Montage whose keys have been confiscated. The in- about the experiences of the 18 black men ever admitted—enough, says Garrett, that cident is resolved without excessive force; and one black woman in his class. Their un- they developed a sense of group identity. some unrealized tension dissipates. Even the dergraduate days predated the campus un- They brought Malcolm X to speak at Eliot most minor incident, the scene implies, can rest of the 1960s, Garrett points out. “There House, and attempted to start a black stu- be fraught, and must be handled with care. was a sort of sense of innocence, then.” Still, dent association. “In many ways, we were Black GI, about African Americans in the the first-year contingent entering in the fall curiosities,” he says. “But as the conscious- military, also takes a keen interest in life’s of 1959 included the most African-Amer- ness increased in the nation, it increased daily texture. The camera zooms in on elab- ican students Harvard and Radcliffe had here, too, with us.” orate handshakes and hand-embroidered Black Power patches, or a broom pushing spent shells off a riverboat. But the film foregrounds this intimate detail with big- Reality Fiction ger questions: the introductory sequence provides a capsule military history that starts with the Spanish-American War; lat- Depicting “the world as it is” er, Garrett sharply questions minority offi- cers about soldiers defending rights abroad by madeleine schwartz that they can’t fully exercise at home. It’s hard to imagine a typical news documen- tary closing, as his does, on the image of a t does not take long for a reader to tion to the Tolstoyan movement. She’s also closed fist against the blue sky of Vietnam. realize that Selin Karadag, the tall, funny, a gifted reporter who has written dispatches Black Journal’s funding dried up in the early and clever Harvard freshman who nar- from , where much of her family origi- 1970s, and when PBS decided to stop airing I rates The Idiot, has more than a few things nates. A novel seems like a departure—ex- the show in 1976, the program took refuge in common with Elif Batuman ’99, its tall, cept that she had wanted to write The Pos- on commercial airwaves under host Tony funny, and clever author. Like Selin, Batu- sessed as fiction, until her editors learned that Brown. “Greaves knew what we younger man came to Harvard hoping to discover the her summers learning Uzbek in Samarkand staff members didn’t,” executive producer deep secrets of books, “what literature re- and attempting forensic dissections of Tol- St. Clair Bourne later reflected. “This film ally meant.” Like Selin, she tried to answer stoy’s estate Yasnaya Polyana had actually making opportunity would not last, but the this question through linguistics, but soon happened. She places little importance on films would.” found that the field lacked a master key to genre, joking that no one made Proust say, Garrett had gotten his start in televi- language. (One seminar assignment requires “This is a memoir about my childhood.” sion directing advertisements. “I remem- Selin to explain a theory to Martians, using The Idiot (its title, like that of The Possessed, ber spending months on a set, trying to get logic notation. “It wasn’t clear to these cereal things to pop out of the box me why the Martians were sup- correctly, so we’d have the right shot and posed to be so good at logic,” she all that,” he says. “That was not particularly thinks.) Like Selin, Batuman in- good for the mind.” Black Journal showed him stead gravitated toward Russian the medium’s potential power: “You could literature, which she found “pro- see it raising the consciousness of people foundly human,” eventually earn- as you traveled around the country.” He ing a Ph.D. in comparative litera- went on to work at NBC and CBS, win- ture; she detailed the experience ning two Emmy Awards and covering the in her bestselling collection of es- Reverend Jesse Jackson’s presidential cam- says, The Possessed. paign in 1984. But by his third decade in the Batuman, now a staff writer news business in , he felt the for , has chroni- powerful need to escape. He moved upstate cled weird corners of academia: and became an organic dairy farmer, though an Isaac Babel conference that he still worked as a news director for a lo- brings together relatives of the cal Fox affiliate between twice-daily milk- author who hate each other ings. “What happened with me—or what (“THAT OLD WITCH WILL happens, maybe, with a lot of people in the BURY US ALL,” one yells at the city—is you get a little ego,” he says. “And other); Danteans in Florence who the nice thing about cows is that they’re go- sing out his entire work, dressed ing to shit on you anyway. They don’t care if in red shirts from Zara; a confer- you have three Emmys, or 20 Emmys.” ence of Tolstoy scholars where, He has since sold the herd (“It’s a young luggage lost, she is forced to at- man’s game”), and is currently at work on a tend the proceedings in pajamas Elif Batuman

book called “The Last Negroes at Harvard,” and is applauded for her devo- SHEEHAN BEOWOLF

Harvard Magazine 57

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage is a nod to Dostoyevsky) is a large and often ful fullness, going from what Selin is read- loose account of Selin’s first year of college. ing—Nabokov’s lectures, Bleak House, Epicte- Explore More Over the course of the book, she falls in love tus—to varied details about undergraduate with an older math student and eventually life: the food at Annenberg, passages from a For more online-only articles on follows him to , where she teaches beginner Russian textbook, the conversa- the arts and creativity, see: English in a village. (Among her responsibil- tions of other students. (In an art seminar ities: judging a Hungarian leg contest.) It’s called “Constructed Worlds,” for example, “A Category of animated by a voice that seems at once very “One student had constructed a world that One” much Batuman’s own and fully recognizable was just Star Wars. It was completely identi- A new off-broadway to any student who enters Harvard Yard: cal to Star Wars, only she had given all the play captures the overwise yet totally naive. At the open- characters old Welsh names.”) enigma of Edward ing of the book, Selin sets up an Internet Partly this fullness results from the book’s Gorey ’50. connection. “‘What creation process. By the time she got to Har- harvardmag.com/gorey-16 do we do with this, vard, Batuman knew she wanted to be a writ- hang ourselves?’ I er, and was constantly writing everything Visitors, Not Viewers asked, holding up down in spiral notebooks “to a very weird de- At the Radcliffe the Ethernet cable. gree.” Much of this material, including many Institute, a touchable ‘You plug it into the emails she sent, made it into the novel. But exhibit plays with wall,’ the girl said.” she didn’t yet know how to write for others, perception. Batuman has la- trying instead to cram dozens of points onto harvardmag.com/ mented, in criticism the page. “It didn’t occur to me that I could jacob-17 for N+1 and The Lon- say all the things I wanted to say in a way don Review of Books, that anyone could understand.” She credits that contemporary her senior tutorial in Russian literature for fiction is too often teaching her how to write something some- continues, when you realize that what gets artificially concise one might actually read. Her professor made you from one point to another in the text and whittled down, writing “a situation of kindness,” where the is an experience of your life you hadn’t ever while “the ghosts of deleted paragraphs reader wants to have a good time—and so thought of before. During such moments of rattle their chains from the margins.” The does the writer. consonance between experience and litera- novel, she thinks, should contain seemingly Batuman is now working on a book about ture, “It feels that reality is supporting you…. inconsequential bits of daily existence: “all Turkey, as well as a sequel to The Idiot. “I had You’re being carried on a cushion of the world the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem this idea,” she says, “that writing autobio- as it is,” she says. “It’s the most exciting part of that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, graphical fiction was cheating in some way, reading, too”: noticing something you hadn’t to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself.” or it was less creative.” But there’s a problem- been aware of before, and wouldn’t have And so The Idiot, appropriately, has a delight- solving element to writing about oneself, she thought could be described.

flames engulfed the water. It wasn’t the Harmonic Progression first fire on the Cuyahoga—a polluted river in an industrial city—but it was the most Composer Robert Kyr embraces peace, love, and nature. publicized, and for Kyr, a high-school junior on the West Side who had recently joined a by lydialyle gibson student environmental-outreach group, it was “a five-alarm bell.” Or maybe here is the place to begin: with here are so many places to begin had happened in each one. Then she wrote Kyr at the piano. He’d been banging on the with composer Robert Kyr. Like up a classified report and never talked about keys since he was two or three, and began here: “I grew up in a family where it again, until one day out of the blue when taking lessons—and composing songs—at T the scars of war were very much her son was 16. “She spoke for about 20 min- 10. At age 11, he started playing pieces from with us,” he says. His father had served in utes and then fell silent, and we sat there for Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, a collection the South Pacific in World War II; his un- what felt like an eternity,” Kyr, JF ’81, Ph.D. of music that the Baroque master wrote for cle had lost a leg in the Italian theater. And ’89, remembers. “And then she said, ‘I just had his wife. “The first time I heard Bach was his mother, working for the Red Cross, had to tell you, because I thought that someday through playing those little pieces and his been one of the first to see the death camps you might do something with this.’” 15 two-part inventions,” Kyr says. “I kept after they were liberated. As an administra- Or one could begin in 1969, when the returning to them again and again because tive assistant to the American military, she Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. they spoke to me in a way that no other mu- walked through room after room with offi- Sparks from a passing train ignited oil- sic ever had.” Or ever would. cers, taking shorthand on the atrocities that slicked floating debris, and smoke and Now 64 and a professor of composition

58 March - April 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746