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4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN Commemorative 11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Nicholas Lemann on Biden’s stimulus bill; Cover Reprints TV by Gen Z; a shock jock’s health guru; Search our extensive classicizing Cohen; enough snow for Jersey. archive of weekly A REPORTER AT LARGE covers dating back to Jane Mayer 18 Trump in the Crosshairs Will the former President be prosecuted? 1925 and commemorate

SHOUTS & MURMURS a milestone with a New Yorker Paul Rudnick 25 Police Procedurals 101 cover reprint. newyorkerstore.com/covers OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS Jennifer Gonnerman 26 Vacancy When COVID shuttered a five-star hotel.

ANNALS OF DOMESTIC LIFE 32 Andrew Solomon The Shape of Love PRICE $8.99 OCT. 24, 2016 The complexities of polygamy and polyamory.

AMERICAN CHRONICLES Louis Menand 46 Change Your Life How student radicals shaped the sixties.

FICTION Imbolo Mbue 54 “The Case for and Against Love Potions”

THE CRITICS BOOKS Joan Acocella 62 A new biography of Graham Greene. Leo Robson 69 Sarah Moss’s “Summerwater.” 71 Briefly Noted

MUSICAL EVENTS Alex Ross 72 The musical taste of Proust.

THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 74 “The Courier,” “Come True.”

POEMS Billy Collins 40 “Days of Teen-age Glory” Ada Limón 51 “Privacy”

COVER Liniers “Springing Back”

DRAWINGS P. C. Vey, Matilda Borgström, Kendra Allenby, Frank Cotham, E. S. Glenn, Mick Stevens, Lars Kenseth, Roz Chast, Emily Flake, Colin Tom, Zachary Kanin, Barbara Smaller, Lila Ash, Benjamin Schwartz, Carolita Johnson, Adam Douglas Thompson, Ellie Black SPOTS Matt Blease

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 1 CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Solomon (“The Shape of Love,” Jennifer Gonnerman (“Vacancy,” p. 26) p. 32) is a professor of medical psychol- became a staff writer in 2015. She is the ogy at Columbia University. His books author of “Life on the Outside.” include “Far and Away,” “Far from the Tree,” and “The Noonday Demon.” Louis Menand (“Change Your Life,” Dig into p. 46), a staff writer, will publish “The Jane Mayer (“Trump in the Crosshairs,” Free World: Art and Thought in the stories from p. 18), the magazine’s chief Washing- Cold War” next month. He teaches ton correspondent, is the author of at Harvard. “Dark Money.” our 96-year Joan Acocella (Books, p. 62) has been a Billy Collins (Poem, p. 40), a former staff writer since 1775. Her most recent U.S. Poet Laureate, has written more book is “Twenty-eight Artists and Two archive. than a dozen books of poetry. His lat- Saints.” est collection is “Whale Day.” Liniers (Cover) is an Argentine cartoon- Imbolo Mbue (Fiction, p. 54) won the ist based in Vermont. His work includes 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction the daily comic strip “Macanudo” and for “Behold the Dreamers.” Her new the forthcoming book “Wildflowers.” novel, “How Beautiful We Were,” came out this month. Ada Limón (Poem, p. 51), the author of five poetry collections, received the Leo Robson (Books, p. 69) is a contrib- 2018 National Book Critics Circle uting writer for the New Statesman. Award for Poetry for “The Carrying.”

Caitlin Reid (Puzzles & Games Dept.), Alex Ross (Musical Events, p. 72) has a crossword constructor since 2017, has been The New Yorker’s music critic since created puzzles for the Times, the Wall 1776. He published his third book, Street Journal, and USA Today. “Wagnerism,” in September.

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

ANNALS OF INQUIRY U.S. JOURNAL Jeannie Suk Gersen on a legal battle Casey Cep reports on a Kansas over “comfort women,” published in bookshop owner’s mission to beat English, Korean, and Japanese. back Amazon.

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2 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 THE MAIL

A GLOBAL-HEALTH MYSTERY clots and organ failure. This should be sobering for those people who have ex- Siddhartha Mukherjee’s piece on why perienced a mild case of the virus; in COVID-19 has hit some countries harder years to come, a memory left behind now than others considers many possible ex- may trigger a storm in response to an as planations, including differences in gov- yet unknown pathogen. ernment response, in levels of immunity, Edwin L. Thomas, Ph.D. FEED HOPE. and in demographic features (“The COVID 1Memphis, Tenn. Conundrum,” March 1st). Another fac- tor at play is cultural differences in the TARKOVSKY’S INSPIRATION FEED LOVE. willingness to follow rules. In a study of fifty-seven countries published in The Alex Ross, in an excellent essay on the Lancet Planetary Health, my co-authors filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, discusses and I found that in cultures with looser how Tarkovsky’s reputation as a prophetic social norms there were five times the artist is in part founded on his depiction number of COVID cases and more than of the mysterious area known as the Zone eight times the deaths as in cultures with in the 1979 film “Stalker,” which seemed stricter norms. These effects were repli- to foreshadow the irradiated forests and cated when controlling for variables in- abandoned structures surrounding Cher- cluding under-reporting, wealth, inequal- nobyl after it exploded, in 1986 (A Critic ity, population density, migration, gov- at Large, February 15th & 22nd). Tar- ernment efficiency, political authoritari- kovsky’s Zone may in fact have drawn anism, median age, non-pharmaceutical from the legacy of a catastrophe that took government interventions, and climate. place prior to the film’s creation: the nu- Ironically, looser cultures had more deaths clear explosion at the Mayak plutonium but less fear of COVID: seventy per cent of plant, in the Urals, in 1957. Although in people in tighter cultures expressed that Tarkovsky’s day the disaster was still ob- they were afraid of contracting COVID; scure in the West, it was known to So- only fifty per cent of people in looser cul- viet intellectuals. The explosion covered tures did. Not all looser cultures did poorly, an area of more than eight thousand and not all tighter cultures were success- square miles with radioactive dust; it cur- ful at limiting cases and deaths. But the rently ranks as the third-worst nuclear results suggest that cultural looseness can disaster of all time. As at Chernobyl, au- be a liability when there is a collective thorities delayed evacuating people, and threat, and that nations must be able to birth defects are said to have followed. adjust norms as needed. “Stalker”’s allusions to Mayak may have Michele J. Gelfand manifested not only in the sinister land- Professor, Department of Psychology scapes but also in the character of the University of Maryland disabled daughter, whose eerie telekinetic College Park, Md. powers perhaps arose from her proximity to the Zone. The Mayak tragedy likely Mukherjee points out that the apparent also influenced the plot of the 1972 So- resistance of certain populations to the viet science-fiction book “Roadside Pic- SARS-CoV-2 virus may be the result of nic,” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, on a memory implanted in their immune which “Stalker” was loosely based. systems by prior exposure to related Michael Benson pathogens. Immunologic memory could Ottawa, Ont. also account for the dire consequences of the virus for older individuals in the • U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. People with Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, more years’ worth of stored-up immu- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited nologic memories may experience a cy- for length and clarity, and may be published in tokine storm that produces a widespread any medium. We regret that owing to the volume inflammatory response, resulting in blood of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming.

MARCH 17 – 23, 2021

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

While the Frick Collection’s historic mansion undergoes renovations, its masterpieces have a new home: the Frick Madison, opening on March 18. (Timed-entry tickets, available via frick.org, are required.) The Marcel Breuer-designed building, most recently a branch of the Met, turns out to be a magnificent context for the museum’s holdings—the brutalist décor even serves the frothy tastes of Madame du Barry, who com- missioned Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s rococo painting “The Progress of Love: The Pursuit,” pictured above.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID ROTHENBERG 1 “Songs for Murdered Sisters” discarding fixed harmony and rhythm from his MUSIC improvisational concept, but he also composed CLASSICAL In 2015, Nathalie Warmerdam was some of the most beguilingly melodic pieces in murdered by a former boyfriend, who killed jazz’s history. Miguel Zenón, himself a com- Drake: “Scary Hours 2” two other women on the same day, in Renfrew manding alto saxophonist, honors Coleman (who HIP-HOP Drake puts his fans on standby with County, Ontario. Her brother, the immensely would have turned ninety-one this month) on “Scary Hours 2,” an hors d’œuvre before the talented baritone Joshua Hopkins, collabo- this live recording by interpreting eight of the long-awaited release of his next album, “Cer- rated with the composer Jake Heggie and the Master’s works, including the inimitable dirge tified Lover Boy.” The three-song EP is full writer Margaret Atwood on the cycle “Songs “Broken Shadows,” with appropriate brio and of top-of-the-world grandstanding and myth- for Murdered Sisters,” to draw attention to headlong drive. Zenón takes full advantage of the making from a master of the form. His life has the pervasiveness of violence against women. vigor and reflexive wit of his three compatriots— only grown more extravagant since “Scorpion,” Atwood’s precise, heartfelt language elicited Demian Cabaud on bass, Jordi Rossy on drums, from 2019—friendships with sheikhs in Dubai, a profoundly empathetic score from Heggie; and Ariel Bringuez on tenor saxophone—calling lounging in owners’ boxes, casually spending a the music—tender and twinkling, haunted and to mind the quartet that Coleman established million on chips at the Wynn Las Vegas—and sad—embodies a sibling’s love being forced with the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman in these cavalier verses reflect a state of supreme to incorporate sorrow. In a riveting filmed the late sixties.—Steve Futterman comfort. “Not too many parallels left in our performance, available to stream on Hous- 1 lives,” he admits. Even a reluctant adjustment ton Grand Opera’s Web site until March 21, to fatherhood doesn’t make rap’s biggest star Hopkins ricochets among the stages of grief. any more accessible.—Sheldon Pearce The film’s terrific soundtrack is also avail- TELEVISION able.—Oussama Zahr The Hold Steady: Behind Her Eyes Special Request: “DJ-Kicks” Netflix’s new nail-biter of a miniseries, based “Open Door Policy” ELECTRONIC The selectors that helm the on Sarah Pinborough’s best-selling novel, is the- ROCK In the course of their seventeen-year re- long-running mix series “DJ-Kicks” often turn matically chaotic, and its characters are messy, cording career, the Brooklyn rockers of the out potted histories of their own evolution as but its ending has a startling, satisfying pop. Hold Steady have shifted from raw, live-sound- listeners and d.j.s. That’s the British dance pro- Louise Barnsley (the excellent Simona Brown), ing studio recordings to a deliberately layered, ducer Paul Woolford’s approach, too. Under the a young Black single mom, embarks on a steamy studio-enriched style—the aural difference name Special Request, Woolford is known for affair with her boss, a handsome Scottish psy- between a stark spotlight and a background breakbeat-driven, rave-ready tracks, and this set chiatrist named David (Tom Bateman), who is starscape. On “Open Door Policy,” the band’s traces all of his interests along a time line. He married to the hyper-composed Adele (a spooky eighth album, this approach softens Craig draws a smoothly curving arc, moving from jazz Eve Hewson), a white woman perennially Finn’s wry, hard-bitten storytelling but doesn’t and soul through a bevy of house and techno, draped in white clothing. Louise is also drawn vitiate it—the Springsteen-esque rhythmic and then, with increasing speed, into the knotty into a friendship with Adele, unbeknownst to chug and chord swells of “Unpleasant Break- drum workouts that end the album, several of David. In flashbacks, Adele, who is skilled in the fast” help lines such as “This coffee’s cold / them his own mixes.—M.M. art of lucid dreaming, is in a mental institution, This toast is gross” go down easier. The album’s where she bonds with Rob (Robert Aramayo), warmth gives even its queasiest moments a gen- a gay working-class junkie from Glasgow. The uine sense of bonhomie.—Michaelangelo Matos Miguel Zenón: “Law Years: two-pronged mystery of the series—what is the secret at the core of Adele and David’s unhappy The Music of Ornette Coleman” marriage, and how might lucid dreaming be Valerie June: “The Moon and JAZZ The saxophonist Ornette Coleman shook connected to it?—is taut and effective, but the up the music establishment when he pioneered show’s sociopolitical agenda is murky. Its real Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers” free jazz, at the end of the nineteen-fifties, by focus is psychic: the human desire to break free ROOTS ROCK To hear Valerie June’s voice is to remember Valerie June’s voice. Tinny and be- witched, her every quiver bespeaks emotional EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC honesty. When the musician first crossed the public’s radar, in 2013, she was steeped in an an- tiquated roots vernacular that she delivered with Some heavy, tormented records that Southern regality. She has gradually nudged her muse to the present, meshing genres from reflect the pulverizing grief of the the church sounds of her youth to the hippie post-pandemic world feel like they soul on her new album, “The Moon and Stars: might crush a listener; others offer Prescriptions for Dreamers.” Recorded with the R. & B. producer Jack Splash and piloted the consolation of a weighted blanket. throughout by her elegant, gravelly vocals, the “CARNAGE,” the first official album album casts June in a sleek light without feeling from Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds like a makeover. The singer remains wedded to her beloved moon and stars, sampling birds bandmate Warren Ellis, is the latter, and pondering the cosmos.—Jay Ruttenberg rumbling toward catharsis through impenetrable noise and jarring lyri- Charmaine Lee cism balanced precariously on sudden CLASSICAL The improvising vocalist and composer celestial arrangements. Cave’s baritone, Charmaine Lee has an instinct for deploying bottomless as ever, traces the contours unconventional methods of sound production, whether wholly physical or electronically altered, of recent anguish—isolation, the deaths in works of intense expressiveness, giddy charm, of his fifteen-year-old son and the Bad and uncanny beauty—something she demon- Seeds member Conway Savage, his strates on “KNVF,” her new solo LP. This week, Lee opens a yearlong Van Lier Fellowship at the growing existentialism—even as he downtown Brooklyn experimental-arts venue scrounges for moments of levity. One Roulette with a streaming première, “Papillae,” comes on “Shattered Ground,” a re- using microphones, radio, and modular synthesis to probe notions of isolation and interdepen- minder to hold on to the bits of beauty

ILLUSTRATION BY JOOHEE YOON JOOHEE BY ILLUSTRATION dence.—Steve Smith (March 20 at 8; roulette.org.) left in the rubble of loss.—Julyssa Lopez

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 5 Equalizer” may not be a police-glorification VIRTUAL BALLET device, but don’t mistake McCall for a ren- egade; she delivers a compensatory fantasy of law and order. The show is a gimme for an audience who’d die to have this therapeutic queen dismantle racial capitalism in one fell girl-boss swoop.—Doreen St. Félix (3/15/21)

Ginny & Georgia The body of this Netflix series is a bantery young-adult soap, the head a woman-on-the- edge thriller, and the tail a race melodrama. It’s also a parody of “Gilmore Girls”: following the mysterious death of her husband, Georgia (Brianne Howey), a young sexpot mother of white-working-class provenance, drives her fifteen-year-old biracial daughter, Ginny (An- tonia Gentry), and her younger son, Austin, to the fictional town of Westbury, Massachusetts, for a fresh start. A twitchy mystery is tacked on to the shallow character studies, and we are teased with a race catharsis between mother and child that never comes to fruition. There’s a clash of traditional-Americana references and hyper-modern lingo, and a spirited engagement in the so-called Oppression Olympics. It’s de- meaning, to be served this ham, but no amount of recoiling changes the fact that “Ginny & “ABT Live from City Center—A Ratmansky Celebration” is not exactly Georgia” is mirroring a mode of cavalier speech live, but this program, filmed at New York City Center in February, is on social media that compresses the ineffability something of a homecoming for American Ballet Theatre, which used to of identity into a checklist of outwardly visible bona fides: what one eats, where one was raised, perform its fall season there every year. The evening is devoted to works how well one twerks. If “Ginny & Georgia” made by Alexei Ratmansky, A.B.T.’s resident choreographer, after he joined sounds canned, then so do we.—D.S.F. (3/15/21) the company, in 2009. Most of the selections, such as the rhapsodic pas de 1 deux from “The Seasons”—danced here by Isabella Boylston and James Whiteside—are presented in excerpted form. (Another excerpt, from DANCE the 2009 piece “Seven Sonatas,” features Herman Cornejo.) But there is one new work, performed in its entirety: “Bernstein in a Bubble,” set to Matthew Bourne’s Leonard Bernstein’s “Divertimento,” from 1980, was created recently in New Adventures Festival a bubble residency in upstate New York, following strict CDVID proto- For decades, the British choreographer Mat- cols. It’s like a blast of fresh air. Tickets for the stream, which is viewable thew Bourne has found uncommon success with March 23-April 18, can be purchased at nycitycenter.org.—Marina Harss contemporary updates and mashups of classics, combining his caricature-clear storytelling with the dazzling sets and costumes of Lez Brother- ston. A monthlong digital festival, available via from one’s own limiting narrative by becoming testament to Eilish’s profound understanding New York City Center, rotates through four of someone else—a craving that is increasingly of obsessive fan culture, which is critical to her his works. “Car Man” (2000)—viewable March explored as the series nears its end.—Naomi success. At the same time, it shows just how im- 12-21—transfers the story and the score of Bi- Fry (Reviewed in our issue of 3/1/21.) possible it is to vanquish fame’s most oppressive zet’s “Carmen” into the roadside-diner noir of elements. Being consumed with a desire to be “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” “Cinder- liked is as authentic as it gets.—Carrie Battan ella” (2017)—streaming March 19-28—moves Billie Eilish: The World’s the fairy tale and Prokofiev’s music to London a Little Blurry The Equalizer during the Blitz.—Brian Seibert (nycitycenter.org) In this new documentary about the anti-pop The unhip cluelessness of the many margin- star Billie Eilish, being real seems like such an alized but stunningly naïve characters in this Paris Opéra Ballet / “Swan Lake” exhausting endeavor that it’s easy to see why so CBS action procedural, a reboot of an eighties Through June, the Joyce Theatre presents a many performers have chosen the alternative. crime drama, allows it to showcase the bad- mix of live performances streamed directly The Apple TV+ original chronicles Eilish as she bitch proficiency of its hero, Robyn McCall, from its stage and prerecorded dances filmed struggles to finish her début album, “When We played by the congenitally warm Queen Lati- elsewhere. This week through April 7, it offers All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” fumbles fah. In each episode, an unequal system plunges a 2016 performance of Nureyev’s “Swan Lake” through live shows, and strives to sustain the a character, who is poor or Black or both, to the by the Paris Opéra Ballet, with the Paris étoiles attention of her boyfriend, Q. Directed by R. J. darkest of depths, and McCall, a former C.I.A. Mathieu Ganio and Amandine Albisson in the Cutler (“A Perfect Candidate,” “The September agent guarding an ugly psychological wound, lead roles. This “Swan Lake,” which Nure- Issue”)—and, notably, funded and produced by is invariably there to rescue them. With the yev created in 1984, places Prince Siegfried, Eilish’s label, Interscope—the project is pre- help of two sidekicks—Mel (Liza Lapira), an rather than the Swan Queen, at the center of sented as vérité footage, and much of it has the ex-Air Force sharpshooter, and Harry (Adam the drama: the whole story is a dream that intimate feel of a home movie. This is less an ar- Goldberg), an I.T. whiz—and her smirking comes to him as he slumbers in a chair—shades tistic choice than a reflection of Eilish’s real life, mentor, William Bishop (the always debonair of “La Sylphide.” The two sides of the her- which is unusually family-centric—she works Chris Noth), McCall takes down gentrification oine, Odette and Odile, represent different almost exclusively with her brother, records profiteers and their hired guns, warmongers aspects of his desire. It’s all very Freudian. in the comfort of her own home, and is often and tech magnates, entitled white male mur- Plus, Siegfried gets to dance a lot more than in

seen calling the shots on set. The film is also a derers and the judges who protect them. “The traditional versions.—Marina Harss (joyce.org) BERNABEU JUAN BY ILLUSTRATION

6 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 1 nelly isn’t a Pop artist, exactly, except by way of from 1988, the dark, curving form of the title’s A RT distant ancestry. Most of his career moves were feline is an anchoring void in the composition; initiated about six decades ago by Andy War- a frail human figure, in either a feverish sleep or hol, who had the not inconsiderable advantage blinding pain, is tended by his lover, who, given David Hammons of being great. I find the show depressing, but the snake wrapping itself around his leg, seems The real star of the Drawing Center’s compre- you would expect that from an élitist art critic, stalked by illness himself. In other paintings, hensive exhibition of the body prints that Ham- wouldn’t you? A chance to snoot highbrows is a crows appear as tormentors or harbingers of mons made between 1968 and 1979 is the artist’s bonus for KAWSniks, whose glee might as well loss. Such phantasmic visitations don’t undercut energetic, younger self. In 1963, when he was be taken in good grace by its targets. There’s a the unflinching realism of the artist’s figurative twenty, Hammons moved to L.A. from his native certain purity in art that’s so aggressively inel- lexicon. Rather, they seem to elucidate another Illinois and began using his own anatomy, com- oquent. Like a diet of only celery, which is said plane of existence, the “strange state” of delirium bined with pigment and paper, as a printmaking to consume more calories in the chewing than it and foreboding in a surreal, but all too real, tool. Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries” (made with provides to digestion, KAWS activates halluci- time of devastation.—J.F. (alexandergray.com) female models) and Robert Rauschenberg and natory syndromes of spiritual starvation.—Peter 1 Susan Weil’s collaborative “Blueprints” had Schjeldahl (brooklynmuseum.org) already used similar methods to propose that all art emanates from the artist’s body. Now, MOVIES Hammons asked, what if that body is Black? Hugh Steers Galvanized by the civil-rights and the Black “Strange State of Being,” the title of Steers’s Arts movements, he returned, again and again, current show at Alexander Gray Associates, is The Inheritance to the subject of America, and her relationship to how the painter described his mood in 1994, one The title of Ephraim Asili’s first feature, a blend Black men as builders and targets, outsiders and year before he died from AIDS-related causes. of fiction and documentary that’s centered on a originators. Throughout the thirty-two prints He was just thirty-two. Most of the sombre, group of young Black people in Philadelphia, and drawings on view (with such punning titles glowing canvases on view are portraits of other suggests the many layers of thought embodied as “Bye-Centennial,” from 1976), one can feel the young men, vulnerably nude or nearly so, seen at in its spare drama. First, there’s a house that a provocateur’s excitement about his medium, but home and in hospital rooms. In “Sleeping Cat,” young man named Julian (Eric Lockley) inherits also his need to push its boundaries, which led to his great interest in performance—another discipline that celebrates the human form, and AT THE GALLERIES the ephemeral.—Hilton Als (drawingcenter.org)

The Kamoinge Workshop In 1963, the Black photographers Louis Draper, James Mannas, Jr., Albert R. Fennar, and Herbert Randall founded the Kamoinge Workshop, in New York City, to counter the sentimental, ab- ject, or otherwise stereotyped portrayals of Black life peddled by mainstream photojournalism. The collective produced breathtaking images and provided a support system—camaraderie, critique, and a sophisticated, if small, group of collectors—as an alternative to the institutional favor enjoyed by the artists’ white counterparts. Some hundred and forty pictures by fourteen core Kamoinge members are now on view in the Whitney’s superb exhibition “Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.” The civil-rights struggle is one of its vital subjects. Adger Cowans, in a sun-drenched aerial view, captures a crowd watching Malcolm X speak and, in another photo, a child in an N.A.A.C.P. T-shirt, seen through the veil of an American flag. Music is another theme: Ming Smith’s other- You probably know the song “WAP,” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stal- worldly action shot of the musician Sun Ra is one lion. Now, from the impressive mind of the first-time curator Christiana of the show’s many high points. But the intimate settings, the everyday situations, and the abstract Ine-Kimba Boyle, comes another body-centric hit: the six-person show compositions on view are just as striking. Beuford “Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm” (on view at the Smith’s exquisite image of his own camera-bear- Canada gallery, in Tribeca, through April 10). Here the acronym stands ing shadow in a waterfall, from 1978, gently con- founds hidebound expectations of Black self-rep- for “wireless application protocol,” and the feminist hook is the overlap resentation.—Johanna Fateman (whitney.org) of the physical and the digital in new figurative representation. The idea is perhaps best expressed in Caitlin Cherry’s deliriously glitchy, nearly “KAWS: WHAT PARTY” nine-foot-long oil painting “Her Burnout Tesseract” (pictured above). In 1992, a Jersey City graffiti artist named Brian A glass-bead-and-Jacquard tapestry by Qualeasha Wood is a pixelesque Donnelly adopted KAWS as his nom de spray ode to the power of daydreams; the ballerinas in Emily Manwaring’s can, only because, he has said, he liked how the four letters looked together. (Were there a Royal ebullient acrylic group portrait get a textural lift from peacock feathers Academy of Bubble Letters, KAWS would be and sequins; and Op-art sleeves meet surreal landscapes in the high-style knighted.) Nigh on thirty years later, he is a divas painted by Delphine Desane. Sydney Vernon ambitiously combines phenomenally successful painter and sculptor, whose neon-bright acrylics, antic statuary, and video, pastel, charcoal, paint, and an X-ray in two tender reflections on gift-shop-ready tchotchkes—based on familiar familial love and loss. And Kenya (Robinson) almost steals the show with cartoons, notably “The Simpsons,” or on such her video “Patriot Games,” which intercuts footage of Whitney Houston characters of his own devising as Companion, a Mickey Mouse-esque sad sack—are on view in singing the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl with a YouTube —Andrea K. Scott COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CANADA THE ARTIST COURTESY this retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Don- video of two young men awestruck by her greatness.

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 7 after the passing of his grandmother; he invites (Christian Bale) takes his fiancée, Alex (Kate named David Ghantt (Zach Galifianakis), who, his sometime girlfriend, Gwen (Nozipho Mc- Beckinsale), home to California to meet his in 1997, is persuaded by Kelly (Kristen Wiig), lean), to move in with him. At her prompting, mom, Jane (Frances McDormand), a record pro- with whom he’s hopelessly in love, to steal mil- they turn it into a collective for Black revolu- ducer whose walls of photographs bear testament lions in cash from his company’s vault. She, in tionary study; friends join them, and the house to a life misspent in rock. She is all the family turn, is being manipulated by a coolly devious becomes a workshop for exploring their intel- that Sam has but far more than he wants, and the friend (Owen Wilson), who ships David off to lectual and political heritage (evoked by the movie watches tenderly over their time together. Mexico and sends a hit man (Jason Sudeikis) to participation of the poets Sonia Sanchez and Jane’s idea of family values is to come within an silence him. The reversals of fortune, the narrow Ursula Rucker). The film also brings to life the inch of seducing her son’s girlfriend, bringing a escapes, the plans for revenge—and, for that city’s oppressive history—its actions against the shameless young rock star (Alessandro Nivola) matter, the details of the robbery itself—are Black political and cultural collective MOVE, along for the ride. The movie has poise and a gleefully outlandish, and Hess imbues them which was bombed by the police in 1985—in lightly perspiring sexiness, but also an uncertain with his unique fusion of sugar-frosted style presentations by MOVE’s survivors and their sense of humor, and you end up rooting for the and religious substance. The goofily coiffed and relatives, as well as in archival news clips. Asili squares—especially Sam and his colleague Sara tucked-in David seems to be answering, in his explicitly relates his film to Jean-Luc Godard’s (Natascha McElhone), who have more fun in the own blundering way, the call of a higher power; “La Chinoise,” borrowing its didactic elements front of a Volvo than seems either practical or David’s jilted fiancée, Jandice (Kate McKin- and romantic moods to forge a vision of collec- legal. Released in 2003.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed non), blends sacred love with profane humor; tive action and personal progress.—Richard Brody in our issue of 3/10/03.) (Streaming on Crackle, and all of the miscreants have a naïveté that’s (Streaming on virtual cinemas.) Amazon, and other services.) close to holy innocence. Released in 2016.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon, Hulu, and other services.) Laurel Canyon Masterminds After the solemnities of her first feature, “High Jared Hess’s wildly plotted comedy of clueless Opening Night Art,” the director Lisa Cholodenko turned to criminals, based on a true story, is intermittently John Cassavetes’s most cleverly constructed lighter matters: specifically, what to do if your funny and consistently inspired. It’s about an film, from 1977, is also a definitive lesson in the mother is an unreconstructed hippie. Sam armored-car driver in rural North Carolina death-defying, all-consuming art of acting. Myr- tle Gordon (Gena Rowlands), a glorious actress in the prime of life, stars in a new play by an elder writer (Joan Blondell) but finds that the story— WHAT TO STREAM which is about aging—is making her look old and feel old, and she resists ferociously, onstage, in real time. The story begins with the magic moment when Myrtle passes from the wings to the stage yet never stops being herself; the psychodramatic improvisations that she wreaks upon the text, and the chaos that they sow among her colleagues onstage and off, are the crux of the action. Myrtle’s co-star (Cassavetes), her director (Ben Gazzara), the producer (Paul Stew- art), the playwright, and the entire company get drawn into her turmoil as she turns the theatre into an arena of existential combat. The familiar fascination of backstage melodrama keeps the action flowing even as the terrifying, self-flay- ing antics threaten to shred the fabric of the drama—and of the screen.—R.B. (Streaming on the Criterion Channel, Amazon, and other services.)

Le Plaisir This 1952 costume adaptation of three stories by Maupassant matches the originals in sensuality and irony, to which the director, Max Ophüls, adds his distinctive blend of visual extrava- gance and bitter, worldly wisdom. The first two episodes—concerning, respectively, a former ladies’ man, now elderly, who dons a mask to The Moroccan government’s ban on Mostafa Derkaoui’s daring 1974 gavotte with young belles at a dance hall, and docu-fiction,“About Some Meaningless Events,” nearly worked: the film the women of a small-town brothel who send the local gentry into a tizzy when they close up shop vanished after one screening and was believed lost until its negative turned to attend the first Communion of the madam’s up, in 2016, in an archive in Barcelona. (It’s showing March 18-31 on niece—look past effervescent ribaldry to reveal MOMA’s Web site, and is available on MUBI.) Filming in the streets and the power of desire along with its elaborate ritu- als. (In the dance hall, Ophüls’s gliding, gyrating bars of Casablanca, Derkaoui and his crew interview passersby about the camera turns the pounding steps of a quadrille Moroccan cinema—and hear from many of them that it should avoid mere into an erotic night-club grind.) The third story, entertainment and depict the real problems of the Moroccan people, such as about a bright young artist whose romance with his model goes sour, is a philosophical tale with a unemployment and poverty. The crew is seen planning the shoot, searching whiplash ending. It presses the director’s elegant for participants, and just plain hanging out—until an interviewee is revealed style to the breaking point, climaxing with a to have killed his boss at his job on the docks. The movie then veers into a harrowing, vertiginous crane shot that rises to a nightmarish frenzy—and leads to one of film-noir-like crime drama of personal conflict and systemic corruption, in the greatest last lines ever. In French.—R.B. which the filmmakers debate their own approach to the subject and have (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.) their motives challenged on camera by the criminal himself. In discussing 1 the possibility of an outspoken yet self-questioning political cinema, Der- For more reviews, visit

kaoui created one—which the authorities tried to silence.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town DE CATALUNYA FILMOTECA COURTESY

8 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 made a short list of contenders I realized noodles, speckled with ground Szechuan that my passion for each was born of its peppercorn and big flakes of chili, with or use in Chinese cooking. Many can be without crumbles of Beyond Beef; silky found at Fat Choy, which the chef, Jus- mapo tofu, garnished with leek greens; tin Lee, and his business partner, Jared vegetable-filled wontons in chili oil. 1 Moeller, market as “Kind of Chinese. If the names of some dishes sound Also vegan.” familiar—“dry pot style,” “dry pepper TABLES FOR TWO Frilly segments of baby bok choy are style,” “cumin style”—it may be because wilted in hot water until tender but still Spicy Moon’s owners once worked at Fat Choy crunchy, then covered in steamed pickled Han Dynasty, to which the menu pays 250 Broome St. garlic, fried garlic, and the house “brown homage. At Spicy Moon, instead of sauce,” made from mushrooms, rice wine, choosing from a range of meats to be Spicy Moon and soy sauce. Skinny, slick florets ofgai prepared in each style, you pick tofu, an 328 E. 6th St. lan, or Chinese broccoli—which Lee assortment of vegetables, or a combina- describes as “kind of like if broccoli rabe tion of both. For a recent to-go order of The other day, while placing an online and asparagus had a baby”—twist them- the kung-pao tofu and vegetables, cubes order for Fat Choy, a new restaurant selves around fat, nubby rice rolls tossed of tofu and morsels of eggplant, battered on the Lower East Side, I must have in charred scallions and black vinegar. and deep-fried until bubbled and puffy, been trigger-happy: without meaning Longevity noodles—coated in a blend of were packed separately from the ruddy to, I ordered several items twice. It was a roasted garlic, shallots, chili, ginger, and sauce; combining them à la minute as- fortuitous accident; each dish on the tiny fermented black beans—are strewn with sured no compromise in texture. menu—which has been tightly edited both bok choy sum (a flowering bok-choy At the beginning of the pandemic, I, to be as pandemic-proof as possible—is variety) and sweet, delicate pea leaves. like so many, stocked my pantry, refrig- worth revisiting. In addition to the vegetables, there are erator, and freezer as though my kitchen I was particularly glad for the chance snippets of Meyer lemon and crunchy were a bomb shelter—a response that to closely examine the sticky-rice dump- bread crumbs on the longevity noodles, seemed staunchly retrograde, a relic of lings, the first container of which didn’t which make it an unconventional, in- the nineteen-fifties. A year later, I’m mar- last long. The stretchy golden rectangles spired twist on the classic Chinese dish. velling at how restaurants have not only are nearly as flat as postage stamps, yet To Chinese-food traditionalists who are kept us fed and feeling connected but they bear an incredible amount of flavor, also vegan—or perhaps simply cutting have also pushed us forward—toward, in especially impressive considering that back on animal products—I’d recom- my most optimistic moments, a world in their scant filling is composed of kitchen mend Spicy Moon, with locations in which service-industry workers are valued scraps—cauliflower cores, collard stems, both the East and West Village. more highly, in which small businesses are shiitakes and kombu strained out of Pea leaves are on the menu there, too, better protected, and in which we eat less stock—that assert themselves even be- still attached to their shoots and sautéed meat, for environmental reasons, among neath a generous blanket of chili crisp with oil, garlic, and Shaoxing wine, a rec- others. Fat Choy and Spicy Moon make and snipped cilantro. ipe no less ingenious for being ancient a fine case for all. (Fat Choy dishes $6-$12. A friend asked me recently to iden- in origin. You’ll also find other, mostly Spicy Moon dishes $5.95-$17.95.)

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAKEDA SANDFORD FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW FOR SANDFORD MAKEDA BY PHOTOGRAPH tify my desert-island vegetable, and as I Szechuanese old favorites: fiery dan-dan —Hannah Goldfield

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COMMENT duced—should not obscure the import- collapsing. Those maneuvers meant that BIGGER AND BETTER ant point. This is the most economically people in finance, and, more broadly, liberal piece of legislation in decades. It people who have secure employment raditionally, every new Democratic is not just much bigger than but differ- and assets in the markets, were spared TPresident starts out by passing a big ent in kind from the Obama Adminis- the severe pain felt by millions of work- economic package (and every new Re- tration’s version, which helped people ing people. Only Congress has the tools publican President starts out by pass- mainly through end-of-year tax credits. to provide direct help to the people most ing a tax cut). Jimmy Carter’s, in 1977, Biden’s bill was designed to send regular in need. That it is now able to act, quickly cost twenty billion dollars. Bill Clin- monthly checks to millions of American and effectively, is a sign that our de- ton’s, in 1993, was mainly a tax increase, families, so it will be palpable that the mocracy isn’t as completely broken as a aimed at eliminating the federal defi- government is helping them in a tough lot of people have been assuming, and cit. Barack Obama’s, in 2009, which moment. Gone are the work require- that government can moderate the gro- passed during the worst economic cri- ments, the sensitivity to the risk of infla- tesquely unequal effects of the pandemic sis since the Great Depression, cost eight tion, and other centrist concerns that have on people’s well-being. hundred billion, some of it spending been at the heart of Democratic pro- A year ago, nobody was predicting increases, some tax relief. grams for decades. The side that always that Joe Biden would be presiding over The American Rescue Plan, which seemed to lose the argument within the a neo-New Deal. His long career didn’t President Joe Biden signed last week, is Democratic Party has finally won. seem to indicate it, and he was clearly on an entirely different scale. It will cost In 2009 and again in 2020, the Fed- not on the way to having large majori- the government $1.9 trillion, even though eral Reserve drew the assignment of ties in both houses of Congress, as Frank- the economy today is in better shape staving off a depression, which it did by lin Roosevelt did. So how did this hap- than it was when Obama took office; keeping interest rates low and by buy- pen? The obvious answer is the pandemic, and, unlike Clinton’s opening economic ing many billions of dollars in financial which generated the sense of urgent, uni- initiative, it is proudly indifferent to the instruments to prevent the markets from versal crisis that the American system size of the federal deficit. The law’s most requires in order to make major changes. famous feature, its fourteen-hundred- It’s less obvious, but just as pertinent, dollar payments to individuals (mean- that the response to the 2008 financial ing that many families will wind up with crisis is now seen as having been woe- much more), is only the beginning. There fully insufficient, in ways that led to years are also extensions of eligibility for un- of unnecessary suffering and a populist employment benefits and food stamps; political revolt that disrupted both par- debt relief for renters; subsidies for state ties. It feels as if half a century’s effort to and local governments that are out of reorient the political economy away from money, so that they can continue to pro- the state and toward the market may fi- vide services; a bailout for insolvent pen- nally have run its course. sion funds; health-care subsidies; and a No Republicans voted for the Amer- nearly universal child-care benefit. ican Rescue Plan—it would not have The left’s disappointments with the passed if the U.S. Senate runoffs in Geor- adjustments necessary to get the bill gia had turned out differently—but the through the Senate—it doesn’t raise the G.O.P. still played a part in what hap- federal minimum wage, and the cash pened last week. The Party’s new sense

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Curbside pickup No-contact delivery votes meant that it was supporting major ought to make it less vulnerable to the may contain large infrastructure pro- covid-relief programs through last year; familiar attacks on social programs. grams, green-energy programs, and the Democrats had to top the Republi- Yet the American Rescue Plan is ac- wealth taxes—a long list, with most of cans’ performance. And, their votes aside, tually a kind of economic appetizer. Its its items lacking the rescue plan’s pan- the Republicans have chosen not to wage most progressive provisions—notably demic-induced sense of crisis manage- a full-scale rhetorical war on the new the child allowance, a monthly check of ment. The new bill’s fate will depend law, perhaps because polls show it to up to three hundred dollars per child, on Americans embracing the idea that be highly popular. Because the law pro- which would be the first true guaranteed the reason the misery of the pandemic vides such immediate and tangible help family-income program in the United may finally be abating is that govern- to most Americans, it’s more difficult to States, and would cut child poverty nearly ment can solve problems. Republicans, campaign against than the 2009 relief in half—are temporary, expiring by the accustomed to caricaturing Democratic effort was. Two generations’ worth of end of the year. The main course is what programs as élitist schemes created by modest Democratic anti-poverty pro- may be called “the Build Back Better a party that doesn’t care about ordinary grams have foundered because their op- bill,” soon to be unveiled by the White people, will have to feel too intimidated ponents portrayed them as mainly ben- House. It will be bigger and more per- by their constituents’ appreciation for efitting minorities; Lyndon Johnson’s manent, representing a real remaking of the American Rescue Plan to stage an War on Poverty and the welfare benefit the government’s role in the economic all-out assault on the new bill. that primarily assisted children of single lives of ordinary Americans. But that’s It is not yet time to celebrate. It is mothers that Bill Clinton ended, both only if it passes. time to prepare for a months-long cam- representing tiny fractions of the federal The bill that Biden signed into law paign with the highest possible stakes: budget, are leading examples. Now, be- last week had the advantage of a dead- a new social compact, which might fi- cause the economic pain is so widespread, line, because the Trump Administra- nally bring an end to forty years of ris- the new law has a very large and racially tion’s pandemic-aid programs were due ing inequality. diverse group of beneficiaries, which to expire in March. Build Back Better —Nicholas Lemann

FAM I LY BUSINESS The family had convened in Griffith based, sustainable, Black-owned com- MAIN-CHARACTER SYNDROME Park on a Saturday morning and was pany,” he explained. “Everyone on set searching for an appropriate place to sit wears them. Two things that changed for that was both shady and conducive to me working on this show: one, the mask social distancing. They settled on a bench I wear, and, two, I’ve taken all the capi- outside the Autry Museum of the Amer- tal letters out of my texts.” Much of “Gen- ican West. Each member of the Barnz eration” ’s narrative unspools over phone family (their last name is a mashup of screens, with the camera tracking speech ow do you teach your child about Daniel and Ben’s original last names, bubbles and selfies, as the teens text or Hresilience? In contemporary Hol- Bernstein and Schwartz) identifies as Snapchat or live-stream. lywood, the answer is trending toward: queer, including Zelda’s younger brother, “Every time we try to write jokes If the kid has an idea for a story, tell the Dashiell. “There’s so much masculine about emojis, Zelda will say, ‘I don’t kid to develop it as a TV show. Make energy in the house I live in normally,” know, that sounds kind of millennial,’” it a family project. The result, in the case Zelda said. She explained that she has Daniel said. “I steer clear of emojis fully. of the Barnz family—parents Ben and never lived with women, except during Daniel Barnz, both industry veterans, summer camp and a few weeks she spent and their nineteen-year-old daughter, two years ago in the U.K. with Lena Zelda—is HBO Max’s “Generation,” Dunham, an executive producer of “Gen- an L.G.B.T.Q. teen dramedy, some- eration.” (The trip—“we got really into thing of a “Girls” for Generation Z. The watercolor”—was fodder for Zelda’s ap- show tracks an ensemble cast, many of plication essay for Yale.) them queer, at a high school in Ana- Zelda, who has curly brown hair, heim, California, instead of against the was sitting cross-legged, wearing a pink millennial backdrop of brunch and bars KN95 mask and Doc Martens. “They’re in Brooklyn. the staple bisexual-wardrobe shoe,” she “I hate this phrase, but it was kind of explained. a teachable moment,” Daniel, who co- “I didn’t know that!” Ben said. wrote the show with his daughter, said. “Everyone always sees me in these “I feel like, as a writer, I’ve lived with fail- and is, like, ‘You’re wearing the bisexual ure and rejection for so many years. So shoes again.’” here we could have this moment with Ben wore a beige KN95 and Nike Air Zelda where we would say, ‘Yeah, this is Force Ones; Daniel wore scuffed white how you go about doing it.’” Nikes and a red mask. “It’s from an L.A.- Daniel, Zelda, and Ben Barnz

14 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 1 I’m also wary of periods, because appar- FREE ADVICE University of Southern California’s El- ently those are like microaggressions ASK A DOCTOR lison Institute for Transformative Med- within texts.” icine, of which he is the C.E.O. Among “He’ll text me with a period, and I’m his other informal advisees during the always, like, ‘O.K., he’s furious,’ and then pandemic: the Trump and Biden Ad- I get home and he’s not mad at all,” Zelda ministrations. “We could see that peo- said. “Some language can feel older. Like, ple weren’t stepping up,” he said. “We the word ‘boring-ass’ is a phrase that feels really didn’t have a choice but to work too millennial.” with the last Administration and this “When we were first talking about “ he Howard Stern Show” counts one to try to make a difference. This one the show, I realized we were learning T among its regular guests a driv- is a lot easier to work with, I’ll tell you these new words, like ‘skoliosexual,’ ” Ben ing instructor known as Bobo, a former that much. They respect science.” said. “I did not know what it meant. Peo- garbage collector known as King of All Agus wore a black Uniqlo sweater ple of Zelda’s age don’t want to be pigeon- Blacks, and a tanning enthusiast known over a white shirt, a uniform he adopted holed or categorized, but they also want as Tan Mom. Last spring, a new per- at the suggestion of a former patient, to be labelled and identified correctly.” sonality joined the mix: Dr. David Agus, Steve Jobs. “He actually helped choose One in six Gen Z adults now iden- physician, professor, and COVID-19 pun- the sweater,” Agus said. An oncologist tifies as L.G.B.T., a fact, the Barnzes dit. Even-keeled and eager to assist, by training, Agus was contacted by Stern said, that was a major influence in the Agus, who is fifty-six, appears on the in 2012, after Stern’s co-host, Robin Quiv- show’s creation. “Both Zelda and her satellite-radio show every few months ers, was diagnosed as having Stage III brother are adopted, and they have dif- to debunk rumors, share best practices, endometrial cancer. “I got a voice mail ferent birth parents, so it’s kind of amaz- answer questions, and, given the nature on my cell phone that was literally How- ing that we ended up with two kids of the forum, goof around. Recently, ard in tears,” Agus said. He got involved who are queer,” Daniel said. “It really Stern asked, “What’s the dumbest thing with Quivers’s treatment and became makes you think about the miraculous- you’ve heard about the vaccine?” Stern’s physician. This added to his rep- ness of life.” “There’s this notion that Bill Gates ertoire of high-profile gigs: regular ap- Each member of the family has had has a plan to take over the country and pearances on CBS; heading up the El- a coming-out experience, although the there’s a tracker in the vaccine, so once lison Institute, funded by another tech younger generation was somewhat more you get it the federal government knows guy, a friend of Jobs. In January of last offhand about it. “Zelda really casually everything you do and say,” Agus re- year, Agus attended the Davos World came out, like at the end of a letter from plied. “Which is true, but it’s astonish- Economic Forum. “A scientist from camp one summer,” Ben said. “And ing that people realize that.” China thrust an iPhone in my face,” he Dashiell literally came out by writing “It’s a very different audience than said. On the phone, via FaceTime, was on a Post-it note one day and was, like, I’m used to,” Agus said the other day, a Wuhan doctor with a warning. ‘I’m gay, text me any questions you have.’ videoconferencing from his office at the “I kept thinking of ‘M*A*S*H,’ when And then the next day he came out to the carpool and the family group chat and the grandparents.” As they wrote “Generation,” the family mined their lives for story lines. “I feel like I always want to take notes,” Daniel said. Ben said that he felt a need to listen more to “the Greta Thunbergs and Emma Gonzálezes of the world.” Asked to describe Gen Z’s voice, Zelda thought a moment. “I think we’re very aware of what’s going on around us, more so than other generations have been,” she said. “But, at the same time, we’re teen-agers, so we can be very my- opic.” She described the increasing prev- alence of what she called “main-character syndrome,” in which teens behave in a way that causes their peers to say, “You’re not the main character.” She added, “That’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot.” “We need to put that in the show!” Daniel said. —Antonia Hitchens “Later on, after work, do you want to have leftovers?” the helicopter came in,” he said. “It was and they smoke more, yet they live lon- like music exists on this plane of emo- chaos. I wasn’t trained as an infectious- ger.” He cited a compound in Burgun- tion and conflict and intensity that’s very disease doctor or a virologist.” He con- dy’s Pinot Noir grapes, resveratrol. “Pfizer hard to capture in normal life,” she said. tinued, “But if you can actually explain bought the rights to resveratrol,” Agus “Which is to say, I don’t particularly write science to people and get them to un- said. “But they stopped the clinical tri- music that’s good for relaxing.” derstand it, as a doctor, that’s part of als, because the way nature produces it is Woolf is forty-eight and wry, with your role.” complex, and, although there’s probably no-nonsense glasses and chestnut hair. Growing up in Baltimore, Agus a benefit, the way they tried to do it in a She was calling from her snowed-in stu- played with lab rats while his peers pill didn’t work.” So it goes: neither sci- dio, where she was working on an opera. played baseball; one of his teen-age ence nor booze can solve every problem. Her latest album, “Luna Pearl Woolf: science projects ended up on a space- 1—Sheila Marikar Fire and Flood,” which spans twenty-five shuttle mission. “It was horrible,” he years of her work, has been nominated said. “They had calculated the g-forces INSPIRATIONS for a Grammy for Best Classical Com- incorrectly, and the mice died.” In 1997, MADOFF AND COHEN, MUSES pendium—a category for records that he was working in a lab at Sloan Ket- don’t fit neatly elsewhere. The opening tering when Andy Grove, the C.E.O. track, “To the Fire,” which Woolf com- of Intel, walked in. “He goes, ‘David, I posed as an undergraduate at Harvard, like your science, but you’re a horrible features a chorus of cruel laughter set presenter,’” Agus recalled. Grove sched- alongside soaring harmonies. (Like “a uled a battery of talks and “basically Cassandrian prophesy of environmental forced me to become a better public hen Luna Pearl Woolf, a com- depredation,” the liner notes read, or “the speaker,” Agus said. Going on “How- Wposer of distinctively unsleepy violent glee of a Twitter mob.”) “Après ard Stern” is still stressful, though. “If I classical music, first moved to Montreal, moi, le déluge,” a four-part operatic work, think about it too much, I won’t sleep she liked to listen to Leonard Cohen in explores the aftermath of Hurricane the night before,” he said. her car. Woolf lives on the north side of Katrina; “One to One to One” takes the Last year, at the suggestion of Ash- Mt. Royal, a fifteen-minute walk to Co- male gaze as its subject. Two standout ton Kutcher, Agus signed up for Com- hen’s grave, and she used to climb the hill tracks are Woolf ’s haunting versions munity, a platform (partially funded by to visit it often. “People leave little gifts, of Leonard Cohen’s songs “Everybody Kutcher) that allows users to text fol- little hearts and stones,” she said the other Knows” and “Who by Fire.” “I wanted lowers without revealing their phone day. Last March, Woolf was dealt a bum to take what I hear in my head when I numbers. Now he has more than fifty hand: long COVID. She picked up the listen to those songs, and spit them out thousand followers, who text him around virus at a benefit in New York—“one of again in my musical language,” she said. a hundred questions a day; Agus fields these big charity things, where there’s ten In Woolf ’s reimagining, “Who by them with the help of one employee. people at a table and it’s so loud you’re Fire,” which borrows from a Hebrew There are other ways to scale. One leaning in”—and still has symptoms. If prayer about God doling out various fates afternoon last month, Agus conducted her heart rate gets too high, she has to (“Who in her lonely slip?/ Who by bar- his hundredth (or so) Zoom Q.&A., stay in bed for days. Still, Woolf has writ- biturate?”), starts softly, with plucked this one with the parents of U.S.C. so- ten thirty-five minutes of music in the strings, before breaking into abstract op- rority and fraternity members. Topics past year, none of it calming. “I really feel eratics, “like I’ve taken a lens and split broached: COVID-19 vaccines (get them), some of the frequencies apart and put masks (still a must), herd immunity them back together,” she said. She picked by April. “Bullshit,” Agus said. New it for its familiarity—her Jewish commu- variants, not enough people vaccinated, nity group sometimes performs Cohen’s something about T cells. Maybe, he version on Yom Kippur—and for its mes- said, “if things go right with the man- sage, the idea that “we’re all struggling ufacturing of the vaccines, hopefully, toward or against something, and we this summer.” don’t always have a choice in where we’re The line of inquiry shifted. “What placed in that spectrum of evils or sins are your thoughts on the longevity diet or happinesses.” She described “Every- by Dr. Longo?” (Eat real food.) “Are you body Knows” as “more cynical.” It’s about familiar with the Gundry diet?” (Eat “human hypocrisies,” she said. “What is real food.) “Brown rice or white rice?” it that our own efforts are doing?” Woolf ’s (No data; eat real food.) The final ques- version opens with a chorus singing the tion: “Which wines and spirits are ac- word “no” repeatedly, in quick, anxiety- tually good for you?” producing bursts. “The voices are sort of “There’s something called the Bur- objecting: No, no, no, no. And the cello is gundy paradox,” Agus said. “People in doing the Cohen melody,” she said. the Burgundy region of France are larger Woolf wrote the Cohen arrangements than people in other regions of France, Luna Pearl Woolf for her creative partner, the cellist Matt

16 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 Haimovitz, who was doing a tour with through reports. “There’s no perfect way is a regular guest, summed up South Jer- a vocal trio from the U.K. (“Pop-y clas- to measure snow,” David Robinson, New sey’s winter weather—it was the state’s sical stuff.”) They went largely unper- Jersey’s state climatologist, said the other twenty-ninth-mildest January on reformed. “I had a lot of fun writing them, day. “But there are standards. You have cord—with one word: “boring.” but the trio was not really into them. It to stick to the standards.” Martucci loves snow (he says it’s the takes a certain kind of personality to like Evidence of the mid-winter weather only thing he misses living on the coastal my music,” she said, dryly. Other proj- moment is most obvious in a video of plain), and the local snow totals were ects have faltered in search of funding. the implosion made by Ben Gravy, a on his mind in the episode he posted In 2014, Woolf began writing an opera Shore-based surfer known for having the day after the casino was destroyed. about Bernie Madoff, which took his surfed every state in the Union. In the It featured two celebrity amateur me- wife, Ruth—“her complete abdication video, shot from Gravy’s board in the teorologists from South Jersey, Sgt. of her own identity into his”—as its main thirty-six-degree water, the scatter of al- Snowflake and Weatherman Franz— character. “Madoff wasn’t a mastermind,” tocumulus and altostratus clouds are cen- John Saltzman, of Cape May, and Marc she said. “He was just a guy who couldn’t ter stage, as are, immediately following Franz, Jr., of Lacey Township, respec- deal with his own failures.” the casino’s collapse, the fifteen-mile- tively. Franz is known for his deeply his- Near the end of Cohen’s career, he an-hour winds blowing from the north- torical Ocean County weather tweets fell prey to a scammer and lost most of west—precisely as forecast by Joe Mar- (“I just post what I feel”), Saltzman for his money. Woolf saw him perform when tucci, the in-house meteorologist for the a viral Facebook incident involving a he was seventy-three: “He had to keep Press of Atlantic City. Martucci viewed 2012 winter storm, a snowblower, and a working.” She pulled up the lyrics to the implosion from Playground Pier, bottle of Cape May Brewing Company his “Tower of Song,” from 1988, on her where the wind chill made the air feel beer. On the podcast, Saltzman opined phone and read, “Well, my friends are like seventeen degrees and Martucci’s on the Cape May Bubble, a phenome- gone and my hair is gray/I ache in the feet feel like ice. The moment the casino non—disputed among meteorologists— places where I used to play/And I’m fell, he knew that his wind forecast was that residents of the peninsula believe crazy for love but I’m not coming on/I’m on the money. “Which was a little un- keeps them mostly thunderstorm- and just paying my rent every day in the fortunate, because you saw the cloud of snow-free. “We have different weather Tower of Song.” “I love this idea that debris coming toward you,” he said. down here than I think a lot of people you’re stuck in the glory of what you Martucci is the only meteorologist give us credit for,” Saltzman said. were born to do, and yet you’re still not employed by a New Jersey newspaper, Despite the Bubble, Cape May holds as good as you want to be,” Woolf said. and he runs one of only a handful of the state record for snowfall: thirty-four “I get something from that.” newspaper-based meteorologic units in inches, in the Great Blizzard of 1899. 1—Anna Russell the country, the model being the Wash- Or at least it did. During the nor’easter ington Post’s Capital Weather Gang. this past February 1st, a Jersey weather SOUTH JERSEY POSTCARD Before coming to the Press, in 2012, observer two hundred miles north, in WEATHER WAR S Martucci, who completed a degree in Mt. Arlington, reported close to thirty- meteorology at Rutgers, did forecasting four inches, threatening Cape May’s work in radio and on North Jersey TV. title. Martucci seemed to take the threat At the Press, he posts forecasts online personally. during the day, and manages the paper’s Robinson, reached in his office re- social-media weather engagement with cently, said that the Mt. Arlington read- a South Jersey readership that took some ing was not likely to be officially counted, ow that the dust has settled at the adjusting to. “Look, in North Jersey, peo- although in reviewing it his staff had Nimplosion site of the Trump Plaza ple ask me what the weather’s going to stumbled upon a thirty-four-inch mea- Hotel and Casino, in Atlantic City, the be, but I get more questions about the surement taken at Oak Ridge, in De- rubble is being eyed by sport fishermen, whys down here,” he said. cember of 1942, making North Jersey of- who want to use it to add to an artificial Most of South Jersey is on the coastal ficially tied with South Jersey in terms reef in nearby Little Egg Harbor. But the plain, but Martucci grew up to the north, of historic snowfall. But, on the day that day of the implosion itself, February 12th, in Union, in the shadow of the Watchung Trump Plaza imploded, South Jersey’s is being remembered by the Jersey Shore’s Mountains. (His earliest memories in- snow record was still in limbo, and the weather-interested mostly for what it clude pre-“Today” Al Roker forecasts.) weather headline was sunshine, which was: a beautiful, clear winter moment Recently, he married Shawnie Caslin, most everybody in Atlantic City was sa- that, meteorologically speaking, repre- a weather-graphics producer at WNBC- voring, along with the sky, which, when sented a short high-pressure respite in a TV; they met in Rutgers’s meteorology a building falls down, is something peo- series of low-pressure systems that briefly club and started dating after Super- ple tend to remember. Martucci himself threatened South Jersey’s place in the storm Sandy. was on the boardwalk, beaming. meteorological history books. State offi- Twice a month, Martucci hosts a pod- “Especially in a string of days that cials have been sorting through North cast called “Something in the Air.” A few were cloudy, you get that sunny day— Jersey’s competing snow totals since days before the Trump Plaza implosion, you know, people just feel right,” he said. February, interviewing observers, going Robinson, the state climatologist, who —Robert Sullivan

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 17 that promise after taking office. Instead, A REPORTER AT LARGE he went to extraordinary lengths to hide the documents. The subpoena will finally give legal authorities a clear look at the TRUMP IN THE CROSSHAIRS former President’s opaque business em- pire, helping them to determine whether Will Cyrus Vance, Jr., indict the former President for financial crimes? he committed any financial crimes. After Vance’s victory at the Supreme Court, he BY JANE MAYER released a typically buttoned-up statement: “The work continues.” If the tax records contain major reve- lations, the public probably won’t learn about them anytime soon: the information will likely be kept secret unless criminal charges are filed. The hard drive— which includes potentially revealing notes showing how Trump and his accountants arrived at their tax numbers—is believed to be locked in a high-security annex in lower Manhattan. A spokesman for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office -de clined to confirm the drive’s whereabouts, but people familiar with the office presume that it has been secured in a radio-fre- quency-isolation chamber in the Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building, on Cen- tre Street. The chamber is protected by a double set of metal doors—the kind used in bank vaults—and its walls are lined with what looks like glimmering copper foil, to block remote attempts to tamper with digital evidence. It’s a modern equivalent of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Such extreme precautions are not sur- prising, given the nature of the case: no previous President has been charged with a criminal offense. If Trump, who remains the Republican Party’s most popular potential Presidential candidate and who recently signalled interest in another run, n February 22nd, in an office in the first, and larger, of two known probes is charged and convicted, he could end OWhite Plains, two lawyers handed into potential criminal misconduct by up serving a prison term instead of a sec- over a hard drive to a Manhattan Assis- Trump. The second was opened, last ond White House term. Vance, the scion tant District Attorney, who, along with month, by a county prosecutor in Geor- of a prominent Democratic family—the two investigators, had driven up from gia, who is investigating Trump’s efforts kind of insider whom the arriviste Trump New York City in a heavy snowstorm. to undermine that state’s election results. has long resented—now has the power Although the exchange didn’t look mo- Vance is a famously low-key prosecu- to rewrite Trump’s place in history. The mentous, it set in motion the next phase tor, but he has been waging a ferocious journalist Jonathan Alter, a longtime of one of the most significant legal show- battle. His subpoena required Trump’s friend of the D.A. and his family, said, downs in American history. Hours ear- accounting firm, Mazars U.S.A., to turn “Vance represents everything that Trump, lier, the Supreme Court had ordered for- over millions of pages of personal and when he was in Queens with his nose mer President Donald Trump to comply corporate records, dating from 2011 to pressed up against the glass in Manhat- with a subpoena for nearly a decade’s 2019, that Trump had withheld from pros- tan, wanted to conquer and destroy.” worth of private financial records, includ- ecutors and the public. Before Trump ing his tax returns. The subpoena had was elected, in 2016, he promised to re- ance’s investigation, which appears been issued by Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Man- lease his tax records, as every other mod- Vto be focussed largely on business hattan District Attorney, who is leading ern President has done, and he repeated practices that Trump engaged in before taking office, may seem picayune in com- Vance is a famously low-key prosecutor, but he’s been ferociously battling Trump. parison with the outrageous offenses to

18 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY WIDLINE CADET democratic norms that Trump commit- major bank cases, producing more than (DeSantis did not respond to a request ted as President. But the New York Uni- fourteen billion dollars in fines and for- for comment.) versity historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose feitures. This inflow covers the D.A.’s Vance’s office could well be the only recent book “Strongmen” examines the annual budget many times over, and operable brake on Trump’s remarkable characteristics of antidemocratic rulers, also pays for a two-hundred-and-fifty- record of impunity. He has survived two told me, “If you don’t prosecute Trump, million-dollar fund for community- impeachments, the investigation by the it sends the message that all that he did justice programs. But Vance is sixty-six, special counsel Robert Mueller, half a was acceptable.” She pointed out that and the pressure of managing one of the dozen bankruptcies, twenty-six accusa- strongmen typically “inhabit a gray zone highest-profile prosecutorial offices in tions of sexual misconduct, and an es- between illegal and legal for years”; cor- the country has been wearying. “It turned timated four thousand lawsuits. And his rupt acts of political power are just an out to be tougher than I thought it would successor, President Joe Biden, so far extension of their shady business prac- be,” he conceded. He told me that, al- seems to prefer that the Department of tices. “Trumpism isn’t just about him,” though his larger-than-life predecessor, Justice simply turn the page. Ben-Ghiat went on. “It’s a whole way of Robert Morgenthau, held the office for As a result, the contest between Vance being in the world. It’s about secrecy, thirty-five years—retiring at age ninety— and Trump is about much more than a domination, trickery, and fraud.” She he himself was ready to give the next financial investigation. It’s a stress test said, of Vance’s probe, “It’s symbolic for generation a shot. “There’s nothing worse of the American justice system. George the public, and very important to give than a politician who doesn’t know when Conway, a lawyer and a Trump critic, the public a sense of accountability.” to leave,” he said. who is married to the former President’s The legal clash between Vance and He had decided to keep his inten- adviser Kellyanne Conway, said, “Trump Trump has already tested the limits of tions quiet until after the Supreme Court is a man who has gotten away with ev- Presidential power. In 2019, Trump’s law- ruled on Trump’s tax records, partly be- erything his entire life. He’s an affront yers argued that Presidents were im- cause he feared that some of the more to the rule of law, and to all law-abiding mune from criminal investigation and outspokenly anti-Trump candidates for citizens.” In office, Trump often treated prosecution. Trump’s appellate counsel, his job might alienate the conservative the law as a political weapon, using the William Consovoy, asserted that Trump Justices. His decision to leave midcourse, Justice Department as a tool for target- couldn’t be prosecuted even if he ful- however, exposes the case to the polit- ing enemies. Now he is pitted against a filled one of his most notorious cam- ical fray of an election. Some candidates D.A. who regards the law as the politi- paign boasts: “I could stand in the mid- have already made inflammatory state- cally blind foundation of democracy. As dle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody ments denouncing Trump, and such Conway put it, “For Trump, the law is a and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Vance rhetoric could complicate a prosecution. cudgel. For Vance, it’s what holds us to- and his team rejected this imperial claim, The investigative phase of the Trump gether as a civilization. And that’s why insisting that nobody is above the law. case will likely be complete before Vance’s people who thumb their noses at it have Trump, in his effort to shield his finan- term ends, leaving to him the crucial to be prosecuted. If they aren’t, you’re cial records, took the fight all the way decision of whether to bring criminal taking a big step toward a world where to the Supreme Court—and then back charges. But any trial would almost surely that is acceptable.” again, after the case was remanded— rest in the hands of his successor. Dan- but the D.A.’s office won every round. iel R. Alonso, Vance’s former top dep- ance’s next move in the case against Vance, in a wide-ranging interview uty, who is now a lawyer at Buckley, VTrump is less clear. Although his with me about his tenure as Manhattan L.L.P., predicts that if Trump is indicted office is credited with numerous con- D.A., said, of appearing before the Su- “it will be nuclear war.” victions during his tenure—such as that preme Court, “Truly, it was like Mt. Trump has already demonstrated a of Pedro Hernandez, the murderer of Olympus.” He declined to discuss the willingness to engage in almost unthink- Etan Patz, a six-year-old boy, in a case Trump case, as legal ethics require, but able tactics to protect himself. Among that had gone unsolved since 1979— he did disclose that he will not seek a his social circle in Palm Beach, specula- critics assert that he has frequently re- fourth term, and that he plans to retire tion abounds that Florida’s Republican treated when faced with rich and pow- from the D.A.’s office on December 31st. governor, Ron DeSantis, an ally, might erful criminal targets. Notably, in 2012, Eight Democratic candidates are cam- not honor an extradition request from he dropped a case involving two of paigning for the job, and, given the city’s New York if a bench warrant were is- Trump’s children, which centered on liberal leanings, the victor of the Dem- sued for Trump’s arrest. Dave Aronberg, their management of the Trump SoHo ocratic primary, in June, is all but guar- the state’s attorney for Palm Beach hotel-condominium, in lower Manhat- anteed to win in November. County, doubts that such defiance would tan. The tabloids have referred to Vance Even before the Trump case crossed stand. Extradition, he points out, is a as Soft Cy, portraying him as a well- his desk, Vance had largely decided not constitutional duty, and a governor’s role meaning Boy Scout who lacks the killer to run for reëlection. He and his wife, in it is merely “ministerial.” But he ad- instinct necessary for nailing the big- Peggy McDonnell, felt that he had done mitted that the process might not go gest white-collar villains in New York. much of what he set out to do—among smoothly: “You know what? I thought Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attor- other successes, he and his federal part- January 6th would go smoothly. Con- ney for the Southern District of New ners had secured judgments in a dozen gress’s role was just ministerial then, too.” York, told me, “I think he’s taken a lot

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 19 Board of Education. Cyrus Vance, Sr., rose swiftly to top government posts, but he, too, had trouble navigating politics. He evidently annoyed President Carter by eschewing television-talk- show appearances. And, in 1980, Vance, Sr., warned Carter that a proposed military plan to rescue American hostages in Iran was too risky. Carter went ahead, in a failed operation that killed eight servicemen and freed no hostages. Vance, Sr., resigned. At the time, Vance, Jr., was attending Georgetown Law. He told “Men want to be me, women want to bite me, “My father was really struggling, in my head off and devour my corpse.” the sense that the President was really not taking his advice. I think he was probably humiliated. Or just hurt. But •• he wasn’t someone to go out and express his hurt or upset.” of undue criticism. It’s hard. The track prosecution, Vance refused to discuss it: Although Vance, Jr., revered his fa- record is not perfect. Maybe he’s been “He’s like Joe Friday—‘Just the facts.’ ” ther, he wanted to escape his shadow. He a little bit gun-shy. But he’s upright and Alter said that Vance’s sense of himself told me that he initially worked for a full of integrity.” as a straight shooter reflects “this whole West African shipping company but As Vance faces an adversary whose noblesse-oblige thing,” adding, “That’s “turned out to be a shitty businessper- character is in many ways the opposite where he comes from.” son.” He then landed in the Manhattan of his own, some of his perceived weak- A third-generation public servant, D.A.’s office, which had jurisdiction over nesses may become strengths. Trump has Vance is a vestige of the old Wasp guard. cases involving some of the world’s big- accused prosecutors investigating him of His father, Cyrus Vance, Sr., became gest criminal enterprises. (His pedigree waging a political vendetta. After the Su- Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State after surely played a role in his getting the job: preme Court upheld Vance’s tax-records years of government service, including Morgenthau, the D.A. at the time, reg- subpoena, Trump denounced the probe top roles in the Kennedy and Johnson ularly hired young men from famous as “a continuation of the greatest polit- Administrations. When the elder Vance families.) Vance soon became a member ical Witch Hunt in the history of our was five years old, his father died; he of Morgenthau’s rackets bureau, which Country,” and claimed that it was “all was reared by his cousin John W. Davis, prosecuted many of the office’s most Democrat-inspired in a totally Demo- the Democratic nominee for President challenging financial cases. crat location, New York City and State.” in 1924, who was defeated by Calvin In 1988, Vance decided to move with Given Vance’s sober, methodical reputa- Coolidge. Davis went on to help estab- his wife to Seattle. He recalls that, as he tion, such attacks may fall flat. “We don’t lish the white-shoe law firm Davis, Polk was packing his car, his father, who had operate politically,” he told me. He men- and the élite Council on Foreign Rela- expected his son to take his place in New tioned that, whenever he goes to his of- tions. Vance, Sr., followed a similar path, York society, admonished him, “not in a fice, he walks past the hulking courthouse becoming a partner at the prestigious friendly way, ‘Cy—you are raising the complex at 60 Centre Street. “There’s a law firm Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett white flag on your career!’ ” But in Seat- stone inscription over this huge building. before joining the Kennedy Adminis- tle Vance launched a firm that was a no- It says, ‘The true administration of jus- tration, where he became the Secretary table success. One of his law partners, tice is the firmest pillar of good govern- of the Army. Robert Sulkin, told me that Vance became ment.’” The quote, he noted, is attributed Vance, Jr., has struggled, as his patri- “the go-to guy” in town for criminal de- to George Washington. “When you have cian forebears did, with the seamy defendants: “He was great on his feet— all the power we have as prosecutors, it mands of retail politics; like them, he quick-witted but never nasty.” Among can’t be levelled against people for polit- is a cautious member of the establish- the people whom Vance represented was ical purposes. We’ve prosecuted Repub- ment who is uncomfortable with glad- Thomas Stewart, a right-wing corpo- licans and Democrats, and we’ve inves- handing and infighting. In 1924, Davis, rate mogul accused of myriad campaign- tigated and not prosecuted Republicans whom H. L. Mencken mocked as “a finance violations. and Democrats. It’s got to be based on lawyer on leave from the ante-room of In 2004, Vance returned to New York, the facts.” J. P. Morgan,” denounced the Ku Klux to work at the firm Morvillo, Abramo- Vance maintains this earnest line, Klan—a political risk at the time—but witz. Five years later, he ran for Manhat- and discretion, even in private conver- then, in the early fifties, he unsuccess- tan D.A. Unlike his legendary prede- sations with friends. Jonathan Alter re- fully defended “separate but equal” seg- cessors Thomas Dewey, Frank Hogan, calls that, as far back as 2017, when he regated schools before the Supreme and Morgenthau—press-savvy crusaders tried to bring up the subject of a Trump Court in a case that became Brown v. who all sought higher political office—

20 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 Vance was a liberal policy wonk more in- WNYC, and The New Yorker—revealed former President’s niece, who is suing terested in talking about subjects like that, a few months after meeting with him and two of his siblings for allegedly community-based crime-reduction strat- Marc Kasowitz, a lawyer for the Trumps, defrauding her out of her proper inher- egies. He was courteous but aloof; his Vance told his prosecutors that he had itance, sees it differently. “Vance let two idea of blowing off steam was to medi- overruled their recommendation to go of my cousins off the hook,” she told me. tate daily. Bruce Gyory, a New York po- ahead with the criminal case. Several “If he hadn’t, he may well have kept Don- litical strategist, said, of Vance, “He doesn’t months after Vance dropped it, the re- ald from running. Do you really think he like politics much, and he’s not all that port revealed, he accepted a sizable do- could have run for President when two good at it.” Nevertheless, despite what nation from Kasowitz. After the article of his children were indicted for fraud?” the Times called a nearly fatal “aversion appeared, Vance returned the donation: She hopes that Vance will be more ag- to self-hype”—and with the help of name thirty-two thousand dollars. gressive this time, given that the Repub- recognition, Morgenthau’s backing, and Adam Kaufmann, the former chief lican Party—which has twice declined generous campaign funds—he won. of the Investigation Division in the to convict Trump in impeachment tri- D.A.’s office, whom Vance overruled on als—clearly lacks the will to impede his he Trump family first attracted Vance’s the Trump SoHo matter, dismisses the possible comeback. A felony conviction T legal attention a decade ago. At the notion that Vance was bought off. Vance, wouldn’t disqualify Trump from a sec- time, Donald Trump was a reality-TV he said, “wrestled with the case from the ond term, but a prison sentence would star and a real-estate developer spread- beginning.” The condominium owners certainly make it harder for him to be ing the lie that President Barack Obama were not particularly sympathetic vic- elected again. “It’s incredibly urgent that hadn’t actually been born in the U.S. tims—their apartments were primarily Vance prosecutes Donald now,” she said. Trump had cultivated a relationship with used as pieds-à-terre—and real-estate Vance has shown that he is capable of Morgenthau, hosting him and his wife practices in New York are so often sleazy redressing his past lapses: last year, his of- at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach. that it would have been hard to persuade fice delivered an impressive conviction in Vance knew Trump only casually, having a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the case of the movie mogul Harvey crossed paths with him at events around the Trumps were unusually criminal. Weinstein, despite having declined to New York City. Vance’s office learned Kaufmann told me, “I did think there pursue charges against him five years ear- that condominium owners at the Trump was enough there to keep going, but I lier. Weinstein was sentenced to twenty- SoHo believed they had been cheated by also understand his position. If I were three years in prison for sexual crimes Trump’s children Donald, Jr., and Ivanka, the D.A., not a level down, I might have against two women. Vance believed that who were managing the project for the done the same.” they didn’t have a strong enough case, but family business, the Trump Organiza- Vance defended his decision, telling Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a model who tion. The buyers alleged that the Trumps me, “The job isn’t about going after big accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct had lied to them by inflating the num- targets just because they’re wealthy peo- in 2015, contends that Vance should have ber of apartments that they had sold, ple. There has to be sufficient evidence, pursued charges then: “Vance made the thereby misleading them into thinking and there have to be sufficient reasons.” mistake. It’s very clear who he listens to— the condominiums were better invest- He noted, “At that time, the Trump fam- the powerful and rich—not a powerless ments than they were. ily was just the Trump family. He wasn’t model like me.” Vance returned to the Several prosecutors in Vance’s office President.” Vance’s team investigated case, in 2018, only after the Times and The wanted to press charges, but he was un- New Yorker exposed Weinstein’s serial sex- persuaded. During the same period, he ual predation. The belated conviction, had repeatedly been scorched in the tab- perhaps the biggest of the #MeToo era, loids after the collapse of a hasty attempt helped bolster Vance’s reputation. He now to press rape charges against Dominique faces an even riskier target in Trump. Strauss-Kahn, the prominent French statesman and former head of the Inter- ance launched his criminal probe national Monetary Fund, for allegedly Vinto the President as a stopgap mea- forcing himself on a hotel housekeeper. sure in August of 2018, after federal pros- Vance had lost faith in the accuser’s cred- ecutors declined to pursue him for his ibility. But the woman’s lawyer, Kenneth the case for two years, but he never be- alleged role in the payment of hush money Thompson, blasted Vance for failing to came convinced that it merited crimi- to the porn star Stormy Daniels. During “stand up.” Justified or not, the Strauss- nal charges. Among other problems, the the 2016 Presidential campaign, she had Kahn reversal was a public-relations fi- apartment owners settled their griev- threatened to reveal publicly that she and asco. A legal peer of Vance’s told me, “You ances privately with the Trump Orga- Trump had had an affair. Trump’s for- can’t have cases that fall apart. Does that nization, then declined to coöperate with mer lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced affect someone psychologically? Maybe.” prosecutors. Vance said, “I had a hun- to three years in federal prison partly for Vance’s opposition to charging the dred thousand other cases in the office crimes connected to the hush money. But Trump children in the SoHo case stirred that year, with victims who actually court documents made it clear that Trump scandal after a 2017 investigative re- wanted us to take the case.” participated in the scheme with Cohen. port—produced jointly by ProPublica, Mary Trump, a psychologist and the The documents referred to the President

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 21 as “Individual-1,” who ran “an ultimately demeanors, but they can become felo- had felt that Vance’s team seemed slow successful campaign for President of the nies if they were committed as part of to talk to some prospective witnesses. But United States.” Yet Trump remained an other offenses, such as tax fraud or in- recently, the person said, prosecutors’ ques- unindicted co-conspirator, because the surance fraud. tions have become “very pointed—they’re Justice Department was unwilling to pros- Vance’s probe has since expanded into sharpshooting now, laser-beaming.” The ecute a sitting President. State and local a broad examination of the possibility source added, “It hit me—they’re closer.” prosecutors have their own authority to that Trump and his company engaged in The change came soon after the D.A.’s pursue crimes in their jurisdictions, and tax, banking, and insurance fraud. Inves- office made the unusual decision to hire Vance and the New York attorney gen- tigators are questioning whether Trump a new special assistant from outside its eral, Letitia James, opened separate in- profited illegally by deliberately mis- ranks—Mark Pomerantz, a prominent vestigations of Trump, who was then a leading authorities about the value of his former federal prosecutor. Pomerantz was New York resident, and whose business real-estate assets. Cohen has alleged that brought on, one well-informed source is based in New York. Trump inflated property valuations in admits, partly “to scare the shit out of Cohen was once Trump’s most loyal order to get favorable bank loans and in- people.” The press has characterized associate, willing to do and say nearly surance policies, while simultaneously Pomerantz, who formerly headed the anything to protect him. That has long lowballing the value of the same assets criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s since changed. On “Mea Culpa,” a pod- in order to reduce his tax burden. Office for the Southern District of New cast that Cohen now hosts, he recently As the Times has revealed, Trump York, as a specialist in prosecuting orga- made his resentment clear. “I went to paid only seven hundred and fifty dol- nized crime, largely because he super- frickin’ prison for him and his dirty deeds,” lars in federal income taxes during his vised the team that, in 1999, obtained a he said. “It’s the Vance investigation that first year as President, and he paid no conviction of the son of John Gotti, the I believe causes Trump to lose sleep at federal income taxes at all during ten of don of the Gambino crime family. In fact, night. Besides the horror of actually hav- the preceding fifteen years. He claimed it was not a major case. Pomerantz’s deeper ing to open up eight years of his per- hundreds of millions of dollars in busi- value, say those who know him, is that sonal income-tax statements, Vance is ness losses, and between 2010 and 2018 he has spent the past two decades at the accumulating a vast road map of crimi- he reported twenty-six million dollars eminent firm Paul, Weiss, artfully repre- nality for which Trump must answer.” in “consulting fees” as business expenses. senting rich and powerful white-collar Cohen, who has been coöperating with Among these fees, $747,622 went to Ivanka criminal defendants. This experience Vance’s office, believes that Trump’s chil- Trump for projects she was already work- makes him capable not just of bringing dren and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump ing on as a salaried employee of the a smart case but also of anticipating holes Organization’s chief financial officer, are Trump Organization. The consulting through which a wily target might es- also under legal scrutiny. fees are being scrutinized by the legal cape. “He’s a brilliant lawyer,” Roberta The initial focus of Vance’s inquiry teams of both James and Vance. James Kaplan, a litigator who has worked with was the hush-money payments. Trump is investigating possible civil charges. She Pomerantz, said. “He knows when to has denied any involvement with Dan- obtained court orders that forced the push and when not to.” Anne Milgram, iels or with Karen McDougal, a former Trump Organization to turn over doc- a former attorney general of New Jersey, Playboy model who made similar allega- uments and that compelled Trump’s son who previously worked in the Manhat- tions. But Cohen has produced checks Eric, who helps run the company, to an- tan D.A.’s office, under Morgenthau, said indicating that Trump reimbursed him swer questions. Vance, meanwhile, is fo- that Pomerantz “likely has greater stat- for some of the hush-money payments— cussed on criminal offenses. The wid- ure than any of the candidates for D.A. and falsely described them as legal ex- ened scope of the D.A.’s investigation right now.” She believes his presence will penses. Cohen has alleged that the pay- was hinted at in a court filing last Au- insure that the Trump case is in steady ments were authorized by both Trump gust, which stated that the office was hands when Vance’s successor takes of- and Weisselberg. Meanwhile, Trump’s now looking into “possibly extensive and fice. Given Trump’s talk of a witch hunt, story about the payments has changed. protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Milgram noted, the fact that Pomerantz He initially claimed no knowledge of Organization.” comes from outside the D.A.’s office helps them. Then, after his lawyer Rudy Giu- take the case “out of politics.” liani described the payments as reim- everal knowledgeable sources told me Vance also recently hired a top bursements, Trump said that they rep- Sthat, in the past two months, the tone forensic-accounting firm, F.T.I., that is resented a “monthly retainer” for Cohen’s and the pace of Vance’s grand-jury probe capable of crunching vast amounts of legal services. Neither Trump nor Weis- have picked up dramatically. A person financial data. Taken together, George selberg has been charged with a crime. who has been extensively involved in the Conway told me, the hirings “are signs (Mary Mulligan, a lawyer representing investigation said, “It’s night and day.” that the D.A.’s office is approaching this Weisselberg, declined to comment.) But, Another source, who complained that investigation very seriously—they clearly if Trump or anyone in his company mis- things had seemed to stall while Vance think they have something, and they’re represented the illicit payoffs as legal ex- waited for Trump to leave the White trying to hone it and move it to a jury penses, they may have violated New York House, and then waited for his tax rec- in New York.” laws prohibiting the falsification of busi- ords, said, of the D.A.’s office, “They Milgram agrees: “In my experience, ness records. Such crimes are usually mis- mean business now.” Earlier, this source when you drill a hole, you wouldn’t often

22 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 go for eighteen months unless there’s the sewers. You can’t get angels to tes- ecutors threaten him or his family with some evidence leading to a crime.” Bha- tify.” What would be crucial, he said, is indictment—as they did with Cohen rara told me, “All the signals indicate corroborating Cohen’s allegations. himself—he will coöperate. “He’s not that there’s a belief on the part of that Persuading an untarnished insider to going to let his boys go to prison,” Cohen office that there’s a good chance of a flip against Trump would clearly be a told me. “And I don’t think he wants to charge.” But, he warned, “no one should breakthrough. Judging from investigators’ spend his golden years in a correctional be under the illusion that this is easy or questions and subpoenas, their sights are institution, either.” In 2018, federal pros- a slam-dunk case.” set on Allen Weisselberg. “I think he’s ecutors had to give Allen Weisselberg To some extent, the direction of Vance’s the key to the case,” Steven M. Cohen, grand-jury immunity in exchange for his probe can be gleaned from his office’s sub- a former federal prosecutor who is close coöperation in the Stormy Daniels mat- poenas, and from the questions that pros- to many top political and legal officials ter—a sign that he refused to be debriefed ecutors are asking potential witnesses. in New York, said. Mary Trump agreed, voluntarily. Weisselberg’s sons, who could Deutsche Bank, until recently one of noting, “Allen Weisselberg knows where not be reached for comment, have not Trump’s largest lenders, has been sub- all the bodies are buried.” As the man been accused of any wrongdoing and are poenaed and debriefed by investigators. who managed Trump’s money flow for not believed to be coöperating. Employees at Aon, Trump’s former in- decades, Weisselberg would certainly But investigators in Vance’s office surance company, have reportedly been make a star witness. He originally worked have debriefed Jennifer Weisselberg, a questioned. Vance’s team is also said to as a bookkeeper for Trump’s father—a former professional dancer and chore- be looking into whether the Trump Or- job that, Weisselberg’s former daughter- ographer who married Barry in 2004 ganization, after having a lender forgive in-law told me, he got after answering and had a contentious divorce from more than a hundred million dollars in a newspaper ad while driving a cab in him in 2018. Investigators have asked loans for a skyscraper project in Chicago, Canarsie. By the mid-eighties, he was her about a gift that Trump gave to her declared the windfall and paid taxes on bookkeeping for Trump. and her husband: free occupancy, for it. In addition, according to the Wall Street Weisselberg isn’t believed to be coöper- seven years, of an apartment overlook- Journal, Vance’s team is intensifying its ating with prosecutors, but he may be vul- ing Central Park. In divorce proceed- focus on financial dealings involving nerable to pressure. He is seventy-three, ings, her former husband described the Seven Springs, Trump’s estate in Mount and he has two sons who are both po- apartment as a corporate property. If Kisco, New York. And, according to three tentially enmeshed in the case. Jack Weis- this gift was not declared as a form of people familiar with Vance’s probe, in re- selberg, the younger son, works at one of compensation on the Weisselbergs’ tax cent weeks Vance and Pomerantz, along the Trump Organization’s largest lend- forms, prosecutors could use the omis- with investigators in the D.A.’s Major ers, Ladder Capital. It isn’t clear if Jack sion against the couple, as part of an ef- Economic Crimes Bureau, have con- handled Trump business there, but Lad- fort to squeeze Allen into coöperating ducted several videoconference interviews der has loaned more than two hundred with them. Bloomberg News revealed with people knowledgeable about the and seventy million dollars to Trump, in the existence of the free apartment last Trump Organization. Although Vance connection with four building projects. year, after Jennifer shared documen- is described by one source as “absolutely Among them is 40 Wall Street, one of tation of it. The article noted that the committed” to the probe, he has appar- the Trump properties whose finances are apartment sold for two and a half mil- ently asked few questions during these being closely scrutinized by investigators. lion dollars in 2016. After the story ran, sessions; Pomerantz has dominated, put- Weisselberg’s other son, Barry, has been Vance’s office reached out to her. In Jen- ting interviewees at ease with jokes and the manager of the Wollman ice-skating nifer’s first extensive public remarks, she exploring not just dry legal details but rink and the carrousel in Central Park— told me that, when someone works for also the social and corporate culture of cash-only businesses that have been run the Trump Organization, “only a small the Trump world, with an eye toward ex- for the city by the Trump Organization. part of your salary is reported.” She ex- posing how financial decisions were made. Michael Cohen, who worked with Allen plained, “They pay you with apartments Since the probe began, Michael Cohen Weisselberg for years, believes that if pros- and other stuff, as a control tactic, so has participated in seven sessions, and, according to sources, he has not held back. He told prosecutors, “Nothing goes on in the Trump Organization without Donald Trump knowing it. It’s like the boss of bosses in an organized-crime family. No one has to ask if the boss signed off. They know he did.” Prosecutors may hesitate to call Cohen as a witness, given that he is a convicted felon and an admitted liar. But Paul Pel- letier, a highly regarded former federal prosecutor, told me, “I’ve used much worse people than him. Angels don’t swim in “Hold on—wait until those people are out of the way.” you can’t leave. They own you! You have Barbara Res, an engineer who worked trant witnesses will feel more strongly to do whatever corrupt crap they ask.” for Trump, recalled, he is skilled at issu- compelled to testify. (The Trump Organization did not re- ing orders obliquely. Res told me, “He Weissmann believes that Trump ob- spond to requests for comment.) would direct work in a way that you knew structed justice in the Mueller probe, Jennifer described her former father- what he wanted you to do without him and would rather see him prosecuted in-law as being in Trump’s thrall: “His actually telling you.” for that. He said, of Vance’s pursuit of whole worth is ‘Does Donald like me The targets of complex financial pros- Trump’s possible financial crimes, “It’s today?’ It’s his whole life, his core being. ecutions often defend themselves by not- not ideal. But at least there’s some ac- He’s obsessed. He has more feelings and ing that their accountants and lawyers countability. You’re not just letting by- adoration for Donald than for his wife.” had approved their allegedly criminal gones be bygones.” Asked if Allen Weisselberg would flip actions. Trump has already started mak- If the case proceeds, some have ar- under pressure, she said, “I don’t know. ing this argument. In a statement de- gued, it won’t only be Trump on trial but For Donald, it’s a business. But for Allen nouncing the Supreme Court’s uphold- the justice system itself. After the D.A. it’s a love affair.” ing of Vance’s subpoena, Trump protested was granted access to his tax returns, Jennifer told me that she first met that his tax returns “were done by among Trump denounced what he called Trump before she was married, at Allen the biggest and most prestigious law and “ ‘head-hunting’ prosecutors” as “fascism, Weisselberg’s modest house, in Wan- accounting firms in the U.S.” not justice.” In fact, according to Anne tagh, on Long Island. That day, the Weis- Andrew Weissmann, a relentless for- Applebaum, the author of “Twilight of selberg family was sitting shivah, for Al- mer federal prosecutor who once headed Democracy,” the American justice sys- len’s mother. Trump showed up in a the Justice Department’s criminal-fraud tem, by holding leaders and ordinary cit- limousine and blurted out, “This is where section—and more recently worked on izens equally accountable, protects de- my C.F.O. lives? It’s embarrassing!” the Mueller investigation—says that mocracy from fascism. The image of a Then, Jennifer recalled, Trump showed Trump’s accounting records might clinch former President facing prison may seem various shivah attendees photographs Vance’s case. “Accounting records can un-American. But she noted that, in other of naked women with him on a yacht. be fantastic,” he said. As a veteran of robust democracies, “it’s not uncommon “After that, he starts hitting on me,” she successful prosecutions of the Gambino for heads of state to be prosecuted.” She said. Jennifer claimed that Allen Weis- and the Genovese crime families, and warned that the lesson from democra- selberg, instead of being offended on also top Enron executives, Weissmann cies under strain elsewhere around the her behalf, humored his boss: “He didn’t told me that the first thing investiga- world is that failing to lay down the law stand up for me!” Asked about this, tors will probably do is a wealth anal- “is dangerous—it creates long-term feel- Weisselberg’s lawyer, Mary Mulligan, ysis. “You pull everything,” he explained. ings of impunity, and incentives for Trump said, “No comment.” Prosecutors will likely create a time line and those around him to misbehave Weisselberg was known behind his and compare it with various financial again.” Vance’s case against Trump may back as the Weasel. His office door, on representations made by the Trump Or- be less than perfect, but the alternative, the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, ganization, looking for inconsistencies. she said, “is lawlessness.” shared a hallway with Trump’s. Jennifer If the accountants’ work records show Earlier this month, the former French recalled, “You walk down the hall, it’s that they weren’t informed by Trump President Nicolas Sarkozy was found Allen-Donald, Allen-Donald—they about misrepresentations that the com- guilty of corruption and influence-ped- don’t do anything separately. Allen would pany made to secure financial advan- dling by a court in Paris, and sentenced know everything.” tages, then it will be much easier to to prison. A previous French President, argue that Trump bears criminal re- Jacques Chirac, was convicted in 2011 of any legal experts believe that, with- sponsibility. As Weissmann put it, “Then embezzlement and misusing public funds. Mout an inside witness such as Allen you’re golden!” Silvio Berlusconi, the demagogic former Weisselberg on the stand, it could be Weissmann also thinks that bring- Prime Minister of Italy, was forced to hard to persuade a jury beyond a reason- ing in F.T.I., the forensic-accounting perform community service after his 2013 able doubt that Trump knowingly en- firm, is a major leap forward. Such ex- conviction for tax fraud. Ben-Ghiat, the gaged in fraud. Tax cases are notoriously perts “are the people you put on the N.Y.U. professor, believes there’s much difficult to prosecute, because the details stand” to explain potential crimes to to be learned from Berlusconi. Italy ini- are dull and complicated; ignorance can the jury: “The fact that they are exte- tially voted him out of office in 2006, be an effective defense. The hurdle is rior to the office is really important. well after his corruption was exposed. proving criminal intent. And, as Bharara You can discount the argument that But his center-left successors did little pointed out, “Trump is actually very they’re political. It’s invaluable.” to address his misconduct. Two years clever.” He learned from his early men- Although Trump ultimately out- later, they were defeated, and Berlusconi tor Roy Cohn, the infamous fixer and foxed the Mueller investigation, Weiss- returned to power for another three years. Mob lawyer, to leave no fingerprints. He mann thinks that Vance is in a stron- She warned, “If we have the chance to writes very little down, has no computer ger position. For one thing, Trump can’t make a strong statement that the rule of on his desk, has never had a personal fire Vance, so he can’t be intimidated. law matters, and we fail, the message is e-mail address, and relies on close aides For another, Trump can no longer par- that these strongmen can get back in to send text messages for him. Also, as don anyone, which means that recalci- power. That’s the lesson for us.” 

24 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 7. If the procedural is set in Lon- SHOUTS & MURMURS don, Wales, or Edinburgh, the locale will be made to look depressing. Sus- pects will most often be interrogated inside garages where they’re welding nonspecific items. No one in these places ever smiles, because they need to get back to their welding. 8. Wealthy suspects will be interrogated in the glacial parlors of their immaculate town houses or estates as a silent, uniformed servant offers beverages. Wealthy suspects, even if they’re the grieving parents of a murder victim, are always guilty of being wealthy and of wearing pearls, cardi- gans, and headbands, and they will say things such as, “We’d gotten back late POLICE PROCEDURALS 101 from the club, and there was blood in the foyer.” BY PA U L RUDNICK 9. If the show is set in France, the entire cast will be attractive. he following precepts apply to 4. A woman on a procedural is al- 10. If the show is set in Scandina- Tprocedural shows from any coun- most always an ex-wife who is so hurt via, the crime will always end up in- try. It’s unnecessary to read the subti- and disappointed that she can be volving climate change. Even the most tles on Netflix, as the characters are al- glimpsed only through a screen door, grotesque Norwegian serial killer will ways saying, “I have to go—it’s work,” or the lead detective’s more warm- be driven to his evil deeds by thoughts “What do we know?,” or “So you left hearted partner, who is either an over- of solar panels and wind turbines. him in that swamp/basement/Arby’s worked mom or a lesbian of color. This In American procedurals, the serial to die.” is called diversity. If the partner is an killer is most often a person who sur- 1. The main character in most pro- overworked lesbian mom of color, the vived an abusive childhood, because cedurals is a troubled male detective show is eligible for government fund- Americans know that climate change whose marriage has crumbled because ing and a Peabody. is a hoax. he works too hard and cares too much. 5. On the rare show that centers on 11. When suspects are brought to the If your real-life husband mentions a a female detective, that character will precinct headquarters to be interro- desire to become a detective, you should express her gritty competence by wear- gated, they will appear on the televi- take it personally and yell, “Do you ing her hair in a ponytail. The ponytail sion screen mostly as a blurry video wish I were a serial killer? Then would is the equivalent of a male detective’s feed, for authenticity’s sake. Yet they you look at me?” shoulder holster or the pint of whiskey never look into the camera and won- 2. The detective has at least one in his desk drawer. The female detec- der, “Is my hair O.K.?” small child, and visitation rights are tive’s husband has most often been mur- 12. Any background information limited to the night he finally cap- dered, so that his unsolved death can about a suspect will instantly be found tures a serial killer after a tense, vio- haunt her. Following her occasional din- online by a fresh-faced tech person, lent standoff. This is the detective’s ner dates, any new love interest will also who will report, “He dropped out of equivalent of taking his child to Chuck be killed. The technical term for this is business school three weeks ago, he’s E. Cheese or a Pixar movie. Some- “suicide by dating a female detective.” had contact with three known militia day, the child will grow up to visit 6. The male detective will always members, and he’s headed east on a Dad in assisted living and ask, with a wear a jacket and tie, unless the pro- Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street in a wry chuckle, “Hey, remember that cedural is set in Scandinavia, in which stolen van.” This underling will never night we were buried alive and Mom case he’ll wear a nubbly sweater (also murmur, under his or her breath, “And got so upset?” known as a Swedish tuxedo). He will he’s so hot. I’d go out with him.” 3. Sometimes the detective has an sport facial scruff and bark commands 13. The relatives of a suspect will al- estranged adult child who exists only at younger staff members, a group re- ways insist, “I haven’t seen him in to have a rare dinner with the detec- quired by law to include a person of months,” right before the alleged crim- tive, which will be interrupted by a color, a peppy young gay guy, and the inal bolts out a back door into an alley. cell-phone call from a crime scene. only blond person on the show. Crime Someday, a weary mom or a taciturn Studies show that estranged adult chil- is no place for blondes, except as vic- dad will ask the detective, “Haven’t you dren of detectives have never finished tims, meaning actresses who appear as ever seen one of these shows? He’s in

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ LUCI an entrée. corpses covered with leaves. his bedroom and he’s armed, duh.” 

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 25 a winter-wonderland theme—at one, OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS decorators used drapery to create the illusion of icicles hanging from above, rolled out a white carpet, and set up a VACANCY snow machine. Jay Laut, a banquet captain at the Pierre, told me, “Some- The new reality inside a five-star hotel in Manhattan. times we would just talk among ourselves and say, ‘Oh, my God, what a BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN party they had!’” To some of the staff, the wedding on March 7, 2020, stood out because it was a “second-generation wedding”— the bride’s mother had also been married at the hotel, three decades earlier. Seventy-eight employees worked the event, including thirty-two banquet servers, who performed their usual ballet of speed-walking into the ballroom while balancing a tray of plates on one palm. The role of banquet servers can be intensely demanding: they present multicourse meals, often on a razor- tight schedule, providing, as the hotel promises, “flawless five-star service.” “It’s a very stressful job,” Laut said. “We have to live up to the name of the Pierre.” During the busy seasons at the hotel— the spring and the fall, leading up to the holidays—banquet servers might have to work double and triple shifts. The March 7th wedding was the last large social event held at the Pierre. The city’s first case of Covid-19 had been confirmed on March 1st, and by the second week of March fear had started to take hold among New York- ers. The hotel’s workers were aggressively disinfecting surfaces and door- knobs. They removed decorative pillows from guest rooms, driven by the idea, n 2019, more than a hundred thou- a forty-million-dollar-a-year business, later discounted, that Covid-19 could Isand people walked into the Pierre, accounting for half the hotel’s revenue. easily be transmitted on surfaces. The the five-star hotel on Fifth Avenue in About eighty weddings took place hotel’s occupancy rate began to plum- Manhattan. Some checked in at the at the Pierre in 2019. A certain subset met, and diners stopped visiting its front desk; others, in ball gowns and of wealthy New Yorkers have attended restaurant, Perrine. Calls came in from tuxedos, headed up the stairs to the numerous events at the hotel, and cou- people who had weddings or galas Grand Ballroom. About five hundred ples who’ve been married there have booked in late March and April; some events were held at the Pierre that year: tried to transform the Grand Ballroom wanted to postpone, others to cancel. weddings, galas, corporate parties, bar in ways that guaranteed that their wed- In the days following the wedding, mitzvahs. In December, there were holding would not be forgotten. Some- Broadway was shuttered, and office work- iday parties every night. Such events times, floral decorators have used net- ers around the city were sent home. On could run to four hundred and fifty ting to suspend thousands of flowers a TV in the Pierre’s employee cafeteria, dollars a guest for food, drinks, and from the ceiling, so that guests felt as workers followed the news. François- staff—and then there were the ice though they were standing beneath a Olivier Luiggi, the hotel’s general man- sculptures and custom-made dance garden. One decorator adorned the ager, told me, “We looked at each other, floors that clients ordered from out- room with ten thousand peonies. There and it seemed so obvious that we should side venders. At the Pierre, events were have been quite a few weddings with just go home.” The week of March 15th, he began telling employees to leave Maurice Dancer, the chief concierge at the Pierre, has worked there since 1994. and not return until they received fur-

26 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS PRIOR ther notice. Looking back on that mo- city’s wealthiest residents to fund the dred and twelve hundred dollars—the ment, he struggled to come up with construction of the hotel. It stood out rooms overlooking Central Park are an analogous situation. “I have never on the Manhattan skyline: a grayish- the most expensive—and a suite starts been in a hotel fire,” he said. “But it white tower rising forty-four stories, at fifteen hundred. To attract guests, felt like there was an emergency and with a steep copper roof and its top the Pierre, like many older luxury ho- you had to evacuate.” floors modelled after the Royal Chapel tels in the city, relies on its history, in- Three months earlier, at the end of at Versailles. cluding the celebrities that it has hosted. 2019, New York City had reached a rec- The hotel’s business plan relied on The Pierre’s Instagram account fea- ord number of visitors for a single year: large events, especially débutante balls. tures photos of Coco Chanel seated in almost sixty-seven million. Its hotels In December of 1930, an A.P. story a hotel suite in 1932, Barbra Streisand had about a ninety-per-cent occupancy about the Pierre reported that “an es- at a Valentino fashion show held at the rate, the highest in the country. But timated 180 girls will have ‘come out’ hotel in 1970, and Andy Warhol smok- in a matter of days Covid-19 had put there during the season which began ing a cigarette while seated with a menu the entire industry in peril. When the in October and ends in February. Their in 1981. Among New York City’s grand pandemic began, there were about parties will average $3000 in cost, which old hotels, the Pierre is less famous seven hundred hotels in the city, em- is more than ½ million for the hotel” than the Plaza and less prestigious than ploying some fifty-five thousand peo- (about seven and a half million dollars the Carlyle, but it has a lengthy his- ple. A union called the Hotel Trades today). Despite the Pierre’s auspicious tory of hosting weddings and other Council represents most of these work- start, the hotel went bankrupt after two events, and as a result has a deep con- ers, including those at the Pierre. On years. In 1938, John Paul Getty bought nection with the city itself. “It’s more March 19th, the union’s president at it and increased the size of the ball- see and be seen at the Carlyle,” Luiggi, the time, Peter Ward, appeared on the room. Two decades later, he converted the Pierre’s general manager, said. “You local news station NY1. “By this time some of the hotel’s suites into luxuri- have a drink at the Carlyle, then you next week, ninety-five per cent of the ous co-op apartments. The co-op own- come to an event at the Pierre—you hotel industry is likely to be laid off,” ers and others bought the building, just go down Fifth Avenue.” he said. while Getty’s realty company contin- Before the pandemic, the Pierre em- Ward’s grim prediction proved ued to oversee the hotel’s operations. ployed four hundred and thirty-five largely correct. In April, the Daily In the seventies, Stanley Turkel was people, including sixty-two room at- News reported that ninety per cent of the executive vice-president of the 795 tendants, eleven bellmen, three painters, the city’s hotel employees were out of Fifth Avenue Corporation, which rep- eleven elevator operators, forty-three work. The Pierre had shut down its resents the co-op owners. By then, the cooks, seventeen laundry workers, and hotel operations on March 22nd and Four Seasons ran the hotel, and the forty-six full-time banquet servers. laid off eighty per cent of the staff, co-op owners were, as Turkel put it, Many of the workers were immigrants, some three hundred and fifty people. “seventy-three of the wealthiest peo- and the hotel kept a spreadsheet of the Luiggi recalled thinking, “We’re paus- ple in the world.” As at other co-op languages they spoke, in case a guest ing for a few weeks—but we’ll reopen buildings in New York City, prospec- needed a translator. There were forty- by Easter.” A year later, the Pierre and tive owners required approval from a nine languages, including Cantonese, other New York City hotels remain board of existing owners. “You couldn’t Creole, Danish, Farsi, Greek, Hindi, nearly empty, and the majority of their get an apartment if you had an inch of Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, staff out of work. With mass vaccina- bad reputation,” recalled Turkel, who Tamil, Tibetan, and Twi. “It’s like the tions under way, Americans could re- is now ninety-five and a well-known United Nations there,” Sergio Dorval, turn to many aspects of their pre-pan- hotel historian. “The board would turn a bartender at the hotel’s restaurant, demic lives by the end of this year. you down.” told me. “It represents what New York But the city’s hotel industry is haunted Today, Taj Hotels, a luxury-hotel City is about.” by questions: When will travellers re- chain based in India, operates the hotel Once people got jobs at the Pierre, turn? And when will New Yorkers and and manages the building. Current co-op they often stayed for decades. As a re- others feel comfortable crowding into residents include Tory Burch, the fash- sult, a large number of employees were a hotel ballroom again? ion entrepreneur; Michael Eisner, the in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. former chairman and C.E.O. of the Employment at a unionized hotel in he Pierre opened in the fall of 1930, Walt Disney Company; and Howard New York City has long provided entry Ton the corner of East Sixty-fi rst Lutnick, the chairman and C.E.O. of into the middle class, owing to the Street and Fifth Avenue, in a neigh- the financial-services firm Cantor Fitz- might and the militancy of the Hotel borhood already known for its concen- gerald, who bought the penthouse—a Trades Council, which was founded tration of luxury hotels. Next door was triplex with its own ballroom—in 2017, more than eighty years ago. Every the Sherry-Netherland, and one block for forty-four million dollars. worker at a unionized hotel in the city south, on the other side of Fifth Ave- The Pierre now has eighty co-op is given family health insurance and a nue, was the Plaza. Charles Pierre, apartments and a hundred and eighty- pension. If a hotel closes, the workers a restaurateur who had grown up in nine hotel rooms and suites. One night have “recall rights,” meaning that, if it Corsica, had persuaded some of the in a hotel room costs between six hun- reopens, they are hired back, in order

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 27 that are appropriate for what you do.” Sergio Dorval started working as a bartender at the Pierre in 2013. He came from the restaurant world, where workers never knew how long their jobs might last. But at the Pierre, he told me, “you just feel that the energy is different. People are pursuing almost a higher calling outside of work.” With middle-class salaries and stable jobs, the workers could focus on other ambitions: buying a house, saving for their children’s college tuition, investing in the stock market. “As soon as I got to the Pierre and saw the community of homeowners, the community of people who are into investing, I right away gravitated toward them,” Dorval said. After four years at the Pierre, he owned a house, too, in northern New Jersey. Harry Cilino, a sixty-six-year-old “And no drag racing until you know how this great-grandfather, found work wash- medication is going to affect you.” ing dishes at the Pierre in 2010, after being laid off from his job as a long- shoreman. He eventually became a •• houseman—a position that involves moving furniture and helping to keep of seniority. Housekeepers working a his siblings worked at the Pierre be- the hotel clean—and regularly showed standard, thirty-five-hour week earn fore he did, and one of his earliest mem- up to work at least an hour early. “I nearly sixty-five thousand dollars a year. ories is of dancing in the laundry room loved it,” he said. “I wish I would’ve Banquet servers, who are the union’s at five years old, when an older sister started there a long time ago.” Each highest-paid members, can make two brought him in to show off his salsa year, the hotel presents one outstanding hundred thousand dollars a year or moves. By now, Medina knows the employee with a prize, the John Foley more. “But nobody gives you nothing laundry’s operations so well that he Award. (Foley, a legendary doorman at for free,” Pasquale De Martino, a ban- can detect a problem with a machine the Pierre, worked there for fifty-four quet server at the Pierre, told me. by a slight variation in its hum. years, retiring in 1984.) After five years, “Working seventeen to eighteen hours The most popular gathering place Cilino won the award. “It was a great a day is like working two jobs.” for the employees was the cafeteria, on honor,” he said. As the general manager of the Pierre, the middle basement level. Before the Until this past year, the Pierre held Luiggi oversees all the employees. Half hotel closed for the pandemic, the caf- an employee holiday party every win- work in banquets and events, and the eteria was open twenty-four hours a ter in the Grand Ballroom. Some years other half run the hotel, working ei- day. Stefanie Schultz, a fifty-year-old it took place in December, but in 2019 ther in the “front of the house,” in jobs room attendant, joined her fellow room the ballroom was fully booked for that that involve interacting with guests, or attendants for lunch each day around month, so the party was scheduled for in the “back of the house,” which in- noon. Beverly Footman, a telephone January 23, 2020. Khady Gueye, an el- cludes the laundry room and the kitch- operator known as Operator Beverly, evator operator, showed up in a black ens. The back of the house is under- could be found catching up with about floor-length dress from her native Sen- ground, spread over three basement ten friends most afternoons at 2 P.M. egal and a pair of her signature rhine- levels. The main kitchen is on the top The food was free, and there was a foos- stone-studded glasses. Jay Laut, the level, the laundry room on the bottom, ball table, two flat-screen televisions, banquet captain, wore the same attire fifty feet below Fifth Avenue. and a massage chair. (Footman told me, that he wore for work: a tuxedo. Guests A new hotel typically sends out its “People were so excited to get in that enjoyed poached shrimp, foie-gras ter- laundry to be cleaned elsewhere, Lu- chair.”) Luiggi said, “At the end of the rine, gnocchetti with lamb ragù. An ice iggi explained, but at the Pierre “we day, to be a five-star hotel, you can- sculpture, carved in the shape of a snow- do everything—all the sheets, all the not have a big difference between the flake and lit up, served as a centerpiece. towels, all the uniforms, the dry clean- front of the house and the back of the If a client had been throwing this party, ing.” Gilberto Medina, the sixty-nine- house. It’s not ‘Downton Abbey.’ You the cost would have been about two year-old foreman of the laundry room, cannot smile every day, work hard, and hundred thousand dollars, but the ven- has held his job since 1981. Three of not have at least some of the comforts ders, who do business with the Pierre,

28 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 donated their services. The holiday ers’ struggles; he’s a union delegate, and gladesh, started working at the Pierre party, Luiggi told me, was “a celebra- his colleagues often reached out to him in 1992, as part of the room-service di- tion of what we do best.” with questions. “They call me up and vision. From his first days at the hotel, they’re, like, ‘Listen, Vinny, I’m really he aspired to join its élite army of tux- he Pierre closed its hotel opera- scared. I got a wife, I got kids, I got a edo-clad banquet servers, and, at the Ttions two months later, but the house. I’ve got to figure out what I have end of 2018, he finally did. In 2019, he building remained open for its co-op to do,’ ” Felicione recalled. earned about two hundred and twenty residents. Fifteen room attendants con- At first, the Pierre’s laid-off work- thousand dollars. Once the pandemic tinued to come to work in order to ser- ers assumed that they would be called struck, and he began receiving unem- vice the co-ops: dust, change the sheets, back to work soon. But as fall ap- ployment and severance payments, provide fresh towels. Stefanie Schultz, proached many workers grew increas- his income, he said, was about three the room attendant, who commuted ingly anxious. “I never thought it was thousand dollars a month—less than from Long Island, said, “It was so sur- going to be so long,” Pasquale De Mar- a fourth of what he had previously real even going to work. In the begin- tino, the banquet server, said. “I relax made after taxes. Chowdhury owns a ning, you didn’t see anyone.” Harry at home. Then one month goes by. Two house in Queens, and his monthly Cilino, the houseman, said, “We would months go by. And five and six and mortgage payment alone is $2,854. To go in for a few hours, do what we had seven. And now you start worrying: cover his expenses, he emptied out to do, but it was really like a ghost How long can we be like this?” De Mar- his 401(k). town.” Schultz continued working, but tino, who is fifty-one, grew up in Italy Cilino’s last day was March 29th. In and moved to New York in 1993. “I have n September 17, 2020, the Pierre April, the hotel’s staffing reached its never, never had a problem looking for Oreopened its hotel operations, be- lowest level, with only about sixty work- a job or finding work in New York coming one of very few five-star ho- ers coming in. City,” he said. “It was a shock for many tels in New York City to accept guests. The Pierre’s laid-off workers were of us.” About a quarter of the workers—some in a better position than those at non- Like other New Yorkers stuck at home, hundred people—were now back, but unionized hotels. The Hotel Trades the Pierre’s laid-off workers tried myr- the kitchens remained closed, and the Council made sure that its members iad strategies to fill the hours. De Mar- banquet employees were still laid off. held on to their health insurance for tino fostered puppies. Jay Laut taught On a few weekends, the occupancy rate the time being, and it later won the himself to cook by watching YouTube reached twenty per cent. “We were a right for employees who had accumu- videos. Sergio Dorval, the bartender, bit optimistic,” Luiggi told me. But lated severance to receive it. But for read books, including some recom- then the second wave of Covid-19 ar- some workers, particularly those who mended by his regular customers. He rived. In late October, New York State did not have much time on the job, the said that ten of them had contacted introduced a rule that visitors from all financial stresses were severe. The union him to see how he was holding up, which but five states had to quarantine for provided listings on its Web site for improved his morale. “Despite all the fourteen days. “That was the right thing soup kitchens and food pantries. trauma that is going on, they did not to do, of course, but that just put an Reports of hotel workers dying of forget about me,” he said. end to business,” Luiggi said. Covid-19 flooded into the Hotel Trades Those workers with young chil- A few days before Christmas, I vis- Council. The union began posting obit- dren at home had additional stresses. ited the Pierre. A security guard greeted uaries on its Web site, including three Jewel Chowdhury, a fifty-six-year-old me with a temperature gun. That day, for workers at the Pierre who died of the hotel’s occupancy rate was ten per the virus: Murtland McPherson, seventy- cent—eighteen rooms were booked— one, who had worked in the laundry and the lobby was so silent you could room for twenty-nine years; Valentin hear every footstep. Maurice Dancer, Constantin, fifty-seven, a houseman dressed in a black morning coat, stood who had worked at the Pierre since his with perfect posture at the concierge early twenties; and Edward Fazio, sixty- desk, behind a shield of plexiglass. If two, who had been a storeroom atten- he found it depressing to look out at dant in the main kitchen for three years, an empty lobby all day, he certainly after two decades at the Waldorf-Astoria. did not show it. Even with a mask on, According to the Hotel Trades Coun- banquet server, had three children and he managed to radiate charisma and cil, about four hundred hotel workers a wife who was suffering from heart warmth. “Are you enjoying the won- in the union have died of Covid-19. failure. His second grader’s schooling derful quiet of the Pierre?” he asked. Word spread among the Pierre’s had become his new job. “You can’t Luiggi, who met me in the lobby, workers about those who had died, but even get out and look for a job,” he was wearing a charcoal-colored suit not everyone knew which laid-off em- said. “You have to be sitting in the and a white cotton mask. Like the ployees were in the worst financial home.” He searched for work on Craigs- hotel’s founder, he grew up in Cor- straits. Vinny Felicione, a sous-chef, list, but there was none to be found. sica. He speaks with a French accent sometimes got a glimpse of his co-work- Chowdhury, who grew up in Ban- and has worked in hotels in Europe,

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 29 but he has spent most of his career in ple; the others were not much larger. to do is just book the parties!” he said. New York City. (His résumé includes “It’s more symbolic,” Luiggi said. “The On the first night of 2021, I drove a stint at the Carlyle.) One of his em- cooks come back to cook. We put around midtown Manhattan, visiting ployees described him to me as “very some flowers out. It just keeps energy other five-star hotels. It was an unsea- understanding.” “You would think in in the building.” sonably warm Friday evening, and in his position he’d be a little more on Luiggi walked me to the Grand pre-pandemic times the hotels would the arrogant side, but he’s not,” the Ballroom. The carpet had been torn have been packed. At the Plaza, a red employee said. up, pieces of shredded foam lay all velvet rope blocked off the front door. Luiggi led me down a hall, up a over the floor, and the room’s chan- At the St. Regis, the lobby was de- flight of stairs, and into the hotel’s Co- deliers had been dropped almost to serted, and the red carpet leading up tillion Room. The ceiling is nineteen the ground. It was in the midst of to the entrance was in dire need of vac- feet high, and floor-to-ceiling windows being renovated, Luiggi told me, and uuming. The Four Seasons, on East line one wall, looking out onto Cen- Michael S. Smith, who had been Pres- Fifty-seventh Street, looked almost tral Park. Al Pacino danced a memo- ident Obama’s decorator at the White abandoned, with one doorway boarded rable tango in this room in the film House, was overseeing the project. “It up. The mystique these hotels had cul- “Scent of a Woman.” The room can fit seems counterintuitive, but, when you tivated had vanished, at least for now. three hundred people, but in the pre- have no business, you can do a reno- “I’m thankful you didn’t drive down vious nine months it had barely been vation,” Luiggi said. Undertaking a the Lexington corridor—that just brings used. On the day I visited, it was empty massive renovation during a regular tears to my eyes,” Vijay Dandapani, the except for a grand piano. The sight of year would have meant “a huge loss of president of the Hotels Association of the deserted space unsettled Luiggi. income,” he explained. “We made a New York City, an industry group for “It’s very difficult,” he said. case to the owners of the building to hotel owners, told me in February. New York State was allowing “non- see if they would proceed while there’s “There are lots of nice hotels—not five essential gatherings” of up to fifty peo- no business. And they said yes.” The stars but close to that, four stars plus— ple, but there had been no demand renovation had become a source of and the vast majority of them are shut.” for events that large at the Pierre. The hope for the hotel’s laid-off banquet Of the city’s seven hundred hotels, Dan- hotel had, however, hosted five “micro- servers. When Jewel Chowdhury heard dapani said, about two hundred were weddings.” The smallest had ten peo- about it, he was ecstatic. “All we have closed. (Some have announced that they will reopen; others have closed permanently.) A hundred and thirty- nine other hotels were being used to house the homeless. Previously, he added, the average rate for a hotel room in New York City had been about two hundred and sixty dollars a night; now it was a hundred and twenty-five. The occupancy rate was about fifteen per cent. Several weeks later, the Hotel Trades Council reported that, of the hotel workers that belong to the union, seventy-seven per cent were still out of work. The future of the city’s hotels is tied up with the future of New York City itself, and many of the attractions that have drawn guests in the past, including Broadway theatres, remain closed. International travellers, who tend to stay longer and spend more money than domestic ones, accounted for about twenty per cent of visitors to the city in 2019—more than thirteen million people. How quickly, or slowly, Covid- 19 vaccines are distributed around the world will likely affect the hotels’ re- covery. Before the pandemic, the city’s hotels were also heavily dependent on “Next, in our ‘What the Heck Is Going On?!’ segment, we go live business travellers, who came for meet- to an expert—some random person with Internet access.” ings, conferences, and conventions. That business is “totally dead for a couple years,” Dandapani said. He predicts that the city’s hotel industry will not fully rebound until 2025. In December, during my tour of the Pierre, Luiggi said that, by the spring, he hoped to bring back half the employees. In a later conversation, he revised that estimate: “I think now by June instead of March.” He did not know when he would bring back the banquet workers. “The only chunk of employees that will really be laid off for a long time is people who do events—and that’s citywide,” he said. This included not only banquet servers and bartenders but “musicians, photographers, florists, people who do production design—the list goes on and on.” For those facing serious financial difficulties, the longer they are out of work, the further they sink into debt, falling behind on rent payments, mort- •• gage payments, credit-card bills. Many laid-off hotel workers lost their health insurance at the end of 2020 and now surprised that they could actually do it.” ninth floor to see the hotel’s most ex- have to pay for it themselves. The Hotel On February 22nd, Governor An- pensive offering: the Presidential Suite, Trades Council provides free legal ser- drew Cuomo announced that he was which costs as much as thirty thou- vices, and some members have called raising the limit on “weddings and ca- sand dollars a night. He unlocked a asking for help filing for bankruptcy. tered events,” starting March 15th, from few doors and led me through the But Sergio Dorval, the bartender, has fifty to a hundred and fifty people, if sprawling and elegant chambers—six noticed that the greatest source of stress they all tested negative for Covid-19. bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and two among most of his co-workers seems Weddings at the Pierre usually exceed living rooms, with a chandelier, a fire- to be existential. “They’re talking about that number, and Spinner hopes that place, and a soaking tub. A family vis- their purpose in life, like ‘I feel use- the limit will be raised again before the iting from abroad once paid half a mil- less,’ ” he said. “They’re not comfort- summer—and that the eight large wed- lion dollars to stay there for a month. able with just getting unemployment dings planned for July and August might Luiggi was not sure when the suite had and staying home.” actually happen. In the near future, wed- last been occupied—“probably five min- Luiggi is encouraged by the fact dings will be crucial for the hotel’s bot- utes before the pandemic,” he said— that the Pierre has thirty-two wed- tom line. In recent years, the Pierre typ- but it appeared ready to pass inspec- dings scheduled for 2022. “So, it is ically did three hundred and fifty events tion, with one exception: a very droopy coming back,” he said. “No one has annually for nonprofit groups, mostly dragon tree. With a diminished staff, given up on New York.” This past Val- dinner galas, but now, Spinner said, it was not easy for the hotel to keep all entine’s Day weekend, fifty-seven “the nonprofits definitely are sitting on its plants watered. rooms were occupied. That month, the sidelines.” Wandering through the suite’s many the hotel held its first fifty-person The day I visited the Pierre, the place rooms, it became apparent that its event in nearly a year: a “micro bar was so quiet that Luiggi said, “It’s like most dazzling feature was not its spa- mitzvah.” The ceremony took place ‘The Twilight Zone.’” The entire tour cious layout or expensive furnishings at the Pierre; there was a dinner for felt a bit eerie. In the main kitchen, but the enormous windows overlook- guests in the Cotillion Room on Fri- there were no pots on the stove, no cut- ing Central Park. From thirty-nine day night and a lunch there on Sat- ting boards on the counter. A menu stories up, the piles of dirty snow on urday; and everyone spent the night for the restaurant was pinned to a bul- the streets below were almost invisi- at the hotel. “It was fabulous,” Bill letin board—filet mignon ($45), Pierre ble, and the view of the Park, with Spinner, the hotel’s director of cater- burger ($29), classic pizza ($29). It was snow-topped trees, was mesmerizing. ing, told me. “People were so excited the last menu before the hotel shut Standing before one window, taking to be a part of an event and to be able down. At the top, someone had writ- in the view, Luiggi went silent for a to celebrate. I mean, it was all only fam- ten, “As of 3/22.” moment. “I almost forget the pan- ily essentially, but I think people were Luiggi took me up to the thirty- demic,” he said. 

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 31 ifteen years ago, when Rich Aus- tin was in his early forties, he F and his wife watched the HBO show “Big Love,” about a polygamous family of fundamentalist Mormons in Utah. “I kind of got hooked on it,” Rich told me. “I had a string of broken relationships, so I was joking, ‘Well, maybe if I was a polygamist, I wouldn’t have that problem.’” He had a daughter, from a fling a few years earlier, whom the couple were raising together. They were swingers, but Rich wanted more than unattached sex, and broached the subject of polygamy with his wife. The marriage soon broke up. In 2008, Rich met Angela Hinkley, and soon told her how much he liked the show. “I felt I had to have Angela on board from the start,” he said. They got engaged, and, around the time An- gela became pregnant, they started looking for another woman to join them. Online, they met a nineteen-year-old, Brandy Goldie, and after months of chatting she visited them at their home, near Milwaukee. Then she stopped com- municating; her mother temporarily thwarted her plans to enter a polygamous union, but, six months later, Brandy called Rich and said, “If I asked to come back, would you ever take me back?” He said, “In a heartbeat.” When Brandy became pregnant, she realized that the arrangement was now permanent, and was scared. She became emotionally distant, and Rich started to realize what he had taken on. He was working odd jobs, Angela worked part time, and Brandy was looking for a job. A Navy veteran, Rich drew disability payments, but for a while the whole family was subsisting on about twenty-eight thousand dollars a year. Later that year, Rich and Angela married. Brandy was a bridesmaid. The next year, in an online forum, they saw a post from a woman in her early thirties named Julie Halcomb that said, “I’m a single mom, I’ve got a two-year- old daughter, and I’d like to learn more.” Rich wrote, “If you want to know more, ask my wives.” Angela had opposed adding a third wife, but when she got off her first call with Julie she said, “O.K., when is she moving in?” Julie visited, mostly to make sure that the kids would get along, and joined the Alina, Vicki, Joe, and Valerie Darger near their home, in Herriman, Utah. Joe says that

32 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 ANNALS OF DOMESTIC LIFE THE SHAPE OF LOVE From opposite sides of the culture, polyamorists and polygamists are challenging family norms.

BY ANDREW SOLOMON

getting bigamy decriminalized in the state involved a “three-prong approach—legislative, legal, and public relations.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELLIOT ROSS THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 33 household permanently a week later. at school—we’d have them there again. gay-marriage movement. “I’ve got a wed- Before getting married, Rich and They were constantly trying to find ding invitation on the way from a friend Angela converted to Mormonism. Julie, signs of abuse.” After six years, the fam- who’s transitioning from female to male,” who also began the conversion process, ily moved to Medford, a small town in Julie said. “I’ve got classmates that came recalled, “We were talking about how northern Wisconsin, where they could out almost twenty years ago. They’ve we’re going to set the family up, and afford a house that accommodated them been lucky enough to get married. I the early Mormons already had a road all and where social services seemed to wish people would be as accepting with map.” But the mainstream Church of accept their setup. us as we try to be of everyone else.” Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has At the family’s largest, Rich had four As many as sixty thousand people in forbidden polygamy since 1904, and the wives, but when I met him, a couple of the United States practice polygamy, in- practice endures only among original- years ago, he and Angela were divorcing, cluding Hmong Americans, Muslims ist communities, including the Funda- and another woman, April, had come and of various ethnicities, and members of mentalist Church of Jesus Christ of gone. Rich, Brandy, and Julie were living the Pan-African Ausar Auset Society. Latter-day Saints (F.L.D.S.). So Rich with their kids—six, including Rich’s and But polygamists face innumerable legal began telling people that Brandy was Julie’s from earlier relationships—and obstacles, affecting such matters as in- a cousin who had become pregnant by saw Angela’s two every other weekend. heritance, hospital visits, and parentage accident. “I didn’t like having to deny The children, who now number seven, rights. If wives apply for benefits as sin- who I was, what type of relationship I ranging in age from one to twenty, view gle parents, they are lying, and may be was in,” Brandy told me. When Julie one another as full siblings. “We almost committing welfare fraud; but if they started writing a blog about their life, need a chart to figure out which kid’s file joint tax returns they are breaking Rich was excommunicated. which some days,” Rich said. Julie laughed. the law. Members of Julie’s family have Their living arrangements attracted “We already told him that, if he wants made it clear that, if she dies, they will other unwelcome attention. Neighbors to add another wife, Brandy and I have demand custody of the daughter from called the police, and Child Protective to find her,” she said. “It’s not just going her first marriage. “That would be very Services interviewed the children. Since to be someone who Mr. Eternal Hope sad for her,” Julie said. “She’s lived here there was only one marriage certificate, thinks might work. We’re the ones that since she was two.” the police couldn’t file bigamy charges. have to live with her all the time.” Polygamists have become more vocal “They said, ‘We don’t like it, but there’s The Austins would like one day to about achieving legal rights since the nothing we can do,’” Julie recalled. “But enjoy the legal benefits that married legalization of same-sex marriage na- we had them at our door constantly. couples take for granted. Brandy and tionwide, in 2015. So has another group: One of the kids would have an accident Julie take heart from the success of the polyamorists, whose lobbying runs in parallel but with scant overlap. Unlike polygamy, which is usually religiously motivated and typically involves a man with multiple wives who do not have an erotic relationship to one another, polyamory tends to be based on utopian ideas of sexual liberty and may involve a broad range of configurations. In the end, however, the real difference is what term fits people’s paradigms; as with much of identity politics, affilia- tions are self-determined. In the popular imagination, polygamists are pre- sumed to be right-wing misogynists and polyamorists to be decadent left-wing- ers, but the two groups share goals and, often, ways of life. In the years I’ve spent talking to members of both communities, I have found that it is usually the polygamists who are more cognizant of common cause. “But people can’t seem to unite under one platform,” Rich said.

n 2015, when the Supreme Court’s Idecision in Obergefell v. Hodges established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, Chief Justice John “Um ... I’ll get the next fire.” Roberts wrote a dissent arguing that, if a system denying marriage to gay and of which facilitates multiple-parent emerging trend.” She went on, “If, lesbian couples represented an assault recognition. Versions of the provision for example, three people intend to on their constitutional rights, existing have passed in California, Washing- have a child together and then parent marriage restrictions must similarly ton, Maine, Vermont, and Delaware, together for an extended period of “disrespect and subordinate people and it is under consideration in sev- time, the court could find that all three who find fulfillment in polyamorous eral other states. Courts in New Jersey, should be recognized as parents.” If relationships.” Roberts continued, “Al- Pennsylvania, Delaware, Texas, Ari- the court is adjudicating multiple par- though the majority randomly inserts zona, and Louisiana have also sup- ents, how can it deny multiple-rela- the adjective ‘two’ in various places, it ported the idea of third parents. Amer- tionship recognition? How can non-rec- offers no reason at all why the two-per- ican conservatism has long mourned ognition not be held to harm children? son element of the core definition of “The law should allow for the recog- marriage may be preserved while the nition of actual functional adult famil- man-woman element may not.” He ial relationships, even if the parties have went on to emphasize that the preva- not formalized those relationships,” lence of polygamy throughout history Joslin said. made it less of a radical leap than same- Three parents are less shocking than sex marriage. three partners—when President Obama Many gay activists, such as Evan “evolved” on gay marriage, he cited the Wolfson, who founded Freedom to injustice encountered by his daughters’ Marry, dismiss comparisons between friends who had gay parents—but one poly marriage and same-sex marriage as the proliferation of single parents, but, flows from the other, and marriage a “scare tactic.” But legal scholars take if two parents are better than one, why rights often further the inclusion they the argument seriously. In an anti-poly are three parents worse? aim to reflect. For all the hate mail and paper in the University of Pennsylvania Douglas NeJaime, a professor at Yale burning crosses that Mildred and Rich- Journal of Constitutional Law, John O. Law School who was involved in the ard Loving had to endure, the legal- Hayward wrote, “Now that the U.S. drafting of the new parentage act, told ization of interracial marriage did much Supreme Court has legalized same-sex me that the impetus for it was that to moderate American racism. Gay marriage nationwide, the only remain- many state laws defining family in bi- marriage has increased acceptance of ing marital frontier—at least for the nary, opposite-sex terms would be in- same-sex couples. Judeo-Christian nations of the West— validated by Obergefell. “If parentage Queer theorists have complained is polygamy.” Another law professor, doesn’t turn on gender or biology but that Obergefell valorizes the family Jack B. Harrison, wrote that state bans on the parent-child bond, then laws values associated with monogamous against plural marriage were sure to be that have limited it by number no lon- marriage and thereby demeans peo- challenged, and that anyone who wanted ger seem logical,” he said. The trend ple who resist those values. But oth- to maintain them would have to “de- toward multiple-parent recognition is ers see it as the first step toward more velop a rationale for them, albeit post not restricted to blue states. “Those of radical change. “Obergefell is a veri- hoc, that is not rooted in majoritarian us who are trying to push the legisla- table encomium for marriage as both morality and animus.” tion understand the L.G.B.T.-family a central human right and a funda- This is no longer merely a theoret- issue as part of a broader universe in mental constitutional right,” Joseph J. ical matter. In February, 2020, the Utah which people’s family arrangements Fischel, an associate professor of wom- legislature passed a so-called Bigamy should be respected,” NeJaime said. “As en’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Bill, decriminalizing the offense by things stand now, once you’re a parent Yale, has written. “We, as an LGBT downgrading it from a felony to a mis- you get everything, and if you’re a non- movement, should be ethically com- demeanor. In June, Somerville, Mas- parent you get practically nothing. The mitted to endorsing poly relations and sachusetts, passed an ordinance allow- folks on the committee understood the other experiments in intimacy.” He ing groups of three or more people who importance of protecting parental re- argues for “relational autonomy” with- “consider themselves to be a family” lationships, especially when they were out regard for “gender, numerosity, or to be recognized as domestic partners. not biologically related to the child. So affective attachment.” Last week, the neighboring town of it deliberately applies to unmarried The campaigns of both polygamists Cambridge followed suit, passing a people who aren’t L.G.B.T.” and polyamorists to have their unions broader ordinance recognizing multi- Much of the drafting of the law was recognized point to the larger questions partner relationships. The law has pro- done by Courtney Joslin, a law profes- that swarm around marriage battles: what ceeded even more rapidly in recog- sor at U.C. Davis who was previously are the government’s interests in mar- nizing that it is possible for a child to a litigator at the National Center for riage and family, and why does a bureau- have more than two legal parents. In Lesbian Rights. She told me that its cratic system sustain such a relentless 2017, the Uniform Law Commission, language reflects “case law in favor focus on who has sexual relationships an association that enables states to of allowing that a particular child has with whom? Surveys in the past decade harmonize their laws, drafted a new more than two legal parents. It wasn’t have consistently found that four to five Uniform Parentage Act, one provision creating a trend—it was reflecting an per cent of American adults—more than

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 35 ten million people—already practice some of 2017, when Andy and Roo lost their this, different from gold and clay, / That form of consensual nonmonogamy, and lease, in Brooklyn, the time had come; to divide is not to take away.”) Andy the true number, given people’s reticence Cal, who had been living in New said that the idea was not “a sexy orgy about stigmatized behaviors, is almost Hampshire, was ready to move in, and bonanza” but a conscious rejection of certainly higher. Aida, a psychotherapist in Boston, two things: first, “dividing relationships Consensual nonmonogamy is hardly planned to relocate as soon as possi- into two categories—one category a new invention. Jewish polygamy pep- ble. They found a house with fourteen being people with whom you have sex pers the Old Testament, even if the acres and some outbuildings in Ulster and the other category being people marriages tend not to be portrayed in Park, on the Hudson. They called their with whom you don’t have sex,” and, positive terms; the Hebrew word tzarah ménage the Rêve. second, “saying that those categories means both “second wife” and “trou- When I visited, last year, everything are defined by some deeply operative ble.” Today, polygyny—the subset of seemed to be a work in progress. Un- distinction that changes the fundamen- polygamy that involves one man and finished projects around the house tal nature of a relationship.” Polyamory, multiple women—enjoys legal status gave a feeling of relaxed chaos. Andy, Andy acknowledged, is hard. “If it were or general acceptance in more than sev- wearing a loose white dress, offered easy, everyone would be doing it,” they enty countries. (Its rarer obverse, poly- me drinks and snacks. Andy is Jewish; added ruefully. The key was to “deal andry, persists in certain communities Aida is Puerto Rican; Roo is mixed with the things that are abundant from in Nepal, Tibet, India, and Sri Lanka.) race and Muslim; Cal is Black and a place of abundance and with the In the West, champions of polyamory mixed race. Their ethnic and religious things that are actually scarce from a have included Mary Wollstonecraft, backgrounds have prepared them for place of compassion and generosity.” George Sand, Havelock Ellis, and Ber- the marginalization they have experi- The four of them saw the Rêve as trand Russell. Still, a particular ethos, enced as polyamorists. a home to a core of residents and as a rooted in Christian, European values, Like the others, Andy goes by the sanctuary for a wider group. The house has created a presumption that mo- pronoun “they” and described them- has room for nine—“more if people are nogamy is superior to all other struc- self as “gender ambivalent.” A lawyer willing to cuddle,” Andy added. At pres- tures. Immanuel Kant saw marriage as in their early thirties, they spoke in ent, some fifteen occupants can arrive emblematic of Enlightenment ideals, long, hyperactive paragraphs, their eyes at the house at any time and stay as claiming that it was egalitarian, be- wide with passionate focus. Their pro- long as they like. “As we build more cause spouses assigned ownership of noun preference, however, is mild. “If structures, as we have more beds, we their sexual organs to each other. you’re saying a sentence about me, you can have more people living here full The Oxford English Dictionary and can use whatever pronoun you want,” time,” they went on. “We want to be Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictio- they said. “They’re all manifestations able to say, This is what we’re doing for nary added the word “polyamory” as of the incomplete power of language the rest of our lives, so, if you aren’t so recently as 2006, and the well-known to translate human experience into stressed about bathroom proximity but relationship therapist Esther Perel ob- sound. We’re all genderqueer. ‘Poly- you want to fuck a little further off into serves that traditional monogamy is amorous’ is a close enough description the woods, this is where you can do it.” on the wane and perhaps increasingly of my practices in the same way as In August, 2019, the Rêve held a com- untenable. “Many social norms don’t ‘trans-masculine’ is a close enough de- mitment ceremony, which they called fit human nature,” she told me. “For scription of my gender.” a HearthWarming. Some forty people most of history, monogamy was one Roo said, “I like the word ‘caucus.’ stayed at the property, mostly in tents. person for life. At this point, monog- We caucus with polyamorists, you cau- Seventy more came for the day. As part amy is one person at a time. The first cus with trans-masculine folk, I caucus of the service, they pledged themselves freedom was that we can actually, fi- with trans-feminine folk. I’m indepen- to the land as well as to one another. nally have sex with other people before dent from that, but I’m on your side.” They invited their parents and all the we are together. Now we want to have There are various romantic configura- queer people they regard as kinfolk and that freedom while we are together. tions among the four partners, but only declared themselves an “intentional fam- The conversation about consensual Andy is in a romantic relationship with ily.” They placed the commitments they nonmonogamy today is the conversa- all three of the others. In addition, they were making to one another in a hole tion about virginity sixty years ago. Or all have “comets”—lovers from outside they had dug, invited everyone else to the conversation about divorce twenty the group who blaze through and then put commitments in, too, and then filled years before that.” are gone. “It’s a more stable structure in the hole and planted a tree. There with more people,” Andy said. was no officiant, but there was a chup- ndy Izenson, Roo Khan, Cal T., The members of the Rêve have pah. Roo’s father is Pakistani, and mem- Aand Aida Manduley envisaged thought deeply about what many peo- bers of his family wore traditional Pa- creating a utopian place where queer, ple characterize as divided love. Andy kistani wedding outfits and henna. trans, and polyamorous people could explained, “When you light a candle Andy’s mother was initially dis- feel safe and welcome. For years, they with another candle, your first candle mayed by the idea of the marriage. “I had told one another stories about the is not less on fire.” (Shelley, in 1821, said, ‘I know I’m not really your daugh- property they would build. At the end wrote much the same: “True love has ter in the way that you wanted to have

36 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 Andy Izenson, Cal T., Aida Manduley, and Roo Khan near their home, in Ulster County, New York. a daughter,’” Andy recalled. “ ‘And I’m to learn that there are discrepancies kids to know that when they’re a not getting married in the way that you between the state’s stories and reality.” grouchy teen-ager they can go, ‘Screw envisioned me getting married. But the That led Andy to think about per- you, Mom, I’m going to the Rêve,’ kind of kid I am is having the kind of sonal choices. “I had had it in my head, and everyone will know that they’re commitment ceremony I’m having, and Eventually, I’m going to have to do the safe here.” if that’s what you get do you want it?’ grownup thing and find the spouse that Cal said, “The thing that I wanted And it turns out she kind of did. She I can tolerate and produce children. It’s was a family. And I didn’t want to get helped me pick out a dress.” going to suck. The first thing you re- married or have children. And it turns Andy grew up in New Hampshire. alize might be, Oh, I don’t actually have out you can still have a family, even if “It’s not a place I would recommend to be a girl. Or, I don’t have to be in a you’re not getting married and hav- growing up if you’re trans, for sure,” relationship with the one person who ing children.” they said. “I learned when I was young provides the completion of my Pla- The group worked with a financial that there was something very wrong tonic soul for the rest of my life. Which- professional who specializes in nontra- with me that nobody would ever un- ever linchpin gets pulled out first, it all ditional-family planning to set up the derstand.” At Skidmore, they studied comes falling down. And once it’s all house as a joint tenancy with rights of sociolinguistics. They had their first fallen down you can say, O.K., I’ve got survivorship, so that if one of them dies polyamorous relationship there, in a all these pieces and now I can build their interest reverts to the others. The lesbian triad. “I started meeting more something.” Andy gestured at the house document also includes prenup-style queer and trans people and realizing and their spouses. “And this is what arrangements for what will happen if that it’s not that there’s something bro- we’ve built,” they said. any of them decides to leave. ken and weird about me.” None of them is currently planning For a long time, Cal worked for a They went to law school in New to have a child biologically. “But we solar company that offers health ben- York City. “I started encountering the have discovered that we like having efits for one domestic partner, and they idea that the state tells you about how kids around the house,” Andy said. put Andy on their insurance because the world works, what a family looks “For discrete amounts of time,” Andy needed it the most. Roo co-owns like, what gender is supposed to be,” Roo added. a small tech worker co-op and gets less they said. “As I was studying, I started Andy said, “We want our friends’ generous insurance through that. “It

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 37 would be convenient if we were all on who live in and around Herriman, Utah. Alina and Vicki—on the same day, the same health insurance and didn’t In 2011, they published a book, “Love in 1990. He was twenty, and they were have to find one covered doctor for Times Three,” about their polygamous twenty and nineteen, respectively. Roo and one covered doctor for the life, even though their marriage was a Alina and Vicki gave birth to their two of us,” Andy said. “Society has these felony at the time, and they tirelessly first sons seven months apart, and two categories: families that get rec- worked to persuade other polygamous each nursed both babies. Ten years ognition from the state and families families to come out. Utah’s decision later, Joe married Vicki’s twin sister, that don’t. The families that get recog- to decriminalize polygamy was in large Valerie, after she left another plural nition are the married, monogamous measure the result of a lobbying cam- marriage. She brought five children ones, and the ones that don’t are ev- paign that the Dargers had pursued for with her and had four more with Joe, erybody else.” two decades. who has seven children with Alina The question is: what does marriage Their house is in a relatively new and nine with Vicki. So far, they have mean? “I remember reading the list of subdivision, with wide views of nearby nineteen grandchildren, and Joe’s eleven hundred and sixty-three federal mountains. Joe, who works in con- youngest children are best friends with benefits that marriage gave, and one struction, has built additional houses his oldest grandchildren. of them that just stuck out to me was on the property for two of his adult Alina founded a nonprofit, Cher- ‘family discounts at national parks,’” children. “Anybody else, they’d say it’s ish Families, which provides support Roo said. “If the federal government a nice estate,” he said, when he showed to people both living in and leaving says you’re a family, you get the fam- me around, in June. “If you’re polyga- polygamy. Valerie works as an advo- ily discount, but we wouldn’t. It’s fuck- mous, it’s a compound. We’ve taken les- cate there. For a time, Vicki home- ing everywhere.” sons from the L.G.B.T.Q. community, schooled many of their children. They Andy talked about a watershed mo- being very deliberate about language, all talked about the difficulties of po- ment for gay rights, in 1989—the case because how you let people define you lygamous life. At one point, Vicki suf- of Braschi v. Stahl. Miguel Braschi was has an impact.” fered severe postpartum depression being evicted from the rent-controlled I had previously met Joe, on Zoom, and was consumed with jealousy to- apartment he and his partner shared, and he had seemed intimidating, with ward the other women. “I hated ev- after the partner died, of AIDS. The an unkempt beard and a forbidding eryone,” she said. “I didn’t know if I landlord contended that the lease was manner, and he had stuck to facts that was going to stay here.” Alina recalled transferrable only to family, and that I was sure he had recited a hundred fearing that the family might break Braschi wasn’t family. Braschi sued. times before. But, when we sat together apart. “All of us have had our turn, The judge issued a stunningly progres- on his back porch, I found him clean- whatever we were going through,” she sive ruling saying that family should shaven, relaxed, and forthcoming, and said. Effectively, they were married be based on the reality of daily life— his wives greeted me brightly. As we not only to Joe but also to one an- these two men lived together, shared talked there for the better part of a day, other. Valerie said, “We share the finances, took care of each other—and children, grandchildren, wives, and oth- kitchen and laundry—and we love not on “fictitious legal distinctions,” ers whose identities were never com- each other and we get jealous. I have such as marriage certificates. In An- pletely clear to me came and went. to manage Alina’s and my relation- dy’s view, the subsequent campaign for Joe and his wives come from fun- ship, Vicki’s and my relationship, Vicki gay marriage represented a missed op- damentalist Mormon families and and Alina’s relationship, all of our re- portunity. “In 1989, he said that a mar- have known one another from child- lationship to Joe. It’s all the dynam- riage certificate was a fictitious legal hood. Some of their grandparents ics all the time.” distinction,” Andy said with wonder. were jailed together for polygamy after In 2001, several members of the “The gay-rights movement took that the 1953 Short Creek raid, in which Darger family contracted a respiratory and said, ‘Actually, no, we’re just going state troops arrested an entire com- virus, and Joe and Alina’s five-month- to throw that out and try and get mar- munity of four hundred people, in- old daughter, Kyra, wasn’t recovering. ried. That seems like a better plan.’ cluding more than two hundred and (It later emerged that she had an un- Imagine if we had taken that idea— fifty children. Joe’s grandfather, who diagnosed heart defect.) When her that legal protections for family should had aliases ready and hiding places condition deteriorated, the family be granted based on the reality of daily mapped out, spent several years on called 911 but couldn’t get through. Joe family life and interdependence and the run. Vicki and Valerie’s grandfa- drove to a hospital, with Alina doing networks of mutual care rather than ther, however, said, “If the authorities CPR in the back seat. By the time they on fictitious legal distinctions—and come, we’ll be home. Have the chil- reached the hospital, Kyra had died. run with it.” dren be neat and comely.” He spent “There were a lot of questions,’’ Alina seven years in jail. Like many chil- recalled. “And always, accusingly, o family in America has done more dren of polygamists, the Dargers grew ‘You’re a fundamentalist.’” Authorities Nfor the image and legal standing up in an atmosphere of secrecy, quickly opened a criminal case and interrogated of polygamists than the Dargers: Joe, learning not to tell their schoolmates all the Dargers. A nurse came to the his three wives—Alina, Vicki, and Val- about their families. house, and then identified herself as erie—and their twenty-five children, Joe married his first two wives— an employee of Child Protective Ser-

38 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 vices and interviewed each child alone. choosing the way they think?” It’s true thinking that it makes sense for na The criminal case was closed after that how we grow up influences what tions to have inviolable borders; brain a month and the familyservices one we eat, where we live, whom we so washed about the morality of abor two months later, but the automatic cialize with or marry. It determines tion, the necessity of medical mari suspicion that the family encountered our taste in clothing, our sense of juana. People are brainwashed into marked a turning point for Joe. “I was, humor, the value we place on formal Jewish culture or Black culture or like, We’ve lived in this fear and it education. Freud wrote about the “rep French culture. doesn’t work,” he said. It was an inaus etition compulsion,” which drives us The Dargers’ book came out a month picious time to start campaigning for continually to recreate our own past, after Jeffs’s final conviction. Alina, plural marriage. In the early twothou whether we were happy in it or not. Vicki, and Valerie were terrified. One sands, Tom Green, a fundamentalist Do people in the mainstream argue of Joe’s mothersinlaw, who had been Mormon, was convicted of bigamy and that polygamists have been brain swept up in the Short Creek raid as a child rape; he had married one of his washed because mainstream values child, called in tears, begging the fam wives when she was thirteen. In 2006, are alien to polygamous ones? If so, ily to halt publication. The publisher Warren Jeffs, the leader of the F.L.D.S., were most people brainwashed to ide phoned Joe just before the book went who had turned the community at Short alize monogamous marriage? Animal to press, saying that she would under Creek into his personal fiefdom, was models suggest that monogamy is stand if Joe and his wives had second placed on the F.B.I.’s mostwanted list, less natural than nonmonogamy. Yet thoughts. Kody Brown, who, with his for arranging marriages between adult violations of it serve as the basis for four wives, had recently become the followers and underage girls. In 2011, terminating otherwise healthy rela subject of the reality show “Sister after two trials—on charges including tionships. We are brainwashed into Wives,” came to Joe in a panic, saying rape, incest, and sexual assault of mi keeping pets, taking daily showers, that his family was under investigation nors—Jeffs was jailed for life. Supporters of polygamy argue that its illegality makes it easier for men such as Jeffs to operate, because women fear that, if they go to the police, they may lose their children. “When you’re criminalizing people who are other wise lawabiding, you push that suf fering under cover of darkness,” Joe said. But he also believes that polyg amists have an obligation to confront what the practice has enabled. “It was important for us—both to win pub lic approval and to regain our own in tegrity—to say we are responsible for Warren Jeffs, our culture created this,” he said. “There’s problems in every culture. Until we own those problems, we’re not going to be seen as respon sible people.” The Dargers note that many of the problems associated with polygamy come from factors that can, but often do not, accompany it: child marriage, assigned marriage, lack of education, and poverty. Joe acknowledges that the system is patriarchal. “But patriarchy is as prev alent in monogamous households as in polygamous ones, and patriarchy is not misogyny,” he said. He emphasized that in households with many women they have a strong voice: “There’s no major decision we make as a family that we’re not unanimous on. We may not all agree, but we’ll all align.” Alina said, “Why is it that we’re always ‘brainwashed’ unless we’re and that his lawyers had advised him to move to Nevada. Joe said, “I’m prepared to be arrested.” D AYS OF TEEN-AGE GLORY

fter meeting the Dargers and other When I was committing the crime of high school, Apolygamists in the Salt Lake area, the songs on the radio I drove four hours south to Short Creek, took about two minutes to play, Warren Jeffs’s former stronghold, where and smoking a cigarette took about five, the most concentrated community of so that things happened fairly quickly Mormon-style polygamists still resides. as we passed the time and it passed us It encompasses two towns straddling without a sound except for the singing. the state border—Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona—a location that Singing by the Orioles, the Dubs, and the Clovers, long enabled residents to evade state plus Lee Andrews and the Hearts, authorities by crossing back and forth. who could do no wrong, according to me. The majesty of the landscape—red rocks, red dust, red mountains—is ar- One night in the spring, resting, but as you come into Hildale I even saw the Jesters battling the Paragons you pass a white concrete wall sur- on the stage of the Brooklyn Paramount, rounding a large, depressing structure then wandered the borough in a drizzle. that Jeffs built for himself, to house his myriad wives. The town is dotted These days, if I’m not at my desk with other Jeffs buildings, including a or asleep in the back room, gigantic ceremonial hall now converted I’m sitting in the garage into a community center; some homes with a cup of coffee watching the rain still have the high fences that Jeffs made mandatory. and waiting for that startling chord I walked around town with Donia that concludes “He’s Gone,” by the Chantels, Jessop and Shirlee Draper, both of whom had been born there in the early seventies and had fled as Jeffs’s reign point Warren took control; Rulon died leave her husband and the two other intensified, only to return later with in 2002.) Donia managed to preëmpt wives he had taken after her—but it the aim of rebuilding the community. assigned marriage by marrying her high- seemed impossible; she had no bank Shirlee works for Cherish Families, the school boyfriend; they stayed in the account, no credit history, and hardly organization set up by Alina Darger. community and had ten children. any friends or family outside the com- (Vicki and Valerie Darger are her cous- Shirlee’s experience was very different. munity. It took her four years to save ins.) Three years ago, Donia was elected When she was twenty-three, her father enough money, and she packed her and Hildale’s mayor, the first woman—and got a call from Rulon Jeffs, and she was the children’s suitcases over several the first candidate not endorsed by the married by five o’clock that afternoon. months to avoid detection. She made F.L.D.S.—to hold the position. She “Because I was raised in the F.L.D.S., it to St. George, Utah, fifty miles away, proudly showed me a park that had it was just the next step,” she said. “It and set up home there. “Taking off your just been replanted. The public school, was, like, Here are these crates of to- identity and going where you have no long closed, is now in use again. matoes that I have to bottle. It’s what support, no sense of belonging is ex- Most residents here are or were you do.” She and her husband had three cruciating,” she said. She didn’t want F.L.D.S. members, and were therefore children in quick succession, one of anyone to know that she was a polyg- subject not only to polygamous unions whom had special needs, as did a fourth amist’s daughter and a polygamist’s but also to arranged ones; the ruling child, who was born a few years later. wife; in a sense, she was still in hiding. elders might pair them with a stranger, Shirlee hoped to fall in love but didn’t. Others were fleeing Short Creek, or someone they hated, or someone Shirlee came to bridle at the en- and Shirlee, wanting to help them, stud- of a completely different generation. trenched patriarchy of the F.L.D.S., ied social work at the University of In addition, the property of Church more so as Warren Jeffs’s edicts became Utah. (She later also got a master’s de- members was held in a trust, so you increasingly extreme. He banned tele- gree in public administration.) But she didn’t own your house or land, and if vision, the Internet, the radio, and news- found that most of the organizations you left you did so with only your per- papers. He ordered divorces and re- offering assistance to those who had sonal effects. marriages, told people to remove their fled also campaigned against polygamy Shirlee and Donia both came of age children from public schools, shut down and required the women they helped when Warren Jeffs’s father, Rulon, was all medical facilities, and expelled many to take a public stance condemning the the head of the Church. (He was inca- members from the Church. Shirlee practice. Shirlee found this exploitative pacitated by a stroke in 1997, at which knew that she had to get out—and to and went to work for the Dargers’ non-

40 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 some people choose to live polyamory or polygamy and it works for them, hal- lelujah, right?” It was a beautiful afternoon, and she the five notes the rungs in a ladder pointed up at the great cliffs that sur- pointed into a vacant teen-age sky. rounded the town. “Growing up around it, I did not appreciate it,” she said. “It They were students together in the Bronx was like wallpaper. After I moved away, at St. Anthony of Padua’s school, it was triggering, because this was the but they named themselves place where so much horrible stuff hap- after a rival neighborhood school, pened. Only now, recently, I’ve started St. Frances of Chantal, to really appreciate how beautiful it is.” having wisely rejected the Paduas, as I imagine them doing one afternoon. oe Darger was confident about the Jchances for decriminalizing polyg- Where are the Chantels now? amy in Utah. He believed that, in ef- Playing in the snows of yesteryear? fect, it already had been decriminal- Bathing in the waters of childhood? ized, thanks to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, Are they hanging in the domestic air in 2003, which rendered a slew of state like a smoke ring over a kitchen table? laws about cohabitation unconstitutional. “It was just a matter of getting Or like one sailing from a girl’s mouth the public to recognize it,” Joe said. He in a car somewhere approached other fundamentalist Mor- only to vanish in a boy’s face mon families, urging them to become reflected pink in the rearview mirror? more politically vocal. It was hard, not only because people feared legal con- —Billy Collins sequences but also because the many sects were often hostile to one another and resistant to forming a united front. profit, which doesn’t seek to change its was caused not by polygamy per se but “Early on, I realized this was going to clients’ beliefs or to persuade them to by patriarchy. Once, after leaving, she require a three-prong approach—leg- engage in public self-disclosure. was doing daily household chores on islative, legal, and public relations,” Joe In 2005, a court froze the assets of her own and felt an unaccustomed said. “The public sways the courts.” the collective that owned the F.L.D.S.’s loneliness. “Women are quite social Even before the Dargers’ book was land and buildings. In 2015, Shirlee was pack creatures,” she said. “We need published, Joe had started seeking out appointed to the board of a trust that women.” I often heard similar things receptive Utah politicians. Rather than is gradually redistributing those assets among the polygamous wives I inter- framing the issue as one of freedom of to the people it sees as rightful own- viewed. One recalled being a child and religion—an argument long rejected ers. When she was first approached, seeing a TV spot that showed a de- by Utah and federal courts—Joe framed she said, “Oh, hell no—my job is to pressed woman lying in bed and told it as a free-speech matter. “If we pur- help people get out of Short Creek.” viewers that they didn’t have to be ported to be married, that was the fel- She wanted nothing to do with the alone. Loneliness is epidemic in con- ony, but I could call them mistresses— place. Still, she believed that those who temporary life, but, to a child of po- not a problem,” he told me. “Speech is had built the town deserved ownership. lygamous parents, the condition seemed our fundamental, most important right. She noticed that most of the residents implausible. “My life was so full of Everything arises in language, and your had left the F.L.D.S. but that all the people that that didn’t even sound like identity is defined by language. If you city council members were still part of it was a real thing,” the wife said. What can’t claim your identity, you grow up the Church. She investigated and ex- struck me most during my interviews under a grave injustice.” posed extensive election fraud, and led in polygamous and polyamorous com- In 2008, he met Deidre Henderson, a voter-registration drive that helped munities was that these extensive fam- who was just entering politics. Twelve get Donia Jessop elected. Since then, ilies created a world sufficient for even years later, it was she who, as a state sen- Shirlee has set up classes for women their most hesitant members. ator, sponsored the successful decrimi- on topics including self-defense and Shirlee still seemed to struggle with nalization bill. (She recently became the financial management—and even a dat- her ambivalence about the system into lieutenant governor of Utah.) Another ing class for people unacquainted with which she was born. “Patriarchal struc- early ally was Connor Boyack, the pres- the etiquette of romance. tures are horrifying for women, and ident of the Libertas Institute, a liber- Shirlee rejected her experience of that includes monogamy,” she said, as tarian-leaning think tank in Salt Lake polygamy but believes that her misery we walked around the town. “But if City. Boyack, a mainstream Mormon

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 41 with no polygamous forebears, sup- fundamentalist Mormons dismiss as took time to recognize that human sex- ported the decriminalization of polyg- political expediency. The practice be- uality is not as square as we make it amy on libertarian grounds. “As a prac- came a felony in Utah in 1935. In 2013, out to be,” he went on. “Polyamory and ticing Mormon, I don’t think God has it was temporarily decriminalized—not even the single life are just as valid as a condoned polygamy, just like I don’t by the legislature but by a judge, who heteronormative, husband-wife, picket- think that it’s O.K. to be injecting your- ruled, in a case brought by Kody Brown, fence, three-children conversation. I self with heroin,” he told me. “But that that the state’s anti-bigamy statute was sponsored the Bigamy Bill because doesn’t mean that I should be support- unconstitutional. But three years later there’s plenty of relationships made up ing laws that punish other people who the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals of three and four people. When we choose to do those things. I don’t drink ruled that, because Utah did not actu- were debating it, I asked the primary coffee, but I don’t think Starbucks should ally prosecute polygamists unless there sponsor and our legal counsel, ‘This be prohibited.” were other crimes, the plaintiffs did not also means non-married multiple part- To Boyack, the fact that the polyg- have standing, so the practice became ners, like a polyamorous situation?’ They amy ban was generally unenforced of- criminal again. said, ‘Didn’t think about it, but yeah.’” fered a new way of pursuing the cam- By February, 2020, the Bigamy Bill Eventually, the mainstream Mor- paign against it. He went on a listening had the cosponsorship of Derek mon leadership, whose anti-gay poli- tour, documenting incest that had never Kitchen, one of only six Democrats cies had increasingly drawn outrage in been reported, interviewing women who in the Utah State Senate and its only Utah, concluded that it was fighting a had never testified to heinous abuse be- openly gay member. Seven years be- losing battle on polygamy, too. Last cause they were afraid their children fore, he and his partner had sued the February, when Henderson brought her could be removed, meeting one woman state in a case, Kitchen v. Herbert, that decriminalization bill to the Utah leg- who had never told anyone that she had challenged its ban on same-sex mar- islature, Church leaders told legislators an autistic child because she feared she riage. They won, and the case led to to vote their consciences. The bill passed would lose him. Henderson held pub- the legalization of gay marriage in the nearly unopposed. lic hearings at which polygamist vic- Tenth Circuit and influenced the Su- Still, even as polygamy gains legal tims of abuse told similar stories. Boyack preme Court’s decision in Obergefell, standing, the institution itself looks said, “When we started talking to leg- eight months later. “The L.G.B.T.Q. harder to sustain. Kitchen notes that islators in that light—not that this is movement and, in particular, a lot of it’s neither environmentally nor finan- freedom for polygamists but, rather, that gay men really embrace polyamory,” cially viable, and that it requires inhu- the status quo empowers abusers—we Kitchen told me. Many Mormon po- man energy. In this same period, Utah very quickly garnered support.” lygamists were more than happy to has seen an upswing in gay couples Still, the Bigamy Bill faced an up- make common cause with the gay- having babies. “They’re mostly non- hill battle in Utah’s legislature, which marriage activists. “A lot of our first al- monogamous,” Kitchen said, adding is eighty-six per cent Mormon—al- lies were L.G.B.T.Q., and that was that he hopes to have kids, but not in though only about sixty-four per cent brave of them,” Alina Darger told me. the context of a monogamous relation- of the state’s residents are. The L.D.S. “I’ve come to an appreciation for their ship. Kitchen and his husband, despite Church was thoroughly opposed to po- struggle, and I am a very firm cham- having won their case for marriage, are lygamy. Boyack believes that main- now divorcing. “To be completely frank, stream Mormons are embarrassed by I don’t know that I’ll engage in mar- the Church’s polygamist past. riage in the future,” he said. “It’s nice The practice began around 1835, when to know that I’m no longer prohibited. Joseph Smith, the Church’s founder, I think marriage entirely is going to took a second wife after receiving a rev- fade away. As people feel empowered elation about polygamy; he eventually to take the question of monogamy into had more than thirty. The 1856 Repub- their own hands and iron out the dis- lican Party platform railed against “those pleasures or unhappiness in their lives, twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and they’ll find polyamory.” slavery”; the South and the West were pion that rights are for every person.” both deemed immoral, and a line was One detail of Kitchen v. Herbert amara Pincus is a psychotherapist drawn between “civilized white society” has remained out of the press. “During Tin Washington, D.C., who works and that of “backwards savages.” In 1862, that time, my partner and I were in- with clients who are exploring alter- Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Big- volved in a polyamorous dynamic,” native sexualities, including polyamory, amy Act. By the late eighteen-eighties, Kitchen said. “We feared we would kink, and L.G.B.T.Q. relationships. it was clear that polygamy would pre- jeopardize our case if people found out She defines herself as a bisexual woman vent the Utah Territory from securing about us having a third, a boyfriend. who has sometimes dated genderqueer statehood. In 1890, the Church’s presi- But we were with him for three years.” people. Her husband, Eric, is cheerful dent, Wilford Woodruff, also prompted So Derek Kitchen was in hiding about and geeky and talks about his apostasy by a revelation, issued a manifesto re- his sexuality even when he was the from conventional marriage with a nouncing polygamy—a decision that most visible gay person in Utah. “It nearly religious fervor.

42 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 They met in 2000, when Tamara, in her mid-twenties, was working with Eric’s mother at a Jewish community center in Washington. They moved in together within months and were married in 2002. For a decade, they lived a monogamous life, but after the second of their two sons was born they began exploring kink and going to sex parties. Soon, they opened their marriage. Eric accompanied Tamara on her first serious date and sat around awkwardly while his wife and the other man made out and started to remove each other’s clothes. But he recalled how happy and affectionate she was afterward. The first person to move in with them was a girlfriend of Eric’s. There were other girlfriends, some more full- time than others. One had a jealous husband trying to control her; Eric had no idea how to respond to his intense aggression, and he and Tamara realized that they needed to manage the expectations—and the baggage—of “Thinks he’s so great now that he’s a dressage clown.” others who entered the setup. “I’m in this committed relationship to Tamara, so if that’s something they can’t han- •• dle we have to go our separate ways,” Eric said. of affairs. We are finding more sustain- erance, but they have an awareness that When their younger son was in first able ways of doing family. Often, mo- tolerance does not necessarily run deep. grade, he drew a picture of his family nogamous married people feel like ‘This After the shooting at the Pulse night on vacation—Tamara and Eric, the two is what I have to do,’ not ‘This is what club, in Orlando, in 2016, one of them sons, and Eric’s girlfriend. “He drew a I choose to do.’ Every day, Eric and I asked, “Do people hate us like they car with the four of us in it,” Tamara make a choice to keep this relationship hate gay people?” said. “Then he put the girlfriend in a together.” They have both had pangs of Tamara and Eric are out as poly- sidecar. She’s this extra person who jealousy, but less so with time. “Where amorous in most contexts, but Tamara’s came along and played games with I mostly get resentful,” Tamara said, “is long-term boyfriend is not. “If he came them. But they could recognize that when he’s fixing something at someone out at work, he would likely be fired,” she was not in our car.” else’s house—because there’s always a Tamara said. According to Eric, the Within a few years, Eric had estab- huge list of tasks around our house.” ex-husband of one of his less frequent lished a relationship with a woman Another partner of Eric’s, whom he partners argued that her poly life style who had two children and was sepa- has known for three years, stays over was evidence that she was an unfit par- rating from her husband, who is him- occasionally, with her child. Tamara’s ent and sued for full custody of their self polyamorous. Four years later, she boyfriend stays over at least once a week child. The judge declared that her erotic and her children moved in. “I love her and has a child who regularly stays over life was immaterial and assigned joint and wanted her to be part of us,” Eric with him. The children in the house custody. “But another judge might have said. “And Tamara was very happy with all regard one another as siblings. Every bought the husband’s argument,” Eric her.” Tamara has a boyfriend of nine Friday, Tamara and Eric host a big din- said. “We have no legal protections at years. Eric said, “When I was support- ner for everyone, including ex-partners all for the way we live.” ive of her doing things, it came back and close friends. “In that picture, we’d much stronger, because she was, like, all be in the car now,” Eric said. Ta- iana Adams, a family lawyer in ‘Thank you, you made that possible.’ mara admits to having worried that her DNew York, has become the leading I’m not a very jealous person.” kids would be isolated or bullied be- figure in the conversation surrounding “The sexual relationship is just eas- cause of their unconventional family; the application of existing laws to poly- ier with newer partners,” Tamara said. Eric had been equally worried that they amorous and other unorthodox arrange- “A lot of children of the eighties and would encounter anti-Semitism. So far, ments. In 2017, Adams, who uses the nineties saw our parents split because the children have encountered only tol- pronoun “they,” founded the Chosen

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 43 men toward monogamy, had allowed women nonmonogamy. They went on, “Divorce specialists will tell you we have an epidemic of people saying they’re monogamous, then breaking up families with lies and infidelity. What is harmful is that that infidelity breaks a covenant. What if we think about what we would actually like to create?” Adams thinks that platonic co- parents, too, should be entitled to some form of recognition. They described a woman who became disabled and whose sister moved in and became the primary parent of the disabled sister’s child. Adams drafted a complex trust so that they could make hospital visits, have shared finances, and buy a house together. “Family is really about people who want to take care of one another because they love one another,” they said. In another case, two male- female couples bonded as a polyamorous quad and were living together. In giving birth, one of the women had a massive heart attack and became se- “I like to let the gentle pinging of devices soothe me to sleep.” verely disabled. Her husband spent the next year taking care of her in rehab centers while the female partner in the •• other couple became the primary parent of the baby. The husband of the Family Law Center, which undertakes were eliminated from American in- second couple became the breadwin- many such cases pro bono. They work come tax, the system would no lon- ner for all of them. “Despite that hor- with polyamorous clients who would ger favor married couples at the ex- rific and tragic incident, they’ve been marry if they could, helping them craft pense of non-dyadic families. The together eight years in that format, and a legal dynamic for their shared life. sheer number of rights associated with they’re a beautiful family,” Adams said. Adams believes that the establishment civil marriage places this country alone Adams and their husband both iden- of gay marriage produced a backlash among Western societies. Gay people tify as queer, and their relationship has against expanded relationship rights, fought, justly, to be included in those been polyamorous from the start. In and they encourage their clients to con- rights. But, Adams said, “we’d like to addition to their husband, Adams is sider other options. “An L.L.C. model get out of the business of the govern- in long-term relationships with two is not related to romance, but it’s re- ment deciding whether your roman- women and also has a boyfriend; Adams lated to how they can share finances,” tic relationship has passed scrutiny has a five-year-old daughter with their they said. “It’s an option I have real- such that you receive immigration husband and has considered parenting ized with polyamorous triads and quads. benefits, health benefits, tax benefits, with a gay male friend. Though they You could say, This family is an L.L.C.— Medicare at death.” live with just their husband and daugh- they own properties in multiple places, They went on, “We’re seeing a move- ter, they are open to cohabiting with have a common health-insurance plan ment away from parenting being de- another romantic partner. Their work and bank accounts, and pay taxes as an fined by DNA and toward its being both reflects and facilitates the com- L.L.C. People should understand the defined by intention. Getting out of plexities of their own life. difference between what we’re creating the model of a two-person monoga- Adams is wary of making common legally and what you want to vow to mous marriage as the basis of family cause with polygamists. “The very con- emotionally. You don’t need to get mar- is the next frontier.” They note that in servative, male, patriarchal image of ried to become a social-welfare state of earlier eras monogamy was expected polygamy is in radical contrast to the two or three or four.” of women but not of men. “When we very modern, evolved world of poly- Legalizing poly marriages would were deciding to make this more eq- amory,” they said. All the same, they require revising the tax code and en- uitable, it could have gone in a differ- believe that the women’s decision to titlement programs to accommodate ent direction,” Adams said, adding that lead a polygamous life should be re- multi-partner families. If joint filing they wished society, instead of pushing spected—“just as we trust them if they

44 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 choose to be exotic dancers or sex work- wanted.” He began to identify as asex- tual legal co-parent,” Avary said. Ul- ers or gestational surrogates.” ual. In 2001, at the age of eighteen, he timately, it was decided that David Polygamy and polyamory share founded the Asexuality Visibility and should move in with Avary and Zeke many features but remain sociologi- Education Network and, soon after, the and be an equal third parent. cally distinct. Polyamorous behavior Web site asexuality.org, which now has Avary found out she was pregnant exists across social groups, but the ter- more than a hundred thousand mem- at the beginning of 2017. The three of minology is of the chattering classes. bers. David is one of the most promi- them went to birthing classes together. Elisabeth Sheff, the author of “The nent activists for asexual people—or In August, their daughter was born, Polyamorists Next Door,” speaks of “aces,” as they are sometimes known. and they gave her all three of their sur- people who are “safe and privileged Some aces don’t seek romantic part- names; she is Octavia Hausfather Jay enough to come out as polyamorous.” ners; others want romance without sex; Kent (Tavi for short). David initiated Texts on polyamory have tended to many want to be parents. David found an adoption process as soon as Tavi focus on the concerns of white, middle- that forming relationships with peo- was born, and the three adults signed class, college-educated readers, and ple who were not asexual was often a co-parenting agreement that stipu- skate over historical and cultural bound- painful. He would immerse himself in lated what should happen if any of the aries that constrain individual choice. the intensity, but if the person found relationships frayed. Sheff, noting that Black people are al- a sexual partner they would shift their I first met the family when Tavi was ready burdened by stereotypes that de- emotional energy toward that other four and a half months old. They were pict them as sexually voracious and un- relationship. living in San Francisco, in an airy, spa- able to form stable family relationships, In 2010, David, who was then work- cious apartment that had a vaguely describes “perversity” as “a luxury more ing as a software developer, met Avary hippie vibe. Zeke said, “The more peo- readily available to those who are al- Kent, who worked in impact invest- ple we have involved with raising Tavi, ready members of dominant groups.” ing, at a conference, and they hit it off; the easier it is for each of us individ- Those who said that gay marriage a few months later, Avary introduced ually, and the easier it is for us, the bet- wouldn’t lead to poly marriage often David to her boyfriend, Zeke Hausfa- ter it is for her.” Avary had disliked the argued that being gay is an intractable ther, a climatologist. David and Zeke version of new motherhood in which condition and being poly is a chosen spent many hours talking science. sleep deprivation was “a badge of life style. Helplessly gay people are Gradually, David began to introduce honor.” She believed that their arrange- therefore a protected category; elec- intentionality into the relationship. “I ment was deeply traditional. “I think tively poly people are not. But Edward said, ‘Hey, I want to have one of those that the whole nuclear-family thing Stein, of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo conversations where we name where was a strong departure from how hu- School of Law, notes that many poly- this relationship fits in our lives, and mans were accustomed to being in amorists claim to have been drawn to how we want to build on it, if that’s community and in family and raising nonmonogamy for as long as they have something you’d be interested in?’” children together,” she said. The three experienced sexual desire, and that many They were. of them continued doing quarterly nominal monogamists have intracta- After Avary and Zeke married, they counselling—“to make sure we can air ble difficulty remaining that way, sug- told David, “We’ve decided we want things out in front of a neutral third gesting that a polyamorous orientation party,” Zeke said. David patted him on may be both innate and immutable. the arm. “Fourth party,” he said. Sheff said, “For some people, it isn’t a Thanks to shared parenting, Zeke choice—it really is an orientation.” But and Avary are able to go out on date even if, for the sake of argument, we nights, and David sometimes goes blues say that being poly is a choice, is that dancing. They all belong to a sci-fi a reason to say that it warrants no pro- book club, and they hold a family tections? Surely, when we defend the check-in every Sunday, to divvy up rights of Jews or Muslims, we don’t household chores and allocate time imply that they can’t help being that with Tavi. When she was a baby, Avary way; rather, we confer dignity on a cho- to have kids. There’s a number of peo- and Zeke would take her to David’s sen way of life. ple we want to invite into that pro- room every night, at around three cess in an intentional way. The per- o’clock. The three of them opened a y the time that David Jay was about son we want to invite in most of all joint account for child-related expenses Bfourteen, his friends had all begun is you.” For more than a year, the three and contribute to an educational- experiencing attractions that he could of them discussed what this arrange- savings account for Tavi. They have hardly understand. “Everyone told me ment might look like. They went to a noticed that, if Zeke and David take that what I wasn’t feeling was one of mediator to try to identify areas where Tavi out for a walk around their neigh- the cornerstones of a healthy, intimate there could be disagreement. “We con- borhood, people usually assume that relationship as an adult,” he told me. sidered how David could do anything the two men are a married gay couple. “And I was pretty certain that healthy, from being Uncle David, who drops It’s an assumption that no one could intimate relationships were what I in from time to time, to being an ac- have made a generation ago. 

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 45 AMERICAN CHRONICLES CHANGE YOUR LIFE The lessons of the New Left.

BY LOUIS MENAND

he New Left was born in the Democracy (SLID), which had been early nineteen-sixties as a re- limping along for decades until, in 1960, T volt against the modern uni- it was renamed, on the ground that, as versity, and it died less than ten years the 1rst president of S.D.S., Alan Haber, later, in the auto-da-fé of Vietnam. Al- put it, SLID was an embarrassing acro- though it helped mobilize opinion on nym for an out1t in decline. issues like civil rights, urban poverty, Haber had entered the University of the arms race, and the war, the New Michigan as an undergraduate in 1954 Left never had its hands on the levers (and did not receive his B.A. until 1965). of political power. But it changed left- His 1rst name was Robert, for the Pro- wing politics. It made individual free- gressive senator Robert La Follette, of dom and authenticity the goals of po- Wisconsin, and his parents approved litical action, and it inspired people who of SLID and their son’s politics. He was cared about injustice and inequality to known as the campus radical, but he reject the existing system of power re- was not a 1re-eater. If S.D.S. had been lations, and to begin anew. associated only with people like him, it If this was a fantasy, then so was the would almost certainly have failed to Declaration of Independence. Fresh attract recruits. It needed a charismatic starts are not difficult in politics. They person who came from the place most are impossible. You can shake yourself students at Midwestern public univer- loose from some of the past, but never sities in the nineteen-1fties came from, from all of it. “All men are created equal” the shores of the American mainstream. did not turn the page on slavery. But Tom Hayden was such a person. there were many who hoped that it Hayden was born in Royal Oak, would, and if there weren’t people will- a suburb of Detroit, in 1939. His par- ing to place all their bets on a better fu- ents were Catholic—he was named for ture—and that was the spirit of the New St. Thomas Aquinas—who, unusually, Left—then we would not be worth divorced, and Hayden was raised prin- much as a society. cipally by his mother in somewhat strait- The New Left emerged independ- ened circumstances. But he had a nor- ently at two great postwar knowledge mal childhood, and he did well in school. factories, the University of Michigan He entered Michigan in 1957 and be- and the University of California at came a reporter on the student paper, Berkeley. More than a third of their stu- the Michigan Daily. Hayden had no po- dents were in graduate or professional litical ambitions. In his coursework, he school. Michigan had more contracts was drawn to the existentialists, then with the National Aeronautics and Space very much in vogue in American col- Administration than any other univer- leges. But in 1960 there was an uptick sity in the country. Berkeley was the in student activism, and Hayden, a main federal contractor for nuclear re- twenty-one-year-old college junior, in- search, and had more Nobel laureates dependent and professionally uncom- on its faculty than any other university mitted, was perfectly positioned to be in the world. caught up in it. “I didn’t get political,” Michigan was the birthplace of the as he put it. “Things got political.” largest and best-known student polit- The inspiration for the Northern ical organization of the decade, and student movement was a Southern stu- probably ever: Students for a Demo- dent movement. On February 1, 1960, cratic Society. S.D.S. was descended four 1rst-year students from the all- Protesters from the Free Speech Movement from the Student League for Industrial Black North Carolina Agricultural and Ron Anastasi (students); John Leggett,

46 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 marching through Sather Gate, the University of California at Berkeley, November 20, 1264. From left: Mona Hutchin and Morton Paley, and John Searle (faculty); Sallie Shawl, Michael Rossman, and Mario Savio (students).

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 47 Technical State University sat down at was thrilled to meet them. “They lived that all of us, Negro and white, realize the pos- a whites-only lunch counter in the on a fuller level of feeling than any peo- sibility of becoming less inhuman humans Woolworth’s department store in down- ple I’d ever seen,” he wrote later, “partly through commitment and action with all their frightening complexities. town Greensboro. The waitress (who because they were making modern his- When Thoreau was jailed for refusing to was Black) refused to serve them, so tory in a very personal way, and partly pay taxes to a government which supported they sat there all day. The next day, nine- because by risking death they came to slavery, Emerson went to visit him. “Henry teen additional students showed up to know the value of living each moment David,” said Emerson, “what are you doing in sit at the lunch counter. The day after, to the fullest. Looking back, this was a there?” Thoreau looked at him and replied, “Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?” it was eighty-five. By the end of the key turning point, the moment my po- week, there were an estimated four hun- litical identity began to take shape.” She paused, then she repeated the last dred. Sit-ins quickly spread, and, within The N.S.A. convention was debating line. There was an ovation. The con- ten weeks, the movement had led to the whether to adopt a statement of support vention endorsed the sit-ins by a vote formation, under the leadership of the of 305–37. civil-rights veteran Ella Baker, of the Hayden was stunned. In almost any Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com- earlier left-wing political organization, mittee (SNCC), which would become a Cason’s speech would have been writ- major activist organization of the civil- ten off as an expression of bourgeois in- rights movement. dividualism. But she was saying exactly In March, Haber came to Hayden’s what Hayden had been saying in Mon- office at the Daily. He told him that terey. She was telling the students that Michigan students were picketing Ann this was about them. Arbor stores as a show of sympathy for It is doubtful whether Black demon- the Southern students and suggested for the sit-ins. The issue was controver- strators being taunted, fire-hosed, beaten, that he cover it. Hayden wrote some sto- sial for some delegates because it meant and arrested felt that they were coming ries about the picketers, but he had little endorsing illegal actions. One of the to know “the value of living each mo- impulse to join them. Around the same speakers in favor of a statement of sup- ment to the fullest.” People like Cason time, though, he read “On the Road,” port was a white graduate student from and Hayden cared about injustice, but which had come out in 1957, and the the University of Texas named Sandra the fundamental appeal of politics for book inspired him, like many others, to (Casey) Cason. them was existential. “We were alike . . . hitchhike to California. There, he got a Cason was from Victoria, Texas. She in our sense of moral adventure, our ex- quick course in politics. took racial segregation “as a personal af- istential sensibility, our love of poetic ac- In Berkeley, he met with students front,” she later wrote, “viewing it as a tion, and our feeling of romantic involve- who had demonstrated at an appear- restriction on my freedom.” Even be- ment,” Hayden wrote about meeting ance in San Francisco of the House fore Greensboro, Cason had partici- Cason. He was now ready to join S.D.S. Un-American Activities Committee pated in protests against segregation in He courted Cason by sending her (huac) and had been dispersed with Austin, where she was active in the boxes of books, including Hermann fire hoses by the police. In Delano, he Young Women’s Christian Association. Hesse’s “Siddhartha,” which he had fran- met organizers for Chicano farmwork- The University of Texas had started ad- tically underlined. They got married in ers. In Los Angeles, at the Democratic mitting Black undergraduates in 1956, 1961 and eventually moved to New York National Convention that nominated but only one dormitory was desegre- City, and it was there, in a railroad flat John F. Kennedy for President, he in- gated, the Christian Faith and Life on West Twenty-second Street, that terviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. At Community. That is where Cason lived. Hayden wrote the first draft of what THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL SAHRE PAUL BY ILLUSTRATION PHOTO OF CALIFORNIA; MUSEUM THE OAKLAND a student conference near Monterey, She got interested in existentialism and would be known as the Port Huron © Hayden gave a talk on “value stimula- began reading Camus. After graduat- Statement. “I was influenced deeply by tion.” The spirit of self-determination, ing, she taught Bible school in Harlem, ‘The Power Elite,’” Hayden said, and he said, “has bowed to the vast indus- and read James Baldwin. the effect of C. Wright Mills’s 1956 book trial and organizational expansion of “If I had known that not a single is obvious. the last 75 years. As a result, the major- lunch counter would open as a result of ity of students feel helpless to chart their my action, I could not have done dif- ills, who was born in Waco, Texas, society’s direction. The purpose of the ferently than I did,” she said in her speech Min 1916, was a large and energetic student movements is at once simple to the N.S.A. delegates in Minneapo- man, the kind of person who builds his and profound: to prove human beings lis. She went on: own furniture. He was also disciplined, are still the measure.” organized, and prolific. By the time he The final stop on Hayden’s road trip I am thankful for the sit-ins if for no other died, of a heart attack, at the age of forty- was the annual conference of the Na- reason than that they provided me with an op- five, he had written more than half a tional Student Association (N.S.A.), portunity for making a slogan into a reality by dozen books. making a decision into an action. It seems to which was being held at the University me that this is what life is all about. While I Mills spent most of his career at Co- of Minnesota. About twenty-five mem- would hope that the N.S.A. Congress will pass lumbia. He was self-consciously a mav-

bers of SNCC had been invited. Hayden a strong sit-in resolution, I am more concerned erick, and had no compunction about TRIBUNE COLLECTION, THE OAKLAND COURTESY 1964. UNTITLED (FREE MOVEMENT), SPEECH PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHRIS KJOBECH, GIFTANG NEWSPAPERS OF OF CALIFORNIA, MUSEUM THE OAKLAND

48 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 criticizing his colleagues, some of whom World.’” The Cold War was making is taken up there,” he wrote to an Amer- were happy to return the favor. As a so- the United States undemocratic. ican friend. ciologist and a social critic—the roles Who could be agents of change in The British intellectuals to whom were the same for him—Mills was in- such a regime? The working class is the Mills was drawn—among them, the terested in the problem of power. And agent of change in leftist theory, a theory cultural theorist Stuart Hall, the histo- he came to feel that there had been a to which organizations like the League rian E. P. Thompson, and the sociolo- change in power relations in the United for Industrial Democracy (the progeni- gist Ralph Miliband—were calling States, caused by what he called “the tor and sponsor of slid) remained true. themselves the New Left. They were new international position of the United By this stage in his career, though, Mills more Marxist than Mills was, but they States”—that is, the Cold War. had no use for organized labor. Labor believed that culture and ideology had In “The Power Elite,” Mills argued leaders sat at the table with the rest of become as important as class in deter- that power was in the hands of three the power élite, he said, but they played mining the course of history. institutions: “the political directorate,” no real role in decision-making. Faith in Mills returned to the L.S.E. in 1959 “the corporate rich,” and the military. the revolutionary mission of the prole- to give three lectures entitled “Culture The power of the first group, the poli- tariat belonged to what he called the and Politics.” (“A huge, alarming Texan ticians, had waned relative to the power “labor metaphysic,” a Victorian relic. Mills has just been lecturing to the London of the two others, whom he called “cor- was not really interested in wealth and School of Economics,” the Observer re- porate chieftains” and “professional war- income inequality anyway. He was in- ported.) The following year, Mills wrote lords.” But the significant thing was that terested in power inequality. But he had an article for the British journal New the three groups did not have rival in- no candidate for a change agent. Left Review, which Thompson and Hall terests: they constituted a single homo- In the fall of 1956, Mills went to the had founded. “I have been studying, for geneous ruling class whose members, University of Copenhagen on a Ful- several years now, the cultural apparatus, virtually all white male Protestants, cir- bright, and travelled around Europe the intellectuals—as a possible, imme- culated from one institution to another. (sometimes on a BMW motorcycle that diate, radical agency of change,” he wrote. Dwight Eisenhower was in the mili- he bought in Munich and that became “For a long time, I was not much hap- tary élite, then became President and an iconic ingredient in his persona). In pier with this idea than were many of filled his Cabinet with corporate heads. 1957, he gave a talk at the London School you; but it turns out now, in the spring Mills never explained exactly what of Economics. That visit was his intro- of 1960, that it may be a very relevant the interests of the power élite were, or duction to the intellectual left in Brit- idea indeed.” Travelling abroad, he had just what their ideology was. But ide- ain, and he and his hosts hit it off. Mills come to believe that young intellectuals ology was not what engaged him. He had been disappointed by the reception were capable of enlightening and mobi- believed, as John Dewey believed, that of “The Power Elite” in the United lizing the public. The article was called democratic participation is an essential States; in Britain, he found people who “Letter to the New Left.” constituent of self-realization, whatever thought the way he did. “I was much Mills’s “Letter” was mocked by his decisions are collectively arrived at. Mills heartened by the way my kind of stuff Columbia colleague Daniel Bell, who concluded that American democracy in this sense was broken. “Ordinary men,” he wrote, “often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. . . . The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society who accord- ingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.” (Although Mills grew up in a Jim Crow state, “The Power Elite” has nothing to say about race relations.) The Port Huron Statement echoes Mills. It says that the Cold War had made the military the dominant power in what Hayden called (after Mills) “the triangular relations of the business, military, and political arenas.” Domestic needs, from housing and health care to minority rights, were all subordinated “to the primary objective of the ‘mili- “I turned the big pile of papers into three smaller piles of papers tary and economic strength of the Free we can go through the next time we clean the house.” called Mills “a kind of faculty adviser igan, that had been loaned to the group Southern segregationists, the Dixiecrats. to the ‘young angries’ and ‘would-be by the United Auto Workers. For the (That problem took care of itself in the angries’ of the Western world.” But the Port Huron Statement represents the 1964 Presidential election, when the South “Letter” was taken up by S.D.S., which American left’s farewell to the labor flipped from solid blue to solid red.) circulated copies among its members movement. The statement did end up But the statement begins and ends and reprinted it in a journal, Studies on containing a section supporting unions, with the university: the Left, launched by graduate students but that was added at the demand of at the University of Wisconsin. “He the students’ League for Industrial De- Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curricu- seemed to be speaking to us directly,” mocracy sponsors. Critical remarks about lums change more slowly than the living events Hayden wrote about the “Letter.” Mills the Soviet Union were added for the of the world; their skills and silence are pur- had “identified ourselves, the young and same reason. Yet those preoccupations— chased by investors in the arms race; passion the intellectuals, as the new vanguard.” the working class and Stalinism—were is called unscholastic. The questions we might This was a wishful misreading. Mills precisely what the students wanted to want raised—what is really important? Can we live in a different and better way? If we wanted did not have Americans in mind at all. be rid of. “Dead issues,” Casey Hayden to change society, how would we do it?—are He was responding to developments in called the concern about Communism. not thought to be questions of a “fruitful, em- Britain, in Eastern Bloc countries such “I didn’t know any communists, only pirical nature,” and thus are brushed aside. as Poland and Hungary, and in Latin their children, who were just part of our America. His next book, “Listen, Yan- gang.” The students did not think of The university has become a mech- kee,” was a defense of Castro’s revolu- themselves as pro-Communist. They anism of social reproduction. It “ ‘pre- tion. Those were the young intellectu- thought of themselves as anti-anti- pares’ the student for ‘citizenship’ through als he was referring to. Communist. To older left-wing intel- perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through Nevertheless, Hayden was inspired to lectuals, that amounted to the same emasculation of what creative spirit there compose his own “Letter to the New thing. Hence the New Left slogan “Don’t is in the individual. . . . That which is (Young) Left,” in which he complained trust anyone over thirty.” It meant “Don’t studied, the social reality, is ‘objectified’ about the “endless repressions of free trust an old socialist.” to sterility, dividing the student from speech and thought” on campus and “the life.” And academic research serves the stifling paternalism that infects the stu- he Port Huron convention began power élite. “Many social and physical dent’s whole perception of what is real Ton June 12, 1962, with fifty-nine reg- scientists,” the statement says, “neglect- and possible.” Students needed to orga- istered participants from S.D.S.’s eleven ing the liberating heritage of higher nize, he said. They could draw on “what chapters. (There were eventually more learning, develop ‘human relations’ or remains of the adult labor, academic and than three hundred. The military esca- ‘morale-producing’ techniques for the political communities,” but it was to be lation of the war in Vietnam, beginning corporate economy, while others exer- a student movement. “Young,” in Hayden’s in 1965, turbocharged the movement, cise their intellectual skills to accelerate “Letter,” meant “student.” particularly among male students, who the arms race.” These functions are all What was needed, Hayden said, was were subject to the draft.) Participatory masked by the academic ideology of dis- not a new political program. What was democracy—“democracy is in the interestedness. needed was a radical style. “Radicalism streets”—and authenticity were the core At the end of the statement, though, of style demands that we oppose delu- principles of Hayden’s forty-nine-page the university is reimagined as “a po- sions and be free,” he wrote. “It demands draft. In that spirit, the delegates de- tential base and agency in a movement that we change our life.” Not having a bated the entire document, section by of social change.” Academics can per- program meant keeping the future “up section. “The goal of man and society form the role that Mills accused Amer- for grabs.” This approach meant that should be human independence: a con- ican intellectuals of abandoning: en- direct actions, like campus sit-ins, un- cern not with image of popularity but lightening the public. For this to happen, dertaken for one cause (for example, with finding a meaning in life that is students and faculty, in alliance, “must abolishing R.O.T.C.) would find them- personally authentic,” the statement says. wrest control of the educational pro- selves being piggybacked by very dif- Since pure democracy and genuine au- cess from the administrative bureau- ferent causes (for example, stopping thenticity are conditions that can only cracy. . . . They must make debate and university expansion into Black neigh- be reached for, never fully achieved, this controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the borhoods, as happened at Columbia in was a formula for lifelong commitment. common style for educational life.” 1968 and Harvard in 1969). Demands It asked you to question everything. The Port Huron deliberations lasted kept multiplying. This was not because Still, the statement does not call for three days. They ended at dawn. Hayden events got out of the organizers’ con- revolution or even an end to capitalism. was elected president of S.D.S. (Haber trol. It was the way the New Left was Its politics are progressive: regulate pri- was happy to return to being an under- designed. Policies weren’t the problem. vate enterprise, shift spending from arms graduate), and the delegates walked to- The system was the problem. to domestic needs, expand democratic gether to the shore of Lake Huron, where Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the participation in the workplace and pub- they stood in silence, holding hands. “It S.D.S. convention at which Hayden’s lic policymaking, support decolonization was exalting,” one of them, Sharon Jef- statement was adopted was held at an movements, and advance civil rights by frey, said later. “We felt that we were educational camp in Port Huron, Mich- ridding the Democratic Party of its different, and that we were going to do

50 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 disinterestedness, which called for parti- san politics to be kept out of scholarship PRIVACY and the classroom. But there was a more pragmatic reason as well. U.C. adminis- On the black wet branches of the linden, trators were wary of the system’s Board still clinging to umber leaves of late fall, of Regents, many of whom were conser- two crows land. They say, “Stop,” and still I want vative businessmen. Joseph McCarthy to make them into something they are not. was dead, but HUAC, though increasingly Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes. What news zombie-like, lumbered on. So political are they bringing of our world to the world activity on campus was banned or tightly of the gods? It can’t be good. More suffering regulated—not only student organiza- all around, more stinging nettles and toxic tions, leafletting, and the like but also blades shoved into the scarred parts of us, outside political speakers. It wasn’t that the minor ones underneath the trees. Rain administrators did not want dissent. It comes while I’m still standing, a trickle of water was that they did not want trouble. from whatever we believe is beyond the sky. Until the fall semester in 1964, stu- The crows seem enormous but only because dents had been allowed to set up tables I am watching them too closely. They do not representing political causes on a twen- care to be seen as symbols. A shake of a wing, ty-six-foot strip of sidewalk just outside and both of them are gone. There was no message campus, on the corner of Telegraph Av- given, no message I was asked to give, only enue and Bancroft Way. One day, a their great absence and my sad privacy vice-chancellor, Alex C. Sherriffs, whose returning like the bracing, empty wind office was in Sproul Hall, the adminis- on the black wet branches of the linden. tration building that adjoined the area with the tables, decided that the specta- —Ada Limón cle was a bad look for the university. He conveyed his concern to his colleagues, and on September 16th the university things differently. We thought that we because he had heard about the student announced a ban on tables and political knew what had to be done, and that we protests against HUAC that had been activities on that stretch of sidewalk. were going to do it. It felt like the dawn broken up with fire hoses. His first cam- Representatives of student organiza- of a new age.” pus political activity was attending meet- tions, when their appeals proved unavail- ings of the University Friends of SNCC. ing, began picketing. On September 30th, om Hayden’s charisma was the cool He agitated for civil rights in the Bay in violation of the ban, organizations set Tkind. He was lucid and unflappa- Area, and in 1964 he went to Missis- up tables at Sather Gate, on the Berke- ble. Mario Savio’s charisma was hot. sippi to participate in Freedom Sum- ley campus. University officials took the Savio’s gifts were as a speaker, not as a mer. Soon after he returned to Berke- names of students who were staffing -ta negotiator. He channelled anger. Sav- ley, the Free Speech Movement began. bles and informed them they would be io’s politics, like Hayden’s, were a kind It seemed to erupt spontaneously. disciplined. Students responded by stag- of existentialist anti-politics. “I am not That was part of its appeal and part of ing a brief sit-in outside the dean’s office. a political person,” he said in 1965, a few its mystique: no one planned it, and no The next day, tables were set up again on months after becoming famous as the one ran it. It had no connection to S.D.S. campus and, at 11:45 a.m., university po- face of the Berkeley Free Speech Move- or any other national political group. lice arrested Jack Weinberg for trespassing. ment (F.S.M.), something most people The reason is that the F.S.M. was a pa- Weinberg was a former Berkeley would have called political. “What was rochial affair. It was not a war for so- mathematics student who had been so- it Kierkegaard said about free acts? cial justice. It was a war against the uni- liciting funds for the Congress of Racial They’re the ones that, looking back, you versity administration. Equality at the foot of the steps to Sproul realize you couldn’t help doing.” The fuse had been lit long before 1964. Hall. (He was also the person who coined Savio was born in New York City in The administration’s tensions with fac- the slogan about not trusting anyone over 1942. His parents were immigrants, and ulty dated to a controversy over loyalty thirty.) When he was arrested, he went Italian was his first language. When he oaths in 1949, which had led to the fir- limp, and officers placed him in a police learned English, he developed a fairly ing of thirty-one professors; its tensions car that had been driven into the mid- severe speech impediment, which may with students dated to the emergence of dle of Sproul Plaza. Students immedi- have helped make possible his later re- an activist organization that participated ately surrounded the car; eventually, there nown as the greatest orator of the Amer- in student-government elections in the were more than seven thousand people ican New Left, since he was forced to late fifties. in the plaza. Some of them climbed onto concentrate on his enunciation. The administration was hostile to po- the roof, with Weinberg still inside, to Savio entered Berkeley as a junior. litical activity on campus for two reasons. make speeches. That roof was where Savio The campus appealed to him in part The first had to do with the principle of made his oratorical début. Weinberg

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 51 how the problem might play out. “If federal grants for research brought a major revolution,” he wrote, “then the resul- tant student sense of neglect may bring a minor counterrevolt, although the target of the revolt is a most elusive one.” Unless, of course, the university gives the students the target. A ban on tables was such a target. The students involved in the Sproul Plaza “stand-in” didn’t trust Kerr. They suspected he would manipulate the pro- cesses he had agreed to so that the students could be disciplined and restrictions on political activity would remain. They probably were right: Kerr seems to have underestimated the strength of student support for the activists all along. So the activists continued to strategize, and, amid the action, they came up with a name for their movement. “The Free Speech Movement” was an inspired choice. The students didn’t really want free speech, or only free “Do I have to eat the cherry?” speech. They wanted institutional and social change. But they pursued a tactic aimed at co-opting the faculty. The •• faculty had good reasons for caution about associating themselves with con- remained sitting in that car until seven- institution could grow and become all troversial political positions. But free thirty the next evening. things to all people because it was inter- speech was what the United States stood While he was there, student leaders twined with the state. It operated as a for. It was the banner carried into the met with administrators, now led by the factory for the production of knowledge battles against McCarthyism and loy- president of the entire U.C. system, Clark and of future knowledge producers. In alty oaths. Free speech was a cause no Kerr, and negotiated an agreement for the nineteen-sixties, undergraduate en- liberal could in good conscience resist. handling Weinberg, the students who rollments doubled, but the number of Another way to gain faculty support had been disciplined for violating the doctoral degrees awarded tripled. These was to get the administration to call in ban on tables, and the students who were graduate students were the experts, Kerr the police. No faculty wants campus dis- preventing the police from moving the thought, that society needed. The pres- putes resolved by state force. At Berke- car. The agreement also revisited the rules ident of a modern university, he argued, ley, this was especially true for émigré for on-campus political activities. is therefore basically a mediator. professors, who knew what it was like to “Mediator” was a term Kerr later re- live in a police state. Astonishingly, the err was the perfect antagonist for gretted using, for it exposed exactly the administration walked right into the trap. KSavio, because Kerr had literally weakness that Hayden and Savio had The F.S.M. continued to hold ral- written the book on the postwar uni- identified in higher education: the ab- lies in Sproul Plaza, using the univer- versity: “The Uses of the University,” sence of values, the soullessness of the sity’s own sound equipment. And since published in 1963. “The Uses of the institution. Kerr was not unmindful of most students walked through the plaza University” basically transcribes three this grievance. The transformation of at some point, the rallies attracted large lectures Kerr gave at Harvard, in which the university had done undergradu- crowds. Tables reappeared on campus, he described the transformations in ates “little good,” he admitted. “The and the organizers were sometimes sum- higher education that led to what he students find themselves under a blan- moned for disciplinary action and some- called “the multiversity” or “the federal ket of impersonal rules for admissions, times not. On November 20th, three grant university.” The text became a for scholarships, for examinations, for thousand people marched from Sather bible for educators, revised and re- degrees. It is interesting to watch how Gate to University Hall, where a meet- printed five times. Savio called Kerr a faculty intent on few rules for itself ing of the regents was taking place. Five “the foremost ideologist of [the] ‘Brave can fashion such a plethora of them for F.S.M. representatives were let in but New World’ conception of education.” the students.” were not allowed to speak. By then, the As his book’s title suggests, Kerr’s view “Interesting to watch” is mediator F.S.M. had attracted members of the of the university was instrumental. The talk. Kerr even had a premonition of faculty and a range of students, from

52 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 the conservative Mona Hutchin, of the ple, the largest mass arrest in California lation. So does its support for the Hanoi Young Republicans, to the communist history. Protesters passively resisted; po- regime, which, after it finally united the revolutionary Bob Avakian. Free speech lice responded by throwing the men country, in 1975, turned Vietnam into a was a cause that united them all. down the stairs. It was not until 4 p.m. totalitarian state. But the New Left Then Kerr overplayed his hand. On that the last protester was removed. never had any political cards to play. It November 28th, disciplinary action was There was a meeting of more than was always a student movement. Today, announced against Savio and another eight hundred professors and instruc- the left has the progressive wing of the student, Arthur Goldberg, for the en- tors, and they voted by an overwhelm- Democratic Party to turn its ideals into trapment of the police car on October 1st, ing margin to support the students’ de- policy. There was no such wing in 1962. among other malfeasances. On Decem- mands. On January 2, 1965, the regents Still, the spirit of Port Huron and the ber 1st, the F.S.M. demanded that the announced the replacement of the F.S.M. was not forgotten. The students charges against Savio and Goldberg be school’s chancellor, and a liberal policy involved had experienced a feeling of per- dropped, that restrictions on political on political activity was unveiled the sonal liberation through group solidar- speech be abolished, and that the ad- next day, a clear signal of capitulation. ity, a largely illusory but genuinely mov- ministration refrain from further disci- Unrest at Berkeley was by no means at ing sense that the world was turning under plining students for political activity. If an end. The war in Vietnam would see their marching feet. That sense—the these demands were not met, the group to that. Nor were the repercussions over. sense that your words and actions mat- promised to take “direct action.” In 1967, Savio served four months in ter, that you matter—is what inspires peo- The demands were not met. A huge prison for his role in the Sproul Hall ple to take risks, and gives movements rally was held in Sproul Plaza the next sit-in. But Kerr had done what the for change their momentum. day, leading to the occupation of Sproul F.S.M. had hoped he would do: he had “What can I call it: the existential Hall by a thousand people. Before they radicalized the faculty. amazement of being at The Edge, where entered the building, Savio gave a speech, reality breaks open into the true Chaos recorded and broadcast by KPFA, in he movement that started in Port before it is reformed?” one of the F.S.M. Berkeley. He depicted the university as an THuron and Berkeley soon got sucked leaders, Michael Rossman, wrote ten industrial firm, with autocraticgovernance: into the political maelstrom of the late years later: sixties. In March, 1965, the United States I never found words to describe what is I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and began its immense bombing campaign if the Board of Regents are the board of di- still my most vivid feeling from the FSM . . . rectors; and if President Kerr in fact is the against North Vietnam, Operation Roll- the sense that the surface of reality had some- manager; then I’ll tell you something. The facing Thunder. That month, marines landed how fallen away altogether. Nothing was any ulty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the near Da Nang, the first American com- longer what it had seemed. Objects, encoun- raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw mate- bat troops in Vietnam. By 1968, there ters, events, all became mysterious, pregnant with unnamable implications, capable of as- rials that don’t mean to be—have any process would be more than half a million Amer- upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any prod- tounding metamorphosis. uct. Don’t mean . . . Don’t mean to end up ican soldiers there. In 1966, Stokely Car- being bought by some clients of the Univer- michael introduced the slogan “Black The music historian Greil Marcus sity, be they the government, be they indus- Power” and replaced John Lewis as the was a Berkeley undergraduate in 1964. try, be they organized labor, be they anyone! chairman of SNCC, which began turning He described the experience of rallies We’re human beings! and mass meetings this way: There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick Your own history was lying in pieces on at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even the ground, and you had the choice of picking passively take part! And you’ve got to put your up the pieces or passing them by. Nothing was bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels . . . trivial, nothing incidental. Everything con- upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and nected to a totality, and the totality was how you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to you wanted to live: as a subject or as an object indicate to the people who run it, to the peo- of history. . . . As the conversation expanded, ple who own it, that unless you’re free, the ma- institutional, historical power dissolved. Peo- chine will be prevented from working at all! ple did and said things that made their lives of a few weeks before seem unreal—they did The transformation of students at élite away white volunteers. The Black Pan- and said things that, not long after, would seem ever more so. universities into a new working class ther Party was founded the same year. (with an echo of Charlie Chaplin in The women’s movement and, after 1969, These reminiscences may seem ro- “Modern Times”) was complete. the gay-liberation movement, represent- mantic. They are romantic. But they ex- As Joan Baez sang “We Shall Over- ing subordinated groups that the New press the core premise of left-wing come” (a civil-rights anthem, but origi- Left had given little attention to, occu- thought, the core premise of Marx: nally a song of the labor movement), the pied center stage. Militancy took over, Things do not have to be the way they are. students proceeded to occupy the four liberals were driven away, and American The nation was at a crossroads in floors of Sproul Hall. Shortly after three politics descended into chaos. the nineteen-sixties. The system did o’clock the following morning, hundreds In retrospect, the New Left’s break not break, but it did bend. We are at of police officers stormed the building with the labor movement seems a di- another crossroads today. It can be made and arrested about eight hundred peo- sastrous, maybe an arrogant, miscalcu- to bend again. 

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 53 FICTION

54 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY HAYLEY WALL ou love someone. Someone loves up and grab the white bottle, then hide the high honor of being called a wife. you not. What to do, besides it in your underclothes as you rush to You want me to explain why no man Y find someone else to love, which, your hut. Keep it in a safe place—if you had yet chosen Wonja to be his wife? by the way, is not easy? Ah, my dear can, sleep with it under your blanket. So, my description of her physical de- young friend, I’m so glad you came to Then, on a full-moon night, pour a few ficiencies does not suffice, eh? I applaud me for advice. A quagmire of this na- drops into the food of the one whose you for your cynicism—you’re right. ture requires the wisest of minds to re- love you are seeking and poof! The Despite all the jokes we made about solve; clearly, you recognize who the next morning you will be so drenched Wonja being as pretty as a sun-dried most sagacious man in this part of the in adoration, so enfolded in bliss and cornstalk, her looks clearly weren’t the country is. gratification, you will ask yourself what sole reason for her suffering. Love is a As you know, there are a million and you’ve ever done in this life to deserve funny thing, you know. For many peo- three solutions to this problem, virtu- such loving. ple, it’s like a tree. There are trees all ally none of which have a great success I’m looking at your face now, and around you. You can choose whichever rate. I imagine you tried at least twenty- you seem incredulous. one you fancy, sit in its shade, enjoy its eight of them before coming to see me You want to know what might hap- fruits. But for certain people, like my today, am I correct? No? You tried only pen if the love potion doesn’t work? friend Wonja, love is more like a rain- four? It doesn’t matter. You’re here and Ha, funny you should ask. Well, the bow. The circumstances have to be per- I have the best advice for you. thing is, love potions usually work. But fect for it to appear. And if it appears Love potions. when they don’t, strange things can hap- while you’re napping, or you’re out of Have you ever heard of them? Oh, pen. Crazy, bad, strange things. the village visiting a cousin, you may what a terrible shame—you’re in the Let me present my friend Wonja as never see it again, and then you’ll be dark about one of mankind’s greatest Exhibit W of what can happen when forced to spend the rest of your life chas- inventions. Let me enlighten you. a love potion goes wrong. ing rainbows. No, I’ve never personally used them Folks who don’t have my level of in- (never needed to, thank you very much). onja wasn’t a great beauty. What- telligence will try to convince you that But I know that every fetish priest in Wever. How many women are great Wonja’s lack of comeliness was her de- every village sells them. The potions beauties? Though, to be honest, to say mise. It wasn’t. I don’t have enough fin- are made according to a recipe passed she wasn’t a great beauty is one stinky gers and toes to count all the women down from an unidentified ancestor, heap of an understatement: her hus- I’ve known in my life who had one de- with a list of ingredients that we mere band, Bulu, actually laughed out loud ficiency or another and still found hus- mortals are not allowed to know. The when his parents first suggested her as bands. Just last month, Timbi, who has fetish priests all store their potions in a wife. “Me, marry that ugly thing?” he teeth like shards of broken rocks, moved similar-looking white bottles, and said. “Why don’t you just wed me to a into the home of her new husband. And charge the same ludicrous fee to those bamboo pole?” Ifinda, who is more muscular than three who come to buy them—a goat, a pig, And who could blame him for say- hunters combined, has been married and three hens. But who has that kind ing that? With her thin legs and flat and happy for ten years, though, if you of wealth to spare for the sake of love? belly, small buttocks and pointy cheek- ask me, her marriage has lasted this long Do you? I didn’t think so. That is why bones, Wonja was not pretty enough to because her husband looks at those mus- I’m going to give you invaluable direc- make any man proud, certainly not a cular arms and says to himself, “I’d bet- tions on how to obtain a love potion man like her husband, who had the fin- ter treat this woman right, or else she’ll for free and get yourself a romance that est mango-shaped head our village had beat all the food she just fed me right will leave your face brighter than the ever seen. “I’ll find a wife for myself out of my belly.” morning sun. when I’m ready,” he insisted to his par- And, speaking of food, I just remem- This is what you need to do: as soon ents, who apparently didn’t care about bered how much Wonja loved food when as an opportune moment presents it- his opinion, because two months later we were children. I still recall all the self, you must sneak into the hut of the he woke up to find them at his door, times I passed in front of her house as fetish priest in your village while the with Wonja standing between them. she sat on the veranda, destroying a fetish priest is out administering a rit- “We’ve paid the bride-price,” they bowl of pounded yams and soup. Thin ual. But make sure you do this only after said as they hurried away. as she was back then, everyone was cer- the sun has gone down and before the “But Mama, Papa ...” he cried. tain she’d grow up to be nice and round. moon has revealed itself. You want to Wonja remained on his doorstep, smil- But, for some unknown reason, she just have enough darkness to conceal you ing like someone who had stumbled into wouldn’t get fat. but not so much darkness that the evil a dream in which an everlasting banquet One after another, her friends were spirits that roam the village at night can had been prepared for her. And why plucked from their parents’ huts as soon see you; trust me, you don’t want to wouldn’t she be happy? No man had ever as their bodies had fully ripened. By the know what horror will befall you if they knocked on her parents’ door asking to time Wonja was nineteen, there were catch you stealing. marry her. No one had even given her only three girls of her age in the entire So, as for the stealing business: when a chance to prove herself worthy of a village who hadn’t yet found a husband. you enter the fetish priest’s hut, hurry husband, and now here she was, with One of them was completely to blame

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 55 borers’ camp; how he really did love her—he was just shy and didn’t know how to approach her. We looked at one another in disbe- lief. Was that even a thing, that a man could be too shy to tell a woman he was interested in her? It was all too dubious even for the most gullible of us. It seemed more likely that, in her desperation, she had seen an interest that wasn’t there. We didn’t want to hurt her, so we told her that we hoped the man would soon get over his shyness and come to see her parents. That man never did, but other men came—for Wonja’s three sisters. The day the last of her sisters got married, Wonja could not hold it in anymore. Surveying all the guests gathered in her family’s compound to dance and fête her youngest sister and her new husband, Wonja burst into tears. Two of her aunts had to rush her into the hut so she would not disrupt the wedding and bring disgrace to her family with her cries of “Why couldn’t this happen to me, too? Am I the worst thing ever to walk the earth?” “If our posts make even one person feel left She wasn’t. She had her share of at- out, then this party is worth it.” tributes. She was a good cook, with a lovely singing voice and a melodious laugh. She wasn’t afraid of hard work— •• Wonja could go to the farm and work through thunderstorms and lightning, for her misfortune: this girl was an only my wife singing a happy song to her- return home, and cook dinner for her child and thought she deserved the moon self as she cooked in the kitchen. She family, all without a single complaint. and the stars, because her mother, who had no reason to fear that Wonja would When her father became too old to was also an only child, had doted on her try to steal me; none of the young wives climb to the roof and patch a hole, she and made her believe that few men in in the village felt threatened by Wonja. got on a ladder and did it. If there was the world were worthy of her. With her Some evenings, we’d be joined by anyone in the village in need of assis- nose in the air, the girl turned down a other friends, both male and female, ev- tance, she was there to help. Young men farmer because his farm was too far out eryone married with children, some seeking trophies with fleshy bottoms in the forest and she didn’t want to have complaining about one spousal head- may have ignored these qualities, but to wait so long every day for her hus- ache or another, and Wonja’s eyes would Bulu’s parents, after years of observing band to trek home with food. She turned fill with tears. If only she had someone Wonja, knew that their son could find down a fisherman from a neighboring to have a marital squabble with! no better wife. village because, she said, he smelled like Wonja did come close to true love Every year after Wonja turned fish. O.K., help me understand this one: once, when we were twenty-four. twenty-five, her parents had lowered the man spends his days with fish— In the dry season of that year, she their standards. First, they told every- what does she expect him to smell like? and her mother had travelled to a town one that they were willing to give her Honey and sunflowers? on the other side of the country, to visit away to any man who was able to pay Oh, the hearts of women. If only my Wonja’s brother, who was working at a the minimum bride-price. Then they friend Wonja had such a problem. banana plantation. When she returned said they’d take half of the minimum from that visit, Wonja couldn’t stop bride-price. Finally, they flung their remember evenings I spent chatting talking about a young man she’d met, hands in the air and said they’d give her I with Wonja, when we were both in her brother’s fellow-laborer. She regaled away for eighty per cent off the mini- our mid-twenties, dissecting the in- us with stories of this man: how he had mum price, and they wouldn’t require tricacies of our days. While Wonja sat smiled at her in a special way every time the groom’s family to pay for any sort with me on the veranda, I could hear they encountered each other in the la- of wedding. Like prudent parents the

56 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 world over, they had to do whatever was laundered and ironed his clothes, and of a woman’s nakedness, that he had necessary to get their daughter out of cooked him a lavish dinner? used his former beloved as a ruse to their hut before her womb shrivelled He glared at her sitting in the par- conceal his weakness, but the theory up and became useless. lor, said not a word, and went to bed. never caught fire, because none of us When Bulu’s parents came to see Weeks later, when I asked Wonja if believed that there was a man on Earth them to discuss taking Wonja off their the account was true, she did not deny who did not fantasize about undress- hands—after doing their own share of it. Nor did she contradict a story an- ing a woman several times a day. waiting for Bulu to find a wife—Won- other friend told me. According to this Bulu’s parents suggested to him ja’s parents cried for joy. “Our shame friend, Wonja, seeing that Bulu wouldn’t woman after woman. He shook his head has been taken away,” they sang for take the initiative to touch her, had gone at all of them. Frustrated, his parents weeks after the bride-price had been to bed naked one night while he was decided to stage a thing we called “cag- settled. The entire village joined them out with his friends. She was hoping ing” back in the day. That is when the in celebrating, for none of us wanted to that, when he returned and got into bed parents of an avowed bachelor go to endure for one more day the sight of a next to a naked body, he would have no neighboring villages and invite the love- woman growing old in her parents’ hut. choice but to do what a man is wont to liest marriageable young women to their do in such a situation. But when he ar- hut, where they hide them in a bed- week after Wonja moved into Bulu’s rived and slipped into bed next to her room off the parlor. Then they invite A hut, I saw her as she was walking he immediately jumped up and barked their son over for lunch. After their son to the well to fetch water. “Eh, Wonja,” at her to put on her nightclothes. has eaten and is relaxed and in a pleas- I said to her, excited. “Tell me every- Wonja personally confirmed to me ant mood, without prelude they open thing about the life of a happily mar- that she had gone to her parents for the door to the bedroom. Out come the ried woman.” Tears immediately filled help, but they had merely asked her to young women, fancily dressed, their her eyes. In that moment, I cursed my be strong, to take it as a woman, be- faces prettily painted, their hair coiffed. fat mouth and wished it had come with cause who knew what the next day might They line up in front of the bachelor, a lid. “Oh, Wonja,” I said. “My marriage bring? Bulu’s parents, when Wonja went and the parents announce that the young also makes me want to cry sometimes, to them, said the same thing. They knew, man will not be leaving the hut until but what can one do?” My attempt to as did everyone else in our village, that he picks one of the women as his wife. make her laugh only made her sadder Bulu, in addition to being uninterested For Bulu’s caging, his parents had and she hurried on her way. in Wonja’s scant physical offering, was found seven young women. Everyone That was all it took for me to real- struggling to evict from his heart a knew what a great farmer he was, and ize that, while we were celebrating her woman he had once loved, a woman the young women knew that to marry marriage, Wonja was spending her days with a perfect gap tooth who lived in a great farmer was to never go to bed in misery. the next village. This woman had loved with a growling stomach, and what could There was only one possible reason him, too, but their love for each other be more important in life? So there they for this: Bulu could not, would not, had been irrelevant to her parents. When all stood in front of Bulu, flashing smiles love her. it had come time to decide who would that said, Pick me, oh, please pick me! News began circling the village about marry their daughter, they’d chosen a Bulu’s mother later told her friends that, all that Wonja was doing to make Bulu for what seemed like a whole hour, Bulu love her. One of our friends told me just sat there, staring past the women that, on the day that Wonja arrived in into space. It was as if they were chil- Bulu’s hut—after he had stormed away dren playing a game of dress-up for his in anger at his parents’ dumping Wonja entertainment and he couldn’t be both- on him—she immediately went to work, ered. When he finally opened his mouth, opening the windows to air out the it was to tell the women that he was so space, dusting the furniture, sweeping, sorry his parents had wasted their time, laundering his clothes, ironing them. and that he hoped they would all have She then cooked four different meals a safe trip back to their villages. He for him, and put them in the pretty wealthy hunter, a man who’d promised stood up after saying this and walked bowls with which her mother had sent to bring them fresh bushmeat three out of the hut. As far as I know, he is her off to her marital home; wise woman times a month. What parents could re- the only man in our area who has ever, that her mother was, she knew that a sist trading their daughter for that? as we used to say, broken the cage. meal was only as good as the bowl in After his beloved married another Yes, Bulu’s heart was that closed which it was placed, and Wonja, with man, Bulu’s heart had closed up. No to love. her limited assets, would need all the one understood such stupidity, that a pretty bowls in the world. man would turn into pulp just because ne evening, a year after Bulu had And what did Bulu do when he re- he’d lost a woman. His friends poked Omarried Wonja, my friend Kotso, turned home that night? What do you fun at him for his inability to patch his who is also friends with Wonja, arrived think he said to his new wife, when he fractured heart. An old gossip in the for a visit as my wife was setting the saw that she had cleaned his house, village started a rumor that he was afraid table for my dinner. Kotso is the kind

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 57 of man who has to taste every meal his tive headache; whenever we saw her, it But if she refused to heed our counsel eyes stumble upon. Most respectable took all our force to not let her forlorn she might very well spend the rest of men, when they walk into your hut as face drain us of our bliss. We couldn’t her life regretting that decision, and she you’re about to have dinner, will wish let her just lumber through the rest of wouldn’t want that, would she? you a happy eating and promise to re- her life. She shook her head. turn in an hour or so, after the food has We did not wish that she had never She knew that she had no choice but settled in your belly. Not Kotso. It’s no- married Bulu. We did not wish that to go and see a fetish priest and seek body’s fault that his wife is a terrible she was still in her parents’ house, pray- out an antidote. cook, but, being a man of great kind- ing that a man, any man, would come Eight days later, one of our friends ness, I had to let him partake in my for her before certain body parts began went with her to see a fetish priest three meal. Otherwise I was doomed to spend to lose their firmness and wrinkles villages away. The man had come highly the entirety of my dinner with two bulg- overwhelmed her face. We merely recommended because his potions were ing eyes trained on every piece of food wished her a measure of satisfaction. so powerful that an impotence remedy that slid down my throat. And we all agreed that that satisfac- he once made for a client had caused It was while we were eating my tion would come only if Bulu was free the client’s wife to have three sets of wife’s celebrated corn fufu and okra to love her. By the time of the meet- twins in four years. stew with pig feet that Kotso told me ing, there was no doubt in any of our The fetish priest listened to all that he had finally figured out what was minds that Bulu’s former beloved had Wonja had to say about Bulu, nodding going on with Bulu: his former beloved given him a love potion. We could find in understanding at her pain and dis- must have given him a love potion as no other explanation for the prison in appointment. When Wonja was done a way of insuring that their love would which he was living. Wonja would have talking, he told her how sorry he was flow eternally. Thanks to the potion, to set him free. for her suffering, but he cautioned her his heart could never now belong to The next day, on a similarly cool against using an antidote to destroy the another woman. evening, we met again in the village power of the love potion, if indeed there I will confess that I had also thought square. was a love potion. this might be the case, but some things This time we invited Wonja to join He said that if the antidote was ad- that you think—it’s best not to say us. I spoke for the group. I told her that ministered improperly, say on a night them out loud, though it is wonderful there could be no rationalization for when the moon appeared full but wasn’t to hear someone else say them. Which Bulu’s behavior except that he was in really full, madness might ensue. The was why, the evening Kotso said this thrall to a love potion. She could ac- best thing to do now, the priest told her, to me, I immediately told him that we cept him as he was, I said, but the whole was to wait and hope that, in due time, needed to go to Wonja and tell her idea of a marriage was to alter the other her husband would excrete the love po- about our suspicion. person, to make your spouse better for tion in his system. Kotso did not think it would be wise your own good. The rest of our friends But how long could the woman wait? to go directly to Wonja and cause her nodded as I said this—we’d all spent Some say that love potions can stay in further pain with an unfounded theory. considerable lengths of time molding a body for years, decades even, and, in He thought it would be best if we got our wives and husbands into people a few cases, for a lifetime. a group of our friends together to dis- Wonja agonized. cuss her situation and see what we could “I can’t do it,” she said, when I pressed do for her. We had to recognize, just as her to get the opinion of another fetish our parents and their parents before priest. She argued that it was all too them had, that the best solution to a risky. “So, you want to spend the rest of problem was often found when many your life loveless,” I said. She sighed minds came together. deeply. Fifteen months into her mar- So, on a cool evening, several of us riage and she had scored no victory. who were born in the same year as So she went to see another fetish Wonja met in the village square to talk priest—a fast-talking one four villages about our friend, whose parents were who would bring us the utmost amount away. This time she went alone, not unable to help her, and whose sisters of happiness and cause us the least wanting to be influenced by us. had all married and moved out of the amount of pain. I don’t have the full story of what village, leaving her to care for her par- I told Wonja that she needed to go happened with this new fetish priest, ents while trying to ingratiate her way and see a fetish priest to make an anti- but we later found out that the man into the heart of a man who barely no- dote for the love potion. I assured her gave her a love potion, not an antidote. ticed her. Those of us gathered that eve- that one of us would accompany her. Worse still, he forgot to remind her that ning had crawled with Wonja, and tod- From our barnyards, we would give her the potion should be administered only dled with her, and walked with her, and the animals she would need to offer to on a night when the moon was abso- danced naked under the rain with her. the fetish priest. I told her that we would lutely full. Which was why, in her ea- Her marriage had brought us joy, and understand if she refused to follow our gerness, on a night when the moon now her marital woes were our collec- advice, the endeavor not being risk-free. merely appeared full, Wonja put three

58 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 drops of the potion into Bulu’s dinner of smoked-bushmeat stew. What do you think happened to her the next day? Madness. Of course. First, she started walking around the village talking to herself. Then, one morning, we found her sleeping under the mango tree. Before long, she had permanently moved out of Bulu’s hut and made the shade of the mango tree her new home. I’ll spare you the details of what she looks like today. Suffice it to say, she now spends her days walking around the village singing, mournfully, “All I wanted was love, all I ever wanted was to know how it feels to be loved.” She sings it softly, she sings it loud, she dances alone. My poor, poor friend. Some days I avoid passing by the mango tree so that I don’t have to see her. It just ... my heart cannot bear the sight. “I meant I was open metaphorically, to new ideas and experiences.” ell, I hope you don’t blame me •• Wfor telling you this story. You asked for it. We could have ended the conversation with how to procure a love their verandas in the evening and a good life. I had to sit there and listen potion, but you wanted to know the watching their children play as the light with my tongue held down firmly be- worst that could happen, and now you starts to fade. You look at such couples tween my teeth, because few people know it. and you think, Oh, how lucky for know what I know, that everything But take heart, my dear friend. What them—they found the right person Mama Gita has today she got because happened to Wonja was an absolute and everything fell into place beauti- of a love potion. anomaly. fully and now they’re enjoying matri- Oh, you’re shocked to hear that. Do you think I would be giving you mony. Rubbish. Unqualified rubbish. Well, hold yourself tight, because by this advice if I thought you’d become Love comes at a cost to everyone— the time I’m done telling you this story insane? I’d never do such a thing to don’t ever forget that. you won’t know what to think of that you. Love potions are the only known Yes, there are the lovers for whom sweet old woman anymore. panacea for desiring hearts, and bro- fate conspired to bring bliss, but more ken hearts, and all kinds of hearts in married people than you can imagine t happened when I was a child. It was need of healing. If I’m telling you to had to steal and lie and claw their way Isuch a big story in your village and go and steal a love potion from your to undying love. the surrounding villages that it was all village fetish priest, if I’m asking you Do you know Mama Gita, who lives people talked about new moon after to risk being caught and given forty near the well in your village? Of course new moon. lashes of the koboko on your bare but- you know her, you’re friends with some When Gita was about eighteen, she tocks by your village head in your vil- of her grandchildren. I saw you at the and her cousin Titi went to a wedding. lage square, with the entire village funeral of Mama Gita’s husband, Papa Weddings in those days were quite like watching as you cry out for your mama Ikolo, last month. I was sitting with a they are today—everyone who has any and your papa and all your ancestors friend who wouldn’t stop talking about blood relation or acquaintance with any to come to your rescue, it’s because I what an exemplary woman Mama Gita member of the bride’s or the groom’s know, I am wholly convinced, that a was—how she had given her husband extended family attends, some because love potion is the best solution. eight children and thirty grandchildren, they care about the bride or the groom, Young people today—you don’t what a wonderful marriage she and but many because they can’t turn down know very much, sadly. Papa Ikolo had had, how Papa Ikolo an opportunity to eat a lot and drink a You walk around and you see mar- must truly be resting in peace now be- lot and dance all night under the stars. ried people happy together, sitting on cause Mama Gita had given him such And, of course, is there a better place

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 59 for young women to display their wares jumped in between them. “You mean which Gita had gone to steal from her and compete for the attention of young my name,” she said to the man, batting cousin a man she believed was right- men in search of wives? her eyelashes, as if a man ever chose one fully hers. Some said that she once So Gita and her cousin, best friends woman over another because of the trekked to the man’s farm, deep in the that they were, sat with the multitude speed with which she could blink. The forest, and offered to help him weed at the compound of the bride’s family, man shook his head. “No, I mean this around his yams and pumpkins, but he cheering and clapping when the two lovely lady right here,” he said, gestur- merely smiled and told her no, thanks, families came to an agreement on the ing to Titi. All Gita could do was pray he would rather do it alone. Others bride-price. The cousins stood up and that her cousin would ignore the man, said that she tried to break up her cous- danced with the other guests when the or say something typical of girls who in’s relationship by telling Titi that her bride was ushered out of her hut and like to play games, something like “What beloved had at least two other women presented to the groom, who lifted her do you want to know my name for?” he was planning to marry. There was veil and promised to take her back But Titi didn’t—how many girls would even a story about how Gita once stayed to his hut and do all that he could to do such a thing to a young man whose in bed for two days with a high fever, protect her. arms and legs were as thick as the a case of lovesickness—but many dis- As Gita and her cousin were danc- branches of an iroko tree? puted that rumor, saying that she was ing in celebration, raising up dust with Titi giggled and said her name, and indeed sick. their feet as the drummers banged the next day the young man was vis- What no one disputed was that, as harder and the choir sang louder, a iting her in her village. He was there Titi’s wedding date approached, Gita, fine-looking young man watched them the day after, too, and the day after sensing that she had lost her battle, in amusement. Through the merry that. Each time, Gita watched from became the loving and supportive crowd, Gita saw the man walking to- the other side of the family compound cousin and best friend she’d once been. ward her and her heart stopped. He was as her cousin basked under the ador- Five weeks before the wedding date, smiling with bright eyes, his whitish ing gaze of a man who would have she went with Titi to the dressmaker teeth exposed, as he neared her. The been hers if he hadn’t, for whatever and giggled with her cousin about the man kept beaming as he walked right senseless reason, walked up to the wondrous day ahead: the chickens and past her, to her cousin Titi. wrong cousin. goats and pigs that the menfolk would Titi’s back was turned to the stranger, Even when I was a teen-ager, women slaughter on the eve of the wedding; so you can imagine her delightful shock peeling peanuts and gossiping on ve- the womenfolk who would gather in when he appeared in front of her and randas were still concocting and em- the compound before sunrise to sing asked her what her name was. Gita bellishing stories about the lengths to and dance as they prepared goat stew and fried ripe plantains and grilled pork shoulders; all the choirs that would be hired to sing, one after the other, until the celebrants could dance no more; and all the happiness that awaited Titi on the other side of her wedding day. Except that Titi would have no wedding day. Nine days before the highly antic- ipated date, Ikolo’s parents went to Titi’s parents to say that they didn’t know how to explain it—this was as difficult for them as it would be for Titi and her family—but there was nothing they could do about it: Ikolo wanted to call off the wedding. He no longer believed that Titi was the right woman for him. How Titi cried. She and Gita went to Ikolo’s village and Titi flung herself at Ikolo, asking him to look into her eyes and tell her what she had done wrong. A crowd gathered around as Ikolo repeated over and over again that he was sorry, truly sorry, but he couldn’t marry a woman he no longer loved. Why did he no longer love her? Titi wanted to know. Ikolo Gita convinced herself she had to rec- potion was in Ikolo’s body stayed put. couldn’t say. “Open your mouth and tell tify for the good of all involved. Soon everyone forgot about what Gita her the truth,” many women in the The chatter about Gita’s visit to a had done to Titi, who married some- crowd shouted at Ikolo, women who fetish priest did not abate after the one else and didn’t utter a good or a bad clearly had also been wronged by men wedding. word about her cousin for the rest of and perhaps hoped that Ikolo’s answer No one knew whom she had gone her life. People forgot that a love po- would be a balm for the multiple scars to, but you would have been a fool to tion was the foundation of the happi- that remained in their hearts. Even Iko- argue that a fetish priest wasn’t involved ness that flowed from Gita and Ikolo’s lo’s parents joined the crowd to exhort in the drama. A man with his senses hut because, love potion or not, humans their son to tell Titi the reason for his unimpaired does not decide to end his are drawn to happiness, and they all change of heart. Sensible parents, they engagement for no good reason and wanted a piece of Gita and Ikolo’s joy. hoped that, if they couldn’t get a re- then marry another woman in a mat- So it was that Gita and Ikolo be- sponse from their son, then a bit of pub- ter of months. A clearheaded man does came the most popular couple in the lic shaming might do the trick. not give up his hut and move to his village, folks stopping by at all hours to It didn’t work. wife’s village, which was what Ikolo did chat and laugh in the home that a love Titi went back to her village crying, the week after his wedding to Gita. His potion had built. her cousin’s arms wrapped around her entire family had tried to stop him from You saw it for yourself, didn’t you? in comfort. doing that, reminding him that a man Even after having eight children and So how is it that a mere four months marries a woman and not vice versa, multitudes of grandchildren, even after later Ikolo’s parents showed up at Gi- meaning that Gita was the one who their backs were hunched and their teeth ta’s parents’ hut to say that Ikolo wanted needed to leave her village, but Ikolo all gone, Gita and Ikolo still held hands to marry Gita? would not listen to reason. as they sat on their veranda, surrounded Oh, the pain that Gita caused her Once he and Gita had moved into by their happy clan. extended family for the sake of a man. a hut that had been left behind by a de- It hasn’t healed to this day. Titi’s fa- ceased relative on Gita’s mother’s side o, if I’m advising you to do some- ther died without ever again speaking of the family, reports began surfacing Sthing uncommon, my dear friend, to his brother, Gita’s father. He couldn’t about how Ikolo could be seen every it’s because I want you to know such understand why his brother would let morning sweeping the hut, an abomi- uncommon bliss. I’ll say it again—there Ikolo into the family after he had dis- nation if ever there was one. Apparently, are many who have found their beloveds graced the entire extended family by the potion that Gita had given him was without the help of love potions, and I dumping Titi for no reason. so strong that Ikolo laundered Gita’s am one of those, but you don’t have the But what was Gita’s father to do? clothes for her, and ironed them, and skills I have, because if you did, would He had five daughters to marry off; he even stayed in the kitchen with her to you now find yourself in this position couldn’t be too choosy about their po- help her as she prepared their dinner. of unrequited love? tential husbands, lest he wake up one He’d evidently lost such a huge chunk Yes, I’m as exasperated as you are by day and find himself with a household of his brain that he was unable to just this game of love. of husbandless women. relax on his veranda in the evenings, Happy as I am in my own home, I Few people attended Gita’s wedding like any respectable man, enjoying a cup still go to bed some nights thinking to Ikolo. of palm wine while his wife did what about Wonja. I wonder if we were wrong I was there with my mother, because wives ought to do. to have steered her toward taking ac- my mother was one of those people Everyone hoped that Ikolo would tion to win Bulu’s heart. But what else who could never turn down a chance be free from Gita’s chains by the time could she have done? How else could to party, even if the occasion to do so the next rainy season came. But the she have found love? She could have was one of the most dishonorable in rains came and went, bringing along a given Bulu the moon and the stars and recent history. I recall how much food healthy firstborn child and leaving their he still wouldn’t have loved her. And to was left over. marriage intact. Wherever one turned think that, less than three months after Even before the wedding, rumors in the village, there they were—smil- she went mad, Bulu was healed and had begun circulating about how Gita ing and delighting in each other as much promptly found himself a new wife, a had paid a visit to a fetish priest. I was as they had on the day of their sparsely woman who was nowhere near as won- ten years old when this happened and attended wedding. Many evenings, after derful as Wonja. I still remember asking myself why Gita dinner, passersby could see them sit- Now they happily prance around the was so determined to steal a man from ting on their veranda, often holding village with their children, while Wonja her cousin, a cousin with whom she had hands, or Ikolo minding the baby, doing wanders with matted hair and raggedy crawled, learned how to walk, and it so casually that it seemed the most clothes, singing, “All I wanted was love, laughed and cried. I cannot tell you why. ordinary thing that had ever happened all I ever wanted was to know how it All I can suppose is that Gita truly be- under the sun. feels to be loved.”  lieved that Ikolo had made the worst A second child arrived for them, and mistake of his life the day he walked happily they carried on. NEWYORKER.COM past her and up to Titi. A mistake that Years came and went; whatever love Imbolo Mbue on sexism and love potions.

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 61 THE CRITICS

BOOKS ORIGINAL SINNER Graham Greene’s dark heart.

BY JOAN ACOCELLA

he first thing I remember is intelligence operation. As was usual “ sitting in a pram at the top with prosperous people of that period, T of a hill with a dead dog lying the children were raised by servants, at my feet.” So opens an early chapter but they were brought downstairs to of a memoir by Graham Greene, who play with their mother every day for is viewed by some—including Richard an hour after tea. Greene (no relation), the author of a The family lived in Berkhamsted, a new biography of Graham, “The Un- small, pleasant satellite town of Lon- quiet Englishman” (Norton)—as one don. It had a respectable boys’ school, of the most important British novel- of which Greene’s father was the head- ists of his already extraordinary gener- master. Greene was sent there at age ation. (It included George Orwell, Ev- seven, and thanks to his position as the elyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth director’s son he was relentlessly perse- Bowen.) The dog, Graham’s sister’s cuted by his classmates. They then sus- pug, had just been run over, and the pected him of telling on them to his fa- nanny couldn’t think of how to get the ther and therefore, it seems, went after carcass home other than to stow it in him harder. the carriage with the baby. If that doesn’t As an adolescent, he began attempt- suffice to set the tone for the rather ing suicide—or seeming to—always lurid events of Greene’s life, one need with almost comic ineptness. Once, ac- only turn the page, to find him, at five cording to his mother, he tried to kill or so, watching a man run into a local himself by ingesting eye drops. He also almshouse to slit his own throat. appears to have experimented, at dif- Around that time, Greene taught him- ferent times, with allergy drops, deadly self to read, and he always remembered nightshade, and fistfuls of aspirin. Most the cover illustration of the first book often remarked on was his fondness for to which he gained admission. It Russian roulette, although his brother showed, he said, “a boy, bound and Raymond, whose gun he borrowed on gagged, dangling at the end of a rope these occasions, said there were no bul- inside a well with water rising above lets in the cabinet where the weapon his waist.” was kept. Greene must have been shoot- Greene was born in 1904, the fourth ing with empty chambers. of six children. His family was com- When he was in high school, his fortable and, by and large, accom- parents sent him to his first psycho- plished. An older brother, Raymond, therapist. Others followed. Eventually, grew up to be an important endocri- he was declared to be suffering from nologist; a younger brother, Hugh, be- manic depression, or bipolar disorder, came the director-general of the BBC; as it is now called, and the diagnosis the youngest child, Elisabeth, went to stuck. But the scientific-sounding label work for M.I.6, England’s foreign- makes it easy to overlook other factors THE IRVING PENN FOUNDATION; ABOVE: TAMARA SHOPSIN TAMARA ABOVE: PENN FOUNDATION; THE IRVING

62 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY IRVING PENN THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 63 that might have been at work. Greene ing protracted, passionate affairs, plus, ture. In time, she became a great expert once recalled to his friend Evelyn Waugh tucked into those main events, shorter on doll houses, and established a pri- that, at university (Balliol College, Ox- adventures, not to mention many after- vate museum for her collection. ford), he had spent much of his time noons with prostitutes. Richard Greene, in a “general haze of drink.” In his writ- despite his objections to biographical hat Greene wanted to do with ing years, he often lived on a regimen prurience, does give us some piquant Whis life was write novels, and, of Benzedrine in the morning, to wake details. Of Graham and one of his mis- after a rocky start, he turned them out himself up, and Nembutal at night, to tresses, he writes, “This relationship was regularly, at least twenty-four (depend- put himself to sleep, supplemented with reckless and exuberant, involving on one ing on how you count them) in six de- great vats of alcohol and, depending on occasion intercourse in the first-class cades. He also did a fantastic amount what country he was in, other drugs as carriage of a train from Southend, ob- of journalism, mostly for The Spectator. well. On his many trips to Vietnam, he servable to those on each platform where Richard Greene estimates that, in time, smoked opium almost daily—some- the train stopped.” Graham wrote about five hundred book times as many as eight pipes a day. Meanwhile, when Greene felt he had reviews and six hundred movie reviews. That’s a lot. to explain such matters to his wife, he One of the latter created his first little The essential point about the manic- summoned his bipolar disorder. As he scandal. Of Twentieth Century Fox’s depressive diagnosis, however, is that wrote to her: “Wee Willie Winkie” (1937), starring Greene accepted it—indeed, saw it as The fact that has to be faced, dear, is that Shirley Temple, he said that Temple, key to his personality and his work. by my nature, my selfishness, even in some de- with her high-on-the-thigh dresses and Richard Greene writes that his biogra- gree my profession, I should always, & with “well-developed rump,” was basically phy is intended, in part, as a corrective anyone, have been a bad husband. I think, you being pimped out by Fox to lonely see, my restlessness, moods, melancholia, even to prior biographers’ excessive interest my outside relationships, are symptoms of a middle-aged gentlemen in the cinema in the novelist’s sex life. But, consider- disease & not the disease itself, & the disease, audience. Fox promptly sued and was ing how much time and energy Gra- which has been going on ever since my child- awarded thirty-five hundred pounds in ham Greene put into his sex life, one hood & was only temporarily alleviated by psy- damages. Ever after, Greene was known wonders how any biographer could look choanalysis, lies in a character profoundly an- to part of his audience as a dirty-minded the other way for long. Greene got mar- tagonistic to ordinary domestic life. man. (Not to Temple, though. In her ried when he was twenty-three, to a de- So, you see, it wasn’t his fault. 1988 memoir, she treated the whole thing vout Catholic woman, Vivien Dayrell- Greene did not, of course, feel like as a tempest in a teapot. She also made Browning, and he stayed married to her sticking around to dry Vivien’s tears or it clear that, at the movie studios, child until he died, in 1991, but only because help raise the son and daughter they actors were indeed subject to unwel- Vivien, for religious reasons, would not had had together. (He didn’t like chil- come attentions.) give him a divorce. After about ten years, dren; he found them noisy.) So he took In Richard Greene’s telling, Graham’s the marriage was effectively over, and an apartment of his own, and Vivien bipolar disorder afflicted him not just, he spent the remainder of his life hav- stayed home, carving doll-house furni- or even mostly, with overexcitement and depression but above all with a terrible boredom, which he could alleviate only by constant thrill-seeking. That’s what caused him to play with guns; that’s what made him get into fights and de- fame Shirley Temple; that’s what sent him to bed with every other woman he came across. Finally, and crucially, this tedium is what made him spend much of his life outside England, not just away from home—from roasts and Bovril and damp woollens—but in the distant, hot, poor, war-torn countries whose efforts to throw off colonial rule formed so large and painful a part of twentieth- century history. He went to West Af- rica (Liberia, Sierra Leone), Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Mexico. He spent years, on and off, in Central Amer- ica. And he saw what the locals saw; at times, he experienced what they did. Bullets whizzed past his head. In Ma- laya, he had to have leeches pried off his neck. In Liberia, he was warned that So did others. There was a minor point, we don’t even know who Hall is. he might contract any of a large num- fashion for conversion to Catholicism “They” are the gang of thugs that ber of diseases, which Richard Greene among British artists and intellectuals Pinkie leads, and before the day is out catalogues with a nasty glee: “Yaws, main the years between the two world they do indeed eliminate Hall, after laria, hookworm, schistosomiasis, dys- wars. Evelyn Waugh converted around which they kill several other people. entery, lassa fever, yellow fever, or an es- the same time as Greene. (Later, Edith This violence is mixed with sex, in a pecially cruel thing, the Guinea worm, Sitwell and Muriel Spark also “poped.”) hot stew, which Greene makes more which grows under the skin and must This was part of the backwash from repellent with the setting of Brigh- be gradually spooled out onto a stick the rising secularism of the late nine- ton—a tacky seaside resort, full of or pencil—if it breaks in the process, teenth and early twentieth centuries. weekend pleasure-seekers down from the remnant may mortify inside the After the Second World War, the Cath- London, shooting ducks and throw- host, causing infection or death.” Un- olic Church would provide a suitably ing candy wrappers on the pavement. willing to miss the Mau Mau rebel- august arena for the transition to an- In Greene’s Brighton, even the sky is lion, Graham Greene spent four weeks other sort of religion: doubt, anxiety, dirty: “The huge darkness pressed a in Kenya. In Congo, he stayed at a leper existentialism. wet mouth against the panes.” Sin ul- colony, where he saw a man with thighs Greene didn’t wait for that. He con- timately crushes Pinkie, and, we are like tree trunks, and one with testes the verted when he was twenty-two, and led to assume, Rose, too. As Greene size of footballs. was observant for a few years. As he himself pointed out, he was, if not a How, and why, did he end up in these pulled away from Vivien, though, he good Catholic, at least a good Gnos- places? Very often, he had an assign- also let go of the things he had acquired tic, a person who believed that good ment from a newspaper or a magazine. with her, for her—above all, religious and evil were equal powers, warring As a sideline, he also did some infor- practice. Later, he said that after he saw against each other. mation-gathering for M.I.6. (Nothing a dead woman lying in a ditch, with her But the book that fixed him in the serious—he might merely send back a dead baby by her side, in North Viet- public mind as a Catholic writer, “The report on which political faction was nam, in 1951, he did not take Commu- Power and the Glory,” came two years gaining power and who the leader was.) nion again for thirty years. But neither, later. Its unnamed hero is a Mexican Basically, any time an organization ever, did he achieve a confident athe- “whisky priest” in hiding in the south needed someone to go, expenses paid, ism. “Many of us,” he said, “abandon of the country in the nineteen-thirties, to a country that had crocodiles, he was Confession and Communion to join during a Marxist campaign against the interested. He was collecting material the Foreign Legion of the Church and Roman Catholic Church. There is no for his novels, most of which would be fight for a city of which we are no lon- end, almost, to the horrors the priest set in these faraway places. ger full citizens.” endures—heat, hunger, D.T.s. He finds dead babies, their eyes rolled back in reene got out of town in another lthough Greene may have turned their heads. Eventually, he is arrested Gway as well. The family he was Areligion down to a low simmer in and put in prison, among a close, dark, born into was Anglican, but they didn’t his life, in his novels he raised it to a sweaty mob, including a couple forni- make a fuss about it. As he told it, he rolling boil. In “Brighton Rock” (1938), cating loudly in a corner. You are sure had a vision of God on a croquet lawn his first big hit, the hero is a seventeen- he will survive, this holy man. He doesn’t. around the age of seventeen, but he let year-old hoodlum named Pinkie. You don’t so much read this book as suf- this pass until four years later, when he (Wonderful name, so wrong.) Pinkie fer it, climb it, like Calvary. fell in love with Vivien, a Catholic who would be an ordinary little sociopath Greene’s procedure—marrying tor- wasn’t at all sure she wanted to marry were it not for the fact that he is a ments of the soul to frenzies of the him, what with his being a Protestant Roman Catholic, and obsessed by sin. flesh—reaches a kind of apogee in “The and also, as he seemed to her, a rather Again and again, he recalls the noise End of the Affair” (1951). Maurice Ben- strange person. that, as a child, he heard across the drix, a novelist, is consumed with rage Leaving a note in the collection box room every Saturday night, when his over the fact that his lover, Sarah, has at a nearby Catholic church, he asked parents engaged in their weekly sex left him, and he hires a private detec- for religious instruction, and was as- act. Pinkie forces himself to marry a tive to find out whom she chose over signed to one Father George Trollope, naïve girl, Rose, because she is a po- him. On and on, in fevered remem- whom he liked, as he wrote to Vivien, tential witness in a murder that he has brance, he calls up details of their love for “his careful avoidance of the slight- engineered. The wedding night—and, affair: the time they had sex on the par- est emotion or sentiment in his instruc- for that matter, most of what takes quet in her parlor, while her husband tion.” Some might have taken the word- place between Pinkie and Rose—is was nursing a cold upstairs; the secret ing of that endorsement as a bad sign, pretty awful, as is much else in the words they had (“onions” was their code but what Greene wanted, apart from novel, once it gets going. Actually, the name for sex); the secret signs. But even- Vivien, was just, as he told her, “some- book raises our neck hair in the open- tually, after Sarah dies, Bendrix discov- thing firm & hard & certain, however ing sentence: “Hall knew, before he ers that the new lover she left him for uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the had been in Brighton three hours, that was God, at which point the novel goes general flux.” they meant to murder him.” At that from steamy to blasphemous. “I hate

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 65 You,” Bendrix tells God. “I hate You of the films are better than the novels. (1955), about the war in Vietnam; “Our as though You existed.” Finally, he’s It is hard to read “Brighton Rock” and Man in Havana” (1958), set in Cuba reduced to conducting a kind of virility not see, in your mind’s eye, Richard At- shortly before Castro’s revolution. The contest with his Maker: “It was I who tenborough, who played Pinkie in the fact that both of these were made into penetrated her, not You.” Ugh. first cinematic version. What a piece of wonderful movies, with famous actors— Some of Greene’s colleagues, not to work is man, you think, as you look at Michael Redgrave in “The Quiet Amer- speak of the Church, began to find his Attenborough’s beautiful young face. ican,” Alec Guinness in “Our Man in combining of religion and sex unseemly. And Pinkie is rotten to the core. This Havana”—did not, in his mind, make George Orwell delivered a more with- paradox makes both the film and the them more legitimate. On the contrary. ering critique. Greene, he wrote, seemed book more textured, knotted. The book- His output does not always conform to believe movie relationship becomes even more to the hierarchy he imposed on it. There that there is something rather distingué in being interesting in the case of “The Third are duds among the serious “novels,” damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, Man.” The book was actually a by-prod- while “Our Man in Havana”—a daz- entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, uct of the film Greene had agreed to zling blend of menace, humor, and res- since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ig- write—something he produced to get a ignation—is one of the finest things he norant to be held guilty, like the beasts that feel for atmosphere before applying him- ever wrote. perish. We are carefully informed that Cath- olics are no better than anybody else; they self to the script—and it will never be But his greatest achievement, “The even, perhaps, have a tendency to be worse, entirely free of the shadow, both literal Heart of the Matter,” is certainly, in his since their temptations are greater. . . . But all and figurative, cast by Orson Welles in terms, a novel—indeed, a Novel. Pub- the while—drunken, lecherous, criminal, or his indelible performance as the villain. lished in 1948, between “The Power and damned outright—the Catholics retain their The colossal popularity of Greene’s the Glory” and “The End of the Af- superiority since they alone know the meaning of good and evil. more down-market novels and their cin- fair,” it is, like them, tightly underpinned ematic adaptations made him rich—for by Roman Catholicism, but it has none This cult of the sanctified sinner, Or- the movie rights to his 1966 novel, “The of the chest-banging or the tawdriness well thought, probably reflected a de- Comedians,” he was paid two hundred into which that subject sometimes led cline of belief, “for when people really and fifty thousand dollars, the equiva- Greene. It is a chaste business. Henry believed in Hell, they were not so fond lent of almost two million today—but, Scobie, a dutiful, observant Roman of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.” apparently, it also embarrassed him. Like Catholic, works as a deputy police com- Still, plenty of readers found the mix many people of his time, he didn’t re- missioner in a small, quiet, corrupt town of the spiritual and the carnal rather a spect films as much as he did literature. in West Africa in the early years of the thrill. When “The End of the Affair” Plus, the film studios wanted changes, Second World War. Scobie has a wife, was published, Time put Greene on its big changes. Greene had given novels Louise, whom he can’t stand and whom, cover, with the tagline “Adultery can like “Brighton Rock,” “The Power and at the same time, he feels sorry for. (They lead to sainthood.” the Glory,” and “The End of the Affair” had a daughter, who died when she was unforgiving endings, which were true to nine.) And so, when Louise says that ne readership that found all this his view of the world, and the studios she can’t stay in this stupid town one Ogood and evil and sex and murder made them nicer, more comestible. Sui- minute longer, he borrows money from quite alluring was Hollywood. Bad be- a local diamond smuggler—he knows havior was fun, after all, and Greene’s this is going to lead to trouble, but he narratives, thanks to those hundreds of does it anyway—to send her on vaca- films he had reviewed, were already cin- tion in South Africa. While she is away, ematic. Has any novelist been better at a French ship is torpedoed off the coast, plotting than Greene? He can shuttle and Scobie has to go help minister to with ease back and forth among three the survivors. Among them is a nine- plotlines at a time, and none of them teen-year-old girl, Helen, newly mar- ever stops charging forward. The sus- ried, whose husband was killed in the pense is huge. You think, “No, they can’t torpedo attack. Helen has no one, noth- shoot the priest,” or “No, Pinkie can’t cides became accidents; terrible cruel- ing. Her sole possession is an album— assault Rose from beyond the grave,” ties were turned into something not so given to her by her father—containing and, surprise, you’re wrong. As for the bad after all. her stamp collection. She clasps it to camera action, the story is often told, Greene solved his problem—stoop her chest. She will speak to no one, until or filmed, from separate points of view; or not?—by claiming that his fiction finally she does speak—to Scobie. big scenes are likely to end in wide shots, fell into two categories. There were his Whereupon he falls in love with her, and so on. “novels,” his serious work, and then there or seems to. In Greene’s work, it is hard Of Western “art” novelists, Greene were his “entertainments,” as he called to tell, when two people go to bed to- may well be the one whose works have them—thrillers, comedies, forms he gether, whether it is love that took them been most often adapted to film. Sev- clearly esteemed less. These latter books, there, or even desire. It could be pity. eral of his novels were dramatized not he implied, were things that he did in As Greene has already told us, that is once but twice or three times, and some his spare time: “The Quiet American” Scobie’s reigning emotion toward his

66 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 wife, and other things as well. Look- ing at the sky one night while tending to the French refugees, he wonders, if one knew the facts, “would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?” So he enters into an affair with Helen, but soon she is screaming at him that he doesn’t love her and is going to leave her, whereupon, of course, Louise returns from her vacation, fully informed by the town gossips as to what Scobie has been up to in her absence. (It’s like “Ethan Frome.” Trying to escape from one nag- ging wife, the hero ends up with two.) He seizes upon a desperate solution: he will fake a heart ailment and then take enough sedatives to kill himself. That way, each of his two women will be free “Mark my words—someday all the chewing to find a more satisfactory mate. As for up paper bags and pooping on stovetops will be done him, he will be damned to Hell for all by those things, and we’ll all be out of jobs.” eternity, but he’s willing. In the end, it doesn’t quite turn out that way. It turns out worse, and that’s Greene for you. But •• in the twentieth century pity was hard to write about. That this dark-hearted uprising, you name it. And he wrote, be loosely described as “a social demo- man managed to—even that he tried— quite strictly, five hundred words per cratic stance,” and that sounds closer to is surely a jewel in his crown. day, in a little notebook he kept in his the truth. In Panama, he hung around chest pocket. He counted the words, with a gunrunner named Chuchu. In “ he Unquiet Englishman” is what and at five hundred he stopped, even, El Salvador, he brokered the occasional Tmight be called a Monday-Tues- his biographer says, in the middle of a ransom. He hated the United States, day biography. On one page, it tells you sentence. Then he started again the next but, outside the United States, that is what Greene did on a certain day in, morning. Richard Greene’s book often not a rare sentiment. say, June of 1942. On the next page, it feels as though it were composed on I think that Graham Greene’s dis- tells you what he did the following day, the same schedule. Many of his chap- tinction as an observer of Africa, Asia, or three days later. This method surely ters are only two or three pages long. Latin America, and the Caribbean is owes something to the fact that Rich- This engenders a kind of coldness. less as a political thinker or activist and ard Greene, a professor of English at To be fair, it should be said that many more just as an artist, a recorder of the the University of Toronto, edited a col- people found Graham Greene hard to way a taxi-dancer in Saigon comports lection of Graham Greene’s letters. In know, and Richard Greene does make herself if she wants to snag an Ameri- other words, he knew what Greene did a contribution to our understanding of can husband; the way the Americans every day, and thought that this was in- his subject. In place of earlier biogra- and English and French, the journal- teresting material—as it could have been, phers’ interest in Graham’s sex life, he ists and officers, sit around on hotel pa- had it contributed to a unified analysis set out to cover the writer’s life as a world tios drinking pink gins and complain- of the man. Mostly, however, the book traveller—specifically, a traveller in what ing about the bugs; the way a Syrian is just a collection of facts. Trips with- was then known as the Third World, diamond smuggler handles an English out itineraries, sex without love, jokes and therefore an observer of interna- policeman whom he is hoping to black- without punch lines—we look for the tional politics. This biography, the jacket mail—and then what happens when beach, but all we see are the pebbles. copy says, “reads like a primer on the the bombs start to go off. The same is Neither are we given much in the way twentieth century itself ” and shows Gra- true of the novels Greene set in less far- of literary commentary. That is not a ham Greene as an “unfailing advocate flung climes; the spiritual and political capital offense. Many good literary bi- for human rights.” I don’t think that crises they tackle fade in the memory, ographers have excused themselves from Richard Greene ever quite makes the and it is his effortless feel for the every- the task of criticism. But, if we don’t get case for Graham’s status as a freedom day that stays with us. That is the heart the man or his novels, what do we get? fighter, but, despite what his publicists of Graham Greene’s matter: not pro- Graham Greene was an almost ee- felt they had to say, he doesn’t peddle fundity—how hard he reached for it!— rily disciplined writer. He could write this line too hard. Eventually, the book but an instinct for the way things actu- in the middle of wars, the Mau Mau says, Graham settled into what might ally look and what that means. 

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 67 Now hear this. Narrated stories, along with podcasts, are now available in the New Yorker app. Download it at newyorker.com/app try’s long and tangled past. Among nov- BOOKS elists writing now, Moss, who was born in 1975, appears the most eager to continue this tradition. She started out OLD HABITS as an academic specializing in nine- teenth-century literature. Her mono- In Sarah Moss’s novel “Summerwater,” there’s no holiday from history. graph “Spilling the Beans: Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in Brit- BY LEO ROBSON ish Women’s Fiction, 1770-1830” (2009), begins with epigraphs from Thomas Malthus (on demography) and Sig- mund Freud (on dreams), and her fiction can be viewed as an effort to fuse realist and Romantic priorities. She writes about class and status, property and professional life, but is guided by interests that transcend the specificity of time and place. Moss’s dual focus has determined her approach to plot and theme. Her intricate début novel, “Cold Earth,” published in 2009, unfolds against the backdrop of a pandemic; it also concerns a graduate student studying the ways in which William Morris refashioned the Vikings for his own age. Adam Gold- schmidt, the lovable narrator of “The Tidal Zone” (2016), her most accom- plished novel to date, is a stay-at-home dad who spends his days steaming vegetables (“boiling removed too many vi- tamins”), listening to radio bulletins (“The American police had shot another child for being black”), ruminat- ing on “the mess of England today,” and debating with his daughter Miriam, a fiercely political fifteen-year-old who has just survived a cardiac arrest. He is also “a bloke with a background in the Arts and Crafts movement,” and is n Sarah Moss’s new novel, “Sum- inertia or cowardice of his temporary researching a postwar effort to rebuild Imerwater” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), neighbors: “Bloody typical. . . . The state Coventry Cathedral in a vernacular which portrays a Scottish campground of this country.” style—“another articulation of the En- during the course of a sodden August The effort to capture what we mean glish suspicion of the machineries of day, a character mournfully reflects that by “these days” is one way of trying to mass-production.” Moss’s slight but sear- Edinburgh is full of English people answer what Thomas Carlyle, in 1839, ing “Ghost Wall” (2018) explores ques- “these days.” It’s a phrase that occurs called the “Condition of England Ques- tions of class mistrust, sexism, social repeatedly: having kids “these days” is tion.” This was originally a quasi-jour- mobility, xenophobia, and the North- not a very clever thing to do; those who nalistic endeavor—a report on hard South divide, while her characters take have had the misfortune of being born times, a portrait of the way we live now— part in “experiential archeology,” behav- “these days” are given silly names like but in the past century such novels as ing as if it were the Iron Age, right down Honey. Everywhere in the book, peo- Virginia Woolf ’s “Between the Acts,” to the idea of virgin sacrifice. ple are sighing over the present. A teen- Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” One of Moss’s claims to novelty, as ager remembers his grandmother be- and Angus Wilson’s “Anglo-Saxon At- a portraitist of a postindustrial England moaning “young people nowadays,” and titudes” showed that scrutinizing pres- saturated with earlier visions of itself, a small boy listens to his father raging, ent-day habits and circumstances could is that her writing is focussed neither in the middle of the night, against the also provide a window onto the coun- on London, as with the work of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, nor on the At a Scottish campground, visitors can’t escape one another—or current tensions. Druid-haunted southwestern county

ILLUSTRATION BY ANTOINE MAILLARD THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 15, 2021 69 of Wiltshire, as with Penelope Lively’s named Milly, she is lying on her back; thing similar in “Ghost Wall,” which, “Treasures of Time” and Jez Butter- her fiancé, Josh, is insisting that they try though it took place in the nineteen- worth’s play “Jerusalem.” Her stories to achieve simultaneous orgasms, a “per- nineties, skewered the crankish side of have unfolded in Northumberland, fect symmetry of desire” that she sim- the “Leaver” mind-set. In one memo- Cornwall, the West Midlands, Man- ply doesn’t want—“She’s still a separate rably tense scene, Bill, an irascible dad chester, and the Shetland Islands. If the person.” In another cabin, sixteen-year- whose patriotism extends to cuisine— tendency to write about established old Alex is so desperate to escape his par- fish-and-chips ahead of “Paki muck”— sites of English memory—the well- ents and his sister that he goes out kay- is patiently advised by a medieval his- tapped sources of Albion—can be traced aking and almost kills himself in the torian that the Romans had not, in fact, to the influence of William Blake, process. David, a former doctor, realizes built Hadrian’s Wall out of fear of the Moss’s desire to explore less travelled that his retirement is driven by an “un- “British” queen Boudicca: it was “never paths was emboldened by the brief, speakable objective”: “to avoid the be- the Berlin Wall ... no raked earth or blazing intervention of W. G. Sebald, loved” and achieve a “stolen hour’s sol- watchtowers.” Moss, though clearly a the German author whose “prose fic- itude.” Claire, a worn-out mom, “envies fan of the E.U.’s yellow stars and every- tions” about the pervasive presence of people who have shared custody ar- thing they represent, avoids polemic. the past took place in regions such as rangements.” Both of the first two chap- The narrative scheme of “Summerwa- East Anglia and North Wales. ters begin with someone trying to leave ter” has been constructed in order to What’s striking is that Moss has com- a cabin without waking anyone up. complicate any single strong opinion. manded recognition as one of the lead- Many of these weary Britons are ex- David, who sees himself as an enemy ing British novelists—a favorite of other ercised by the members of a Ukrainian of English insularity, is also the kind writers, a mainstay of end-of-the-year family, the Shevchenkos, who live in of person who might very well feel in- roundups—despite keeping faith with Govanhill, a deprived area of Glasgow. sulated from the Brexit voter’s sense of what Sebald dismissed as the “standard” This foreign-speaking presence—the being overlooked or left behind. When novel during a time of almost maximal, family is successively taken to be Bul- Milly meets him, she is convinced that and partly Sebald-inspired, impatience garian, Polish, Romanian, and Rus- she has him pegged: “Doctor, final-sal- with that form. Although Moss’s writ- sian—has provoked the wrath of the ary pension scheme, the whole works, ing is deft and resourceful, making use other holidaymakers, who chafe at the probably bought some fabulous Vic- of parallel chronologies and multiple per- Shevchenkos’ taste for loud late-night torian pile in Bearsden for tuppence spectives, of books within books and de- parties. But the family also provides a ha’penny in the ’70s.” But, before the tailed descriptions of art works both real scapegoat for the frustrations harbored reader pigeonholes David as he pigeon- and invented, the closest she comes to by “this alleged holiday,” and an outlet holed “the English,” Milly hits the lim- formal experimentation is an aversion to for other aggressions. “You’re supposed its of her prejudicial sketch. She starts using quotation marks with dialogue. to have left, you know, people like you, speculating that the doctor and his wife “Summerwater,” though smaller in did you not get the message?” a small also own “a gîte in Provence or Tuscany scale than most of her previous works, girl, Lola, says, taunting the Shevchenko or whatever,” and then recognizes that, exhibits many of her strengths and daughter. A chapter that adopts the if that were the case, they wouldn’t be preoccupations. In tracing her charac- perspective of Steve, a middle-aged staying in this miserable place, along- ters’ finicky, circular, weather-obsessed Mancunian father, begins, “He’s not side somebody like her. thoughts (“Ostentatious rain. Pissing it being a racist. Even though they weren’t “Summerwater” departs from the down”), Moss touches on—or, more ac- meant to be here any more, it’s no odds human perspectives it inhabits in a curately, brushes past—the Brexit vote, to him that they’re foreign.” David, the series of brief, usually page-long, in- Anglo-Scottish relations, climate change, doctor, expresses a more cosmopolitan terludes—sometimes luminous and the concept of rape culture, overpopula- perspective: elegiac, sometimes morbid and mention, adolescent depression, and, if not acing—which provide glimpses of The windscreen wipers, which detect the exactly warfare between the generations density of rainfall and set themselves accord- phenomena that the characters fail to and the sexes, then at least mutual in- ingly, slow their beat. He indicates, takes the notice: the Viking sea roads that are comprehension and froideur. The cast of switchback turn for the hairpin bends up the still followed by transatlantic flights, characters proves usefully broad; of the hill, a fine smooth EU-funded miracle of engi- for example, or the boats from past book’s dozen perspectives, each rendered neering that sees maybe two dozen cars a day, centuries that languish at the bottom off season. How could the English be so stu- in a colloquial free-indirect style, seven pid, he thinks again pointlessly, how could they of the nearby loch. There’s also the are female and five male, with a span of not see the ring of yellow stars on every new four-hundred-and-twenty-million- ages from small child to pensioner. road and hospital and upgraded railway and year-old Highland Boundary Fault, a Privacy is elusive in the novel’s camp- city centre regeneration of the last thirty years? relic of a time when “the rocks that ground setting, especially with the are now Scotland lay south of the chronic rain. (“If all the neighbours are o “Summerwater” is a study of Brexit equator,” and a reminder that the land indoors there are watchers at every win- SBritain set far from both the pre- “beneath our buildings, roads, pipes, dow.”) But the proximity of family mem- cincts of power and the postindustrial subway systems, mines and even our bers and partners is a source of greater northern towns where Europhobia was fracking” is “always shifting, forming, trouble. When we meet a young woman most prevalent. Moss attempted some- changing state.”

70 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 15, 2021 These non-narrative passages provide clues for what Moss is up to. The novel is powered not by the local ten- BRIEFLY NOTED sions it depicts but by the existential conflict underpinning them. When we Foregone, by Russell Banks (Ecco). Leonard Fife, the protag- write about the behavior of a society, onist of this elliptical novel, is a documentary filmmaker, a Moss seems to say, we are also talking man whose career has rested on uncovering the truth. Now about the workings of the individual cancer-stricken and facing his life’s end, he agrees to a retro- mind; collective myths—nostalgia for spective interview with a grating former protégé. During their a pre-industrial past and an unmixed discussion, Leonard starts to confess to past sins: a wife and populace, the dream of a sovereign fu- child abandoned, infidelity, lies. But it’s not clear how trust- ture, some settled story about our pres- worthy his memories are; he might be lost in the fog of his ent moment—are simply drives and medication. Banks carefully layers the strata of a life, show- fears writ large. ing that the past is always more ambiguous than we think. “Summerwater,” like much of Moss’s recent work, suggests that the Freud- The Bad Muslim Discount, by Syed M. Masood (Doubleday). ian half of her formation is beginning The two main characters of this novel couldn’t be more dif- to prevail. “The Tidal Zone” employs ferent, though both are Muslim immigrants who find their the trappings of the social portrait to way to the Bay Area during and after the Iraq War. Anvar spin a kind of fable—its opening words and his family come from Pakistan and assimilate with rel- are “Once upon a time”—about how ative ease. “There was no culture shock,” he says, having seen human beings confront what Adam the U.S. on screens his whole life. Safwa escapes from Bagh- calls “the ordinary extraordinary,” the dad, after terrible loss, by agreeing to a dangerous deal that way in which dramatic developments, haunts her. Their paths cross in a tense climax set against the “terrible things” from the near-death backdrop of the 2016 Presidential election. Masood offers of a treasured daughter to the aerial sharp observations on religion, violence, and politics, and his bombing of a city or, indeed, to the kill- clever choice to place the characters’ disparate experiences in ing of young Black men, must be ac- parallel challenges Islamophobic stereotypes. commodated by our vision of the normal, the familiar, or the routine. The The Enlightenment, by Ritchie Robertson (Harper). The stan- historian in “Ghost Wall,” a novel cen- dard narrative of the Enlightenment usually takes the form tered on acts of aggression and abuse, either of science unshackling the world from faith and su- observes that it’s a mistake to think perstition or of cold reason leading to disenchantment. This that the Celts possessed primitive minds sweeping history instead describes an “enormous and diverse but “we don’t.” tapestry” of conflicting and often contradictory strands. Rob- Now, in “Summerwater,” Moss has ertson expands the conception of the Enlightenment from delivered a series of snapshots of the familiar topics like the scientific revolution to include areas family romance, complete with reflec- as diverse as public administration and manners. He por- tions on sibling rivalry, fear of the out- trays not only well-known philosophers but also the many sider, attachment, sex, physical decay, civil servants and functionaries, from Philadelphia to St. Pe- and what one character thinks of as tersburg, who gave practical shape to Enlightenment ideals. people’s “unconsciousnesses, their re- For Robertson, this period was ultimately “an age of feeling, pressed selves or what have you.” An sympathy and sensibility,” in which the goal was human engagement with the way we live now happiness in this life. opens onto a deeper concern with the way we have always lived. Even as she Let the Lord Sort Them, by Maurice Chammah (Crown). This immerses the reader in customs and haunting history of capital punishment in the United States mores, she emphasizes their contin- focusses on Texas, which accounts for a third of the fifteen gency—the truth that, as a mother and hundred people executed since the Supreme Court reinstated running enthusiast observes in the the death penalty, in 1976. Probing American history for the opening pages, our “ways of doing origin of our criminal-justice system’s punitive strain, Cham- things” are “mostly just habit.” It’s hard mah finds a frontier culture that saw extrajudicial killings as to miss that the novel follows “Ghost “expressions of the will of the community” and ultimately for- Wall” in turning from the brashness malized such retribution in law in ways that reinforced racial of daily life toward a more remote or and class inequities. Chammah sees hope, however, in the enclosed realm, in closer touch with gradual decline of executions since the nineteen-nineties. In human atavism—and also, perhaps, his portrayals of inmates, victims, and legal advocates, a cau- with what really matters to this bril- tious theme emerges: the prospect of a democratic solution— liant, confounding writer.  born of popular will—to an unmerciful system of justice.

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 15, 2021 71 at a musical salon has a seismic effect MUSICAL EVENTS on the connoisseur Charles Swann. Two new compact disks, both of them more or less perfect and charming, evoke MUSIC REGAINED the ambience of the Proustian musicale. On “Music in Proust’s Salons” (BIS), the New compact disks conjure the sounds of Proust’s salons. cellist Steven Isserlis and the pianist Connie Shih perform works by com- BY ALEX ROSS posers who moved in Proust’s circles. And on “Proust, le Concert Retrouvé” (Harmonia Mundi), a pair of splendidly named young French musicians—the violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and the pianist Tanguy de Willien- court—re-create the concert at the Ritz, or most of it. In the liner notes, Cécile Leblanc, the author of a book on Proust and music, remarks that the Ritz program “constitutes in large part the ‘au- ditory stream’ that in time would give rise to ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ ” Listeners on the hunt for the “little phrase” will not find it here. Early drafts of “Swann’s Way” make clear that Proust originally had in mind the limpid second theme of the first movement of Camille Saint-Saëns’s First Violin So- nata, which Hahn had frequently played for the author on the piano. Later, Proust attributed the phrase to the fictional composer Vinteuil, who, in the course of the cycle, is revealed to be a major creative figure, surpassing Saint-Saëns in significance. Various models for Vin- teuil have been proposed, but the stron- gest candidate is Gabriel Fauré, to whom Proust once sent an extravagant fan letter: “I know your work well enough to write a three-hundred-page book about it.” Proust may have been especially be- n July 1, 1907, Marcel Proust or- Afterward, Proust reported to the com- guiled by Fauré’s way of wafting airy Oganized a short concert to follow poser Reynaldo Hahn, his friend and melodies over an unstable harmonic a festive dinner at the Ritz in Paris. The sometime lover, that the evening had ground, with familiar chords dissolving program, with its interweaving of Ba- been “perfect, charming.” His distin- into one another in unfamiliar ways. roque, Classical, Romantic, and proto- guished invitees, who included the Prin- The music often exudes a bittersweet, modern strands, exemplifies the impec- cess de Polignac and the Mesdames de complicated happiness that aligns un- cable taste of one of the most musically Brantes, de Briey, d’Haussonville, de cannily with the moods of “In Search attuned writers in literary history: Ludre, de Noailles, and de Clermont- of Lost Time.” As it happens, Fauré was Tonnerre, enjoyed themselves thoroughly. to have performed at the Ritz event, Fauré: Violin Sonata No. 1 Beethoven: Andante [unspecified] Little did they know that the affair was but he fell ill and withdrew. Schumann: “Des Abends” a dry run for the charged musical eve- Fittingly, Fauré’s music occupies more Chopin: Prélude [unspecified] nings that occur throughout “In Search than half of the running time of “Proust, Wagner: “Meistersinger” Prelude of Lost Time.” Proust was not only an le Concert Retrouvé.” The First Violin Chabrier: “Idylle” alert listener but also an intent observer Sonata is a relatively early score—it had Couperin: “Les Barricades mystérieuses” Fauré: Nocturne [unspecified] of other listeners. His characters reveal its première in 1877, when Proust was a Wagner: Liebestod from “Tristan” themselves as music sweeps over them. child—but it bears the signatures of the Fauré: Berceuse In “Swann’s Way,” a stray “little phrase” elusive Fauré style. Langlois de Swarte and Williencourt deliver an idiomatic Proust was not only an alert listener but also an intent observer of other listeners. performance, with a warmly singing violin

72 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY AGOSTINO IACURCI PROMOTION line poised above cleanly articulated piano up another side of Proust, who once textures. (The disk was produced in col- wrote in praise of “bad music,” saying laboration with the Museum of Music that it has a vital role in the broader so- at the Philharmonie de Paris, which cial fabric. What matters most about supplied instruments suitable for the the “little phrase,” after all, is not its in- occasion: the “Davidoff” Stradivarius trinsic quality but the emotional res- and an 1891 Érard piano, which is lighter onances it accumulates as it dances in sound than modern Steinways.) The through time. duo are especially mesmerizing in Fauré’s Andante, with its slinky, abbreviated roust apparently never encountered theme and its steadily pulsing iambic Pthe remarkable sisters Boulanger, rhythm. In faster passages, they might Nadia and Lili, who frequented a few have applied sharper rhythmic defini- of the same salons. Welcome attention tion. When Jacques Thibaud and Al- is now falling on the music that the fred Cortot recorded the sonata back women wrote in their youth, before in 1927, just three years after Fauré’s tragedy struck: Lili died in 1918, of tu- death, they found a marvellous strid- berculosis, at twenty-four. A few years ing motion in its initial bars—open-air later, Nadia renounced composing, turn- music rushing into a salon. ing her energies instead to an extraor- Williencourt makes a formidable im- dinary career as a teacher. (Among her pression in his solo selections. He grasps pupils were Virgil Thomson, Aaron what the composer and educator Nadia Copland, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Boulanger, a Fauré pupil, called “la grande and Quincy Jones.) Lili was perhaps ligne”—the long line that ties together the more gifted of the two—her set- a work’s disparate components. His rendi- ting of Psalm 130, the “De Profundis,” tion of Fauré’s Nocturne No. 6, in D-flat, is a monumental cri de coeur in the reconciles questing melody with wayward face of the Great War—but Nadia left harmony. Even more striking is his Lie- behind a trove of cultivated mélodies, bestod, in Liszt’s arrangement—a free, along with an opera, “La Ville Morte,” rhapsodic, surprisingly graceful account, which Catapult Opera plans to stage in keeping with Proust’s tendency to in New York. Pandemic permitting, the cherish Wagner on his own terms, with- theme of next summer’s Bard Music out grandiose hysteria. Williencourt is Festival will be “Nadia Boulanger and one of several younger pianists who are Her World.” exploring Wagner at the piano; for Mi- Two exceptional tenors released al- rare, he has recorded a survey of Liszt’s bums of Boulanger songs last year: Cy- transcriptions and elaborations of music rille Dubois, accompanied by Tristan from the operas. A fairly astounding Raës, on Aparté; and Nicholas Phan, achievement, it left me wishing that joined by Myra Huang, on Avie. Du- Williencourt had tackled the “Meister- bois focusses on Nadia, bringing to bear singer” Overture on the Ritz disk—that elegant phrasing and luminous tone. piece is the major item missing from The best of the songs have a translu- the Proust playlist. cent quality, a rarefied lyricism. Phan Isserlis, a master at projecting intro- trains his acutely expressive voice on spective states, has extensive experience Lili’s 1914 cycle “Clairières dans le Ciel” with Fauré and has twice recorded the (“Clearings in the Sky”), motivically composer’s cello sonatas. His new album interlinked settings of poems by Fran- includes two pensive Fauré miniatures, cis Jammes. “Clairières” is dedicated to “Élégie” and “Romance,” but gives pride Fauré and borrows a feature of his cycle of place to Saint-Saëns’s First Cello So- “La Bonne Chanson,” in which the final nata—a stormier argument than the song incorporates reminiscences of ear- Violin Sonata that enchanted the young lier numbers. The effect is Proustian, Proust. Isserlis also presents a cello ar- but Phan imbues it with a hallucina- rangement of César Franck’s moodily tory, anguished tinge—perhaps with an ardent Violin Sonata, which has also eye to the imminent collapse of the been cited as a model for Vinteuil. In- Belle Époque. The cycle ends with terspersed are shorter, slighter works by ghostly, bell-like chords and the words Hahn, Henri Duparc, and Augusta “I have nothing left / nothing left to Holmès. Their sentimental aura plays hold me up.”  elated to find the customary props in THE CURRENT CINEMA place: a chalk mark swiped across a lamppost; a radio turned up loud to deter bugging; and—my favorite—a BORDERLANDS dinky Minox camera, used to photograph military documents and dia- “The Courier” and “Come True.” grams. But why does Penkovsky keep the Minox in his desk drawer, where BY ANTHONY LANE the K.G.B. can sniff it out? Basic error, Oleg Vladimirovich! wo men walk down a street at night. look sprightly and debonair, like David At one point, with the Cuban mis- T One of them says, “I’ve dreamed of Niven. It fails. sile crisis looming, we see another cam- this moment for a very long time.” The Penkovsky and Wynne—they sound era—a closeup of a lens, in the under- other man says, “What happens now? I like a pair of magicians—are brought belly of a U-2 spy plane, trained on don’t need to do anything, do I?” On a together by the joint initiative of the Soviet installations below. This is a later occasion, in a hotel room, we see American and British intelligence ser- straight steal from Steven Spielberg’s them draw close, leaning in to murmur vices. Penkovsky has made the initial “Bridge of Spies” (2015), to which, un- in each other’s ear. It must be love. approach, but such is the level of sur- avoidably, “The Courier” will be com- Not so fast. These scenes come from veillance in Moscow that any contact pared. Cooke’s film is shorter by half an hour, and the plot is urged along at a brisk trot. In the latter stages, we are indignant, on Wynne’s behalf, when he is arrested on Russian soil, imprisoned, and taken far into his discomfort zone. His hair is shorn, and so, to our disbe- lief, is his mustache. Yet the movie, less stirring than it ought to be, is peculiarly cramped, lacking the emotional latitude of “Bridge of Spies.” Spielberg dramatized a clash of moral principles, under the cover story of a thriller, but “The Courier” is all that it appears to be and not much more. For fans of Cumberbatch, on the other hand, it will be a fount of joy. Like Bill Nighy and, before him, Den- holm Elliott, Cumberbatch excels at playing decent men, well-meaning Merab Ninidze and Benedict Cumberbatch star in Dominic Cooke’s film. and well-mannered, who are weak at heart, and who worry—with reason— Dominic Cooke’s “The Courier,” which with a Western spy would be doomed. that decency alone will not shield them is set in the early nineteen-sixties A C.I.A. agent, Emily Donovan (Ra- from the larger world. That is why and is based on true and hazard- chel Brosnahan), appeals to her coun- such men prefer to keep their lives ous happenings of the period. The terparts in London for help: a flatter- small, and why they twitch and flinch first man is Oleg Penkovsky (Merab ing request, although her boss, back in or, in Wynne’s case, muster a stricken Ninidze). He runs the state commit- Langley, warns her about “the bullshit smile at the prospect of jeopardy. tee for scientific research in the So- of dealing with the Brits.” “They’re good “Would I be putting myself in dan- viet Union, and is so alarmed by the guys,” she says. “I just have to make them ger?” is one of Wynne’s first questions speed of the arms race that he of- think they’re in charge.” to his handlers, and even at lunch, fers—for the sake of peace, not for Enter the amateur. Wynne, who has in London, he glances over his shoul- personal gain—to pass Russian nuclear done legitimate business in the East- der. Against the odds, though, this secrets to the West. The other man ern Bloc, trading in scientific machin- middling coward finds a fortitude in is Greville Wynne (Benedict Cum- ery, is persuaded to fly to Moscow, to himself, and is altered by the discov- berbatch), a less distinguished soul. establish an overt professional link with ery. His wife, Sheila, played with a He is an Englishman, a salesman, and, Penkovsky and, under that masquer- tender sharpness by Jessie Buckley, in terms of espionage, a rube. He has ade, to bring back sensitive informa- isn’t sure what he does on his trips a wife, a son, a trilby, a waist-length tion. An elegant arrangement, which to Moscow, but she feels the effect. sheepskin coat, and a mustache that works until it doesn’t. Anyone who rev- “He’s become so energetic in bed,” she is presumably meant to make him els in such tales of subterfuge will be says, more perplexed than pleased, as

74 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY MADISON KETCHAM if noting a change in the weather. The The problem is that, later on, she does their cigars in delight. Notable landmarks spy who comes back from the cold is fall for his nerd charms—one of many include one humanoid figure with a head warming up. narrative swerves at which viewers may like a splintered tree, a second with a snigger or balk. The finale, in particular, windmill of waving legs where its upper he first time we see Sarah ( Julia is designed to be scrapped over like a half should be, and a third who pops like TSarah Stone), the heroine of “Come bone. Yet the film reaches out, even at a silent balloon, leaving a ragged blob True,” she is lying in a sleeping bag, at its most implausible, and claws at you; and recalling a similar burst in “Under the foot of a slide, in a playground. It’s when Sarah sleepwalks along a road, the Skin” (2013). What’s more, if you have early morning, and we have an instant trailing cables, with Jeremy and another happy memories of being traumatized sense that things are out of joint in Sar- researcher dogging her slow steps, you by the ghosts in “The Fog” (1980), whose ah’s life. From the playground, she cy- start by wondering where all the cars are eyes were mere glowing holes, you’ll love cles home for a shower, taking care to and end up marvelling at the surreal dig- the gang of shady fellows who throng avoid her mother, before setting off for nity of this mini-procession. In every the dormant Sarah, gazing from the gloom school. So why, at the age of eighteen, sense, it is Stone who leads the way. As like nocturnal animals on the prowl. was she waking in a public space? And Sarah, she is slight and quick, with round What matters most about movie from what abominations was she roused? features and a shock of short blond hair, dreams, however, is not how they stand Not surprisingly, Sarah keeps dozing and, if she didn’t play Ariel and Puck on- out but how securely they are set, like off in class, and you can’t blame her for stage at school, I want to know why. gems, in the context of the film. Whether signing up to participate in a sleep study. One way to gauge the impact of to- we honestly need the crazy-colored night Anything to get herself on track. Hence- day’s movie stars is to imagine them in fever in “Vertigo” (1958), given how richly forth, she will spend her nights at a spe- the era of silent pictures. Saoirse Ronan Hitchcock steeps us in the dreaminess cial facility, where, clad in a sleep suit and and Florence Pugh, for instance, would of the everyday, is open to debate. Burns’s a soft helmet—both of them curiously have thrived back then, and so would method, in “Come True,” is to veil Sar- ribbed, with wires attached—she will be Stone. The person she most resembles ah’s dreams in a deep gray haze, which monitored as she drifts off into dreams. is Mary Astor, whose long career was renders details indistinct, and then to Think of her as a somnonaut. For her kicking off a century ago. Like Astor, dull the light during her waking hours, pains, Sarah will earn twelve dollars an Stone has wide-set eyes, more doleful too, so that we can scarcely tell where hour; the film, which is written, directed, than innocent, which make her look pre- reality ends and reverie begins. Is that shot, and edited by Anthony Scott Burns, ternaturally wise to the fact that, what- a fine philosophical conceit, or has the is the story of those pains. ever she does, trouble will be along soon. evidence been rigged? And why is it The facility, of course, is staffed with One difference is that, with the advent that casual, clear-cut, and non-spooky oddballs. The boss, Dr. Meyer (Chris- of talkies, Astor’s voice proved to be en- dreams—you know, the kind in which topher Heatherington), wears huge ticingly low, whereas Stone’s delivery, in you go to the supermarket, buy some glasses, like Elliott Gould in the “Ocean’s “Come True,” has more of a teen-age milk, and realize that the cashier is the Eleven” films, and the resident genius, snap. “So cool,” she says, when Jeremy guy who taught you chemistry when Jeremy (Landon Liboiron), is accused shows her what his monitor can do. It you were twelve—are never granted ac- by Sarah of stalking her, out of office not only registers brain activity but also cess to Sarah’s sleeping mind? Because hours. She tells him, “You just thought, reproduces actual dreams on a screen. too much normality, I guess, would be Hey, since I don’t ever leave my nerd For people who collect movie dreams, an embarrassment to the cultivation of den, this is probably my best chance to “Come True” is quite a find. Sarah’s sub- fear. Only nightmares need apply.  meet the future Mrs. Nerd, so, if I just conscious journeys waft her through so follow her around, maybe she’ll fall for many doors, and other helpful orifices, NEWYORKER.COM my magical fucking nerd charms.” that any remaining Freudians will drop Richard Brody blogs about movies.

VOLUME XCVII, NO. 5, March 22, 2021. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four planned combined issues, as indicated on the issue’s cover, and other combined or extra issues) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Eric Gillin, chief business officer; Lauren Kamen Macri, vice-president of sales; Rob Novick, vice-president of finance; Fabio B. Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast Global: Roger Lynch, chief executive officer; Pamela Drucker Mann, global chief revenue officer and president, U.S. revenue; Anna Wintour, chief content officer; Jason Miles, chief financial officer (interim); Samantha Morgan, chief of staff; San- jay Bhakta, chief product and technology officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.

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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 75 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Paul Noth, must be received by Sunday, March 21st. The finalists in the March 8th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the April 5th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ” ......

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“So that’s where all the furniture went.” Andrew Gray, Jackson, Tenn.

“Don’t make me come up there.” “I could never pull that off.” Michele Moreno, New York City Nicole Chrolavicius, Burlington, Ont.

“Just as I thought. There’s nothing going on upstairs.” Carol Lasky, Boston, Mass. Design advice for real life.

@getclever archdigest.com/clever 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT. 14 15 THE 16 17 CROSSWORD 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 A lightly challenging puzzle. 27 28 29 30 31 BY CAITLIN REID 32 33 34 35

ACROSS 36 37 38

1 Low blow 39 40 41 42 43 44 10 Like heavy desserts 14 Raw umber or burnt sienna, e.g. 45 46 47 48 49 15 2008 Pixar film about a trash- compacting robot 50 51 52 53 54 16 Anti-collision course? 55 56 57 58 59 17 Tended to, as a squeaky hinge

18 Site of a legendary couples cruise? 60 61 62 63 19 Ability to amuse 20 Make the rounds? 64 65 22 Lacking forethought 66 67 24 Part of a 29-Across 26 Trigonometric term from the Latin word for “curve” 2 Big name in casinos 44 Greet warmly, in a way 27 Sandals and sneakers 3 Norse explorer Leif 45 Wags a finger at, say 29 Fragrant purple flower 4 Off-roading ride, for short 47 Vamoose 31 Number associated with perfection 5 “That was close!” 49 Surgical tubes 32 Tantrums 6 Comic ___ 51 Pattern for many a flannel shirt 34 Got around 7 Budget boarding option 53 Great ___ 36 Selection at a sushi bar 8 Smallest bill in the till 56 Not feeling a hundred per cent 38 Wintry weather 9 “Ideas worth spreading” lectures 58 ___-cell therapy 39 Dumpster fire, as it were 10 Sudden attacks 62 Nobel Prize winner Steven who served 42 Pitchers seen in still-lifes 11 “All right, tell me more” as Secretary of Energy under Obama 45 Bewigged singer of “Chandelier” 12 Scrubbed 63 Org. charged with enforcing the Toxic 46 Applied using a pastry bag 13 Actress Tippi who is Dakota Johnson’s Substances Control Act 48 Percussion instruments grandmother 50 Start of a certain address 15 Took first place Solution to the previous puzzle: 52 21 “Seinfeld” character whose dancing is “Got it” H A L F S I T A R P E P S described by George as “a full-body dry 54 Make mittens, maybe E L L I O T P A G E E V E N heave set to music” 55 “I’m in heaven!” I M A L L Y O U R S Z E R O 23 Safe kind of job? N O M A D S T O O L R I O 57 ___ de deux (dance for two) 25 “___ in my memory lock’d, and you I N A S E C W E T M O P 59 Cheer for Atlético Madrid yourself shall keep the key . . .”: Ophelia E D S R O A M F O O D S 60 Parable’s point 28 Envelope sticker S P I N D O C T O R S F A R M T O T A B L E 61 “This is just too much!” 30 Be too close to T O G A P A R T I E S 64 Certain office communiqué 33 Units of yarn B E L A Y P E O N C S T 65 Back-to-back-to-back titles 35 Dance to bounce music, perhaps Y A K N O W E M I L I A H C L N I G H T I N E P T 66 Transmit 37 Actor Giancarlo of “Better Call Saul” A H O Y D R E A M S C A P E 67 Gets the better of, intellectually 39 Strike a chord N E R O T A L K I T O V E R DOWN 40 High-fibre muffin material D R E W H Y P E D G E D S 41 Segment of a tennis match 1 Coniferous trees often used to make Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at chests 43 Go too long newyorker.com/crossword GET YOURS AT GQ.COM/NEWYORKER BEST STUFF

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