The New Criterion – February 2021

February 2021 A monthly review edited by Roger Kimball Notes & Comments, 1 Saint Ted of the Senate by James Piereson, 4 Sybille Bedford at the feast by D. J. Taylor, 10 Calhoun: American heretic by Allen C. Guelzo, 15 Solzhenitsyn & history by Robert D. Kaplan, 21 New poems by Anton Yakovlev, Rachel Hadas & Jessica Hornik, 26 Reflections by James Zug & Edward Greenwood, 29; Reconsiderations by David Platzer, 35; Theater by Kyle Smith, 38; Art by Karen Wilkin & James Panero, 42; Music by Jay Nordlinger, 49; The media by James Bowman, 53 Books: Richard Bradford Devils, lusts & strange desires reviewed by Brooke Allen, 57; Alexander Rose Empires of the sky reviewed by John Steele Gordon, 60; Robert Tombs This sovereign isle reviewed by Simon Heffer, 63; Iris Jamahl Dunkle Charmian Kittredge London reviewed by Carl Rollyson, 66; Jan 02 Swafford Mozart reviewed by John Check, 67; Judith Flanders A place for 42 64692 74820 February everything reviewed by Anthony Daniels, 69; Paul Betts Ruin & renewal reviewed by Daniel Johnson, 71; Notebook by Charles Cronin & Eric Gibson, 75

Volume 39, Number 6, $7.75 / £7.50 / c$9.75 02 > The New Criterion February 2021

Editor & Publisher Roger Kimball Executive Editor James Panero Managing Editor Benjamin Riley Associate Editor Andrew L. Shea Poetry Editor Adam Kirsch Visiting Critic Myron Magnet Hilton Kramer Fellow Isaac Sligh Office Manager Caetlynn Booth Assistant to the Editors Jayne Allison Editorial Interns Ariana Gravinese & Yulia Pyankova

Founding Editor Hilton Kramer Founding Publisher Samuel Lipman

Contributors to this issue Brooke Allen writes frequently for The New Simon Heffer’s The Age of Decadence will be Criterion and other publications. A former Pro- published in America by Pegasus in April 2021. fessor of Literature at Bennington College, she Jessica Hornik is the author of the poetry collection now teaches in its Prison Education Initiative. A Door on the River (Chatwin Books). James Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics Daniel Johnson is the founding editor of TheArticle. and Public Policy Center and the author of Robert D. Kaplan’s The Good American was Honor: A History (Encounter). published in January by Random House. John Check teaches music theory at the University Jay Nordlinger is a senior editor at National Review. of Central Missouri. James Piereson is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Charles Cronin is an adjunct professor at Keck Institute. Graduate Institute of the Claremont Colleges. David Platzer is a freelance writer, actor, and Anthony Daniels is a contributing editor of singer. City Journal. Carl Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Eric Gibson is the Arts in Review Editor of Faulkner (University of Virginia Press) and The The Wall Street Journal. Last Days of Sylvia Plath (University Press of John Steele Gordon is the author of An Empire of Mississippi). Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Kyle Smith is the critic-at-large for National Review. Power (Harper Perennial). D. J. Taylor’s On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography Edward Greenwood taught English Literature (Abrams) is out in paperback in May. at various universities, including the University Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and critic. of Kent, Canterbury, England. Anton Yakovlev’s latest book of translations is The Allen C. Guelzo is Senior Research Scholar, Last Poet of the Village: Selected Poems by Sergei Council of the Humanities, Princeton University. Yesenin (Sensitive Skin Books). Rachel Hadas’s new book of poems, Love and James Zug’s latest book is Run to the Roar: Dread (Measure), will be published this spring. Coaching to Overcome Fear (Penguin).

The New Criterion. ISSN 0734-0222. February 2021, Volume 39, Number 6. Published monthly except July and August by The Foundation for Cultural Review, Inc., 900 Broadway, New York, NY 10003, a nonprofit public charity as described in Section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue code, which solicits and accepts contributions from a wide range of sources, including public and private foundations, corporations, and the general public. Subscriptions: $48 for one year, $88 for two. For Canada, add $14 per year. For all other foreign subscriptions, add $22 per year. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster and subscribers: send change of address, all remittances, and subscription inquiries to The New Criterion, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Notice of nonreceipt must be sent to this address within three months of the issue date. All other correspondence should be addressed to The New Criterion, 900 Broadway, Suite 602, New York, NY 10003. (212) 247-6980. Copyright © 2021 by The Foundation for Cultural Review, Inc. Newsstand distribution by CMG, 155 Village Blvd., Princeton, NJ 08540. Available in microfilm from University Microfilms, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Internet: www.newcriterion.com Email: [email protected]

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1776 the twin affirmations that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” A nation that neglects its past is in danger of It should go without saying that the equality betraying its future. of which the Declaration spoke is moral equal- That, in a line, is the chief burden of the ity before the law, not an equality of talent or forty-odd-page report issued last month by other natural endowments. (Hence the philoso- the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. pher Harvey Mansfield’s quip about the “self- This is no ordinary government “white paper,” evident half-truth” that all men are created full of reader-proof verbiage whose chief accom- equal.) Nevertheless, despite the self-evidence plishment is darkening a quantity of wood pulp. of that great truth, the Declaration has accu- On the contrary, the 1776 Commission’s report mulated barnacles of cynicism, not least from is an eloquent, closely argued exposition of the those who eagerly point out that many of the distinctively American principles of liberty. It in- Founders, including the principal author of cludes an anatomy of major challenges to those the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, were slave- principles, historical and contemporary. And it holders. Does that not render their high-flown concludes with a sketch of ways in which the rhetoric disingenuous, not to say hypocritical? idea of America—currently under siege from a variety of freedom-blighting initiatives—might be renewed through a thoughtful resuscitation No, it doesn’t, and the report patiently ex- of civic education and the liberal arts. plains why. We won’t rehearse those arguments here. They are familiar to anyone who has bothered to look into the question. The real Those responsible for this remarkable docu- issue was articulated by Lincoln: ment include Larry Arnn, the Churchill scholar and president of Hillsdale College; Victor Da- All honor to Jefferson—to the man who . . . had vis Hanson, the historian and classicist; and the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce Charles Kesler, the author and editor of the into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract Claremont Review of Books. No one familiar with truth, applicable to all men and all times . . . that their work will be surprised by the depth, au- to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke thority, and rhetorical power of this report. and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of In part, it is a restatement of the founding re-appearing tyranny and oppression. principles of the American Creed. At the center of those principles are the truths articulated Lincoln’s point is this: There have been plenty by the Declaration of Independence, above all of revolutionary manifestos throughout his-

The New Criterion February 2021 1 Notes & Comments

tory. What makes the Declaration of Inde- other Founders was education. A sentinel must pendence special is that it is not simply an recognize and appreciate what he is guarding affidavit of separation but also an affirmation of if his watch is to be successful. Fostering this a central moral truth, a truth that is universal— “auxiliary precaution”—educating citizens for “applicable to all men and all times”—as well liberty, teaching “enlightened patriotism”—is as prophylactic: a people that embraces the at the center of the 1776 Commission’s report. principles of the Declaration has a potent guard Perhaps the most pungent section of the re- against “re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” port is its inventory and analysis of challenges to the American ideal. It is wholly appropriate that slavery comes first and receives the most The prospect of that reappearance is the sad- extended discussion. Other challenges that ness inscribed in the Declaration. It is a sadness the report enumerates are progressivism, the inscribed also in the human heart. “If men were “ideological cousins” of fascism and commu- angels,” Madison observed in Federalist 51, “no nism, and the new racism of identity politics. government would be necessary.” Likewise, he notes, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government Some commentators have expressed surprise would be necessary.” Hence the ineradicable that the authors should have included progres- difficulty in “framing a government which is sivism and identity politics in this roster of toxic to be administered by men over men”: “you challenges to the American idea. But they were must first enable the government to control right to do so. At the center of the progressive the governed; and in the next place oblige it to ideology is the idea that truth is relative to his- control itself.” How is that working out for us torical circumstances. Accordingly, progressiv- today? Madison went on to note that popular ism holds that the principles enshrined in the sovereignty (“a dependence on the people”) is Declaration and safeguarded by the Constitu- the primary check on the abuse of government tion are not fixed. What is wanted, as Woodrow power. But he also noted that the imperfection Wilson, an early progressive saint, had it, is a of human nature—for men are not angels and “living” Constitution whose principles must be are wont to seek their own aggrandizement at malleable under the pressure of changing his- the expense of their fellows—argues for the torical realities. The doctrine of moral relativity wisdom of “auxiliary precautions” against tyr- dictates that individual rights give way to group anny. This brings us to the incandescent center rights and that ultimate sovereignty resides not of Madison’s genius: his elaboration of a sys- in the people but in a managerial, bureaucratic tem of checks and balances that counterpoises cadre of elites. We hear a lot of talk about the not only the different branches of government “administrative state” today. That Leviathan had but also the contending private ambitions of its birth in the deeply anti-democratic cult of ex- citizens. “This policy,” he writes, perts that was (and is) such a prominent part of progressivism. Voters may be ineradicable. But of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the the nuisance they represent can be neutralized to defect of better motives, might be traced through the extent that real power is shifted to unelected, the whole system of human affairs, private as well and increasingly unaccountable, bureaucrats. as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several There is broad agreement—at least, there was offices in such a manner as that each may be a until recently—about how fascism and com- check on the other that the private interest of every munism challenge the American idea of liberty. individual may be a sentinel over the public right. Both ideologies explicitly sacrifice the rights of the individual to the state. Lenin promised that One “auxiliary precaution” that was not men- under communism the state would “wither tioned by Madison but was assumed by him and away.” He neglected to add that what would

2 The New Criterion February 2021 Notes & Comments take its place was the suffocating bureaucracy “defends America’s founding on the basis of of the Politburo, whose self-imposed mandate slavery,” while cnn cut to the chase and skirled was to keep track of everything—and everyone. that the “Trump administration issues racist There was no subterfuge about creating a school curriculum report on mlk day.” As it “workers’ paradise” in fascism, whose glorifi- happens, many critical assessments of the re- cation of the state over the individual was as port mentioned, with disapprobation implicit unapologetic as it was thoroughgoing. Identity or explicit, that it appeared on the holiday com- politics, the conceptual grandchild of Marxists memorating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, is the irony is that the left-wing media misses more cunning. Instead of aiming to overthrow the report’s celebration of the ideal that King bourgeois institutions like the family, churches, articulated when he looked forward to “a day education, and the rule of law directly, it bur- when people will not be judged by the color of rows underground to subvert them from with- their skin, but by the content of their character.” in. In the United States, this project took flight “Freedom,” Ronald Reagan famously ob- in the 1960s, but is only now, with the triumph served, is “never more than one generation of doctrines like “Critical Race Theory,” achiev- away from extinction.” It is an achievement that ing its destructive ends. As with the phrase “so- must constantly be renewed if it is to survive cial justice,” “identity politics” weaponizes an and prosper. That is a truth we are in danger of adjective to paralyze the noun it accompanies. forgetting. It is the indispensable merit of the “Social justice” represents not an improvement 1776 Commission’s report to dramatize with on justice but its suspension. Just so, “identity rare historical intelligence the dangers to liberty politics” is not politics but its demonic parody. that we face and to uncover the homely but potent resources we possess to reanimate it.

What gives the 1776 Commission’s report its urgency is the extraordinary division that is Some family news deepening across the country. “Americans,” the authors note, “are deeply divided about the meaning of their country, its history, and how Attentive readers will notice a change on our it should be governed. This division is severe masthead. The name “Cricket Farnsworth,” enough to call to mind the disagreements be- which has appeared there since February 2003, tween the colonists and King George, and those first next to the title “Assistant to the Editors,” between the Confederate and Union forces in then next to the title “Office Manager,” has van- the Civil War.” This may seem hyperbolic. Un- ished. Cricket (whose given name is, we can now fortunately, it is a simple statement of fact. reveal, “Nancy”) came to us in the winter of 2003 for two weeks to fill a sudden vacancy. Well, the weeks stretched to months, the months to As we write, this report is available on several years, and by the time Cricket hung up her New websites, including the White House site where Criterion spurs she had been with us fully eigh- it was first published on January 18. But on teen years. Many readers got to know Cricket, January 20, Inauguration Day, the incoming telephonically if not in person, and we know administration announced that the commission that they will be as sorry to bid her farewell as would be dissolved by executive order. That is we are. She is not, however, going far, and we a pity, for the realities the report illuminates know we will be in close touch for the new ad- transcend partisan politics. Alas, it is a measure ventures that await us and her. We are delighted of how much human territory has been ceded that Caetlynn Booth, formerly Assistant to the to the forces of dissolution that an inquiry so Editors, will now assume the reins of Office principled and high-minded should endure the Manager, and that Jayne Allison has joined us censure of thoroughly partisan animus. But so as our new Assistant to the Editors. Farewell, it is. The New York Times charged that the report congratulations, and welcome are all in order!

The New Criterion February 2021 3 Saint Ted of the Senate by James Piereson

When Edward M. Kennedy died in 2009, The author views Kennedy much like the he was eulogized by President Obama as “the tragic hero of the ancient Greeks—a man soul of the Democratic Party, and the lion of with noble aims (promoting liberal policies), the U.S. Senate—a man who graces nearly one brought down by moral flaws and episodes of thousand laws, and who penned more than poor judgment. This provides an overall theme three hundred himself.” Many agreed that for the biography, for (as Gabler argues) the rise Kennedy, after serving forty-seven years in the and fall of Kennedy’s political fortunes during Senate with many legislative victories to his the 1960s mirrored the fortunes of the liberal credit, deserved to be recognized among the cause during that period. Liberals sacrificed greatest figures ever to serve in that body, on their “moral authority” as spokesmen for the a level with the likes of Daniel Webster, Henry poor due to the violence and disorder that en- Clay, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Robert A. Taft. gulfed the country by the end of that decade, Neal Gabler, the author of this new biog- while at the same time Kennedy lost his own raphy of the youngest son of Joseph P. Ken- moral authority due to his reckless conduct nedy, Sr., endorses this assessment, even after in 1969 in the notorious incident at Chappa- considering the many lapses and indiscretions quiddick. When the dust settled in the 1970s, that would have brought down other pub- Kennedy was left to carry the liberal flag more lic figures not named Kennedy. Catching the or less on his own as the country turned in a Wind, largely based upon already published conservative direction. This is the larger story sources and documents, takes the story from that the author tries to illuminate through Ken- Edward M. Kennedy’s birth in 1932 through nedy’s career: “the shift in the nation’s political 1975, a low point for the senator when, follow- tectonic plates from liberalism to conservatism.” ing the deaths of his brothers, the successes and The glamour later attached to the Kennedy then the failures of liberalism in the 1960s, and name obscures the difficulties and setbacks his own personal scandals, he was uncertain “Ted” Kennedy experienced while growing whether he had any constructive role left to up in the middle of a large and highly ambi- play in public life.1 The author plans a second tious family. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., the fam- volume, no doubt as sympathetic and detailed ily patriarch, had his own political goals in as this one, that will plot Kennedy’s career the 1930s as an fdr ally, but soon projected from 1975 to his death in 2009, a period in them on to his two eldest sons, Joe, Jr., and which he discovered a new role as one of the John, leaving Ted and brother Robert as after- Senate’s more effective legislators. thoughts. His family shuffled him around from school to school during his early years, from 1 Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Bronxville to Palm Beach to Boston and even Hour, 1932–1975, by Neal Gabler; Crown, 928 pages. $40. to London, where his father was ambassador

4 The New Criterion February 2021 Saint Ted of the Senate by James Piereson to the Court of St James. Kennedy found it be. He was just thirty years of age, after all, difficult to make friends at these schools, as barely old enough to hold that seat. His father classmates ridiculed him for being awkward and brothers were Democrats, not because or overweight or not too bright. Within his they were liberals but because the Protestant own family, he was judged a “lightweight” in elites in the Northeast controlled the Repub- comparison to his older brothers, who glided lican Party and would not allow the Irish to effortlessly through schools and other youthful advance. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was a tough challenges that the youngest brother never was conservative and anti-communist; and John F. able to manage. These experiences, according Kennedy said more than once that he was not to the author, left young Kennedy with feel- comfortable with liberals. As the youngest in ings of insecurity that lasted into adulthood the family, Ted Kennedy did not receive the and which he sought to overcome by diligent political education that his father imprinted work and attention to details. upon his older brothers. He entered the Senate Kennedy eventually found his footing at as something of a neophyte, lacking strong Harvard, where he made friends, passed his views and looking to his brother in the White courses, and played on the football team, until House for political direction. Naturally, vet- he was expelled in the spring of his freshman eran members of the Senate mocked him as year for cheating on a Spanish exam—in the a lightweight (that phrase continuing to dog first of several moral lapses that marked his him) riding into office on his family’s name. conduct over the years. He enlisted in the Army and served for nineteen months in a Kennedy soon discovered that he liked the series of administrative and non-combat jobs, Senate, with its traditions and rules and distri- even as military action escalated in Korea— bution of powers among members and com- much in contrast to his older brothers, who mittees. His older brother, now President volunteered for dangerous assignments during Kennedy, had been a member of the Senate World War II (Joe, Jr., was killed in 1944 in for eight years, but skipped meetings and one such assignment). The stint in the Army missed votes, and spent much of his tenure opened a path for readmission to Harvard, plotting a run for the presidency. Ted Ken- where he completed his undergraduate educa- nedy, by contrast, though dismissed as a dil- tion in 1956. When he applied afterwards for ettante, worked diligently on legislation and admission to the law school at the University committee assignments, studied the issues of Virginia, he encountered opposition from and avoided publicity, and established good faculty members who pointed to the cheating relations with the senior members and com- episode at Harvard, plus his mediocre grades, mittee chairmen who controlled the Senate. as reasons to reject him. It required external He even got along with James Eastland, the intervention from family and a full vote of the reactionary Mississippi Democrat who chaired faculty to overcome the opposition to his ap- the judiciary committee (of which Kennedy plication. In spite of that controversy, Kennedy was a junior member). Naturally, the novice performed reasonably well as a law student, senator supported the program of the Ken- graduating in 1959 with plans to use his degree nedy Administration, including a civil rights as a pathway into politics. bill, which southern Democrats like Eastland In 1962, Kennedy, now just three years out usually managed to bury. But Kennedy, like of law school, ran for the Senate seat vacated his brother in the White House, was astute by his brother when he was elected to the enough to see that he came into office at a presidency. Time magazine featured him on moment when liberalism was ascending across its cover during that campaign. He won the the country. contest handily for the seat now deemed a The assassination of President Kennedy in family inheritance, campaigning mostly on 1963 gave new momentum to the civil rights state and local issues. At that time, Kennedy cause and his administration’s legislative pro- was far from the liberal he later turned out to gram, though it cut off Senator Kennedy’s in-

The New Criterion February 2021 5 Saint Ted of the Senate by James Piereson

fluence with the White House and left him ning of the California presidential primary, bereft of political direction. The two surviv- Robert Kennedy was shot and killed, a sacrifice ing Kennedy brothers, Edward and Robert, (as the Kennedys believed) in the struggle for responded to that event in different ways— civil rights. Robert’s death thrust Ted Kennedy Robert turning himself into a wounded and forward as the leader of the family and focus sentimental liberal speaking for the poor and of its political ambitions. Democratic leaders dispossessed; Edward focusing more intent- urged him to pick up Bobby Kennedy’s fallen ly upon legislative goals in the Senate. Ted standard and carry it forward in a campaign Kennedy cooperated with Lyndon Johnson for the presidential nomination. But Kennedy, when Johnson sought to capitalize on the as- shaken by the second assassination in the fam- sassination by promoting the late president’s ily, chose to wait for a future opportunity to civil rights agenda, even as Robert Kennedy pursue the presidency, increasing the odds that resented Johnson for usurping the family’s Richard Nixon would be elected that year to rightful control over the presidency. succeed Lyndon Johnson. Ted Kennedy spoke eloquently in 1964 on behalf of the Civil Rights Act, worked to break After Nixon’s election, Kennedy settled into the Southern filibuster, and led the biparti- the role as leader of the Democratic opposi- san coalition that passed the bill in June of tion, the “shadow president,” as his biographer that year. He fought on behalf of President describes his new position in Washington. Johnson’s Voting Rights Act and supported Kennedy hoped to save the liberal agenda from amendments to eliminate the poll tax as part “the depredations of the new president” and of that larger bill. The conservative coalition to protect the “poor and the powerless” from in the Senate killed those particular amend- Nixon’s neglect. Kennedy won election in 1969 ments, but the Supreme Court stepped in the as majority whip in the Senate, defeating Rus- next year (1966) to declare the poll tax un- sell Long, one of the Senate’s “old bulls,” with constitutional. Kennedy, in perhaps his most the plan to use that post to solidify his role as significant legislative achievement, was the leader of the opposition to Nixon. Neverthe- floor manager in 1965 for the Immigration less, Nixon, ever devious, outmaneuvered the and Naturalization Act, which repealed the liberals by proposing mild reforms in health- national quota provisions of the 1924 Immigra- care, the environment, and welfare instead of tion Act and subsequently opened the United calling for the elimination of those programs States to large-scale immigration from Asia, altogether. Nixon proposed a domestic agenda South America, and Africa. Kennedy viewed of “progressive light” that appealed to moder- all three of these bills as monuments to his late ate voters and complicated Kennedy’s efforts brother’s commitment to civil rights. to oppose him. Despite those successes, Nixon Kennedy voted reliably for Johnson’s do- was preoccupied with Ted Kennedy, following mestic agenda but (after 1966) gradually broke his moves step-by-step, frequently proposing with the administration’s policy in Vietnam, measures to counter them. Gabler argues that calling for diplomacy and negotiations, along it was Nixon’s obsession with Kennedy that with a reduction in military forces, to end the eventually led to Nixon’s downfall via the Wa- conflict, much like other liberals of that era. tergate scandal. When Robert Kennedy announced his cam- Kennedy’s role as shadow president was paign for the presidency in 1968, fighting for short-lived, as things turned out, because the “the soul of the nation,” as the author puts it, accident at Chappaquiddick in July of 1969 and to end the war in Vietnam, the younger nearly wrecked his career and discredited any Kennedy reluctantly signed on, fearing that his idea that he could continue as the moral leader brother’s candidacy would split the Democrats of the Democratic Party. Gabler describes the but also dreading the possibility that it might episode in detail, eventually accepting Ken- provoke another assassination attempt. In the nedy’s explanation that he accidentally drove event, that is what happened when on the eve- his car off a wooden bridge in the midnight

6 The New Criterion February 2021 Saint Ted of the Senate by James Piereson darkness and into a pond below, and that he Nevertheless, it must be judged as another fled the scene (leaving his female companion installment in a series of Kennedy “hagiogra- to drown in the car) in a disoriented state of phies” that began in 1965 with the publication mind. Kennedy accepted blame and received of Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days and a suspended sentence for leaving the scene of Theodore Sorensen’s Kennedy and has contin- an accident, which the author claims was stan- ued to the present time through many histories dard punishment for that kind of violation. and biographies of the Kennedy brothers that Days later Kennedy issued a televised apol- burnish the legend of an enlightened family ogy to the voters. The voters forgave him— fighting to save the nation from its darker im- apparently—because they continued to re-elect pulses. In this universe, Kennedy failures are him for decades afterwards. Nevertheless, Ken- understood as tragedies or lapses or the fault of nedy’s conduct in that situation (as the author others, while similar failings by Republicans or writes) left a stain “that no amount of penance conservatives are the result of dark or sinister could erase.” motives. The Kennedys represent the mor- Gabler ends this installment of the biogra- ally enlightened side of America, and so their phy with a telling scene that occurred in Bos- failures must be excused, while Republicans ton in 1975: Kennedy wading into a crowd of like Richard Nixon appeal to “the darkness of white ethnics (mostly Irish) protesting a court the electorate,” in other words, to the “bad” ordered integration scheme to bus students America populated by reactionaries and bigots. between predominantly white and black areas This author goes so far as to write that Richard of the city. Kennedy was caught on the horns Nixon caused the collapse of liberalism in the of a dilemma: on the one side, the protests 1970s because he exploited divisions in the of those working-class voters who had pro- country—even though he acknowledges that pelled the Kennedys into power; on the other, those divisions were created in the first place his commitment to black voters, civil rights, by liberal policies on crime, welfare, and race. and school integration. Kennedy remained Gabler also acknowledges that liberals lost silent on the issue, and in any case refused to their moral authority in the 1970s—exemplified side with the parents. He fled the scene—or, by the busing controversy in Boston—though rather, he was chased from the scene, pursued he is not specific about what that means or by protesters: “You’re a disgrace to the Irish,” how it happened. It is not complicated: liberals some called out. “Teddy’s no longer welcome indulged their moral sensitivities about race here,” a bartender said afterwards, recognizing and poverty but expected others to absorb the that Kennedy would sell out the interests of costs through busing, rising crime, and social those white working-class parents in favor of disorder. Ted Kennedy and the federal judge liberal moral goals. This episode, which was who ordered the busing program in Boston repeated in cities around the country, reflected lived in exclusive suburbs or sent their children the breaking-apart of the old coalition between to private schools and were never going to bear blacks and working-class whites that was a key the burdens of the policies they supported. element of the post-war Democratic Party. The Others would have to pick up the tab—which tried and true formula of the 1960s—the appeal was perfectly fine with Senator Kennedy and to the poor, the black, and the dispossessed— other liberals who supported those programs now lost its moral authority among those eth- across the country in the 1970s. That is how nic voters. This, as much as any other factor, moral authority is lost—when people call for ended the era of liberal reform that began in policies that they know they will not have to 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy to pay for. Busing, moreover, was a complete the White House. failure, as it promoted white flight from the public schools and left them even more racially This biography, once completed, is likely segregated than before. to serve as the authoritative account of Ted This author mentions the tragic deaths of Kennedy’s long political career in the Senate. John and Robert Kennedy and chalks them up

The New Criterion February 2021 7 Saint Ted of the Senate by James Piereson

as episodes in the struggle for civil rights— party house to describe the accident to his but never mentions the circumstances of the cousin and a friend, and perhaps to discuss assassinations or the names of the men who how to handle it—not the sign of a person committed those crimes. Is this a deliberate in a state of panic. They urged him to call the omission? That is question worth asking—for police. Instead, he fled (once again) back to his the facts of those assassinations cut against hotel, where he was thinking clearly enough to the civil rights interpretation of those events. change clothes, speak to guests in the lobby, President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey and make several telephone calls to friends and Oswald, a committed communist who had aides before retiring for the evening. Some said defected to the Soviet Union but returned to he was creating an alibi to claim that Mary Jo the United States disillusioned with Soviet Kopechne was driving the car, or that he was communism but newly committed to Fidel buying time to recover from an evening of Castro’s revolution in Cuba. He (probably) drinking, or concocting a strategy for dealing shot President Kennedy because he learned with the accident. He was at breakfast in the in 1963 that the Kennedys were plotting to hotel restaurant the next morning (eight hours overthrow or assassinate Castro. Robert Ken- after the accident) when he learned that the nedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian police were on the scene and had determined national living in the United States who was that it was Kennedy’s car in the water—and angry with Kennedy because he supported the that Kopechne had drowned. sale of fighter jets to Israel and was sympa- Might she have been saved if Kennedy had thetic to Israel’s cause in its regional conflicts. reported the accident? Perhaps. In any case, he Neither of those events had anything to do pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident with civil rights, instead having their origins and received a suspended sentence, which was in foreign policies supported (justifiably) by something of a joke because no one, except the Kennedy brothers. Were John and Rob- perhaps a Kennedy, receives a suspended sen- ert Kennedy slain due to their support for tence for leaving the scene of an accident in civil rights? No—but that is an aspect of the which someone has died. Such cases are typi- Kennedy legend circulated over the years and cally treated as felonies, for which the guilty promoted in this biography. are sentenced to jail time—as should have The account of the Chappaquiddick incident happened here. in this biography amounts to a whitewash of Ted Kennedy’s conduct on that occasion. The It remains a puzzle as to why so many people author claims that it was an accident (which claim that liberalism is an enlightened doctrine, it was), that Kennedy panicked in the after- or that liberals are on the side of the angels, math and thus failed to report it (implausible), in view of the wreckage they have inflicted and that the suspended sentence he received on the nation since the 1960s. Welfare case was standard treatment for those convicted loads and violent crime tripled or quadrupled of leaving the scene of an accident (wrong). in major cities across the country during the Some claimed that Kennedy escaped from the 1960s, courtesy of policies promoted by Sena- sunken automobile via an open window on tor Kennedy. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the passenger’s side, so that he had to climb at that time, the reaction of many liberals “was over his companion on his way out. Kennedy, not to be appalled by the disorder but almost moreover, had multiple opportunities to re- to welcome it.” Public schools have collapsed port the accident after he escaped from the in major cities since that decade, largely due automobile, and thus perhaps to save his com- to the power of teachers’ unions promoted panion. One house, lights on, was just a hun- by Kennedy and fellow liberals. As soon as dred yards away; several others were within a the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, they half mile of the accident scene. He walked past perverted it into a system of quotas that con- all of those houses (and the Edgartown Fire tinues to this day; and in much the same way Department) on his way back to the original they turned the environmental movement

8 The New Criterion February 2021 Saint Ted of the Senate by James Piereson into a campaign against industrial society. welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination The Immigration and Naturalization Act of and expand access to health care and education. 1965, Kennedy’s great legislative achievement, Those are the issues that have motivated me and opened the United States to uncontrolled le- have been the focus of my work as a United gal and illegal immigration from third world States senator. countries, dividing the nation and turning im- migration into a heated political issue. Absent This letter surprised many of the senator’s sup- opposition from conservatives, liberals led by porters who assumed that, as a secular liberal, Ted Kennedy would have succeeded long ago he had little use for the Catholic Church and its in turning the United States into a modern- conservative teachings. Family members main- day dystopia. They may yet succeed in that tained that, despite departures from orthodox campaign, oblivious to where they are headed. doctrine, he remained a sincere and observant Catholic. But what is most interesting about Several weeks before he died in 2009, as Gabler the letter is Kennedy’s assertion that personal reports in his introduction, Kennedy sent a salvation can be achieved through liberal poli- touching letter to Pope Benedict XVI implor- tics rather than through individual acts of con- ing the Pope to pray for him as he entered his trition and charity. Whether or not this is true, final days. The letter, which was personally Kennedy believed it, as do many others today delivered by President Obama, read in part: who view liberalism not as a set of policies to be tested against their consequences, but as a Most Holy Father, religion or a church that divides the good from I am writing with deep humility to ask that the bad, the moral from the immoral, and the you pray for me as my own health declines. enlightened from the unenlightened. That is a I want you to know Your Holiness that in my key theme running through Kennedy’s life and nearly 50 years of elective office I have done my through this biography—and a good statement best to champion the rights of the poor and open of what was wrong with Kennedy’s career and doors of economic opportunity. I have worked to the kind of politics he championed.

The New Criterion February 2021 9 Sybille Bedford at the feast by D. J. Taylor

Thirty years ago, waiting to take my seat at a were revealed to him, and the same charge dinner at the pen Club in Chelsea, London, could be leveled at the little old lady of the I caught sight of an elderly woman quietly pen Club. installing herself a place or two down on the When it came to cannibalizing her own other side of the long oak table. Though frail life for the purposes of fiction, Bedford, like and diminutive, there was something rather Powell, was a serial offender, a kind of liter- formidable about this apparition, something ary anthrophage forever feasting on her own steely and self-possessed, and the sense of in- lightly grilled bones. In her comprehensive ner fires steeply banked increased when she and admiring biography, Sybille Bedford: A Life, reached into her leather satchel, brought out Selina Hastings notes that in Jigsaw, subtitled a bottle of wine, decanted some of it expertly “An Unsentimental Education,” her subject’s into a glass, and began lapping it up like a fourth novel, “the difference between real- cat let loose on a saucer of milk. “That,” the ity and imagination is almost impossible to person standing next to me murmured, in the discern.”1 But the same critique can be made of manner of one who draws attention to some her second, A Favourite of the Gods (1963)—“a rare antique run to earth among a shelf full of mirror image of Sybille’s adolescence” accord- low-budget curios, “is Sybille Bedford.” ing to Hastings. It hangs ominously over her At this stage in her long and eventful life, third, A Compass Error (1968), large parts of Bedford (1911–2006) was luxuriating in the which simply recapitulate material from the success of Jigsaw (1989), which, somewhat previous volume, and it doubtless explains the implausibly, had been shortlisted for the pre- distressing family sit-down of 1956, when, after vious year’s Booker Prize for fiction. The im- publication of her debut, A Legacy, a posse of plausibility lay in the book’s autobiographical Sybille’s German relatives turned up in Lon- tendencies—a tethering in the circumstances don to protest at the pain that this “ghastly of the author’s rackety early life in Continental book” had caused them. Europe so pronounced that it seemed odd Sybille, in short, was not only an autobi- that no judge had wondered whether calling ographer manqué, but a recycler and a re- it a novel was an offense against the Trade animator, to the point where her work, seen Descriptions Act for a work whose every other in the round, sometimes looks like a gigantic character has an alter ego purposefully at large palimpsest, a constantly re-stitched piece of on the wrong end of the pre-war French Riv- embroidery, a single idea endlessly refashioned iera. “I thought, you know, that novelists were and refurbished, the same remorseless tocsin supposed to make things up,” Kingsley Amis once complained, when the full extent of his 1 Sybille Bedford: A Life, by Selina Hastings; Knopf, 432 friend Anthony Powell’s failings in this line pages, $32.50.

10 The New Criterion February 2021 Sybille Bedford at the feast by D. J. Taylor

clanging away above her readers’ heads. All Old Europe so recondite that to examine it this suggests that the experience on which her in detail is the social equivalent of inspecting books were based is of a highly unusual, or the collection of objects laid out on the raree highly stylized, kind, and that the living of showman’s table at a Victorian gypsy fair. If it at once defined her as a creative artist and Bedford is invariably herself—sharp (at any yet channeled that creativity into a groove rate in her later days), self-willed, and self- that she could not have escaped even had preserving—then she is always, in her highly she wanted to. There were to be no flights of individual way, a representative of several older fancy, capricious experiments, or attempts to worlds that every so often loom into view like break new ground—all the random ballast by slides dragged under a microscope. Like a which the average literary life is sustained—for foregrounded figure in a medieval frieze, her the ground already broken was quite fanciful existence is undetachable from the backdrops enough to begin with. she seems to dominate. One of these backdrops is the landscape So what is Sybille Bedford: A Life actually of her upbringing as the daughter of what about? As well as covering the ups and Hastings calls “an eccentric Bavarian baron” downs of a high-end twentieth-century lit- on an estate south of Munich. The patronym erary career, it is, necessarily, about locales was “von Schoenebeck,” but there was Jewish and journeys and sensations: driving across blood, acquired through her mother, Lisa, and the Italian border to Alba, let us say, for the a fair amount of paternal eccentricity. Keen truffle season; taking “a nice walk into empty on objets d’art, but notoriously hard-up, the Belgrave Square”; looking for “a quiet refuge baron seems to have survived on handouts where one can work undisturbed through from the wealthy parents of his dead first the summer.” Given the subject’s enthusiastic wife. Certainly, Hastings’s accounts of life at lesbianism, practiced ceaselessly over a pe- the schloss at Feldkirch in the aftermath of riod of nearly seventy years, it is, naturally, the Great War sound as if they were robbed about women—Alannah and Eda and Esther, wholesale from a novel by Joseph Roth. The Betsy and Lesley and Anne—and about be- von Schoenebecks did not get on, and they ing taken up, taken out, and intermittently divorced in 1922. Raised mostly by her father, taken in. It is about food and drink—white and transferred to her mother’s care after his wines with a good smoked salmon mousse death, Sybille found herself confronted with and hot toast, entrecôte grillé, pommes frites, both a new parent and a new lifestyle. Hav- and Fleurie served frais, goose foie gras—and ing spent the first stretch of her teens in the frequently about judgment (“Life is so much sequestration of a South German village, she less joyful when you are not there”), even if spent the second half as a sort of cosmopolitan the most rigorous eye of all sometimes seems vagrant, either following Lisa around various to be trained on the table d’hôte. Happily the European watering holes or being farmed out foie gras mentioned above turns out to be as a paying guest on people she barely knew. “almost unbearably good. . . . It was like a Eventually mother and daughter fetched up pain to eat the last of it.” at Sanary-sur-Mer on the French Mediterra- But Hastings’s account of this extravagant nean, not far from Saint-Tropez but cheaper journey through a succession of gentlewoman- and less fashionable. And here a second lost ly bedrooms and enticing trattorie is something landscape looms into view—the world of the more than a sapphic carousel with Michelin interwar artists’ colony, populated by Con- stars attached. It is also a study of bohemian- tinental drifters drawn south by sunshine, a ism, and what happens to bohemianism when favorable exchange rate, and a place to work, it grows old. Even more important, perhaps, or to pretend to do so: the kind of place where it is a book about two, or possibly even three, the car pulled up outside the bistro is pretty demographics that no longer exist. Simulta- sure to contain Aldous Huxley and his wife neously, it offers a series of glimpses into an Maria, and Cyril Connolly is rumored to be

The New Criterion February 2021 11 Sybille Bedford at the feast by D. J. Taylor

staying in the next village. It takes the descrip- longer tipsy, ribald or inept/ The beastliest men tion of Sanary, and all the other places in which in England, we accept.” Meanwhile, one or two Sybille spent her peripatetic adolescence, to of the implications of Sybille’s status, or rather establish just how odd this early life was, how her non-status, were becoming uncomfortably random, how infinitely detached from 1930s clear. As a Jew, her German citizenship was convention. Large parts of it were spent on her revoked by the Nazis in 1935. Walter Bedford, own, the solitary girl hunkered down over a whom she married in London in 1935, sight book (or the wine list) in the corner of a out- unseen, was employed at a gentleman’s club in of-season hotel while Lisa mooned after Nori, St James’s. His later activities are unrecorded. the man who became her second husband, or The marriage, contrived by well-placed friends in London bedsits under the notional eye of as a way of furnishing Sybille with a British English friends. If Sybille relished her inde- passport, was very nearly forestalled by the pendence, then she was also aware of some of Home Office. There were other anxious mo- its problems. Jigsaw, in particular, is weighed ments five years later when she and her lover down with stealthy intimations of disquiet, Alannah Harper found themselves stranded on sometimes amounting to menace. Here are the Riviera as the German tanks sped south. some specimen sentences: Weighed down by a baggage train that in- cluded Alannah’s nineteen suitcases and a pet France became the nearest thing I’d ever known poodle, they managed to escape into Italy and to a home. board the last passenger ship leaving Genoa for the United States. Also stowed in SS Ex- I accepted what I found. eter’s hold alongside Alannah’s compendious impedimenta was half the Italian gold reserves. Circumstances allowed me to make a choice when I was still incapable of weighing what It is not the fault of Selina Hastings, always the choice involved. a resourceful and diligent sleuth, that the second half of this four-hundred-page biog- That was the beginning of a time of confusion, raphy is a bit less interesting than the first, sudden journeys, new places—waiting—where and its subject not quite so alluring a figure. did we go, and in what order? And who went Perhaps it is just that the gaining of experience and who came? nearly always has the edge on its conjuring into print. Back in Europe, not without pro- She stayed away for what seemed a long time. cedural difficulty (three Dexedrine a day at one point) or emotional distraction (“falling “She,” predictably, is Lisa. In each case, you rather madly in love”), she began her literary sense that Sybille is pulling her punches, twist- career with a Mexican travelogue (The Sud- ing inference around a formal statement of den View, 1952). Celebrity fans of A Legacy, the facts, letting the reader burrow down to four years later, included Nancy Mitford and the emotional disturbance that lies beneath. Waugh, who wondered, teasingly, who this If some of the friends she made in the Sanary “Mrs Bedford” could be (“A cosmopolitan wine bars were high-caliber eminences from military man, plainly, with a knowledge of the world of arts and letters (the Huxleys, Klaus parliamentary government and popular jour- Mann), then others were scene-swelling scamps nalism, a dislike of Prussians, a liking for Jews, such as Brian Howard, the part model for An- a belief that everyone speaks French in the thony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead home”). There was a new lover, Eda, a succes- Revisited (1945). After one particularly raucous sor to an Evelyn, who had showered Sybille evening ended in a brawl, Howard sent Sybille with excruciatingly twee love letters, in which and her current paramour a verse apology that the pair masqueraded as tortoises, hares, and began: “With humble gratitude and lowered other fauna (“and all time thinking lovingly eyes/ Aware of folly, swearing to be wise/ No of his dearest creature . . . his great beast.

12 The New Criterion February 2021 Sybille Bedford at the feast by D. J. Taylor so kind”). Sybille also took up a lucrative and a veto on any editorial intervention side-line reporting on such high-profile court whatever. (“No nagging . . . no showing of cases as the trials of the alleged serial killer Dr. sample chapters . . . no hurrying.”) As a final Bodkin Adams, the Profumo affair’s Stephen insult Sybille called in a literary agent halfway Ward, Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby, through the writing and instructed him to and the jailers of Auschwitz. renegotiate the contract. Did success spoil her? Alannah certainly thought so, and Hastings quotes a pained Another of Sybille’s sticking points was hav- letter from the early 1970s in which she com- ing to pay for the expenses racked up while plains that “You were much nicer and fun- writing “the biography of one of the world’s nier years ago Sibbie, before all the femme de most distinguished men of letters.” Once the lettres stuff.” But it may be that this glacial, book was out, she turned suddenly world- disdainful side, which other friends also came weary and indifferent. (“This whole business to bemoan, was a product of Alannah’s own of publication . . . is more shocking than I sage counsel. Having introduced Sybille to expected. One feels exposed.”) Life backed one or two notabilities in Rome in the 1950s, down, agreed that Sybille could write at the Alannah protested that she could not length she chose, and even upped the fee from $3,500 to $5,000. But not everyone was pre- understand why you behave like a maid being pared to act as the en bas to Sybille’s de haut, interviewed when you first meet people. . . . and Hastings offers a choice account of an Behaving with ease and a certain boldness on evening spent with the artist David Hockney meeting new people, whoever they are . . . [is] in 1978 at the close of which, after being com- a class thing, and for a person of your breeding manded to ferry her home and being further and obvious upper-class and even aristocratic instructed that the corner of Old Church Street family . . . [your manner] is impossible. It gives wouldn’t do (“You will drive me to my door”), people the wrong impression about you. he returned to ask his host, “Who the fuck is that old bitch?” Meanwhile, the life, now Clearly lessons were learned as the grand being lived in London, went on as it always manner which Sybille seems to have adopted had done. There were more girls—Jenny and by her middle years brought impressive re- Annie and Carla and countless others, as un- sults. Publishers, for example, were consis- differentiated, for all Hastings’s best efforts, tently cowed by her refusal to be edited, work as the faces in a chorus line—and even excur- to deadlines, listen to polite suggestions, or sions to a low-rent lesbian club where the tal- submit to all the other minor inconveniences ent made itself available by the hour. Asking of this exacting trade. Commissioned by Life one of the girls what she did, Sybille was told to cover the Auschwitz trial in 1965, she la- that she worked “on the forecourt.” Was this mented that something to do with the Inns of Court, her patron enquired? No, the girl replied, it was there is this new thing of interfering with writers a gas station. which is taking on truly frightening dimensions. There was also a lot more food. Plates of it, Have we forgotten that it is writers, original banquettes of it, buffets of it, a kind of eternal writers not hirelings, who change and make and restaurant groaning with bouillabaisse, racks of breathe life into language, not the editors with lamb, cunningly finessed artichokes, roulettes their levelling tools who limp behind? of fillets of sole, and sea urchins in aspic. You can forgive Sybille her relish of the high style Robert Gottlieb, the American publisher of these latter days (much of it financed by who commissioned her life of Huxley (two wealthy friends) as it contrasts so painfully volumes, 1973–74), was bombarded with with the insecurity of what had gone before. snooty letters demanding an advance com- There is, frankly, something inevitable in a mensurate with “my standing as a writer” trajectory that finds the onetime bohemian

The New Criterion February 2021 13 Sybille Bedford at the feast by D. J. Taylor

expatriate rooting for Mrs. Thatcher, the friend high life, for sybaritism of this kind has to be of all those mid-century modernists disliking worked at, and la dolce vita never came easy. their postmodern successors (see some wound- Her writing is full of odd, subdued half-lights, ing remarks about the “pedestrian and resent- the meaning somehow fugitive and ulterior, ful Indian writer” Salman Rushdie), and the little hints of bygone unhappiness and life not émigré from Nazi Germany deciding that taking the shape that imagination has wished “some races are superior or inferior to others on it. Jigsaw is crammed with these moments— in terms of human development.” It is all of “Billi” (Sybille) on the beach with her mother a piece with the Coutts & Co. bank account, at Naples, as the pair of them wonder if “Ales- the Companionship of the Royal Society of sandro” (Nori) will ever come back. For the Literature, and the daube à la provençale with first time, the narrator decides, she “felt the pasta macaronade. sting of compassion. I never forgot that after- noon by a grey Mediterranean.” As for Sybille If the white wine is nearly always passable, the Bedford: A Life, with its stupendous cuisine, its entrecôte grillé impeccable, and the partridges tortoises, hares, and great beasts, its disdain for perfectly roasted, then with Bedford herself sample chapters and its certain boldness, if not a final judgment hangs slightly out of reach. perhaps setting out with this aim in view, Se- No point in assailing her hankering for the lina Hastings has written a comic masterpiece.

14 The New Criterion February 2021 American heretic, American Burke by Allen C. Guelzo

There are some biographies which are almost For such a task, the great literary critic John impossible to write. Sometimes this is because Gardner laid down this rule: No true compas- the subject is guilty of such monstrosities that sion without will, no true will without compas- the empathy required to write a worthwhile sion. Without the will to judge, as Kershaw biography can undermine the moral judgment recognized, any empathy is suspect, and will a difficult subject demands. Ian Kershaw, at be regarded that way. Without compassion, the beginning of his two-volume biography of however—without a deep understanding of Adolf Hitler, admitted that “any biographical motives, times, places, losses, sorrows: con- approach” to a character like the Nazi fiend text, again—the result will never rise above has the “inbuilt danger” of requiring “a level sanctimonious caricature. In fact, without of empathy with the subject which can easily biographies of difficult subjects, it might not slide over into sympathy, perhaps even hid- be possible to write biographies at all. den or partial admiration.” Any attempts to John Caldwell Calhoun is one of those difficult understand Hitler as something other than subjects, something which the Baylor University a consummate devil—as an opportunist, a historian Robert Elder acknowledges in the title hypnotizer, an anti-Bolshevik, a social revo- of his new Calhoun biography, Calhoun: Ameri- lutionary, or a Weberian charismatic—all have can Heretic.1 Born in 1782, at almost the close lurking within them the “potential for a pos- of the American Revolution, Calhoun was the sible rehabilitation of Hitler” as some version offspring of that wave of two hundred thousand of a national hero, if only his “crimes against Scots-Irish immigrants who crossed the Atlantic humanity” could be somehow contextualized. in the five decades before Independence. The Yet, context is as much a necessity in biog- first Calhoun—John’s grandfather—arrived in raphy as judgment; the one, in fact, has no Pennsylvania in 1733, but like so many of the meaning without the other. “The biographer’s Scots-Irish, the Calhouns kept on moving. mission,” wrote Paul Murray Kendall, “is to Young Patrick Calhoun—John’s father—settled perpetuate a man as he was in the days he in the Shenandoah Valley in the late 1740s, but lived—a spring task of bringing to life again, a decade later pushed on to the South Carolina constantly threatened by unseasonable freez- hinterlands, surviving warfare with the Cherokee es.” But context is itself a slippery task, and and eventually acquiring 2,100 acres of land— contextualizing a difficult subject sets up a and sixteen slaves. different hazard for the biographer, that of South Carolina was, from the very start, a being misunderstood as a co-conspirator in the different world from the rest of America. In the subject’s project, so that both the subject and the biographer are heaped with opprobrium 1 Calhoun: American Heretic, by Robert Elder; Basic by a drone of self-congratulatory criticism. Books, 656 pages, $35.

The New Criterion February 2021 15 American heretic, American Burke by Allen C. Guelzo

1790 census, its population had the closest to Once there, however, Calhoun found it racial parity between white and black (140,000 more difficult to play the true Jeffersonian. to 109,000) of any American state, virtually all Although Jefferson’s political heir, James of the latter enslaved; forty years later, whites Madison, still presided over a Jeffersonian- were a minority (237,000 to 265,000), and by dominated administration, Jefferson’s party the eve of the Civil War whites were outnum- was fracturing. One faction, led by the Ken- bered four to three. It was also a state with a tuckian Henry Clay, was chafing at Jeffersonian dramatic political divide between lowcountry policies on trade, banking, and tariffs, while elites, loyal to the Federalist party and clustered a stubborn band of Jeffersonian purists, the around Charleston and the coast, and back- Tertium Quids (the “third something,” after country landowners, tied to Thomas Jefferson’s the Federalists and the Clay faction), headed Democratic-Republicans and deeply resentful by the razor-tongued Virginian, John Ran- of the way the lowcountry ruled the legislature dolph, angrily demanded “taxes repealed; by appointing the governor, the state’s federal the public debt amply provided for, both electors, and almost all the state offices. principal and interest; sinecures abolished . . . public confidence unbounded.” Calhoun Young John Calhoun’s education was a confir- found himself drawn almost at once to Clay, mation of all of the back-country’s Jeffersonian and with Clay, he voted for bills to establish predilections: at age thirteen, after his father’s a new federal bank, protect manufacturing death, he was enrolled in a classical academy through tariffs, and fund an ambitious pro- run by his Presbyterian brother-in-law, Moses gram of government-sponsored infrastructure Waddel; then, in 1802, he entered the junior projects. And he won personal prominence by class at Yale College, where he stubbornly clung bearding the raspy John Randolph on the floor to the Jeffersonian persuasion despite the Fed- of the House. When James Monroe succeeded eralism breathed into the Yale atmosphere by Madison as president in 1816, Monroe had the college’s president, the devout and devoutly no hesitations in inviting Calhoun to join his Jefferson-hating Timothy Dwight. He was administration as Secretary of War. “one of the very few, who dared to speak out The Monroe years, from 1816 to 1824, enjoy in College in 1803–04 when Federalism was so the appellation “The Era of Good Feelings.” prevalent at Yale,” remembered one fellow stu- Calhoun’s tenure at the War Department, dent; forty years later, another classmate could however, was not exactly easy going. His congratulate Calhoun on being “the same true staff consisted of just thirty-four clerks and and undeviating republican, in principle and eighteen agents who administered the govern- practice, that you were forty years ago.” ment’s entire Indian policy, and much of his Or so it seemed. Calhoun added another time was consumed with supervising the not Connecticut year in 1805 by studying law at always kindly enforcement of tribal removal yet another Federalist stronghold, the Litchfield treaties. Calhoun had even more grief with law school established by Tapping Reeve. (An the behavior of over-mighty white aggressors, abiding rumor was that Calhoun had stopped en especially the über-popular Andrew Jackson, route in Washington to pay homage to Jefferson, whom he flatly condemned for his unilateral and perhaps to reinforce his Jeffersonianism be- occupation of Spanish-owned Pensacola. fore facing another blast of Federalism). When By 1824, Calhoun was ready to make a presi- he returned to South Carolina in December, dential bid, advertising himself as a moderate 1806, he opened a law practice in Abbeville. But who stood “on the great Republican cause, he admitted feeling “a strong aversion to the free alike from the charge of Federalism or law,” and soon enough turned to politics. The Radicalism.” He had to settle for the vice- turn was almost too easy. Elected to the state presidency, under John Quincy Adams, and legislature in October 1808, he waited only two in many respects this marked the climacteric years before successfully running for Congress. of his political career. Although Adams was He was just twenty-eight years old. opposed to slavery and Calhoun was by now

16 The New Criterion February 2021 American heretic, American Burke by Allen C. Guelzo a substantial slave-owner, Calhoun’s relations From that moment, Calhoun never had any with Adams had always been cordial. He had real hope of the presidency. Having directly been willing to condemn the transatlantic challenged Jackson over the tariff, he resigned slave trade as an “odious traffic,” and, in the his vice-presidency. He was triumphantly re- midst of the great controversy in Congress turned to the Senate to represent South Caro- over the admission of Missouri as a slave state lina for the next two decades, but his energies in 1820, Calhoun had agreed that Congress were now poured into political philosophy, had jurisdiction over legalizing slavery in the and the formulation of an alternative republi- Western Territories. It is not inconceivable that canism. Beginning with his Exposition and Pro- he could have even become a leader in the test of December 1828, and running through his Whig party that Clay formed in 1834 to combat Fort Hill Address (1831) and his posthumously Andrew Jackson and promote a program—an published Disquisition on Government and A “American System”—for tariffs, banking, and Discourse on the Constitution and Government infrastructure. Moving in that direction, he of the United States, Calhoun developed a new might have (like Clay) espoused some strategy American political theory, built around four for gradual emancipation and colonization. principal points. First, his repudiation of the Declaration of Instead, from 1824 onwards, Calhoun was Independence and the natural-law principles it under the pressure of mounting criticism from embodies. Calhoun went straight to the root his South Carolina constituents that he was of American political self-understanding by going soft on slavery, and feeling the intel- insisting that the Declaration of Independence, lectual influence of the hard-line Jeffersonian by taking inalienable natural rights as its fun- John Taylor of Caroline. Rather than accom- damental premise, was an enormous mistake. modation, Calhoun now swung hard away “There had never been a proposition of such from Clay. He cast his first vote against tariffs dangerous import, or which had been so mis- (as vice-president) in 1825, then turned against understood, or been productive of so much federal infrastructure funding. When Andrew evil” as the notion that “certain inalienable Jackson evicted John Quincy Adams from the rights” had been conveyed to anyone, much presidency in 1828, Calhoun was picked to re- less life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. main as vice-president. But he was now deeply The idea of natural rights was only a “hypo- committed to resisting federal authority, no thetical truism,” and “nothing can be more matter who was president, and between 1828 unequal than the quantum of liberty assigned and 1832 he directed a political war against to each individual.” Liberty, for instance, is not federal tariff legislation that asserted South an inherent right, hard-wired in equal pro- Carolina’s authority to nullify federal laws portions into every individual human nature, within its own boundaries. Since tariffs gen- but “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to erated 94 percent of the federal government’s be gratuitously lavished on all alike.” Those revenue, this amounted to a practical veto over people who were “too ignorant, degraded and all federal authority, and that generated a fe- vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or rocious backlash from Andrew Jackson, who of enjoying it” should not have liberty handed threatened to march federal troops into South to them. Carolina to enforce federal authority. But it Second, his advocacy of white racial suprem- was clear that Calhoun’s real concern was not acy. Nothing was more obvious to Calhoun the tariffs per se, but federal power to touch but that Africans were far, far below the bar of slavery. Tariffs were only “the occasion, rather such political privileges. “I appeal to facts,” he than the real cause of the present unhappy state declared in an 1837 speech. “Never before has of things,” Calhoun wrote in 1830. It was “the the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn peculiar domestic institution of the Southern of history to the present day, attained a condi- States” he wanted to protect; tariff nullification tion so civilized and so improved, not only was only a skirmish line. physically, but morally and intellectually” as it

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has under American slavery. For that “Central and slavery as the primary national problem, African race,” slavery was not a labor system dividing “the manufacturing States” and “the to which power had assigned them, but “a Agricultural States,” Calhoun (like Malthus, positive good” which benefited it, and until Ricardo, and ultimately Marx) foresaw that some sign appeared that “the black race” had “the time will come when it will produce the moved beyond ignorance, degradation, and same results between the several classes” and viciousness, in slavery it should stay. “I hold “the contest will be between the capitalists [slavery] to be a good, as it has thus far proved and operatives.” The plantation system, by itself to be . . . and will continue to prove so contrast, preserved what Calhoun imagined if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition.” was a humane balance between labor, capi- Third, his romantic glorification of histori- tal, and the environment. Every “plantation cal process. Not only were the Declaration and is a little community of itself,” Calhoun be- natural law wrong, they were also historically lieved, where generous-minded white men irrelevant. “If we trace it back,” Calhoun de- cared for contented and grateful black slaves clared before the Senate in 1848, “we shall find in a quasi-medieval idyll. “Property in our the proposition” about equality “expressed in slaves,” he argued, “is but wages purchased the Declaration of Independence” had been in advance including the support and supplies “inserted in our Declaration of Independence of the laborers, which is usually very liberal.” without any necessity.” The real origins of the And “it ought to be a principle of morals and Revolution were evolutionary, as British colo- patriotism,” he wrote to Edmund Ruffin in nists used, developed, and asserted traditional 1835, “that no gain is legitimate that does not English liberties. “Breach of our chartered leave the land as productive as it was before privileges, and lawless encroachment on our it was taken.” acknowledged and well-established rights by the parent country, were the real causes—and Calhoun did not, however, underestimate of themselves sufficient, without resorting to the determination or the numbers in the anti- any other, to justify the step . . . in construct- slavery movement, especially after the shock of ing the governments which were substituted the Missouri statehood controversy in 1820. in the place of the colonial.” It stood to rea- Northern free-labor political power was grow- son, then, that historical process would not ing, and it would only be a matter of time stand still, either, but continue to reveal it- before anti-slavery majorities wrested control self in new developments, in different places, of the federal government out of the hands among the relations of different peoples. The of Southerners and destroyed his little slave Constitution contained more than one “case communities. To preserve them, Calhoun bent of mission,” and relied on “slow and successive his political energies to a reconstruction of the experience” for “correction and adaptation.” Constitution which would insert guarantees It was only to be expected that “preservation for minority identity rights into the legal sys- is perpetual creation.” Calhoun was, in that tem. “What was this body but a community of sense, the first living constitutionalist. states, united for the purpose of maintaining Fourth, his critique of the North’s commer- their separate institutions?” Calhoun asked. cial society. The offense of Clay’s “American To keep it that way, he argued in 1828, states System” of tariffs, banking, and federal infra- should possess a veto over federal legislation, structure was not solely a matter of federal in the form of state nullification. When that authority; a greater offense lay in how Clay’s possibility withered in the teeth of Andrew program benefited commerce, trade, and free Jackson’s unforgiving rage, Calhoun proposed labor at the expense of Jeffersonian agricul- as an alternative the doctrine of “concurrent turalists. The “manufacturing interest” was majorities,” which required the assent of a ma- primed to “rear up a moneyed aristocracy” jority of the states, as states, to federal law and in America, Calhoun warned, and though not simply assent by the general population as Americans might at that moment see freedom represented in the House of Representatives.

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“Government of the people is the government syllable the reputation of Abraham Lincoln, of the whole community,” not merely the “gov- fingered Calhoun’s writings as “a landmark in ernment of the absolute majority.” the transition from individual rights to group Calhoun did not live to see the full flowering rights” and a repudiation of “constitutionalism of his philosophy. He contracted the scourge of and the rule of law.” Calhoun was, for Jaffa, the nineteenth century, tuberculosis, probably “reminiscent of Hegel” in seeing that human in 1845, and died of it on March 31, 1850, even history is the product of “not human art or as he was conducting a stubborn campaign to reason but human passion.” open the Western Territories to slavery and de- The most recent turn around Calhoun’s feat Henry Clay’s effort to strike a compromise memory has been iconoclastic. In 2017, Yale to contain slavery’s spread. Calhoun’s admir- University renamed the residential college it ers in South Carolina raised funds to erect a had called Calhoun College eighty-four years monument to him in Charleston; it was still before; this past summer, Clemson Univer- unfinished when South Carolinians opened sity removed Calhoun’s name from its hon- fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor and ors college; in June 2020, the Charleston City began the Civil War. Council voted to remove the statue of Calhoun which stood on a pedestal in Marion Square Calhoun stands today, as he did in his own as a gesture toward “racial conciliation and time, as the premier defender of white racial for unity in this city”; and Fort Wayne, In- supremacy, of slavery as a legitimate labor diana, is at this moment debating renaming system, of the triumph of minority factional- Calhoun Street as a “constant symbol of an ism, and ultimately as the intellectual spark oppressive past.” to disunion and civil war. He was the anti- This makes the task Professor Elder sets for Washington, and, for that matter, the anti- himself in American Heretic a steep one, for Madison and the anti-Lincoln, of American while he fully recognizes that “to many Cal- history. When the Supreme Court, in the no- houn seems to represent the antithesis of the torious Slaughterhouse Cases judgment in 1873, American idea of equality, inclusion, and pop- successfully crippled the Fourteenth Amend- ular democracy” and “was to some even in his ment’s extension “of the common rights of own lifetime, a heretic,” Elder cannot entirely American citizens under the protection of the escape the seduction, even at the distance of a National Government,” Justice Stephen Field’s century and a half, of Calhoun’s commanding dissenting opinion stigmatized that conclu- persona and the singular consistency of his sion as “the opinion of Mr. Calhoun and the political logic. “There are dangers inherent class represented by him.” Henry Wilson’s in the ritual of proclaiming heretics,” Elder History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power insists, “who often go to the stake to expiate (1875) pinned “the dissolution of the Union” the anxieties of those who watch them burn.” on the “wrong position” in which Calhoun Whether this sympathy is best applied to Cal- had “placed the South.” Calhoun’s first major houn, or to the abolitionists beaten and mur- biographer, Herman von Holst, condemned dered by pro-slavery mobs, or to the fugitives him in 1882 as “interested in nothing outside hunted down and condemned by kangaroo slavery,” whose defense he raised to the level of courts under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 “abstraction, as a principle.” W. E. B. Du Bois is a question Elder does not answer, but it is denounced Calhoun in Calhoun’s own home the kind of problem posed by all biographies state of South Carolina in 1946 as one of those of difficult subjects. “men whose names must ever be besmirched Elder’s caution in dealing out judgment is by the fact that they fought against freedom mirrored in his detailed lope across the land- and democracy in a land which was founded scape of Calhoun’s life. American Heretic, at upon democracy and freedom. . . . This class 656 pages, dwarfs all the major studies of Cal- of men must yield to the writing in the stars.” houn in the last fifty years (Irving Bartlett’s And the late Harry Jaffa, defending to the last 1994 John C. Calhoun: A Biography weighs

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in at 416 pages, John Niven’s 1988 John C. estimates or burlesques Calhoun. He is frank Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography about Calhoun’s family troubles (especially at 367 pages). Mercifully, it rarely drags, even with his sons), about Calhoun’s confusion in though much of it is devoted to a fastidious dealing with unruly slaves who failed to obey walk through the development of Calhoun’s the script for little communities, and about his political ideas. Unhappily, that also makes mismanaged finances that, by the 1840s, “were for a certain flatness, especially when Elder in a magnificent shambles,” as Calhoun robbed deals with the moments in Calhoun’s career Peter to pay Paul by borrowing “money sim- which coruscate with dramatic collision. The ply to pay the interest and payments on his famous Jefferson’s Birthday dinner of 1830, other debts.” when Calhoun hoped Andrew Jackson would join in a carefully orchestrated round of toasts If there is a singular flaw in American Heretic, that would signal Jackson’s cooperation in nul- it is the failure to place Calhoun in any larger lifying the tariff, is passed by in two bland context than antebellum politics or the de- paragraphs. This reflects Elder’s doubts that motion of his reputation after the grim Civil Jackson’s surprise toast—“Our Union, it must War years. Elder briefly notes that Calhoun be preserved”—really represented some sym- enjoyed a minor resurgence of respect in the bolic rending of the Democratic temple’s veil. last decades of the twentieth century among But it’s also symptomatic of Elder’s low-key political theorists in the Netherlands, North- approach to anything that threatens to become ern Ireland, and South Africa, where concern exciting. It’s true that there has been signifi- for minority rights were major issues. But he cant debate over the actual importance of the misses an opportunity to draw an important dinner and the toasts; yet the moment itself historical connection between Calhoun and was theatrical enough to deserve more from Edmund Burke, for if Calhoun cannot exactly Elder (as indeed it has from H. W. Brands in be called the American Hegel, he almost cer- Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry tainly deserves to be thought of as the Ameri- Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, Robert can Burke. This oversight is all the more odd Remini’s Andrew Jackson: The Course of Ameri- since Calhoun himself lauded Burke as the can Freedom, and even in my old high-school “greatest of political philosophers” and the favorite, Paul Wellman’s The House Divides). “greatest of modern statesmen.” In the same Congenial as Elder’s style is, the book is way that Burke understood the British con- not without the occasional pothole. James stitution to be a collaboration of centuries of Somerset, the focus of Lord Chief Justice experience unique to the British peoples, Cal- Mansfield’s famous judgment against slavery houn applauded the Constitution as a product in the British Empire, was not “a Virginia of historical incident, malleable to historical slave,” but was from Boston; the oft-quoted change. Like Burke, he had no use for any dictum of “the Mississippi legislature” in 1818 transcendent or universal political principles; which denounced slavery as “condemned by and just as Burke imagined the British Em- reason and the laws of nature” was actually pire as “the aggregate of many states under the judgment of the state supreme court in one common head,” Calhoun believed that Harry v. Decker & Hopkins; the description “so far from the Constitution being the work of a British bombardment of Alexandria in of the American people collectively, no such 1813 is confused with a subsequent description political body, either now, or ever did exist.” of the British occupation of Washington in But Calhoun was wrong about the American 1814. And then there are a number of annoy- people and the American Union, and wrong ing stylistic tics—the use of “on account of” about the intentions and vision of the Found- as a substitute for “because” and the peculiar ers, and one suspects that his mistakes throw a failure to set out Calhoun’s birth date (March doubtful shadow backwards onto Burke, too. 18) and death date (March 31). Still, Elder has Alas, that it cost us a civil war and 750,000 the decency of compassion and never under- American lives to learn this.

20 The New Criterion February 2021 Solzhenitsyn & the engine of history by Robert D. Kaplan

It is a conceit of the modern world that history characters. Solzhenitsyn, far more than oth- is governed by reason. Reason is like an axe er writers, uses his characters to announce to the living, growing tree of history, with its counterintuitive and unpopular truths. He convoluted branches, each cell and molecule knows that a bundle of passions can decide a emerging as a matter of sheer contingency, one seemingly clear-cut and rational action, to say building upon the next—so that great events nothing of the most consequential decisions arise from innumerable plots and threads. that can be decided by a momentary mood. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a series of ex- Hindsight is lazy in this regard, Solzhenit- hausting books, totaling thousands of pages, syn intimates, since it reduces complexity to about unreason in history and the subsequent a counterfeit clarity. He replaces hindsight creation of the modern world, in which the with a multitude of characters thinking and axe of reason, as he puts it, is rare, and when acting in the moment, so that at the begin- it does fall sometimes creates absolute terror. ning of World War I, “The clock of fate was The Red Wheel, with its “discrete” “nodes” suspended over the whole of East Prussia, or “knots,” is composed of August 1914, No- and its six-mile-long pendulum was ticking vember 1916, March 1917, and April 1917, with audibly as it swung from the German to the March 1917 alone accounting for several long Russian side and back again.” Indeed, the life volumes. This is the principal work of the No- and death of whole battalions of men, as the bel laureate’s life, to which Solzhenitsyn dedi- author vividly demonstrates, can be effected cated several decades and into which poured by a misplaced pencil movement on a general’s all his thoughts about the senseless chaos of dimly lit field map. the modern and postmodern worlds, all told Solzhenitsyn’s dissection of the Russian through the prism of that most contingent defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg, which of events, the Russian Revolution. That sig- occupies much of the action of August 1914, nal event begins with a complex and bungled should be studied at every military war college. war and ends with a shaky Bolshevik coup Without that failure, there might well have that set in motion a death machine virtually been no Romanov abdication, no Lenin, thus unrivaled in history. And none of this might no twentieth century as we know it. Solzhenit- have happened had Russia’s resolutely effective syn’s presentation of the battle over hundreds and moderate prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, of pages is panoramic, immersive, and mas- who pursued a “middle line of social develop- terly, the equivalent in typewriter ink of Pieter ment,” not been assassinated in September 1911 Brueghel the Elder’s Fight Between Carnival at the Kiev opera house. and Lent. As with any writer of great epics, “When things are too clear, they are no Solzhenitsyn knows many disparate things: longer interesting,” says one of the author’s the technicalities of artillery formations and

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field maneuvers; the mental process by which From this flows dozens of pages of descrip- semi-starving, over-extended, and ill-led sol- tion of Russian military disorganization and diers become looters; how small changes in slovenliness, with a chain of command and terrain affect forced marches; as well as the general officer corps corrupted by a thoroughly placement of the stars in the night sky and the rotten czarist system. Russian generals make al- names of many Orthodox saints. coholic toasts over heavy lunches in the middle of a campaign. A withdrawal is ordered after War between Russia and Germany begins in gaining ground in a horrific battle to protect a a whirlpool of emotion. Elation was general, general’s reputation in the expectation of fur- especially in Moscow and Petrograd. After ther loses. At the highest levels there is almost all, this was one war you “could not reject.” always the avoidance of risk and the rewarding “Historic obligations” to Slavic brothers in of mediocrity. Serbia were sacred. “A European war can- Solzhenitsyn’s sympathy is rather with the not be a prolonged conflict.” Of course, the middle-level officers, who “all bore the indel- popular naïveté preceding World War I is an ible impress of a similar background: army old story that is the stuff of many books. But tradition, long spells of garrison service in a Solzhenitsyn goes on to illuminate in his saga world isolated from the rest of society; a sense how the same innocence will carry through of alienation, of being despised by that society the entire revolutionary process in Russia, and ridiculed by liberal writers.” Throughout in which phrases like “war” and “revolution” these pages Solzhenitsyn reveals himself as the meant very different things to a people whose ultimate patriot and reasoned conservative, frame of reference extended only to the end of who, with a deep belief in an Orthodox Chris- the nineteenth century. Thus they had no con- tian God, recognizes the primacy of culture ception of how history could wildly swerve in a and empathizes with the military, even as he new technological age, so that the new military must expose every aspect of a decadent and conflict would be nothing like the Franco- autocratic imperial system that has failed its Prussian War of 1870–71, and the revolution own people. Solzhenitsyn’s uniqueness—that to come would yield nothing like the French is, his greatness—rests on his deep political one of 1789, which even with its Reign of Ter- conservatism, married to a narrative genius ror was altogether benign compared to what akin to Tolstoy’s, encompassing, like the earlier was in store for Russia. People sleepwalked master, just so many universes: from the hor- backwards into the horrors of the twentieth rors of the Romanian front, to the exaltations century, blindly slashed by its revolving blades. of falling in love in middle age, to the fantas- Solzhenitsyn doesn’t tell us this; he illustrates tic dinners in private rooms, with masses of it through dozens of fully realized characters. smoked salmon and sturgeon, bouillon, sour World War I on the Eastern Front begins cream, and rowanberry vodka. with the uneasy specter of culture conjuring Solzhenitsyn sees an unnecessary war that itself up. Solzhenitsyn concentrates on de- chain-reacts within a society—spread across terministic aspects of reality that our policy half the longitudes of the earth—that for some and intellectual elite want to avoid. To wit, years already has been crumbling into chaos: a Russian soldier is amazed at the tidiness of with inflation; food shortages; complete bu- the German landscape the moment he crosses reaucratic dysfunction; a dynasty bordering on the frontier: the neat regimentation of the sheer “helplessness” and “irresolution”; and a brick houses, the pigsties, and the wellheads. rowdy Duma given to endless, flowery, and The electric lighting deep in the rural interior directionless speeches in the worst of parlia- and the well-kept roads through the clean, mentary traditions. Here is the very texture of practically shaven forests bespeak an “inhu- anarchy, with crowds assaulting police with man cleanliness” and “parade-ground order” stones and chunks of ice, while the police are shocking to a Russian peasant accustomed to in turn afraid of the cossacks. Meanwhile, con- the filthy dreariness of his home and village. geries of parties and factions within parties

22 The New Criterion February 2021 Solzhenitsyn & the engine of history by Robert D. Kaplan are left to debate among themselves. Loose, is too late. For, as it is said, people who have drunken talk postulates that if only the govern- lost faith in God believe in nothing, and they ment would change, everything would become will therefore believe in anything. Richard better and more humane. There is almost a Bernstein, a former book critic for The New romance about the future, about any fate save York Times, in referring to campus multicul- for the present. The author isn’t so much writ- turalism, calls this larger phenomenon “the ing a series of novels as unloading everything dictatorship of virtue,” something that took he knows and thinks about pre-revolutionary firm root in twentieth-century totalitarianism, Russia, and constructing a tight philosophi- in which the perfect race or system becomes cal argument about it, which glints through the absolute destroyer of everything good. In multiple layers of description. this way Solzhenitsyn’s story is a timeless one, aptly suited for our own age. The opposite of anarchy is hierarchy, from Tyranny is inseparable from the mob. Elias which order emanates. And it is the melting Canetti, the Bulgarian-Jewish Nobel laureate away of hierarchy that Solzhenitsyn describes in literature, made this the theme of his 1960 in almost tactile terms. Institutions like the masterwork, Crowds and Power, traumatized royal family, the imperial bureaucracy, the as he was by the mobs he had seen in Vienna Duma, and the police gradually cease to func- in the decade prior to Hitler’s takeover. The tion, or even to answer properly to each other crowd, Canetti suggests, emerges ultimately in the course of these novels. Solzhenitsyn is from vulnerability and the consequent need a deeply moral man of liberty, as the political of the individual for conformity with others. philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney has observed. Thus the lonely individual exerts dominance Yet as a man of liberty he realizes, as all con- through participation in a crowd that speaks servatives do, that without order there is no with one voice. Once that crowd has achieved freedom for any man. And the greater the a sufficient size, others are coerced to join disorder, the greater the repression to follow. it, or at least not to interfere with it. From For in this entire revolutionary process, what lockdown, to isolation, to loneliness, to ex- pierces most through the intelligent reader’s plosion in the streets, that is: one contingent consciousness is the madness of crowds coupled event leading to another, as in the expanding with the romance and irresistibility of extrem- branches of a tree. Obviously our own society ism, so that a minority ends up moving history. has institutional breaks and barriers that pre- Just listen to Solzhenitsyn’s timeless words: revolutionary Russia utterly lacked. Think of our contemporary drama as a much subtler For a long time now it has been dangerous to yet relevant deviation of Solzhenitsyn’s story. stand in the way of revolution, and risk-free to “The crowd!” Solzhenitsyn writes. “A assist it. Those who have renounced all tradi- strange special being, both human and inhu- tional Russian values, the revolutionary horde, man . . . where each individual was released the locusts from the abyss, vilify and blaspheme from his usual responsibility and was mul- and no one dares challenge them. A left-wing tiplied in strength.” The psychology of the newspaper can print the most subversive of ar- crowd, or mob, is thus: “show us who [next] ticles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most to tear to pieces.” incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing And the mobs that are the most lethal for out the dangers of such utterances and the whole civilization are composed of the young. Listen leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation. to one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters:

Nobody interferes with the mob, least of all Idolized children despise their parents, and when the polished and oh-so-civilized intelligentsia, they get a bit older they bully their countrymen. who see the radical Left as composed of a purer Tribes with an ancestor cult have endured for and distilled archetype of their own values, centuries. No tribe would survive long with a and only awake from their dreams when it youth cult.

The New Criterion February 2021 23 Solzhenitsyn & the engine of history by Robert D. Kaplan

The problem with youth, as the aging travel granite, as a contemporary of his once put it, writer Paul Theroux, among others, has ex- someone who has no humanity and is per- plained, is that there is a place where it cannot manently focused on a problem: Vladimir go, but which its parents and grandparents Lenin, whom Solzhenitsyn captures in exile have experienced in all its vividness: the past. in Switzerland in the pages of November 1916. The young have never seen the past and there- This émigré world of Russian revolutionar- fore have no intimate realization of it. Hav- ies is, of course, most brilliantly depicted by ing lived enough years in the past makes one Joseph Conrad in his 1911 novel, Under Western humble, unsteady, aware of the imperfections Eyes. Conrad’s characters resemble, as one critic of life and of fate, and therefore more immune observed, “apes of a sinister jungle,” in which to ideal solutions for society. To trust youth Conrad announces that “the spirit of Russia is blindly, to see in youth the answer to our own the spirit of cynicism. . . . For that is the mark sins and imperfections, may hold some appeal, of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt,” so but it is also dimwitted. Youth can break down that revolutions begin with idealism and end an institutional order, but building a new one with fanaticism. Solzhenitsyn is not cynical is another story, especially as the mobs seeking about Russia the way that Conrad, the Pole, to ransack the dotty Romanov royal house had is. But his portrayal of Lenin is, nevertheless, no idea about how technology in the twentieth quite jarring: century would assist repression in the new regime aborning. All that Lenin lacked was breadth. The sav- age, intolerant narrowness of the born schis- Solzhenitsyn’s mind seethes with all these matic harnessed his tremendous energies to realizations and revelations. His answer is a futilities—fragmenting this group, dissociating fictional protagonist, Colonel Georgi Mikha- himself from that . . . wasting his strength in lich Vorotyntsev, the very embodiment of meaningless struggles, with nothing to show ex- human agency. Vorotyntsev, as a colonel, cept mounds of scribbled paper. This schismatic comprehends all the details of grand strat- narrowness doomed him to sterility in Europe, egy yet also experiences the peasant grunts left him no future except in Russia—but also in their filthy trenches getting ripped apart made him indispensable for any activity there. by German bullets. He sees above and be- Indispensable now! low him, in other words, a trait common to upper-middle-level officers in any military. And that is the point. Once out of Europe and Battle plans obsess him; sleep and mastering back in Petrograd, Lenin becomes the most fo- his own impatience he finds impossible. He cused man in Russia, indeed perhaps the only despises the czarist courtiers and mediocre focused man in Russia, a man whose narrow generals, but also loathes the revolutionary mind—grinding like the gears of a clock— nihilists in the streets and plotting abroad. concentrates on one issue. While everyone And all his emotions arise out of an exalted yet else is debating politics, Lenin meticulously practical patriotism. He is the ultimate good plans how to actually seize power, which, as man, in other words, who struggles to have Solzhenitsyn’s vast canvas makes clear, is, as an effect—a less consequential version of the they say, lying in the streets waiting to be murdered prime minister Stolypin. But Sol- picked up. Lenin was a nightmarish machine zhenitsyn, ever the novelist, understands that of domination. This is human agency at its even the best men are made out of flesh and heights, though not the kind that intellectual not out of granite, and so saddles Vorotyntsev idealists contemplate. with an extramarital affair, which distracts him “There is just one buttress: the spell of the and undermines his effectiveness. Tsar’s name!” someone remarks in March There is another protagonist in the story, 1917, Node III, Book 1. “The people are gen- though not a fictional creation, who is never erally indifferent to the various parties and distracted and who is composed of a block of programs but not to the fact that they have

24 The New Criterion February 2021 Solzhenitsyn & the engine of history by Robert D. Kaplan a Tsar.” Of all the violence depicted in these dam Hussein, whose Baathist ideology was books, perhaps the most terrifying is the sight devoid of any sense of tradition and politi- of the Tsar’s full-length portrait hanging in the cal compromise. As for the Shah of Iran, had Duma, shredded by bayonets. Despite all of he not been forced to abdicate in 1979, Iran its monumental faults, the monarchy was the today—like Iraq today had the Hashemites only graspable fact of stability in Russia. How- remained in power, and like Russia today had ever backward, reactionary, and ineffectual it the Romanovs remained—would have evolved was, longevity had provided Nicholas II’s gradually over the decades into a highly im- royal line with legitimacy, allowing him to perfect constitutional monarchy with the rule without the sharpened steel of extrem- royal family as stabilizing figureheads. Had ism that the twentieth century was to manifest the Hohenzollerns been restored to the throne with all its frightening isms. This is why, as in Germany after World War I, even stripped of explained by Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn came any real political power, there might well have to see the February Revolution that brought been no Hitler. This, then, is the twentieth the democrat Alexander Kerensky to power as century: the axe-like ending of the Old World “the true revolution and the enduring disaster,” with all of its stabilizing traditions, allowing since it toppled the monarchical order and for the rise of abstract and utopian movements, led Russia into complete anarchy, from which each in its own machinal way constituting a a Bolshevik coup, the October Revolution, dictatorship of virtue. was only subsequent. Indeed, the murder of In his first book, published in 1957, titled Nicholas II’s family, including all his children, A World Restored, the young Henry Kissinger in July 1918, probably ordered by Lenin, was wrote that “the most fundamental problem the seminal crime of the twentieth century: if of politics . . . is not the control of wicked- you could deliberately kill children with guns ness but the limitation of righteousness.” It and bayonets, well then, you could kill millions. is self-righteousness that lies at the heart of most tyrannies: the belief that only you and Indeed, while democracy is a relatively new your side are moral and on the right side of and fragile phenomenon across the span of history, making your opponents immoral, history, monarchy is perhaps the oldest gov- and therefore not only wrong but illegiti- erning system and incubator of stabilizing tra- mate. This was what the vast anarchy across dition known to man. The twentieth century the whole of Russia, every detail captured in came to be marked by other seminal crimes quasi-fictionalized manner by Solzhenitsyn, and tragedies, quite a few involving the end finally wrought. Solzhenitsyn was a conser- of monarchies. In July 1958, forty years to the vative because he believed in tradition. And month after the Romanovs were butchered, because he believed in tradition he also be- army officers in Iraq murdered the family lieved in moderation, all of which made him of the Hashemite King Faisal II, bringing a a great humanist. His Red Wheel warns still of string of military rulers to power in Baghdad, the future, with all its terrifying technological culminating in the chilling brutality of Sad- and ideological innovations.

The New Criterion February 2021 25 New poems by Anton Yakovlev, Rachel Hadas & Jessica Hornik

So much to say

On the evening they try to kill you you won’t think of me. I will remain standing by the side of the road. I won’t come through for you.

In small ways, perhaps. Avoid eye contact with the landscape at low tide. Let’s find the only restaurant open after the hurricane,

just as it starts raining again. Let’s hide in the tunnel under the parkway we drove when we were made up of a completely different set of molecules.

—Anton Yakovlev

26 Ghost guest

I sometimes think I recognize the face of my own death. Knowing it is nearer makes me feel it ought to be familiar, a neutral guest I’ve seen somewhere before. Even if it’s not a face I know, can it be ignored, that shadow presence quiet in a corner? And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. Which is the lesser of two evils here, which the least boorish way to be a host? Who is hosting whom? If I’m a host, I’m also just as much a guest, a ghost. What heart heard of, ghost guessed. So, death, I’ll acknowledge you, I’ll be polite, hand you a drink and let you circulate and talk with others. You will cycle back. Precisely: at my back I always hear and do not hear and see and do not see, know and do not know you’ll catch up with me. Since I think I know you from somewhere, why should I be so sure that you do not know me at least as well, my length of days and my Achilles heel, which in each person’s in a different place? Sometimes I think I recognize your face.

—Rachel Hadas

27 Coltsfoot

The coltsfoot is in bloom— are words no one has ever been moved to say. Poking up its fringed face

along the wasted roadside, through dead leaves grayed with winter, coltsfoot doesn’t ask

to be looked at. Yet here you are, waylaid by what seems a stunted, oddly early

dandelion. Its dullness is a kind of dogma. You can rely on it. It won’t tear you up on the inside

with some unnameable beauty— like a nothing-special sunset, when the light just goes.

—Jessica Hornik

28 Reflections Stepping stones by James Zug

When I was younger and wiser, I loved the They lived in a cottage high on the windswept conversational tangent. It burst out in those hills behind our house. Every afternoon he irrepressibly flowing, intense, interrupting toddled down to the stone-walled pool for dialogues. We were at a café or pub, linger- what he called his daily constitutional. After ing in the half-light, a second cup, or a third his swim he toweled off, sat in a chair, and round, moving from the gossip and quiddities read. I’d come down and we’d talk. He told of our days to larger, more abstract issues. me stories of a life spent across all the conti- We discussed memory, the meaning of life, nents. Some days he handed me a roughed-up where we might be going, and why. Sunday Times. He had it posted from Lon- The tangent was not a dining-out tale, don each week. For many weeks—this was something humorous and easily retrievable 1994—the Times excerpted a major biography from my past with which to regale an audi- of Graham Greene (the second volume by ence who was giving me a meal. Instead it Norman Sherry). Paddy loved Greene, had was a method to unknot something: we were read every one of his novels, had mourned his putting our world to rights and figuring out death. “But his nonfiction is extraordinary,” how to live. he told me, more than once. It didn’t always go well. I remember an A few years later, I stumbled upon that non- evening in Ketcham, Idaho. We were twenty- fiction. I twice read Greene’s Journey Without two, full of life, two-thirds of a summer’s Maps (1936), about his month walking around drive across the country. We spent a long Liberia. I also stumbled, when a library was de- dinner discussing the future. Evidently we accessioning, upon a copy of Greene’s memoir, were callow, obnoxiously opinionated, assur- A Sort of Life (1971). As a schoolboy, Greene edly solipsistic, or possibly just loud. A guy wrote, he was bullied by a classmate named came up to us on his way out, white beard, Watson. Greene had a memorable phrase for old (probably in his fifties). He stopped and how he was haunted by his memories of Wat- said, in a fly-fisherman voice, “You guys are son: revenge was alive for him like a creature completely full of s—. Just stupid. You don’t under a stone. Three or four decades later know what the f— you are talking about.” He Greene was in a store in Kuala Lumpur buy- was probably right. ing whiskey. He was going to Malacca for the When we got into one of these tangents, Christmas holidays. a go-to was my Graham Greene tale. I never A man approached him. It was Watson. read much Greene when I was young. His pa- For years, Greene had pondered humiliating perbacks were in the corner, with their white Watson. Now, he had the chance. covers and garish illustrations. Then I met Watson, it turned out, remembered being Paddy. He was the husband of our landlord. good chums with Greene at school, swotting

The New Criterion February 2021 29 Reflections

up their Latin together. Greene was astound- into the village. I found an antique shop. I ed. In the liquor store, with the clink of dusty bought a slim Penguin orange-spined paper- warm bottles, they made half-hearted plans to back copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin get together in the New Year. It was the usual and the Gypsy. I sat in a teashop around the thing. Greene went on to Malacca, forgot corner and started to read. I had never heard all about Watson, and never looked him up. of this novella (it was found, apparently, in That was it. That was Greene’s ultimate Lawrence’s papers when he died in France revenge. No creature lived anymore under in 1930). As I read, I felt that peculiar emo- that stone. tion of being at once alone and adrift and yet tethered, through words, to the vast literary I was recently reminded of my old Greene world. The book started with a delicious sen- story. While on a trip to London, I had a tence: “When the vicar’s wife went off with a free afternoon. It was a surprise. Usually young and penniless man the scandal knew when traveling for work, I found myself no bounds.” overscheduled with a full calendar of meet- Since then, I had occasionally lucked into ings, busy rushing around; all the while, like these kinds of moments: finding a shop in water slowly seeping through your house’s New York’s Soho that sold only kaleido- foundation into your basement while you scopes, a blisteringly tough museum about were sleeping, emails leaked into my inbox, slavery in Doha, a church of John Coltrane drop after drop after drop. in San Francisco. It was about being open Years ago, it was different. When I trav- to the new. eled alone in the pre-digital age, I could dis- Decades later, here I was—in London appear for an afternoon when it transpired with nothing to do. The plan was to meet that I was free. No one who knew me knew my wife’s cousin for dinner and the theater, where I was. In various cities on various con- but until then a few hours stretched out, luxu- tinents, I wandered in cities and towns, drift- riously, before me. I headed along Oxford ing through neighborhoods. I circled back. Street, poking into stores. It started to spit I got lost. I had no map, no guidebook, no and then, ever so slowly, the gray skies sent expectations or obligations. rain down in blinding sheets. I turned into The first time it happened, I was in Cape Regent Street, stunned by hundreds of wet Town. It was my twentieth birthday. I took Union Jacks in the air (another royal wed- the train out to Simon’s Town, along the ding). I ducked through some side alleys and northeastern edge of the Cape peninsula. The came into the Charing Cross Road, just above train stopped in Kalk Bay, blue-green waves Trafalgar Square. Thirty years earlier, while crashing nearly onto the railroad tracks. After up at Oxford, I had haunted Charing Cross a hesitation, the train lurched and reversed, secondhand bookstores. I’d buy up a half going backwards up the track. Through the dozen books and the seller would sometimes scratchy PA system the conductor said in a tie them with brown twine like they were a heavy Afrikaans accent that the train was re- miniature bale of hay. turning to Cape Town. This time there seemed to be far fewer The next stop the other way was Muizen- bookstores. I plunged into the first one. Out burg. I disembarked. I saw a sign for the of the rain, curling up my battered umbrella, cottage of Cecil Rhodes. I knew little about I realized that my entire lower legs, feet, and Rhodes. He was just a statue back at Oriel or socks were soaking wet. I clomped downstairs, here in Rondebosch, some sort of mythical leaving gray wet footprints on the floor. I beast who painted the continent British pink. scanned the shelves. I saw a blue spine: Gra- I walked into the tin-roofed seaside cottage. ham Greene, Ways of Escape. I hadn’t heard of It turned out that it was there that Rhodes, this book. A novel? No, his memoir. Another? one of the wealthiest people in the world, had Ways of Escape came out in 1980, a sequel died at the age of forty-nine. I then walked of sorts to A Sort of Life. It originated in in-

30 The New Criterion February 2021 Reflections troductions Greene had written for a col- ducked and closed the door and ran down lected edition of his novels. Deep into Ways the stairs. of Escape, Greene discussed his Catholic faith, A few days after I finished Broyard’s mem- which led him to thinking about his relation- oir, I was in a used bookstore on Fourth Av- ship with another famous English Catholic enue. In those days, before the internet, I spent writer, Evelyn Waugh. This led to reprint- hours in used bookstores, never imagining a ing some correspondence between him and day when books would be too easy to find. Waugh and a short exegesis on Waugh’s The (Once I was passing through Portland, Or- Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). I had never egon. Some friends gave me the grand tour read this novel. When I got home, I ordered a of Powell’s bookstore. At the front door, they copy. I read it. I didn’t like it. I adored Waugh said, “meet back here in three hours,” where- and found the novel trapped, thwarted. It was upon we all emerged with towering stacks of even boring, something I thought Waugh books in our arms and glittering looks in our could never be. eyes.) Here on Fourth Avenue, I bumped into a copy of Dylan Thomas’ New York and bought This kind of literary stepping stone—Sunday it for three dollars. It was an oddly fascinat- Times with Paddy to Greene to Waugh—was ing book: full of photographs from the 1970s; commonplace. When I moved to Greenwich musings by an American, Tryntje Van Ness Village in the mid-1990s, my college room- Seymour; and excerpts from Under Milk Wood. mate gave me a housewarming present, a copy The book led me to Paul Ferris’s 1977 bi- of Anatole Broyard’s 1993 memoir, Kafka Was ography of Thomas which led me, inevitably, the Rage. to his poems. I rummaged out my Collected Broyard had a short aperçu about Caitlin Poems, the 1953 New Directions edition, which Thomas. They met in the early Fifties at a lived, like many of the books in my tiny walk- party on Morton Street. “I saw only the bot- up apartment, under my bed. It had a book- tom half of her, her legs, thighs and cotton plate in the front. I had forgotten, but it was underpants,” Broyard wrote, “because she was originally from the library of a prominent New holding her dress up over her head.” Caitlin England boarding school. One summer dur- got a bit wild at this party. She punched one ing college, through a friend of a friend, I had man in the face and chucked ceramic Haitian taken a room in a rambling house in north figurines off a mantelpiece. Her husband, Berkeley. It wasn’t really a room, but more of Dylan Thomas, tossed her onto a bed and a hallway leading out onto the backyard. One sat on her until she calmed down. On Dylan’s of my housemates had kept the Collected Poems instructions, Broyard took Caitlin back to when he exited the school a few years earlier the Chelsea Hotel. She invited him into her in a rather unceremonious way. When I left room. He declined. She threw a punch. He the house, I filched it from him.

The New Criterion February 2021 31 Meeting Mrs. Mandelstam by Edward Greenwood

I met Nadezhda Mandelstam at her Moscow south of Moscow. I was just about to bring out apartment in August 1975. I had struggled with a book, Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision. At her husband’s difficult poetry in Russian with the time, the Brezhnev years, Intourist visitors the aid of various translations and such articles were supervised. Anti-Western suspicion was as I could find for a number of years. The rife. All baggage was searched to see if visitors most rewarding aids to understanding it were, were bringing in Bibles, Solzhenitsyn, or the in fact, her own magnificent autobiographi- banned work of Mandelstam herself. I would cal studies Hope Against Hope (Memuary in have to obtain special permission to visit the Russian) and Hope Abandoned. Her husband’s Tolstoy estate. This raised bureaucratic diffi- character and destiny as man and poet are, as culties typical of the regime. I had to pay for she herself emphasized when I met her, the a private car—bus or train would expose the thematic center of each work. But there was public to ideological contamination. When I still more to her own works than that. I felt arrived I had to be accompanied everywhere that they continued into an unpropitious and by a guide. iron age that gift for the re-creation of the All this meant that I had a day alone in physiognomy of both life’s external forms and Moscow when the others went on to what its inner spirit which the great Russian memoir was then, of course, still Leningrad. I was de- writers of the nineteenth century—Aksakov, termined to use the time to see Mrs. Mandel- Herzen, and Kropotkin—had achieved. But stam. When I went to the office of the Union while her husband’s poetry (apart from the of Soviet Writers, they affected not to have perspicuous, and, in retrospect, prophetic ode heard of her. With some difficulties I managed of May 1918, “Let us glorify, brothers, the twi- to find directory inquiries by calling from an light of freedom”) partook of that obliquity information booth. Though I mispronounced characteristic of modernism, it also always the Mandelstam name, stressing the first syl- conveyed a sense of deep humanity. lable rather than the last as I should have done, I traveled to the Soviet Union as a co-driver the lady at directory inquiries gave me her on a school trip with Nicholas Leader, the telephone number, much to my amazement. Russian teacher at the Simon Langton Gram- Mrs. Mandelstam answered and gave me her mar School in Canterbury, England. We had address, and I set off by taxi. ten pupils with us. We discovered when we When I entered her ground-floor apart- reached the border that we had to have a guide ment, I couldn’t easily see what it was like and throughout our travels in the country. how many rooms it had. She ushered me into My own principal object for the trip was a small, poorly lit room to the right. There to visit Tolstoy’s house at Yasnaya Polyana, was a window at the far end. This seemed to in the Tula province about eighty or so miles be kitchen and sitting room combined. The

32 The New Criterion February 2021 Reflections

lavatory and washing facilities were probably the poet Lev Gumilev (who had been shot by communal. We sat at a little table. I remember the Bolsheviks) had been sent to the Gulag. thinking that she was so old and frail that it Mrs. Mandelstam quoted four lines of what she seemed a kindness on someone’s part to let thought was Akhmatova’s best work. But my her have a ground-floor apartment. As she Russian wasn’t good enough to grasp the sense was kept under surveillance by the kgb it of an oral rendering, and I foolishly didn’t ask wasn’t surprising that she was initially suspi- her to repeat them so I could write them down. cious. She had been a teacher of English and I showed her the Soviet edition of her husband’s thought my English sounded foreign at first. poems. “That is a horrible book, I don’t wish I recall her testing me with a quotation from to know about it. The editor is a scoundrel. He Shakespeare’s King John—a play I didn’t know printed inferior texts deliberately.” particularly well. I told her about the nature of my trip to the Mrs. Mandelstam then asked me to do one Soviet Union and about our guide. “Don’t or two things for her in the West. This neces- trust these pleasant girls,” she said, “for all their sitated writing down addresses. When she saw charm, they are all members of the kgb.” She me writing on the fly leaf of the Soviet edition was amused rather than disquieted by my ac- of her husband’s poems, she said the authori- count of my visit to the Union of Soviet Writ- ties would be sure to look at the book as I left ers. “Oh no one would know me there,” she and, noting an address on it, would confiscate said derisively, as though she took a quiet pride it. There was a nervousness akin to paranoia in the fact. I stumblingly expressed my admira- in her. “No, they won’t,” I said, “for I’ll tear tion for her memoirs. To my utter amazement it out and hide it in my wallet.” She was for she said she would like to have a copy of her the most part unwilling to name the people in own book. After all it was not allowed into the the West with whom she had contact, except, country. I soon realized that what she meant of course, those she had to mention as part of was a copy of the English translation. her request. She spoke of an Oxford professor, We talked a little more about the two vol- whom she would not name (Isaiah Berlin?), umes of her memoirs, and it was then that she who had invited her abroad for a visit. She told me that her husband was the real center wouldn’t leave, she said, because she was sure of both works. I respectfully questioned this, that once they let her out of the country she saying that, though Osip Mandelstam was cer- would not be allowed back in. “I hate this tainly at their center, they nevertheless dealt country, but whether it is the language, my with many other persons, in particular with husband’s poetry in that language, whatever the poet Anna Akhmatova and with formalist it is, I just could not bear not to be allowed critics such as Victor Shklovsky. She said that back here; here is the place I wish to die.” I when Shklovsky divorced and married a much keenly felt her fear of what Shakespeare called younger woman, she (Mandelstam) had to “the bitter bread of banishment.” choose between his previous wife Vasilissa and I asked her if she was still harassed by the the new one. Apparently she chose Vasilissa. authorities. Surely they didn’t persecute her Mrs. Mandelstam told me that Akhmatova now she was old? She said that she was still had been very afraid, almost paralyzed with fear. worried. It seemed that while she was at the Did she like Akhmatova’s early love poetry? dacha of some friends, her flat had been broken Not really—there was too much of the refined into and the kgb had used this affair as an “elegant” lady, about her ego and its sufferings, occasion to suggest that she was somehow im- a kind of enjoyment of the role of heroine, a plicated in the theft of things to be smuggled constant note of self-regard. Even her poem to the West. She feared the Lubyanka prison about the purges, Requiem, didn’t merit much and still considered interrogation to be a real praise. Akhmatova was too fearful to circulate possibility. She said that she hadn’t traveled her best poems, those political works about abroad for fifteen years. She spoke scathingly the suffering under the Terror. Her son with of Soviet writers and of the state of the country

The New Criterion February 2021 33 Reflections

under the regime, saying that it was full of deliberate memorization. She simply found drunkenness and inefficiency. I gently ventured that when she familiarized herself with a text to hint, on my knowledge of Tolstoy’s “The she loved she could quote it from memory. I Devil Was the First Distiller” and of the works recalled to myself how she preserved much of Dostoevsky, that drunkenness had not been of her husband’s poetry during the gloomy unknown in Russia under the old regime, but years when it was not allowed to be published. she obviously thought that things had gotten It emerged that the Russian Orthodox faith much worse. I mentioned that I was going to had become very important to her. I told her visit Leningrad. “It is a dead city, a dead city,” how we had greatly enjoyed the singing in Smo- she said. I thought of her husband’s response lensk cathedral and how we had been impressed to seeing the city when it was the city of Peter: by the youthfulness of the bishop. She replied “We shall die in transparent Petropolis.” Alas, that many of the higher clergy were young be- he didn’t know he would die miserably on the cause their predecessors had been shot. She told way to the Gulag. me that a young priest she knew had almost been killed in a car crash. She was convinced When I said that I was going to Yasnaya that the whole thing had been rigged so that Polyana to visit Tolstoy’s home, a twinkle ap- the “accident” was nothing less than attempted peared in her eyes and she said: “Look at all murder. She herself tried to get to a service the peasants in the village. They all look like each Sunday, but the nearest working church Leo Tolstoy.” It occurred to me that this was was too far to walk, necessitating a taxi. I asked probably a joke she had heard as a girl when her what she thought of Orthodox thinkers it was doing the rounds in pre-revolutionary like Shestov and Berdyaev. She conveyed the St. Petersburg. impression that she had no need of their help in We talked of Tolstoy and it emerged that, matters of religion. Her own meditations were just as everyone is either a Platonist or Aris- rich enough. Indeed, she told me that she was totelian, so everyone is either a Tolstoyan or writing a third book, not memoirs this time, Dostoyevskian. I spoke of my great admira- but a book on Orthodox Christianity. I must tion for Anna Karenina. She came out with not mention this to anyone. an objection to the truth of the work which We discussed Solzhenitsyn. I think she saw struck me as totally idiosyncratic. It seemed him as a courageous man, but as somewhat that Mrs. Mandelstam had never been able “Soviet” in his style of writing. She much ad- to read the novel without feeling a note of mired Proust. The contemporary literary scene falsity and strain. I have always felt just the was awful for the most part. As to politicians, opposite, the marvelous ease of the narrative. Kosygin was the first whose hands weren’t It strikes me how much of the novel—such as stained with blood. She saw the whole country the excellence of the portrayal of Levin’s per- as run down, industry and agriculture in a ter- plexities about his relations with his brother rible state, shortages and drabness everywhere. Nicholas, his half-brother Koznyshev, his wife, She wanted to know if I thought the English and the peasants—would remain unaffected by had any literary figure of significance to suc- her remarks, even if she was right. It seemed ceed T. S. Eliot. that Tolstoy was not so central to Mrs. Man- She gave me to understand that no mail delstam’s moral and literary experience as I was allowed to reach her either from abroad had hoped. After all, she had a great poet, or from inside Russia. We had been talking for her husband, one who suffered horrors even two and a half hours, and she seemed tired. Tolstoy couldn’t have imagined, to reside in I felt I ought to leave. I rose to go, and we the foreground of her life and imagination. shook hands. She accompanied me to the door. Mrs. Mandelstam was proud of her Eng- She went to her post box and opened it: “See, lish and had taught it to students who would there is nothing inside. There never is and then go out to teach the language themselves there never will be.” The door closed and I in schools. She didn’t learn things by rote, made my way to the tram stop.

34 The New Criterion February 2021 Reconsiderations Isabel Colegate endures by David Platzer

Isabel Colegate, born in 1931, may well be cany in the first half of the twentieth century the greatest living English novelist, and yet and into the 1950s—the time of the revelations many readers have never heard of her. Never- of the Cambridge Traitors and the Suez cri- theless, she has always attracted discriminat- sis, both central to Agatha, the last novel in ing admirers. Her best-known book is The the trilogy. Colegate, the daughter of a Tory Shooting Party (1980), set in an Oxfordshire politician, Sir Arthur Colegate, has often writ- country house in 1913 and adapted into a 1985 ten in the way of Trollope about people who film starring James Mason, John Gielgud, seek and wield power, sometimes placing her Dorothy Tutin, and Gordon Jackson, who tales in the recent past as Thackeray did. The played Upstairs Downstairs’s Hudson. A little trilogy takes place mainly in the years of her before, in 1984, Penguin published two pa- childhood and her youth, but there is nothing perback collections, one her first three novels evidently autobiographical about it. She tells us (The Blackmailer, The Man of Power, and The that “We know the story of course. . . .We are Great Occasion), the second the Orlando Tril- here profoundly to contemplate eternal truth.” ogy, originally published separately as Orlando If this seem a little ponderous, be reassured: King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold amid much that is tragic, hints of comedy are (1972), and Agatha (1973). New, elegantly always present and never more so than in the written, trim books by Colegate regularly darkest moments near the trilogy’s end. appeared throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Her The story tells of a boy born in 1909 to most recent book, published in 2002, is her two unmarried Cambridge undergraduates, one full-length venture into nonfiction, A Leonard Gardner and “a girl called Pauline.” Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries A kindly lecturer named King adopts the child and Recluses. For several years, most of her and raises him with the help of a gruff Austra- books other than The Shooting Party have been lian named Sid on a tiny island in Brittany’s out of print. Now, Bloomsbury has produced Gulf of Morbihan. The boy, handsome and a new edition of the Orlando Trilogy, the third strong except for his hammertoes, goes to paperback version (the second was published school with the children of fishermen. King in 1996 by Virago), this time under the name works on building a tower. When Orlando of the first novel in the series, Orlando King.1 turns twenty-one, King sends him to London The trilogy is based on Sophocles’ Oedipus to spend six months. In hand are six letters of Rex trilogy, the names anglicized and the set- introduction, one of them to Leonard Gard- tings adapted to Brittany, England, and Tus- ner, who never knew Pauline was pregnant and whom King imagines to be a civil servant. 1 Orlando King, by Isabel Colegate; Bloomsbury, 608 The Gardner Orlando encounters is instead pages, $19.99. a rich businessman, married to Judith, the

The New Criterion February 2021 35 Reconsiderations

sister of Lord Field (Conrad to his friends), a imagines of Orlando’s occasional affairs. For great landowner in Somerset and prominent all her beauty and hardness, she is insecure and in politics. Gardner initially tells Orlando he acutely aware of how much older she is than can’t help him, much as he would like to. Ju- her young, attractive husband. dith walks into the room, takes an immediate The first part of Orlando King reaches an interest in Orlando, and reminds her husband intensity worthy of nineteenth-century opera of a vacancy in a furniture business, Timber- as the 1930s approach their end. Orlando’s work, that he directs with his brother-in-law friend Graham, a talented designer employed Conrad. Orlando is staying with another of at Timberwork with a chip on his shoulder King’s contacts, Guy Waring, who takes him about his grammar school education, is driven to his tailor and barber. Waring’s wife takes by his communism to perish, pointlessly, in him to her bed. The boy is immensely at- the Spanish Civil War. The Warings, Orlando’s tractive to women, his bad foot discouraging first mentors in England, become disciples of them no more than Byron’s did. Orlando’s Sir Oswald Mosley and will be interned in plan to return to the island is scotched by 1940. Orlando becomes a junior minister in King’s sudden death, and he remains in Lon- the Cabinet, and a wholehearted supporter don, finding success in business, with women, of appeasement to Hitler. Conrad strongly and soon in politics, causing one character disagrees, and their differences are illustrated to compare him to Trollope’s Phineas Finn. in several pages of dialogue. Sid, King’s Aus- Gardner explodes into a fury when he arrives tralian companion, fleeing a collapsing France, at his office at Timberwork one afternoon to arrives in England and reveals Orlando as find Orlando at his seat, feet up on his desk. Gardner’s son. By the end of this part of the Gardner storms out, jumps into his car, and trilogy, Orlando’s quick ascent is in ashes, and runs it into a viaduct. Orlando’s initial feelings he retreats into obscurity, as much Icarus as of remorse make him want to go back to the is- Oedipus. Forsaking politics and business, he land. Conrad counsels him instead to remain in becomes a fire warden, is injured and half- England and take up the safe seat in the House blinded. His abnegation shows that Orlando of Commons intended for Gardner: now it lacks the cold-blooded search for power of is Orlando’s if he wants it. Conrad strongly Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool. Lying in his warns Orlando against getting involved with hospital bed, Orlando resolves to return to Judith, who is much older than Orlando and the island, complete King’s tower, and remake the wrong wife for him. But Conrad’s advice his life and those of Judith—last heard of in comes too late: Judith has already welcomed an asylum—and her sons by Gardner: Paul Orlando into her arms, and, despite Conrad’s and Stephen. warning, Orlando soon marries her. The brittle Judith, a femme a little too fatale At the opening of Orlando at the Brazen for her own good, is likened to the women in Threshold, the war has ended. In addition Aldous Huxley’s early novels, but she shows a to his damaged sight, Orlando’s heart is worldlier aspect than that possessed by such weakened in more ways than one. He resists Huxleyian vamps as Myra Visheash or Lucy Conrad’s entreaties to return to politics, his Tantamount, or Anthony Powell’s Pamela participation in which he regards as a mistake, Flitton, creatures more of high bohemia than as highlighted by his former support of ap- politics and business. Judith and Conrad each peasement. Judith has died in her asylum, have a tragic aspect: Conrad, a religious, high- and King’s diaries, recently discovered, re- minded man who believes in empire, belongs veal King to have been unhappy and lonely in to virtues the twentieth century is discarding; ways Orlando hadn’t imagined, an expatriate Judith, self-destructive and prone to such fads among people whose language he can un- as psychotherapy, is prey to contemporary derstand only on a functional level. Return- foibles. Herself fond of lovers on the side, ing to Brittany, Orlando finds King’s house Judith is wildly jealous of what she learns or and unfinished tower in ruins and post-war

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France short of food. On the suggestion of Orlando in his expatriate exile seems to have Miss Bates, an Englishwoman resident in reached a truce with life. There is to be no Tuscany, he buys property in Chianti and be- such ease for others in the final book of the gins building his own tower there. Agatha— trilogy, taut and as suspenseful as a well-made Orlando’s daughter by Judith, now seventeen thriller, which takes place in the mid-1950s. and hoping to become a doctor (perhaps a Stephen has committed suicide, and his tor- wish inherited from the genes of her unknown mented brother Paul, always a problem, has paternal grandmother, Pauline, whose father been caught and imprisoned for his spying was a doctor)—joins him just as Antigone did for Soviet Russia, his treason inspired more her father Oedipus. Close to her half-brother by perversity than ideology. In her portrayal Paul, who is now married to the daughter of of Paul, Colegate may well have diagnosed the a brash businessman named Daintry, Agatha disease that afflicted the real-life Cambridge tries to persuade her father to return to busi- Traitors, and by extension, such spiritual de- ness as Paul wants, in large part to spite his scendants as today’s Black Lives Matter/Antifa brother Stephen, who is directing the family “protestors.” Conrad reappears, caught up at firm that Orlando once brilliantly conducted. the same time in the Suez crisis and the escape Orlando refuses. Once a man of action, he of his nephew Paul from prison. He also sus- now seems something of a sage. His Chianti pects that his daughter-in-law, Agatha, mar- is populated by the figures one would expect ried to her first cousin, Conrad’s estranged among the British settlers in Tuscany: Miss son Henry, is involved. Conrad tells the police Bates, impeccably competent and always there of his suspicion. Agatha, the mother of two when needed; William Holmes, the art expert young children rather than the doctor she once who lives in an impressive villa and has his hoped to be, works in a bookshop in Chelsea, pale brown hair curled like an 1830s dandy; her employers two eccentric and left-wing el- and the ubiquitous Warings, who turn up derly ladies. The scene when the two ladies throughout the trilogy. are captured in an anti-Suez demonstration, James Lees-Milne, fond of Colegate, wrote Henry with them, shows a horrified Conrad in his diary of his admiration for The Shooting seeing his son in the mob. It is one of the Party, “firm, well-balanced, well-written. Yet funniest moments of the trilogy, closer to the it makes me hate Edwardians.” The Orlando Marx Brothers than John le Carré. Trilogy can make a reader feel something simi- The books, together a brilliant and compel- lar about the generations of the Thirties and ling portrait of manners, leave a reader with the Fifties, though there are exceptions, in- more questions than answers, a latter-day The cluding Orlando. The shadows surround Or- Way We Live Now. Colegate’s writing, seem- lando, with his weak heart and his blindness. ingly effortless, is as intricate as a Renaissance When he escapes away to an idyll in Florence painting, revealing new facets the more it is with a young woman of his daughter’s circle, examined. With any justice, this reissue should there is already a sense of an Indian summer confirm the trilogy as a classic and send readers about the affair, though Orlando is only in to Colegate’s other books, all of which deserve his mid-forties. to be in print.

The New Criterion February 2021 37 Theater Guys & dolls by Kyle Smith

Summing up the state of the New York le- in to take its place. After 9/11, when Broad- gitimate theater on the last page of his gos- way was described as facing its biggest crisis sipy book Singular Sensation: The Triumph of in thirty years, it reopened within two days. Broadway, Michael Riedel runs through a list So far, then, the covid crisis is roughly 160 of some long-running hits and ends the book times as bad as 9/11. with this line: “Broadway is in the midst of its As Riedel was writing this book, Broad- new Golden Age.”1 That sentence was true as way was coming off a near-record year: in recently as March, when Riedel thought his 2019 grosses were just shy of 2018’s dizzying book was finished. He added a foreword in all-time-best sales of $1.8 billion. Thanks to May acknowledging that the title he had cho- Hamilton, Broadway had reclaimed an impor- sen had taken an ironic turn. Today Broadway tant perch in the nation’s cultural order, and is in the midst of not a golden age but a coma. celebration was appropriate. Riedel, however, Notwithstanding the preternatural pep of the appeared an odd figure to wave the pompoms. theater community, it may never recover. A His reputation is for being to Broadway shows full reopening remains many months away, what icebergs are to passing luxury liners. For with the most optimistic observers speculat- many years he has been New York City’s best- ing that a partial reopening may be feasible informed and (consequently) most widely read by late summer. What then? Theatergoers are theater reporter, first at the New York Daily famously more high-strung than, say, nascar News and then at the New York Post, where I enthusiasts, and no one knows whether the used to shape barbs for my film reviews at audience will ever fully regain its pre-covid a desk not far from where he sat firing bul- enthusiasm for an experience that involves lets over Broadway. Reporters tend to be an sitting in a tightly packed space for three hours anxious lot who spend much of their energy with 1,800 cheering, coughing, and sneezing worrying and fuming, but Riedel, who never strangers. Even should the current virus be had any serious competition in his domain vanquished—a process that would require Bill from The New York Times or any other quarter, de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo suddenly to is a merry assassin. He’d come into the office acquire a level of competence neither has ever in mid-afternoon and lean back in his swivel approached—future potential ticket buyers chair, swapping wisecracks on the phone with will be calculating the possibility that another his show-folk friends, never more delighted lethal and highly contagious virus could waft than when learning every gruesome detail of a disaster in the making so he could share the 1 Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway, by Mi- fun with his readers. I’ve popped a few pro- chael Riedel; Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, ductions’ balloons myself over the years but 352 pages, $28. never have enjoyed the honor of making a joke

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so biting that it got me punched out in a bar. Riedel’s previous book began in the vaude- This did happen to Riedel, who was struck by ville era, before the invention of what we today the director of a revival of Fiddler on the Roof. think of as the Broadway musical, and told an The director, David Leveaux, objected to the engrossing story of how the Shubert brothers, columnist’s jokes about the way Leveaux had of Syracuse, gobbled up Broadway then spent toned down the Jewish aspects of the material, decades undergoing one existential threat after or, as Riedel put it, staged an “all-Presbyterian another. The company barely weathered the production of Fiddler on the Roof. ” Great Depression, a struggle for control of the company that saw an alcoholic heir ousted in Riedel confesses in his new book that after favor of two sober lawyers, a fight with the Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway (2015), government that led to a consent decree meant an essential document about the history of to dilute the outfit’s near-monopoly power the theater in New York, he was at a loss for over its medium, and the catastrophic collapse an idea to follow it and pitched many half- of Times Square in the late Sixties. New York- hearted suggestions that were swatted down ers and especially tourists were terrified to walk by his editor before the two of them latched the neighborhood after dark, and one survey onto the idea of a sequel. Like most sequels, found there were nine men for every woman the new book falls short of the standard set on the sidewalks at night. Razzle Dazzle has a by the original, though it’s mostly a bouncy plot, and it’s a classic: the gifted but besieged read, especially in its early chapters. Like a good hero (the Shubert Organization) undergoes newspaperman, Riedel leads with his best stuff. one nerve-shredding trial after another on the His best chapters—most of which focus on way to a huge reward, which was the late- a single production—are the early ones, and Seventies resurgence launched by A Chorus they teem with entertaining details about a Line and continuing through Evita and Cats real-life cast of rogues, crooks, and divas to and Phantom of the Opera. rival the dramatis personae of Guys and Dolls There is no such narrative drive to Singular (the beloved 1992 revival of which gets its own Sensation, however, which is essentially an an- chapter). The heel of the book is Garth Drabin- thology in which each chapter is more or less a sky, the polio-lamed Canadian impresario who standalone report on the progress of one show founded the now-disbanded company Livent or another. There is no lurking threat of doom. and produced the 1989 Toronto production of In 1991, the Tony nominees for best musical Phantom of the Opera and the 1996 Broadway were a lackluster quartet that included Miss show Ragtime. Drabinsky’s bookkeeping she- Saigon and The Will Rogers Follies (which won), nanigans raised eyebrows for years before he but the Theater District was no longer seen was finally convicted of fraud and forgery in as unacceptably unsafe. Miss Saigon, Phantom Canada in 2009, earning himself a prison stay. of the Opera, Cats, and Les Misérables kept the In an introduction that strikes an uncharac- theater as a whole flush, and the presence of teristic (for a reporter) stance of humility, Rie- these successes attracted patrons to the Theater del acknowledges that although he reported District and to other shows. The big four were on many of the productions he discusses in all British imports, however, and this proudly the book when they were going up, he didn’t American art form was thirsting for a made- at the time understand the full story behind in-usa response. It came, with fireworks: Rent many of them. This volume promises a more and Chicago were all-American blockbusters, complete picture. Those who cherish Riedel and their minimalist aesthetics proved to be mainly for the way he danced on the graves of a clever and profitable rebuttal to the British so many failed shows will be taken aback by style, which was heavy on spectacle. The Lion how mysteriously, alarmingly, discombobulat- King, which under Julie Taymor’s direction ingly nice he sounds. The wolf has lain down was no mere adaptation but more of a rei- with the lamb. Even his portrayal of Drabinsky magination of the Disney animated feature, isn’t particularly unkind. was an even larger success.

The New Criterion February 2021 39 Theater

Meanwhile, the British mega-musical Dunaway was so awful in rehearsals for the Los made one last elephantine effort: Andrew Angeles production that one wag compared Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, which her to Florence Foster Jenkins, the notoriously sought to dazzle the audience with a colos- untalented but deep-pocketed soprano who sal levitating mansion but, despite logging rented out Carnegie Hall in 1944 for a concert the largest advance sale in Broadway history, so bad it became a legend (and the climax of ultimately closed at a loss. It cost a then- a 2016 film that starred Meryl Streep). Lloyd unthinkable $500,000 a week or so in running Webber closed the show in Los Angeles at a costs, on top of $13 million for development. huge loss rather than allow Dunaway to go on. All of that money could not buy the thing a soul. “The thing about this show—it’s a Another stellar chapter is the one told from the fantastic score—but there’s not one character point of view of Fran and Barry Weissler, a pair in this show that I actually like,” noted the of small-time theater producers derided by their producer Cameron Mackintosh. Thanks to richer competitors as “the Weisslers, of New the delicious backstage sniping among the Jersey.” A successful four-night concert staging many divas involved (Patti LuPone, Glenn of a 1970s show at City Center in 1996 struck Close, Faye Dunaway, Lloyd Webber himself), them as Broadway material, but when they tim- the making of Sunset Boulevard, notoriously idly inquired whether they could have a small described by Frank Rich of the Times as “the piece of the producing pie when the production ultimate ‘hit’ flop” because it sold scads of transferred, they were told they could take all of tickets and yet lost oceans of money, provides the rights. No one else wanted to produce the Riedel with a particularly tasty chapter. Lu- revived musical on Broadway. Wary of spend- Pone said that when the show was in rehears- ing too much, the Weisslers decided to keep the als, the cast found to their chagrin that the show just as it was—a glorified concert—and radio frequencies used to raise the mansion hoped to keep it going long enough to pay scenery were the same ones being used by taxi off its modest budget, which they sought to dispatchers outside on the street. The scenery raise from others. At the last minute, the bulk would sometimes lurch upwards unbidden by of their financing fell apart. The Weisslers, of anyone in the theater, occasionally with terri- New Jersey, couldn’t find anyone to pony up a fied cast members still on it. “Anyone passing measly two million for Chicago on Broadway, by the Adelphi,” LuPone said, “could give me so they took a deep breath and violated the a thrill ride just by picking up the phone.” cardinal rule of Broadway producing: never put Close reports that she plastered the face of your own money in the show. The Weisslers her unhinged character Norma Desmond with barely had the $2 million. They were betting white makeup because she had seen the effect their futures on one single show. when Walter Matthau’s wife did it, observ- Twenty-four years later, Chicago, now the ing that the elderly Mrs. Matthau must have longest-running American musical in the his- thought it made her skin look like porcelain. tory of Broadway, was still on the boards as A clever publicist got Lana Turner, who had of last March, and the Weisslers, Riedel notes rarely been seen in public for decades, to attend with satisfaction, today live regally on their the Los Angeles premiere in order to generate nearly twenty-acre estate, which is not in New publicity that obligingly compared Turner to Jersey but in Westchester County, New York. the story’s batty silent-film queen Desmond, Being famously cheap to produce because of and another publicist arranged for Ronald and its spare staging, Chicago has been able to stay Nancy Reagan to attend. (The former presi- viable through a quarter-century of economic dent pronounced it the “best show I’ve ever reversals and crashes, though the success of seen,” though an onlooker was startled to no- the Oscar-winning movie adaptation in 2002 tice that Reagan, who had not yet made public surely served as invaluable publicity. his battle with Alzheimer’s, was unaware that Chicago’s story parallels that of Rent, an- there existed a film version of the musical.) other underdog show with a stripped-down

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look that positioned it as an antidote to Lloyd water. The other Tony nominees—Steel Pier, Webber’s wedding-cake overkill. By the time The Life, and Juan Darien—were flat-out flops. it hit Broadway the same year as Chicago, in A chapter on the Mel Brooks smash The Pro- 1996, the death of its composer-lyricist Jona- ducers (2001) begins and ends dramatically than Larson at age thirty-five was already the enough: the show’s planned director, Mike stuff of theater lore. Larson collapsed with Ockrent, died of leukemia during development an undiagnosed tear in his aorta just hours in 1999, leaving the reins to his widow, Susan before the musical’s first public performance Stroman, who had planned merely to choreo- at an experimental downtown theater. Riedel graph the show but wound up directing it, to retells this oft-told story of the plucky deter- universal acclaim. After the 9/11 attacks early mination of an array of irrepressible theater in its run, the show and its star Nathan Lane kids with due sensitivity and respect. Among became Broadway’s most visible champions, young people, Rent was the Hamilton of its and the theater quickly rebuilt its audience. time. An obsessively enthusiastic cohort of stu- The creation of the show doesn’t make for es- dents and fledgling creative types flocked to pecially compelling reading, though: “[theater its grungy, multiculti reworking of La Bohème. executive] Rocco Landesman was not happy The production worked marvelously for the about having to cut short his weekend in the kinds of people who thought Friends was a country on a cold Sunday afternoon in April great television show. Rent’s showtune-rock to attend a reading of The Producers,” runs a songs, however, are unbearable, and by the typical passage. Later we learn that Stroman time it closed in 2008 it was a period piece. threatened to walk off the show if not granted It seems unlikely to cast a spell over future her choice of costumer and set designer. This generations, and La Bohème has already been is thin gruel. re-reworked for Broadway, this time under Despite some attempts at online perfor- the title Moulin Rouge, which after Hamilton mances that rarely make an impact comparable was Broadway’s second-highest grossing show to that of in-person productions, Broadway as of last March. sits in suspended animation. Singular Sensation has a different feel than was intended while it Late in the book, Riedel’s material runs a was being written, shrouded as it is by a sense bit thin. He baffled me in spending an entire of loss, but it’s also a cheerful reminder of bet- chapter on Titanic the musical, a not bad but ter days that once were, and which perhaps largely forgotten 1997 effort that was neither a will return. There’s little doubt, closing either famous hit nor a notorious flop. I’d forgotten of Riedel’s books, that Broadway people adore it swept the Tonys that year, but then again their art and pour everything they have into everyone else forgot that also, because the en- it. May we all be fortunate enough to be able tire Broadway musical season was written on to savor their creations again soon.

The New Criterion February 2021 41 Art “The Fall Reveal” at moma by Karen Wilkin

It feels like much longer ago, but the most the often messy, contradictory, and illogical recent addition to the Museum of Modern development of art from the late nineteenth Art, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfrew, century to the present with this open-minded, turns out to have opened in October 2019. wide-ranging approach. But if we hoped that As was much discussed at the time, the more the museum would help us to make sense of than forty thousand square feet of well lighted, this baggy monster, we were notably disap- handsomely proportioned permanent col- pointed. Visitors were obliged to find their lection galleries, west of Yoshio Taniguchi’s own way, clutching small maps or their cell 2001–04 addition, were conceived to eliminate phones. (Now it’s just cell phones.) Even a preferred path through the works of art on my graduate students, who were enthusias- display: all had multiple doorways, none on tic about seeing “so many different things,” axis. The initial installation, spurred by moma’s confessed to being confused and sometimes new mantra “there is no single or complete disoriented by the new installation. history of modern or contemporary art,” was Whatever our reactions, we were urged intended to expand our (inadequate) linear to be patient. The opening installation, we conception of that history, and disturb our were told, was a beginning, a work in prog- (even more inadequate) parochial notions of ress. It would be altered and reconfigured at the relative achievements of various artists. regular intervals. (No one, as far as I know, Works by previously ignored or “marginal- mentioned how visitors who came specifically ized” practitioners from all over the world, to see moma’s legendary collection might react many recently acquired, were put on display. if the Mona Lisas of modernism were not on Ideas about chronology, influence, and view in a coherent relationship.) The shutdown that much maligned concept “quality” were that began in March 2020 played havoc with deemed restrictive and largely ignored. The all museum and gallery scheduling, but in only concessions to more or less traditional mid-November we were finally rewarded for hierarchies were the broad, somewhat un- withholding judgment. “The Fall Reveal” gave balanced, sometimes broken, top-to-bottom us twenty “transformed” galleries throughout divisions of the collection: 1880s–1940s on moma’s three collection floors, characterized the fifth floor; 1940s–70s on the fourth; on the website as “new art from wall to wall.” 1970–present on Floor 2. While many of Those listed as responsible include a remark- us wondered about the wisdom of moma’s able number of staff members, although things downplaying its magnificent, celebrated col- being how they are, the itemized names may lection of “historical” modernism in order acknowledge the admittedly invaluable con- to become yet another museum of trendy tributions of preparators and security per- global art, we had to admire the effort to echo sonnel, as well as curators. We are told that

42 The New Criterion February 2021 Art

because the museum recognizes that—wait for have been integrated with contemporaneous it—“there is no single or complete history of works, most conspicuously in a fifth-floor modern or contemporary art,” the Fall Reveal gallery titled “Circle and Square: Joaquín was designed to “offer a deeper experience of Torres-García and Piet Mondrian,” subtitled art through all mediums and by artists from “abstraction above and below the Equator.” more diverse geographies and backgrounds The installation commemorates the two men’s than ever before.” There’s no doubt about the meeting in Paris, in 1929, and their founding variety of mediums and the diversity of geog- of Circle et Carré—circle and square—an or- raphies and backgrounds. A deeper experience? ganization and publication that attracted an I’m not sure. international group of artists committed to ge- ometry, order, and rationalism, in opposition Some things have not changed. The galler- to Surrealism’s courting of the illogical. Torres- ies devoted to the 1880s–1940s on the fifth García kept the principles of Circle et Carré floor still begin, as they did in October 2019, alive and created a Spanish-language version with classic, well-known works by Vincent van of the magazine after he returned to his native Gogh, Henri Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, and Uruguay in 1934 and created his Bauhaus-type their peers, along with a glorious Medardo school and workshop, the influential Taller Rosso sculpture. It’s an impressive selection Torres-García. Four important paintings by guaranteed to satisfy all visitors. In the gallery Mondrian, including Broadway Boogie Woogie otherwise devoted to moma’s exemplary col- (1942–43), are shown with significant examples lection of Pablo Picasso’s work, that enormous by Torres-García that range from a canvas of 1967 Faith Ringgold provoked by a street riot stacked glyphs, to a bare-bones, fictive grid, still takes up a lot of real estate. (The point to a generously scaled, rough-hewn construc- has been made. Is it heresy to suggest that tion in wood. Also included is a miscellany the story might now be enhanced by more of South American works and constructions of Georges Braque’s paintings and collages, by a British artist and a Belgian founder of made when the two pioneers of Cubism were De Stijl. Whether they were associated with “roped together like mountain climbers,” as either the French or Uruguayan iterations of they described it, rather than by an unrelated the group is not stated. canvas chosen to address issues of diversity?) Nearby, “New York City, 1920s” offers a In the dazzling Henri Matisse gallery, a satisfying assembly of works by Stuart Davis, reasonably strong painting by Alma Thomas Arthur Dove, Edward Hopper, John Marin, is still cruelly placed beside the unassailable Georgia O’Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Florine Red Studio. Thomas is a fine painter, but even Stettheimer; photographs by Walker Evans her loyal fans—I am one—have to admit that and James Van Der Zee; and sculpture by Elie she would be better served by integrating her Nadelman and John Storrs, plus an atypical work with that of her Washington School col- but strong José Clemente Orozco painting of leagues, inventive painters who, like her, used the New York subway. Cumulatively, the se- radiant color as the main carrier of emotion lections summarize many dominant concerns and meaning. Yet those artists, while repre- of the decade. There’s also a tantalizing film sented in the collection, are conspicuously clip by Oscar Michaux, an excerpt from Ten absent from the current installation. On the Minutes to Live, a thriller apparently about a plus side, the delightful tribute to the poet and lovely young black woman being stalked by a former moma curator Frank O’Hara, on the handsome bad guy. The film is dated 1932, but fourth floor (1940s–70s) is still intact. the views of a now-vanished New York make What’s new? Occasional signs indicating up for the discrepancy between the date and routes to exits and to the collection. Selections the gallery theme. from the generous Patricia Phelps Cisneros Focused as these individual installations are, gift of Latin American geometric abstrac- we still, as before, experience staccato rhythms tion, initially isolated in a special exhibition, and chronological disruptions as we move

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from gallery to gallery, overwhelming any the installation. The whole is a fine portrait of hints of continuity. “Circle and Square” and an era, but since chronology is out of favor, “New York City, 1920s” are interleafed with there’s also a prototype for a façade panel with “According to the Laws of Chance,” mainly stylized foliage from a project by Herzog & de about Marcel Duchamp, and “Ornament and Meuron, from the 1990s. Abstraction,” a terrific overview of architectural decoration and textiles. The former, subtitled Apropos this disregard for chronology, “new “What happens when artists give up control?,” art from wall to wall” on the fifth floor (1880s– is one of the few galleries that suggests the 1940s) includes Gerhard Richter’s suite of fif- depth of moma’s collections. Elsewhere, teen paintings, October 18, 1977, a meditation on apart from the very welcome, unchanged the unsatisfactorily explained deaths, on that concentrations on Matisse and Picasso, and date, in a Berlin prison, of members of the a fourth-floor gallery given largely to Nam- violent, radical left-wing organization often June Paik—not that I’m equating the three called the Baader–Meinhof gang. The blurred artists—works are treated as isolated examples, images translate photos of the youthful gang the way provincial institutions display their members, dead and alive, and related settings, often limited holdings. “According to the Laws into subtly modulated, mysterious expanses of Chance” confirms how broadly Duchamp of grays. Painted in the late 1980s, the series is represented at the museum: an early Cubist was a kind of personal exorcism for the art- canvas; a painting based on “standard stop- ist, who described himself as haunted by the pages” (the results of dropping meter-long gang’s actions, their trial, and its aftermath. lengths of string); a smallish work on glass, The less explicit, more ambiguous paintings now shattered, with a machine-like image; a of half-glimpsed horizontal figures and vague bicycle wheel ready-made; and much more, interiors seem more potent than the some- including an extraordinarily annoying sound what sentimental transcriptions of headshots, piece. Works by Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Jean especially when the images are repeated, at Arp contextualize the Duchamps, along with different scales, on multiple canvases, further a witty Francis Picabia and a surprisingly ac- abstracting them, but the series as a whole complished Cubist-inflected painting by Kath- is unquestionably among Richter’s strongest erine S. Dreier, Duchamp’s friend, patron, and, efforts. Couldn’t moma have found a more with him and Man Ray, a founder of moma’s informative context for it? One of the new ancestor, the Société Anonyme. installations on Floor 4 (1940s–70s), “Gor- “Ornament and Abstraction” is a feast of ar- don Parks and ‘The Atmosphere of Crime,’ ” chitectural fragments from the late nineteenth includes, in addition to selections from Parks’s and early twentieth centuries, when progres- searing 1957 photo essay on crime, justice, and sive architects and designers rejected academic incarceration in America, vintage mug shots, classicism in favor of geometry and motifs from newspaper photos of crime scenes, an image of nature, and modernism had not yet rejected the bullet-riddled car in which Bonnie Parker ornament. There’s an undulating wrought- and Clyde Barrow died, and a graphic shot by iron window grille by Antoni Gaudí, from the Weegee, made in 1942, of elegantly dressed Casa Milá, Barcelona; a gorgeous spandrel—all men in a police van, hiding their faces with swirling tendrils and burgeoning leaves—and their top hats. Surely that gallery would have a dizzyingly elaborate stenciled frieze panel made a provocative segue, to or from Rich- from Louis Sullivan’s Gage Building and his ter’s series. Chicago Stock Exchange, respectively; geo- Yet that kind of relationship among adjacent metric stained glass windows and bits of the or even proximate galleries was evidently never extravagant geometric ornament of some of desired at moma, neither in 2019 nor in the Frank Lloyd Wright’s early houses; and a length Fall Reveal. Nor, despite the stated intention of railing by Otto Wagner. Drawings, textile of providing “a deeper experience,” is there designs, and textiles by contemporaries enrich any indication that visitors should be encour-

44 The New Criterion February 2021 Art aged to spend extended time with the works Mangbetu woman, with an elegant neck, a on view. The effort to present “works in all magnificent headdress, and the elongated skull mediums” means many galleries include film once characteristic of the people, bracket the clips, videos, and other sound-producing art red images, serving as witnesses. It’s powerful forms—see Marcel Duchamp on Floor 5. The and disturbing work and needs to be taken in films and videos are usually relevant and enrich slowly, without distractions. The sound from the installation as a whole (apart from a puerile a nearby video by the Chinese artist and acute anti-American effort by the Canadian Joyce social critic, Cao Fei, no matter how worthy, Wieland on the fourth floor), but there’s no is not an enhancement. sound isolation; the result is an inescapable cacophony. It’s a toss-up as to whether the in- Is the Fall Reveal an improvement over the sistent Duchamp piece, with its random, pierc- reconfigured moma’s initial installation? It ing notes, is the most intrusive or whether that may be even more wide ranging. Works such title goes to Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s Cinematic as a seldom-exhibited canvas by the influential Illumination, on Floor 4, a room-filling, ani- Indian abstract painter Vasudeo Gaitonde are mated construction that all-too-vividly evokes now on view. But works by other significant what we are told was “an immersive moving artists are not. We look in vain for Marsden image event . . . in the Tokyo discotheque Hartley and Bay Area figuration, for example; Killer Joe’s, as part of the Fluxus-associated Martin Puryear is represented only by the Intermedia Arts Festival,” in 1969. The enor- cover of an illustrated book. As in the opening mous ring of constantly changing, dizzying installations, some artists seem to have been projected images and the sound level are ef- systematically written out of the canon, as if fectively and distressingly reminiscent of the politics rather than aesthetics had driven the disco experience. I guess you had to have been choices. Many of the notably absent, then and there. On reflection, the Duchamp sound piece now, are those whose work was acquired and wins “most irritating.” We have a choice about exhibited by William Rubin, moma’s distin- entering (and leaving) the space where Shuzo guished curator and director of the depart- Azuchi Gulliver’s contraption is installed. We ment of painting and sculpture in the 1970s can’t avoid Duchamp. and 1980s. Rubin’s legacy is being erased. The most memorable addition to the We would never know, in the “new” moma, second floor (1970–present) is Carrie Mae that the collection includes major works by Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and Milton Avery, Anthony Caro, Gene Davis, I Cried, made in 1995–96, a moving disquisi- Sam Gilliam, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, tion on the way black people in this country Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, have been perceived by white Americans. or Frank Stella, or that moma staged illumi- Weems’s appropriated images, from the past nating exhibitions of their work. Like most to the near-present, include the horrifying institutions, these days, moma is attempting portraits of African Americans, treated not to redress their neglect of women and art- as people but as ethnographic specimens, ists of color, and to reduce their emphasis made for the Harvard biologist Louis Agas- on white males, such as those on the list of siz, and the sympathetic portraits of black sol- ignored artists. I applaud the much-needed diers in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s memorial effort to broaden our vision, but why does to the heroic Shaw Regiment. Each image that require eliminating important contribu- has been tightly cropped by a circular mat tors to the culture? How can an exclusionary, and tinted red; Weems’s comments, some- Maoist revision of recent art history coexist times laconic, sometimes accusatory, always with moma’s often repeated assertion that thought-provoking, are superimposed. Black- “there is no single or complete history of and-white portraits of what we learn is a royal modern or contemporary art”?

The New Criterion February 2021 45 Next stop by James Panero

The demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s to 600,000 a day spread across Amtrak, New Pennsylvania Station proved to be the great Jersey Transit, and the Long Island Rail Road— architectural trauma of New York. It was ar- were crushed down into what remained of the guably the worst destruction the city endured increasingly urine-soaked passages beneath. The in the past hundred years before the attacks ingenious double-decker platforms of old Penn, of 9/11; its effects altered the urban fabric just originally created to distinguish the path of ar- as much. At Penn, the promise of “progress” riving and departing passengers, now just added was, in fact, the terror that leveled that civic to the underground mayhem. temple of 1910 and replaced its soaring clas- From the Baths of Diocletian, one of the sicism with the soul-crushing modernism of classical models for the original station, to a today’s station. In 1965, a sign on Seventh modern-day sewer, old Penn has haunted the Avenue announced the “redeveloped” sta- city’s conscience just as its replacement has re- tion with the cheery slogan, “on the way to mained a blight on the urban landscape. “One you.” Just behind it, as commuters continued entered the city like a god,” the architectural to board their trains, the station’s exterior historian Vincent Scully famously observed. colonnade and vaulted interior were bashed “One scuttles in now like a rat.” Over the years, to bits and carted off as landfill to the New even as much else in the city has improved, new Jersey Meadowlands. Penn’s warren of dingy tunnels and onrush- The tragedy signaled an ignominious end ing crowds has remained astonishingly grim. to New York’s classical era. The indignities it In my own underground transfers, I too introduced have become a daily reminder of have learned the many twists and turns it what was lost. That’s because, for the sake of ex- takes to walk from the Seventh Avenue sub- pediency while developers disfigured what had way to an Amtrak train. I pass through one to remain an active transportation center, the sickly tile corridor after another, beneath the old station was leveled rather than excavated. stained ceilings perfumed with stale pretzels, To keep the trains running, on through if not on up to Penn’s departure concourse, only on time, the tracks, the east–west submarine to wait among a scrum of passengers jostling tunnels, and the platforms were all kept, even as one another over the announcement of their they were covered over with an oppressively low departure track. The one solace of this sub- new ceiling. Like a blister in the sun, the awful terranean passage is the glimpse of old Penn new Madison Square Garden rose above these that occasionally flashes in the light like an ruins. (To add insult to injury, the sports com- artifact kicked up in the rubble. A old handrail plex was named after the original palace where here and a staircase there—a few remnants of Harry K. Thaw had murdered Stanford White.) the original station remarkably remain intact Commuter and intercity rail passengers—up amid the latter-day squalor.

46 The New Criterion February 2021 Art

Some three decades ago, looking up from massing to a minimum while terraces of glass the back of Penn Station on Eighth Avenue, maximized the light within. Around the open Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the iconoclastic stairways, natural illumination filtered all the senator from New York who died in 2003, way down through the levels, even reaching made a similar discovery on a much larger the trains passing beneath. scale. What he saw was not exactly old Penn, In the reuse of its original structural steel, where as a boy he had once shined shoes, but now selectively left exposed, the new train hall there to the west was a building with strik- reveals the dna it shared with the departed ing similarities to the original station. And station while recalling some of the forms of indeed, occupying an equivalent two-block that crystal-palace shed. The train hall’s new space, the General Post Office Building, now main concourse has been carved out of the known as the James A. Farley Building, still post office’s former central work room. As rises as a shadow of old Penn. In fact, McKim, originally designed by McKim, Mead & White, Mead & White designed the facility, which this large central sorting area, just behind the opened in 1914 and was expanded to its current post office’s retail windows, was glazed with its size in 1935, to complement the station. The own sunken skylight that spanned the entire Olympian building ringed with Corinthian space. Blacked out during World War II, this columns and pilasters at one time served the back-of-the-house open acre was modified and same central role for mail as Penn did for pas- divided more than once, yet the roof retained sengers. At the time that Moynihan gave it its steel superstructure. another look, changes in postal distribution In the thirty years it took to develop the new were upending the rail-based facility, just as train hall, many proposals were put forward the car and airplane had done to old Penn. for reglazing this space. Some called for new Moynihan had a vision to reuse the old skylights at the building’s upper roofline. The postal building as a new passenger station. final decision to keep the original trusses while Starting in the early 1990s, he began negotiat- cutting down the concourse to street grade has ing with a tangle of federal agencies to secure created a lofty new space that still reaches back the permissions and funding to get the idea on to an important past. The core of the train hall track. Like much else at Penn, the arrival of this makes the most of its original structural ele- initiative, what is now called the Daniel Pat- ments, opening up its massive trusses and cross- rick Moynihan Train Hall, has been delayed. braced columns and walls that, in the original With New York still in partial lockdown, the post office design, were left unseen. At its cen- hall’s January 1, 2021, opening came and went ter, a new four-sided pendant clock, designed with little fanfare, even as the completion of by Peter Pennoyer Architects in 20th-Century- the 255,000-square-foot transit hub has cost Limited moderne, ties the space together with $1.6 billion and taken a generation to reveal. a nod to the analog Benrus clocks suspended That the Moynihan Train Hall offers im- inside the original station. provements over Penn’s existing facilities is a New skylights now fill in among the old low bar to clear. At its best, the new train hall trusses in barrel-vaulted form with some extra indeed finds ways to echo the grandeur of the fizz. These custom-engineered glass baubles original station, just as the late senator had en- are the station’s nod to the future, but one visioned. As adapted by Skidmore, Owings & wonders if simply restoring the original glaz- Merrill, the train hall hints at what was lost ing would have had a similar illuminating next door. In the original Penn, the station’s effect while freeing up resources for other classical Seventh Avenue head house opened to improvements. For while the train hall’s cen- the west onto a glass-enclosed train shed. Just tral concourse looks sharp in battleship gray, as that station’s façade and waiting room took with nicely illuminated rivets, its integration inspiration from the past, its crystal concourse with the trains running beneath—the whole looked ahead, revealing the splendor of the ma- purpose for its creation—seems to have been chine age. Exposed cross-braced steel piers kept an afterthought.

The New Criterion February 2021 47 Art

Beyond its uplifting forms, it is still an as- block west just to have to walk back the other tonishing fact that the function of a century- way on the platform. He also suggested that old train station should be better than any- Amtrak was making a tally of those still board- thing created today. At the original Penn, glass ing from Penn and those from Moynihan, tile brought illumination to all levels. Step and would eventually stop listing the trains on one of Moynihan’s slick new escalators in the old location, forcing passengers to use down to the platform and you descend from the new hall. light to near-total darkness. Here, the light For the rail commuter, the addition of is only skin deep. An earlier proposal calling Moynihan merely adds an extra length of for glass flooring, both inside and out, went turns to get from the subway to the Amtrak nowhere. Now beyond signaling their new- train. A pleasant concourse at the extreme end ness, those fancy new skylights are all form of a rat maze merely compounds an unsavory and no function. overall experience. The poor integration of That’s not all the signaling here. Move typography, wayfinding, and pathways with beyond the historical features of the main the rest of Penn Station remains a joke, now concourse and this train hall most resembles made cruel with this reminder of what there a high-end mall. In attempting to create a once was. It is all the more remarkable that new retail and commercial hub, the surfaces som’s own new underground waiting area, mistakenly look west, to the flailing empo- the West End Concourse, with overworked rium at Hudson Yards, rather than east, to the signage by Pentagram, which opened in June spirit of old Penn. A colleague of mine calls 2017, shares no stylistic similarity with the this slick consumer finish the “international austere Moynihan concourse directly above. duty-free style.” With a smart but tiny waiting area designed by the Rockwell Group tucked Beyond the trains, the last missing piece of the under a side of the concourse, one wonders Moynihan Train Hall is Daniel Patrick Moyni- where trains even ranked in the level of im- han. Until recently, the new rail center was sup- portance for this train hall. The answer may posed to be known as Moynihan Station. Then be near the bottom, just a half step above its in 2017, the first signs went up calling it Penn original use as a post office, which continues Station West. It could be that cancel culture but with little integration now with the rest finally caught up with the trailblazing studies of the complex. The recent leasing of much of of this senator who wrote “The Moynihan the building to Facebook, with new retail and Report,” the 1965 paper concerning the high restaurants planned just beneath them, speaks out-of-wedlock birthrate of black Americans more to the design’s underlying interests. and its negative economic consequences. A Unfortunately, as a hall for trains, the new simpler answer is that the New York governor Moynihan Train Hall more than once goes only ever wants to credit a civic project to a off track. The hall’s street-level avenue en- Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo now plans to build trances, to the north and south of the grand a new station, in a new style, over the entire post office stairwell, are the opposite of in- Penn complex, and he would prefer to retain viting. Positioned at the far western end of the naming rights. platforming trains, the new concourse also As the National Civic Art Society and others presents an added inconvenience for the ma- have argued, the real solution for Penn Sta- jority of passengers coming to the station tion is Pennsylvania Station: the demolition of from the east. As I noticed the day I visited, Madison Square Garden and the rebuilding of the new concourse was deserted compared McKim, Mead & White’s lost masterpiece over to those oppressive waiting areas across the the extant tracks. Daniel Patrick Moynihan felt street at Penn, which are still better posi- that loss deeply and dedicated his final years to tioned over the center of the trains. When I finding it. By looking to the past, his new train asked a Moynihan ticket-taker about this, he hall should now inspire others not to make the wondered why anyone would walk an extra same mistakes of fifty years ago all over again.

48 The New Criterion February 2021 Music Livestream chronicle by Jay Nordlinger

A week before Christmas, the Oxford Phil- wrote it for violin and piano, and later orches- harmonic Orchestra staged a concert—not a trated it. This Englishman liked to give pieces Christmas concert, but a festive concert none- French titles. The companion to this piece is theless. It paid tribute to the Oxford scientists Chanson de nuit. Elgar also wrote the famous, who had worked unceasingly to come up with beloved Salut d’amour. His publisher described their vaccine against covid-19. There was it as a “morceau mignon,” which is perfect. All no audience for this concert, except online, of these pieces are dear. Is that a put-down? It around the world. The players and singers sounds like one, but I don’t mean it that way. were socially distanced. Dearness can be desirable. Singers? Yes, the choir of Merton College, After the morning song, Bryn Terfel and the Oxford; Bryn Terfel, the great bass-baritone Merton choir sang “Abide with Me,” the great from Wales; and others. hymn whose words are by Henry Francis Lyte The program consisted of “feel-good mu- and whose music is by William Henry Monk. sic,” which I would defend in three ways, at As the hymn progressed, another solo voice least: (1) What’s wrong with feeling good? took over for Terfel’s: that of a boy, Alexander (2) There is a lot of excellent music that feels Olleson. The bbc named him its Young Choris- good. (3) Feel-good music is called for when ter of the Year for 2020. The contrast between you’re hailing a new vaccine, and thanking the Terfel’s voice—so big, rich, and renowned—and men and women who worked to produce it. this treble voice was very sweet. Oxford’s program featured one new work, Plus, Master Olleson will have quite a story by John Rutter, the renowned Englishman to tell, decades from now: how he stood on who today is seventy-five. There was a second a stage with the great Bryn Terfel, before a Rutter piece, too, and it began the concert. worldwide audience, to sing in tribute to a This was “Look to the Day,” a choral piece team of scientists who had labored to produce written in 2008. The composer’s website de- a covid-19 vaccine. scribes it as “a tuneful and uplifting anthem With a soprano—a full-grown one—Terfel with warm harmonies.” And its level of dif- sang some Rodgers and Hammerstein: “You’ll ficulty? “Very Easy.” Never Walk Alone,” from Carousel. (Senator Rutter wrote the words, as well as the mu- Bob Dole’s favorite song, by the way.) The sic. “Look to the day when the world seems soprano was Alexandra Lowe. Terfel likes new again.” “Look to the day when the earth R&H, and I imagine Ms. Lowe does, too. Who is green again.” “Look to the light that will doesn’t? Twenty-five years ago, Terfel made a drive out darkness.” whole album of R&H: Something Wonderful Next on Oxford’s program was a little piece (whose title song, as you recall, comes from by Elgar, Chanson de matin. The composer The King and I).

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John Rutter’s new work is Joseph’s Carol, chiefly. Of course, there is ample crossover in Christmassy indeed—but the composer linked these vocal categories. it to the vaccine team. “I feel a strong sense The men were in smart red bowties. The of connection with the team,” he said in a women looked beautiful. Ms. Blue, incidentally, videotaped interview. “I know exactly what is a former beauty queen, as well as an opera it feels like to be working in the back room, star. She has a killer smile. Pretty Yende is pretty which can be a lonely place. You don’t get killer herself. I will give you one biographi- any public appreciation for your efforts until cal fact about her: she got interested in opera your work’s all over.” Plus, “there’s a constant when she heard the Flower Duet from Lakmé deadline pressure.” (Delibes) in a British Airways commercial. You In any event, said Rutter, “my thoughts never know how a career will start. were very much with the team when I wrote Our four singers were sometimes accompa- Joseph’s Carol, which is my musical thank-you nied by a pianist—Cécile Restier, from France— to them.” and sometimes by a string quintet, plucked from Rutter went on to explain that he regards the Morphing Chamber Orchestra, of Vienna. Joseph as “the character in the Christmas Hold that thought, because some people back story who most often gets overlooked.” Jo- home in New York weren’t very happy about seph “must have felt that he was treading a the presence of the Morphing Quintet, or of very long, dark road, without knowing what Ms. Restier, presumably. was at the end of it.” But “at the end of that The music on this program was gala music. long, difficult journey, a miracle took place, Also feel-good music? Yes, in the operatic cat- and that’s what my carol’s all about: a miracle, egory, you could say. The concert began with which will never be forgotten.” excerpts from The Daughter of the Regiment Joseph’s Carol was sung by Terfel and the (Donizetti). Javier Camarena sang the “high- choir, accompanied by the orchestra. It is an Cs aria,” “Ah! mes amis.” He was a little tight example of relaxed, beautiful storytelling. The on some of those Cs—there are nine of them, music has a mixture of gravity and hope. It by the way—but basically fine. The final high has a lovely lightness of texture. The carol is Cs were his freest and best. well made, meaning that everything—notes, It is very strange not to hear applause at the words—is in its right place. end of this aria, and others like it. Camarena The concert ended with the Hallelujah Cho- snapped off a nice salute—in character—and rus. It was a little tame, for my taste—without smiled hugely. Let me add that piano accom- the verve that really makes you say, and feel, paniments often sound absurd in these bel canto “Hallelujah!” But to end with this master- arias. This is no fault of Cécile Restier’s, need- work—masterwork within a masterwork—was less to say. a very good idea, as was this entire concert. Pretty Yende sang another aria from the op- era, “Chacun le sait.” She was not at her most ac- Traditionally, the Metropolitan Opera has a curate, but she was more than adequate. At the New Year’s Eve gala—and the show went on, end, she giggled charmingly (and in character). though on the Internet, only, and from Augs- How much acting should singers do in galas burg, Germany. Four singers gathered there: such as this? If they do too much, they can two sopranos and two tenors. The first names look foolish. At the same time, you are not of the sopranos are “Pretty” and “Angel.” We presenting an oratorio. Our four singers struck are speaking, of course, of Pretty Yende, from an intelligent balance, neither overacting nor South Africa, and Angel Blue, from Los An- underacting. geles. The tenors were Javier Camarena, the When it was their turn to take the stage, An- Mexican, and Matthew Polenzani, the Ameri- gel Blue and Matthew Polenzani sang excerpts can. In this concert, Yende and Camarena were from La bohème (Puccini)—that fabulous 1-2-3 paired, as bel canto singers, chiefly, and Blue at the end of Act I: the tenor aria “Che gelida and Polenzani were paired, as “lyric” singers, manina”; the soprano aria “Sì, mi chiamano

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Mimì”; and the duet “O soave fanciulla.” How The final, most gala-like portion of this many composers have ever written so successful gala started with “Lippen schweigen,” the a stretch? Anyone tempted to sneer at Puccini duet from The Merry Widow (Lehár). As a should think again, or listen again. rule, singers not only sing the duet, they also Polenzani was “hooked up,” in fine voice. He waltz to it. Blue and Polenzani did not disap- was at his best, I think, in soft, subtle passages. point. Then there were three hits from Naples: Angel Blue has a beautiful voice. Was she Itali- “Mattinata,” “Torna a Surriento,” and “O sole anate in this music? Passably so, I think. Did the mio.” All four singers did commendable things two singers pull off the high Cs at the end of in these songs, but Polenzani stood out, ex- the duet? They can do better, but yes, they did. hibiting the style. The way he toyed with “O Later in the program, there was more Puc- sole mio” was especially pleasing. cini, involving all four singers. This was “Bevo They said goodbye with “Auld Lang Syne,” al tuo fresco sorriso,” from La rondine. I would which I hope made Guy Lombardo smile, describe it as half toast, half hymn. It is noble, somewhere. stirring, and absolutely beautiful. Our four sing- Earlier, I mentioned some upset back home, ers made some nice sounds, of course, but the in New York. The Metropolitan Opera Orches- piece did not have its impact—its thrill. The tra issued a blistering statement, saying that singers could have used a proper orchestra (no its members had been callously treated during offense to the quintet). Possibly, they could have the pandemic. “There is no reason why these benefited from a conductor, too. gala events need to take place in Europe. There “Ah! mes amis” is a signature aria for Ca- are star singers on American soil too.” What’s marena. So is “Sì, ritrovarla io giuro,” from more, the pandemic “does not need to be so La cenerentola (Rossini). He duly sang this financially devastating to the orchestra, nor so aria on New Year’s Eve. I often regret that we contentious and heartless—that is the choice don’t apply the word “virtuosic” or “virtuoso” of Met management.” to singers—because it would suit Camarena. In this miserable period, there are a million I have a joke—or an observation, really—to stories. make about Rossini’s aria. The first two notes are on “Sì” and the first syllable of “ritrovarla.” The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has been These days, I swear you’d think the tenor were playing a New Year’s concert since 1939 (not asking Siri for help. a proud year, to be sure). It starts at 11:15 on Pretty Yende sang some more Rossini—“Una New Year’s morning, in the Goldener Saal of voce poco fa,” from The Barber of Seville. She sang the Musikverein. The program is Viennesey: it winningly, with agility and style. But I often waltzes, galops, polkas, and the like, especially want to caution singers about one thing: don’t composed by members of the Strauss family. so load your arias with ornaments and interpo- These days, tickets can run as high as 1,200 lations that you, or the audience, lose sight of euros. Families pass down their seats from the song. A stellar aria such as “Una voce poco generation to generation. I’m reminded of the fa” is more than a vehicle for technical display. Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia: Angel Blue did her best singing of the night the waiting list for tickets closed in 1978. in a very difficult aria: “D’amor sull’ali rosee” This year, there was no audience in the from Il trovatore (Verdi). She was disciplined and Musikverein, but the show went on—and it was focused. She had both vocal focus and mental watched by some fifty million people around the focus. She succumbed to a little flatting at the globe. The Vienna Philharmonic underwent a end, but this was of no great import. After the program of rigorous covid testing. Therefore, aria, she spoke to the audience—the camera— they were able to play onstage together. saying that her father had died on New Year’s “Without a concert on January 1,” said Ric- Eve fourteen years before. He was a great lover cardo Muti in a press conference beforehand, of opera, she said, and taught her how to sing. “the Musikverein would be like a grave. That She concluded with, “Thank you, Dad.” would be a negative sign to the world.” Muti

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was conducting the New Year’s concert, for letting the players do their familiar thing, and the sixth time. No guest except Lorin Maazel enjoying it. I have never seen Muti do so much has conducted it more. The vpo is self-run, dancing on a podium. meaning that the players decide on conductors I don’t know about you, but, for me, a little and programming. of this music goes a long way. Still, it goes Muti has been conducting the orchestra for down easy. One of the pieces on this morning fifty years. He first conducted the New Year’s was Ohne Sorgen! (Without a Care!), a polka concert in 1993. “I couldn’t sleep for nights,” by Josef Strauss. That was the mood of the he said. “I was terrified.” The vpo players are concert at large. “unique” in this repertoire, he said. “I felt The highlight of the concert, I believe, was that, with my inexperience, I could only do more Suppé: the famous Poet and Peasant damage.” Italians have Verdi within them, he Overture. The vpo and Muti betrayed no hint said—not Lehár, the Strausses, and the rest. of slumming in this piece. They approached Yet he came through fine. it as they would a Schubert symphony. It was The Viennesey music is much more difficult precise, beautiful, stirring, and satisfying. to conduct than people imagine, he said. “The There is an extensive cello solo, handled by boat needs a good pilot, an expert pilot.” It Tamás Varga (Budapest-born) with elegance. does not go, or even float, by itself. When Let me give you an aside. Out of habit, Muti you conduct a New Year’s concert, said Muti, went to shake the hand of Rainer Honeck, the “you can’t relax until the Radetzky March.” This concertmaster (and brother of the conduc- piece, by iron tradition, is the final encore. The tor Manfred Honeck). Honeck demurred, and audience claps along. Although this year, there Muti suddenly remembered we’re not shaking would be no clapping, “so we will finally hear hands at the moment. The two nodded at each the march as it’s written,” smiled Muti. other with big smiles. He was staying in the Imperial Hotel—and One of the last items of the day was the was virtually the only one in it. There was al- Emperor Waltz, by Johann Strauss the Younger. most no one on the streets. “I have the sense It was irresistible in its nobility and pomp, and of being in a horror movie,” said Muti, smil- blessedly unrushed. ing again. Taking a microphone, Muti made a state- When he took the stage on New Year’s ment to the audience—the audience beyond morning, the players clapped vigorously for the hall. The past year was an “annus horribi- him. I think they were trying to make up, in lis,” he said. Yet music has a message to deliver. part, for the lack of an audience in the hall. “Music is more than entertainment,” he said. They opened with the Fatinitza March, i.e., “It is not only a profession, it is a mission. the march from the operetta Fatinitza, by This is why we do this work: to make society Franz von Suppé. The players had the lilt, better.” That is a platitude, maybe, and we can the step, the bounce—everything that makes argue about it, but such words have particular this sort of music special. As I frequently say, weight in a time of worldwide distress. when writing of them, they were good as a Before the Radetzky March—which is by unit and good in their solos. They showed Johann Strauss the Elder—comes On the Beau- technical exactitude. And their patented tiful Blue Danube (the Younger). Tradition so sound came through, even on your laptop dictates. In the Danube waltz, the horns were at home. incredibly fluid. Don’t they know that horns Muti? He was in good form throughout are supposed to cough, shout, and flub? As the concert. He was charismatic and disci- for the Neapolitan on the podium, he was plined. He let his hair down—and that hair unquestionably idiomatic in his conducting. is famous—while maintaining order. He knew I must say, I enjoyed the Radetzky March how much conducting to do, by which I mean, without the clapping. But may the clapping he knew when to intervene: when to impose return next year, and the year after that, and himself, or guide, and when to stand back, on and on.

52 The New Criterion February 2021 The media Democracy dies in the media by James Bowman

The top headline of The Washington Post’s History is in the pockets of the Post and of its “Today’s Headlines” newsletter on the Sunday brethren in the media, both old and new, these after the Epiphany riot in the Capitol read as days because they have succeeded in branding follows: “Republicans largely silent about con- themselves as exclusive purveyors of “Truth” sequences of deadly attack and Trump’s role in and enlightenment. “Democracy,” remember, inciting it.” The big news in the D.C. swamp “dies in darkness.” But when the truth of your that day, it seems, was that there were unac- reporting is proclaimed in advance of the news countably still people thereabout who could be you report, the reporting tends to be more or suspected of not agreeing with The Washington less limited to confirmation of what you have Post about these things—both the prospective claimed already to know. The shock headline “consequences” and “Trump’s role in inciting” in the next day’s Post was: “For anti-Trump the riot, which were treated equally as simple Americans, calamity spurs a muted sense of matters of fact. Emboldened by its own firm vindication.” It can’t have been difficult to possession of these unquestioned truths, the find a few anti-Trump Americans who, like Post was hinting that, if indeed there were such the writers and editors of the Post, can now people, they had better get their minds right claim to have known of Mr. Trump’s perfidy pdq, or they might face a few consequences all along. They could therefore all afford to be of their own. modestly “muted” in their I-told-you-so. Not Of course, one is used to such subtly intimi- that they really were. datory language from the media nowadays, Meanwhile, just outside this elite circle of but I can well imagine its chilling effect on precognition, there was some real muting any remaining “moderate” Republicans who going on, as the Twitter and Facebook ac- hadn’t, at that point, spoken up with the sort counts of President Trump were shut down of ritual denunciation of the President being and the aspiring Twitter rival Parler, whose demanded of them in the media. They might brand is “no censorship,” was itself censored well wonder, however, whence came the me- by Amazon, Google, and Apple. No doubt the dia’s authority, either for its truth claims or for fortune-tellers at the Post saw all this coming making such threats against those unwilling as well, if not the riotous pretext by which it to believe them. This was ostensibly a news would ultimately be accomplished. It doesn’t story, and therefore, presumably, partook of take psychic powers to predict that the “con- that tentativeness once implied when the re- sequences” mentioned in Sunday’s article will porters of the news were said to be writing be continuing for some time to come, and that “the first draft of history.” Now they are asking they will affect many more people than Mr. us to accept without question that it is also Trump. Within days, Senator Josh Hawley’s the final draft. forthcoming book—ironically on The Tyranny

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of Big Tech—was canceled by Simon & Schuster to investigate electoral fraud before certifying on account of his persistence in backing efforts the election of Joe Biden: “Worse Than Trea- to delay certification of the election pending son: No amount of rationalizing can change an investigation into allegations of voter fraud. the fact that the majority of the Republican The Post’s denial of such allegations out Party is advocating for the overthrow of an of hand, from the very moment they were American election.” first made, was thus of a piece with its more In fact, it would have taken very little ra- general self-certainty, which, in turn, is the tionalizing indeed, assuming he were capable twin of its invincible self-righteousness. We of it, for Mr. Nichols to recognize that this now take it for granted that both qualities are putative advocacy of “the overthrow of an shared with the rest of the progressive Ameri- American election,” not to mention the un- can media that, on account of them and on named crime said to be “worse than treason,” present showing, will soon be all the media depended absolutely on an if clause that he, for there are. Such absolute faith in their own obvious reasons, chose to leave out and that rightness of opinion, which is what it means might have read something like this: “if (and to report opinion as fact as often as they do, is only if) those Republicans knew there to be characteristic of totalitarianism, as is the need no electoral fraud and were claiming that it to make any waverers, like those temporar- existed anyway.” Like so many others in the ily silent Republicans, profess their assent to hypercritical media, Tom Nichols could stake media-determined party lines. such extravagant claims of criminality on the assumption that his readers, all partisans like Accordingly, it should not surprise us if our himself, would be willing to take for granted public life seems to have made yet another as true what was, in fact, in dispute. quantum leap in the direction of totalitarian- That of course is why there was never any ism in the first days of the new year. It would mention of the presidential and other Repub- have taken no special foresight to observe from lican claims of fraud anywhere in the pres- the beginning that this was always the direction tige media without the qualifiers “baseless” in which we were being taken by the cancel or “unfounded” being attached to them. No culture—which has, as I write, now come for one must be allowed to suspect that fraud was an elected President of the United States. His even possible, lest the storm of abuse being 75 million voters must now include a fair few heaped upon the heads of the President and who are wondering how much longer it can be his supporters should come to seem a trifle before it comes for them. As an unusually per- overdone. And this, remember, was before the spicacious celebrity named Emily Ratajkowski renewed opportunity for such abuse afforded pointed out, “If [Mark Zuckerberg] can shut by the riot, which was said by one and all with the president up/off, he can shut any of us up/ equally positive certainty to have been incited off.” The more dissenters from the media con- by Mr. Trump. sensus are shed by their on- and offline thought A rational person might have been less im- police, the more power the media have to shed pressed by the riot itself than by the riot of them—or to intimidate any remaining inde- self-righteousness and claptrap about democ- pendent thinkers into falling into line. racy from people who have spent the last four Before the riot, I had begun to write this years trying to thwart the democratic choice of column as an attempt to show how such lead- 2016 and condoning the actions of those who ers of that consensus as The Washington Post seek to impose their will on the country by and The New York Times go about the manu- extra-democratic and intimidatory methods. facture of truth and what they have lately been Talk about incitement! It’s hard for me to see pleased to call “reality.” They make this to their how Mr. Trump’s appeal to his followers be- own specifications by what I called the “sup- fore some of them rioted was anywhere close pressed conditional”—as when Tom Nichols to being as provocative as Nancy Pelosi and of The Atlantic wrote of Republican attempts her fellow House Democrats who kneeled to

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the rioters in Washington D.C. last summer, previous attempt but the new one as well could draped in kente cloth to show their support. hardly count for impeachment as envisaged by Now, of course, the rioters were coming after the Founding Fathers, for “high crimes and them, which must have made a difference in misdemeanors.” It was clearly nothing but their attitude. But back then—remember?— political vendetta. rioting was just fine and dismissed as “mostly But either there are too few fair-minded peaceful protest” when it was Black Lives Mat- people or too many amnesiacs these days, ter and Antifa who were claiming to have a the latter having fallen along with the media grievance and who thought that the people in into the mere habit of outrage, like children power weren’t listening to them. throwing a temper tantrum every time they don’t get their own way—each outburst in It will be observed, perhaps, that the public utter forgetfulness of the one before, so as discourse (if you can call it that), as managed by to be full of fresh indignation. Impeachment the media, now depends on a kind of induced should thus appear to those who have not amnesia, for which the media must owe a lot to lost their memories, or their minds, like the the educational establishment’s help in produc- prosecution of General Flynn, or the attempt ing a new generation of readers and watchers by prosecutors in the southern district of New who know almost nothing about the past—or York to get hold of Mr. Trump’s tax records, nothing but the media version of it as found, not to mention the two-year Mueller inves- for example, in The New York Times’s 1619 Proj- tigation. In other words, it was and always ect. The media’s own self-induced amnesia goes has been a (hopeful) conviction in search of a even further and requires that yesterday’s misre- crime. Is that how American justice was sup- porting, as of the “Russian collusion” hoax, be posed by the molders and shapers of our legal utterly forgotten in order to clear the way for system to work? today’s. Who now remembers the wild goose Who can remember that far back? Or per- chase of the Mueller report, which for months haps the better question is who wants to re- was top-of-the-headlines news every day in the member that far back when the media have prestige media? The President’s “collusion” the power to threaten “consequences” for any- with Russia—no one was ever quite sure what body who does? No doubt that is the reason criminal act, exactly, they were supposed to why there are so few voices being raised in have colluded in—proved to be a truth that protest against the reduction of democratic wasn’t true, but that didn’t mean that it was politics to raw power struggle—or few voices an error, let alone a falsehood. It was simply outside of the right-wing media ghetto, now forgotten, dropped down Winston Smith’s more ghettoized than ever on the same pretext memory hole. that is being used to check off everything else And then there was the impeachment of on the political wish list of the Democrats last year, which you might have supposed and the media. Do ordinary, more or less would be somewhat fresher in the media’s apolitical Americans then approve of the way memory. Yet the “consequences” referred to in the law and the deep state have been used The Washington Post headline first mentioned to hound the President since even before he above included yet another effort by Nancy took office? The election results would seem Pelosi and her fellow Democrats in Congress to suggest that they do, but then some people to impeach the President only days before the continue to doubt the results, in spite of all end of his term. To anyone whose memory the media’s urgings. stretches back even as far as one year, the mes- I think we have to confess that if ordinary sage they were sending by such a pointless voters seem confused, it is at least partly the act could only have been: “Now we’ve finally fault of both parties. I always thought that the found something we can really impeach him Republican impeachment of President Clinton for.” It ought to be a pretty obvious point to in 1998 was a mistake. I understood that it be raised by the fair-minded that not only the was meant as payback for the attempted “high

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tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas seven years every repetition of the a priori claim that his earlier (presided over by one Joseph R. Biden), allegations of election fraud were “unfound- but the Republicans were politically interested ed” or “baseless,” we are reminded that truth parties who could not honorably or impartially and falsehood have become entirely a matter sit in judgement of the President. They should of which side of the political divide they are have left his punishment for the Monica affair, coming from. One side’s truth is the other’s if any, to the Democrats and thus, ultimately, falsehood, and vice versa. Who doesn’t know to the voters. But when I suggested this to one that now, whatever the media say? And what or two prominent Republicans at the time, are ordinary people supposed to make of it, I was slapped down as naive. This was, like apart from concluding both that they’re lying it or not, what hardball politics now looked and that truth—true truth—is now inaccessible like in America. to anyone not himself engaged as a partisan? Well, we sowed the wind, along with Mr. Biden, and we (if not he) have now reaped the There used to be an unwritten rule in the ad- whirlwind. Neither Republicans nor Demo- vertising business about “no knocking copy.” crats should be too surprised if all the pious If Coke started claiming that Pepsi would cant about the holy shrine of democracy’s make you sick, Pepsi would naturally retali- defilement by Trump supporters on January 6 ate by claiming that Coke would kill you, falls on deaf ears among the public at large. and ordinary everyday people would begin to The naked and unseemly power struggle think it safer to leave both of them alone and that has gone on in that building for the last drink Dr. Pepper. Something like that seems thirty years (at least) cannot have looked to to have happened in our political life, largely many of those outside it like the sacred rites because of the media’s post-Watergate faith of democratic self-government. Few politi- in the power of scandal and threats of scan- cians today appear even to know what the dal to manipulate politicians into advancing word “democracy” means, since so many of their own agenda. The Democrats have been the ironically named Democrats have spent happy to take advantage of this because the four years trying to nullify an election in its media’s agenda is so largely their own, but name—and now seek to prevent Mr. Trump if they had any aspiration beyond the sheer from seeking office again on the paradoxi- exercise of power they might now be think- cal grounds that any future election he won ing twice about this devil’s bargain, now that would be as much of a “threat to democracy” they’re being asked both to condone riotous as the last one. assemblies and to impeach a president for (al- But even that is a mere trifle compared to legedly) doing the same. That kind of thing, the political degrading of the very idea of truth. too, was not anyone’s idea of democracy up Now, with every “false or misleading statement” until the day before yesterday. Now it appears of President Trump catalogued by The Wash- we’ll have to get used to it. What was it again ington Post’s indefatigable “fact checkers,” and that democracy was said to die in?

56 The New Criterion February 2021 Books Vicious Highsmith by Brooke Allen

It’s a well-known principle that if you admire ing in ruined lives, and if a relationship did certain writers’ work, maybe you’d be better not provide her with such fodder she soon off not meeting them in the flesh. Good writ- moved on. ers are often surprisingly unpleasant people— The question of mental illness of course aris- no one can quite figure out why, but it’s true. es, though Highsmith was never diagnosed. And never has there been a writer I’m so glad Bradford cites a psychiatrist, unacquainted not to have known (though I very much enjoy with the writer, who passed her in a hotel her fiction) as Patricia Highsmith (1921–95). corridor and noted that her facial expression To use a non-PC term—I think I can get away was one he had never witnessed outside of an with it in these pages—she was a predatory insane asylum. She herself speculated that she lesbian, in addition to being a professional might have been bipolar, but to me (amateur homebreaker; a nasty drunk; an emotional psychologist that I am) her behavior seems sadist; and an equal-opportunity bigot who more in keeping with borderline personality seems to have detested every group except the disorder. But we will never know. American and European gratin. Arabs, Jews, What makes all this interesting, aside from the French, Catholics, evangelicals, Latinos, the reader’s prurience and the perverse fasci- blacks, Koreans, Indians both dot and feather nation involved in watching a train wreck in . . . the list goes on and on. progress? It is, Bradford demonstrates, that Richard Bradford, Highsmith’s most recent Highsmith’s personality is so closely interwo- biographer, observes, in his book Devils, Lusts ven with those of her characters, her patholo- and Strange Desires, her carryings-on with a gies so allied with theirs, that a knowledge of sort of horrified fascination.1 “Compared to her life truly expands the imaginative exercise Highsmith, the likes of Casanova, Errol Flynn of reading the fiction—which is not always and Lord Byron might be considered lethargic the case with biographies. But how much do —even demure. She seemed to enjoy affairs we actually know, and how much of what she with married women in particular, but break- tells us can be trusted? From adolescence on ing up lesbian couples was a close second.” she recorded her life, thoughts, and fantasies “An insatiable appetite for things, and people, in a series of “cahiers,” now assembled in the stolen from or denied to others, seemed to Swiss Literary Archives at Bern. Bradford has have become her modus operandi.” She had an clearly spent a long and frustrating time in urgent and insatiable need for high drama end- those archives, trying to differentiate truth and fantasy, fact and fiction. He admits that the 1 Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia attempt was often vain—but that fact in itself Highsmith, by Richard Bradford; Bloomsbury Caravel, tells us much about Highsmith’s odd psyche. 272 pages, $30. “As well as writing books featuring invented

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characters,” he tells us, “she decided that her porarily split up and Patricia was left with her own life should become the equivalent of a grandparents in Fort Worth for a year while novel, a legacy of lies, fantasies and authorial her parents worked things out. Then it was inventions.” She apparently did this for sev- back to New York, and the Julia Richman High eral reasons: to create a life she desired rather School, where one of her major crushes was than the one she lived, shaping her own life one Judy Tuvim (later to achieve fame as Judy as fiction; to transpose her own experiences Holliday). In 1938 she enrolled at Barnard Col- imaginatively into those of her characters; and, lege, where she cut quite a swath “dressed as mischievously, to confuse scholars and biogra- a character in a noir movie”; “My vision of phers, poor saps like Bradford who, she knew, her,” remembers one contemporary, “is with would scrutinize her papers after her death. a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. And the camel hair coat, the high white Much of her childhood and early life can be collar and I think she wore an ascot. I mean ascertained, however. Was there anything there she was stylish.” A year into college she joined to have caused the extreme behaviors of later the Young Communist League. Not that she years? Probably so, as it turns out. She was was ever very political; Bradford’s assumption born in 1921 in Fort Worth, to Jay Bernard is that she posed as a communist for attention, Plangman and Mary Coates Plangman. When as it was not a persona adopted by many of the Mary got pregnant, the Plangmans, who were nice Barnard girls. “Quite soon, though, she looking forward to a new life in New York, grew tired of this new performance.” attempted an abortion (with turpentine!) It was at this time that she commenced her but botched it; Jay inexplicably revealed this lifelong career of social climbing, befriend- incident to Patricia in later years. The birth ing luminaries like Janet Flanner, Ludwig and of the child (whom neither parent wanted) Madeleine Bemelmans, and Berenice Abbott. hastened the collapse of the marriage, and the Most of all she lusted after the rich, the glamor- Plangmans split up six months later. Mary got ous, the wasp. Like her most famous character, remarried two years later, to Stanley High- Tom Ripley, fixating on the glittering, golden smith, an illustrator and photographer, who Dickie Greenleaf, Highsmith was always fas- adopted the child. cinated by such creatures of fantasy: “she only Patricia claimed to have childhood amnesia, truly desired women who came from the kind a state that is usually connected with child- of social, cultural and intellectual ranking to hood trauma, and in fact she suspected that she which she aspired.” She even stalked them. had been sexually abused at her grandmother’s When she was working as a temporary sales- house. Bradford suggests, however, that the woman at Bloomingdale’s one Christmas sea- amnesia might possibly have been invented son, for example, she was deeply struck by a as a method for Highsmith to place her life mink-clad blonde and tracked her down to her within her own artistic control: “one has to home. Unlike the situation in her 1952 novel, wonder,” he writes with justifiable frustration, The Price of Salt, which was inspired by this “if Highsmith intuited [invented?] childhood incident, she and the strange woman would amnesia as a means of rewriting her past.” never actually meet, let alone have a romance. Certain salient facts, however, still stood out (Times being what they were, Highsmith had to her. “My [sexual] character was essentially to publish The Price of Salt under a pseud- made before I was six,” she recalled, as well onym; much later, after its true authorship as that from the age of eight or so she had had been finally revealed, it was adapted as entertained “evil thoughts of murder of my the 2015 movie Carol.) stepfather”: “I learned to live with a grievous As Bradford points out, “there are eerie and murderous hatred very early on.” resemblances between the real-life stalker, Patricia spent much of her childhood shut- Highsmith, and her horrid creation, Bruno” tling back and forth between Texas and New (the psychopath in Strangers on a Train). High- York City; at one point the Highsmiths tem- smith, he continues, “spent much of her life as

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a writer siphoning the emotional catastrophes coma. But as Highsmith aged, her vision grew she prompted, encountered, and experienced,” even darker, perhaps because, as she remarked using alcohol as a way of heightening her al- in a cahier, she regarded the vast majority of ready provocative behavior. The two most humans as “morons.” One of her lovers mused: memorable characters in her fiction, Tom “If she hadn’t had her work, she would have Ripley and Charles Anthony Bruno (whose been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics’ name was changed to Bruno Anthony in the home. . . . It took a while for me to figure this Hitchcock film), are almost certainly memo- out, but all those strange characters haunting rable because of the author’s personal iden- other people, and thinking and writing about tification with their obsessions: like Bruno, them—they were her. She was her writing.” who wishes profoundly for his father’s death, Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires is certainly an Highsmith fantasized for years about murder- engrossing book, though it leaves a rancid taste ing her stepfather, and, like both Bruno and in the reader’s mouth. But why was it written? Tom, she equated murder with love. “Murder,” There are already two Highsmith biographies she wrote, “is a kind of making love, a kind out there: Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: of possessing.” A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) and Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires is not a criti- Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith cal biography, but the connections between (2009)—and this for a writer who has been Highsmith’s life and works are made clear. dead only twenty-five years. Bradford’s intro- In the years after college Highsmith began duction doesn’t provide a justification, and writing, supporting herself primarily by pen- one suspects that, 2021 marking Highsmith’s ning scripts for the Sangor-Pines Comic Shop. centenary, he approached, or was approached (Bradford suggests that the spare comic-book by, Bloomsbury to produce a volume in honor style might have had some influence on her of the occasion. Bradford, a British academic, prose.) She drew well, and even considered is a prolific writer who specializes in literary bi- becoming an artist rather than a writer. In 1944 ography, having authored lives of John Milton, she moved to a pleasant villa in Taxco, Mexico Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, both Kingsley and (Bradford rightly wonders where she got the Martin Amis, Ernest Hemingway, and George funds to pay for it), and wrote a novel, The Orwell. Trying to separate fact from fiction in Click of the Shutting, which was “irredeemably the Swiss archives might have made Highsmith bad” but whose plot foreshadowed the central the most difficult subject he’s taken on. His relationships in Strangers on a Train and The most serious handicap in the attempt is his ob- Talented Mr. Ripley. The first of her twenty- vious unfamiliarity with the American scene: two published novels, Strangers on a Train, he compares the lifestyle in The Philadelphia appeared in 1952. Story with “those of the degenerate Regency From this point on, with an assured income, Aristocracy,” calls Manhattan’s 103rd Street Highsmith spent much of her time abroad: “midtown,” says that Astoria “is a suburb of in Positano (which she wonderfully recreated New York” and that Barnard College is “in as Mongibello in The Talented Mr. Ripley); in Central New York, adjacent to Broadway.” France, although she hated the French; in Simply asking an American reader to have a Switzerland, where she died of lung cancer and look at the book prior to publication would aplastic anemia in 1995, mourned by few. She have cleaned up this sort of thing. had always been dreadful: once she had looked But, at his best, Bradford can demonstrate on as a distraught lover washed down an over- real psychological savvy. Speaking of High- dose of Veronal with several large martinis, smith’s avowed anti-Semitism, for instance: then left her there on the bed and went out to dinner with friends, returning at 2:00 a.m., I suspect . . . that Highsmith as the foul anti- finally deigning to call an ambulance when Semite was in part an invention. Like Ripley she failed to wake the hapless Ellen from her she reflected horrible elements of her creation

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honestly enough but she deliberately exagger- zeppelins were capable of handling substantial ated them as an excuse in provocation and self- numbers of passengers. Only in the mid-1930s loathing. Highsmith knew that those closest to could airplanes do the same. her were appalled by her views and her expres- And while zeppelins were slower than air- sions of them, which is why she continued them. planes, they had a much greater range because She was genuinely anti-Semitic, but in the same they didn’t need to expend energy just to stay sense that Ripley was a genuine, real murderer. aloft. Large ones could easily cross the Atlantic Ocean, for instance. And they were much faster The key word here, I think, is “self-loathing.” than the other means of transatlantic passenger Was she born this way, or had the conditions service, ocean liners. A zeppelin could cross the of her early life created the pathology? For all Atlantic in only two and a half days, twice as fast of his assiduous archival detective work, Brad- as rms Queen Mary, the fastest ship of her day. ford has not succeeded in finding the answer. The dirigible had other undeniable ad- vantages over the airplane as well. Unlike the cramped, uncomfortable space in early The air up there airplanes, airships were more like ocean lin- ers. They had cabins, commodious lounges, a Alexander Rose well-stocked dining room and bar, sometimes Empires of the Sky: even a grand piano (made of aluminum to Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s save weight). They even had smoking rooms, Epic Duel to Rule the World. pressurized to ensure safety, where the stew- Random House, 624 pages, $32 ard would light people’s cigars and cigarettes with a device like an old-fashioned automobile reviewed by John Steele Gordon cigarette lighter to avoid a flame. Because we now live so deep in the age of Flying has been a dream of humankind since the airplane, all that most of us know about time immemorial. As E. Y. Harburg wrote, airships is the spectacular end of the largest and “Somewhere over the rainbow,/ Blue birds fly/ grandest of them, the Hindenburg, on May 6, Birds fly over the rainbow/ Why then, oh why, 1937. Transatlantic zeppelin landings had be- can’t I?” Only at the dawn of the twentieth come routine by then and therefore no longer century was the dream of flying finally real- newsworthy. But, fortuitously, a cameraman ized. And, as hardly anyone now remembers, was there to capture riveting footage of its it was realized twice. landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey. For a third of a century, the two means Bad weather had made the ship seriously of flying—heavier-than-air (airplanes) and late, and the weather was still threatening lighter-than-air (airships)—vied to become thunderstorms as the Hindenburg maneuvered the dominant form of air transportation. This towards its mooring mast. Suddenly the great now forgotten contest has been brought back airship burst into flames—probably due to to vivid life in Empires of the Sky by Alexan- a gas leak and a build up of static electricity der Rose, the author of several well-regarded because of the weather—and crashed to the works of history, including Washington’s Spies: earth, killing a third of its passengers and crew. The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (2006). The footage was shown around the world in Despite a ridiculously over-the-top subtitle, newsreels and can be seen online in dozens of this new work is well worth the reader’s time. documentaries and docudramas, as well as in The dirigible, also called a zeppelin after the raw footage itself. its inventor, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, a The United States at the time had a mo- German aristocrat, had many advantages over nopoly on non-flammable helium, thanks to the airplane in the early days of flying. For natural gas wells in Oklahoma that were par- one thing, it evolved from a proof-of-concept ticularly rich in the first of the noble gases. Had to a mature technology much faster. By 1910, the United States been willing to sell helium

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to Nazi Germany, the disaster wouldn’t have day call light bulb–shaped and could not be happened. But America wouldn’t, afraid it steered. Untethered, they were at the will of might have military applications. And so the the wind and thus had no practical use other Germans had to use hydrogen. than entertaining people brave enough to take Hydrogen has the advantages of being both a ride. (Steiner had been in the Union Army cheaper and able to lift 18 percent more weight balloon corps, intended for observing enemy than the same volume of helium. But it has the movements, but it had been disbanded when fatal disadvantage of being highly flammable, it yielded little actionable intelligence.) and the end of the Hindenburg spelled the end But Steiner told Zeppelin about how he in- of the airship as a serious rival to the by then tended to revolutionize ballooning by chang- rapidly developing airplane. ing the shape of balloons to one more like a Indeed, no more dirigibles, with their metal cigar, with a large rudder at the back end to framework and vast sacks of gas, were ever com- help steer it. Zeppelin flew with Steiner the pleted. Today what you see hovering over major next day and would not fly again for more sporting events are blimps, essentially large, than forty years, but the idea of a practical, helium-filled, powered balloons. Today’s Good- freight- and passenger-carrying airship did year blimps are 192 feet long, dwarfed by the not leave him. Hindenburg, which was more than four times As early as 1874 he had produced the es- that length. The Hindenburg remains to this sential design of a dirigible, with a rigid metal day the largest flying object ever constructed. frame and huge gas bags inside an outer skin. But he had to wait until nearly the end of the Rose tells this tale through the eyes of three nineteenth century for two new technologies main characters, Graf von Zeppelin, Hugo to emerge that made the dirigible possible: Eckener—who ran the Zeppelin company for cheap aluminum, which weighs less than half much of its existence—and the American Juan what steel weighs, and the internal combustion Trippe, who built Pan American World Air- engine, which had a much higher power-to- ways into a major airline. It was the last two weight ratio than the steam engine. who would battle for dominance in air travel Zeppelin’s first dirigible, the LZ-1, flew in in the 1920s and ’30s. 1900, three years before the Wright Broth- Graf von Zeppelin was born in 1838 in the ers successfully flew an airplane. Zeppelin, a Grand Duchy of Baden in what is now the military man with the rank of four-star gen- southwest of Germany. Educated by private eral, foresaw military use for them, but the tutors and at the University of Stuttgart, where German army was not very interested at the he studied engineering, he joined the army of time. The military did, however, commandeer Württemberg, one of the many still-sovereign zeppelins at the outbreak of World War I and states that would form modern Germany in 1871. ordered many more from Zeppelin’s company In 1863 he took leave in order to be a military for bombing campaigns against England and observer in the American Civil War. Unim- France. But while they created considerable pressed with the Union Army, Zeppelin toured panic at first (they were dubbed “baby-killers”), the upper Midwest, thereby missing the battle they were very inaccurate and once defenses of Gettysburg. It was in St. Paul, Minnesota, were developed, such as search lights, they that he encountered a balloonist and fellow proved too vulnerable to attack to be useful German, John Steiner, who offered rides to as bombers. people for a fee. Zeppelin took his first balloon Zeppelin, an aristocrat to his fingertips, flight with Steiner, in a tethered balloon that thought using zeppelins for passenger travel gained its buoyancy from coal gas. a vulgar tradesman’s undertaking and had Steiner was grounded by winds on the little interest in the founding of the world’s day he met Zeppelin, and so he had plenty first airline, the Deutsche Luftschifffahrts- of time to talk to him about ballooning. Bal- Aktiengesellschaft (German for “German Air- loons at that time were what we would to- ship Travel Corporation”), known by its acro-

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nym, delag. But by the outbreak of World an apparently limitless future. Then, of course, War I, the company had transported 34,028 pay- came the Hindenburg disaster. ing passengers on 1,588 flights around Germany. Graf von Zeppelin died in 1917, and by that Juan Trippe was, on his father’s side, what his time Hugo Eckener was head of the company. generation would have called “well born.” His Born in northern Germany, he earned a doc- mother’s side was considerably more raffish, torate at the University of Leipzig in psychol- with a colorful line of crooks and gold diggers ogy, which he would later put to very good that Trippe was always at pains to conceal. His use marshaling public interest and support for maternal grandmother, Irish born, had mar- airships. But he became a journalist. Assigned ried Juan Pedro Terry as her second husband, to cover the first zeppelin flights, he criticized a Venezuelan of Irish ancestry, whose father the engineering, and Graf von Zeppelin sought owned the biggest sugar plantation in Cuba. It him out for advice and asked him to become a was after his step-grandfather that Juan Terry part-time publicist for the company. He soon Trippe was named, a name he hated. became deeply fascinated by airships and went Trippe was always closed-mouthed about to work for the company full time. He earned his background and business dealings (he kept his airship pilot’s license in 1911. a roll-top desk in his office which was always The Treaty of Versailles that ended World locked unless he was alone). And he cultivated War I forbade Germany from building any what Rose calls a “silky sneakiness.” Franklin large airships, and the two that the compa- Roosevelt—a Harvard man, of course, and a ny owned were given to France and Italy as shrewd judge of character—called him “the reparations. After much skillful lobbying by most fascinating Yale gangster I ever met” and Eckener, the company was allowed to build a “a man of all-yielding suavity who can be de- new zeppelin for the U.S. Navy in 1923, named pended on to pursue his own ruthless way.” the Los Angeles. In 1924, Eckener piloted it Trippe had a conventional wasp upbring- across the Atlantic to the naval air station at ing at the Hill School and Yale (St. Anthony’s Lakehurst, New Jersey, the first non-stop trans- Hall, Skull & Bones) and went to work on atlantic flight. Wall Street. But he was soon bored and he The strictures of the Versailles Treaty were was already fascinated by airplanes. He had loosened in 1927, and the company was able dropped out of Yale when the United States to build the Graf Zeppelin, modeled on the entered World War I to take flight training Los Angeles. It entered passenger service in from the Navy and was commissioned an 1928 (it was christened on what would have ensign in the Naval Reserve. The war ended been Zeppelin’s ninetieth birthday), operating before he saw combat, and he returned to Yale, mostly between Germany and Brazil, which graduating in 1921. had a large German population. In 1929, at the In 1923 he raised money from his Yale friends behest of William Randolph Hearst, it went and founded Long Island Airways, using nine around the world, making the first non-stop surplus Navy biplanes based on Coney Island crossing of the Pacific by air. It also went to to take passengers for rides along the beach. the Arctic on a scientific expedition, both times But there was only room for one passenger and piloted by Eckener. giving joyrides was no way to make a profit, These flights made Eckener a national hero especially as during the barnstorming era there in Germany, and he was considering running was lots of competition. He put in larger en- for president of the country until Paul von gines and moved the fuel tanks to the wings Hindenburg decided to seek another term. As to make room for a second passenger seat, but Eckener was adamantly anti-Nazi, when Hitler the airline shut down after only a few months. took power he was soon sidelined. But Ecken- Trippe studied the history of railroads and er in the previous sixteen years had succeeded shipping lines and came to three conclusions. in establishing that lighter-than-air passenger First he realized that an airline needed sub- service was a viable commercial enterprise with stantial capital to invest in the latest aircraft.

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Second, an airline had to be able to charge These new routes were made possible by enough to make a profit, and that could only the rapid increase in airplane capacity and be done if it had exclusive rights to a particular range in these years, pushed relentlessly by route. And third, the public had to be con- Trippe, especially for seaplanes that didn’t need vinced that airplanes were now a legitimate runways to take off and land, producing the form of transportation, not just something famed Pan Am clippers. By 1940, air travel by to take a joyride in. airplane was routine and growing quickly, the With his Yale friends, who numbered long battle with the airship already forgotten. Vanderbilts and Whitneys among them, capi- Whatever his personality defects, Juan tal was not a major problem. And a change Trippe was, undoubtedly, the most important in how airmail was carried solved the second single individual in the history of passenger problem. The Post Office had been running air travel. its own airmail service, and the railroads were Alexander Rose handles this complex story complaining about competing with the gov- with authority and very considerable skill, ernment. So the Kelly Act of 1925 provided making Empires of the Sky not only an enjoy- for four-year exclusive contracts with airlines able read but a deeply satisfying one as well. to carry airmail on various routes. And new government regulation of flying and airplanes quickly made flying much safer, greatly reduc- Sceptered & sovereign ing insurance rates (and ending the brief era of the barnstormers). Robert Tombs Rose goes into entertaining detail about the This Sovereign Isle: wily and often devious Trippe and his corpo- Britain In and Out of Europe. rate machinations as he maneuvered his way Allen Lane, 224 pages, £16.99 into becoming president of Pan American Air- ways. He had an agreement with the president reviewed by Simon Heffer of Cuba giving him exclusive landing rights, and he used that to force a merger of his Co- At 11:00 p.m. on December 31, 2020, the lonial Air Transport with Pan American, which United Kingdom of Great Britain and North- had the Key West–Havana mail contract but ern Ireland finally left the European Union, no landing rights in Cuba. forty-eight years after it had joined its prede- The Post Office had specified that the route cessor organization, the European Economic had to become operational no later than Octo- Community. The United Kingdom left four ber 19, 1927, or the contract would be canceled and a half years after the binary referendum that very afternoon. Heavy rains had made the of June 23, 2016, when it had voted by 51.9 runway at Key West unusable, and his first percent to 48.1 to do so, and eleven months plane had not been delivered. But Trippe saw after embarking on a “transition” while the in the contract that it didn’t specify that the United Kingdom and the European Union plane had to take off from a runway. He man- sought a post-departure “deal”—a term cover- aged to find a seaplane and, in the nick of ing not only tariff-free trade, but also coop- time, fulfill the contract’s requirements. Pan eration on matters such as security and crime Am was in business. and regulation. The European Union, which is already economically moribund, was worried Over the next decade, Pan Am expanded that without continuing to impose a level of through the Caribbean and South America unnecessary regulation on the United King- (Trippe wisely took along the already legend- dom, the departing country would obtain a ary Charles Lindbergh when he personally ne- competitive advantage over the bloc. When a gotiated rights with various South American deal was finally concluded on Christmas Eve, countries). He also began trans-Pacific opera- both sides, inevitably, claimed it as a triumph. tions in the late Thirties. The document enumerating the “deal” runs to

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1,266 pages: it will be some time before it is in the view of the European Union’s British absolutely clear what price has been paid for opponents especially, a European superstate Britons’ ability to drink champagne, claret, or federation. Many of Tombs’s arguments and chianti tariff-free for the indefinite future. have been well rehearsed, but are no less valid One of the first details to rise from the verbiage for that: Britain had lost its empire but hadn’t was that the United Kingdom’s ability to have found a role; the British, who had spent what complete control of its own waters for fishery money they had after the Second World War purposes—one of the most outrageous sur- on new housing and consumer goods first and renders of sovereignty made upon joining the on investment last, found themselves lagging bloc—had been postponed until the summer behind both the quality and productivity of of 2026. Given the typically inflated rhetoric European enterprises, notably those run by the of Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, recently defeated Germans. When Britain first about how there would be no surrender of tried to join what was then called the Com- the fisheries, it appears that at least one defeat, mon Market, in 1962–63—with the attempt albeit temporary, has been sustained. famously, or notoriously, vetoed by General Robert Tombs is one of Britain’s most emi- de Gaulle—senior ministers knew very well nent historians, though one who has spent that the organization was more than the simple his distinguished career at Cambridge Uni- trading bloc that Harold Macmillan and others versity studying the history of France. Mar- had presented it to the public as being. The ried to a Frenchwoman and, as he says in this Treaty of Rome was clear about the goal of book, a citizen of the Republic by marriage, ever-closer union; it was clear, too, to those he can hardly be accused of the ignorance or not befuddled by idealism, that the surrenders the xenophobia with which most advocates of sovereignty—and therefore of democratic of Britain’s leaving the European Union find power—demanded would not be acceptable to their reputations tarred. Tombs himself ad- the British public if they were widely known. mits that he came close to voting “Remain” Ironically, they did not become widely in 2016; ultimately he was swayed by a belief known until after Britain had joined, and in- that the European Union was a fundamen- deed until well after the first referendum on tally anti-democratic institution (which it is), continued membership was held in 1975, when but also by the admission of one of his fellow the vote was two-to-one to stay in. There was a Cambridge dons that the economic damage passionate anti–Common Market movement, to the country would be negligible, requiring whose earliest and most articulate visionary only a “readjustment.” His new book draws, to was Enoch Powell, who curiously barely rates a begin with, on his superlative single-volume mention in Tombs’s otherwise comprehensive version of the Island Story, The English and survey. The arguments that were advanced in Their History, published in 2014, as he outlines the 2016 “Leave” campaign were essentially the relationship between Britain and Europe in the same arguments Powell was putting for- the couple of millennia since the Romans ar- ward as early as 1969, and they were especially rived. He describes This Sovereign Isle: Britain powerful in the alternative anti-EU campaign In and Out of Europe as a sort of appendix to of 2016, called “Leave.EU,” fronted by Nigel that magnum opus, which indeed it is. Farage. Tombs’s unwise disregard of Leave.EU is the only serious flaw or omission in his Having detailed the essential apartness of book. Farage brought with him into the tent Britain from Europe throughout history, and a vast number of working-class voters, many notably its reluctance to become embroiled of whom owed an allegiance to the Labour in European affairs, he then examines what, Party, and who would have been less easily after the Second World War, drew the country persuaded by Boris Johnson or Michael Gove, into what was essentially a Franco-German the two cabinet-level Conservative politicians plan to create an economic entity in Europe who led the “official” Leave campaign. Tombs that widened and deepened until it became, advances a number of reasons why Leave nar-

64 The New Criterion February 2021 Books rowly won, and all are valid. But none is so Leave had to be witnessed to be believed. They valid as the one he never advances, which is had insulted the voters’ intelligence before the that Farage, through his direct line to those vote—claiming as part of what became known who felt left behind by Europe, was in the end as “Project Fear” that there would be an eco- primarily responsible for the Leave victory. nomic collapse after a Leave vote. This was orchestrated by George Osborne, then the Tombs devotes much of the last part of his Chancellor of the Exchequer (now, happily, book to discussing the appalling, and deeply no longer in parliament), and, as Tombs points anti-democratic and unconstitutional, activi- out, most of the Treasury’s prognostications ties of much of the political class (led by the were wildly exaggerated. Some Remainers then Speaker of the House of Commons) to simply went off the deep end: a Conserva- reverse or obstruct the democratic decision of tive MP, Heidi Allen, already renowned for 2016. The author has been trapped inside the not being the brightest light on the seafront, Remainer-dominated enclave of Cambridge, said to a public meeting that eight million one of only a handful of dons with the courage people would lose their jobs if Britain left—a and principles to argue for Britain’s leaving quarter of all those employed. Nobody took the sinking ship of the European Union and her seriously, and happily she, too, no longer reasserting its right to trade with the rest of sits in the House of Commons. the world as just one expression of its own Tombs is unequivocal about the effect this sovereignty. He tells of a typical Cambridge contempt for the public had in shaping the doyenne whom he met at a party, and who told outcome first of the referendum, and then of him she only understood what Leavers were on the 2019 general election, when an electorate about when she deigned to discuss the matter sick of having their democratic wishes bla- with her gardener and cleaning lady. I too wit- tantly disregarded fought back and elected an nessed the start of this at Cambridge, dining overwhelmingly pro-Leave parliament. But he on High Table in my own college the Friday may not, perhaps, go far enough in condemn- before the referendum, and again a fortnight ing these vindictive Remainers. Having lost later. In the first instance my dining compan- in 2016, many were incapable of asking why; ions burst out laughing when I said I thought yet their utter disregard for the wishes of the Leave would win the following Thursday—an people was a principal cause. Perhaps even assertion I made having spent weeks traveling worse, they were so used to getting their own with Farage’s campaign, and having witnessed way as an elite that they could hardly articu- the mobilization of the working class and vast late their outrage when the masses thought swaths of the Conservative grass roots. On my differently: it was as if they were asking how return there was no laughter—most dons were dare these people not do as they were told? in deep shock—but one had the decency to ask Tombs could enlighten them about 1789, and me why I had thought the outcome would perhaps he should. be as it was. I asked when he had last had a He ends by looking at how pitiful the Eu- conversation about politics with his bedder ropean Union’s reaction to the covid-19 pan- —the woman who cleaned his rooms in the demic was and draws the right conclusions college—and he took my point with grace. about what this says about the organization Many others did not. A very senior former post-Brexit. Many of its constituent econo- civil servant told my college’s High Table that mies are basket cases, and even those that autumn, when dining as a guest, that the civil profit from the European Union because of service would stop “it.” Certainly some made an artificially low exchange rate—Germany, a heroic attempt to do just that, which was notably—cannot afford to rescue some that not least why Theresa May’s premiership was are in trouble. Italy is the foremost example, such a disaster for her and for the country. The and what no one yet has the guts to admit is disdain and contempt with which the British that nothing will be put right there, or in sev- elite chose to treat the 17.4 million who voted eral other similarly afflicted countries, without

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those economies leaving the Eurozone and though the facts—such as London’s death being allowed a devalued currency. This crisis by kidney failure—were amply established. cannot be kicked like the proverbial can down So well does Dunkle present her case for a the road forever. Tombs also reflects on the revised biography of Charmian that she per- Chinese steamroller, the real challenge of the haps overlooks what Stone or any biographer decades to come. had to contend with. Like other widows who Some years ago one of Britain’s leading behave as keepers of the flame, Charmian had historians of the seventeenth century, Blair a vision of her husband she wanted to preserve Worden, wrote a superb book, Roundhead for posterity. As Dunkle points out, in Charm- Reputations, in which he traced political and ian’s own biography of her husband, The Book class divisions still apparent in twentieth- of Jack London (1921), she rearranged certain century England back to the civil wars of 1640s. events and took liberties that no biographer One question all Britons must ponder is for adhering to the facts could condone. Stone, how many generations the query will be raised for all his faults, would have had a hard time of whether a person’s forebears were Leavers with Charmian even if he had chosen not to or Remainers. The divide is that fundamental, be so high-handed and intent on forcing the and its legacy will be around for a lifetime or evidence to fit the story he wanted to tell. two yet. Tombs’s is a first, and rather good, But Stone is a good foil for an honest and draft of this part of British history; others in scrupulous biographer like Dunkle, who gets the years ahead will make increasingly interest- on with her story in a lively fashion, feeding ing reading, especially if—as Tombs and many our appetite for the fascinating account that of us expect will be the case—the future is far supplants Stone’s melodrama. Although Jack brighter than the elites, choking on their sour London, the writer as adventurer, might grapes, will ever be prepared to admit. overwhelm anyone else’s own story, Dunkle manages to depict her subject in the round, as Charmian saw herself and as others responded Appreciating idiosyncrasies to her. Here is a typical passage: “Charmian was well aware that her behavior—wearing Iris Jamahl Dunkle pants, riding astride, and traveling around the Charmian Kittredge London: world in a small yacht—must seem mad to Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer. most people, and this gave her the ability to University of Oklahoma Press, appreciate the idiosyncrasies of others.” 312 pages, $26.95 Charmian called her husband her “mate,” and that typified the marriage, which thrived reviewed by Carl Rollyson on a reciprocal relationship of writers sharing their work often aboard ships sailing around Not often does a biography begin with a the world. Charmian typed up London’s sto- villain—a biographer no less. In a rousing ries and articles, edited them, and sometimes opening, Iris Jamahl Dunkle has Irving Stone added passages at his request. He did the same explode on the scene, romancing Jack Lon- for her, acknowledging her talent and encour- don’s widow, Charmian Kittredge London, aging her all along the way. She forgave him and dancing her into cooperating with his de- his numerous infidelities but also stood up for sire to write a biography, Sailor on Horseback herself, never allowing his work to overwhelm (1938), which casts the woman as the femme hers, except on occasions when, desperately ill fatale that, in effect, drives her husband Jack and despondent, he needed her full attention. to suicide. Dunkle’s book might well be titled Even so, on trips to New York, for example, “Justice to Charmian.” Stone’s life of Lon- she refused to accompany him because she had don is really a biographical novel. He went her own writing to do at home. He objected, in search of an archive in the London home tried to wear her down, but she would not that served his sensationalistic purposes, even relent, remaining loyal to her own ambition.

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Dunkle carefully develops Charmian’s back don’s death, which came after several warnings story, how she grew up with a mother who was to stop drinking, change his diet, and reduce also a writer, and with a controlling Aunt Netta his hectic schedule. He became increasingly who took over after Charmian’s mother died irritable and sometimes irrational. Charmian, and her father proved incapable of providing in Dunkle’s unsparing account, never nagged a stable home. Netta had an open marriage her husband but mostly left him to his own that seems to have provided an example for devices, loving him all the same and rational- the unconventional Charmian, who had af- izing, perhaps, that some kind of intervention fairs with married men—most notably Harry on her part would have made no difference in Houdini—without any qualms. her husband’s pell-mell careening into disaster. Charmian enthusiastically joined Jack Lon- Sometimes Dunkle wants to believe she don in a quest to sail the world, cut short by knows more than a biographer has a right to his own ill health and his self-treatment with a claim, resorting to what Charmian “must have mercury-based medicine that most likely led to felt” and what “must have been.” But these the kidney failure that killed him. She reveled are minor lapses in a well-told narrative and in their singularity and fame and in the oppor- meticulously researched study. tunities to visit remote islands that had seen few Western women. Charmian took these exotic locales in stride, and she later wrote Miraculous Mozart about them in her best-selling The Log of the Snark, named after the sailboat they built for Jan Swafford the journey. Mozart: The Reign of Love. Harper, 832 pages, $45 Dunkle’s biography is as much a cultural study as it is the story of a singular woman reviewed by John Check ahead of her times. Stone could make her out to be an opportunist because of her aggres- The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart be- sive lifestyle and manner that fit none of the gins with the “miracle of January 24, 1761.” narratives of her time. Here is another fine This is Jan Swafford’s apt phrase, found in his paragraph that reports on rather than editorial- new biography, Mozart: The Reign of Love, for izes on how Charmian got slotted out of the what happened one night in Salzburg when a picture during a visit to the Solomon Islands: four-year-old boy sat down at the harpsichord in his parents’ house and began to play. His An iconic photo of Charmian was taken on Au- sister Nannerl, age nine, had been practicing gust 16, 1908, when she visited a women’s market a scherzo, and he was taken with its lively that was being held on the beach. With a revolver rhythms. When she finished, he wanted to give strapped to her hip, she stands smiling at the it a try. Their father, Leopold, a composer, vio- camera among a group of naked native women. linist, and music pedagogue, was astounded Later, when Jack tried to include this photograph by what happened next: the boy immediately in his book The Cruise of the Snark, the editors caught the gist of the piece. Within half an at Macmillan refused to publish the photograph hour, despite being unable to read music and because they found it obscene—not because the having had no previous harpsichord instruc- natives are naked but because Charmian, a white tion, he had learned it by heart. woman, wasn’t disgusted by their nakedness. Swafford, a composer and veteran biogra- pher, capably guides classical music enthusi- Dunkle’s biography is a rediscovery of a history asts through Mozart’s life from its miraculous that the standards of her subject’s time could first act to its denouement. Mozart was born not permit to be seen. in Salzburg in 1756. The achievements of his The bravura beginning of this biography is early years defy comprehension. At five he matched by the harrowing details of Jack Lon- composed his first piece, a minuet, and more

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quickly followed. These earliest works were From 1773 to 1781, Mozart was centered transcribed into notation (and lightly edited) mainly in Salzburg. A prodigy no longer, by Leopold, but, Swafford emphasizes, the he turned to the writing of concertos, often elder Mozart did little more than tidy up loose placing himself in the starring role. He taught, ends, ensuring that what was characteristic tailoring his instruction to the strengths of his in his son’s art was preserved intact. Leopold pupils. He fell in love with the beautiful so- led Wolfgang through a series of composition prano Aloysia Weber, only later to marry her exercises, after which the boy’s “wild imagina- sister Constanze. All the same, he chafed at tion” took over, filling in gaps and making the the relative confines of Salzburg. No irritant most unusual of connections. was greater than his employer, the new arch- In 1762, Leopold took Wolfgang and Nan- bishop, Hieronymus Colleredo. Colloredo nerl to Vienna. So polished was her playing, was a proud progressive who treated those so impressive were his pieces and improvisa- beneath him with contempt. Bristling at be- tions, that they caused a sensation. A lucra- ing considered a servant, Mozart sought to tive sensation: the money Leopold received extricate himself from the archbishop’s grasp, during this relatively short visit exceeded searching in vain for employment elsewhere. his yearly salary as a musician in the court Now that the course of his career was no longer orchestra of the archbishop of Salzburg, the being dictated by his father, Mozart, writes openhanded Sigismund von Schrattenbach. Swafford, “proceeded to bungle nearly every This doesn’t begin to take into account the opportunity that presented itself.” He showed gifts showered on the children. The next ten up established composers, complained when years were dominated by tours, the longest asked to perform on inadequate instruments, of which, lasting some three and a half years and couldn’t quite conceal his disgust at the and including visits to the music capitals of poor taste of potential patrons. Things came Europe—Paris, London, Amsterdam, and to a head in 1781. Colloredo was so sick of Mo- others—came to be known as the “grand zart’s scheming and insolence that he had him tour.” The engineer of these vast productions booted out the door. Out the door, Swafford was Leopold. As he wrote of a later tour of adds, and “into his glory.” Italy, he planned for it as a general plans for Mozart’s glory came during the ten years of a military campaign, going so far as to refer 1781–91, when he called Vienna home. Among to his son as “my little soldier.” its fruits are his last half-dozen symphonies. The final three of these, his very best, were Whether at home in Salzburg or, more often composed in about six weeks. Paying hom- than not, on the road, Mozart composed at a age to Haydn, the father of the string quartet, furious rate. Before the age of ten, he wrote his Mozart published the six “Haydn” quartets in earliest symphonies, most of them tidy three- 1785. Swafford quotes the dedication, in which movement affairs, and orchestral serenades. Mozart warmly reveals how much the elder His first Mass dates from his teens. More am- composer’s “approbation” meant to him. The bitiously, he began to compose operas, the seventeen piano concertos of the Vienna pe- genre for which he would in time set the bar. riod, Swafford writes, were “more substantial, As commissions began to come his way, he bigger in sound . . . more nearly symphonic worked to refine his craft. “At sixteen,” accord- than any before.” Two of these, the K. 449 and ing to Swafford, “Mozart was already one of the K. 453, are dedicated to his piano student, the finest of melodists, but more important, the virtuosa Barbara Ployer. he was already creating art capable of making And then there are the operas, especially life sweeter, more poignant, more intense.” the three with librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Within a year, Mozart wrote what Swafford The Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte, and Don considers his first “unforgettable” symphony, Giovanni. The treatment of these works is a Symphony No. 25 in G minor. He was now a highlight of the book. Take Figaro. Swafford mature composer. traces its development from the 1778 play by

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Beaumarchais that mocked the excesses and And everything in its place abuses of the aristocracy. Mozart assigned Da Ponte the task of fashioning a libretto from the Judith Flanders play. Da Ponte, it becomes clear, was rather A Place for Everything: The Curious an operatic figure himself. Jewish by birth, a History of Alphabetical Order. convert to Catholicism, an ardent student of Basic Books, 352 pages, $30 languages, a onetime priest who gave in— completely in—to the pleasures of the flesh, Da reviewed by Anthony Daniels Ponte reduced the number of characters and simplified the plot, endowing the story with a So accustomed are we to alphabetical order, briskness and naturalness that suited Mozart’s and so much do we take it for granted, that we purpose to a T. Swafford notes the contribu- assume it is an entirely natural way of ordering tions of the soprano Nancy Storace, whom he things rather than a means of classification that calls “the soul of the first production,” and the had to be invented. A moment’s reflection, tenor Michael Kelly, who talked the composer though, ought to be sufficient to persuade into accepting his stuttering delivery in the sex- us that alphabetical order is not a synthetic a tet from the third act. This opera gave Mozart priori judgment, à la Kant. In addition to the enormous satisfaction. Not long after the 1786 fact that people whose system of writing is premiere in Vienna, he wrote a friend about not alphabetic have nevertheless managed to the production in Prague. “[H]ere they talk order things successfully, to judge by their level about nothing but Figaro. Nothing is played, of civilization, it is obvious that alphabetical sung or whistled but Figaro. Nothing is draw- order is something that we have to learn to ing like Figaro. Nothing, nothing but Figaro.” employ rather than know by instinct, though “Figaro,” adds Swafford, “is as close to perfect I admit to having no recollection whatever of as Mozart ever came, which is to say as close how or when I learned to employ it. as opera ever came.” Such order has since become second nature The author of biographies of Beethoven, to me, as it is to everyone else of my acquain- Brahms, and Charles Ives, Swafford is a fluent tance, which is why, before reading this book, I writer with a sharp eye for detail. As he states had never considered its history. Whatever has in the introduction to the present book, “I am not always existed has an origin story, however, primarily a composer, and I write biographies and it was a clever idea of the social historian of composers from that point of view.” The Judith Flanders to write that story, in a book amount of musical analysis the book contains entitled A Place for Everything. Without in the is substantial—for non-specialists, perhaps too least meaning to, she makes us—or me—feel substantial. While examples set out in notation slightly foolish for never having thought about are absent, the more readers know about the it before. technical side of music, the better. For anyone who has long taken alphabeti- cal order for granted, it will surely come as a Mozart’s life came to an end with a miraculous surprise that the history of its development last act. The Magic Flute, the clarinet concerto, was so tortuous and took so long. One cannot “Ave Verum Corpus,” the beginnings of the point to an Archimedes of alphabetical order Requiem—these were among the immortal who had a sudden flash of inspiration in the works of 1791. Mozart died early that Decem- bath, or library; there was no bibliographical ber. He was thirty-five years old. “The gods, na- Kekulé who dreamed of alphabetical order as ture, whatever it was that made Mozart,” writes the organic chemist is said to have dreamed Swafford, “had indifferently created a miracle, of the benzene ring. and indifferently let it be erased long before its Alphabetical order developed incrementally. time”; “[T]he gods do not care.” He is wrong. The author tells us that the scrolls in the Al- The gods do care: who else could have given exandrian library were divided first by subject us the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? but were then stored according to the first

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letter—though whether this was of the title, indexing took hold, but initially only with the author, or a further subdivision of the first-letter alphabetical order. subject we do not know. Furthermore, alpha- There was ideological resistance to alpha- betical order was by first letter only, all As, Bs, betical order, one of the last objectors being etc. being lumped together with no further Coleridge. The hierarchical way of arrang- alphabetical ordering. We would suppose that ing books pointed to a stable worldview; the once the first step to alphabetical ordering was method symbolized the great chain of being taken, it would be obvious that universal al- which gave order and meaning to the universe. phabetical ordering would follow as the night Alphabetical order, by contrast, was arbitrary, the day: Austen before Austin, for example. symbolizing the one-damned-thing-after- But this was not the case. It took hundreds of another view of life. In English, ants come years for the final step to be taken. before bees, but in French, ants come after Like so much else—at least as I was taught bees; which, then, was higher or lower in the history—the notion of alphabetical order, great chain of being? such as it had previously existed, was lost in Alphabetical order reduced the sense of hi- the Dark Ages, and revived only slowly. Both erarchy, even though there is a natural human books and written documents were uncom- tendency for people to think that what comes mon, particularly back when individuals, not first, starting with the letter A, is more impor- teams of scribes, copied books. Parchment was tant and better than what starts with the letter not a medium suitable for dashing off quick B and so forth. (Nowhere is a C mark in an notes. A collection of two hundred fifty books examination higher than a B.) Buyers of sec- counted as very large, but it was well within ondhand books will have noticed a tendency the capacity of any custodian of them to put for hand-written annotations to become more his hand on any of them, so convenience of infrequent and die out altogether the further access was not a problem. on in the book they go. Nevertheless, they were put in order, though Of course, there are ways of indicating im- a hierarchical one. First came the Gospels, then portance in a classification other than where a the Acts of the Apostles, then the Church fa- thing classified comes in the order. Length or thers, commentaries on the Gospels, etc., and elaboration of entry in an encyclopedia is a tell- then profane literature if any. ing clue to the importance of a subject (though As books became more numerous and bu- we should remember that importance is not a reaucracy grew in size, a better—which is to say natural quality, and requires a human mind to more convenient—means of classification was ascribe it). Thus “aardvark” is not more impor- necessary. Documents that were stored in date tant than “Aaron,” the brother of Moses, just order were not easy to refer to if there were because it is found earlier in the encyclopedia. many of them and dates were uncertain. Once As the author points out, the salience of the number of books surpassed the ability of alphabetical listing has declined with digitaliza- any one person to locate them in a collection, tion. To look up something on Wikipedia, I some other means had to be found. More- don’t have to know where it is stored relative over, when books were few, scholars—who to anything else: I just type in the name of were also few—were expected to be able to the object of my inquiry and up comes the find their place in any book they wanted to answer. Try as I might not to allow Wikipedia refer to, much as advocates in court are now to make judgments for me, the length of the expected to have mastered the papers in a case entry affects my estimation of the importance (and which they often do to a quite admirable of the subject that I have looked up. extent), or a Koranic scholar knows the whole of the Koran by heart. But this was no longer I am not qualified to say whether the author’s possible when books became numerous, sub- account of the development of alphabetical ject matter more diverse, and cross-referencing order is accurate or her interpretations of the more difficult and sophisticated. The idea of evidence, much of which is very arcane, at least

70 The New Criterion February 2021 Books to 99.99 percent of a general readership, are of Europe, but the battle for the soul of civi- reasonable. I wish that she had not used the lization raged on: in classrooms and lecture odious, weasely, and absurd—but now very halls, on the airwaves and the conference cir- widespread—“B.C.E.” for “B.C.” and “C.E.” for cuits, in press and parliament, throughout the “A.D.,” surely a manifestation of modern ideo- Cold War and beyond. Having plumbed the logical mania. I should be interested to know depths of barbarism, Europe saw itself in a whether the author chose to do so herself, or new light—or twilight, rather. For the West, whether it was imposed upon her by sub-editors it was the dawn of a new, democratic age of with the mentality of Soviet apparatchiks. prosperity, led by the nations of the free world; The way in which we classify the things, for the Communist East, it was the dusk of people, and events in the world is very impor- “late capitalism,” of a dying imperial order that tant, but there is no way that is correct for all would soon be swept into oblivion. purposes. One of my projects in retirement is Paul Betts has made it his mission to in- to classify and catalogue my books, some thirty vestigate this post-war era, a lost world yet thousand of them, in time for my relict to sell still living in memory. His Ruin and Renewal: them to a bookseller at a knock-down price Civilizing Europe after World War II uses the merely to disembarrass herself and the house mutating notion of civilization as a framework of them. How do I classify them? Alphabetical to examine Europe in the period during which order plays a part, but only a part. Nobody it finally and irrevocably conceded global he- else looking at the books would understand gemony. His labors have divined new sources the way they are arranged. My classification, to irrigate the scorched earth of the Cold War an autobiography of sorts, is unique and dies landscape, from etiquette books that taught with me. West Germans how not to behave like Nazis to the literature produced by Marxist-Leninist anthropologists who envisaged Africa as a Same old story laboratory for socialist experimentation. An expert on Communist East Germany, Betts Paul Betts bends over backwards to be fair to the Soviets Ruin and Renewal: and their allies. The vivid vocabulary of the Civilizing Europe after World War II. West—“the free world,” say, “totalitarian” or Basic Books, 544 pages, $35 “evil empire”—is excluded. So are the crimes that gave rise to international communism. reviewed by Daniel Johnson The climax of the book is a chapter devoted to “World Civilization,” which is an illuminating The decline of civilization is as old as civiliza- —if occasionally rose-tinted—account of the tion itself. From Cassandra of Troy to Marx early years of unesco: the United Nations and Nietzsche, from Augustine of Hippo to Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organi- Rousseau and Gibbon, the lamentations of zation. Fueled by the hopes of the “greatest latter-day Jeremiahs echo down the centuries. generation,” a utopian cosmopolitanism was Never does the chorus of doom swell more very much part of the zeitgeist and, until many volubly than in the aftermath of conflict. The of the new global institutions were hijacked Great War enabled Oswald Spengler’s Decline by anti-Western forces, not the most ignoble of the West to reinvent the genre of cultural pes- of legacies. Alas, unesco, like other similar simism. The Second World War turned the dis- organizations, has been taken over by the very course of decline into a cascade of catastrophe. people it should shun. The United States, its No sooner had civilization seemingly sur- most generous donor, has twice left unesco vived destruction on an apocalyptic scale than because of its outrageous bias against Israel— the rival intelligentsias of East and West vied most recently in 2017 after the body designated with one another to dramatize its predica- Hebron’s Old City and Tomb of the Patri- ment. The guns fell silent on the battlefields archs, the second holiest site in Judaism, as a

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“Palestinian” World Heritage site thanks to its foundation with a focus on international re- “Islamic” history. As I write, it has just elected lations and global development, with strong to its Intergovernmental Committee for the institutional connections to the European Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage none Union. However academically prestigious, the other than the Syria Trust for Development, a dons of St Antony’s are anything but neutral front organization of Bashar al-Assad, run by on certain contentious issues such as migra- his wife Asma. The Assad regime is responsible tion, Brexit, or Trump. The college has this in for the destruction of most of Syria’s world common with the rest of Oxford and indeed heritage sites—which unesco is meant to pro- almost all universities in the United Kingdom, tect. Yet Betts writes blithely that unesco still United States, and European Union, but opin- carries on its work of preservation “under the ion there is probably even more unanimous banner of world civilization.” No: under the than elsewhere. Hence one might expect Pro- banner of a genocidal dictator. fessor Betts to frame his view of the recent past Much of the book is an admirable effort of through the prism of our present discontents. empirical research, rediscovering largely for- He does not disappoint. gotten episodes such as the trial and incarcera- In fact, the Bettsian view of the world in tion in 1949 of Cardinal Mindszenty, the Prince 2021 is at least as apocalyptic as any of the Primate of Hungary, by the newly established thinkers he invokes from the late 1940s. In Communist regime of Mátyás Rákosi. The key a final chapter, ominously titled “New Iron terms in the conceptual armory of liberalism, Curtains,” he paints an alarming picture of a such as human rights and international law, European continent in the grip of “right-wing acquired their modern meanings during the nationalism, tribal populism and anti-Muslim epoch of decolonization. Betts surveys the furi- xenophobia.” Half of all border walls built since ous controversies in which they emerged, cit- 1945 have been erected after the 9/11 attacks ing not only the leaders of movements against of 2001, he tells us, as “demands to protect colonialism, but defenders of empire, too. The civilization under threat have accompanied the latter included passionate advocates of the fortification of new Iron Curtains . . . . So there European idea: the Belgian Foreign Minister is a new specter haunting Europe, and it goes Paul-Henri Spaak, who ensured that colonies by the old name of civilization.” such as the Congo were included as “asso- Betts sets out his case with a familiar litany ciate members” of the European Economic of villains: “strong-arm leaders across the Community, as part of a revamped mission world—from Hungary to Turkey, Russia to civilisatice known as “Eurafrica.” Then there Egypt, China to the United States—have de- was Carl Schmitt, the former “crown jurist” ployed [civilization] to bolster their conser- of the Third Reich, who deplored the aban- vative political outlook.” His, too, is a vision donment of the Ius Publicum Europaeum, the of decline, from the universalist conception Eurocentric view of law and civilization rooted of civilization in the post-war era—associated in medieval Christendom. What would later with “science, comfort, rights, and protect- become the European Union—which is indeed ing civilians in war zones”—to one of “sharp a kind of secularized Holy Roman Empire— boundaries,” “religious fundamentalism,” and has had some strange bedfellows. “ethnic homogeneity.” Betts concedes that “the ongoing recasting Yet the animating idea behind this baggy of civilization is not simply a story of doom monster of a book is rather more polemical and gloom.” But where does he look for solace? than simply a post-war panorama of a divided Not to the West, but to “Chinese sociologists” Europe redefining its own civilization and who are said to be “rethinking the history of acknowledging others. Educated at Haver- ‘communist civilization.’ ” Others, “especially ford College and the University of Chicago, in China,” talk of “ecological civilization.” Betts Betts is now Professor of European History argues that the covid pandemic has “brought at St Antony’s College, Oxford—a graduate with it a renewed one-world planetary con-

72 The New Criterion February 2021 Books sciousness about the mortality of humanity Continental neighbors; this is one reason for and civilization itself.” He hopes for “concerted the absence from the Westminster Parliament action based on more universal values to pre- of extreme right-wing parties. serve the future of our species.” Nor is it the case that the West has erased the Historians are not obliged to be politically developing world from either its consciousness impartial, but it is an absurd anachronism to or its conscience. The levels of international describe as “new Iron Curtains” the attempts aid now flowing south, whether from govern- by European and American countries to pro- ments or ngos, dwarf anything seen in the tect themselves against illegal mass migra- post-war era. More significantly, the rising na- tion. “Iron Curtain” was of course coined by tions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have— Winston Churchill at Westminster College in with a few notorious exceptions— abandoned Fulton, Missouri, in 1946: it had everything to the socialist models foisted on them by Soviet- do with the emerging Cold War and nothing led initiatives from the 1950s to the 1970s. As to do with migration. The post-war era was a result, poverty has fallen dramatically. The one of huge population movements in Eu- danger now is the neo-colonial influence of rope, notably the expulsion of up to fourteen China, which has just extinguished the inde- million ethnic Germans, mainly from Poland pendence of Hong Kong, one of the first great and Czechoslovakia, to the western zones of post-war Asian success stories. If there is a Germany. Such east–west migrations contin- threat to law, liberty, and democracy in the ued until the erection of the Berlin Wall in world, it comes not from the West, but—as 1961. Large numbers of “guest workers” also in the Cold War—from Beijing and Moscow. arrived by invitation to provide cheap labor, but they had limited civil and political rights. Betts concludes his threnody to a lost era of The collective social security of the welfare progressive politics by calling as an improb- state requires a society with shared values. able witness the novelist V. S. Naipaul—who, Where those values are absent—as in more though Betts does not say so, was just as proud recent migrations from Africa, Asia, and the of his adoptive British citizenship as of his Middle East—the impact on host populations native Trinidad or his Indian ancestry. In a is bound to be different from that of earlier 1990 lecture in New York on “Our Universal upheavals within Europe. Despite the diffi- Civilization,” the writer paid tribute to “the culties of integrating some, mainly Muslim, extraordinary attempt of this civilization to migrants, attempts by European nation-states accommodate the rest of the world, and all to reassert sovereignty over their borders have the currents of that world’s thought.” Betts not been accompanied by serious ethnic or leaves open the question of whether Naipaul religious conflicts. But jihadist terrorism and was speaking of the past or the future. But the political Islam have undoubtedly made it hard- authority of a Nobel laureate is clearly being in- er to integrate some Muslim asylum seekers, voked to suggest that, in the thirty years since, particularly if they arrive undocumented and the “universal civilization” of which he spoke in large numbers. Yet the tensions that have has been occluded by “conservative” forces. inevitably arisen serve only to demonstrate I must declare an interest: Standpoint, a the robustness of civil liberties, democracy, monthly magazine that I founded and edited and the rule of law in Europe. The present for eleven years, was dedicated to the defense debate in France, in which President Macron of Western civilization. According to Professor is reasserting Republican secularism (“laïcité ”) Betts, this puts me in the reactionary camp. It against Islamist “separatism” is, thus far, quite doesn’t help that the values we spoke up for civilized. As for the notion that Brexit has un- are also those of the Enlightenment: expecting leashed a wave of racism and xenophobia in others to respect our liberties is “Eurocentric.” the United Kingdom: this canard has been re- Defining that civilization as Judeo-Christian futed many times. In reality, the British emerge only makes matters worse. The language of from polling data as more tolerant than their civilization renders its defenders suspect.

The New Criterion February 2021 73 Books

Yet a leading member of my editorial adviso- United States, Naipaul paid tribute: “This idea ry board was Naipaul. He read every issue and of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the often sent appreciative messages via his wife, attractiveness of this civilization to so many Nadira. He and I agreed implicitly on what we outside it or on its periphery.” That pursuit is meant by civilization. It was indeed, as he said “an elastic idea; it fits all men. . . . It cannot in that 1990 speech, universal—in the sense be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot gener- that it was open to all. But it owed everything, ate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and nevertheless, to the Western civilization that because of that, other more rigid systems in gave birth to it. His view of what it was to be the end blow away.” civilized, like the Manhattan Institute where he delivered it, was conservative: as in Mat- That prescient speech, given immediately after thew Arnold’s definition of culture, it was the the fall of the Berlin Wall and more than a best of what has been thought and said. As he decade before 9/11, explains rather well why said in that speech, his family had come from those who lament the decline and fall of West- India: “We were a people of ritual and sacred ern civilization are likely to be proved wrong. texts.” Original literary composition had no Naipaul would have rejected the nostalgia of place. Somehow, in Trinidad, “an idea of the liberals like Professor Betts for a lost golden high civilization connected with the [English] age of the mid-twentieth century. By the time language came to my father.” His father passed Naipaul died in 2018, he was reviled by the on the idea of being a writer, and Vidia real- progressive intelligentsia. No longer content ized that his vocation required him to move to to be merely a pioneer of postcolonial litera- England. Naipaul was deeply versed in what ture, he had become a voice in the wilderness, Goethe called Weltliteratur, the great books of or rather a defiant watchman standing guard all languages, but he chose the Anglosphere as over the civilization he loved. He loved it so his audience and Anglo-American literature as much, indeed, that he could be caustic about his frame of reference. He was a global version his heritage, even though this infuriated lib- of the English man of letters and identified erals. Asked why he left Trinidad, he replied: fiercely with the civilization that had made it “To join civilization.” But he always took seri- possible for him to be a writer. ously the threats from those who have always In his Manhattan speech, he reflected on rejected our universal civilization: the Islamists his travels in Muslim lands and on the con- and communists, the fanatics and totalitarians frontation between Islam and the “universal” of all stripes. His most quoted line remains: civilization created by the West. And then he “The world is what it is.” Only our civilization, recalled his hosts. Without even naming the embattled as it is, can redeem it.

Forthcoming in The New Criterion:

One hundred fifty years of “Demons” by Jacob Howland The long shadow of Baudelaire by Dana Gioia Chips Channon revisited by David Pryce-Jones The last libertines by James F. Penrose Turgenev’s liberalism by Gary Saul Morson

74 The New Criterion February 2021 Notebook Mario Bois’ Bureau de Musique by Charles Cronin

Of the dozens of family-run music publishers London. Here he sold first editions of scores, that flourished in Paris in the early twentieth and books about music, while working as- century, only a handful remain, including Edi- siduously on catalogues and bibliographies tions Enoch et Cie and Editions Lemoine. of editions of works by Gluck, Puccini, and Both of these houses, over one hundred and other musicians. Barzun described Hopkin- two hundred years old, respectively, have sur- son’s lifework as “exemplifying the tradition vived, in part, by specializing in the music of amateur scholarship—‘amateur’ meaning, of French composers, and by forging close of course, neither haphazard nor careless, but personal relationships with living musicians merely non-academic.” Without the baggage whose works they publish. In addition to of an academic training in music, “he retained selling print copies of their editions, they rent intellectual independence and full freedom instrumental parts of their published orches- for his imagination.” tral scores and charge fees when their editions Hopkinson documented 550 music publish- are used for public performances. Given the ers operating in Paris between 1700 and 1950. drastic decline of Paris’s once-vigorous print Unlike in Germany, where music publishers music publishing industry, musicians will be were distributed in cities throughout the heartened to learn that a relatively recent ad- country, in unitary-state France music pub- dition to this dwindling cadre of publishers, lishers were concentrated in Paris. Until the the eponymous Bureau de Musique Mario professionalization of the industry in the early Bois, is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. nineteenth century, French music publishing In 1979, Jacques Barzun wrote an introduc- houses were uncommonly promiscuous, offer- tion for the Da Capo Press reprint of Cecil ing, in addition to printed music, instruments, Hopkinson’s Dictionary of Parisian Music Pub- pictures, stationery, and in one case lingerie. lishers, self-published by the author in London Beginning in the early twentieth century, the in 1954. Even knowing Barzun’s extraordi- juggernaut of the music sound-recording in- narily catholic interests, his panegyric on the dustry gradually decimated the ranks of printed deeply obscure Hopkinson and his Dictionary music publishers worldwide. Several of the seems peculiar until one realizes how vital most prominent French music publishing Hopkinson’s earlier Berlioz Bibliography was houses, like Durand and Salabert, survived to Barzun’s magisterial two-volume treatment by consolidating. Even these houses ultimately of the composer, published in 1950. persevered only through acquisition by the Barzun describes how Hopkinson, loath to American conglomerate Universal Music, their apply his education in engineering to his fam- commercial significance now sadly inconse- ily’s construction business, established himself quential compared to that of the dozens of as the proprietor of First Editions Books in record labels generating Universal’s profits.

The New Criterion February 2021 75 Notebook

The ineluctable development of audio after a good deal of re-consulting maps, and re- recording technology, particularly in the tracing steps. On one occasion Bois, invariably latter half of the twentieth century, engen- gracious but undoubtedly chagrinned by my dered not only galloping musical illiteracy but unpunctual arrival, gave me a copy of his most also the nearly universal passive “consump- recent book, Beethoven et l’hymne de l’Europe, in- tion” of musical works from recorded per- scribing a dedication comprising a compliment formances. These developments devitalized followed by “et à la fois un homme insupport- hundreds of small music print publishers and able.” Liliane Segura-Marie, Bois’ soignée aide- sellers in European and American cities. At de-camp, always greeted me warmly, humoring once-venerated shops like Patelson’s in New my clumsy spoken French while leading me York and Byron Hoyt in San Francisco, edu- through a warren of bookshelves en route to cated (i.e., literate) musicians used to spend his office, which was overflowing with books, hours silently perusing unfamiliar scores, per- scores, pictures, and cigarette smoke. haps quietly humming a passage here and Bois has written over twenty books, about there—as Oliver Sacks reports his father did, musicians, painters, and dancers—includ- between appointments with patients, con- ing Stravinsky and Nureyev, both of whom juring performances by reading miniature he knew well. Stravinsky, who had been an scores of symphonic works. Even these in- American citizen and Los Angeles resident stitutions have folded; today musicians buy since 1945, often visited Paris during the their scores online, in isolation. While the 1960s. The Paris branch of Stravinsky’s pub- internet and digital technologies have made lisher, Boosey & Hawkes, assigned Bois, it easier to locate not only printed scores of then a young employee of the firm, to join esoteric works but also “virtual” scores that Stravinsky’s entourage during his sojourns in are marvelously manipulable, they too have Paris. Through this assignment Bois became contributed to the desuetude of these brick- acquainted with not only Stravinsky and his and-mortar musical havens. second wife, Vera, but also his wide circle of friends and collaborators, including Picasso, I met Mario Bois thirty years ago while I was Artur Rubenstein, and Jean Cocteau. Most a graduate student in musicology. I had tran- significantly, he befriended Rudolf Nureyev, scribed what was identified as an unpublished the dancer who remained in Paris after his autograph sketch of Souvenir d’Aix, a suite of dramatic defection from the Soviet Union, waltzes by Jacques Offenbach, which I came accomplished at Paris’s Le Bourget airport across in Stanford’s underappreciated Memo- in 1961. Nureyev was close to Claire Motte, rial Library of Music. The late conductor and an étoile at the Ballet de l’Opéra national de Offenbach promoter Antonio d’Almeida put Paris, and later, under Nureyev’s leadership, me in touch with Bois, who published my its ballet mistress. In 1964 she married Bois; transcription. Offenbach’s charming suite has they had two sons during their twenty-two now been heard—likely for the first time, as years together until Motte’s untimely death Offenbach never drafted a complete score from from cancer in 1986. which the work could be performed—through In 1989, Nureyev broached with Bois plans performances and recordings made possible by for a new full production of Bayadère. Bois in- Bois’ publication of my transcription. formed Nureyev that he would be unable to Attempting to locate Mario Bois’ Bureau publish an edition of the music for Nureyev’s de Musique in Paris, I realized why there is arrangement of the ballet because Ludwig no French phrase for “city block.” None of the Minkus’s complete score was available only at taxi drivers who drove me to my handful of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theaters. In 1987, visits there was familiar with Rue de Rocroy, however, with Mikhail Gorbachev’s permission, a crooked sliver of a street in a neighborhood Nureyev had visited Moscow for the first time west of the Gare du Nord. More than once I in twenty-five years. And although his visit to was horribly late, having located No. 19 only the Soviet Union was limited to forty-eight

76 The New Criterion February 2021 Notebook hours, he managed to obtain a photocopy of the (One often encounters the names Lanchbery Bolshoi’s complete score for Bayadère, which and Bois in the programs for abt performanc- he presented to Bois after pitching his idea es.) Nureyev designated Bois executor of the for a new production of the ballet. Nureyev, rights to his choreographic works, and Bois’ however, or whoever operated the photocopier firm continues to manage the performance at the Bolshoi, had made horizontal copies of rights and associated royalties for Nureyev’s vertically oriented pages, thereby lopping off revised choreographies for Swan Lake, Sleeping significant portions of Minkus’s score. Also, Beauty, and many other ballets. and in a classic Soviet moment, the toner of The variety of musical works published the photocopier was exhausted before Nureyev and sold by Mario Bois’ Bureau de Musique completed the job, so the music on the pages reflects the wide-ranging artistic curiosity of toward the end of the run was barely legible. its founder, but particularly his dedication to Upon confronting the chaotic sheaf Nureyev ballet and works by relatively unknown French proffered, Bois summoned his friend John composers. In 2016, recognizing Bois’ decades Lanchbery, who joined Nureyev and Bois, of entrepreneurship promoting the performing puzzling for innumerable hours through hun- arts in France, the French Cultural Ministry dreds of sketchy pages to re-assemble Minkus’s designated him, among a distinguished cohort score. Lanchbery, a former music director of the including Yo Yo Ma and Marion Cotillard, American Ballet Theatre, had arranged and re- an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. orchestrated the music for well-known ballets Now on the brink of his ninetieth birthday, including Giselle and Don Quixote, as well as that Bois is retired, having relocated from his home of dozens of other works which he converted near the Palais Garnier to Bordeaux. Thierry to ballets, including operas like Lehár’s Merry Fouquet, a former director of the Opéra Na- Widow. He had also collaborated with Natalia tional de Bordeaux, now heads Bois’ Bureau Makarova, who, in 1980, directed at abt the first de Musique, which has also relocated, thirty complete Bayadère performed outside the Soviet miles south from its raffish neighborhood in Union. According to The Washington Post, when Paris’s Tenth Arrondissement, to Boissettes, Makarova appealed to pre-Perestroika Soviets for a leafy suburb on the Seine. a copy of Minkus’s full score, she got nowhere. Fortunately for her, a decade earlier Harvard’s Unlike the dozens of long-established music Houghton Library had acquired the Sergejev publishers and music shops in Paris that folded Collection, an enormous trove of documents during the twentieth century, Bois’ Bureau de relating to Russian ballet of the late imperial Musique, founded in the 1970s, has survived period. It contains Sergejev’s manuscript of the because its mission is grounded by the concin- complete dance score, which documents Petipa’s nities of the specialized interests of its founder choreography for Bayadère, as well as a repetit- in music, visual art, and dance. Bois once men- eur’s score in which Minkus’s music is reduced tioned to me that his affection for Paris was to an arrangement for two violins. Makarova based on its human scale (unlike New York, and Lanchbery used these sources, as well as where I was living at the time) that allowed Makarova’s recollections from her performances one to be aware of the city’s modulating “poetic years earlier of an abbreviated version of the bal- rhythm.” The human scale of Bois’ enterprise, let at the Kirov, to cobble together a score for delineated by the topics and related artifacts her full-length production. of his eclectic but focused curiosity, provides Lanchbery subsequently wrote an arrange- a similar foundation. It has always been more ment based upon the reconstituted Minkus an oeuvre de l’esprit than a tangible creation and, score, which was used in Nureyev’s acclaimed as such, is contingent upon an ongoing ap- production of Bayadère, first performed in 1992 preciation of its founder’s artistic sensibilities by the Opéra national de Paris. Bois published and curatorial finesse. As he, and his Bureau de this, and many other Lanchbery scores, that Musique, turn ninety and fifty respectively, I are still widely used by ballet companies today. wish them both joyeux anniversaire et longévité.

The New Criterion February 2021 77 James T. Demetrion, 1930–2020 by Eric Gibson

Sometimes under-the-radar lives do more rector and Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s longtime to illuminate a particular moment than the curator. Though it had been open as a public brightest blips on the scope. Such is the case museum of European and American modern art with James T. Demetrion, the director of the of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden for for just over a decade, the Hirshorn still bore sixteen years beginning in 1985, who died in the stamp of a private collection, its holdings Washington, D.C., a few days after Thanksgiv- large, eclectic, and unbalanced. The museum, ing last year, at the age of ninety. housed in Gordon Bunshaft’s Brutalist donut, In his time, Demetrion was not an art world had opened in October 1974 with about six celebrity. This had nothing to do with his abili- thousand objects. (A bequest after Hirshhorn’s ties and everything to do with his personality. death in 1981 boosted that number to around Down-to-earth, self-deprecating, and partial twelve thousand.) The collection included to loud neckties, Demetrion was the antithesis pre-Columbian art, Persian miniatures, Benin of the suave, smooth-talking director out of bronzes, and Eskimo carvings. As well as acquir- central casting—a man more comfortable oper- ing across a broad front, Hirshhorn collected ating behind the scenes than working a room. certain artists in depth, among them Henry Yet reflecting on his career from the van- Moore, David Smith, Elie Nadelman, and even tage point of today, it seems clear that he was, Thomas Eakins. if not the last, then very nearly the last of a The Hirshhorn was famous for its outstand- breed that emerged in this country between ing collection of modern sculpture, Rodin to the two World Wars and that is exemplified by around the mid-twentieth century. Outside of moma’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: moma there was nothing like it—Raymond the scholar-connoisseur who had art in his Nasher’s collection wouldn’t go public until bones, and for whom the shaping of an insti- 2003. Things were a little rougher around the tution was a kind of creative act. edges with the paintings. Reviewing the inau- Demetrion was born in 1930 in Ohio, the son gural installation for The New York Times, Hilton of Greek immigrants. He came to art relatively Kramer found that outside the Eakins holdings, late, while stationed in Europe with the U.S. the nineteenth-century American paintings “do Army in the early 1950s after college. He returned not add up to a significant museum survey”; to Europe a little later on a Fulbright scholarship early American modernism “is one of the most for graduate study on the work of Egon Schiele. viable sections”; but Abstract Expressionism But he never completed any advanced degrees. was “unevenly represented,” with only a few He came to the Hirshhorn after sixteen Gorkys, de Koonings, and Stills. The 1960s, years running the Des Moines Art Center, however—“op, pop, color-field painting, the succeeding Abram Lerner, the founding di- realist revival, and much else”—were extremely

78 The New Criterion February 2021 Notebook well accounted for, though “as we come closer It’s a measure of Demetrion’s sober tempera- and closer to the present day, the effort to in- ment and discerning eye that, given the hype at- clude one of everything, whether good, bad, or tending the emerging artists of the 1980s—Julian indifferent, is unmistakable and dreary.” Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, et al.—he The “present day”—the mid-1970s—was did not, as did so many of his colleagues, leap pretty much where the collection stopped. aboard the bandwagon. Those three didn’t enter Demetrion was brought in to tidy things the collection until well into the 1990s, while up—to give the collection more coherence and others, such as David Salle and Robert Longo, shape while hewing to Hirshhorn’s modernist have never made the cut. vision—and to turn it into a living museum by collecting contemporary art. In this latter effort Something else that distinguished Demetri- he was the beneficiary of one final Hirshhorn on’s tenure was that he organized exhibitions: gift: the freedom to sell anything to acquire monographic shows on Francis Bacon (1989), more art. So he went to work. Jean Dubuffet (1993), Stanley Spencer (1997), In the press release announcing Demetrion’s and Clyfford Still (2001). These averaged out death, the current Hirshhorn director, Melissa to one every four years, a remarkable feat given Chiu, true to the zeitgeist, praised him for hav- the demands of his “day job” as director. The ing “diversified” the collection. And it’s true Dubuffet show was a revelation to me—I have that he acquired work by artists such as Da- never forgotten the figure composed of a collage vid Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Ana Mendieta, of butterfly wings—and a typical reflection of Nam June Paik, and Eva Hesse. But that blin- Demetrion’s independent mind. I had known kered view shortchanges Demetrion’s singular this artist only from his anodyne late work, talent as an acquisitor, which combined both exemplified by his Group of Four Trees (1970–72) breadth of vision and sharp focus. You get a in New York’s Chase Manhattan Plaza. Deme- more accurate picture of his accomplishments trion’s show began just after World War II with from a May 1986 Washington Post story. In just the artist’s discovery of “art brut”—the work his first eighteen months as director, it said, of children and the insane—through which Demetrion acquired a 1985 Frank Stella relief; he sought to arrive at a more authentic mode a Robert Irwin disk; sculptures by Deborah of expression, and stopped in the early 1960s, Butterfield, Claes Oldenburg, Ed and Nancy mercifully short of the late phase. Reviewing Kienholz, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Arneson, the show for the September 1993 issue of this Sol LeWitt, and H. C. Westermann; and paint- magazine, I wrote, ings by Jean Dubuffet, Richard Diebenkorn, William T. Wiley, Leon Golub, and Anselm Dubuffet differs from today’s “transgressive” artists Kiefer. By the time he retired in 2001, Deme- in that his tactics weren’t undertaken solely for their trion had sold or traded 2,901 objects and ac- own sake. What invariably surfaces in Dubuffet’s quired more than three hundred works. (“We churning aesthetic is a deep humanity. The gnarled may be the only modern art museum in the figure of a vintner in The Soul of Morvan—a sculp- world whose collection has decreased,” he had ture made out of twisted grape vines and roots—is wryly observed to the Post two years earlier.) He an expression of aesthetic opportunity, to be sure. was lucky in his timing—the market in the ’80s It shows Dubuffet working at the extreme end of was red hot, so things sold well. For example, the found-object aesthetic, “seeing” in the random that same 1986 Washington Post story reported configuration of natural objects a human figure and that Henry Moore’s Seated Woman (1956–57), doing little more in the way of artistic manipula- the lesser of two bronze casts of the work the tion than simple assembly. Yet beyond the purely museum owned, had sold for $990,000, “far aesthetic aspect of this work one senses an identi- above the estimated $550 to $750,000.” By the fication of the artist with his subject, a Millet-like time he retired, Demetrion had parlayed an admiration for the dignity and difficulty of work annual $150,000 acquisitions budget into a on the land. This emotion is present in virtually all $30 million endowment fund for purchases. of Dubuffet’s work, even the most comic.

The New Criterion February 2021 79 Notebook

I got to know Demetrion in the early 1990s gum balloon on a rampage. By 2013, delays, when I worked at The Washington Times and so escalating costs, and projections of millions discovered another of his singular characteris- in operating losses doomed the project, caus- tics. I was the art critic, but since we were a small ing Koshalek to resign. Since succeeding him, staff and there were pages to fill, I doubled as Melissa Chiu, like so many of her colleagues, the art feature writer. And so one day my editor has gone all in on contemporary art. And she assigned me a series of interviews with the city’s has opted for crowd-pleasing extravaganzas art museum directors as they led me on tours of like the 2017 retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, a their collections. These yielded good conversa- serious artist whom that show Disneyfied. It tions, even memorable ones. J. Carter Brown, was such a box-office success that Chiu decided at the National Gallery, stunned me by pointing to come back for seconds with another Kusama out a painting, an Eakins, he said he had once show last year that was postponed owing to disliked. I’d never heard a museum director covid-19. And not a single scholarly, histori- make such an admission and made a point to cal show has been originated on her watch. include it in my story. But it’s Demetrion’s tour On the extracurricular front, for the past two that has remained with me across the decades. summers Washingtonians have been able to For one thing, it was anything but the “Great- attend the Hirshhorn Ball, hosted on both est Hits” I was expecting. It was personal, even occasions by a drag queen. idiosyncratic. Rodin (The Burghers of Calais) In the wider world of museums, directors no and Willem de Kooning (Two Women in the longer organize big shows. They are now more Country) were the only marquee names on the focused on the physical plant—renovating and/ tour. For the rest we looked at works by Giorgio or expanding it—than the objects it contains, Morandi, Dubuffet, Thomas Hart Benton, and their removal from art symbolized by the ceo the now undeservedly forgotten Czech Cubist title many have adopted in addition to that of sculptor Otto Gutfreund. But what has really director. Collecting is no longer about connois- stuck in my mind is Demetrion’s ability to talk seurship but a kind of defensive play—ensuring about works of art spontaneously, insightfully, your institution has a sufficient number of the and with deep feeling. “I was just astonished at right sorts of individuals and groups to appease all the color that’s in this work that appears to the social media furies. be basically gray with little touches of violet and Then there’s deaccessioning. A fact sheet yellow and blue,” he said of Morandi’s 1943 Still issued by the Hirshhorn following Deme- Life. “This background color—all kinds of pinks trion’s death praised his “deft and prescient” and yellows there.” All the others had talked approach. How those words resonate! They about what their works meant to art history or came little more than a month after the Balti- to their institutions. With Demetrion, the tour more Museum of Art was forced to abandon was about what they meant to him. I’d never a plan to sell works by Clyfford Still, Andy heard a museum director talk like that before, Warhol, and Brice Marden to raise money to, nor have I since. among other things, “purchase new works by women and artists of color.” In other words, Sadly, the post-Demetrion Hirshhorn has time-tested, irreplaceable paintings were to become a very different place. Where he have been disposed of for work of unknow- stood for substance, his two most recent able long-term significance. And Baltimore is successors (there have been four since he hardly the only museum to have adopted such retired) have opted for spectacle. Richard an ideological, blunt-instrument approach to Koshalek took over in 2009 and immedi- deaccessioning. ately started planning “The Bubble,” an Jim Demetrion was too modest a man ever inflatable event space designed by Diller to have thought of himself this way, but the Scofidio + Renfro that would have protruded fact is that he did more than build a great 150 feet up through the central opening and museum collection. He set a standard for the out one side at ground level like a bubble- profession—one sorely missed today.

80 The New Criterion February 2021