a halt so they can sell their goods. “Hawa watu wanatusubua kabisa.” These people are messing us up. George has a gaunt black face, a face thinned by years of overwork, and when he curses his temples tighten. You can feel his weariness; it sinks into you.

     

    July is the coldest month in Nairobi and all the vendors and policemen are clad in sweaters and coats. A female vendor is wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with “University of Iowa,” which she probably purchased from one of the many used American clothing markets all over Kenya now. The bougainvillea bordering the roundabout looks sad. Gray and dusty. The bright pink and orange flowers of April and May are all gone. July in Nairobi is leaden English weather without the rain.

    Bored and thirsty, confined by the vendors and policemen’s “entrepreneurial spirit,” many of the nearby drivers part with forty or fifty shillings (about fifty cents in American dollars) to buy bottled water, bananas, or peanuts. They might even buy a flashlight in anticipation of a power blackout, or a plastic tea strainer as a gift for their mothers or grandmothers next time they visit the village. Buying trinkets is a pleasant enough way to pass the time, and none of the drivers seem to mind parting with a few shillings. The car next to us is a hulking black Range Rover. When I look over at the driver, I see a prosperous-looking man nestled in the passenger seat passing a hundred-shilling note to the vendor, and the vendor, a man who barely looks to be in his twenties, handing him a blue handkerchief wrapped in plastic.

     

    My daughter leans her head against the window and sighs. I don’t blame her; it has been a long day. We have just spent nearly five hours on the congested train from Mombasa to Nairobi and are eager to get to our guesthouse on the western side of the city. Our taxi is still stuck. We haven’t moved for twenty minutes.

     

    And then, without warning, the police officers instruct the vendors to clear the road, and wave us through into the roundabout. Still annoyed, George clicks his tongue again, starts the car engine and complains. “Hawa watu wabaya kabisa” — these people are terrible. For taxi drivers such as George, making money requires moving fast and getting the first crack at the next passengers. The delay has cost him money.

     

    As soon as the taxi starts moving, George turns up the volume of the radio—he is eager to hear about the next caller’s dilemma. Her name is Petronella and she is from the Kisii region of Kenya, and she is calling to bemoan the fact that her husband is useless and has abandoned her and their five children. Because she cannot find him, she has been forced to sleep with other men to make ends meet. Callers respond with the predictable condemnation and support, in equal measure. 

     

    I manage to tune out the radio conversations. I have become used to hearing these kinds of call-in complaints all over Nairobi, on FM radios in taxis or matatus, and on radios in beauty shops and while waiting in line at vending kiosks. These call-in conversations have infiltrated daily life, and it occurs to me that they may provide more than just demoralizing gossip. Their insistent focus on pressing social and economic issues have bit by bit turned ordinary citizens into ethnographers of family life, and the radio into a civic forum. But I am too tired now to engage with the various comments on Petronella’s dilemma.

     

    We navigate the roundabout, and then quickly pass All Saints Anglican Cathedral, where the rich and famous of Nairobi marry or are mourned as they pass from one life to another. The colonial-style edifice, with its red tiled roof, stone walls, and well-tended gardens, feels out of place next to the tall dilapidated 1980s office buildings on the opposite side of the street. I attended the wedding of a friend’s sister there once, a highly elaborate affair with all the traditional trappings. I wonder how the couple is doing now. Have their lives stalled or been obstructed by an unhealthy marriage like that of Petronella?

     

    Thankfully, we are nearing our guesthouse. Ada and I are anxious to get out of the car and away from the noise of the spiraling talk and traffic. Once out of the taxi Ada rolls her eyes, lets out another deep sigh, and asks why people in Nairobi are so captivated by salacious talk shows. “We have this stuff in America too,” I remind her. “Remember Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones? People somehow love these kinds of shows.” Then I recall that Ada is only seventeen years old and is probably too young to know who Jerry Springer or Jenny Jones are. The format is new to her. But here in Kenya it cannot be escaped. The number of radio stations have multiplied in the last few years, since the Kenyan government deregulated radio broadcasting and licenses have gotten cheaper (There were over a hundred radio stations in Kenya in 2018 compared to a mere ten in 1999.) Call-in shows are cheap and easy to produce, and many of the seven million people who live in the Nairobi area tune in everyday to hear the latest tales of frustration and woe. 

     

    Of course, gayness, let alone gay marriage, is illegal in Kenya. Ada knows this, so she rightly wonders why someone would want to out themselves like that on public radio. I shrug and offer an explanation: the people calling in remain anonymous, and besides, rumor has it that this stuff is just made up. That it is staged. The radio hosts or their producers probably arrange for people to phone in with fabricated stories because they believe listeners will find this stuff interesting — and clearly they do. The appetite for ordeal — of whatever kind — seems insatiable. Even if they are staged, the shows must be striking some nerves since they continue to be highly rated. 

     

    I sometimes think, rather cynically, that the callers’ dilemmas comfort the audience by assuring them that others are worse off than they are and that their own troubles are not so bad. After all, nearly half of Nairobi’s population live in poverty in places such as Mathare or Kibera, crowded together in makeshift dwellings of corrugated iron sheets, without electricity or running water. Most of these people did not end up in Nairobi by choice. Roughly one quarter of Nairobi’s current population was forced to move into the city due to the increase in population and lack of arable land in the rural areas, and due to falling agricultural commodity prices. The World Bank’s and the IMF’s economic policies of the late 1980s also exacerbated the problem. The neoliberalism of the day stipulated that the economy be opened to free trade to stimulate economic growth, and so the World Bank and the IMF proceeded to cut aid to the Kenyan government — which inevitably meant a decrease in funding for schools, hospitals, sanitation, general infrastructure, and services for the poor. No doubt the government’s general mismanagement of the economy did not help. This kind of thinking was seconded by Dambisa Moyo, the celebrated Zambian-born economist, now Baroness Moyo, who wrote Dead Aid, a book that sought to explain that “aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa.” Entrepreneurship was, for her, the better way. 

     

    But entrepreneurship meant that young people were obliged to leave the villages and move into cities such as Nairobi or Kisumu to try to earn more shillings. Soon the city streets were teeming with kiosks, shoeshine stands, street hawkers peddling chapatis or roasted maize, fruits of all kinds, newspapers and magazines of all kinds, and nearly anything else that could be turned into ready money. The shoulders of all the major thoroughfares were soon lined with jerry-built dukas — small shops made of unhewn timber and roofed with tin or tarps to shelter the scanty merchandise. (Some of the better shops now occupy repurposed shipping containers that at least seem less haphazard.) If you had nothing to sell you could set yourself up as a palm reader or quack doctor.

     

    Adding to the disorder was the growing number of street kids and prostitutes. Uwen Akpan poignantly told their stories in his extraordinary book, Say You Are One of Them, in 2008. So did the late writer Binyavanga Wainaina, whose essays on Nairobi describes the painful lives of poor people in the city. It didn’t take long to transform the low-income areas of the city into a crowded labyrinth of clogged alleys whose occupants had to dodge dark piles of indeterminate sludge as they meandered their way through sale racks of plastic, tinseled imports. Skirmishes, some of them violent, became inevitable, as each vendor had to protect the little they had and to keep newcomers from encroaching on their paltry plots. Wherever one looked, the struggle to find a livelihood laid siege to the senses. It quickly became evident that the unregulated market managed to solve the problems of only a lucky few, and that there were scarcely any real prospects for most of Nairobi’s new arrivals. The economic promises of neoliberal aid turned out to be little more than a conceit believed only by its few beneficiaries. 

     

    The precarious situation continues to exist to this day — as I write, Kenyans have spilled into the streets to protest the rising prices, as well as the 1.5% progressive income tax proposed by the government to help build affordable housing. The protests were limited to small pockets in the city, mostly in poorer areas such as Kibera, and they were met with tear gas and water cannons. More than anything, the protests represent a distrust of the government’s ability to deliver on its promises, especially promises to help the poor. It is no mystery, then, why the call-in radio shows might provide a scrap of consolation to listeners. They aren’t enjoying a sense of schadenfreude, exactly, just the reassurance that their suffering is relative, and not absolute. Their lives could be more difficult — if they were gay, for example.

     

    And perhaps this also explains why discussions of gay people have become so conspicuous on the radio, as well as in print and on social media. The media and government officials exploit prejudices against LGBTIQA+ people and make them scapegoats for everything that has gone wrong in Kenya. Objecting to a recent Kenyan Supreme Court ruling that allowed gay people to assemble and advance their agenda through Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), an editorial in TUKO, a major online news outlet in Kenya, noted: “Homosexuality is biblically evil and culturally distasteful. Period…Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of these kinds of evil thoughts and practices. Kenya is setting herself up for a similar tragedy by entertaining this mediocrity from the West.” These kinds of crass appeals to religion and revulsion are, sadly, hardly confined to Kenya.

     

    On the other hand, the radio host in Jane’s case appeared to be sympathetic to these issues. He demonstrated a fair amount of patience and persistence when he argued that the caller take her time and introduce the idea of bridewealth slowly, with circumspection. Over time, he suggests, money and cattle might soften even the most stubborn of prejudices, even those of God-fearing fathers. It is even possible that the host is using Jane’s case as a subtle form of protest, as an indirect way of normalizing the idea of gay marriages, so that eventually the government will have to acknowledge them, and even change its policies.

     

    It is still the case, however, that LGBTIQA+ issues are discussed almost exclusively on radio talk shows in Kenya and rarely in everyday conversations. Still, these call-in shows might encourage people to talk more openly about these concerns in their living rooms, kitchens, and places of work. Didn’t American sitcoms such as Modern Family or Ellen help make people more at ease with the idea of gay marriage? It occurs to me that the radio hosts are trying to suggest to the larger public that change is possible, even socially acceptable. While discussions of gay marriages are not openly designed to be subversive, it is likely that they are meant to be a subtle form of persuasion which shifts the Overton window just a bit. We can at least hope, in the long run, that all the radio show talk becomes part of a more elaborate social choreography, one that — for now — dances around the presence of homosexuality and that might in good time make even the most unaccepting listen to the music and acknowledge its reality.

     

    When we finally arrive in our room at the guesthouse, Ada flops on the bed, looks at me and observes how interesting it is that in Nairobi having money doesn’t always make one’s life easier: “I can’t believe all those people in Mercedeses and Range Rovers were stuck in the traffic for twenty minutes, completely paralyzed. They were practically held hostage by those poor vendors. Just like us.” Of course, they got to sit secure in the comfort of their leather seats and air-conditioning. But this is one reason I love Nairobi. There was an important lesson about class and equality in that clogged but busy roundabout.

     

    Unlike many Western cities where the rich can live easy lives and forget the poor exist, in Nairobi the rich are forced to confront the consequences of poverty as soon as they emerge from their gated compounds. The social and economic difference does not confer an epistemological difference. Once the security guard closes the gate behind them, the well-to-do walk — or more likely drive — on the same streets as the poor. They have no cognitive privilege or protection. All that divides them from the unruly hustle outside is a car window.

     

    “Just look at the roads in this rich neighborhood where we are staying,” I say to my daughter. “They are as rough and pitted as those in the poor areas of the city. The wealthy must dodge potholes along with everyone else.” While the well-off may be able to hide behind guarded compounds and remain relatively safe, unperturbed and undeprived, they can never completely insulate themselves. It is impossible for them, try as they might, to evade the poor streets, or the poor on the streets. The moment they venture out, they witness all the cheerless vexations of the disadvantaged and the destitute. 

     

     “Of course, if the government paid policemen a living wage, they wouldn’t feel the need 

    to take bribes from the vendors,” Ada says. I reply: “But what would the vendors do then? They wouldn’t be able to make a living. It looks like the system works. In the end, the police get what they want, and the vendors get what they want.” Ada doesn’t like the sound of this: “That doesn’t seem right, mom.” “Yes, I know. But that’s the way it is in most of the Global South.”

     

    The “instrumentalization of disorder” is what the scholars Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz like to call this kind of social arrangement. Their argument has always seemed to me slightly disheartening, particularly since it depends upon a process of profiling the pathological as the norm. It usually starts at the government level, at least according to their influential book, Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument, which appeared in 1999. In it, they argue that African political elites have purposely engineered the present state of disorder and corruption on the continent, and that they have done everything in their power to preserve it — because it works for them, especially in their dealings with international institutions. The elites, Chabal and Daloz contend, hope to “maximize their returns on the state of confusion, uncertainty, and sometimes even chaos, which characterizes most African polities.” For example, state officials will sometimes fabricate “NGOs” to attract new resources from abroad, so as to unburden themselves of the expensive and politically arduous task of building effective state institutions and bureaucracies. And since African governments are highly patrimonial, officials often use these foreign resources to fulfill their patronage obligations by distributing the largesse to their clients in exchange for political allegiance. The chaos works quite well for them. As long as the disorder and the corruption continue to benefit the elites, the system manages to perpetuate itself. This theory also gives African leaders an aura of agency, making them seem less obviously the hapless victims of outsiders.

     

    But surely, argues Ada, a country cannot run on perpetually contrived disorder, especially if the system only benefits only the elites and their cronies. This is true. So few people profit from trickle-down patronage that this system cannot go on much longer. It works no better than trickle-down economics. It is neither inclusive nor equitable, and very little trickles down from the patrons who are supposed to be looking out for everyone’s well-being. The practice is unlikely to create any kind of sustained and stable wealth for most Africans. When government institutions don’t work for the majority of people, those people will inevitably employ a variety of strategies to meet their needs—including working around a system that is perceived to be unjust or exploitative. Often it requires passive resistance, and sometimes active sabotage: the needy will employ whatever means necessary to survive. Hidden in these work-arounds is an entire political philosophy. What has emerged on the streets of Nairobi is a kind of civic pragmatism, a host of improvisatory and creative practices that amount to a supplementary accommodation which grants the poor a meager means of survival. 

     

    At the roundabout, for instance, the police see themselves as part of the civic community rather than impersonal functionaries in the government apparatus. They see themselves as performing an extra-governmental service or, perhaps, as exercising a supplemental authority that allows them to help the poor. Of course, this kind of unsanctioned authority can have a dark side: it may invite corruption. But at least in this instance the police believe that they are serving and protecting; they do not believe that they are corrupt. And who are we to disagree? 

     

    Working with the poor vendors is probably what any good and reasonable person would do, and if the police receive a few shillings or a few mangos to take home, everyone is happy — except perhaps the prosperous commuters in their comfortable cars or taxi drivers such as George, who are taxed for a few moments of their time. Though the actions of the police may be open to doubt, at least fewer of the poor are forsaken. What others — particularly outsiders — may see as instances of everyday corruption are, for the players, a means of keeping the wheels turning, a means of survival. And since much of the law-making process in Kenya and other parts of the Global South is inchoate or reactive, this kind of illicit adaptation allows ordinary citizens such as street vendors to become part of an informal rule-making system with its own guidelines and practices.

    Perhaps this embodies a sort of democratic law-making, a different kind of common law. You might even say that, given its continued existence, we can recognize in their society-wide agreement Edmund Burke’s idea of the practical wisdom of given arrangements.

     

    So maybe it works better this way, at least for now. Who is to judge? In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we live, homeless people take advantage of long stoplights at a few of the busier intersections to walk between the rows of cars carrying signs describing their plight, hoping that someone will roll down their window and hand them a few dollars. Meanwhile the occupants in the cars listen to the progressive NPR. The stoplights control the traffic. They are efficient and impassive, and we obey them mechanically. Everything appears orderly, except for the poor and homeless who weave through the rows of traffic hoping for a handout.

     

    They are considered interlopers, whose cardboard petitions announce their lonely disenfranchisement. In other words, observing the law does not necessarily produce better living conditions for the poor, and it certainly does not provide a solution for the unhoused. Throughout Boston, impoverished men and women curl up with their belongings in corners of subway platforms or on moving trains to claim a few hours of warmth. Unlike the other passengers, the unhoused end up going everywhere and nowhere at once. The rich are never forced to interact with them, exceptional for the occasional solicitation. The poor may not be completely out of sight, but they are permanently blurred and kept mostly out of mind. 

     

    I do not mean to compare the levels of poverty in Boston or Cambridge to those in Nairobi. They are on a different scale. But in Nairobi, time and again, we witness the informal practice of civic accommodations playing out on the streets and on the radio talk shows. The police manage to compromise with the street vendors so that they are both better off. Everyone knows gay marriages have been outlawed in Kenya, but the radio show hosts knowingly ignore the law (or indirectly participate in the law-making process) by openly discussing the matter and offering counsel. Maybe the discussion will lead to changes in homophobic laws as more listeners are exposed to these stories. Maybe not. But the callers are not silenced. In fact, by virtue of the airtime granted them, they become indirectly legitimized. In time these discussions may contribute to a more open and inclusive form of civic democracy. 

     

    What seems to matter in Nairobi — whether on the streets or on the radio — is that people find a way to manage their relations, that they somehow try to find a way to get what they need or get where they are going, regardless of economic or political frustrations. Indeed, much of the “real” business of politics takes place in informal negotiations and in localized settings, usually outside the scope of the government apparatus. This is not to say, of course, that the problems are solved. These are fixes, not solutions. Gay people are still persecuted, the streets remain potholed, the infrastructure still crumbles. The poor certainly remain poor. And yet, through an inventive kind of civic pragmatism, the citizens of Nairobi find a way of “instrumentalizing disorder” in ways that allow them to survive. Somehow, in a roundabout way, people keep trying to get by.

    The Supreme Court Wars: America and Israel

    One of the many extraordinary powers that the progressive Israeli Supreme Court has given itself is the authority to invalidate a government action based on the Justices’ conclusion that the government did not weigh, or properly weigh, all relevant public interest considerations before acting. This “reasonableness” doctrine is an open-ended judicial check to ensure that elected officials and civil servants “respect their fiduciary duties vis-a-vis the public they serve and exercise their powers with a view to advancing the public interest,” explain Israeli law professors Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany, defenders of the doctrine. The Court has invoked the reasonableness doctrine to invalidate numerous government appointments and initiatives.

     

    The right-wing coalition government in Israel, which prevailed in the elections of 2022 by a very slim margin, despises the reasonableness doctrine and other tools that the Court has wielded to neuter the Israeli right’s victories at the polls by thwarting their policies in office. On July 24, 2023, the Knesset narrowed (but did not eliminate) the reasonableness doctrine by disallowing the Court and other Israeli judges from applying it to cabinet ministers. “This is the destruction of Israeli democracy,” declared Yair Lapid, the leader of Israeli’s largest opposition party. Lapid was puffing wildly. The July 24 vote imposed a relatively modest and perhaps circumventable check on the Court that left intact all of its powers over legislation and the vast majority of its powers to review government action. 

     

    Lapid’s deeper worry is that the government will pass a broader package of judicial reforms that would dramatically diminish the only check on its otherwise boundless power, as the current government has vowed to do. The ultimate stakes in the Israeli judiciary debate are about who controls the future of the State of Israel: the demographically ascendant nationalist and religious groups who currently control the Knesset but who have long been losers in the Court; or the demographically less ascendant secular and progressive groups currently excluded from political power whose interests have long been reflected in and protected by the Court. These stakes explain Lapid’s catastrophizing, and why judicial-reform opponents have engaged in massive disruptive protests — including threats by reservists to quit the military and by prominent businesses to leave the country — since the reforms were introduced in January 2023.

     

    Sixty years ago the great legal scholar Alexander Bickel labeled the question of whether unelected judges can legitimately invalidate laws enacted and enforced by elected officials as the “countermajoritarian difficulty.” The Israeli judicial reform movement argues that as practiced by the Israeli Supreme Court, the answer is no. But there are other answers. John Hart Ely claimed that judicial review bolsters democracy when it checks anti-minority biases in the elected branches and supports prerequisites to democracy such as freedom of speech and voting rights. One can see traces of Ely’s idea in the opposition to reform, which is premised on a belief that the Israeli Supreme Court is the nation’s only bulwark against the government’s corruption, its privileging of religious rights, and its diminution of human rights for groups excluded from politics, including Palestinians and Arab Israelis. 

     

    The United States has also recently experienced a clash of judicial visions, albeit at a lower temperature and with the political roles flipped. Here the conservative shift in the Supreme Court following President Donald Trump’s three appointments — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Barrett — has led many progressives to paint the Court as a threat to democratic values, to try to discredit it, and to propose reforms to limit its authority in the name of democratic control. In April 2021, President Biden appointed a bipartisan commission to analyze these proposals. (I briefly served on the commission.) Its final report later that year was a consensus document without strong recommendations. But it seriously considered many reforms, including expanding the Court’s size, imposing term limits or super-majority voting rules, rotating Justices, stripping the Court of jurisdiction to decide certain cases, and empowering Congress to override Supreme Court decisions. 

     

    The parallel debates in the United States and Israel seem like they are about the same issue, but vast differences in the histories and the legal and political cultures of the two nations counsel caution in the comparison. And yet these debates considered together have much to teach about the necessary but invariably unsatisfying role of independent courts in a democracy. 

     

            

    Progressive agitation to curtail the power of the U.S. Supreme Court reached a fever pitch in the summer of 2022, when the Court overruled Roe v. Wade, expanded gun and religious liberty rights, and made it much harder for the executive branch to redress climate change. The Court had been moving rightward for decades, as Republican presidents since Nixon have appointed fifteen of nineteen Justices. But it had sided with the left on most social issues during this period, and conservatives continued to lose on other issues they cared about as well. 

     

    With the term ending in June 2022, the most conservative Court in almost a century finally seemed to have overcome all constraints on effectuating its vision. Groups on the left were enraged over having lost complete control of the Court that did so much of its bidding for so many years going back to the New Deal. Frustrated by Trump’s success in appointing three Justices (and in the failure of President Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland), and appalled by the Court’s rulings, they began to attack the Court as illegitimate. And they clamored for action to cut back the Court’s power by packing it with liberals, impeaching conservatives, and fast-tracking Congress’ power to override Court decisions. 

     

    It all seemed pretty radical, but none of it was new. Since the beginning of the republic, the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution’s many open-ended provisions to limit state and federal laws and actions. Through such judicial review, the Court has asserted the final say over the nature and the scope of governmental power and the range and content of fundamental rights. At times the Court pressed a progressive vision on the country — for example, from the mid-New Deal through the 1970s, when the Court reordered federal and state power and constrained both with revolutionary new civil and political rights. And at times it pressed a conservative vision on the country — for example, during most of the first four decades of the twentieth century, when it was guided by a stark laissez-faire philosophy, and again, increasingly so, in recent decades.

     

    It would be surprising in a democracy if such broad interventions by unelected judges went unchallenged. In the United States, they have not. The Court’s outsized power has from the beginning been a topic of fierce contestation accompanied by political efforts to shape and control the Court’s decisions. The Constitution gives the Justices life tenure and salary guarantees as a check on these tendencies. But it also contemplates many mechanisms for political pushback on the Court.

     

    Consider the Court’s size. The Constitution leaves it to the political branches to decide how many Justices serve on the Court. Several times in the nineteenth century, Congress and the President sought to influence the Court by adding or subtracting seats. During the transition of the presidency from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in 1801 — a period of bitter partisan polarization not unlike today — the outgoing Federalist Congress reduced the number Supreme Court seats from its original six to five, in part to maintain Federalist dominance of federal judiciary. The outraged incoming Jeffersonians reversed this move. Congress also increased the size of the Court from six to seven in 1807 and from seven to nine in 1837, both times to ensure Supreme Court decisions that favored the party in power. 

     

    Congress increased the Court’s size from nine to ten in 1863 so that, as the legal scholar Tara Grove put it, “President Lincoln could appoint Justices who favored the Republicans’ agenda of combatting slavery and preserving the union.” In 1866, soon after Andrew Johnson became president, Congress reduced the Court’s future membership to seven because (to borrow the words of the Biden Commission’s Final Report) “the Reconstruction Republicans who controlled Congress in the post-Civil War era did not trust Johnson to nominate Justices sympathetic to the reconstruction efforts in the South.” On March 4, 1869, the day Ulysses S. Grant became president, fellow Republicans in Congress increased the number back to nine.

     

    The number has stood at nine ever since. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously proposed to increase the size of the top bench up to fifteen in an effort to arrest its invalidation of New Deal legislation. Congress did not go along, and many historians believe that Roosevelt lost political momentum in his New Deal reforms as result of this failure. Yet the plan appeared to succeed in one important sense. Soon after the proposal, and long before its rejection, the Court started upholding New Deal laws, though scholars still debate the extent to which the Justices changed course under pressure from Roosevelt’s plan. From the late 1950s until Donald Trump’s presidency, there appeared to be a firm norm against changing the number of Supreme Court justices even though it would be lawful to do so. But ever since then, the norm’s firmness seems to have eroded. 

     

    The political branches can also control the Court’s agenda by narrowing its power to hear certain cases. The most famous example involved a challenge in 1868 to the constitutionality of congressional Reconstruction. After an oral argument suggested that the Court might declare Reconstruction unconstitutional, and while the Justices were deliberating, Congress passed a law that removed the Court’s power to hear the case. The Court promptly dismissed, reasoning that in light of Congress’ control of its appellate jurisdiction, “it is quite clear . . . that this court cannot proceed to pronounce judgment in this case.” Legal scholars have tried to devise limits on Congress’ dominion over the Court’s agenda. But the brute fact is that the Constitution by design and in operation gives the political branches of the government enormous control here. It is norms of political restraint, not law, that hold Congress and the president back.

     

    The same is true of the appointment and confirmation process. While these things go in cycles, judicial selection and confirmation have often been very partisan affairs. Presidents have nominated justices based on judicial outlook, policy goals, or rewarding constituencies. Merit, a slippery term in this context, has sometimes mattered, but often not. And the Senate has often not confirmed the president’s nominee. As the political scientists Lee Epstein and Jeffrey Segal have shown, the Senate has confirmed fifty-nine percent of Supreme Court nominees under divided government, and ninety percent when the president’s party controlled the Senate. As the Court expanded its reach in the twentieth century, interest groups started to play a larger role in the confirmation process. And the norms that used to govern confirmation battles have eroded significantly since the 1980s. Here again, norms and politics are the protectors of judicial

    independence. 

     

    Today it is American progressives — winning in politics but losing in the Court — who urge Supreme Court reform to influence decisions they find illegitimate. Not too long ago, conservatives were in the same position doing the same thing. Republicans responded to the Warren Court with all manner of constitutional and statutory proposals to limit the Court’s power. And they were still at it during the Reagan administration. In 1982, a young Justice Department lawyer named John Roberts wrote to the Attorney General in support of the legality of numerous Republican bills that would strip the Court of power over cases involving school prayer, desegregation, and abortion. The following year, the future Chief Justice, then a White House lawyer, wrote about a Senate-proposed constitutional amendment to limit federal judicial tenure. “There is much to be said in favor of changing life tenure to a term of years, without possibility of reappointment,” Roberts declared, since the “federal judiciary today benefits from an insulation from political pressure even as it usurps the roles of the political branches.” 

     

    The threats and occasional reality of Court-packing, jurisdiction stripping, confirmation fights, and constitutional amendments are but a few ways that American politics engages with the Supreme Court to control judicial review. Presidential elections, in which the Court has been a central electoral issue, have often led — as in the case of the Trump presidency — to appointments that impact the direction of the Court. Other options lurk in the background, including impeachment and presidential underenforcement of Supreme Court decisions. 

     

    The prevalent influence of politics on the Court, and the Court’s ultimately fragile independence, protected mainly by norms, supports several general conclusions.

     

    The United States has never solved the countermajoritarian difficulty. Bickel recognized that one of the Court’s vital roles is to check the passions of popular democracy in the name of a richer conception of democracy that protects fundamental rights. He simply underscored the inevitable awkwardness of judicial review, especially when, as is always a danger, the unaccountable Court strikes down directives of the elected branches in ways not obviously compelled by the Constitution. The problem is compounded because the proper method for interpreting the Constitution has always been contested and the interpretive tools deployed by the Court have changed over time.

     

    That said, the countermajoritarian difficulty has always been tempered because judicial review has never taken place outside of politics. When the Court has adjudicated matters that go to the core of the national project, and especially when it has taken important matters out of the hands of the people, the people and their representatives have always pushed back. Often, but not always — it depends on the underlying politics — they succeed. Judicial review in the United States exists within politically structured bounds. 

     

    These political factors have worked to keep the Court from running too far, for too long, from the basic preferences of the people and their representatives. Sometimes the impact has been stark, as when the Court backed down or tacked in the face of political pressure. 1868 and 1937 are examples of backing down; there are others. But more broadly, as the scholar Michael Klarman has shown, the Court has rarely acted in ways that are significantly and persistently out of touch with majority opinion. Thus, landmark cases on the most salient societal issues of the day — Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and Obergefell v. Hodges (the gay-marriage case) — all reflected the beliefs or commitments of at least half and sometimes more of the country. Put another way, as Klarman sometimes has, there is practically no chance the Court would have decided, for example, Brown or Obergefell ten or fifteen years before it did. 

     

    Bickel once observed that the Court “is a leader of opinion, not a mere register of it, but it must lead opinion, not merely impose its own; and the short of it is — it labors under the obligation to succeed.” He added that the Court should interpret the Constitution in ways that “will — in time, but in a rather immediate foreseeable future — gain general assent.” It is controversial whether this idea can serve as a normative guide to judging. But it is surely a largely accurate descriptive account of when the Court brings serious trouble on itself and the country. 

     

    When the Court decided Roe, for example, democratic support for abortion was growing and abortion laws were liberalizing. As Ruth Bader Ginsberg maintained, however, the Court went too far too fast in wiping out most state laws on the subject and in disabling state legislators altogether from regulating abortions in the first two trimesters. The result violated Bickel’s “general assent” principle. It gave rise to what Ginsburg described in 1992 as “a well-organized and vocal right-to-life movement” that “succeeded” not just “in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction,” but, we now know, in sparking a powerful movement that changed American politics and the direction of the Court. 

     

    It is too soon to tell whether the Court’s newly aggressive conservative turn has set it on a path that will similarly fail Bickel’s test. In the year in which it overruled Roe, the Court was noticeably more moderate and gave surprising victories to liberals on voting rights, immigration enforcement, tribal rights, and state control over federal elections. “Along With Conservative Triumphs, Signs of New Caution at Supreme Court,” declared the headline in the New York Times’ annual assessment of the Court. “Perhaps the justices… have faced up to the public’s waning confidence and decided to self-adjust,” said Epstein, a leading scholar of Supreme Court trends.

     

    This continuous calibration between judicial decision and political reaction mitigates the counter-majoritarian difficulty. The threat and reality of political control constitute, as Charles Black once argued, “the rock on which rests the legitimacy of the judicial work in a democracy.” Almost every time the Court exercises judicial review, it does so pursuant to authorizations in jurisdictional statutes that the political branches can withdraw. It thus can be said to have the tacit blessing of the polity for its actions. And the failure of the political branches to limit the Court’s jurisdictional power can be seen as an acknowledgment that the Court is acting legitimately even when it issues very controversial decisions. In this sense, the ultimate political control over the work of the Court, and debates about whether its power should be tempered, are, in the round, healthy and justificatory.

     

    The danger, of course, is that politics might spin out of control and destroy the Court, and with it all of the incontrovertible virtues of judicial review in a democracy. The norms of judicial respect and independence that constrain the political branches from going this far have been remarkably firm for a long time, despite persistent anxiety about the Court’s work. And while they appear to be weakening — at least if the quantity and the extremity of the fiery rhetoric are measures — they remain widely shared, as President Biden’s skepticism about reform makes clear. The American left is apoplectic over the Court, is attacking it viciously, and has engaged in unprecedented protests at the Justices’ homes. But it is not yet taking to the streets on anything like the scale in Israel. 

     

    Yet it would be foolish not to worry about the Court’s place in American government. The Court’s public approval is at a modern low, and there is every reason to believe that the anger and protests and efforts at delegitimation by the left will continue and increase. Independent of the conservative path of its decisions, the Justices have diminished their public credibility by failing to craft and respect a comprehensive public ethics code. Internal dissensus on the Court is high, made worse by the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion that overruled Roe. All of this is happening during a moment when the norms that have propped up institutions are cratering in nearly every other governmental context.

     

    In January 2023, a group of American law professors wrote an open letter to “strongly oppose” the judicial reforms in Israel. The scholars worried that the reforms “will seriously weaken the independence of the judiciary, the separation of powers, and the rule of law” in ways that “would pose a dire risk to freedom of expression, [and] to human and civil rights.” A few of the signatories were prominent critics of judicial review in the United States. The same people who wanted to preserve judicial independence in Israel wanted to diminish it in the United States. They believed that judicial review was necessary to protect civil and political rights in Israel, but harmed, or at least was unnecessary to protect, civil and political rights in the United States.

     

    One might view these left-of-center professors as hypocritical in their views about the place of courts in a democracy. But they left themselves wiggle room because the letter stated that “some of us believe that the Israeli Supreme Court has over-reached in important respects and would support a scaling back of its power to review legislation and executive decisions.” In any event, there is no contradiction between advocating for diminished judicial independence in the United States and strongly defending it in Israel. Or vice versa. Israel and the United States have very different political and legal systems, with Supreme Courts that scrutinize government action in different ways and with different justifications. Israel has a much greater need for judicial scrutiny of government action than the United States; but unfortunately judicial power in Israel rests on a much more precarious foundation than in the United States.

     

    The Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948 promised a constitution within the year. But Israel’s founder and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, opposed the idea. “We chose a parliamentary form of government” in which “the nation decides on the laws, and their representatives implement them,” he said to the Knesset’s Committee on Constitution, Law, and Justice on July 13, 1949. “I don’t think it’s possible to delegate authority to the court to decide whether the laws are kosher or not kosher.” The promise of the Declaration was never fulfilled. It was agreed that the Knesset would over time enact Basic Laws that, in the end, but not until then, would form a Constitution. But this slow process was never completed.

     

    Thus the new nation had nothing akin to a written Bill of Rights or a Fourteenth Amendment. This was a serious lacuna in a modern democracy, and a fateful one for Israel, which from the beginning was burdened with profound internal divisions about the nature of the state and novel problems of relations with non-Jewish citizens, but which lacked the disciplining and legitimating impact of fundamental law effectuated by judicial review. By contrast, judicial review was widely understood to be entailed from the outset by the U.S. Constitution’s conferral on the Supreme Court of “the judicial Power” to interpret federal law, including fundamental law, the Constitution. 

     

    In addition to firmly grounding judicial review, the U.S. Constitution and laws impose other institutional restraints on government action. Legislation must be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President, and these three institutions are not typically controlled by the same party. Senior executive branch officials outside the White House must be confirmed by the Senate, which often is not controlled by the President’s party. There are loads of internal legal and normative constraints on executive action — inspectors general, laws governing agency action, limitations on vacancies appointments, and the like. These constraints are in theory changeable by Congress, but in practice they enjoy wide bipartisan support as a check on an oppositional branch of government; they aren’t going anywhere. (Donald Trump is scheming to skirt some of these protections should he be elected in 2024, but doing so is much easier said than done.) And the United States has a federal system with states that counterbalances federal power. 

     

    Israel from the outset was in a very different position. It lacked institutional constraints on government action other than the difficulty of forming a governing coalition and a few procedural rules on lawmaking. The Supreme Court early on stitched together additional constraints modeled on English administrative law, and it used various techniques to build a modest human rights regime. But the Court, in decisions in the 1980s and 1990s known as the “judicial revolution,” under the leadership of Aharon Barak, did what the Israeli government and Israeli people were unable to do: it gave itself enormously robust powers to constrain the government. “What Barak created out of whole cloth was a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices,” wrote Judge Richard Posner in 2007. “He puts Marshall, who did less with more, in the shade.” 

     

    The Israeli Supreme Court rejected justiciability constraints on decision-making that are an important precondition to judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the United States, only injured parties can sue; in Israel, anyone can. The Court also ramped up the reasonableness doctrine to a place that in practice has no counterpart in the United States or any other legal system. It also, crucially, empowered executive branch lawyers to constrain the government through binding decisions unless and until the Supreme Court rules differently. And the Court rectified the absence of fundamental law by declaring that two “Basic Laws” in 1992 gave the Court grounds to review legislation for consistency with human rights, including rights unenumerated in those Basic Laws, and for consistency with other Basic Laws as well. This was a remarkable development, since the two laws were passed by a small fraction of Knesset members and were not viewed at the time of passage as fundamental law. It was an act of judicial hocus-pocus that, in Barak’s words, happened “almost clandestinely.” 

     

    The appointments process for Justices in Israel and the United States are also notably different. In the United States, it is fully embedded in politics: the president nominates but the Senate must consent. In Israel, it is more distant from politics, and the Court has a big say. Appointments are determined by a nine-member committee that consists of two cabinet ministers, two other Knesset members (including, typically, an opposition member); two lawyers chosen by the relatively progressive Israel Bar Association; and three Supreme Court justices chosen by the Court’s president. Since it takes seven votes to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, the Court has effective veto rights on successor justices. (Imagine John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito having a power to nix new Supreme Court Justices.)

     

    The Court has wielded its extraordinary powers to push a largely progressive agenda, at least from the perspective of conservative, religious, and nationalist groups who have been gaining political power in recent decades and whose initiatives the Court has regularly frustrated. “These legal beagles have fashioned a system whereby they replicate themselves with impunity and occupy every central intersection of policymaking,” writes the Jerusalem Post columnist David Weinberg. “These much-too-powerful actors have upset Israeli democracy by usurping powers to themselves never intended by Israel’s founders or parliamentarians; powers which extend far beyond those held by the legal system in any other democracy.” 

     

    This, is a nutshell, is the basis for the extensive judicial reforms introduced in the Knesset in January 2023: eliminating reasonableness review, limiting judicial review of Basic Laws, empowering the Knesset to override certain Supreme Court decisions, and enhancing political influence in the selection of Supreme Court Justices.

     

    The debate in Israel is about preventing a single component of the Israeli government from having practically unchecked power. The left thinks the worrisome branch is the coalition government. The right thinks the worrisome branch is the Court. Both sides have a point. 

     

    If the Israeli government were to achieve all the reforms it proposed in January 2023, it would diminish the Court’s power significantly. This is a dreadful prospect to many in Israel who fear that the coalition would then implement the ultranationalist and ultrareligious wishes of its extreme parties. The worst-case scenario is much greater religious autonomy for ultraorthodox groups, imposition of religious precepts throughout Israeli law, exclusion of Israeli Arabs altogether from politics, and perhaps even a theocratic Greater Israel that greatly deepens the hardships for the already-degraded Palestinian people — in short, a radically changed Israel.

     

    This will not come to pass. Both the entire package of judicial reforms, and the extremist agenda of some of the coalition parties, lack full coalition support. Still, the “religious coercion, radical inequality, and nationalist aggrandizement” of the extreme right agenda is seen to “represent a version of politics that requires our moral condemnation,” as Michael Walzer put it. The mainly secular elite leftish groups in the streets threatening hardball tactics are nominally focused on protecting the Supreme Court, but they are really motivated by abhorrence of the far-right vision, by what it implies for their lives in Israel, and by deep loathing for some of the people and groups that now dominate the Knesset, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom many believe is pushing judicial reform primarily to gain the authority to halt a corruption prosecution against himself.

     

    The problem is that the protesters’ ultimate vision of the Court is just as unattractive as the ultimate vision of the reformers. They claim to seek to protect democracy, as Lapid’s reaction to the July vote implies, but their actions seem to indicate that any judicial reform, including the Knesset’s diminution of reasonableness, is unacceptable. One argument is that changes to the Court’s power require a broader social consensus than a three-vote majority in the Knesset. This argument lacks a basis in Israeli law and forgets that the Court grabbed its enormous power without any social consensus. Yes, fundamental law is often based on what Bruce Ackerman calls a “constitutional moment” of higher super-majority politics. But the power claimed by the Court has no such justification. Entrenching the Court’s unilateral assumption of power while disabling the Knesset from enacting (reversible) laws to check the Court — which is basically what the protesters want — is not an argument easily grounded in democratic theory.

     

    This issue is now teed up, since the Supreme Court has agreed to consider in September whether the reasonableness reform is lawful. It will be a defining moment for the Court. If it upholds the reform, it will embolden the Knesset and legitimate the possibility of greater judicial restraint. If it strikes down the reform, it will spectacularly confirm its democratic illegitimacy. For it will basically be saying that a self-proclaimed judicial doctrine to control government action cannot be changed by legislation or without an impossible-to-reach supermajority that is not required even to pass Basic Laws. (It might also reason, more radically, that the Knesset cannot amend a Basic Law, which is how the reform was implemented.). Such a judgment would amount to a declaration that the Court’s power is irreversible, and that Israel is in fact a krytocracy, not a democracy. This would mirror the arguments of the street protesters, who lost in the political process and some of whom threaten to abandon Israeli society and institutions unless krytocracy prevails. They may well have the moral high ground, as Walzer says. But arguments for a largely unchecked Court to constrain a largely unchecked government are not arguments for democracy. 

     

    There are of course many potential intermediate possibilities between the extreme poles of judicial hegemony and legislative hegemony. Israeli president Isaac Herzog tried hard to forge a compromise in the first half of 2023. He failed, and both sides say that for the child the other negotiated in bad faith. The Court could also try to promote a compromise by affirming the Knesset’s authority to temper reasonableness while still proclaiming the Court’s authority to assess the validity of other legislation, including Basic Laws. Still, it is doubtful that such a ruling would bring the two political sides together. Israeli society is divided in fundamental ways far beyond the fissures now bedeviling American society. And its judicial system lacks the grounding in politics, and the ability to adjust to changing politics, that has always prevailed in the United States. The Israeli Supreme Court cannot claim democratic legitimacy the way its American counterpart can — from a written Constitution or from authorizing statutes that political actors can shape. And Israel lacks a ready mechanism to alter the political hue of the Court over time. 

     

    One consequence of the upheavals in Israel is that if the Court emerges relatively unscathed from the current unpleasantness, it may be able to claim a justification based on the higher politics that we are not witnessing. The unprecedented attacks on the Court, followed by an unprecedented defense, could, if the defense is successful, give the Court a legitimacy it has always lacked. One suspects that some of the opponents of judicial reform, who have chosen extreme tactics, may have this end in mind. Or at least they have nothing to lose in seeking it. 

     

    The eventual problem for the protesters is demography. Though the current population numbers are far from apocalyptic for the Israeli left, the religious and nationalistic right is growing faster than the secular left, and has been for a while. No judicial power in any society can stand in the face of persistent majority displeasure. What we are witnessing now in the streets of Israel is people who are fighting for time but who may come to realize that in the long run the battle over the Court may already be lost.

     

    One day before the Biden Supreme Court Commission released a draft of its report on October 14, 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken gave a major speech in Ecuador entitled “Making Democracy Deliver for the Americas.” Hours before the speech, Ecuadoran president Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency to combat drug-trafficking violence. It was an awkward backdrop, but Blinken praised Ecuador’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law, and especially the role of courts. The Columbia Law School-educated diplomat was also, it seems pretty clear, speaking to the debate about judicial reform in the United States.

     

    “Consider a country,” Blinken said, “where a leader is elected in a free and fair election, and then sets about chipping away slowly but surely at the pillars of democracy” by, among other things, “undermining the independence of the courts.” He then asked the audience to “imagine that leader then seeks to use the levers of democracy to pass anti-democratic reforms,” including, prominently, “packing courts.” He continued: “That’s the story of more than one democracy in our hemisphere. And it’s one of the ways that democracies can come undone.” Blinken added that this was the story of Ecuador a decade earlier, but that these anti-democratic efforts did not succeed in Ecuador because “institutions like the courts . . . pushed back.” 

     

    Blinken was restating what has become a core element of American foreign policy: a healthy democracy that protects human rights needs independent courts and judicial review. Blinken articulated that policy in early 2023, when he commented on the judicial reform debate in Israel. The United States and Israel shared values about “core democratic principles and institutions, including respect for human rights, the equal administration of justice for all people, rights of minority groups, the rule of law, a free press, a robust civil society.” President Biden and other American officials have been pushing a similar message all year. “The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary,” he said last February.

     

    Biden’s comments elided all of the many differences between the legal systems in the two countries. So, too, did the conservative American columnist Matthew Continetti, who, in a comment typical of the right, claimed that Biden is “condemning Bibi for pursuing the same policy in Israel that the progressive left would like to see pursued in the United States.” As these comments imply, preaching the virtues of judicial independence to other countries will become increasingly difficult in light of the American domestic situation, as progressive attacks on the conservative Supreme Court, and calls to diminish its independence, continue to grow.

    The Good European

    On the evening of June 7, 1914, police officers were dispatched to break up a crowd of over a thousand people assembled outside the Comedy Theatre on West 41st Street in Manhattan. Hoping for a last-minute ticket, they had been turned away at the doors and were now blocking traffic on Sixth Avenue. Inside the theater, every seat and every inch of standing room was occupied by people eagerly waiting for the evening’s program to begin. What had they come to see? Not a performance by Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor then at the peak of his fame; nor a ragtime revue by Irving Berlin, or a play by George Bernard Shaw. Strange as it sounds to contemporary ears, the many hundreds in attendance had come to be lectured on Shakespeare by the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, then in his early seventies. As an article in The New York Times put it the following day, it was “one of the most remarkable welcomes ever extended to a foreign lecturer.”

     

    It ought to have been a crowning moment for a writer once described by Thomas Mann as “the northern Sainte-Beuve” and by Stefan Zweig as “the international master of the history of literature,” who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature by Anatole France and hailed as “a good European” by Nietzsche, a writer whose lectures on European literature in Copenhagen introduced Scandinavian readers to realism and naturalism, whose books had been translated into German, English, French, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and Japanese, and whose biographical study of Shakespeare in 1896 achieved worldwide recognition and was admired by Joyce and Freud. Yet there was a huge cloud over the event in New York.

     

    Brandes’ American lecture tour was darkened by concern for the fate of the European continent. For years, for decades, he had been saying what no one wanted to hear: that Europe was on a suicide mission. As early as 1881, he had warned that by the turn of the century “Germany will lie alone, isolated, hated by the neighboring countries: a stronghold of conservatism in Europe […] protected by all the weapons of murder and defense which science can invent.” In 1905 he criticized the Anglo-German naval arms race, particularly the English politicians who openly spoke of an “unavoidable” war with Germany. In 1913 he cautioned against a new generation of French intellectuals, including Charles Péguy and Maurice Barrès, who looked upon war as “a purifying force.” (Peguy was killed in action just before the Battle of the Marne.) When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek were bunglingly assassinated in Sarajevo, Brandes had little doubt about the immediate future. “A wave of misery washes over Europe,” he confided to his diary.

     

    For Brandes the war in Europe had profound personal implications. A Jew from a provincial Protestant backwater, his career was indissolubly bound up with the internationalism of the European culture of the second half of nineteenth century. He became one of the great Jewish cosmopolitans. His countless lecture tours brought him to France, England, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Poland, Finland, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Egypt, Greece, and Scotland. He met and corresponded with Thomas Mann, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola, Theodor Fontane, Edmund Gosse, the brothers Goncourt, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Peter Kropotkin, Theodor Herzl, and Benedetto Croce. His essays and articles had appeared in almost every major European newspaper and literary review, many of which he was attached to in some editorial capacity.

     

    The war took it all away. Overnight, literary and intellectual salons in Paris and Berlin, hot with patriotic fever, closed their doors to him. In the new nationalistic Europe, liberal cosmopolitanism, especially that of a Jew, no longer had a home. Brandes was publicly attacked by former friends such as Georges Clemenceau (with whom he had often vacationed in Karlsbad) and the Scottish writer and critic William Archer for refusing to take sides in the war and for supporting Denmark’s neutrality. (H. L. Mencken later called him “the only genuine neutral the war has produced.”) Disgusted with the belligerence and the chauvinism of Europe’s empires, Brandes endeavored to defend the continent’s embattled minorities instead. But when he began reporting on the persecution of Jews in Poland, he was denounced by the Polish Author’s Union, which denied that any pogroms had ever occurred on Polish soil. Stefan Zweig wrote to congratulate Brandes for his courage, assuring him that “a coming age will recognize those who dared to stand unarmed against the brunt of hostile opinion as the true heroes.”

     

    But that age never came. Brandes’ life after the war was one of increased illness and growing isolation. Though he lived until 1927, his reputation never regained its pre-war eminence, at least not outside Denmark. Like so many other good things, his international literary standing effectively died with the war. The tributes that poured in on the occasion of his death — from Mann, Hamsun, Kerr, Gosse, Barbusse, and Schnitzler — already seemed to harken back to a vanished world. Perversely, Clemenceau’s cruel response was the appropriate one. Upon being informed of Brandes’ death, the former French prime minister said, “So he has died! He was right to do so. Only he should have done it sooner. Now that story is forgotten, like so many others.”

     

    Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was born in Copenhagen on February 4, 1842. His parents were a part of the Danish capital’s vibrant Jewish minority, which had grown steadily since the granting of full civil rights to Danish Jews by royal decree in 1814. Brandes later recalled that he was first made aware of his Jewish identity when a few young boys shouted an unfamiliar slur at him in the street. He asked his mother what it meant:

    “What does it mean?” “Jew!” said Mother. “Jews are people.” “Nasty people?” “Yes,” said Mother, smiling, “sometimes very ugly people, but not always.” “Could I see a Jew?” “Yes, very easily,” said Mother, lifting me up quickly in front of the large oval mirror above the sofa.

    I uttered a shriek, so that Mother hurriedly put me down again, and my horror was such that she regretted not having prepared me. 

     

    Brandes was not raised religiously. For him, Judaism was an anachronism associated with old rituals and dietary restrictions. “The poetry of it was a sealed book to me,” he wrote. And yet it marked him, in Protestant Denmark, as an outsider and set the stage for a life forged in adversity and opposition. 

     

    In school, he was quick to doubt the veracity of his Christian religious instruction, with its wearying emphasis on miracles and rituals. “The demand made by faith, namely, that reason should be fettered, awakened a latent rebellious opposition,” he recalled in his memoir. Later, as a precocious, querulous teenager, he discovered Lermontov, Heine, and Byron, writers who imbued him with a sense of what he called “the demonic”: “the worship of one’s own originality, under the guise of an uncompromising love of liberty.” At the University of Copenhagen, where in 1864 he completed a doctorate in aesthetics, he rebelled against the abstract metaphysical and dourly German (read: Hegelian) atmosphere that predominated among his professors, most of whom were trained as theologians. They had hoped to mold the brilliant young student in their own image, but by then it was far too late. Brandes already had his back to them. In 1866 he made his first trip to Paris, where he met and befriended Hippolyte Taine, whose multi-volume History of English Literature became an “antidote” to his university teaching. And though Brandes, characteristically, remained skeptical of the more deterministic aspects of Taine’s positivism, the French philosopher welcomed the young Dane into his home and introduced him to friends such as Ernst Renan and the painter Charles Gleyre. For the remainder of his life, he would always have one foot outside Denmark’s borders.

    Brandes’ other transformative encounter at this time was with John Stuart Mill. In 1869 Brandes translated On the Subjection of Women, as a result of which Mill decided to look up his young Danish translator. Brandes later recalled meeting the sixty-four-year-old philosopher: “His eyes were bright, and of a deep, dark blue, his nose slender and curved, his brow high and arched, with a strongly marked protuberance over the left eye; he looked as though the labor of thought might have forced its organs to extend in order to make more room.” He visited Mill on several occasions at his home in Blackheath in southeast London in 1870. During one of their meetings, Mill confessed that he had never read of a word of Hegel, just as Taine knew little of German poetry and Brandes’ university professors knew nothing of English empiricism or French positivism. Surprised by the ignorance that even some of the most eminent minds in Europe seemingly had of one another, Brandes realized that “one could do much good by simply studying, confronting, and understanding these great minds that fail to understand each other.” His desire to serve as a kind of European intellectual emissary grew from these early encounters with national obtuseness.

     

    In 1870 Brandes set out on a fifteen-month trip through Europe, traveling to France, England, Italy, and Germany. The awakening that his readings of Taine and Mill catalyzed came to completion through this journey. Everywhere he went he saw the wheels of history turning dramatically: the capture of Rome, the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune. By comparison, Denmark seemed to him backward and parochial, half-asleep in its Biedermeier nostalgia. He resolved to bring his riches home with him, to introduce his own small world to the enormous one into which he thrust himself.

     

    While abroad, Brandes struck up a correspondence with Henrik Ibsen, then living in self-imposed exile in Dresden. Though the Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had written to warn Ibsen against Brandes — “there is something wrong with a person who does not have faith in God at his center” — Ibsen took an instant liking to the young Danish firebrand. On his way back to Copenhagen, Brandes paid Ibsen a visit on July 14, 1871, Bastille Day, an appropriate date for an encounter between two minds itching to hasten their own countries into a new era. The two recognized in one another the same hunger, and a kindred loyalty to their respective origins enriched by a curious and quickening cosmopolitanism. When they parted ways that evening, Ibsen called out to Brandes: “You provoke the Danes and I’ll provoke the Norwegians!”

     

    Brandes heeded his friend’s directive, and speedily. November 3, 1871 marks a turning point in Scandinavian cultural and intellectual history. That evening, in Auditorium 7 at the University of Copenhagen on Vor Frue Plads, Georg Brandes appeared before a large crowd to deliver the first of his lectures on the subject of “Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.” For weeks the occasion had been shrouded in rumor and intrigue. Brandes had already courted controversy with his translations of Mill and his newspaper articles attacking the theology of Rasmus Nielsen, Denmark’s leading philosopher. (Nielsen figured in Kierkegaard’s intellectual development and was for a while his friend.) In a city of just two hundred thousand inhabitants, these things did not go unnoticed. 

     

    The audience was a who’s-who of Copenhagen’s intellectual life: aspiring young writers such as Jens Peter Jacobsen and Holger Drachmann, the politician and bishop D. G. Monrad, Kierkegaard’s old punching bag H. L. Martensen, and Carl Christian Hall, the Minister of School and Church Affairs. (Monrad and Hall had both served as prime ministers of Denmark). Brandes, just twenty-eight years old, began his lecture by asking for the audience’s forbearance. It was his first time speaking from the pulpit and no doubt his delivery would prove wanting. As far as the substance of his lecture was concerned, however, the audience could take it or leave it. “What may offend you today will not be altered,” he declared. “I consider it a duty and an honor to pay tribute to those principles in which I believe: my faith in the right to free inquiry and the ultimate victory of free thought.”

     

    Framed as “a comparative study of European literature,” Brandes’ lectures, which over the course of the next two decades would swell to become a huge six-volume epic, constituted a dramatic account of European literature between the French Revolution and the uprisings of 1848. They were an astonishing display of erudition, evincing an awesome mastery of entire canons and the intellectual dexterity to weave them together into an intelligible whole for an ignorant and unprepared public. Arranged as a portrait gallery of all the major and minor writers of the period, beginning with Rousseau and Chateaubriand and concluding with Heine and Hegel, it is one of the earliest examples of what we now call comparative literature, as well as a precursor to studies such as Axel’s Castle and To the Finland Station (Edmund Wilson ranked Brandes alongside Taine, Sainte-Beuve, and Leslie Stephen), and perhaps even to Raymond Aron’s Main Currents in Sociological Thought. It introduced Scandinavian culture to radical new ideas of positivism, Darwinism, and biblical criticism, while its success abroad can be attributed to the connections that Brandes made between writers and ideas across national and cultural boundaries. Thomas Mann summed up the impact of Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature when he called it “the bible for young European intellectuals” and a “classic document in nineteenth century intellectual life.”

     

    The immediate reaction to Brandes’ opening lecture was one of horror and derision, not least because he mercilessly condemned the cultural and political backwardness of Danish society (personified by many of the members of his audience). “Today, as usual, we are forty years behind the rest of Europe,” he complained. Since he believed, rather programmatically, that literature ought to take up the most pressing social and political problems of the day, Danish literature appeared to him sunk in a complacent stupor. Where was the Danish George Sand? The Danish Feuerbach? The Danish Voltaire? In order to contribute to the continued progress of humanity, Danish writers needed to adopt a critical attitude toward the conditions and the institutions of society. They needed to yank themselves free of the chains of their pastoral idealism. Brandes blasphemed against the bard of Danish Romanticism, Adam Oehlenschlæger, for his folklorist tragedies, and against B. S. Ingemann for his historical novels modeled on a genre invented by the “full-blooded Tory” Walter Scott.

     

    Brandes’ patriotism manifested in his desire to pull Denmark forward. That impulse was unsurprisingly interpreted as disloyalty by the Danish establishment. To the attending members of Copenhagen’s cultural and political elite, Brandes’ chastisements were incendiary and insulting — especially coming as they did on the heels of the revolutionary uprisings in Paris and the founding of the Danish chapter of the First International. That Brandes was not a socialist hardly changed the fact that his ideas were perceived as a threat to Danish society in a time of sweeping national anxiety. (Denmark’s humiliating defeat to Bismarck’s Prussia in the Second Schleswig-Holstein War in 1864, in which a third of the country’s territory was lost, had a debilitating impact on the national psyche.) Brandes was accused of immorality, atheism, even treason. D. G. Monrad published a small pamphlet called Free Thought and Dr. Georg Brandes’ Lectures, in which he castigated the young critic’s “revolting” rhetoric. Worst of all, when Carsten Hauch, professor of aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen, died in 1872, Brandes’ application for the position was ignored — despite the fact that Hauch had singled him out as his natural successor. (As an added insult, the position would remain vacant for twenty years.) Sensing the despondency of his young friend, Ibsen wrote to encourage Brandes to remain a steadfast soldier in the war of ideas. “A war such as yours should not be waged by a royally appointed civil servant. If they weren’t slamming doors in your face it would mean they aren’t afraid of you.”

     

    Engendering fear may be flattering, but it is also isolating. As Brandes continued his lectures into the new year, the attacks on him intensified in their vindictiveness and their malevolence. The Danish press exposed their own anti-Semitism by portraying him as a freethinking Jew with a lecherous appetite for the daughters of the Copenhagen bourgeoisie. Caricatures in newspapers and magazines accentuated the size of his nose. In 1873, the minor writer H. F. Ewald published Agathe, a polemical novel in which the main character, Gustav, has recently returned from Paris filled with ideas of “chaos, the unleashing of our wildest desires, barbarism and refined hedonism in beautiful surroundings.” Gustav marries the titular Agathe and takes her with him to Paris only to later abandon her, whereupon she dies of shame and grief. The novel was loosely based on Brandes’ relationship with a married woman named Caroline David — a love affair that caught the public’s prurient attention when David decided to divorce her husband and leave her family for the younger man. (After her relationship with Brandes, David wound up living in Naples with an Italian silk merchant. She died of tuberculosis in 1878.)

     

    The English writer Edmund Gosse, who twice traveled to Denmark between 1872 and 1874, was first introduced to Brandes around the time of the earliest Main Currents lectures and the David scandal. “It was difficult to account for the repulsion and even terror of Georg Brandes which I heard expressed around me whenever his name came up in the course of general conversation,” he later recalled. “He belonged to the race of iconoclasts, like Heine before him, like Nietzsche after him, and he was expected to disturb all the convictions of his contemporaries.” Gosse often visited Brandes in his apartment on Møntergade in central Copenhagen, where he would read to him from the poetry of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Swinburne. One day Brandes confided to him that he felt it necessary to leave Denmark. “He said to me, as we parted,” Gosse wrote, “that if I came back to Copenhagen, one person I should certainly not find, and that would be himself.’

     

    Between 1877 and 1883 Brandes lived in intellectual exile in Berlin, though the culture war that he had instigated, the battle between forces that yearned for a larger cultural horizon and those that were committed to a militant parochialism, continued to be fought in Copenhagen in his absence. For decades intellectual circles in Denmark splintered into anti-Brandes and pro-Brandes factions, sometimes even coming to blows. As late as 1912, a fight broke out during a lecture at the University of Copenhagen when a professor inveighed against the pernicious influence on Danish society of Brandes’ “Jewish-liberal materialism.” It is hard to imagine the heat that these ideas carried, the fevers that they inspired. (When someone in the audience pulled out a revolver, everyone had the good sense to flee the scene.)

     

    Nor did his absence soften his image at home, where his allies and his enemies continued waging polemical warfare. In Berlin he could at least walk the streets without being recognized. The new German capital was expanding at an explosive rate and offered access to grand museums and well-stocked libraries. At Zum schwarzen Ferkel (“The Black Piglet”), a bar on Unter den Linden, he met and conversed with his fellow Scandinavian misfits August Strindberg and Edvard Munch. His books slowly trickled into German translation, he became a regular contributor to the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, and he was even briefly considered for a professorship at the University of Vienna.

     

    But money was tight. Despite his monstrous productivity — during his Berlin years he cobbled together a collection of essays and churned out studies of Benjamin Disraeli, Ferdinand Lasalle, and the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér — he often found himself in the embarrassing position of having to turn down social invitations because he could not afford the price of a cab. He had married his wife, Henriette, in 1876 and felt that domestic life in Berlin was too expensive. (And perhaps a little awkward: Henriette was the ex-wife of Brandes’ friend Adolf Strodtmann, Ibsen’s German translator.) Fortunately, thanks to string-pulling by his younger brother Edvard, Brandes was eventually offered a ten-year endowment by a group of anonymous donors on the stipulation that he return to Copenhagen and resume his public lectures at the university. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. As he put it in his farewell address at a dinner at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin: “In Germany I could have no other goal than to make my name more and more known. But in the North are all my tasks. In the North there is a generation of youths whose teacher I must be.”

     

    On his return to Copenhagen in 1883, Brandes resumed his role as the chief enforcer of what became known as the Modern Breakthrough, that richly productive period of Scandinavian literary history when writers in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden first embraced realism and naturalism, breaking with their idealistic and Romantic traditions. It was Brandes who gave the movement its name: in 1883 he published Men of the Modern Breakthrough, a collection of essays on the new generation of Scandinavian writers. (Though he agitated admirably for the emancipation of women, Brandes remained mostly male-centric in his literary tastes.) The writers to emerge from this movement include Jens Peter Jacobsen, Herman Bang, Knut Hamsun, August Strindberg, Henrik Pontoppidan, Alexander Kielland, Arne Garborg, and Hans Jæger.

     

    All of them, in their way, responded to the challenge and the incitement of Brandes’ example. Jacobsen’s Marie Grubbe was the first realist novel in Scandinavia and earned comparisons to Madame Bovary for its frank portrayal of female sexuality. Garborg’s debut novel, A Freethinker, dramatized the consequences of individual free thought in a morally dogmatic Norwegian society. In Lucky-Per, admired by George Lukacs and Thomas Mann, Pontoppidan wrote a sweeping social novel of Denmark in which Brandes himself figures as a minor character. Many of these writers ran afoul of government censors and public morality. Herman Bang, whose novels and stories chronicled the quiet lives of lonely and isolated women, was subjected to a barrage of smear campaigns for his homosexuality. Arne Garborg lost his job as a state auditor following the publication of his novel Menfolk. Hans Jæger’s novel The Kristiania Bohemians was confiscated and the author sentenced to sixty days’ imprisonment.

     

    Brandes, perhaps a little predictably, was not always favorably disposed toward the writers whose literary beginnings he encouraged or enabled. He wrote a glowing review of Marie Grubbe but never quite reconciled himself to Jacobsen’s remarkable second novel, Niels Lyhne, finding it too disillusioned and interior, as well as wildly overwritten. In like fashion, he dismissed Hamsun’s viscerally powerful Hunger as too monotonous after a cursory scanning of the first few chapters. It is probably true, as Hamsun’s biographer Ingar Sletten Kolloen has argued, that Brandes was too much of a rationalist at heart; his appetite for concepts and principles circumscribed his imagination. “A radical thinker,” Kolloen observes, “Brandes may have raised the banner against God, the priesthood and politicians, but never against reason itself. He had no desire to identify with a literary figure with whom he could not engage intellectually.” Edmund Gosse similarly found Brandes’ literary tastes to be too narrow. He tried in vain to interest him in Baudelaire, only for Brandes to dismiss him as un sale monsieur — a filthy man. Perhaps this limiting rationalism was the price he paid for being capable of consecrating his life to ideas.

     

    And yet, for all his peculiar blind spots and often overtly political approach to literature, Brandes was unquestionably a perceptive critic. He played an instrumental role in fostering the awareness of Dostoevsky beyond the borders of the Russian empire, writing of his use of dialogue that it was “a kind of inquisition, a continued contest between men who seek to wrest their secrets from each other.” In 1877 he published the first biographical study of Kierkegaard at a time when the Danish philosopher was little known outside academic circles in Copenhagen. His long and pioneering essays on Ibsen, Strindberg, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Zola contributed to the international renown that these authors all enjoyed in the closing years of the nineteenth century. 

     

    The most influential lectures that Brandes ever gave, more influential even than Main Currents in Nineteeth Century Literature, took place at the University of Copenhagen in April and March of 1888. Two years previously, a young German philologist had sent Brandes a copy of one of his books by care of his publisher. It was titled Beyond Good and Evil. A year later, two more volumes arrived in the mail: Human, All Too Human and On the Genealogy of Morals. It did not take long for Brandes to grasp that he was in possession of something radically new, something brilliant, something at once profound and disturbing. “A new and original spirit breathes to me from your books,” Brandes wrote in his first letter to Nietzsche on November 26, 1887. “I do not yet fully understand what I have read; I cannot always see your intention. But I find much that harmonizes with my own ideas and sympathies, the deprecation of ascetic ideals and the profound disgust with democratic mediocrity, your aristocratic radicalism.” Nietzsche responded a week later, gratefully acknowledging that “such a good European and missionary of culture” should now rank among the five or six friends who understood his work. He also endorsed the expression “aristocratic radicalism:” “It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself.”

     

    On April 10, 1888, Brandes delivered the world’s first lecture on the work of Nietzsche. Since nobody knew who the German thinker was the event was sparsely attended, but word traveled fast and on the occasion of the second lecture the auditorium was completely packed. Following a brief biographical sketch of the author’s life, Brandes emphasized Nietzsche’s assault on moral prejudice and cultural philistinism. “All of us are now born into a society of cultured philistinism,” Brandes said. “It confronts us with prevailing opinions, which we unconsciously adopt.” Since we go about our day and find everywhere the same tacit conventions with respect to religion and morality and marriage and family, it is the task of the individual to liberate himself from this cultural mediocrity and seek out “the highest examples of humanity itself.” Against the utilitarian notion that we should aim for greater happiness for a greater number of people, Brandes interpreted Nietzsche to mean that the highest significance of human life is achieved instead by “being lived for the rarest and most valuable examples of the human race.” In his final lecture, Brandes explained that his principal reason for calling attention to Nietzsche was that Scandinavian literature had “been living quite long enough on the ideas that were put forward and discussed in the last decade” — which is to say, the very ideas Brandes himself had introduced: “a little Darwinism, a little emancipation of woman, a little morality of happiness, a little freethought, a little worship of democracy, etc.” To paraphrase what Martin Amis once said of Christopher Hitchens, one occasionally gets the impression that the only person Brandes thought truly worth arguing with was himself.

     

    Following the conclusion of the second lecture, Brandes reported back to his new German friend that “some three hundred people listened with the greatest attention to my exposition of your works.” And as an indication of just how embedded Brandes was in Europe’s cultural and intellectual networks, he encouraged Nietzsche to send copies of his books to Bizet’s widow in Paris and to the liberal Prince Urusov in Saint Petersburg. He also instructed Nietzsche to acquaint himself with Kierkegaard and boasted that he had won over for him the “mad Swede” Strindberg, with whom he eventually put Nietzsche in touch. When it was published in German in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1890, Brandes’ “An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche” lit the fuse of the German philosopher’s explosive influence. “We Germans must never forget,” Mann wrote many years later, “the ray of sunlight that shone on Nietzsche’s cold loneliness when word of a certain Dr. Georg Brandes’ lectures at the University of Copenhagen first spread.”

     

    To many observers there was something perplexing about the meeting of these particular minds. Nietzsche, after all, was a merciless critic of the modernity and the rationalism for which Brandes had spent two decades crusading. How did the translator of Mill come to champion the ideas of an avowed enemy of democracy? Once again Brandes found himself bogged down in intellectual battles both at home and abroad. In Denmark, the philosopher Harald Høffding accused him of embracing anti-democratic ideas. In Germany, he was singled out by Max Nordau in his bestselling reactionary screed Degeneration, which appeared in 1892, for popularizing the “unhappy lunatic” and his degenerate ravings. Brandes responded in vain that his principles and fundamental beliefs had not been altered in the slightest by his encounter with Nietzsche, that he was long past the age in which it was possible to change one’s view of life. But still the attacks continued. As Nietzsche wrote in his last letter to Brandes, “When once you had discovered me, it was easy enough to find me: the difficulty now is to get rid of me.” He signed the letter, in the sad and slightly demented tone of his last years, “The Crucified.”

     

    The remarkable career of Georg Brandes reflects many of the divisions and the contradictions of the late nineteenth century. By the time of his Nietzsche lectures, his attitude toward Taine’s positivism had slackened. “Taine looked upon criticism as applied science,” he wrote, “but no methodical research can give us the key to a composite human spirit.” His interest in Enlightenment-style emancipation contracted to a narrower focus on individual genius. He now shared with Nietzsche and Ibsen a belief in what we might call the Great Man Theory of Culture: that great art is brought forth only by exceedingly strong-willed individuals. “Nietzsche’s value,” he wrote, “lies in his being one of these vehicles of culture: a mind which, itself independent, diffuses independence and may become to others a liberating force, such as Schopenhauer was to Nietzsche himself in his younger days.” He devoted many of his later years to writing multi-volume biographies of some of Europe’s great men: Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, Voltaire, Caesar, and Homer.

     

    As the scholar William Banks has recently pointed out, these works were noticeably more apolitical than Brandes’ earlier writings. “Everything in his literary works of the 1890s,” Banks notes, “was pointing away from political engagement.” Yet this was not because Brandes himself had become apolitical. On the contrary, he was more engaged than ever with the issues of his day. The shift is better described as a bifurcation of his writing: literature on the one hand, politics on the other. For at the same time that he wrote his massive biographical tomes, Brandes became an outspoken critic of Europe’s encroaching nationalism and a defender of oppressed peoples inside and outside the continent.

     

    Around the turn of the century, Brandes began putting his considerable celebrity in the service of the burgeoning international human rights movement. In his essay “Thoughts at the Turn of the Century,” he wrote: “The decisive political event we have experienced at the end of the nineteenth century is this: the great powers divide the world among themselves […] they act with an injurious recklessness, because for the sake of economic advantage they sacrifice not only those peoples whom they conquer by fire and by sword and in all manner of horrors, but further all the small nations within their immediate orbit, which are either absorbed for the sake of national unity or exchanged as bounty or delivered up to brutality.” Being an outsider from a small nation on the margins of Europe heightened Brandes’ sympathies with the oppressed. In an address in 1904, he said that “it should be known that, despite the small size of our country, men lived here who felt sympathy with all wronged individuals or peoples across the world and who lifted their voices, spoke on their behalf.” He continued: “All Poles and Finns, Ruthenians, Georgians, Armenians, should know that freedom and justice lived in Denmark.” 

     

    It is worth pointing out a few occasions on which Brandes lifted his very prominent voice on behalf of the wronged. Between 1896 and 1906, he wrote twenty-two articles about the Dreyfus affair. In the essays “The Aryan Race” in 1905 and “Race Theories” in 1912, he objected strenuously to modern race “science,” writing that “every modern people, like every one of antiquity, is the result of a nearly immeasurable intermixing of tribes.” He criticized Kaiser Wilhelm II’s so-called “Hun speech” on the occasion of the dispatch of German forces to China to crush the anti-colonial Boxer rebellion, condemning European powers for having “swarmed like birds of prey over China and ripped her to shreds.” (In 1923, the Chinese writer Zheng Zhenduo declared that “Brandes does not belong to Denmark, he belongs to the world!”) He opposed British and Russian involvement in Persia, at one point even meeting with the Iranian politician Hassan Taqizadeh in Copenhagen to draft an article denouncing czarist policy together. In a celebrated anti-imperial address delivered in Oslo in 1922, he was admirably forthright about the cruelty of conditions in French North Africa, especially in Tunisia and

    Algeria.

     

    Yet the central calamity of his long life was the First World War. It unraveled the internationalism of fin-de-siècle Europe, destroying the links between nations that Brandes had helped to create. Worse: it killed over fifteen million people in a little over four years. Outraged, Brandes wrote dozens of articles and appeals, collected in The World at War (1917) and The Second Half of the Tragedy: Peace (1919). But his activism served only to isolate him. For the consummate European, this was a heavy toll. Brandes’ very public break with Clemenceau, culminating with the Prime Minister bidding Brandes “adieu” in his journal L’Homme enchaîné, was especially painful. So too was the pressure to take sides from friends such as August Rodin, the hateful letters that piled up in his apartment, and the accusations that his refusal to blame Germany for the war amounted to treason, given Prussia’s defeat of Denmark in 1864. “It is terrible how my contempt for humanity has intensified,” he wrote to a friend. “I almost can’t stand the sight of other people. When I go out, I walk along those streets where I am least likely to run into anyone.”

     

    The two major biographies that he wrote during the war, Wolfgang Goethe in 1916 and François de Voltaire in 1917, bear the imprint of his retreat from the theater of humanity. He described Goethe’s Olympian “contempt for the ignorance and loquaciousness of the masses,” his “painful familiarity with the ignorance, the envy, the prejudice of the human horde.” Voltaire, meanwhile, was to be admired for vanquishing the piety and superstition of the masses, for serving as a beacon of enlightened hope. “Throughout his long life he awakened generation after generation to the might and power of reason,” Brandes wrote, a little defensively. 

     

    Setting aside his misguided retreat into the intellectual dead-end of genius worship, Brandes’ suspicion and even contempt for the masses was not without justification. (You might even say that, for a Jew in interwar Europe, suspicion of the masses was a condition of survival.) After all, he had been a victim of chauvinistic smear campaigns, reported on the Dreyfus affair, defended vulnerable minorities against their powerful neighbors, and witnessed an entire continent engulfed by a murderous war in which even the press, the politicians, and the intellectuals were complicit. He felt he was living through an era of unprecedented collective madness. “What is Europe?” he asked. “Transformed into hundreds of battlefields, thousands of cemeteries and hospitals, one enormous bankrupt estate, and one immense insane asylum.” 

     

    A year before his death, he was described in The New York Times as “a European who has outlived Europe.” Brandes was inclined to agree. When he suffered a fall just a month before his death, he committed the following to his diary: “It’s over. Everything is deserting me. Sight, hearing, smell, mobility. I’ve outlived myself and my generation. The new one is ten times worse.” He knew that the liberal cosmopolitanism he had, in his myriad ways, spent his life espousing now belonged to what Zweig called “the world of yesterday.” And yet he had no illusions about the future, either. The First World War’s “destroying hatred,” he had written in 1916, “will live long after the war, and will inevitably give birth to new wars. The longer the war lasts, the shorter the coming peace will be.” The poignancy is enormous. Brandes’ faith in reason had left him poorly prepared for reason’s eclipse. He regarded the war as a regression, a betrayal of civilization, rather than as its unavoidable shadow: “I am convinced that future generations will look upon the great days we are living in as we look upon the days of witchcraft and the Inquisition.” We would do well to remember Brandes: his grand agon with liberal universalism and the politics of unreason is one that continues to bedevil us today.

    God Has Not Shown Me

    God has not shown me in nightdreams
    and no sorcerer has divined
    where my last day will overtake me
    and how my end will look, that I may know.

    Whether in my tent, on my couch, I will die
    with all my cherished close to me,
    every one of them camped mutely around me,
    sentries of love and sanctity at my bed,
    who will count my last breaths in the bosom of my God
    as one would count coveted attainments.

    Or, scorned and despised, in the ire of God and man,
    hated by my fellows and a fugitive from my family,
    on a pile of straw in a forsaken cell
    I will emit my vacant and impure soul.
    Nobody will attend my spirit’s release
    and no hand will shudder over my snuffed-out eyes.

    Or perhaps, in my hunger and my thirst
    for life and its delicacies,
    with loathing in my soul,
    in spite of the Creator and his wrath,
    I will kick away His gift
    and like hurling a soiled shoe from my foot
    hurl my soul at His feet.

    Or maybe my soul will wait long and longer until it rots,
    from too much expectation and too much silence,
    and spill upon the earth in my bitterness
    as I vomit it like blood from my heart.

    Or it might drop like a pearl with my last teardrop,
    the light of the world within it, trembling,
    and shine many generations later
    for eyes that never beheld me.

    Or perhaps like a butterfly, dancing and leaping
    around the flame, my soul will depart.
    Or like the flame itself, before it consumes the wax,
    in the throes of its death my soul will flutter
    and flicker and smoke for many days, an optical illusion,
    until suddenly it plummets into a dark abyss
    and is extinguished forever.

    Or perhaps like the sun before it sets —
    abruptly all its beams ignite
    and it disperses its flaming torches across the clouds
    and its pyres among the mountaintops,
    and thousands of eyes open wide and gape
    at the approach of its final radiance.

    Who knows, my God may be cruel to me
    and I will die while still I live,
    and they will bundle my soul in shrouds of paper
    and bury me in a bookcase,
    the mold in the house will grate my bones
    and a rat in a hole will gnaw at me,
    and I will stand with my own feet in my own grave
    and recite the kaddish with my own mouth for myself.

    Or perhaps my death will arrive small and without sense,
    and not as I had hoped:
    on a furious winter night,
    like a starving dog behind one of the fences,
    I will freeze.
    The gentle snow will cover the black stain
    and erase the shame of a man and his life,
    and the last rattle of my teeth as I curse my death
    will be scattered by the raging wind.

    Translated by Leon Wieseltier,
    in loving memory of A.B. Yehoshua and Meir Shalev

    The Quality to be Tragic

    Elizabeth Hardwick is having a moment — and why not? The last two years have brought The Uncollected Essays, an addendum to The Collected Essays of 2017; Cathy Curtis’ biography, A Splendid Intelligence; and Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of his writerly apprenticeship at Hardwick’s feet. Like Joan Didion, a very different sort of talent and sensibility, Elizabeth Hardwick was a lion of the 1960s and 1970s (and 1980s and 1990s). Lavishly frank, instinctively original, elegant, intimate, and when she wanted, very, very funny, Hardwick was one of the great critics and great prose writers of the second half of the twentieth century. It is fit and fine that her work and example be forwarded to a new generation of readers.

     

    My own interest in Hardwick is tangled up in a larger obsession with the New York intellectuals, that storied gaggle of talkers and writers — cultural critics, political philosophers, editors, polemicists, controversialists — who bestrode American thought in the decades after World War II. Readers conversant with the group may be surprised to hear this, for of the figures typically enumerated among its members — Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, and a dozen or two others — Hardwick has never been one. It is not because she was a woman: Hannah Arendt was a key presence; Susan Sontag, the youngest of them all, is regarded as a kind of last hurrah. It is not because she wasn’t Jewish, though Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, Hardwick’s best friend, were the only gentiles. It is not because she didn’t share the same milieu. Hardwick lived in New York throughout the 1940s, left for ten years, then returned for good. She went to the parties, holding her liquor and holding her own. She was a mainstay of the journals: Partisan Review, and then, for more than forty years, the New York Review of Books, of which she was among the founders. She was universally esteemed, and not infrequently feared.

     

    It is because she wasn’t, strictly speaking, an intellectual. I don’t mean this as a deprecation; quite the opposite, in fact. Like Henry James, she had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. More than any other critic I’m aware of, Hardwick possessed the ability to speak with great incisiveness about a work, an author, without recourse to general conceptions: no theses, no theories, no larger arguments, oftentimes no arguments at all. “She stayed away from academic criticism, theory, analytic philosophy,” Pinckney tells us, while “Marxism made her distrust ideologies of criticism.” Though her reading was vast, she eschewed comparison, allusion, discussion of genres, movements, genealogies. Instead, she focused like a lover on the writer before her, bringing her entire self to the encounter, which she enacted in prose of incomparable suppleness and energy. She didn’t “review”; she metabolized.

     

    What she shared with the other New Yorkers, though, was larger than her differences. Like them, she came of age at a time when the life of the mind was lived without reference to the university — when the models were Paris and Vienna, not Harvard and Yale. Critics now are academics first: if not professors or disappointed PhDs, then former literature or “studies” majors trained in the accepted points of view. Among the New Yorkers, even those who taught steered free of academic sensibilities, manners, jargon, frames of reference. They eschewed professionalization; they stood on the authority of their own aesthetic experience. Hardwick enrolled in a doctoral program (at twenty-three, in English), but she found her professors uninspiring, and scholarship unappealing, and she soon dropped out to write — to be a writer, to have a different kind of mind and life. “They are critics and have good taste,” wrote Kazin of a pair of academic acquaintances. “I am a writer and interested in everything I can see and read and feel and touch.” Like others among the New Yorkers, Hardwick saw herself, and was, a bohemian — unsalaried and uncredentialed, living hand to mouth on freelance checks and books. Like them, she self-educated, stubbornly and idiosyncratically. With them, she gathered to debate, to individuate, not to align and conform. Like theirs, her style of thought and writing was unique.

     

    Nothing in her background prophesied her destiny. The modal New York writer was a Jew from the outer boroughs, maybe the Lower East Side. The city was their native ground, texts and arguments their birthright. Hardwick was from Lexington, Kentucky, and despite her later reputation for gentility, she grew up working-class, at the wrong end of town. Her father, who didn’t make it past the seventh grade, was a sometime plumber and full-time wastrel. Her siblings, ten in all, would come to include a beautician, a steamfitter, a postal clerk, and a couple of teachers — this last the highest she was meant to reach for. There is simply no accounting for her gifts. She was a unicorn, born among horses.

            

    The only thing that Hardwick ever wanted in Kentucky was to leave. Lexington had scarcely forty thousand people in her youth. Small towns, she would later write, were scenes of a “galling, busy puritanism…moving on the wheels of disgrace and scandal, drunkenness and deceit.” Her ticket out was books. As an adolescent, Curtis writes in her biography, she “read her way through the classics” at the local public library. College, at the state university downtown, introduced her to communism, “European émigré professors,” contemporary literary currents, and “a group of clever young Jewish men from New York.” These last determined her direction. She was, she later said, like a provincial out of Balzac “yearning for Paris.” A year out of college, she turned down a fellowship at LSU in favor of Columbia, boarded a Greyhound, and headed for the Emerald City.

     

    That was in 1939. In 1943, after sojourns in a women’s dormitory, then some nearby rooming houses (the latter an experience she’d call upon in fiction), Hardwick shifted to the Hotel Schuyler, a grotty den of transients and failures — “spotted rugs and walls,” “greasy, smoking ovens,” “people who slept all day in their graying underwear” — a short stumble from Times Square. She stayed for years, sharing an apartment with a gay young man she knew from home, then a call girl and her pimp. Other neighbors included a middle-aged woman, barroom pianist by trade, who borrowed fifty 1940s dollars (more than eight hundred in today’s money), then, by way of repayment, called Hardwick a “dirty cunt.” When the pimp cornered her in the hallway and rubbed himself off on her coat, she decided it was time to leave.

     

    Meanwhile, she wrote: fiction first, then criticism also. Her maiden novel failed to find a publisher. A second manuscript, The Ghostly Lover, appeared in 1945. It was not well received — reviewers called it “removed from reality,” its characters “strangely suspended in air” — but it won the attention of Philip Rahv, the editor of Partisan Review. In general, Hardwick’s fiction of the 1940s and 1950s — some fourteen stories plus a second novel, The Simple Truth, about a murder trial in Iowa City, which she seems to have started as a way of dealing with living, for a semester, in Iowa City — is well-constructed but excessively controlled: stylistically cautious, self-consciously premised and plotted, lacking a genuine pulse.

     

    It was in the essay, starting at Partisan Review in 1945, that Hardwick found her voice, her freedom. She took chances; she had fun; she let it fly. An early piece, on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, begins: “Vassal, slave, inferior, other, thing, victim, dependent, parasite, prisoner — oh, bitter, raped, child-swollen flesh doomed to immanence! Sisyphean goddess of the dust pile!” Her style took shape. There were her famous adjectives. That paragraph on de Beauvoir goes on to offer “madly sensible” and “brilliantly obscure” as descriptions of that landmark tome. Later she will give us “the clamorous serenity of [Frost’s] old age” and “the mournful, expensive defeat of Fitzgerald’s last years,” Plath’s “ambitious rage” and “the sumptuous, taciturn resonance” of Bartleby’s “I prefer not to,” the “aggressive simplicity and shy opulence” of the old New York aristocracy and the “intimidating revelation” of contemporary girls in string bikinis. Hardwick’s adjectives aren’t decorative; they are load-bearing. They create volume. They tell a story in a phrase, and it is always one of life’s impossible conjunctions, its vitalizing oxymorons. 

     

    Then there are her similes. Some are marvelously simple, homespun. A character is “as dry as an old lemon rind.” An account of Dylan Thomas’ disastrous, drunken visits to America is “as flat and true as a calendar.” The names of old Boston worthies such as William Ellery Channing “remain in one’s mind, without producing an image or a fact, as the marks are left on the wall after the picture has been removed.” Others draw upon her eye for social types. Boswell hung about Johnson’s coattails “like an insurance salesman after a policy.” The owners of jazz clubs, always changing, quickly failing, “started out with the embezzler’s hope and moved swiftly to the bankrupt’s torpor.” The most brilliant of Hardwick’s similes crystallize a situation in a single image. Delmore Schwartz, in his last, mad years, was “given by paranoia to the shedding of friends and wives, angrily plucking them off like flies on the worn threads of his jacket.” A pair of poor, aging women who roam the streets of her neighborhood “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind.” The naïve and friendless heiress Catherine Sloper, in Hardwick’s dazzling account of Washington Square, “is as alone as an animal in a field.” Morris Townsend, the adventurer who seeks her fortune, “goes for Catherine’s attention with the watchful concentration of the sportsman waiting for the game to fly in the range of the gun.”

     

    Her wit — dry, sly, sticking in the shiv before you even see the flash. Ted Kennedy was “no guardian of his reputation.” Rabbit’s wife in Rabbit, Run “is confused, sore, exhausted, and not sober.” Apropos the O.J. Simpson trial, “It is not easy to imagine Lawyer Dershowitz in discomfort about his life decisions.” Epigrammatic: “the example of the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre.” Deflating: “swapping” was for “wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner.” Just plain wicked: for Truman Capote, the South was “there to be called upon…as a sort of spécialité, like Key lime pie and conch fritters” — this from an essay-length draught of vivid vinegar (“crocodilian celebrity,” “ruins and works of art he declined to get off the yacht to see”) composed at eighty-one, an age at which writers are usually napping or dead.

     

    Above all, her sentences: their moves, their turns, their variety and unpredictability, their sinuosity and steel, the way they gather and release their force.

     

    On Jude the Obscure:

    “Every single character fails and falls, in great pain, each one.” The sympathy is in the syntax.

     

    On the subjects of Frans Hals’ The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse:

    “The laughing cavaliers perhaps had eaten too many oysters, drunk too much beer and died a replete, unwilling death, leaving the poor, freed by a bitter life from killing pleasures, to shrivel on charity, live on with their strong, blackening faces.” Nearly every phrase, sometimes every word, turns us in a new direction.

     

    On Capote’s Black and White Ball to celebrate the publication of In Cold Blood: “The party at the Plaza acquired the fame of a coronation for the very successful book, still a work of riveting interest for its portrait of the misshapen bodies, language, highway felonies and idiotic plans and dreams of two savage, talkative, rawhide murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.” A syntactic cascade, phrase falling into phrase; a thread that ties the happy famous to the heartland refuse on whose wretchedness the book was built.

     

    And this:

    Updike went on to Harvard and, as a young writer, came under the benevolent paternalism of The New Yorker, married early, had children, moved to Massachusetts, and with an uncommon creative energy wrote stories, novels, poems, essays, and still writes on and on with great success about suburban landscapes or small-town ones efflorescent in observed detail, prodigal in image, and brashly knowing and accomplished in the rhythms of current dialogue and steaming with the orifices and bodily fluids of many fluent copulations.

    Form follows function, a prodigal sentence for a prodigal talent, remaining aloft, with its unexpected “ands” (“and still writes on,” “and steaming with”), like a basketballer torquing toward the hoop, and finishing, like a spent adulterer, in a superfluity of fluids.

     

    There are no flat patches in Hardwick’s prose. Every inch is as detailed and colored as a Renaissance landscape. All is taut, condensed; there is pressure on every word. “She writes like a poet,” said Robert Silvers, eternal editor of the New York Review of Books. “The leaps are so precise and dramatic that they open up the mind.” Yet Hardwick had it tougher than the poets, for as a critic she was more constrained by sense, by the demands of clarity and fact, by the expectations of the form. She had to look before she leapt. Still, it’s no surprise to discover, from Pinckney, that she believed in reading poetry before one sat down to write prose, because it “opened up the possibilities of language in your head.” Nor that she composed like a poet — “line by line,” he says. “She couldn’t go on to the next sentence if the one before it wasn’t right.” Curtis reports that it could take her six months to write a fifteen-page essay. Her dedication to criticism as a high literary calling, an art form of its own, is virtually without parallel.

     

    Was there something too precious about all this, as some have said — a cult of the sentence, of style for style’s sake, for which Hardwick, along with some of her contemporaries, was responsible? I don’t think so. Style, for Hardwick, was an instrument of exploration, a way of pushing language to the point of discovery. Writing, she once said, is “the only time in your life when you have to think.” As both a reader and writer, she possessed an absolute belief in the value of art as a way of knowing: independent of politics, superior to journalism and the social sciences, indispensable for understanding. That conviction, so essential to the New York writers as to not require naming, has over the ensuing decades gradually been submerged — under scientism, under the frivolity of garbage entertainment, under, lately, ideology — and is one of the cultural resources that Hardwick can help us recover.

     

    Hardwick did not enter the New York literary world at a good time. She entered at the best. She raised herself above provinciality at exactly the moment America did. The great nineteenth-century American writers were isolatoes, one-offs: Poe, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson. Then came the expatriates: James, Stein, Eliot, Pound; Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Now, after the war, New York was the center, a city of refugee geniuses and incandescent offspring of working-class immigrants. In the Greenwich Village circle, at cocktail parties at the Rahvs, one can only picture the commotion that Hardwick and McCarthy caused, two brilliant, sexy gentiles from the exotic heartland. “The dull Communist wives,” Pinckney reports, “didn’t like…their double act. They said challenging things, wore bright red lipstick, and were pretty.”

     

    It was at one of those parties, in 1947, that Hardwick met Robert Lowell, a year younger and well on his way to establishing himself as the leading American poet of their generation. The marriage lasted more than twenty years and knew as much drama as all of Aeschylus. Lowell’s endless infidelities were frequently the prodrome to a re-eruption of his mania. Again the mental ward, the verbal abuse, the brave face to family and friends, the false, returning hope — a Sisyphean repetition. “All night I’ve held your hand,” he wrote in “Man and Wife,” “as if you had / a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad / … / and dragged me home alive.” And that was only 1959. Hardwick’s was a deep and wounded love. “I would kill myself if it would cure you,” she wrote in 1965. The good times were extraordinary; his intellect opened up worlds. Five years later he abandoned her for good, taking up with Caroline Blackwood, an aristocratic Englishwoman who’d already burned through Silvers, Lucien Freud, and others.

     

    It was devastating. It was also liberating. Artist couples, Hardwick later wrote, “share in perceptions, temperament, in the struggle for creation, for the powers descending downward from art, for reputation, achievement, stability, for their own uniqueness — that especially.” That especially. She had changed her name when she married, but she hadn’t changed her byline. “Elizabeth Lowell never wrote anything,” she said. But the relationship, particularly as it staggered through the 1960s, cost her as an artist. “I love Lizzie,” Lowell once told Sontag, “but she’s such a good writer. One can’t have one’s wife writing Madame Bovary in the kitchen.” He needn’t have worried: the tumult of their home life made the necessary concentration unobtainable. By the time they split, she hadn’t attempted a novel since The Simple Truth in 1955, hadn’t published a story since 1959. But soon, with Lowell gone, she set out upon the work that would develop into Sleepless Nights, her great accomplishment in fiction. First, however, she produced a volume of essays that represented both “an act of self-rescue,” as Pinckney puts it, and the height of her achievement as a critic.

     

    Seduction and Betrayal, from 1974, is anomalous among her books. Her other collections — A View of My Own (1962), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), Sight-Readings (1998) — represent the harvest of many years of freelance work, and each covers a wide range of subjects, including, in the first two cases, politics, theater, and travel. The essays that make up Seduction and Betrayal were written in a concentrated burst, during the three years immediately following Lowell’s departure, and on a single theme: women and literature — the Brontës, Ibsen’s heroines, Plath, Woolf, Zelda, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, and, in the title essay, Tess, Clarissa Harlowe, Hester Prynne, and others.

     

    The list is telling in its heterogeneity. Hardwick’s approach as a critic was to place the characters of fiction on the same plane as real people. She treated them alike, because she was interested in the same questions with regard to both. Questions, precisely, of character, in its twin senses: one’s moral composition, as shaped, in part, by place and family and history (“deforming conditions,” she calls them), and one’s way of facing those conditions. That is, the why and how of action and its consequences. You can call this gossip, as Hardwick sometimes playfully did. It is also an exalted version of the kind of thing that every reader — every “common reader” — does. This is the point of Hardwick’s refusal to read like a specialist. She read for the reasons that everyone reads, or everyone who hasn’t been debauched by learning: aesthetic bliss, and knowledge of our fellow human creatures, who were for her an endless fascination.

     

    In Seduction and Betrayal, those questions of character largely revolve around what might be called the drama of the gifted woman. Charlotte Brontë and her heroines, Nora in A Doll’s House and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Thomas Carlyle’s wife and William Wordsworth’s sister: intelligent, spirited figures constrained by the condition of being a woman, by their limited options in life. How did they respond, and at what cost? The autobiographical dimension here is not hard to spot. Hardwick sees Zelda Fitzgerald as someone whose creative potential was sacrificed to her husband’s convenience and ego, and Jane Carlyle as a brilliant intellect and wit who spent her energy, as Hardwick did a lot of hers, on housework. Yet we shouldn’t overstate the parallels. For one thing, Hardwick was looking back, mostly to the nineteenth century. Her own life straddled old and new: born to traditional expectations, she had had the chance to overleap them as Sue Bridehead or Jane Eyre had not. These essays were themselves the proof of that.

     

    For another, she did not believe that conditions, however deforming, were determining. We all face them in one form or another. The question, given that, was what was inside you and what you did with it. Dorothy Wordsworth, Hardwick judged, had the gift of minute observation (as demonstrated in her celebrated journals) but “did not understand meter” and “lacked generalizing power.” Her own poems were “not good,” and her existence as her brother’s sidekick (“she lived his life to the full”) was in fact a blessing. Jane Carlyle, who wrote wonderful letters but never became the novelist we imagine she might have been, “lack[ed] ambition and need — the psychic need for a creation to stand outside herself.”

     

    “Ambition”: a sacred word for Hardwick — it repeats in her essay on Plath — as was “discipline.” She understood the gulf between potential and achievement and what it took to cross it. She also understood the difference between writing — real writing, finished work — and domestic substitutes. She admired Jane Carlyle and she respected housework, but the “truly staggering Victorian energy” that poured four years into Oliver Cromwell, and thirteen into Frederick the Great, belonged to her husband. “This is altogether different from nailing carpets and shaking out curtains.” Dorothy’s contribution to her brother’s poetry — the shared walks and feelings — was an “illusion of collaboration.” “This is the way for gifted, energetic wives of writers to a sort of composition of their own.” Hardwick was, or had been, married to a writer, but she was not a writer’s wife. She was a writer. Ambition, discipline, achievement.

     

    And, in Hardwick’s case, as these examples demonstrate, brutal frankness, a quality for which she was famous and feared — in the parlor, the classroom, the pages of an essay — and that is nowhere more in evidence than in the volume’s title piece. The seduced, she loudly implies, want to be: “guile and insistence are clever at uncovering pockets of complicity.” As for the betrayed, they shouldn’t be surprised. That is love: it goes wrong. For those who merely suffer under their betrayal — Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter — Hardwick feels pity but no respect. Dimmesdale “cannot ask fundamental questions about life.” Hetty “hasn’t the quality to be tragic. Instead she is something smaller and lesser — she is miserable.” The tragic qualities are courage, dignity, fortitude, endurance, and these depend on an acceptance of “the griefs of experience,” “the command of necessity” — the reality of “life.” They mark the difference between the victim and the heroine. Tess is the latter: “She is not surprised by loss and rejection and therefore never degraded by it.” In light of the circumstances under which they were written, those words were an act of self-rescue indeed. “The betrayed heroine,” Hardwick goes on, “unlike the merely betrayed woman, is never under the illusion that love or sex confers rights upon human beings.”

     

    The composition of the essays in Seduction and Betrayal coincided not only with Lowell’s fresh abandonment but also with the heyday of second-wave feminism. Ms. was founded in 1971; the ERA passed Congress in 1972; Roe was decided in 1973. The volume went against the movement’s grain and was received within it less than gladly. Assertions like the notion that Clarissa’s rape “may be a crime, but it is not exactly a betrayal of her expectations” — from the title essay, which was first delivered as a lecture at Vassar, no less — were not designed to flatter the party line. Hardwick’s own view of the movement was dim, seeing it as mostly “bad writing, bald simplicity, and simple-mindedness.”

     

    In retrospect, the limitation was partly hers. Having lived from old to new, or relatively new, she couldn’t imagine the next step, a world of full equality in which Elizabeth Lowells split the household duties with their husbands fifty-fifty (in which Elizabeth Hardwick didn’t have to be Elizabeth Lowell at all). But she also knew things that she saw the movement — and the era’s social utopianism more broadly — as having failed to learn. She knew that human beings, women no less than men, tend to disappoint the roles that ideologies script for them. Women have an erotic relationship to caregiving, she sometimes implies, for example, as men do to power. She also knew that while the tragic qualities may be in short supply, tragedy itself is not a choice. “Flirtation, surrender, pregnancy, misery. This is the plot of existence.” Sex, she told the age of Kinsey and the pill, is not the solution — “the body is a poor vessel for transcendence” — nor even is love, “love with its ancient distresses.” What she mourned was not this, but the loss of a sense of the tragic in fiction and life — the era’s slick mobility, its desperate insouciance. She turned and returned to an earlier age, the great age of the English novel, to find the depth she felt so lacking in the present.

     

    Hardwick realized her own great novel not by emulating traditional forms, as she had in her earlier fiction, but by inventing her own. The true American artist, Harold Rosenberg had written, surveys their situation and “searches for the principle that applies, even if it applies only once.” In Sleepless Nights, it applied only once. The work appeared in 1979, and, in its associative movement, owes something to Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976) and to Didion’s fictions of the 1970s, Play It As It Lays and A Book of Common Prayer, but it is unique, in Hardwick’s corpus and the world. She never wrote another novel; one feels she didn’t need to. It is one of those books in which a writer states their entire being. It is a novel with no plot, no character development, no resolution. It is a memoir, fictionalized, that avoids discussion of the self. It is largely a series of sketches of people she has known, from Billie Holiday to the woman who does her laundry, interleaved with invisible art. It has no apparent structure, yet its structure feels unshakable, recalling Lily Briscoe’s thought in To the Lighthouse: “on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric [is] clamped together with bolts of iron.” It is all voice, mood, sensibility, address.

     

    She is lying awake — the title’s premise, not explained until the final line but everywhere implied. She is writing “Dearest M” (Mary McCarthy), calling out in thought, composing letters in her head. She is reassembling her life, her self, from fragments of memory glued together by imagination, yet finding that the self does not cohere so much as flow: “On the battered calendar of the past…I had imagined there would be felicitous notations…And myself there, marking the day with an I…And yet the old pages of the days and weeks are splattered with the dark-brown rings of coffee cups and I find myself gratefully dissolved in the grounds as the water drips downward.” She is thinking of others, mostly women, mostly distressed, downhearted, downtrodden. Hardwick’s sympathy for ordinary people was the treasure that she carried with her from Kentucky. That laundress, Ida; bag ladies; a “failed mezzo,” Miss Cramer; a local girl who turned to prostitution out of willfulness or nameless need; her mother — refracted selves, paths she might have taken or could still. It is a book about time, what it does to us.

     

    Much of the novel happens elsewhere — in Kentucky; in Maine, where she summered; in Boston, where she and Lowell lived for much of the 1950s; in Amsterdam, where they spent a year — but it is thoroughly a New York book. Its movement is the movement of memory, of gossip, one story calling forth another, but it is also the movement of a walker in the city, of serial encounters on the sidewalk, figures looming up, fates etched on faces, then dropping back, receding. Hardwick lived on West 67th Street, a few doors down from Central Park, for nearly fifty years. “I never heard Elizabeth Hardwick say, ‘I took a walk in the park,’” Pinckney writes. “What she wanted when she went out were shops, sidewalks, traffic, to be among strangers on Main Street, the small-town girl’s dream.” In fact, the whole book happens in New York, in her bedroom, in the mind of a New Yorker, consciousness sending out feelers, reaching around corners, peering in windows. In the background is “the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street.”

     

    Manhattan, she would later write, “is not a city of memory, not a family city.” People come and go; the city is always destroying itself, “overthrow[ing] the future before it arrives.” She makes a memory for it, gathering an ad hoc family of New York strangers. The final chapter centers on the rooming houses where she passed her early years. Working women, talkative and secretive, some young and transient, some older, defiant, “as if to say: You cannot destroy a ruin.” Solitary New York women, together in “the strange apartment with its peculiar cells for the protection of a vast, overwhelming privacy.” Lives lived apart in close proximity. “Someone is running a bath, someone is listening to the late-night preacher on the radio.” Now, forty years later, the narrator is old herself, is solitary once again, is back to listening to noises from the nearby rooms, the sounds of other lives, which keep her company across the sleepless nights.

     

    The novel changed the way that Hardwick wrote. It was followed by a set of stories that were even more associative in form. “Cross-town,” “The Bookseller,” “Back Issues,” “On the Eve”: set in New York, they read like outtakes from the book, or further thoughts, more New York lives recorded in her loose and brisk notation, colored by her sympathetic irony. But her criticism grew associative as well. She taught herself to make an essay travel like a conversation. This was her late style, which she practiced through her middle eighties. Instead of laying out an argument in sequence, she would hover over points, digress, move on, circle back. Transitions became abrupt, or absent, or occurred within a paragraph. Sometimes paragraphs themselves were mini-essays, related to each other only by accumulation. And yet because she somehow seemed to be able to talk about several things at once — the work, the life, the biography under review — she could always recover from the digression, pick up a dropped thread, move on in whatever direction she chose. She would end with an aside, an evocation rather than conclusion, or with an unexpected point that she had, as it were, just thought of. She had more to say but her time was up, so she was going to say goodbye now, the end.

    The World as an Institute

    In August 1990, the recently retired Dutch ethnologist Johannes Jacobus Voskuil had a dream: he lay in his coffin and was carried to his grave while a song he had heard hundreds of times — Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” — played in the background. He heard the crunch of gravel under the pallbearers’ feet. After a while, the soft swaying over others’ shoulders stopped, and he felt himself being lowered to the ground. As faint murmurs arose, and the footfalls died away, he lifted the lid of his coffin and sat up to watch the attendees depart. Those at the tail of the funeral train he didn’t know; those at the head were now too far away to recognize. Lying back, letting the lid settle over him again, he remained awake, “overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless sorrow.” 

    A month later, Voskuil began work on Meneer Beerta (Mister Beerta) an autobiographical novel chronicling eight years in the life of his alter ego, Maarten Koning, at the Bureau for Dialectology, Folklore, and Onomastics in Amsterdam. By July 1991 he had moved onto a sequel, Vuile Handen (Dirty Hands). He would continue writing at an average pace of around four pages a day, until by 1995 he had finished the longest novel written in Dutch, and one of the longest novels ever written, entitled Het Bureau (The Office or The Institute) which appeared in seven volumes from 1996 to 2000.

    On its surface, the premise is anything but promising: a not-quite-young man in need of work looks up a former professor, who offers him a job as a researcher for an Atlas for Folk Culture, investigating such topics as beliefs about the kabouter, a sort of leprechaun or gnome. Maarten accepts the post against the spirited protests of his wife Nicolien, because he must have a job, and because he feels that, of the two of them, he will better tolerate steady employment. For five thousand pages, he goes to work every day, produces an exhaustive record of petty squabbles, malingerings, and the vicissitudes of his field of volkskunde — commonly translated as folkloristics or ethnology, though neither term fully encompasses the breadth of the Dutch, especially given the transformations volkskunde underwent in Voskuil’s time. Well over half of the novel consists of dialogue: transcriptions of committee meetings, domestic arguments, conversations with barbers or shopkeepers, and a decades-long exchange with a psychologically disturbed friend named Frans Veen. As transformations overwhelm his workplace, the former Bureau for Dialect, Folklore, and Onomastics, known from 1979 onward as the A.P. Beerta Institute, Maarten chooses to take early retirement, only to find that the backdrop of his life has disappeared, and he is “adrift like a balloon in the sky.” 

    He returns to the office periodically, to finish a few lectures and essays; his colleagues greet him first with tolerance, then indifference, then hostility; finally, his desk is taken away and his papers piled up in the corner. He never believed in his work, and had described himself and his coworkers as “belonging to a reservoir of superfluous intellects society no longer needs, who must be given some pointless task to keep them off the street.” What had kept him going for thirty years, he believed, was solidarity, but he now realizes that it was a mirage. “Despite his skepticism, and against his better judgment, he had wanted to believe, deep in his heart, in his people, as like Gideon’s band of three hundred. Only now, with the slow passage of time, did he realize he had knowingly deceived himself.”

    There is no sex and no romance, there is scant adventure only apathetically described, there are no noble heroes, no dastardly villains, no deathbed penitence or hidden treasure. Yet Het Bureau has gained a hold on the Dutch imagination comparable to the fever caused elsewhere by Harry Potter or Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is perpetually out at the libraries, has inspired a radio play and a graphic novel adaptation; for a time the Meertens Instituut, the real-life counterpart of Maarten Koning’s office in the novel, offered guided tours, and there was even an exhibition at which institute employees mentioned in the book stood at their desks, ready to converse with fans. There have been reports of Dutch office workers nicknaming their colleagues after those they most resemble in the novel. More than one person, chronically ill, sought special permission from Voskuil’s publisher to see proofs of the novels later volumes before release, in order to die in peace, knowing how Maarten’s story ended. 

    In my own experience, mention of the book among the Dutch gives rise to an almost conspiratorial sort of amity like that which once brought together fans of The Wire in the United States, but with an added note of gratitude, because the Netherlands is a country that outsiders rarely bother to learn much about. The untraveled and uncultured can trot out stereotypes about snooty Frenchmen, lusty Latins, stolid Russians, and orderly Germans, but how many under fifty have any sense of the proverbial frankness and frugality that inspired the terms “Dutch uncle” and “going Dutch”? Neither in Europe nor in the United States have I had the sense that Dutch culture matters much to anyone: Rembrandt, sure, or the diary of Anne Frank, or Cees Nooteboom or Gerald Reve for the really well-read, but these references run out soon, and pale in comparison to the significance of Amsterdam as a budget airline destination for the cannabis-and-sex-tourists who have made much of its historic center almost uninhabitable. For these reasons, and perhaps because of the relatively scant attention received by Gerd Busse’s heroic translation of the entirety of Het Bureau into German, critics have debated whether there is something specifically and irreducibly Dutch about Voskuil that would impede his success in other languages.

    This is nonsense. Het Bureau is a masterpiece almost unique in its accessibility, dense with humor and sorrow, and ecumenical in its concerns. It is the sort of book you live with, feeling sorrow as the pages turn, and in the weeks since I finished it I have more than once felt maudlin, wondering when my copies of Voskuil’s diaries would arrive so that I can get another fix. Even now, reopening the first volume to check something, I was consoled by the recollection that it was still there, and I could start over whenever I wished.

    Frequently remarked upon is Voskuil’s capacity to show the interest in boring things, the interest even in boredom itself. In volume four of Het Bureau, his protagonist, Maarten, tells one of his closest colleagues, Ad Muller, about his research into threshing techniques. Ad replies he could get excited over a simple farming implement, and Maarten counters, “When you immerse yourself in something, it becomes interesting as a matter of course.” Het Bureau depends on this principle of immersion, and its form is intended to frustrate readers who imagine they can skim and still get the point. On this, Voskuil was categorical:

    A book should be thick, a book should be detailed, a book should be “tedious” for those who are not my true readers. If you are able, you should scare readers away. Then, you’ll be left with those you can trust.

    [All translations are mine throughout.] 

    This principle is nicely illustrated by Maarten’s minute observations of his bête noire, Bart Asjes, a fellow researcher whose variations on the phrase “I have serious objections” have a rhythmic Bartlebyesque insistence. At first one forgives his peculiarities, before growing frustrated with his finickiness and finally beginning to sense something sinister in his supposed probity, the lone effect of which is to stall or derail every possible initiative, while offering no constructive alternatives because, as he never wearies of reminding Maarten, that is his responsibility. Their relationship at times takes on a morbid quality, with Maarten’s attention to him a form of tormented distress, as Bart’s every movement is subjected to surveillance in anticipation of discord in the wings:

    Bart returned from the card catalogue room. He greeted Ad, sat at his desk, and began to type with short, hard strokes. “Hey!” he said every time he made an error. He then erased the incorrect letter and typed the right one in its place.

    The moment is mundane, the prose is lacking in ornament; what gives it its bizarre power (and this is true of Het Bureau as a whole) is the patient reprisal of related incidents, like the inexorable lapping of waves, that gives shape to a character not as a pendant to the protagonist’s story but as a quantum of his life.

    Voskuil shows, like Natalia Ginzburg or Chekhov, that syntactic virtuosity is often a matter more of self-regard than art, and may introduce an air of contrivance that is detrimental to real pathos. At some point in the discussion of any long novel, you have to get it over with and talk about Proust, so I may as well say it here: weepy as I get when Bergotte dies on a settee at an exhibition of Dutch paintings after admiring the “patch of yellow wall” in a Vermeer, the scene strikes me, if I’m honest, as flowery babble, and almost dishonorable in its sponging of religious principles in pursuit of aesthetic rapture. There is no “world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice… which we leave in order to be born on this earth,” and since it does not exist, we will not return there, and Bergotte inhabits no ether where the precepts of his heart reign, he is just dead and rotting in a coffin. 

    Contrast with this the death of Maarten Koning’s father, a disillusioned old socialist and newspaper man, who in retirement continues to write editorials every morning that he then tears into tiny pieces and throws away. He grows grumpier, his gait slows, his mind wanders; one day he is taken to the hospital; he despises the doctors’ cluelessness, and the nurses telling him when to drink, when to eat, when to piss, asking him patronizingly whether the flowers his son brought him aren’t nice. When Maarten wishes to know whether he is afraid of dying, he responds, with unsettling honesty, “I’m not… But of course I don’t know whether I will be afraid when the moment comes.” “God, what an end,” he says elsewhere amid interminable bedside conversations crowded with bromides, insipid gossip, medical trivia, words uttered to pass the time. One day Maarten’s wife tells him that she thinks his father wants to hold his hand. Maarten does so gingerly, but realizes that the old man is asleep, and the couple goes home. An hour later, Maarten’s brother calls him to tell him their father is gone.

    A similar tenderness is evident in Voskuil’s portrayal of Nicolien’s mother’s dementia, which begins with an untoward crying fit when Maarten and his wife change residence and ends with her in a nursing home, unsure where she is and who is who, constantly repeating “Oh, yes,” as though understanding were still possible, as though she could yet hold onto all the facts needed to retain a clear picture of the world. It is there, too, in rare moments of joy, as when Maarten recovers his pipe the day after the bowl detached from it and rolled into the waters of the bay as he was knocking it against a stone bollard. The pipe has no history; it is not a prized inheritance from a favorite uncle, a keepsake from a long-lost friend, a costly indulgence or a reminder of happier days. It is just something Maarten likes, a piece of his world, and when he lies in bed holding back tears because he thinks it gone, Voskuil doesn’t coddle the reader with explanations why. 

    I might remark here on the contrast with another, more famous, comparably massive fictional project: the six volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. At the peak of Knausgaard fever in America, one had the sense that this was something unprecedented, but even within European literature My Struggle already formed part of a tradition of long novels that struggle between the competing tendencies of radical intimacy and radical objectivity in the search for autobiographical truth. Exemplary in this regard are Gerhard Roth’s Archive des Schweigens (Archives of Silence), Peter Kurzeck’s Das alte Jahrhundert (The Old Century), and De harde Kern (The Hard Core) by Voskuil’s friend Frida Vogels, who appears in Het Bureau under the name Henriette Fagel. Knausgaard shares with some of these older writers, and certainly with Voskuil, what Frederic Jameson has called the “itemized” approach to description. Knausgaard distinguishes himself from them through the consciously metafictional nature of his endeavor: My Struggle cannot be separated from the public and private scandals around it, which form much of the material of the later volumes. It also evinces a confidence in the author’s analytical powers, with regard to autobiographical memories and even with the thoughts of others, that has more in common with the omniscient first-person of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel than with the hesitancy to explain that characterizes both Het Bureau and the projects mentioned above.

    This hesitancy is essential to Het Bureau’s effect, which combines a feeling of profound familiarity with bafflement, even despair at why things happen as they do. Voskuil shuns the mantle of creator: he is instead a chronicler (he repeatedly insists that nothing in the book is invented and that conversations are recorded verbatim) whose concern is to intrude as little as possible on the transcript of events. Though in all aspects Maarten Koning’s life resembles his own, the third person that Voskuil employs is unusually opaque: even his most private thoughts, in the form of diary excerpts, are artifact rather than proof. Voskuil strives for a representation of a single subjectivity in the most objective possible terms — a subjectivity that is also subjection to the myriad realities, some material, others impalpable, that define an individual self, but of which that self is never master.

    Het Bureau is a self-contained story, but Maarten Koning exists elsewhere — in the novel Bij nader inzien (Upon Closer Inspection), written in 1963, and in Binnen de huid (Within the Skin), written between 1964 and 1968 but published a year after Voskuil’s death. Both books show a protagonist at odds with the world: in the first, he is a radical university student taken with the illusion that he and his friends might live together, true to their values, forever, and who stands by in disappointment as they marry, get jobs, and adapt to the demands of convention. (Not immune to the allurements of revenge offered by the roman-à-clef, Voskuil used Bij nader inzien to send a message to his comrades: “This is what you said, and this is what you did.”) Binnen de huid is an account of Voskuil’s own capitulation in turn. In it, Maarten is married to Nicolien, and his friend Paul is married to Rosalie. Maarten and Nicolien disdain her — she is the one, they think, who turned Paul from a Francophile would-be poet to a teacher and paragon of bourgeois conformism. Yet Maarten falls crazily in love with Rosalie, and Nicolien begins a relationship with Paul. Neither affair leads anywhere, and Maarten learns that he, too, lacks the courage of his convictions: “I began to suspect that betrayal was the only way of staying alive, and that all I’d done thus far was postpone the execution.” 

    Ironically, Maarten becomes a teacher himself — briefly — in Groningen, in the north; he quits this job just before Het Bureau begins. I hasten to add that there is no need for pious distinctions between biography and fiction, or boring reflections on auto-fiction, in the case of Voskuil. He is quite straightforward: in interviews, he refers to himself and his protagonist interchangeably; in histories of the Meertens Institut, more than one writer has mistakenly referred to real people by the names Voskuil assigns them in his novel; and in Binnen de huid, when Paul comments on the mistake of confusing an author with his main character, Maarten chides him, “That is the only way you should read.”

    Those acquainted with the earlier novels will recall Voskuil’s contempt for science — wetenschap in Dutch, which, like Wissenschaft in German, describes not just the hard sciences but the systematic pursuit of scholarly knowledge in general. Maarten’s willingness to make an exception for volkskunde is partly a result of his indolence — he needs to do something, daydreams of being a farmer, or a baker like his grandfather, but seems to sense that fate has marked him to be an urban intellectual — and partly of his impression of the disreputable nature of the field. Dominated, since the mid-nineteenth century, by a search for what used to be called “the genius of the people,” Dutch folkloristics had long placed special emphasis on supposed continuities among Germanic peoples in a way that dovetailed with the Nazis’ racial thinking. Several significant figures in Dutch folklore studies and ethnology were prominent supporters of the Nazi occupiers, and the broad rebuke to the discipline after the end of the Second World War led to a more discreet approach, with a focus on documentation to the detriment of grand theories. For Maarten, this means the opportunity to labor in the dark: to send out questionnaires, conduct field research, clip newspaper articles, and fill out file cards free from the obligations entailed by institutional prestige. 

    Maarten pursues his work under the auspices of Anton Beerta, a fussy and aloof gay man who drops frequent, tacit hints about his sexuality while at the same time scorning what he calls “homos.” The Atlas for Popular Culture, which he hires Maarten to work on, is “a Dutch-Flemish initiative that dated from the time before the war, when Beerta, like so many of his persuasion, was an ardent believer in the idea of the Greater Netherlands,” that is, the unification of Dutch-speaking territories severed during the Eighty Years’ War into the Dutch Republic and the Catholic Netherlands — precursors to the modern Netherlands and Belgium, respectively. Beerta’s enthusiasm has vanished by the time of Maarten’s arrival, and his chief passion has become the joining of as many committees as possible. Maarten looks to Beerta as a paragon, “the living proof that it was possible to shield oneself from the world so much that one became untouchable.” To his friend Klaas and to his wife, who would have preferred that he become a postman, Maarten explains:

    If Beerta hadn’t offered me the job, I wouldn’t have sought it out. I accepted it because we were out of money and I think Berta believes in nothing, just as I do. He has built the perfect alibi for himself, and in its shadow he can live a life of his own. At present, I feel that’s the only solution. At least if you don’t want to hold your hand out and beg.

    Nicolien suspects from the first that Maarten’s employment in the office is a mistake. Her interminable, hysterical grousing is one of Het Bureau’s high points; it is impossible not to laugh at her limitless indignation as Maarten cowers, and is scolded for cowering; clams up, and is scolded for his silence; protests, and is exposed to infernal fury. That so little resentment ensues from their fights is due to Nicolien’s role as Maarten’s conscience: she knows that he won’t stop at being a researcher, that papers and lectures will follow, that a late evening at the office or a Saturday spent polishing an essay are not fleeting obligations, but harbingers of a future in which he will commit himself rigorously to a respectable role in a society he has always claimed to despise.

    Some of the novel’s greatest moments of humor are owed to the tension between Beerta’s outsized pretensions and Maarten’s indurate skepticism. After Beerta promises the Commission — Voskuil favors such vague designations as the Office, the Main Office, the Commission — that the Atlas of Folk Culture will be completed by his retirement, he asks Maarten how long it will actually take. Reminding Beerta that he has worked for twenty-five years on the yet-to-be-published first volume, or better twenty, subtracting five years for the war, and that the Atlas is projected to run to twenty volumes, he arrives at the figure of four hundred years. “But I was the only one here,” Beerta tells him. “And now I have you.” “Fine, two hundred years,” Maarten replies.

    In fact, the Volkskunde-Atlas voor Nederland en Vlaams België, edited by P.J. Meertens and Maurits de Meyer (Anton Beerta and Jan Vanhamme in the novel), which began to appear in 1959, met a somewhat ignoble end, ceasing publication after four volumes. It was criticized for the superficial nature of its analysis, its haphazard selection of themes, and a lack of rigor in its approach to the diffusion of folk customs. Volume IV, Het ophangen van de nageboorte van het paard (The Hanging of the Afterbirth of the Horse), written entirely by Voskuil, consists of a hundred-page commentary on a single map showing where, in Belgium and the Netherlands, the afterbirth of horses is traditionally burned, buried, thrown on a dung heap, or hung from a tree. In Het Bureau, Maarten is proud enough of his work on the subject, which represents the first time the Bureau has managed to locate one of the cultural boundaries that are in principle essential to its labor, that he scolds Beerta’s failure to recognize its “historical significance.” But Maarten himself cannot well say why this difference exists, and eventually, he will forsake the geographical method, abandoning the idea of fixed cultural tendencies in favor of a study of processes whose relationship to tradition is rarely reducible to practices persisting across time. 

    Were the years not marked — these are the only chapter divisions in the book — readers of Het Bureau might struggle to situate it in time. History intrudes overtly only when it affects Maarten Koning’s life: the Vietnam War appears twice, once as Maarten’s justification for voting for the Pacifist Socialist Party, and once when he and his wife attend an antiwar demonstration. The most significant mention of apartheid occurs when Maarten turns down an offer of collaboration from a professor at the University of Stellenbosch and must defend himself to the Bureau and the Commission. Yet there are aspects of history that ought not be ignored. The fate of the Bureau, for example, is dependent on economic developments in the Netherlands: political shifts and GDP growth as high as eight percent per annum from the early 1960s to the late 1970s encouraged massive social spending in a climate in which, as one historian put it, “a successful minister was defined as one who could get a larger share of the pie.” 

    In this context, the bureaucracy expands vertiginously, leaving Maarten to fight for resources with his colleagues in Dialectology and the Music Archive. (Onomastics, the preserve of Beerta’s successor Jaap Balk, seems barely to exist for him.) A symbol for this expansion is the card catalogue that Maarten maintains, which by 1976 has reached one million cards and continues to grow at around fifty thousand entries per year, recording the sleeping attire of informants in the countryside, details about threshing practices, the text of press clippings, the titles of books, and cross-references to superstitions involving the severed fingers and hands of thieves. So long as things are flush, no one bothers asking whether this endless notation has a point, and when Maarten’s staff asks he gleefully tells them there isn’t one; but with economic stagnation, austerity measures make their appearance in 1980, along with the new managerial language of productivity measures, self-evaluations, efficiency, and output.

    Before this happens, however, Maarten has a revelation about his work. It comes in volume five, En ook weemoedigheid (And Melancholy, Too), which takes its title from the penultimate stanza of the modern Flemish writer Willem Elsschot’s haunting poem, “Marriage,” in which a husband dreams of beating his wife to death, setting fire to his home, and running away:

    But bludgeon her he didn’t, for between dream and deed

    Stand laws and practical objections,

    And melancholy, too, which no one can explain,

    But comes in evening when we go to sleep.

    At conferences for the European Atlas of Folk Culture, one of the many obligations that he has piled on himself in the course of his career, Maarten comes to condemn the geographical method favored by Beerta and, previously, himself, and casts doubt on the very idea of culture and tradition. Already in volume four, he tells his staff that volkskunde stands at a crisis point: the idea that the distribution of customs contains clues to a distant past has been disproven, and a new basis must be found if the science is to move forward. This new basis he finds in a psychological approach to ethnology. Traditions, he believes, respond to psychological needs; he will later describe them as remission points in historical processes that address anxieties about changing identities. 

    Illustrative of Voskuil’s thinking here is his essay “De weg naar luilekkerland” (“The Road to the Land of Milk and Honey”), described in Het Bureau with characteristic dismissiveness as his “bread research.” Voskuil begins by noting the longstanding stereotype of a north-south divide between rye and wheat bread consumption that was dispelled when he mapped informants’ responses about bread consumption for the Meertens Instituut in 1974. He did find a clear geographical divide, but it was between east and west, which was logical given the appropriateness of the two grains to the clay soils of the southwest and the sandy soils to the east. He explains anomalies in this general pattern with reference to rinderpest, which forced a transition from cattle breeding to grain cultivation; the importation of wheat from the Baltics; and eventual improvements of infrastructure, which flooded the Netherlands with cheap American wheat and eliminated availability as a factor in dietary preferences. He attributes the persistence of a partiality to rye bread to “a rapid expansion of the intellectual elite.”

    The new intellectuals are a product of the provinces and the lower middle classes, and much later of the working class. They enter a milieu where they find it difficult to adjust and have problems with their identity. To compensate, they may attempt to adapt fully to their new environment; on the other hand, they may adopt a defiant posture based on the ideal image they hold of the class they proceed from. This representation will be ideal because they are psychologically cut off from the values of their elders. This may manifest itself in coarse manners, coarse clothing, coarse food, coarse language, and (if their numbers are large enough) in a change in prevailing norms.

    Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the paradoxes that produce, say, the mixologist who keeps his ice saw in a leather tool belt while making high-priced tiki drinks for hedge funders, or tech millionaires in hoodies and jeans, or the class ambivalences that inspired Nordstrom’s Barracuda Jeans with their artificial mud coating and Balenciaga’s eighteen-hundred-dollar “super-destroyed” sneakers.

    Het Bureau presents few indications of Voskuil’s theoretical forebears, and given the contrast between his narrow research interests and his fundamentally literary inclination, it is hard to say which of his ideas are borrowed and which he hit upon independently. He mentions Tristes Tropiques. He must have been aware of Georg Simmel. The most prominent thinker he cites is Norbert Elias, who resided in Amsterdam for the last decade of his life and whose book The Civilizing Process provoked heated debates among Dutch sociologists beginning in the late 1960s, when the revised German edition appeared. Maarten’s first mention of him is contemptuous, but increasingly his own research will similarly renounce broad-brush conceptual explanations (the German sociologist Peter Gleichmann referred to Elias’s approach as “concept avoidance”) in favor of a model of social change rooted in alterations in the self-interpretation of individuals when their habitus, that is, the practices that define them as members of a given social group, must react to novel circumstances.

    Strange here is the total absence of Voskuil’s near-contemporary Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher of science who was a convinced positivist in his early years but became one of the most trenchant critics of established science. In his paper “The Problem of the Existence of Theoretical Entities,” Feyerabend controversially subverted the distinction between objects observable to the senses and those present only to the mind. With the phrase “all empirically observable entities are theoretical entities,” he both furnished a sensory basis for theoretical constructs and introduced radical uncertainty as to the possibility of any one perspective establishing priority in its understanding of the world. 

    To the extent that Het Bureau embodies a kind of ethnology of the office, its observational rigor is aligned to an almost solipsistic adherence to a single perspective. This gave rise to objections among those portrayed in it, not only privately but in the press and on television. Ton Dekker, the model for Ad Muller, has mounted a particularly vigorous rebuttal of Voskuil’s portrayal of him. Responding to his critics, Voskuil was at once blithe and peremptory: the novel was not about other people, it was about his experience of other people. Moreover, “they should be happy to finally hear how I experienced them in all these years. After all, you never really hear what someone thinks of you.”

    Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that with time, the control of bureaucracies inevitably passes from the hands of those devoted to the ends for which the bureaucracy was conceived into the hands of those devoted to the perpetuation of the bureaucracy itself. Maarten sees this in action as the long arc of Het Bureau draws to a close. Anyone who has worked in Europe and seen the absurd psychology of institutional-legitimation-through-English will roll their eyes when a new director comes on board with the ambition of transforming the Bureau into a “Center of Excellence,” while higher-ups at the Ministry float the proposal that the Bureau’s yearbook, concerned exclusively with Dutch dialectology, onomastics, and folkloristics, be published in English to give their research an international reach.

    These institutional changes, which only accelerate as Maarten announces his imminent retirement in 1987, accompany more profound changes in Maarten’s frame of mind. He is getting old. He is scared of foreigners and young people; the constant din of automobiles maddens him; new policies giving women priority at university strike him as absurd. There is a sort of contemporary reader, nourished on writers who use fiction to promote an ideal version of themselves so that their admirers can in turn fabricate ideal versions of themselves, who will find this degree of sincerity distasteful; but I would defer here to Lousje Voskuil, who stresses the central role of accountability in her late husband’s writings. Gerard Rooijakkers writes that for Voskuil “the one freedom a person has is the freedom of (self) reflection: to find out how and why things happened, how people (willingly) misunderstood each other, and, of course, the overpowering inevitability of it all.” And Voskuil was not one to deny himself this freedom simply to look good before others.

    Maarten’s aging has much in common with Jean Améry’s notion of the elderly person as “outmoded in an incurable way,” watching a new era come into being before his eyes at the same time as it recedes from his grasp. He rails against the incursion of the computer into the Bureau, is dismayed when his colleague Ad Muller puts in an order to replace his old, sturdy wooden chair for a “bigshot chair… a jerkoff chair,” a padded office chair. Maarten’s disappointment doesn’t grow with the passing of years, because he has never had the illusion that his life at the office had meaning. In Meneer Beerta, he tells a friend, “With every step I take, I have the feeling I am moving further away from myself.” Five thousand pages later, in Afgang, which I will translate for convenience’s sake as Debacle, he confirms the truth of this intuition, adding that even the pretense that he would know himself better when he was old has failed to hold up. Het Bureau is a novel not of revelation, but of dogged persistence in error and of the refusal to mitigate the gravity of this error by indictments of the malfeasance of others or the cop-out that everyone does the best they can. 

    A commonplace among reviewers of Het Bureau, put forward to buttress critics’ perplexity that a novel so superficially banal should prove so deeply engaging, is that nothing happens in it. But this is not true in the least. What disarms readers, I think, is the lack of hierarchy among its events. In most fiction, there is little doubt about what you must attend to and what you can ignore. In Voskuil, either everything counts or nothing does. There is a sense in which things speed up in the later volumes, but this is a question less of fictional constraints than of time: in Afgang, Anton Beerta, Frans Veen, and Nicolien’s mother all die, because Maarten has reached the age when people start dying. These figures are portrayed movingly, and their end has a clear import, but the undeviating rigor of Maarten’s introspection, and the discontinuity of any given episode in the novel, biases readers in favor of whatever instant is before them, whether it be one of Maarten’s strikingly rendered dreams, the pettiness of a colleague trying to appropriate more room for his department, or the contemplation of a coffee bean on the floor:

    While sweeping the kitchen floor, he found a coffee bean. He went to throw it in the trash with the dust, but changed his mind. A bean like that had been grown in South America, had been plucked, shipped, roasted, and packaged. This is nonsense, he thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out, and he dropped it into the coffee grinder. When, after grinding, he spilled some coffee on the counter, he hesitated before wiping up, but this time, only as a matter of consistency. Because a ground bean meant nothing to him, no more than a piece of meat in which he no longer recognized an animal.

    At the end of his retirement dinner, preceded by a ceremony at the Bureau with gifts, honors, and speeches, Maarten, walking home with unsure steps, turns to his wife, full of feeling, and tells her, “Anyway, I think they liked me.” When she keeps silent, he continues, “Don’t you think?” Nicolien responds, “I don’t know.” The final volume of Het Bureau, De dood van Maarten Koning (The Death of Maarten Koning), will show how little his life has meant. If earlier he described himself as an ape in a cage, he now struggles with the unmitigated open. He starts repairing things around the home, to Nicolien’s consternation, takes long walks around Amsterdam, rides his bicycle, gives direction to strangers, more an observer than a participant in the world. He has a dream one night that he is back at the office, and Karel Ravelli, Beerta’s longtime companion, calls him. “I thought you were retired,” he says. Maarten tells him he still has a few matters to take care of. “Yeah, that’s what everyone says,” Karel responds. Maarten’s work at the Bureau, which consisted of combing through endless primary sources in order to extract data on abstruse topics for the buttressing of dubious hypotheses, was by its very nature an endeavor not subject to conclusion, but his guiding delusion has always been that its incompleteness demanded redress; and even when he is not compelled to go there, the feeling of things unfinished at the office continues to exert its pull. 

    But there is something more here, something difficult to grasp, related to the perception of time in Voskuil’s writings, which he hinted at in a radio interview in 1996. “The curious thing about working at such an office is that as soon as you turn your back on it, melancholy ensues.” Voskuil then describes the experience of attending conferences, which are an unqualified torment for Maarten and inevitably occasion migraines and fits of vomiting: you are brought together in a small space with people you don’t like, but “you turn your back on them, you go home, and it seems you have left behind an oasis of peace.” This is a small example of the way Voskuil disentangles the perception of the objects of thought in past, present, and future. His great virtue lies in the renunciation of any attempt at reconciling these modes of time, the admission that there is no true and final account of experience. In his arguments with Nicolien, or his attempts to grasp what his life at the office has meant, he concedes that even the act of recollection exerts a distorting effect on the thing being recollected. In sum: his work has been meaningless, and it has also been his primary source of meaning; the office was once purgatory, and now it feels as if it had been a haven.

    Complicating this is an unstated vision of personality as a tension between elemental feelings, which prey upon Maarten independent of his environment. Vulnerability is perhaps the most basic of these: “Maarten felt threatened” is the most frequently repeated sentence in the novel. For nearly thirty years, the threats come from colleagues and rivals in the profession. But when he retires, instead of vanishing, the peril merely migrates: now he worries about nuclear war, surly young people on the train, death, the decline of culture. His essential posture is fearful and defensive, longing for a safe harbor that is always somewhere else.

    Maarten’s initial excuse for returning to the Bureau is to hand in a set of page proofs. By this point, even the colossally irascible Nicolien has thrown in the towel. She asks if he couldn’t just send them; he responds that doing so is a nuisance; she tells him, “You know best.” When he rings the doorbell at the Bureau, an unfamiliar doorman lets him in. Maarten tells him he used to work there, adding pathetically, “Look, there’s my name.” Initially he is received warmly, but there are nefarious doings afoot. Maarten’s replacement is a careerist, “a Catholic tyrant, a brute,” and still worse, “the author of fifty-two articles.” (Maarten has previously declared that if less was published, “it would be an act of charity toward humanity.”) The new head of the Institute, Dick van de Marel, a theoretical linguist who, Maarten suggests, applied for the job only to escape falling victim to budget cuts at the university, pushes out staff and institutes publication quotas, ignoring Maarten’s warning that the quality of research will suffer in consequence. Worst of all, Ad Muller readily connives with both men to destroy Maarten’s legacy. 

    The climax of De dood van Maarten Koning comes at the farewell gathering for Eef Batteljee, an employee in the Music Archive whom Maarten hired a decade before. None of the higher-ups at the office invite Maarten; Eef himself informs him privately that he is emigrating to work in his family’s business in South Africa. When Maarten brings him a gift, Eef reveals the depths of Ad’s betrayal: “Everything changed the very day you left… Everything you stood for has been dismantled and desecrated, and all in the name of a higher production.” On his way out, Maarten sees his former colleagues in the stairwell, taking their cups of coffee to the celebration: one turns up her nose at him, one looks away, one stares at him with a triumphant smile. Later, two remorseful employees visit him at home (a third sends his greetings but stays away, afraid it will be bad for his career). From them, he learns how much he was hated by the people he supported and looked after.

    The Swiss writer Hermann Burger uses the word Grus (in English, offal), a term of art from the tobacco trade for useless leavings that have fallen to the ground, to examine the problem of the superfluous in literature. Ilyusha’s mother’s fascination with the toy cannon in The Brothers Karamazov, the small string of tobacco that lies “coiled like a brown maggot” in The Green Hat — these are a kind of Grus: they have no obvious connection to the plot of the books they feature in, and yet they are things without which fiction has no point. Het Bureau abounds in these sorts of anecdotes, cameos, and finely observed details, and together they make the novel far more poignant and beautiful than anything I can convey here. I am thinking of when Maarten, in Hungary for a conference, asks a peasant woman whether her life has improved under communism, and an interpreter translates her response: “No, because she was young before, and back then her husband was still alive.” Or of the fate of poor Slofstra, an eccentric older man sent to the Bureau by the employment office, whose favorite joke is to walk around repeating the phrase, “Je parle toutes les langues, exceptée la langue française, parce-que c’est une langue très difficile.” Beerta compares him to a robot, but for Maarten he is “authentic,” someone who has arrived at the Bureau because society has nowhere else for him. One day Slofstra brings Maarten a drawing of a farmhouse as a gift, because his wife, whom he met through a marriage agency, has told him that she can’t stand looking at it anymore. When she decides to stick him in a nursing home, not because he is ill but because she is tired of having him around, she calls the Bureau to make sure his internment will not disrupt her collection of his retirement payments. 

    No less touching are the moments of vulnerability, such as the late nights in bed when Nicolien confesses her fears of old age and death. Hers is precisely the “special way of being afraid” that Philip Larkin described in “Aubade,” made doubly bitter by the knowledge that she has gotten so little of the man she loves because he has given his life to an institution. And I have barely mentioned Voskuil’s gift for comedy, which is in evidence on nearly every page: when Nicolien berates him for his audacity at moving a shelf, and his every attempt at fixing the error drives her to further degrees of outrage, I had to wipe tears of laughter from my eyes.

    If we accept the idea that greatness in art partakes of the universal, then here I must come back to Proust and his points of comparison with Voskuil. Most of us never see the drawing rooms of the aristocracy or have an epiphany over a cup of tea, and few of us will glimpse in their involuntary memories a cathedral-like structure whose grandeur justifies our days of pampered idleness; but all of us, rich or poor, at some point in our lives, and many for the better part of our lives, will be made to sit in a chair and do something pointless which we will be told is the height of urgency. None is spared the sense that life, which could be the vessel of so much kindness and beauty, is stolen, frittered away in the need to fill out forms and surveys, make phone calls and xeroxes, attend to correspondence, all in an effort to justify one’s existence on the basis of a job that one would rather have not had in the first place. This exasperation in the service of futility is a defining experience of the modern age, and Het Bureau is its epic.

    Forever Taking Leave

    Roland Barthes asked if we are “condemned to the adjective” when speaking of music, when attempting to put into words music’s special way of pulling heartstrings and twisting guts; and in the case of Gustav Mahler one feels especially so condemned. It is difficult not to rhapsodize about Mahler. The descriptors accumulate on the tip of the tongue; a deluge of feeling engulfs us, and we can only in turn unleash our own deluge — of words. But words are pallid and limp before such beauty. Mahler induced even Arnold Schoenberg to rhapsody, a bit of purple prose to which I will return, while Daniel Barenboim lamented Mahler’s status as “the only composer who is discussed mostly in non-musical terms” (the “only” here is arguable). One associates Mahler with the discourse of sheer feeling, not with “musical terms,” for which we may have Visconti’s Death in Venice happily to blame. And there is worse. Namedropped in Woody Allen films, indexed in Sondheim’s “Ladies Who Lunch,” framed as the preoccupying obsession of a certain Lydia Tár — one further associates Mahler with the glib stuff of urbane conversation, his rough edges sandpapered off in the smoother interests of sophistication and “culture.” One can wearily sympathize perhaps with the anti-Wagnerian critic Eduard Hanslick:

    An intelligent musician will, therefore, get a much clearer notion of the character of a composition which he has not heard himself by being told that it contains, for instance, too many diminished sevenths, or too many tremolos, than by the most poetic description of the emotional crises through which the listener passed.

    And yet one doesn’t wish to dissect music like a cadaver. Bruno Walter, for his part, instructed that “no evaluation in strictly musical terms can be just” when approaching Mahler’s corpus, for “his work was the outcome of his entire inner life… human as well as aesthetic values must enter in.” Mahler himself seemed to invite such grandiose and holistic readings: in an exchange with Sibelius in 1907, he made his immortal remark that “the symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything” (countering the austerity of the Finnish composer, who had declared that “I admire the symphony’s style and severity of form”). It is a high-wire act, writing about music: to call up the aesthetic experience in all its aliveness, to analyze while avoiding death by analysis, one must tread carefully, barely grazing the edges of the thing to leave its integrity, its wholeness, and its separateness from ourselves intact. One must recognize it as an autonomous aesthetic reality even while attending to the overflowing subjectivity from which it sprung. 

    I want here to tread carefully over Das Lied von der Erde, “The Song of the Earth,” the penultimate symphony that Mahler composed. I aim to give a brief chronicle of it, to ask what it means, and to begin to traverse its aesthetic, conceptual, and historical significations. It is a symphony that bids farewell to existence, looks death in the eye, radiates outward in a thousand shades of feeling: therefore I wish also to ask after its correspondence with life. “Nothing beautiful is separable from life,” said Valéry, “and life is that which dies.” 

    Das Lied von der Erde is popularly associated with the sources of acute grief that occasioned it. There was the death of Mahler’s beloved daughter Maria; the revelation of his own congenital heart condition; the kindling of antisemitism in Vienna and the political maneuverings of his colleagues, culminating in his resignation from the Vienna Court Opera in 1907. Death in assorted guises had come knocking at the door. Completed in 1909, the orchestral song-cycle — whose full title reads Eine Symphonie für eine Tenor und eine Alt (oder Bariton) Stimme und Orchester (nach Hans Bethges Die chinesische Flöte, or “a symphony for tenor and alto (or baritone) voice and orchestra (after Hans Bethge’s The Chinese Flute)” — was conceived as a setting of Bethge’s collection of loosely translated and paraphrased Chinese poems, published in 1907, the beauty and clarity of which had cut through Mahler’s thick fog of grief at just the right moment. 

    Harmonically, Das Lied’s East Asian influence is clear, particularly in its frequent use of the pentatonic scale. But the piece absorbs disparate influences, opening for instance with a Trinklied or drinking song, in A minor, its repeated refrain more melancholy than raucous: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod, “dark is life, is death.” The gloomy phrase is pitched, as in the “mein Vater” of Schubert’s Erlkönig, slightly higher in each iteration — steadily raising the stakes of its misery, like a beer-clutching drunkard growing more wretched and hollow-eyed as the party wears on. Yet with its horn fanfares and energetic cross-rhythms, establishing a jaunty mood of festivity, this opening movement is not as passive or bleak as its lyrics suggest. It is also richly chromatic, anchoring Das Lied in the sonic ambiguity for which Mahler’s late style would become renowned. 

    The piece’s middle ranges from the slow second movement to a spirited three-part scherzo, all occupying that same continuum between pleasure and despair, between celebration of life and grief at its evanescence. “The sweet fragrance of the flowers has fled; / A cold wind bends down their stems… My heart is weary” — with its suggestion that fading and fatigue are cruelly inevitable, as harsh winds lay waste to spring’s flowers — is redolent of Keats at his most doleful. We are located in a natural landscape both lovely and indifferent, both alive and withering into decay; we imbibe the sap of life and are face to face with death. 

    These movements alternate between the respective songs of the alto and tenor — the song-cycle form here is fully assimilated into that of the symphony — and coalesce into an orchestral song-cycle or “song-symphony,” as some call it (a form that Mahler did not invent but made his own, as in his Kindertotenlieder of 1904). A song-symphony is a flexible hybrid organism. It coheres into a large-scale whole as a symphony does, but its songs can nonetheless feel self-contained, like set-pieces or vignettes loosely strung together. As legend has it, this was Mahler’s attempt at transcending the fabled “Curse of the Ninth,” a late Romantic superstition owed to the fact that Schubert, Beethoven, and Bruckner all died with their tenth symphonies unfinished. Mahler’s genre-bending Das Lied von der Erde ventured to dodge this fate, the fear of which had apparently preyed on him continually.

    His widow Alma Mahler, who survived him by fifty years, recalled his musing that “no great symphonic writer was to live beyond his Ninth,” though she is something of a bête noire among Mahlerians for her unreliable and often seemingly self-serving narratives — the “Alma Problem.” It was a fate to which Mahler would eventually succumb: following his Ninth Symphony of 1909, also the music of farewell, Mahler died with his tenth symphony incomplete. Schoenberg reflected rather mystically on the phenomenon in an essay on Mahler. “He who wants to go beyond [the Ninth] must pass away,” he intoned. “It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter.”

    Das Lied‘s expansive, slow-burning final movement, called “Der Abschied” or “The Farewell,” proceeds lightly, mostly lacking in the Wagnerian thunder of the cycle’s opening. Its orchestration is a feat of naturalism, featuring the gong, the celesta, simulated birdsong, and the tam-tam — the instrument of death par excellence, often brought to bear in funeral marches. Only select groups of instruments are wielded at a given time; no individual instrument’s color is effaced or sacrificed to a wall of sound. Many have observed that this delicate touch lends the movement the feel of chamber music. The piece climaxes with lines altered considerably by Mahler himself and, unlike the often tightly compressed verses of prior movements, his rhetoric is overwhelmingly lyrical. Here we witness the protagonist wandering the mountains alone, seeking an elusive peace.

    A cool breeze blows in the shadow of my fir trees.

    I stand here and wait for my friend.

    I wait for him to take a last farewell.

    I long, O my friend, to enjoy the beauty

    Of this evening by your side.

    Where are you? You leave me long alone!

    I wander to and fro with my lute

    On pathways which billow with soft grass.

    O beauty! O eternal love-and-life-intoxicated world!

    A purely orchestral interlude intercedes — a funeral march of sorts — and at length Das Lied von der Erde concludes with lines written by Mahler alone:

    The dear earth everywhere

    Blossoms in spring and grows green again! 

    Everywhere and forever a blueness lights the distance 

    Forever…forever… 

    “Ewig…ewig…”: it would be the last word that Mahler set to music. Voiced as a falling second, its melody descends two whole steps downward, from E to D and from D to C. Though on one level simply a routine cadence, the interval of the falling second had been associated, ever since Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 in Eb major (“Les Adieux”), with the theme of parting and farewell; hummed aloud, it has the innocent ring of goodbye. Ewig also hints at self-quotation, recalling the monumental finale of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with its repeated horn-and-strings-backed cries of “ewig, ewig.” Where the Eighth’s ewig had proclaimed the eternal triumph of love and human creativity, in the final words of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two — das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan, “the Eternal Feminine draws us onward” — the ewig in Das Lied is cast in a decidedly muted palette. The “forever” is repeated, over and over, unfurling like a chant, growing gradually quieter, finally dissolving into an icy, deafening silence. 

    With its irregular cadences and incorporation of silence, Der Abschied has thus far moved centripetally toward this end. But when does the silence really reign? I have seen audiences momentarily freeze, unsure whether the sound waves have merely stopped reaching their own strained eardrums or whether the piece is indeed over. Or the opposite phenomenon: following a performance of the piece recorded for Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, the audience erupts in applause preemptively, before the final bars of music have passed away. When is the alto’s soft intonation swallowed up by quiet, the “forever” engulfed by nothingness? It is haunting to think that the earth and this very song of the earth will one day cease to be. But is the suggested impression that it is not the song that ends, but we who stop hearing it? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, and so on. “Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on…”

    It was one of the last concerts I attended in-person, in January 2020, before the pandemic overturned and pulverized life as we knew it. The faint whiff of death was already in the air; the threat was still immaterial and our fears still insubstantial. The New York Philharmonic had paired Das Lied with Schubert’s Fourth, or “Tragic,” Symphony. Could there be anything more quintessentially Romantic, I thought, than the impulse to immortalize a communion you fear to be already lost — a “forever” you suspect to be slipping through your fingers like sand, or one whose other name is nothingness? The declaration of “forever” seemed always to contain the recognition of its opposite, of finitude and the pit of non-being. Das Lied‘s misty escape-into-landscape finale, like that of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” features a speaker anxiously awaiting the arrival of a friend — one whose face and voice and fervor would affirm for the speaker the truths that he so ardently desires to believe, the truths he feels receding from him even as he insists on their self-evidence.

    I do not mean through overwrought association to imply that Mahler read Wordsworth or was otherwise influenced by him. I am simply stitching together my own influences and long-accrued associations. Simply to identify Mahler with a Romantic ethos requires elaboration: he is properly regarded as both a paragon of late-Romantic style and a precursor of modern music, a kind of bridge between the two — expanding tonality to its outer limits without collapsing it entirely, only taking up Schoenberg’s injunction to “emancipate the dissonance” so far. And this is not even to acknowledge the distinct meanings of “Romantic” in music and literature. Mahler, at any rate, had his suspicions about the term. In a letter to a friend, discussing Goethe, he had this to say:

    What Goethe says on the meaning of the terms Classical and Romantic is this: ‘What is Classical I call healthy, what is Romantic sick… Most modern work is Romantic not because it is modern but because it is weak, sickly and ill, and old work is not Classical because it is old but because it is strong, fresh, joyful and healthy. If we distinguish Classical and Romantic by these criteria, the situation is soon clarified.’ The inner connection between my argument and Goethe’s should be obvious.

    Mahler leaves ambiguous what “my argument” is. We can only wonder if and how he applied these criteria to his own compositions. Is Das Lied hale and hearty or dour and morbid? Brimming over with hope for renewal or baldly nihilistic? Does it engender in its listener the proverbial desire to take to the sickbed? These oppositions aren’t necessarily useful ones; plainly, music need not do anything, and in the best of cases may do the wholly mysterious. Even Nietzsche, in his polemic against what he came to perceive as Wagnerian sickliness, recognized in it the essence of modernity — “a diagnosis of the modern soul” — and that “there is no way out: one must first become a Wagnerian.” The Nietzschean mandate may be one of health-through-sickness, or, put in modern terms, spiritual inoculation (“sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant”). It was he who remarked that whatever did not kill him made him stronger.

    It is notable that Mahler should have thought along these lines at all, toward the physiological sphere of sickliness and heath, though I suppose one could chalk it up to his reading of Nietzsche or the larger concern of his culture with degeneration and vitality. (Mahler moved in intellectual circles saturated by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; he nearly called his Third Symphony “The Gay Science” and, in its fourth movement, set Zarathustra’s Roundelay to music.) Privately Mahler mused about a potentially despondent audience response to Das Lied, allegedly grilling Walter: “What do you think? Is it at all bearable? Will it drive people to make an end of themselves?” Caustic or impish as the question may have been, Mahler evidently held on some level that his music did do something to its listener, that it bred and reared something considerable in her breast. What is it Das Lied von der Erde effectuates or demands — and if we privately experience it as some sort of call, toward what duty or vision are we being summoned?

    The attentive reader will have noted my relative lack of attention to the symphony’s conclusion, without which such questions are dead on arrival. “Ewig” on its face may bring comfort, and the broader musical structure of Der Abschied, with its progressive tonality, would seem to express uplift; it possesses an affecting, consolatory C minor to C major tonic scheme. Musically we experience a sublime feeling of breakthrough and transformation — a renewal of spring, if you will. But the hard-won release does not feel like a triumph, exactly, nor like what we may call joy. Like the low murmurous adagio of Mahler’s Ninth, this finale breathes a great sigh of resignation, its peace achieved at the threshold of extreme suffering. If this is bliss, it is the bliss of anguish borne and surpassed. It is also perhaps a self-negation in the face of what Buddhist and Hindu texts term upādāna, attachment, a kind of death to the flux of this world. To be sure, Das Lied closes out with a protracted, non-metrical decrescendo that some compare to a slow dying-away of breath, a deadening pulse. Der Abschied begins “schwer,” or “heavily,” and ends “gänzlich ersterbend,” or “completely dying away”: life’s weight has been lifted, the lightness of non-being attained. Yet even this interpretation, with its Schopenhauerian thread, feels only skin-deep. 

    Benjamin Britten would say of the piece’s final chord, “I cannot understand it,” marveling in a letter to Henry Boys that “it passes over me like a tidal wave — and that matters not a jot either, because it goes on forever, even if it is never performed again… that final chord is printed on the atmosphere.” What is this apotheosis “printed on the atmosphere”? The music radiates a mood of gentleness, of pain melting into joy and vice versa: the effect is achieved in part by a final series of arpeggiations, so that the music unwinds itself in horizontal concatenation before gathering itself up into vertical concord. The notes form a blended whole only to unfasten themselves, floating dreamily back into arpeggiated sequence, the cycle beginning once more. 

    And what are those notes? Above the final chord drifts the vocalist’s melody on the E—D—C motive. The melody does not, at long last, resolve to its tonic, C: the final note of the final “ewig” is in fact C’s supertonic, D. It’s as if we have taken a step, expecting once more to feel solid ground beneath our feet, but instead we find ourselves still suspended in mid-air. This may be a farewell, but closure eludes us. And the musical climax here is doubly unresolved. The terminal chord of Das Lied von der Erde is C major (made up of the notes C, E, and G) with an added A, the sixth scale degree of C major; this results in what is known today as a C major sixth chord. The major sixth, in traditional tonal harmony, is a consonant interval, but here the added A forms an extreme dissonance with another chord tone of C major (a second with G). For the interval of the major second, picture two white keys lying side by side, struck in unison; they clash, too close for comfort. Mahler leaves the dissonance unresolved. This was quite a choice: before the twentieth century, before its assimilation by jazz, an unresolved major-sixth chord existed as an acceptable tonic primarily in ragtime and cakewalks. This A sits above middle C, voiced too low in the chord to sound like it’ll slide easily downward to G — a customary resolution — and yet not low enough in the bass to alter the chord’s sonority from C major to A minor. 

    Yes, C major is bound intimately to A minor, the key with which Das Lied begins. A minor is the relative minor of C major, meaning they share the same notes, but differ on their tonics or resolution tones. The faint evocation of A minor through a resounding C major, dissonant though it may be, is an all too effective case of sublation: the opening movement’s essence is at once preserved, nullified, and transcended. This whisper of the original tonic refreshes our memory, reminding us that — on top of the C minor to C major of Der Abschied — the work as a whole possesses a broad-scale progressive tonal architecture, wending its way from A minor to C major and toward its own transformation. 

    The effect of an unresolved dissonance is typically one of infinite ache, and this is no exception. But what is unresolved can by definition seem to be without end. The essential, protean simplicity of C major encircles us, and the dissonant A lingers on indefinitely as a color, an atmosphere, a promise of endlessness.

    This farewell, this leave-taking — what is it? For Leonard Bernstein, Der Abschied is a farewell to tonality: the high water mark of tonal expansion before dissonance would flood it completely, and Mahler’s intensely pained farewell to German Romanticism. “It was Mahler’s destiny to sum up the whole story of Austro-Germanic music and tie it up,” he proclaimed of the end of Das Lied. “And not in a pretty bow, but in a fearful knot made out of his own nerves and sinews.” To be a Romantic in an increasingly post-Romantic age requires negotiation with the death of aesthetic culture as you know it. This is, for Bernstein, what Mahler attempts over and over, unable to loosen his grip without anguish; part of him would cling to a tonal temperament “forever.” Like Hans Castorp humming Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum” in the corpse-ridden landscape of the Great War, headed toward his own extermination, this is an elegy for Romanticism as an era, a mood, a climate of feeling, and for the music that had once expressed its spirit. That spirit, felt to be ebbing in an increasingly mechanized age of world war and mass culture, had to be mourned. Yet, in what I will call the Bernstein reading, there is a Romanticism that steadily and remorselessly blooms in the soul of twentieth-century man — even as it outwardly might be elegized.

    The Mahler we have today is in a certain sense Leonard Bernstein’s Mahler. He could still remark, in 1960, that “Mahler isn’t one of those big popular names like Beethoven,” and while today we would disagree, it is in large part owing to his influence. Bernstein hardly plucked Mahler from oblivion — Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Jascha Horenstein, among others, had already put him on the map, and Aaron Copland had been a longtime advocate — but Bernstein almost single-handedly mainstreamed the composer in the United States, inaugurating a major revival of interest in his work. His conducting of the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s made Mahler a classic in repertories thereafter; he featured Mahler in his popular televised lectures; and he pulled off the first complete recorded cycle of Mahler’s symphonies. In the United States, certainly, the ubiquity of Mahler — as opposed to, say, Strauss or Bruckner — is partly a function of Bernstein’s gigantic celebrity.

    Bernstein’s cheerleading made for a tangled legacy. One senses in his televised programming a determined overidentification with Mahler: they were both Jewish-born conductors of the New York Philharmonic, though it didn’t bear that name in Mahler’s day; both conductors and composers; both thereby afflicted by what Bernstein called a “double nature.” There was a funny effect whereby the two figures were forever linked in the public mind. Yet Bernstein was not without his critics. He was occasionally accused of conducting at a slower tempo than was typical for Mahler, and for taking infelicitous liberties with his rubato. Pierre Boulez, a great Mahlerian in the concert hall and in recordings, noted in a late interview how frequently Mahler’s tempo markings implore their conductor not to drag. Mahler, he felt, was afraid that his music might sink under the load of excessive emotion. 

    Bernstein was on that basis charged with sentimentalism. Some found his melodramatic public persona in poor taste. He swayed on the podium, eyes closed intermittently, registering an extremity of emotion that looked a lot like ecstasy. The man was possessed: dripping with sweat, almost giddy, his physical charisma tremendous. One wants to watch Bernstein as much as one wants to listen to the music he is conducting. Through him, Mahler became all but synonymous with ostentatious, even histrionic, emotionalism. Bernstein was himself a spectacle, but his innate musicianship, his profound understanding of Mahler in particular, was undeniable — and he had the platform and the desire to propound his grandiloquent thesis. Ever the Romantic interpreter, it was often a Keatsian mood with him: in his personal introduction to Das Lied, recorded during rehearsal breaks with the Israel Philharmonic in 1972, he recites from a touchstone of English Romanticism, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: 

    Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

    I have been half in love with easeful Death…

    [Bernstein murmuring, “that is almost exactly the quality of the end of this piece.”]

    Was it a vision, or a waking dream? 

    Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?

    [Bernstein, pausing: “That is the essence, that is all, of Das Lied von der Erde.”]

    Yet what might it mean for a composer to part with Romanticism? It will help to first sketch a faint picture of Romanticism in music, concentrating for the most part not on theory but on what all of this sounded like. An admission first: there was perhaps for some a whiff of derision to the term “Romantic” — a sense that it meant surrendering form to feeling, wallowing in emotion, and not living up to the “strong, fresh, joyful and healthy” standards of classicism. Less polemically, one can regard Romanticism as a temporal designation, referring loosely to a kind of long nineteenth century in music. Some variation on the Beethoven-to-Mahler genealogy would suffice.

    The term was first applied to music by E.T.A Hoffman in 1810, in his review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where he alleged that music was in fact the only truly Romantic art. For Hoffman, the term implied expressive triumph. Romantic music was the music of the artist qua artist, responsive to the throbbing dictates of his own soul — overfull, unchained from reason, prevailing over the banal and the finite to bear witness only to the fiercely real. “Beethoven’s music stirs the mists of fear, of horror, of terror, of grief, and awakens that endless longing which is the very essence of romanticism,” Hoffman wrote breathlessly. Hold on to that notion of “endless longing,” which would later become a standard cliche of Wagnerism. Other attributes of the Romantic temperament would be a delight in the natural world, a taste for folklore and the Gothic, and an incorporation of extra-musical material: songs, tone poems, program music generally. But lofty passions and stormy sensations — emotional extremes — remain the calling card of musical Romanticism.

    Formal compositional revolutions whirled alongside the thematic ones. Abetted by the public concert hall and the rise of the domestic salon, the period saw musical works expanding and contracting in scale, tempo, and dynamics, the better to pour out every species of feeling. Romantic music remained perceptibly tonal but moved just as perceptibly toward harmonic ambiguity. The graceful harmonic sequences and well-proportioned melodies of Haydn and Mozart yielded in Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt to a new and mottled sonic universe: chromatic saturations, dissonant intervals, mysterious harmonies, modulatory surprises.

    One cannot breathe a word about Romantic music, of course, without addressing Wagner, though some would position him later in the story, as a late-nineteenth-century neo-Romantic. Wagner’s monumental music dramas appeared at first blush to erode fixed keys, or at least to resolve themselves into unexpected keys, breaking down large-scale durational unity into “brief tonal particles which follow each other in line, connected like links in a chain rather than assembled round a common center,” as Carl Dahlhaus elegantly put it. And beyond Wagner’s generally soupy tonality was his famed Tristan chord, debuted in 1865. The chord — made up of the notes F, B, D♯, and G♯ — was inscrutable, harshly dissonant, and strangely beautiful, impossible to predict in its path toward resolution. Wagner seemingly was not the first to use the chord, but the first to use it as the structural principle of a work: listeners of Tristan und Isolde were made to molder in its ambiguity, seemingly interminably. Wagner eventually rounds off the repeated cadence into ecstatic consonance, but not until the last thirty seconds of an opera whose running time is approximately four hours. The delectable tension is released — so belatedly that release becomes almost an afterthought. There lurks in this dynamic an element of masochism perhaps ever-present in Romanticism’s longing for longing: Schiller, following Kant, had identified the experience of the sublime as at once “a joyous state, that may rise to rapture” and “a painful state, which in its paroxysm is manifested by a kind of shudder.”

    Wagner’s innovation will be better understood against the backdrop of common-practice tonality, developed in the Baroque period through the nineteenth-century. It was poised on the axis of the musical key: in the key of C, C is the tonic or pitch of central interest; the tonic and its chain of corresponding relations form the basic syntax of tonal music. Tonal compositions often depend upon dynamics of tension and resolution: on straying potentially far from one’s tonic chord only to return home faithfully in due course. In such a scheme, dissonance — however seductive — must ideally be annulled or transcended, and can be only a temporary excitement, a roadblock on the path to eventual consonance: an exotic spice sprinkled to enliven but never to overwhelm.

    Dissonance is a nebulous concept whose meaning has evolved over time. Select intervals have been hotly contested, such as the fourth: it was for some an open-and-shut dissonance and for others a quite perfect consonance. (“It is not, therefore, the human ear or nervous system that decides what is a dissonance, unless we are to assume a physiological change between the thirteenth and fifteenth century,” Charles Rosen admonished.) The introduction of the keyboard as we know it had divided the octave into twelve equally spaced pitches, approximations of intervallic frequencies existing in nature; of the intervals on a keyboard, only what we call the octave and the fifth exist as “consonances” scientifically (if you strike a string and hear its reverberations, the ensuing series of overtones naturally includes these intervals). If the understanding of what counted as dissonance was mostly historically contingent, so too was that idea of dissonance itself — but the rigors of tonal scaffolding came to behave like a set of natural laws in the classical period. A momentary dissonance, a chromatically altered C major, at the start of Mozart’s nineteenth string quartet got it branded “The Dissonance Quartet” for the next couple of hundred years. It was such a scandal to its nineteenth-century interpreters that they insisted on doctoring it, overwriting its dissonant early bars at public performances. I have heard it drolly claimed that the “emancipation of the dissonance” dates back to this.

    Broadly speaking, Wagner and his contemporaries undertook to throw a wrench in tonic-oriented musical organization. Wagner disdained what he called “quadratic compositional construction,” the tightly symmetrical and balanced compositions of his predecessors. Whether composers such as Wagner (or Chopin or Liszt) were flouting arbitrary aesthetic calcifications or the very laws of nature — no matter. This was inexorably where music was headed: harmonic ambiguity became its own destination, and desire more desirable than consummation. Well before “modern” music, then, and well before the twentieth century, there occurred a gradual unfocusing of tonal music’s accepted contours — and Mahler had one foot in both camps. 

    The boundaries of modern music are porous. To speak of separate camps is not quite misleading but not quite useful. If modern composers and their tonal murk did not arise ex nihilo in the twentieth century, and were nourishing growths whose roots lay as deep in the soil as Mozart, what accounts for that special modern sound? You know it when you hear it: it concentrates itself around the year 1900 and gains momentum around 1914, spurred to maturity in the crucible of the Great War. One can think as far back as 1889, to Strauss’ Don Juan; to the dissonant, nearly atonal shrieks of his one-act opera Salome in 1905; to the riotous premiere in 1913 of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with its mammoth polychords and barbed rhythms; to the impressionism, so-called, of Debussy and Ravel. Adorno meanwhile would call Mahler’s Ninth Symphony “the first work of the new music.” 

    In this regard, one man outpaces the others in the minds of many to this day. Arnold Schoenberg was the most controversial composer of his age, striking ire into the hearts of audiences and bewildering those who found his style self-indulgently cacophonous. It is claimed that he secured a definitive break with tonality. Or was he merely playing out the consequences of the Wagnerian upheaval? Schoenberg, to be sure, invented a newfangled system to replace functional harmony. But even his twelve-tone technique can be treated as a late flowering of the process of harmonic expansion already underway. Thomas Mann had called Wagner a “cultural Bolshevik” already “on atonal terrain”; he may have been better describing the father of the Second Viennese School. 

    Schoenberg had been cautiously testing the limits of tonal music as early as 1899. In that year’s masterpiece of a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht, in the ravishing Gurre-Lieder of 1900, and in the chromatically saturated Pelleas und Melisande of 1903, he still moved discernibly in the ambit of Beethoven and Wagner. In 1909, the year Mahler completed Das Lied, Schoenberg was already dabbling in free atonality (or pantonality, a term he seems to have preferred). In his fully formed twelve-tone technique, completed by the early 1920s, no single pitch or key center was to take precedence over another: the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale were to be used equally, without repetition, abrogating the hierarchy of tones necessary to establishing a tonic. The epiphenoena of functional harmony — major chords, minor chords, diminished and augmented chords — were to be left in the dust.

    If you deploy twelve pitches equally and without repetition, treating consonance and dissonance as kindred substances, your music will give the impression of jumping around, of rising and falling too swiftly to sort itself out into a key or assume definite shape. What sounded to some like unfocused, scattershot noise — pitches flitting through the air like so many nameless particles of sound — was in fact a highly structured and purposefully engineered musical ambiguity. “Tonality is no natural law of music, eternally valid”: these were Schoenberg’s fighting words. 

    The appeal to tonality’s origin in nature can be refuted if one recalls that just as tones pull toward triads, and triads toward tonality, gravity pulls us down toward the earth; yet an airplane carries us up away from it. A product can be apparently artificial without being unnatural, for it is based on the laws of nature to just the same degree as those that seem primary.

    Taken side-by-side with another statement of Schoenberg’s — “I have made a discovery that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years” — one glimpses a curious thought process irreducible to contemporary intellectual frameworks. Schoenberg was perhaps a revolutionary conservative, revolutionary in the service of preserving an unbroken line of “German music”: a chain of aesthetic inheritance in which he placed himself without hesitation and in whose supremacy he believed. One feels as if his twelve-tone technique and the ambiguity it systematized was, at bottom, an attempt to replicate the soul-rattling power of the composers who had enthralled him — a way of realizing their staggering, discomposing beauty for a new age. 

    Schoenberg worshipped Mahler. He arranged Das Lied for chamber orchestra, to be performed in his exclusive Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. The admiration ran so deep that the first edition of his Theory of Harmony, published shortly after Mahler’s death, bears the following dedication:

    This book is dedicated to the memory of GUSTAV MAHLER. The dedication was intended to give him some small pleasure while he still lived. It was also meant to express reverence for his immortal compositions, and to show that these works, which academic musicians pass by with a shrug of the shoulders, indeed with contempt, are worshiped by someone who is perhaps not entirely ignorant either. Gustav Mahler was denied greater joys than my dedication was meant to provide. This martyr, this saint, had to pass on… now he is dead, I want my book to win me respect, so that nobody can pass by when I say, ‘That was one of the truly great men!’

    What would Mahler have made of the panegyric — and of Schoenberg’s musical novelties, for that matter? To study the convergence of these figures is another way of straining to situate Mahler in the shifting sands of late Romanticism and early modernism, to stamp Mahler and his legacy for good. Music composed in the middle and later nineteenth-century, up until right about 1910, is a no man’s land, up for grabs by those inclined to throw labels around. We would do well to recall Rosen’s advice in The Classical Style: “Every period of time is traversed by forces both reactionary and progressive. Beethoven’s music is filled with memories and predictions… Instead of affixing a label, it would be better to consider in what context and against what background Beethoven may be most richly understood.”

    Against what backdrop, then, is Mahler most richly understood? To suggest that he must be grasped in relation to Schoenberg and the serialists as much as in relation to his Romantic forebears — though on one level patently obvious, and elucidated by many scholars and critics — may grind the gears of some. Labels and camps may be limiting or arbitrary, but the partisan hothouse of twentieth-century musical culture, a culture we fall heir to today, would make their effects actual.

    Mahler certainly hewed closely to Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, the Romantic luminaries in whose shadow he and his contemporaries composed — and more specifically to the motif of farewell. For Mahler’s Das Lied does more than distill a century’s worth of tonal expansion; as a song-cycle it forms a late entry in the genre of the German Lied. The Lied or art song tradition was where the poetry and the music of German Romanticism merged. The enormous output of Schubert, especially his Winterreise, typifies the genre and looms over Mahler’s body of work. Mahler’s Abschied was not the first of its kind; Schubert had composed scores of Lieder in the leave-taking mode, many with that very title. What is the farewell lyric all about, if we can get a fix on such a thing? If it is true that the human being is chronically contorted in such a pose, so that by our nature and despite our very best efforts we are habitually poised on the axis of farewell — turning, lingering, suspended on one threshold or another — what is the content of this existential orientation? In his Eighth Elegy, Rilke asks a plaintive question — “Who has us twisted around like this, so that/ no matter what we do, we are in the posture/ of someone going away?” — and goes on: 

    Just as, upon

    the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley

    one last time, he turns, stops, lingers — 

    so we live here, forever taking leave.

    How does the composer render this essence musically? Is this essence uniquely Romantic, and how does Mahler’s farewell fit in?

    Let us begin with Schubert’s litany of farewells. They include “Abschied” (D. 578), a farewell to a friend; “Abschied von der Harfe” (D. 406), a kind of farewell to music; “Willkommen und Abschied” (D. 767) and “Auf dem Strom” (D. 943), farewells, in their own ways, to beloveds; and a bleaker consideration of love, “Abschied” (D. 475), among others. It is hardly surprising that most farewell songs concern romantic parting and abound with the tears and sentimentalism of doomed lovers. But there are musical partings with a more contemplative cast, with the end-of-life awareness exhibited by Mahler. There is, for instance, Schubert’s “Abschied von der Erde” (D. 829), with text by Adolf von Pratobevera, composed in 1826, in which we move from a slate of particularized farewells to a sweeping farewell to life. 

    Farewell, beautiful earth!

    I can understand you only now, 

    when joy and sorrow

    pass away from us.

    Farewell, Master Sorrow!

    I thank you with moist eyes! 

    Joy I take with me,

    you I leave behind.

    Be only a gentle teacher

    and lead all men to God; 

    in the darkest nights 

    reveal a little red streak of dawn!

    Schubert’s song is scored for spoken voice and piano, meaning it has no vocal melody and is instead performed like a dramatic recitation. Its score is marked langsam, or slow, but it provides no further rhythmic direction for its vocalist: much is left to the discretion of the reciter in electing where to place dramatic emphasis, if any. It is fascinating that Schubert felt that these words did not cry out for melody or firm pacing — that he wished to impart to them a kind of conversational fluidity, as if the vision of life and death they gave voice to were being worked out in the very act of speaking. The lyric positions its listener in neither supreme ecstasy nor supreme doom: at the moment of farewell, all emotional excess has been drained away, and only a delicate mode of “understanding” remains. The soft red glow of dawn streaks across the sky. Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Abschied” partakes of a similar emotional extinguishment. “I may drink with you, all things/ Hate and love be forgotten then,” he advises his beloved. The poet shows his hand, admitting that “to be gone is my wish,” but he equivocates: “Later perhaps one day,/ Diotima, we’ll meet — here, but desire by then/ Will have bled away.” With its soft watercolor palette, its suggestion that parting and death are inducements to ultimate repose — states of nonbeing where extremes, including the exigencies of desire, are nullified and melt away — Hölderlin’s poem feels like the melancholy lover’s mirror image of Schubert. The perfume of renunciation lingers about them both. 

    From Haydn to Beethoven to Liszt, there were musical farewells, but it was the Schumanns who most visibly took up the mantle. Here renunciation is not quite the point. Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen (“Forest Scenes”), a set of solo piano pieces composed in the late 1840s, cycles through a dizzying array of emotional states to examine the ambivalence of man in nature. Its final movement, “Abschied,” is sweetly beautiful, pulsating softly and gesturing toward a realization of peace and uplift in nature. He would take up the Abschied theme again on several occasions, including in his final song-cycle Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart (1852). Its fourth song, “Abschied von der Welt,” features the soon-to-be-beheaded queen embracing death with open arms. She cries out for the cessation of her earthly torments; the joy of death is all that remains.

    Crudely speaking, the respective farewells of Waldszenen and Gedichte reflect perhaps two sides of Schumann’s bifurcated persona in the public mind, as well as the innate doubleness of the Abschied form, brought into bittersweet unity by other song composers. They notably included his extraordinary wife Clara: her song “Beim Abschied,” with a text by Friederike Serre, is a farewell dripping with ambivalence (and one that gently refuses to regard itself as one, even as it bears the traces of the farewell lyric). It opens: 

    A purple glow shines from afar,

    Golden now the bright day sinks… 

    One more greeting, now goodbye,

    No farewell, no departure…

    Notice, as in Mahler, how frequently a soft glow glints in the distance (here it is purple; in Das Lied it is blue). Farewells are linked with archetypical consistency to shifting light: in them light waxes, wanes, dissolves, flickers, tinges, envelops. Morning-glow and evening-glow, standard settings of transition, are images befitting the literal contingencies of parting, but they also suggest the merging of one’s undulating ambivalences with the earth’s eternal cycles. The dim light that the scenes impart also matches their mood of existential pause — their aura of quiet stillness and shadowedness. I like to think of this clustering of images, associations, and resonances as part of the lyrical-musical atmosphere that Mahler absorbed, knowingly or not, almost in the manner of a cultural unconscious.  

    Mahler’s farewell temperament is echoed in a song such as Richard Strauss’s exquisite “Morgen!” (op. 27, no. 4) in 1894: it is not quite a farewell, and not quite about death, but it bears traces of the tradition under consideration. As its title — Morning! — suggests, the song looks toward the morrow. It sets forth an image system by now familiar — “this same sun-breathing earth,” a landscape of “blue-waved bliss,” and so on — and it joins together the sense of an ending with a perception of the eternal:

    And tomorrow the sun will shine again

    And on the path that I shall take,

    It will unite us, happy ones, again,

    Amid this same sun-breathing earth…

    And to the shore, broad, blue-waved,

    We shall quietly and slowly descend,

    Speechless we shall gaze into each other’s eyes,

    And the speechless silence of bliss shall fall on us…

    After completing two identical harmonic progressions in G major, the piece concedes its vocal melody (“and the speechless silence of bliss shall fall upon us…”) over an unresolved dominant chord. After a dramatic pause, the piano picks up where the vocalist leaves off, and music supersedes language: in the ensuing purely instrumental realization of the G major cycle, we can feel the sun breaking through, shining again once more, even as all human presence has left the frame. (I am perhaps alone in preferring the bare piano and voice version to the fully orchestrated one.) This is a restatement of musical material made magical and salutary through simple repetition — and, if you will, a belated resolution to the tonic. It is an evocation of nature resuming its course, operating independently of human will and expression: the subject of Strauss’s song is the aftermath of human departure. He returned to this spiritual terrain many decades later, in the fourth of his Vier letzte Lieder, or Four Last Songs. In these songs I recognize the lineaments of a Mahlerian ethos, clear as day. 

    Thresholds and suspensions are Romantic in nature, are they not? Schlegel, for instance, declared that “the poetry of the ancients is the poetry of possession, while ours is the poetry of longing… the former is rooted in the present, while the latter hovers between remembrance and anticipation.” Recall that Das Lied‘s “hovering,” its suspension, is harmonic and literal. Indeed, I know of no better harmonic language to match these lyric modes than Mahler’s C major sixth. In its resounding C major-ness and intervallic sixthness — the piercing ray of incongruous light imparted by its A — Das Lied‘s musical climax feels both shut and open, both inevitable and impossible, the sort of farewell that cuts you to the core. 

    In Mahler’s leave-taking mood, we find an affirmation of death as life’s precondition and vice versa — but not the Romantic-Wagnerian longing for death as completion, consummation, or redemption. Der Abschied bleeds out anticlimactically, while Schubert’s “Abschied von der Erde,” one of its closer analogues, lacks vocal dynamism. The Strauss pieces simmer but never boil over; they are slow, steady, wistful, reconciled. Contrast these subdued forms of yearning and fulfillment with the soaring raised stakes of the Tannhäuser and Lohengrin preludes, or the achingly sweet and long-awaited consonance of Isolde’s Liebestod — a harmonic release both sacred and sexual, one that coincides with the expiration of the human body onstage and of the music itself. Baudelaire’s famous account of being ravished by Wagner’s music is barely distinguishable from the logic of orgasm. Orgasm is, of course, perennially coupled with self-extinction, as Elizabethan puns on the word “die” and the French “la petite mort” suggest. But death is not orgasmic or glorious in Mahler, nor is extinction construed necessarily as a deliverance or refuge into “holy night” (as in Tristan). From such nocturnal fantasies, from such voluptuous death-addled aestheticism, Der Abschied’s lyrical voice departs decisively. It decouples death from the claustrophobia of eros and opens up onto a plane of fresh mountain air, infinite space, and brightening horizons. To grasp death unblinkingly in the bright light of day is quite a different matter than to lust after it in the dark.      

    I have situated Mahler amid eclectic and freely overlapping traditions, against a broader backdrop of Romantic forms — staging a musical and lyrical scene and populating it with definite, though gauzy, shapes and figures. This context brings Mahler’s aesthetic-cultural source material into sharper focus. But it should be noted with equal emphasis that Mahler’s posture was not strictly a backward-looking one. Mahler was also a curious and cautious enthusiast of the “new music.” He welcomed the young Schoenberg as a disciple of sorts, keeping up the correspondence even after the latter’s style had begun to perplex him. Though sometimes irritated by Schoenberg’s arrogance, he stood resolutely by the younger composer, and apparently had to be restrained from attacking hecklers at the premiere of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet. Legend has it that when Mahler told the audience they had no reason to protest, someone replied: “I hiss at your symphonies too!” The exchange hints at the continuity and the likeness that the composers possessed in the minds of many of their contemporaries, for whom they signified all that was modern. (Mahler’s modernized re-orchestration of Beethoven’s Ninth provoked a backlash in Vienna as early as 1900. One critic called it “barbarism.”)

    Schoenberg’s full embrace of serialism may have baffled him, but Mahler was himself headed in an expressionist direction late in life, flirting with atonality in his final symphonies. There is a point at which late Mahler’s and the early Schoenberg’s styles seem close to converging, though Mahler died before the dynamic could play itself out. In 1909 he wrote to Schoenberg: “I have your quartet with me and study it from time to time… But it is difficult for me.” The letter concludes movingly, if cryptically: “I’m so terribly sorry that I cannot follow you better; I look forward to the day when I shall find myself again (and thus find you).” 

    Mahler completed his Ninth Symphony that same year — his final symphony, composed shortly after Das Lied, and a critical document of his “late” style. Its first movement is a little ghastly, touched by bitterness. Though it opens in D major, this D major is in troubled waters, wrestling with D minor for dominance throughout and easily swamped by dissonant explosions. These clashes are eerie, even nightmarish, and stray far from the relatively smoother surfaces of Mahler’s earlier works. The work’s final movement, like Das Lied’s, has been interpreted as expressing a kind of death drive: in its final bars a high A♭ voiced whisperingly by the first violins, trickles away until it is swallowed up by a closing D♭ major triad, and with an icy silence. Both Das Lied and the Ninth are farewells, but the Ninth terrifies in its utter opacity. Explicit hope of renewal, of an abiding “ewig,” seems less of a sure thing. I hasten to add that not everyone would agree with such a reading: Bruno Walter, who conducted the piece’s premiere in 1912, described its final movement as a “peaceful farewell; with the conclusion, the clouds dissolve in the blue of heaven.” I think Schoenberg gets a little closer to capturing its fearsome power: “[Mahler’s] Ninth is most strange,” he writes. “In it, the author hardly speaks as an individual any longer. It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author who used Mahler merely as his spokesman, as his mouthpiece.” 

    This eclipsing or emptying out of the self, this surpassing of merely personal expression, could help to explain the tendency among some Mahler enthusiasts — I share it — to explain away his late drive toward maximal dissonance and disintegration. Such sonic violence must be Mahler’s intimation of a future to be mourned: political catastrophe, civilizational decline, aesthetic decay. As if someone had forced Mahler’s hand, as if he had looked straight into the maw of fascism and were crying out in prophetic sorrow. Bernstein claimed that Mahler’s symphonies “foretold all,” referring to the horrors of the twentieth century. Is this really so? Is all bleakness in early twentieth-century art a prophecy of historical catastrophe to come? There can be a curious mental block in considering that what sounds demonic in Mahler is being expressed not as commentary but for its own sake, or for a sake otherwise unknown to us. 

    And there is his unfinished, often atonal-sounding Tenth Symphony to consider, beside which the tempests of the Ninth may appear quite consonant, though the cobbled together version we possess bears an uncertain relationship to Mahler’s original intentions. When one contemplates the arc of his late output, one wonders where Mahler would have gone musically had he lived past fifty — had he lived even a few more years. In its form and tonal contours Mahler’s Ninth, especially its first movement, has always seemed to me to be blood brothers with Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, composed within the same decade, and with Anton Webern’s Passacaglia in D Minor, Op. 1, composed one year earlier. To pigeonhole Mahler as a mournful bookend to the Romantic age, as a late Romantic grieving a vanishing world and clinging to the last scraps of tonality available to him, would be to paper over his compositional range and evolution — and to neglect his flesh-and-blood immersion in his space and time. Tonal dissolution gripped Mahler, mystified him, and unnerved him; he gestured toward it increasingly. One wonders, in other words, what terrible storms Mahler could still have called forth. 

    After the Second World War, tonalists and serialists waged their own battle. “The compositional currents of an age shed light on the way it interprets past music, and vice versa,” Dahlhaus remarked. “It would distort their place in music history if we neglected to analyze the overlap between post-serial music and the Mahler renaissance.” Dahlhaus is in turn somewhat scathing on the term “late Romanticism,” seeing in it a blinkered “failure to take seriously enough the age’s sense of its own identity” — and worse:

    “Late romanticism” is a pejorative and polemically loaded term used in the 1920s by adherents of neo-classicism and the Neue Sachlichkeit [the New Objectivity] to separate themselves from the immediate past… [Turn-of-the-century modernism] saw itself as a fresh start in a new direction. It was the next generation that turned it into a historical denouement, a dead legacy, using terminology as a means to commit, as it were, historiological patricide.

    It is doubtless difficult to picture a composer sitting down to write “late Romantic music” or regarding himself with this vocabulary of overripeness; it smacks too much of historical hindsight. We do not like to think of ourselves as latecomers, artists least of all. It seems plausible rather that a composer would identify with what is newly brewing within and around him. But Dahlhaus touches on what makes the question a difficult one, namely its “pejorative and polemically loaded” dimension — its considerable political proportions. The mood of the twentieth-century musical scene was indeed feverishly political.

    Composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg held that functional harmony had atrophied: it was no longer enough to seize on dissonant chords and intervals, scramble tonal boundaries, or modulate into tonal nether regions as Wagner had done. An attack at the root was in order. Serialist theories, or variations on them, would become dogma thanks to some of Schoenberg’s more rabid students, to the René Leibowitz-descended school from which Boulez emerged, as well as to the serialist catechisms of Adorno. Popular audiences never quite caught up with the modern sound, finding it less than beautiful; it was incomprehensible noise to many of them, and they thirsted for music they could understand and adore. Later composers such as Milton Babbitt did not conceal their utter contempt for audience tastes. A chasm was widening between aesthetic factions who regarded each other with near-venomous enmity. The Mahler Renaissance bloomed in this era of ideological ferment. 

    And then there was the matter of Mahler’s Jewishness. The Third Reich had famously embarked on a scorched-earth campaign against modern art and modern music, inveighing against the jazz influences coursing through Weimar culture and nearly banning atonal music altogether (it was felt to possess a distinctly Jewish effluvium). The art historian Henry Grosshans writes that for Hitler “modern art was [seen as] an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit.” While it embraced and exalted the machinery of modern warfare, Nazism was on some level a neo-Romantic movement. It expounded and exploited the eminently Romantic longing for a pre-alienated past — a past that is always hypothetical and out of reach, but that one senses deep in one’s gut, buried but perhaps recoverable. This is the private imaginative soil upon which fascism preys.

    A particularly potent strain of antisemitism identified Jews with all that was discomfiting about modernity, including its critical spirit: modern art was too brainy for those Germans “who thought with their blood,” as Peter Gay put it. Jews were Oswald Spengler’s “decomposing element” in culture, and more broadly, a perfect stand-in for the early twentieth-century sense that art and life had grown disenchanted, fragmented, and drained of innocence. The twisted Otto Weininger, himself a Jew, had argued as much in his explosive tract Sex and Character (“inner ambiguity, I repeat, is absolutely Jewish,” he wrote, and “simplicity is absolutely un-Jewish”). This was a people fated to wander, foreigners in every land and yet mysteriously intellectually dominant therein. Jews were the ur-types of existential alienation, “rootless cosmopolitans” detached from the Volkskörper upon which they could only be parasites. The sickness of modernity was in essence a Jewish sickness and it could be fumigated with poison gas. That such an animus would abet the hypermodern death machine of the Third Reich is one of history’s most pitiless ironies. 

    Mahler, of course, was Jewish, born in 1860 to a petite bourgeois family in Kaliště and raised in Iglau, a small village on the Bohemian border. His family were German-speaking Jews in a sea of mostly Czech-speakers. After a stint of conservatory training and a slew of conducting appointments throughout Central Europe, Mahler arrived at the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, the same Vienna in which the famed antisemite Karl Lueger had recently been elected mayor. Mahler would convert to Catholicism in the year he took up the post, a conversion of the sort that Heine famously described as the “ticket of admission to European culture.” Lingering antisemitic feeling among his colleagues and resistance to the maestro’s severity would cause him to be driven out in 1907, and he accepted an appointment at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

    It was a tenuously assimilated Viennese milieu in which Mahler moved. It was also, as is well known, a climate of Jewish intellectual preeminence; the man who towered over it all was that skeptical and ambivalent and idiosyncratically proud Jew, Sigmund Freud. Hitler reported in Mein Kampf that his teenage immersion in Vienna cured him of his formerly Jew-friendly politics. The enlightened secularism of turn-of-the-century Jews was less than irrelevant to the Third Reich: conversion was an empty facade to those for whom Judaism was a race, and for whom race was deeply metaphysical. Despite Mahler’s conversion and thoroughgoing secular assimilation, and despite a substantially tonal body of work, his music would be effectively outlawed in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 (though Richard Strauss, as onetime president of the Reich Music Chamber, had advocated for the continued performance of his symphonies). A bronze bust of Mahler’s intensely expressive face, sculpted by Rodin in Mahler’s final years — and Alma’s gift to the Vienna State Opera in 1931 — would be destroyed by Nazis. Mahler’s niece, a virtuosic violinist and a baptized Protestant, would be deported in a cattle car to Auschwitz in 1943. The concepts and the vocabularies of the political sphere may leave art itself, not to mention the very notion of aesthetic quality, untouched — but the same is not true of artists, who may be silenced, crushed, and destroyed. 

    In the ashes of the postwar age there sprang up among some a desire to recover, and to honor, the “degenerate art” that the Nazis had loathed. The Third Reich had, to put it mildly, politicized music: who could blame those who politicized it in return? Ernst Krenek, who fled to the United States in 1938 and was himself briefly married to Mahler’s daughter, once explicitly claimed to write twelve-tone music to steer clear of fascist tastes: “My adoption of the musical technique that the tyrants hated most of all may be interpreted as an expression of protest.”(His jazz-opera Jonny spielt auf, which became a European sensation when it premiered in 1927, would be banned by the Nazis and in caricatured form became the poster image of the “Degenerate Music” exhibit in Düsseldorf in 1938.) After the Nazi conflation of Jews, modernism, and degeneracy — and their heralding of Beethoven and Wagner at official state events — it was difficult to simply get on with the usual programming. That unbroken chain of inheritances, Schoenberg’s “supremacy of German music,” was felt to be rotting from within. Some seemed to flinch from the beauty that once delighted them. Perhaps there was even a suspicion of the sweeping quality of Romantic music, its appeal to unreason, its sonic pull away from all limits and toward the infinite. Atonal music, by contrast, may preclude instinctual submersion, the annihilation of the self. It is a series of interruptions and roadblocks, defamiliarizing itself at every turn, forcing its listener moment by moment to begin again. Every successive sound punctures and slices up the silence anew.

    The Mahler revival flowered in this charged historical moment. Serialists and tonalists warred. Accusations of wrongthink abounded. Popular taste and conservative opinion shrunk from modern music, while universities and composition departments by and large embraced it. (It was difficult in some cases to get a faculty position as a tonalist in the later twentieth century, which yielded perhaps its own aesthetic sclerosis). Bernstein, a hero of this story, admirably tried to split the difference. He posited in his Norton lectures that two trends would define music in the coming century: the Schoenbergian break and the Stravinskian expansion, with Stravinsky personifying the maximization of harmonic ambiguity within tonal bounds. Mahler was a paragon of tonal expansion, in Bernstein’s eyes; on this he and Boulez agreed. Bernstein, though himself a tonalist inclined toward the Romantic, and though a bearer of incomplete theses, ultimately eschewed the dogma that insisted he take a side. He was comfortable declaring Mahler to be the very peak of German Romanticism and happy to acknowledge Mahler’s link to the modern school, in his embrace of tonal puzzles. Bernstein apprehended Mahler’s wistful backward glances but never denied his unflinching forward ones. Mahler was lucky to have had such a level-headed champion.

    Alma Mahler left a recollection of her husband’s final moments, and though it may be a little too good to be true, it is worth reproducing. 

    During his last days, while his mind was still unclouded, his thoughts often went anxiously to Schoenberg. “If I die, he will have nobody left. Who will protect him from the mob?” Then the end. Mahler lay with dazed eyes; one finger was conducting on the quilt. There was a smile on his lips and twice he said: “Mozart!”

    There it is, in all its poetic symmetry. 

    Upon completing Das Lied, Mahler had only four years to live; he was never to hear his work performed, and Walter would conduct its premiere in the wake of its creator’s untimely death. Death marked the work’s gestation and it would mark the work’s reception. This seems altogether fitting: the song of the earth is after all a song of death, and life and death, death and re-birth, constitute our notion of what a cycle is. Mahler’s song-cycle dies with “ewig” on its lips and leaves us rattled with paradoxical emotion. We hunger for resolution but it is denied us; we strain against the necessity of the end, but the end comes. To pinpoint the decisive moment would be impossible: we are not up for the task, and we imagine its arrival either too late or too soon. It is mysterious, the moment this beautiful dissonance slips into silence, like the moment the sun recedes from view — leaving the world strangely bright for a while, until suddenly it goes dark.

    Testimony of Sleep

    Past the fences of beds

    we are movie sheds

    of sleep.

     

    We can’t stamp

    or clap.

     

    At best

    we shriek in monkey speech,

    our old dialect,

    about the latest things.

     

    And then we 

    truly live through

    our own civilization. 

     

    Translated by Clara Cavanagh and Michal Rusinek

    Nights of Inseparation

    1.         Night.

          The bridge’s scent.

          The fence lets in roots.

          Water shines for the earth.

          A listening stone.

          A hair sings.

     

    1.     Night.

          Road.

          Your own knees lost in suppositions.

          There is no separate green.

     

          A different epoch of the hand,

          a different time of swaying.

     

          Moths and stars

          watch each other;

          they point crosswise

          to night’s rims of horizons

          a glass jar.

     

    1.     Night.

          Now we all grow together, we rotate,

             potatoes people dogs roofs . . . 

             Who’s going?  Who’s breathing?

             You above me and farther up—

             a branch, let’s shake on it,

             we won’t tread on one another,

                    oh my stony leg,

          oh bark oh fish

          speak say whatever . . . 

     

          you feel how our heart beats

                         under scales under shells

          oh, that anxiety

                    let’s get rid of it —

                    we die together

    Self-Verified

    A chair stands:

    article of truth

    sculpture of itself

    tied into one knot

             reality’s abstraction

     

    It broke.

    That’s a form too

             yes — candelabra

             yes — bull’s face.

     

    A chair’s abstract calling

    now summons

    whole crowds of reality

    ties them in one knot

    inside the stockroom of truth

             reality’s abstraction.