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APRIL 18, 2016

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Jill Lepore on women and power; desperate bankers; disrupting eulogies; Hugh Dancy; James Surowiecki on infrastructure crises. ANNALS OF SCIENCE Elizabeth Kolbert 22 Unnatural Selection Breeding better coral in Hawaii. SHOUTS & MURMURS Emma Rathbone 29 What “XOXO” Really Means LIFE AND LETTERS Hilton Als 30 Immediate Family The unclassifiable writer Maggie Nelson. A REPORTER AT LARGE Ben Taub 36 The Assad Files Building a case against the Syrian regime. LETTER FROM ITALY Ariel Levy 50 Beautiful Monsters Art, aristocracy, and obsession in Tuscany. SKETCHBOOK Barry Blitt 57 “Hillary/Bernie New York Primary Diary” FICTION Colin Barrett 62 “Anhedonia, Here I Come” THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE Clive James 70 Binge-watching “Game of Thrones.” BOOKS Caleb Crain 76 American ighters in the Spanish Civil War. 81 Briefly Noted Dan Chiasson 82 Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Gap Gardening.” POP MUSIC Hua Hsu 84 J Dilla’s “The Diary.” THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 86 “Demolition,” “Louder Than Bombs.” POEMS Charles Simic 53 “In Wonder” Carl Dennis 66 “Two Lives” COVER Peter de Sève “Luxury Coops”

DRAWINGS Seth Fleishman, Paul Noth, P. C. Vey, David Borchart, Jack Ziegler, Pat Byrnes, Roz Chast, Tom Chitty, Liam Francis Walsh, Will McPhail, Trevor Spaulding, Mick Stevens, Michael Crawford, Michael Maslin, William Haefeli, Charlie Hankin, Joe Dator, Robert Leighton, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Liana Finck, Drew Dernavich, Bob Eckstein, Tom Toro SPOTS Luci Gutiérrez

CONTRIBUTORS

Ben Taub (“The Assad Files,” p. 36) has Hilton Als (“Immediate Family,” p. 30), previously written for The New Yorker the magazine’s theatre critic, is an as- about jihadism in Europe. Reporting sociate professor of writing at Colum- for this piece was facilitated by a grant bia University’s School of the Arts. from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Ariel Levy (“Beautiful Monsters,” p. 50) is working on a book based on her New Jill Lepore (Comment, p. 17), a profes- Yorker article “Thanksgiving in Mon- sor of history at Harvard, is the author golia,” which won a 2014 National Mag- of nine books, including “Book of Ages: azine Award for essays and criticism. The Life and Opinions of Jane Frank- lin” and “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” which will Peter Granser (Photographs, pp. 50, 58), be out in May. an Austrian photographer, has won many prizes for his work, including the Elizabeth Kolbert (“Unnatural Selection,” Arles Discovery Award, in 2002. “J’ai p. 22) is a staf writer. Her book “The Perdu Ma Tête” is his latest book. Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural His- tory” won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Colin Barrett (Fiction, p. 62) won the nonfiction. 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for his collection Emma Rathbone (Shouts & Murmurs, “Young Skins.” p. 29) will publish her second novel, “Losing It,” in July. Caleb Crain (Books, p. 76), the author of the novel “Necessary Errors,” has Peter de Sève (Cover) is an illustrator contributed to the magazine since 2005. and a character designer for animated films. His work can be seen in the up- Hua Hsu (Pop Music, p. 84) is the au- coming animated feature “Ice Age: Col- thor of “A Floating Chinaman: Fan- lision Course,” which will be released tasy and Failure Across the Pacific,” his this summer. first book, which comes out in June.

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SHADOW PUPPETS other businesses to sustain it (“The Bid- ding War,” March 7th). Aikins writes that George Packer, in his review of Michael Afghan trucking contractors hired by the Hayden’s memoir, “Playing to the Edge,” military paid of the Taliban to secure safe describes the shortcomings of the former passage through dangerous territories. Yet C.I.A. director (“Can You Keep a Secret?” the problem of money being used in un- March 7th). During the Vietnam War, anticipated ways in the course of a war is Hayden was an intelligence oicer, guiding not unique to foreign contractors. The pilots of B-52 bombers; I had a similar military has famously relied on Ameri- position when I worked with the Army, can private contractors in other engage- using electronic sensors to guide artillery. ments, such as Halliburton, in Iraq, and Although the capability to minimize col- in the process has made these companies lateral damage was praised at the time, extremely wealthy and given them access the technology was highly inaccurate. The to the channels of policymaking. Once language that Hayden has used to sup- we begin paying for war, we have little port drone warfare echoes what we heard control over where our money goes and during Vietnam, but similar problems with who benefits from it. precision persist. Automated warfare has Avi Frey allowed Hayden and others to stay above Brooklyn, N.Y. the din of combat: soldiers kill people in the 1 Middle East from their desktops in Ne- THE PRO-BUSINESS BIAS vada. As with Vietnam, we had the tech- nical advantage in Iraq and Afghanistan, James Surowiecki, in his assessment of but we did not win these wars. When we Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy, high- act from afar and from the shadows, we lights the Supreme Court rulings in busi- do much more harm than good. ness cases, which are often overlooked but Captain Bruce W. Rider have sweeping efects on our lives (“Court- U.S.A.F.R. (Ret.) ing Business,” March 7th). Although he de- Grapevine, Texas scribes the Roberts Court as “pro- business,” it has benefitted transnational corpo- Packer’s review ends by noting the par- rations at the expense of the smaller adoxical relationship between the public companies that make up the majority of and the intelligence community: we ex- American businesses. Surowiecki notes pect the agencies “to keep us safe, we resent that shortly after Scalia’s death the Dow them for their intrusions and their fail- Chemical Company, rather than go be- ures, and we need to believe that they fore the Court with one less corporate ally know better than we do in spite of all the on the bench, settled a major class-action evidence to the contrary.” Transparency suit. The plaintifs were not individuals; is impossible as long as these institutions most were small manufacturers that had continue to operate outside constitutional paid artificially inflated prices for mate- and international law, a situation that makes rials. America’s independent businesses— us less safe, not more. We turn friends into especially those serving local residents— enemies and enemies into terrorists by have more in common with average condoning torture and murder, fraud and ci t i zens than with the giant corpora- abuse. As a nation, we should acknowledge tions that hold so much sway over our the real cost of what we call safety. courts and legislative bodies. Catherine Lynn Zudak Jef Milchen 1Ann Arbor, Mich. Bozeman, Mont. WARRING INTERESTS • Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, Matthieu Aikins, in his article on the U.S. address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited military’s inadvertent funding of insur- for length and clarity, and may be published in gents in Afghanistan, touches on a broader any medium. We regret that owing to the volume issue: war is a business that requires many of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

APRIL 13 – 19, 2016 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

“In the cherry blossom’s shade there’s no such thing as a stranger,” the great Japanese poet Issa wrote. If so, there’s no better place to meet new friends this spring than the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. For the next month, more than two hundred lowering trees are in leeting bloom, representing around thirty species (bonsai count, too). Enjoy the view, but think twice before bringing a picnic. As another haiku master, Basho, observed: “From all these trees—in salads, soups, everywhere—cherry blossoms fall.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC THE THEATRE DANCE 1 1 New York City Ballet OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS NOW PLAYING The enticing spring season includes performances of both the evening-length “Jewels”—composed American Psycho Antlia Pneumatica of three ballets, each sufused with the palette Benjamin Walker plays the murderous inancier On the ranch in West Texas where they used to of a diferent gemstone—and, toward the end of Patrick Bateman, in Duncan Sheik and Roberto hang out in their youth, some almost-forty-year- the season, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one Aguirre-Sacasa’s musical adaptation of the Bret olds are making preparations for the funeral of of George Balanchine’s most appealing narrative Easton Ellis novel. Rupert Goold directs. (Schoen- one of their own. Around a large kitchen island, works. There will be a new Christopher Wheel- feld, 236 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.) too much food is being made, memories are don ballet, with music by George Gershwin, a being rehearsed, and old relationships are being composer with whom, if “An American in Paris” Cirque du Soleil—Paramour reëstablished. The playwright Anne Washburn is any indication, Wheeldon has a particular ain- The Canadian circus company mounts its new- (“Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play”) uses this sce- ity. Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering”—a est acrobatic spectacle, which tells the story of nario to launch into a static, cosmic meditation series of folk-infused pieces set to Chopin—re- a starlet choosing between love and art during on mystery and loss, and makes life very dii- turns, as does the sumptuous “Vienna Waltzes,” Hollywood’s golden age. (Lyric, 213 W. 42nd St. cult for her director (Ken Rus Schmoll), her cast, by Balanchine. And then, a novelty item: a new 877-250-2929. Previews begin April 16.) and her audience. The actors are called on, alter- work by the relatively unknown young choreogra- nately, to leave the stage and have their voices pher Nicolas Blanc, set to Mason Bates’s “Moth- Dear Evan Hansen piped into the auditorium, or to deliver the lines ership,” a big, bombastic symphony with both Michael Greif directs a new musical by Benj in complete or near-darkness. Washburn surely acoustic and electronic elements. • April 19 at Pasek, Justin Paul, and Steven Levenson, in had reasons for structuring the play this way, 7:30: “Jewels.” (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. which a lonely teen-ager (Ben Platt) becomes the but audiences may wonder why they needed to 212-496-0600. Through May 29.) accidental subject of viral Internet fame. (Second come to the theatre for an underlit lecture. (Play- Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422. In previews.) wrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.) “Transcendent Arts of Tibet and India” In the context of a festival of Tibetan and Indian The Father House Rules music, visual art, and dance at the Winter Gar- Frank Langella stars in a play by the French Unresolved childhood rivalries and festering cri- den, the New York-based choreographer, dancer, writer Florian Zeller, translated by Christo- ses of identity alict two pairs of Filipino-Amer- and teacher Malini Srinivasan will present a se- pher Hampton and directed by Doug Hughes ican siblings, in this soapy new play by A. Rey ries of twenty-minute group dances in the bharata- for Manhattan Theatre Club, about an eighty- Pamatmat, presented by Ma-Yi Theatre Com- natyam style. (The inal performance, on April 15, year-old man who is losing his grip on his life pany. Each pair features one dutiful child—a doc- is an evening-length solo by Srinivasan, accom- story. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212- tor, in fact, that archetype of assimilated success panied by a Carnatic and Hindustani music en- 239-6200. In previews. Opens April 14.) for the children of immigrants—and one artsy semble.) Highly codiied and dramatically rich, type. The dutiful ones resent their artsy coun- bharata natyam is perhaps the most widely per- Fully Committed terparts for being irresponsible; the free spirits formed of the many classical Indian dances. The Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays nearly forty char- resent the bookworms for going along with pa- events are free. (230 Vesey St. artsbrookield.com. acters at a trendy New York restaurant, in this rental pressures (the titular rules). Faced with April 11-15.) one-man comedy by Becky Mode, directed by the inevitable prospect of losing their parents, Jason Moore. (Lyceum, 149 W. 45th St. 212-239- made more urgent by health troubles, both pairs “Rhythm in Motion” 6200. In previews.) of siblings must learn to get along or risk losing The American Tap Dance Foundation’s annual their roots. Many squabbles later, they arrive at sampler of what’s new in tap choreography is un- Long Day’s Journey Into Night uneasy compromise. The inter- and intragener- rivalled, which is both laudable and unfortunate: Jessica Lange, Gabriel Byrne, John Gallagher, Jr., ational conlicts that Pamatmat depicts are all some competition might help to raise standards. and Michael Shannon play the dysfunctional Ty- too real, and perennially pertinent, but the play’s As it is, the interesting and the extraordinary are rone family, in the Roundabout’s revival of the meandering plot and relentlessly emotive argu- mixed in with the lacklustre. This year’s likely Eugene O’Neill drama, directed by Jonathan ments make it somewhat tiresome. (HERE, 145 plus side includes a piece by the odd and orig- Kent. (American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101. Through inal Warren Craft, a performance by the char- 212-719-1300. In previews.) April 16.) ismatically dorky Caleb Teicher, and a piece by a woman those two fellows often work for: the Shuffle Along King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great MacArthur-award-winning Michelle Dorrance. Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Cycle of Kings (Theatre at the 14th Street Y, 344 E. 14th St. 212- Billy Porter star in a musical about the making of The last time the Royal Shakespeare Company 780-0800. April 13-17.) a popular African-American stage show from the brought an ambitious slate of plays to New nineteen-twenties. Directed by George C. Wolfe York, in 2011, the results were less than tri- Miami City Ballet and choreographed by Savion Glover. (Music umphant. But the R.S.C. has gone once more This is the irst visit by the full company since Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.) unto the breech, conveying a quartet of history 2009, and since Lourdes Lopez took the helm, in plays—“Richard II,” “Henry IV, Parts I and II,” 2012. It seems not to have lost its distinctive ef- Tuck Everlasting and “Henry V”—and a singularly uncomfort- fervescence, and it comes bearing gems. Three Casey Nicholaw directs a musical adaptation of able throne to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, programs show of impressive recent pieces, not Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 children’s novel, about a under the direction of Gregory Doran. To judge yet seen in New York, by the in-demand cho- family that accesses eternal life from a magi- by “Henry V,” the company is waging a much reographers Alexei Ratmansky (“Symphonic cal spring. The cast includes Carolee Carmello, stronger campaign this time. The production Dances”), Liam Scarlett (“Viscera”), and Jus- Andrew Keenan-Bolger, and Terrence Mann. is accessible and economical, though not with- tin Peck (“Heatscape”), along with several of the (Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. In out stylistic lourishes. Oliver Ford Davies, in Balanchine works that remain the foundation of previews.) contemporary dress, provides a witty and rue- the company’s repertoire. (David H. Koch, Lincoln ful chorus, transforming the theatre’s worthy Center. 212-496-0600. April 13-17.) Waitress scafold into the ields of Agincourt. Alex Has- Jessie Mueller stars in a new musical based on sell is a somewhat reserved king, though his per- Vicky Shick and Dancers the 2007 ilm, about a small-town waitress who formance gains in magnitude as the play pro- “Another Spell” is the latest dance by Shick, a enters a baking contest, with music and lyrics by gresses, and he is the rare man to look plausible magician of subtlety, nuance, beguiling eccen- Sara Bareilles. Diane Paulus directs. (Brooks At- in a leather jerkin. (BAM’s Harvey Theatre, 651 tricity, and evanescence. The sets and costumes, kinson, 256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929. In previews.) Fulton St., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100.) some recycled from earlier works, are by Barbara

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 5 DANCE

Kilpatrick, who, with the sound designer Elise Kermani, is always in tune with Shick’s sensi- bility. The cast—all female, intergenerational, and terriic—includes Heather Olson, Omagbitse NIGHT LIFE Omagbemi, and the unassuming wizard herself. (Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111. April 14-16.)

Arcane Collective Samuel Beckett’s novels “Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable” would seem unlikely source material for a dance, but that bare, sepulchral tril- ogy has inspired at least two: “Return to Absence” and a follow-up, “Ebb.” The collective—run by the Butoh artist Oguri and the Momix alumna Mor- leigh Steinberg—works without text, somewhat in the mode of a nonlinear silent movie, complete with slapstick and stone sucking. (New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St. 212-924-0077. April 14-16.)

Nora Chipaumire Muscular, powerful, imposing: the adjectives used to describe this Zimbabwe-born dancer and cho- reographer are often ones more commonly asso- ciated with men. In “Portrait of Myself as My Fa- ther,” set inside a boxing ring, she takes on ideas of black masculinity directly, if skeptically. The work, a première in Montclair University’s Peak Performances series, is paired with Chipaumire’s short ilm “Afro Promo #1: Kinglady.” (Alexander Kasser Theatre, 1 Normal Ave., Montclair, N.J. 973- 655-5112. April 14-17.)

Martha Graham Dance Company America’s oldest modern-dance troupe, founded in 1926, soldiers on, lately attempting to stay relevant Root Progression The album isn’t coy about the im- by juxtaposing Graham’s masterworks with commis- plications of its title: Spalding, having After four years, Esperanza Spalding sions from lesser, mostly European, choreographers. upended expectations more than once, Tepid oferings by Mats Ek, Andonis Foniadakis, reimagines herself yet again. and Nacho Duato are joined by a première from the has released nothing like it before. The Canadian veteran Marie Chouinard. The April 18 For many fans, Esperanza Spalding’s shape-shifting songs leap between fran- program features another première, by Pontus Lid- story starts with her 2011 Grammy tic spoken interludes, thumping art- berg, and a guest appearance by Aurélie Dupont, a former star of the Paris Opera Ballet who was re- award for best new artist; it’s a founda- rock hybrids, and intrepid jazz numbers cently appointed its artistic director. (City Center, tion that she has both built on and that tackle subjects as opaque as theol- 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. April 14-18.) evaded. The award, which she certainly ogy and as knotted as beauty. Spalding “Fridays at Noon” / Brian Seibert deserved but didn’t need, has been in- wields beauty to reject it, critical both Seibert, a Times critic (and longtime Goings On terpreted in countless ways: as a bid for of what she calls pop’s “cult of About Town contributor), will speak about his credibility on the part of the Recording beauty”—which waves her in for per- recently published history of tap, “What the Eye Hears.” Born from a crossing of paths of the de- Academy; as a step toward the center formances at the Oscars and the White scendants of African slaves and immigrants from for jazz, a genre that can seem paralyzed House—and of the expectation that the British Isles, tap is a quintessential New World by its history; and as a huge upset for jazz be aesthetically palatable to con- art form, whose story touches on race, appropria- tion, and the evolution of American popular art. Justin Bieber. ventional audiences. Songs like “Good In addition to reading from the book, Seibert For her part, Spalding—who will Lava” and “One” veer of course with has invited the young tappers Roxane Butterly, perform at the Apollo Theatre, in Har- discordant guitars and apocalyptic Kazu Kumagai, and Caleb Teicher to perform— and there’s always a chance that the author will lem, on April 14—continued on track. choirs, a tactic that’s almost counterin- join in. (92nd Street Y, Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. In 2012, the bassist and composer, cel- tuitive for a vocalist and composer who 212-415-5500. April 15.) ebrated in her own corner of the music could so easily stick to pretty. Lyrically, American Ballet Theatre Studio Company industry since her teens, released “Radio even the most straightforward stabs at This ensemble of sixteen constitutes a kind of Music Society,” a tongue-in-cheek rec- romantic platitudes aren’t without bite: inishing school for promising dancers from the ord that retained its jazz chops while “Faded clichés and makeup / dancing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, as well as a pool of potential recruits for the main company. glancing toward mainstream fans, who and singing scripted delights,” she sings Two separate programs of (mostly) contempo- now noticed her afro, leaving aiciona- on “Unconditional Love.” “Every act rary works include Alexei Ratmansky’s “Bolero,” dos to wonder: Was Spalding the miss- ends in breakup / That same old boring a sleek, sporty piece for six, set to Ravel’s famous score, as well as new works by Gemma Bond (a ing link that would reinstate jazz’s place story I’ve played too many nights.” promising young choreographer who is currently on the main stage? If her latest album, There is a new story now, Spalding in- a dancer in the main company) and Ethan Stiefel, “Emily’s D+Evolution,” is any indica- sists—the one that she wants to play. a former A.B.T. star who went on to direct the Royal New Zealand Ballet. (Joyce Theatre, 175 tion, she has less interest in lag bearing

Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. April 15-17.) than in lag burning. —Matthew Trammell HEIDI CHISHOLM BY ILLUSTRATION

6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 1NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP rap classics, before a long tenure touring with both jazz groups and rap bands. This month, Musicians and night-club proprietors lead Martin released “Velvet Portraits,” continuing complicated lives; it’s advisable to check to braid together strands of hip-hop, soul, and in advance to conirm engagements. jazz. (National Sawdust, 80 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 646-779-8455. April 15.) 79.5 This slow-paced, psychedelic outit is enjoy- 1 ing a weekly residency at C’mon Everybody, JAZZ AND STANDARDS a pleasantly snug bar, bordering Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy, that’s always good for a night of Andy Biskin music that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. While the clarinet may not be experiencing The six-person ensemble includes four women, a full-bore resurgence, it certainly appears in and the cooing choral arrangements on its 2012 jazz circles with increasing frequency these twelve-inch “Boogie/OOO” sound like Donna days. Biskin was ahead of the curve, long gifted Summer and Evelyn (Champagne) King playing at balancing his musical-Americana ixation a Steve Rubell club. After a fan-sourced fund- with side trips into regions unexplored. For ing campaign, the band is polishing its début this Stone residency, Biskin fronts an assem- album, and, with little recorded material re- bly of idiosyncratic small groups, including leased, its precious new tunes may be best ex- the similarly inclined clarinet quartet Reed perienced in the lesh. (325 Franklin Ave., Brook- Basket. (Avenue C at 2nd St. thestonenyc.com. lyn. cmoneverybody.com. Wednesdays, April 13-27.) April 12-17.)

Alex G and Porches David Fiuczynski This doubleheader might be the best indie af- Though it may be lacking in poetic elegance, fair that the city has to ofer this spring. The “Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian MicroJam” is an accu- songwriter-guitarist Alex Giannascoli has a rate description of the musical mélange of mi- golden ear for concise, shy phrasing and casu- crotonality, hip-hop, Messiaen-inspired bird-call ally sewn arrangements that ind intimacy in a tones, and Eastern strains stufed into Fiuczyn- morning riding shotgun or late nights lounging ski’s latest album. The guitarist spent his late on a buddy’s Persian rug. Even when the Dom- childhood in Germany, before studying at the ino signee skirts toward the sinister, it’s with New England Conservatory and going on to play day-one friends: “I was waiting for a baggie / a on more than ninety-ive albums and with several powder bunny,” he whispers on the scratchy ensembles. Fiuczynski takes pointed advantage “Trick” opener, “Memory.” “I have a buddy I of the fretless appenditure of his double-necked grew up with / He hooked it up for me.” Aaron guitar, and will be joined by a like-minded tonal Maine’s Art Deco R. & B. on “Pool,” the new adventurer, the saxophonist Rudresh Mahan- album from his band, Porches, is an equal plea- thappa. (Shapeshifter Lab, 18 Whitwell Pl., Brook- sure—highlights like “Mood” and “Glow” nail lyn. 646-820-9452. April 14.) soft-focus keys and rubbery kick drums that will make this midsized venue feel no big- Catherine Russell ger than a irst-semester single. (Music Hall of Versatile to the core, this jazz-and-blues vocalist Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 718-486- collaborated with David Bowie just before his re- 5400. April 13.) tirement from the stage, in 2004. Here she looks back further, honoring the swing-era arranger Goldie Sy Oliver. Joined by La Tanya Hall and Caro- Legacies like that of Cliford Joseph Price, known lyn Leonhart, Russell will take on Oliver’s vocal to fans as Goldie, are emblematic of how po- charts, originally devised for male trios and later tent the globalization of street arts and cultures rearranged for a female cohort. The instrumen- can be in music’s current borderless moment. tal support team includes the guitarist Matt Mu- “Inner City Life,” from his 1995 album, “Time- nisteri and the trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso. (Appel less,” brought drum-and-bass music to the Lon- Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th St. don masses, drawing on reggae dub culture and 212-721-6500. April 15-16.) breakbeat sampling, among other inluences. After years spent as a B-boy and a graiti artist, Lea Salonga Goldie launched the seminal record label Metal- Tempus fugit indeed—it’s been almost twenty- headz, in 1994, and enlisted collaborators like seven years since the teen-age Salonga irst David Bowie and Afrika Bambaataa for music turned heads, in the mega-hit musical “Miss and ilm projects. Building on the bridges that Saigon.” Now a mature and respected veteran, igures like Goldie helped solidify, London, Ja- she has a swath of Broadway and international maica, and New York are again engaged in riv- productions under her belt, and is sure to ofer a eting musical dialogue, and this edition of Chi- few samples, aided here by a spare guitar-and-pi- natown’s beloved rave series Dark Disco couldn’t ano team. (54 Below, 254 W. 54th St. 646-476- have been better timed. (88 Palace, 88 East Broad- 3551. April 12-17.) way. 212-941-8886. April 16.) Cecil Taylor Terrace Martin The world may never catch up with Taylor. The Martin is coming down from a whirlwind year: perennially avant-garde pianist and composer can after becoming one of Snoop Dogg’s most still, at eighty-seven years old, produce disjunc- sought-after producers, in the early aughts, the tive, utterly personalized music that will shake Los Angeles saxophonist and composer was you to your socks. This welcome retrospective brought into the fold at Kendrick Lamar’s TDE inds him playing with domestic collaborators label, where he helped to craft many of the jazz (Henry Grimes, Andrew Cyrille, William Parker), elements on Lamar’s celebrated 2015 album, “To as well as with equally committed European Pimp a Butterly.” The thirty-six-year-old spent enthusiasts (Enrico Rava, Tristan Honsinger). his teen-age years bouncing between eight-hour (Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort St. 212-570- jazz-practice sessions and studying West Coast 3600. April 15-24.)

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 7 MOVIES

An American woman travels to a remote Peruvian village for spiritual healing in “Icaros: A Vision,” directed by Leonor Caraballo and Matteo Norzi.

The World’s a Stage blur the boundaries between Arthur’s Twice” is focussed on a New York im- private life and his onscreen persona, prov troupe that’s threatened by the Performance and fantasy in the Tribeca probing wounds and provoking reve- centrifugal force of success when several Film Festival. lations that go far beyond Arthur’s in- members are tapped to audition for a The copious programming of the tentions or control. The meta-iction “Saturday Night Live”-like show. Tribeca Film Festival (April 13-24) blends a quietly antic self-satire and a Keegan-Michael Key has a drolly stretches quality a little thin, but the best kaleidoscopic twist on the very concept ambiguous turn as a self-anointed star, ilms in this year’s edition are worthwhile of personal ilmmaking with the inti- but Gillian Jacobs, as a powerhouse viewing, starting with “Actor Martinez,” mate astonishments of the directors’ performer tormented by self-doubt, is a tough-minded yet wryly ironic behind- do-it-yourself artistry. the ilm’s movingly dramatic center. the-scenes look at the personal relation- The actor’s life also comes to the fore Fantasies of a diferent sort are at ships that can make or poison a movie. in two other distinctive ilms. In Sophia the core of “Icaros: A Vision,” in which The title character is Arthur Mar- Takal’s “Always Shine,” two twenty- Angelina (Ana Cecilia Stieglitz), a tinez (played by a man of the same something actresses and best friends in young American woman, travels to a name), a Denver computer repairman Los Angeles, Anna (Mackenzie Davis) village in the Peruvian Amazon to take who dreams of a career as an actor. He and Beth (Caitlin FitzGerald), spend ayahuasca under the care of shamans recruits two prominent independent a weekend in an isolated house in Big in a rustic, hostel-like compound. ilmmakers, Nathan Silver and Mike Sur. Beth is a rising star, albeit in horror Meanwhile, the work of a young sha- Ott, to make a movie based on his life, movies that hardly excite her; Anna is man (Arturo Izquierdo) begins to in- in which he stars. The directors—play- still waiting tables, and their achieve- trude on his private life. The directors, ing themselves—ilm their discussions ment gap opens an abyss of jealousy Leonor Caraballo and Matteo Norzi, with the actor, intermingling the true and vulnerability. The ilm (written by ilm the outpost and its wild (and in- story of Arthur’s life (including his ro- Takal’s husband, Lawrence Michael creasingly despoiled) surroundings with mantic troubles) with its dramatization. Levine, who co-stars) is a sort of ilm- an ecstatic stillness, and they capture Then, Lindsay Burdge, a professional noir cosplay, in which Anna and Beth’s the medicinally induced hallucinations actress who also plays herself, arrives— creative passions magnify their conlicts with a visual imagination of rare spec- and turns a skeptical eye on the direc- to tragic dimensions. Mike Birbiglia’s iicity and fury.

tors’ risky methods, which (as she says) lovingly detailed comedy “Don’t Think —Richard Brody CONIBO PRODUCTIONS COURTESY

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 1 MOVIES OPENING same venue. Despite Hawke’s intensely committed Everybody Wants Some!! performance, Budreau gets more from the story’s The new ilm from Richard Linklater is his irst since Barbershop: The Next Cut A comedy sequel, about sidemen, such as a record producer (Callum Keith “Boyhood,” in 2014, and one of his sprightliest. It is a group of barbers and their customers, who join Rennie), a probation oicer (Tony Nappo), and Ba- set at a Texas college on the threshold of a new school forces to protect the community from gangsters. ker’s father (Stephen McHattie). The movie ofers year, with freshmen like Jake (Blake Jenner) arriv- Directed by Malcolm D. Lee; starring Ice Cube, a more insightful view of the music business than ing, in mild trepidation, to begin the next install- Cedric the Entertainer, and Regina Hall. Opening of Baker’s art.—Richard Brody (In limited release.) ment of their lives. Classes start in a matter of days, April 15. (In wide release.) • Criminal Kevin Cost- and, until then, pleasure is unleashed. Jake, who is on ner stars in this action ilm, as a violent convict The Boss the baseball team, dwells in a house infested with his whose mind is implanted with the memories of a Early in this boisterous and sentimental comedy, Mi- teammates: partygoers like Roper (Ryan Guzman), dead C.I.A. agent (Ryan Reynolds). Directed by chelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy), a high-powered Dale (J. Quinton Johnson), and the silver-tongued Ariel Vromen; co-starring Gal Gadot, Alice Eve, motivational speaker, thrills a packed arena with her Finn (Glen Powell). Some are still callow boys, and Gary Oldman. Opening April 15. (In wide re- hectic and reckless exhortations to inancial success. while others, like the hyper-competitive McReyn- lease.) • Down There Chantal Akerman directed this Ofstage, Michelle is solipsistically indiferent to the olds (Tyler Hoechlin), already bristle like grown essay-ilm, about her 2006 visit to Israel. Opening needs of others; she’s feared but hated, and no one men. The year is 1980, and songs from the period lit- April 15. (Anthology Film Archives.) • The Jungle Book laments her downfall in an insider-trading scandal. ter the soundtrack, but Linklater’s happiest gift is to A live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Upon her release from prison, with nowhere else transform the action—you can barely call it a plot— about an orphaned boy who is raised by animals to go, she crashes on the couch of Claire (Kristen into a dance to the music of time. He makes room in the wild. Directed by Jon Favreau; starring Neel Bell), her former assistant. Babysitting for Claire’s for each character to breathe, so that no one should Sethi; with the voices of Bill Murray, Ben King- tween-age daughter, Rachel (Ella Anderson), Mi- feel left out; and, just when the movie seems in dan- sley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, and Scarlett Jo- chelle decides to turn Girl Scout-like cookie sales ger of slackening into a free-for-all, he introduces hansson. Opening April 15. (In wide release.) • The into big business, and then helps Claire boost home- Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a performing-arts major, Measure of a Man Reviewed in Now Playing. Open- made brownies into a rapidly rising startup—though who beguiles Jake and bestows a measure of calm. ing April 15. (Metrograph.) • Sing Street A comedy, not without a heaping of self-interest. Meanwhile, The inale, like that of Linklater’s “Dazed and Con- set in Dublin in 1985, about teen-agers who start a Michelle gets tangled in an unresolved relation- fused,” partakes of an exhausted bliss. With Wyatt rock band. Directed by John Carney; starring Fer- ship with a competitor and ex-lover, Ronald a.k.a. Russell, as the in-house hippie.—A.L. (4/11/16) (In dia Walsh-Peelo and Aidan Gillen. Opening April Renault (Peter Dinklage), and the action veers of wide release.) 15. (In limited release.) • Wrong Move Reviewed needlessly into action-caper territory. The movie is in Now Playing. Opening April 15. (IFC Center.) all too neat a package for McCarthy’s exuberantly Hello, My Name Is Doris inventive comic artistry. As directed by Ben Fal- Michael Showalter’s amiable new comedy features 1 cone (her husband), the actors are ilmed without a taut setup that packs howls of anguish in its con- NOW PLAYING much attention to comic timing or framing; Mc- trived simplicity. Doris Miller (Sally Field), a seven- Carthy’s mighty talent needs sharper provocation. tyish bookkeeper, is a ish out of water in her cubicle Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice With Kathy Bates, who delivers wild undertones at a hip young media company in Chelsea. She’s un- It had to happen. Anything Marvel can do, DC Com- in grand understatements.—R.B. (In wide release.) married and has no children, having lived her entire ics can do better, or, at any rate, no worse. That is the supposition behind the new Zack Snyder ilm, which is every bit as tranquil and as understated as earlier Snyder ilms. (Think “300” and “Sucker Punch.”) Whereas Iron Man and his fellow-Avengers are gath- ered in amity, however, the tone here is one of violent discord: Superman (Henry Cavill), forever striving to locate his lost personality, comes to blows with Batman (Ben Aleck), who bufs and pumps him- self for the occasion. The cause of their tif is never entirely clear, but it is heightened by Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), whose hobbies include kryptonite theft and building a homemade monster. The movie is two and a half hours long, yet feels closer to ive. The dialogue ights to be heard above the crunching soundtrack and, more often than not, loses; let us be thankful for small mercies. The one bright spot is the arrival of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who, having been shut out of the action until the inal reel, seems in no mood to be messed with. On paper, the supporting cast must have looked unbeatable: Amy Adams, Holly Hunter, Diane Lane, Lau- rence Fishburne, and Jeremy Irons.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 4/4/16.) (In wide release.)

Born to Be Blue This bio-pic about the jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) focusses on two piv- otal episodes in the musician’s career, both from the mid-sixties. One, Baker’s performance as himself in a dramatic movie about his own life, is ictional; the other, a brutal beating that cost Baker his front teeth and forced him to rebuild his technique from scratch, actually happened. As told by the writer and direc- tor Robert Budreau, Baker and his co-star on the ilm shoot, an actress named Jane (Carmen Ejogo), begin a relationship that helps Baker kick his long- time heroin habit. Meanwhile, Baker is haunted by a 1954 performance at a New York club where his ego was delated by a lacerating word from Miles Davis (Kedar Brown); after recovering from the grave in- jury to his mouth, he attempts his comeback at the

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 9 MOVIES life in a house in Staten Island with her mother, Midnight Special theatrical release. Wenders’s modern Wilhelm who, at the start of the ilm, has just died. Doris— The director Jef Nichols has a Spielbergian knack (Rüdiger Vogler) is a young bourgeois man with a whimsical, hypersensitive, socially awkward—is for working with children, and his latest fable is cen- great record collection and a head full of frustrated burdened by her sudden solitude when, in an ele- tered on an eight-year-old boy named Alton Meyer ambitions, who escapes from his family home into vator at work, she bumps into John Fremont (Max (Jaeden Lieberher). Alton is blessed—or burdened— an artist’s life. En route to Bonn (West Germa- Greenield), the handsome and charming twenty- with extraordinary powers. He can track the path of ny’s capital), Wilhelm joins a group of performers, something new art director in her oice. She’s in- satellites in his head and mimic a radio station, word including the acrobat Mignon (Nastassja Kinski, stantly smitten, and takes unusual measures—aided for word, without turning the radio on. At times, a in her irst ilm) and the actress Therese (Hanna by Vivian (Isabella Acres), the teen-age granddaugh- ray of blue light blazes from his eyes, conveying in- Schygulla). Wenders grafts the novelistic frame- ter of her best friend, Roz (Tyne Daly)—to insinu- efable visions to anyone on the receiving end. For work onto a road movie that’s a virtual documen- ate herself into John’s life. Showalter, who co-wrote years, he has been in the hands of a religious cult, but, tary of West German sights and moods. What he the ilm with Laura Terruso, keeps the tone senti- as the date of his apparent destiny nears, he is borne inds is a country that’s hemmed in by its pros- mentally comedic, blending touches of wit (Doris’s away by his father (Michael Shannon). Together with perity and burdened by the undigested weight of fantasies), whimsy (Doris’s excursion to a rock club a loyal sidekick (Joel Edgerton), they drive to a ren- its horriic history. With a contemplative eye for in Williamsburg), and drama (Doris’s relationship dezvous with Alton’s mother (Kirsten Dunst), who cityscapes, he sees the sleek forms of postwar Ger- with her brother). But within the perky antics is be- hasn’t seen her son in a long while. On their trail are man architecture as mirrors within mirrors that wildered rage at the prospect of aging, solitude, and desperate members of the cult, plus the F.B.I. and a stile thought by means of style. Wenders looks irrelevance; the best thing about the ilm is that it thoughtful fellow from the N.S.A. (Adam Driver), at young rockers through a lens of high culture has no answers.—R.B. (In limited release.) who starts out skeptical but winds up pleading to and applies the theatrical fervor of the Enlight- come along. The climax, though spectacular, is some- enment to the rumpled rounds of modern busk- The Measure of a Man thing of a letdown—unavoidably so, given the grave ers. Linking Germany’s grand literary heritage This sociological drama, starring Vincent Lindon tension that has prevailed thus far. Yet the movie, to the indelible national stain of the Nazi-era de- as Thierry, an unemployed machinist in a French Nichols’s fourth, is a worthy addition to his stud- pravities, he turns a self-consciously casual ram- suburb, is remarkably divided; it’s two movies in ies in anxiety and dread, personiied by Shannon’s ble into a vast soul-searching.—R.B. (IFC Center.) one. The irst story—about Thierry’s frustrations troubled face.—A.L. (3/28/16) (In limited release.) with a government employment center, his con- Zootopia licts with former colleagues who are suing the Miles Ahead Disney’s new animated ilm is about a rabbit cop, company that laid them of, and his exertions to Don Cheadle as Miles Davis: it’s an excellent it— eager and optimistic: Thumper with a badge. Judy help his bright and disabled teen-age son—feels the most mercurial of actors playing the lord of Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), raised on a like a well-meaning but trite composite. But when ceaseless invention. Cheadle, who also directed the peaceful farm, comes to the city to ight crime, un- Thierry gets hired as a security guard in a hyper- ilm and wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigel- dismayed by being the smallest mammal on the market, the movie becomes a masterly quasi-doc- man, rightly judges that no movie could contain force. As in “The Lion King,” the world presented umentary police procedural, illed with hypnot- the epic sprawl of his hero’s life. (Davis’s 1989 au- by the movie is entirely human-free, although, in ically lurid technical and intimate details of the tobiography makes the efort and leaves the reader this case, no friction exists between predators and detection and punishment of crime, however petty. utterly wiped out.) The focus is narrowed, there- the lesser beasts. In Zootopia, everybody lives pretty (Scenes of video surveillance ofer guilty thrills.) fore, to a lurid patch of the late nineteen-seven- much in harmony—a mushy conceit, yet the direc- Noting the major impact of minor charges on the ties, during which Davis has gone ominously quiet tors, Byron Howard and Rich Moore, take care to lives of the accused, Thierry confronts his com- and become a near-recluse. He is doorstepped by a suggest how vulnerable such peace can be. Only by a plicity in a system that, he knows, also helps his scuzzy reporter (Ewan McGregor), and high jinks whisker is it preserved, thanks to Judy and her side- bosses to shed unwanted employees. This moral ensue, including a shootout and a car chase. The ep- kick, a hustling fox (Jason Bateman), who have two crisis is the director Stéphane Brizé’s point, but isode is breezy enough, but it’s contrived for the days to crack a diicult case; their comradeship, un- by focussing on it too closely he misses his mov- sake of the movie, and you feel bound to ask: When likely as it sounds, is a furry sequel to that of Nick ie’s strange, ambiguous resonances. Most of Lin- a personal history is packed with real incident and Nolte and Eddie Murphy, in “48 Hrs.” There are no don’s fellow-actors are nonprofessionals who do crazed with creative adventure, as Davis’s was, why songs, apart from those performed by a superstar ga- their real-life jobs onscreen, and the intrinsic fas- bother to dream up something new? Much of the zelle (Shakira), but the beat of the movie barely dips, cination of their performances—and of the world zip of the drama comes from lashbacks to earlier sustained by a steady profusion of gags. With the of work itself—opens exotic speculative vistas. In and less stricken times, when he met and married voice of Idris Elba.—A.L. (3/14/16) (In wide release.) French.—R.B. (Metrograph.) Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Even there, however, the music tends to pepper the story in its 1 Meet Marlon Brando and fragments. For a more sustained and lowing REVIVALS AND FESTIVALS During the New York press junket for the ilm demonstration of Davis’s genius, try his heartbreak- “Morituri,” in 1965, its star, Marlon Brando, re- ing score for Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gal- Titles with a dagger are reviewed. ceived a series of journalists for brief interviews lows,” from 1958.—A.L. (4/11/16) (In limited release.) at a table in the Hampshire House hotel and toyed Anthology Film Archives “Entangled Forms.” April 16 with them gleefully and mercilessly. This 1966 doc- Wrong Move at 7:30: “Little by Little” (1971, Jean Rouch). • April umentary, by Albert and David Maysles, captures This 1975 drama by Wim Wenders, a loose adap- 17 at 7: “Bamako” (2006, Abderrahmane Sissako). Brando’s transformation of the setup, through tation of the primordial bildungsroman, Goethe’s BAM Cinématek The ilms of Chantal Akerman. the sheer force of his personality, into a grandly “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” is one of his April 13 at 7:30: “Toute Une Nuit” (1982). • April ironic variety of performance art. Brando brazenly best ilms, but it’s only now getting its irst U.S. 15 at 7:15 and 9:30: “Night and Day” (1991). • April lirts with several female journalists, compliment- 1 18 at 9:30: “Chantal Akerman by Chantal Aker- ing them on their appearance, and aggressively man” (1996). • April 19 at 7: “Dis-Moi” (1980). Film questions male interviewers about their looks, THE FRONT ROW Forum “The Maysles & Co.” April 15 at 2:20 and too (with particular attention to their ingernails 7:50 and April 16 at 7:10 and 10:45: “What’s Hap- and their clothing). Challenging the interview- pening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.” (1964). • April ers’ readiness to act as “hucksters,” Brando mocks 17 at 2:40 and April 18 at 3:50 and 9:50: “Showman” the blatantly promotional conversations with (1963) and “Meet Marlon Brando.” F • April 19 at sly or lamboyant sarcasm and disarmingly sin- 6:30: “A Visit with Truman Capote” (1966). Film cere relections. In a streetside interview, Brando Society of Lincoln Center “Art of the Real.” April speaks French with a French interviewer, and in 16 at 6:15: “The Thoughts That Once We Had” response to a political question about the circum- (2015, Thom Andersen), followed by a Q. & A. stances of black people in the United States, he with the director. • April 19 at 9: “A German Youth” beckons to a black woman who’s passing by and (2015, Jean-Gabriel Périot). Metrograph In re- poses the question to her. The resulting portrait vival. April 15-18 (call for showtimes): “Los Sures” of Brando—sexual, intellectual, aggressive, vul- (1984, Diego Echeverria). • April 17 at 3:15 and nerable, seductive, rebellious—shows him creat- A video discussion of James Gray’s “The Immigrant,” 5:15: Short ilms by Julie Dash, including “Illu- ing a greater character than any ever written for from 2013, a romantic crime drama set on the sions” (1982). Museum of Modern Art “In revival.”

him: himself.—R.B. (Film Forum; April 17-18.) Lower East Side in 1921, in our digital edition. April 14 at 1:30: “Variety” (1983, Bette Gordon). RESOURCE KOBAL/ART

10 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016

1 OPERA

Metropolitan Opera CLASSICAL MUSIC Despite reports that some members of the company would like to see James Levine retire as music di- rector, the current revival of “Simon Boccanegra” proves that the orchestra still plays Verdi for him like it does for few others, with sensuous phras- ing and richly saturated color. The beloved tenor Plácido Domingo is dramatically suited to the title role, but his increasingly weathered voice lacks the dark baritonal hue required to blend into Verdi’s sumptuous orchestral texture. Joseph Calleja and Lianna Haroutounian, as the opera’s tenor-soprano couple, are an ardent, fresh-voiced pair, and Fer- ruccio Furlanetto and Brian Mulligan deliver fe- rocious performances as the Boccanegra’s nemeses. (April 13 at 7:30 and April 16 at 8.) • The late Patrice Chéreau was a giant among opera directors: his work in the nineteen-seventies and eighties pop- ularized the now-standard practice of reimagin- ing an opera’s setting in new and revealing ways. His production of “Elektra,” Richard Strauss’s Ex- pressionist take on Greek mythology’s most dys- functional family, inally comes to the Met, after stops in Aix and Milan. The company has assem- bled a world-class team for the occasion, with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen leading Waltraud Meier, Adrianne Pieczonka, Eric Owens, and the Aaron Copland, best known for his populist works, also composed in a more rugged modernist style. prëeminent dramatic soprano Nina Stemme (in the title role). (April 14 and April 18 at 8.) • Pucci- ni’s “La Bohème,” perhaps the world’s most pop- A Man in Full and cuddly. Commissioned by the Lou- ular opera, never disappears from the Met sched- isville Orchestra, it is an orchestration ule for long. Now it’s back, with a promising young Michael Tilson Thomas and the San cast that features Maria Agresta and Bryan Hymel, of his famously jagged Piano Variations Francisco Symphony perform Copland. and Ailyn Pérez and Levente Molnár, as the two (1930), an uncompromising solo work. leading couples; Dan Ettinger conducts. (April 15 at In the nineteen-nineties, those days Copland had Socialist sympathies, but 8.) • The inal two performances of David McVic- ar’s new production of Donizetti’s Tudor tragedy of peace and prosperity and Pax Ameri- he was also a savvy businessman, and “Roberto Devereux,” a hurricane of great singing, cana, Aaron Copland (1900-90) was the orchestrating the work was a strategic feature Sondra Radvanovsky (an awesome Eliza- beau ideal whom young American com- move, allowing him to reassert his mod- beth I), Matthew Polenzani (an emotionally fear- less Roberto), Elīna Garanča (an exquisitely sung posers strove to emulate. The tonal-atonal ernist bona ides at a time when more Sara), and Mariusz Kwiecien (a robust Duke of split in classical music, embedded in Cold populist styles had acquired a Soviet Nottingham). The conductor Maurizio Benini is War cultural politics, no longer seemed tinge. The Piano Concerto (1926), of- careful never to drown out the singers, but keeps the musical drama simmering nonetheless. (April 16 urgent, and the values that shone from fered with the soloist Inon Barnatan, is at 1 and April 19 at 7:30.) (Metropolitan Opera House. such mid-century scores as “Appalachian arguably Copland’s deepest engagement 212-362-6000.) Spring,” the Clarinet Concerto, and with jazz—and with Gershwin, whose BAM: “Les Fêtes Vénitiennes” “Fanfare for the Common Man”—clar- “Rhapsody in Blue” is a close relation. The conductor William Christie, the paramount ity, optimism, and impregnable crafts- It’s a far more ingratiating piece than practitioner of French Baroque opera, joins forces manship—were hugely attractive. the Variations, but its abstract and un- with the director Robert Carsen for André Cam- pra’s eighteenth-century ode to the often illicit Such works are a permanent part of sentimental treatment of jazz and rag- pleasures of Venetian carnival. Taking the form the American repertory. But now, in an time inluences demands an attentive of ive discrete vignettes, each with its own story era dominated by terrorism, environmen- audience. line, Campra’s saucy yet elegantly composed opéra-ballet fuses singing and dance in a single tal anxiety, cultural fragmentation, and The third work, “Inscape” (1967), meta-entertainment; Christie conducts his es- economic inequality, members of a written at the close of Copland’s career, teemed early-music ensemble, Les Arts Floris- younger generation—which takes dysto- is fully twelve-tone and thus, in a way, sants. (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Ave. 718-636-4100. April 14 and April 16 at 7:30 pian cynicism as its birthright and rock- the most “modern” of the set. (The title and April 17 at 2.) inlected minimalism as its “common is a word, invented by Gerard Manley 1 practice”—ind such artistic values rather Hopkins, denoting a semi-mystical state ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES quaint. How itting, then, that the conduc- that reveals a hidden pattern of order.) tor Michael Tilson Thomas’s upcoming Yet its granular dissonances mask a gen- New York Philharmonic concert with the San Francisco Symphony, tler sensibility. The three qualities that The distinguished Dutch maestro Bernard Hait- ink brings a uniquely understated yet command- at Carnegie Hall (April 13), reveals a com- mark any great Copland piece—the ing touch to Mahler, a composer whom the Phil- poser far removed from the sunny populist lyrical, the kinetic, and the proclama- harmonic rightfully claims as its own. This time, whom most audiences know. tory—are still there, glowing beneath he guides the orchestra in the composer’s most transcendent score, the Ninth Symphony. (David No one could accuse Copland’s Or- the shadows of dusk. Geen Hall. 212-875-5656. April 14 and April 19 at chestral Variations (1957) of being warm —Russell Platt 7:30 and April 15-16 at 8.) MIKKEL SOMMER BY ILLUSTRATION

12 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 CLASSICAL MUSIC

Accademia Bizantina ica”). Further concerts, held at Dixon Place, down- The exuberant Italian chamber orchestra, a long- town, feature new and recent pieces by compos- time presence on the period-performance scene, ers from Ukraine, Denmark, Argentina, and other comes to Lincoln Center bearing a cornucopia of far-lung locales. (80 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. April 13 ART Vivaldi concertos and vocal scenes. The admired at 8. For tickets and full schedule, see matafestival.org.) soloists include the contralto Delphine Galou, the 1 Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center bassoonist Sergio Azzolini, and the cellist Christo- MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES phe Coin; Ottavio Dantone conducts. (Alice Tully April 15 at 7:30: An exceptional ensemble, featur- Hall. 212-721-6500. April 13 at 7:30.) ing the pianist Gilles Vonsattel, the violinist Ar- naud Sussmann, the violist Paul Neubauer, and National Museum of the American Indian San Francisco Symphony the cellist Paul Watkins, ofers a program centered “Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains” After an initial concert that features music by Cop- on Dvořák’s great Piano Quartet in E-Flat Major; A sequel, of sorts, to last year’s blockbuster “Art- land and Schumann (the rhapsodic Symphony No. 2 the group precedes it with sounds from the com- ists of Earth and Sky,” at the Met, this impres- in C Major), Michael Tilson Thomas and his superb poser’s cultural milieu, including Beethoven and sive exhibition unites nineteenth-century note- orchestra conclude their residency with Schubert’s Dohnányi (the Serenade in C Major for String books and painted hides with nearly sixty works Symphony No. 8 (“Uninished”) and another of the Trio). • April 19 at 7:30: In “American Visions,” a by contemporary artists, many commissioned for conductor’s specialties, Mahler’s “Das Lied von der program of works inspired by American popular and the show by the curator Emil Her Many Horses. Erde”; the ine vocal soloists are the mezzo-soprano folk music, the Society presents several esteemed Among the peoples of the Great Plains, warriors Sasha Cooke and the heldentenor Simon O’Neill. musicians, including the baritone Randall Scar- were also artists, and they immortalized their bat- (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800. April 13-14 at 8.) lata, the pianist Gilbert Kalish, the violinist Chad tles and hunts in narrative tableaux. Around 1890, Hoopes, and the percussionists Christopher Froh the Yanktonai leader Black Chicken commem- TENET: “Madrigals of War and Love” and Ayano Kataoka, performing colorful works by orated an expedition by painting charging men The Boston Early Music Festival’s Paul O’Dette Gottschalk and Dvořák (the Sonatina in G Major on horseback and a man whose back is pierced guest-directs the New York-based early-music for Violin and Piano), selected songs by Ives, and with hooks for a sun dance. Artists also por- group in “Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi,” one of George Crumb’s “American Songbook II: A Jour- trayed the violence and the social upheaval of Monteverdi’s late-period masterworks for mixed ney Beyond Time.” (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.) the reservation era; while imprisoned at a noto- voices. The collection (with lavish instrumental rious Florida fort, the Southern Cheyenne war- accompaniment) is noteworthy for the way it ex- Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax rior Bear’s Heart depicted his fellow prisoners plores war as a metaphor for love, with music that In his work with his Silk Road Ensemble, the of war forced to listen to a lecturing bishop. A has the agitated pitch of battle. But its best-loved world’s leading cellist ranges far and wide, but in number of the contemporary artists bring long- selection is “Lamento della Ninfa,” a piece of this Carnegie Hall program he returns to a bed- held traditions into the twenty-irst century. enduring loveliness. (Society for Ethical Culture, 2 rock of the repertory. With a long-valued partner Plains artists, short on paper, used to draw on W. 64th St. 888-718-4253. April 16 at 7.) at the keyboard (a major star in his own right), Ma discarded ledger books. So does Dwayne Wil- traverses all ive of Beethoven’s sonatas for cello cox: in one drawing, a woman, resplendent in a Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and piano, a compendium of the composer’s long Lakota robe, holds a smartphone that reads “r u Marin Alsop is back with her vibrant orchestra, a and turbulent career. (212-247-7800. April 15 at 8.) at da pow wow.” Through Dec. 4. cynosure of excellence in a battered city. Amer- ican music, not atypically, is on her mind, with Roulette: Hossein Alizadeh New York Public Library a New York première from the composer Kevin and Pejman Hadadi “Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Puts (“The City,” a frank depiction of contempo- Two masters of Persian music—on lutes and Printmakers, 1570–1900” rary Baltimore, with a ilm by James Bartolomeo) percussion, respectively—perform treasures In the mid-nineteenth century, the Dutchwoman preceding the very Austrian Fifth Symphony by from their repertory at the Brooklyn perfor- Henrietta Louisa Koenen amassed an uncommon Gustav Mahler, one of Gotham’s great conduc- mance space, in a concert arranged by the ad- collection of Renaissance, Baroque, and rococo tors. (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800. April 16 at 8.) mired world-music impresario Robert Brown- prints by female artists and engravers (now part ing. (509 Atlantic Ave. roulette.org. April 16 at 8.) of the library’s holdings). In an era when women Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were barred from life study in painting, they grav- A good week for great orchestras rounds out with Jeremy Denk itated to portraits or still-life. But in printmak- two concerts from the legendary Munich ensem- The idiosyncratic piano virtuoso and writer— ing women were free to approach historical and ble, a dark gem polished for decades by the world’s the Charles Rosen of Generation X—comes to mythological imagery. In golden-age Amster- leading conductors. Mariss Jansons, the group’s cur- Carnegie’s Stern Auditorium for what is an ex- dam, Geertruydt Roghman produced a churn- rent chief, brings it to Carnegie Hall for a mixed ceptionally personal program: a dazzlingly broad ing, echt-Baroque “Massacre of the Innocents.” program of strong works by John Corigliano (“Fan- array of solo works by such composers as Bach While some women aspired to fame and to Eu- tasia on an Ostinato”), Korngold (the lush Violin (the English Suite No. 3 in G Minor), Byrd, rope’s academies, others remained in the shad- Concerto, with the ubiquitous Leonidas Kavakos), Schubert (the Sonata in B-Flat Major, D. 960), ows, whether by choice or convention. A pastoral and Dvořák (the buoyant Eighth Symphony), fol- Hindemith, Ives, Stravinsky, William Bolcom, scene of two dozing country bumpkins bears the lowed by an evening devoted to one overwhelm- and Youmans via Art Tatum (“Tea for Two”). name of François Boucher, an icon of the French ing piece, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, “Len- (212-247-7800. April 17 at 2.) rococo. Note the Latin inscription in one corner: ingrad.” (212-247-7800. April 19-20 at 8.) uxor eius sculpsit. Translation: “carved”—i.e. en- Artemis Quartet graved—“by his wife.” Through May 27. 1 Zankel Hall is the destination for the formi- RECITALS dable Berlin-based ensemble (now with a new, 1 American member, the violinist Anthea Kres- GALLERIES—CHELSEA MATA Festival ton), which will perform canonical string quar- Now in its eighteenth year, MATA is New York’s tets by Mozart (the “Haydn” Quartet in G Major, Haris Epaminonda leading showcase for talented young composers K. 387) and Janáček (No. 1, “The Kreutzer So- In the spellbinding sculptures of this Cypriot art- from around the world. Du Yun, the acclaimed opera nata”) as well as a somewhat out-of-the-way item, ist, fragments from the natural world ind their composer, is curating the festival for the second Grieg’s impassioned Quartet in G Minor. (212- counterparts in shards of historical materials. In year, a lively series that runs through April 16. The 247-7800. April 17 at 3.) one work, a palm frond is suspended from a metal irst of four concluding events—including “MATA armature above a sheet of gold foil. A plinth sup- Funhouse,” an improv-techno party at Trans-Pecos, Takács Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson ports a bronze cast of a Japanese lobster, its an- in Queens—is held at the vaunted new Williams- The earthy yet assured style of this ensemble has tennae jutting into the air; nearby, a Chinese vase burg space National Sawdust. It’s a concert by the made it a longtime favorite hereabouts. Ohlsson, rests on the loor. Less is more for Epaminonda, French group Ensemble Linea, which, in its MATA an outstanding veteran artist, joins it in a pro- a master of understatement. Think of his rubber début, performs premières by Yair Klartag (from Is- gram that ofers quartets by Beethoven (the “Ra- ish regarding itself in the mirror as one of our rael) and Weijun Chen (from China and the U.S.), zumovsky” No. 2 in E Minor) and Webern, as primordial ancestors, contemplating evolution in addition to pieces by Italy’s Zeno Baldi and the well as Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A Minor. (Zan- in our era of selie-drenched narcissism. Through American composer Scott Wollschleger (“Amer- kel Hall. 212-247-7800. April 19 at 7:30.) April 23. (Kaplan, 121 W. 27th St. 212-645-7335.)

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 13 ART

Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin Marcel Duchamp’s notion that the viewer com- pletes a work of art has rarely found a more per- suasive expression than the delirious installa- ABOVE & BEYOND tions of Trecartin and Fitch. In their fever-dream cineplexes, more hours of footage are screened simultaneously than can be ever absorbed in one visit, forcing—or freeing—each viewer to become the de-facto editor of a new director’s cut. Here, a miscellany of seating, from rustic (faux boulders, hunter’s tree seats) to lounge- like, sprawls through four darkened rooms, as, onscreen, merry-prankster gangs of hes, shes, and theys play fast and loose with the laws of time, space, and cosmetics, in locations ranging from a dilapidated Masonic temple to the sea- shore. This is “terra nonconforma,” as one actor puts it, a world in which language is as luid as Green Festival art fair dedicated to photography, returns to the identity. Tying to parse the frenetic dialogue For the ifth year, the Jacob K. Javits center hosts Park Avenue Armory (April 14-17), with booths can feel like eavesdropping on the future. “One this three-day environmental festival, featuring representing more than eighty dealers. Among of the reasons you don’t have a boyfriend is that more than two hundred and ifty exhibitors and ifty the highlights this year are an example of Mor- you’re such a weapon against reality,” one char- speakers. Venders ofer a wide selection of prod- ton Bartlett’s eerie doll photographs, pictures of acter hears. Bad for dating, perhaps, but trans- ucts and services, from green foods and clothes to Iceland and Greenland by the Spanish environ- porting for art. Through April 16. (Rosen, 525 sustainable-energy and design ideas; attendees will mental photographer Daniel Beltrá, and rare im- W. 24th St. 212-627-6000.) enjoy hands-on demonstrations and presentations ages by the Italian actress-turned-revolutionary on health and medicine. A highlight will be the di- Tina Modotti. (Park Ave. at 66th St. aipad.com.) Luigi Ghirri rector Keegan Kuhn’s screening and discussion of The Italian photographer, who died in 1992, made “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret,” a “Black- 1 these quiet landscapes and still-lifes in his last ish”-esque feature-length documentary about the READINGS AND TALKS decades. They’re charmingly reticent images, animal-agriculture industry and its efects on the asides rather than declarations. Though Ghirri planet, including deforestation, water pollution, Apexart anticipated the snapshot-style approach that is greenhouse-gas emissions, and topsoil erosion. The “Double Take” rethinks the reading series, invit- so popular with young artists today, there’s noth- latest cut of the documentary, showing on Satur- ing pairs of emerging and award-winning novel- ing careless in his small, precise works. He also day, was executive-produced by Leonardo DiCap- ists, poets, editors, and artists to exchange ideas presaged the postmodern trend of photography rio. (655 W. 34th St., 212-216-2000. April 15-17.) on a shared topic. In this week’s edition, orga- about photography and delighted in capturing 1 nized by the Bookforum editor Albert Mobilo, the readymade scenes of pictures (posters, ads, scraps editor and playwright Donald Breckenridge and of newspaper) within pictures. Through April 30. AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES the educator Johannah Rodgers consider Bed- (Marks, 526 W. 22nd St. 212-243-0200.) ford-Stuyvesant’s Saratoga Park; the novelist 1 The two big houses are busy this week with an and musician Stephen Tunney and the writer assortment of sales spanning various disciplines. and translator Peter Wortsman muse on sleep- GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN Over at Christie’s, the selection begins with an less nights; and the photojournalist and New auction of antiquities (April 12) led by a sec- School professor Lauren Walsh chooses a photo- Scott Alario ond-century Roman bronze of Bacchus. The graph at random and trades observations about The pleasures and confusions of domestic com- house then segues into a new category, “Excep- it with the author Colin Dickey. (291 Church St. fort are the subject of Alario’s new color photo- tional Sale” (April 13), an auction of decorations 212-431-5270. April 13 at 7.) graphs. His family and its belongings appear de- that includes a little bit of everything: Chinese liberately out of register, as the artist exploits an furniture, a Russian tea set made of gold, a pair Powerhouse Arena outmoded three-color process. The stuttering, of silver pistols gifted by the Marquis de Lafa- Fay Wolf, an actress, singer, and pianist, may multilayered images convert movement and time yette to Simón Bolívar. A second sale on the same claim most proudly her role as a professional into lashes of ecstatic energy. Alario reveals mar- day is devoted to sculptures, and a third to works organizer. For nearly a decade, Wolf has helped vels in life’s minutiae, whether it’s steam curling of art related, however tenuously, to the idea of countless clients, including Hollywood celeb- up from a forkful of pasta or coolant streaming revolution (including a portrait of Marie Antoi- rities and stay-at-home parents, rid themselves into a car’s radiator. The artist’s daughter, her nette by the court painter Elisabeth-Louise Vigée of excess possessions and give structure to those arms waving in front of TV cartoons, casts an Le Brun and a print by Paul Revere depicting objects that they hold on to. In her irst book, aura, a little dynamo of excitement in an other- the Boston Massacre). Then, after a day of Old “New Order: A Decluttering Handbook for Cre- wise static white room. Through May 1. (Lorello, Masters (April 14) the house presents a sale of ative Folks (And Everyone Else),” the author 195 Chrystie St. 212-614-7057.) Japanese and Korean art (April 15). (20 Rocke- aims to do the same for readers, suggesting that feller Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.) • On April more streamlined physical surroundings will Eileen Quinlan 19, Sotheby’s holds an auction of jewels, the star lead to a clearer mind and more eicient and en- The mid-career New York photographer irst of which is a blue diamond of nearly ten carats, joyable work habits—not to mention a cleaner captured the art world’s attention a decade ago, purchased by Shirley Temple’s father, in 1940, as e-mail inbox. (37 Main St., Brooklyn. 718-666- with allusive abstractions that literally involved a gift for his talented and hard-working daughter 3049. April 13 at 7.) smoke and mirrors. Her most ambitious and (then starring in the ilm “The Blue Bird”). In exhilarating exhibition to date includes nudes, the lead-up to that sale, the house explores var- Strand Bookstore landscapes, architectural details, and pictures ious niches of the decorative-arts market, from The musical adaptation of the classic children’s of wildlife, as well as colorful geometric im- ornate European furnishings and decorations, on novel “Tuck Everlasting” opens this month, and ages (which recall Barbara Kasten) and the al- April 13-14, to silver and porcelains (including a is already being celebrated for its winking humor luringly disorienting efects of a mirror placed set of twelve silver-gilt plates made for Cather- and traditional use of ballet on the Broadway on top of a scanner. Vestiges of the known world ine the Great), on April 15. This is followed by a stage, held up by a whimsical score that builds have crept into Quinlan’s work, but that doesn’t “designer showhouse,” on April 17, in which buy- to bright climaxes without relying on nods to- mean it’s straightforward; even the lattest im- ers will be invited to peruse a series of well-ap- ward more popular sounds. Chris Miller and Na- ages seem to open onto another dimension, get- pointed rooms, whose contents they can take than Tysen, the songwriting team who brought ting scratched, scraped, and crumpled along home, for a price: picture Ikea illed with tables the numbers to life, will discuss their work on the way. What she achieves is radical beauty. by Yves Klein and modernist sconces by Max In- the adaptation and preview its songs before the Through April 17. (Abreu, 88 Eldridge St.; 36 Or- grand. (York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) • The show opens, on April 26, at the Broadhurst The-

chard St. 212-995-1774.) AIPAD Photography Show, the oldest and biggest atre. (828 Broadway. 212-473-1452. April 18 at 7.) AMARGO PABLO BY ILLUSTRATION

14 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 FßD & DRINK

1 TABLES FOR TWO tasting menu. The biggest draw, though, BAR TAB Okonomi / Yuji Ramen is the daily Japanese set breakfast. Miso soup and nutty, mauve rice accompany 150 Ainslie St., Brooklyn (718-302- a plate of sides, as thoughtfully arranged 0598) as a painter’s palette: pickles, egg custard, At Okonomi, a twelve-seat haiku of a and seasonal vegetables, like sweet po- restaurant in Williamsburg, you’re doing tatoes tossed with sesame oil and mirin. more than eating the chef Yuji Haragu- It comes with a choice of ish, and you Tomi Jazz chi’s food; you’re eating his philosophy, can’t go wrong—the salt-lecked mack- 239 E. 53rd St., lower level (646-497-1254) that a cuisine that’s good for you and for erel is as perfect a bite as the kombu- If you’re lucky enough to snag a seat at one of the the environment is one that honors its cured roasted sea bass. But the real two long, narrow tables at this intimate, hard-to- ingredients. After one taste of the line- showstopper is the optional onsen egg, locate jazz club (better to let your ears, rather than caught ocean perch, you heartily concur. gently poached until the white and the your iPhone, be your guide), you’ll be close enough to the band to lirt a little with the saxophonist The Maine-procured uni, gobbed over yolk are the same molten texture. Served during sets. Until fairly recently, Tomi was a mem- mazemen (a brothless ramen), strength- with more of that unforgettable sea ur- bership club that served only Japanese patrons— ens the message that the seafood on the chin, it begs to be stirred into the rice. that history is still apparent in the bar’s impressive menu of Japanese spirits and izakaya classics, like East Coast is as good as that in Japan, You leave nourished more than full. the mentaiko spaghetti (funky with fermented cod as long as you know how to handle it. The restaurant’s small size has a roe) and an enormous okonomiyaki (exactly what The wild-tuna sashimi—a glistening, price. Trying to predict the wait works you want after a few rounds of Yamazaki 12 year). As intriguing as the frozen Green Tea cocktail garnet dinner special, served alongside about as well as guessing the G train’s (vodka, matcha, half and half) and the Ume Hime fermented yuzu zest spiked with chili schedule: 11 A.M. on an early-spring (brown-sugar plum wine, calpico) might sound, pepper—is the ultimate revelation. You Sunday? Fifteen minutes. The same you’re better of sticking to soju or sake. Some inventions, however, are undeniably delightful: atone: I won’t eat farmed ish anymore! time on a Saturday a few weeks later? Pocky sticks come speared into a milkshake glass Everything about the place embodies Almost two hours. A respite may be on that glows sapphire from a glug of Blue Curaçao. the Japanese concept of mottainai, let the way: Haraguchi hopes to open a Ken Mukohata, who bought the club six years ago and opened it to the public, established a nightly nothing go to waste. The dining room, new place nearby—part ish market, jazz calendar in hope of attracting anyone who likes in shades of wood, soil, and water, is part classroom, part sushi bar—this to tap her toes over a strong drink. On a recent minimal without being austere. Dried summer. But even the notoriously blunt Saturday night, as oil lamps lickered throughout a full house, a woman in a light-blue kimono nod- ish skins decorate the walls; bones from butchers at the Meat Hook, where Hara- ded her head to the Standard Procedures, featuring the morning’s ish go straight into the guchi buys bones for his stock, know he’s the L.A.-based saxophonist Ray Zepeda, which evening’s unctuous broth. But for a chef worth the wait. As one of them attested, was closing its set with a lively rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” Zepeda took ive, who values simplicity Haraguchi gives “He’s the only cook who comes in every and, in exchange for some Pocky sticks, divulged diners a lot of options. On weekday day! What a damn good chef.” (Set some of his favorite out-of-the-way Japanese- nights, the restaurant transforms into breakfast $27-$35; ramen $16-$24; ten- inluenced jazz bars, as well as his go-to very boozy nightcap, the Adios. Diicult as it was to pass up, Yuji Ramen, a noodle joint, while week- course tasting $120.) it would have been a shame to say good night just

TOP: PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION THE NEW YORKER; FOR ERIC HELGAS BY PHOTOGRAPH TOP: end evenings feature a ten-course ramen —Becky Cooper yet—the next band was setting up.—Wei Tchou

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 15

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT THE SOVEREIGNTY OF WOMEN

n less than a year, the United States may well inaugu- of attacks that drew upon a particular history. Trump, notably, I rate its first female President. This outcome isn’t inevita- insisted that Obama release his birth certificate, arguing that ble, but it’s a few blocks uptown of probable. If the delegate the President was not a U.S. citizen but a Kenyan. Citizen- leads of the front-runners hold, if their Conventions don’t ship claims have been the elemental political and legal argu- unseat them, and if the latest polls are to be believed, Hil- ments of generations of African-Americans, none more im- lary Clinton will face Donald Trump in November, and she portant than that made by Dred Scott, in 1857, and denied by will defeat him. If that happens, it will have less to do with the Supreme Court, which ruled that no descendant of any Clinton’s greatness as a candidate—she’s not a great candi- “negro of the African race” could ever be a citizen of the United date—than with Trump’s lousiness as one. Still, her election States. Attacking the legitimacy of Obama’s Presidency on the would be historic. ground of citizenship, however lunatic, was by no means ar- There hasn’t been much discussion yet of the “first female bitrary. What, then, can be expected in the way of attacks on President,” except insofar as Clinton’s campaign and her sup- the legitimacy of a female ruler? porters, most notably Gloria Steinem, have been by turns The question has come up before. In 1553, Mary Tudor be- despairing and outraged that younger Democratic female came the first ruling queen of England. This was a problem voters prefer Bernie Sanders, notwithstanding Clinton’s at- because she was, first, a woman; second, a Catholic; and, third, tempts to reach them through Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, beginning in 1554, a wife. Protestants who opposed her used and “Broad City.” Instead, there’s been a lot of discussion of all three facts as arguments against her, but the first case was how badly Trump does with female voters—much of it com- the easiest to make. In 1558, the reformer John Knox claimed, ing from Ted Cruz’s campaign, after a spat involving the can- in his treatise “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the didates’ wives—because Trump can’t stop talking about how Monstrous Regiment of Women,” that for the weak to gov- some people are dopey and how other people are disgust- ern the strong was “repugnant to Nature” and “the subversion ing. Clinton “got schlonged” by Barack of good order.” Mary’s defenders tended Obama; Cruz is a “pussy”; Megyn Kelly to argue that, politically speaking, she bleeds from her you-know-where; and was a man, “the Prince female.” After the man himself promises that there is her death, Protestants who had opposed no problem with the size of his what- her were left to defend the coronation ever. Cruz is betting that he can defeat of her half sister, Elizabeth, an unmar- Trump by winning over women, but ried Protestant, by arguing, begrudgingly, his victory last week in the Wisconsin in favor of female rule. John Aylmer, later primary did not draw on dispropor- the bishop of London, insisted that if tionate support from female voters, and, God decided “the female should reigne in a race against Clinton, he’d have and governe” it didn’t matter that women plenty of trouble. were “weake in nature, feable in bodie, Ugly as the primary season has been, softe in courage,” because God would there is every reason to believe that the make every right ruler strong, and, in general election will be uglier, especially any case, England’s constitution abided if it’s Clinton vs. Trump. The election by a “rule mixte,” in which the author- of the first African-American President ity of the monarch was checked by the was the occasion for a great deal of ju- power of Parliament, and “it is not she

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM BY ILLUSTRATIONS bilation, but it also unleashed a series that ruleth but the lawes.” Elizabeth

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 17 called on a diferent authority: the favor of the people. her husband, in a letter, to “remember the ladies” in the na- The debate about a female prince advanced all kinds of tion’s “new Code of Laws,” which he most emphatically did political ideas, not least the rule of law, the mixed nature of not. “Depend upon it,” he wrote back, “we know better than the English constitution, and the sovereignty of the people. to repeal our Masculine systems.” It also inaugurated an era of topsy-turvy play in everything This might all seem ancient history, except that it’s also from Elizabethan drama and French carnival to German very much a part of the rhetoric that will likely characterize woodcuts, as the brilliant historian Natalie Zemon Davis ar- this year’s election. “Woman is man’s equal,” the first wom- gued in a 1975 essay called “Women on Top.” Davis wrote en’s-rights convention resolved, in 1848. The Nineteenth that the fascination with female rule came at a time when Amendment was ratified in 1920, but the Equal Rights men were asserting new claims over women’s bodies and their Amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1923, was never property. In 1651, in “The Leviathan,” Thomas Hobbes wrote ratified, and the League for a Woman President, founded in about Amazons to support his claim that “whereas some have 1935, never saw success. As recently as the 2000 primary, a attributed the dominion to the man only, as being of the more New Hampshire Republican said about Elizabeth Dole’s excellent sex; they misreckon in it,” which is why it’s impor- Presidential campaign, “The Bible teaches us that a woman tant that laws exist, to grant man that dominion. In 1680, in should not have authority over a man.” “Patriarcha,” Sir Robert Filmer located the origins of all po- Who rules? Trump will want this to be an election about litical authority in Adam’s rule. Meanwhile, some theorists popular sovereignty: the people rule. Clinton will not be who imagined a state of nature, a time before the rise of a able to avoid making an argument about female rule, be- political order, became convinced that America, before Co- cause much in Trump’s campaign, and in Cruz’s, too, sug- lumbus, had been a “gynæocracy,” as one French writer called gests that a woman should not have authority over a man, it. But the chief consequence of this debate was the Lockean or over her own body, either. The candidates may not want idea that men, born equal, create political society, to which this election to become a battle of the sexes, but the lines women do not belong; women exist only in the family, where have been drawn, long since. they are ruled by men. Hence, in 1776, Abigail Adams urged —Jill Lepore

UP LIFE’S LADDER over a table in the New Diorama’s café, about their motivations and ambitions. YOUNG TURKS drinking lemon-ginger tea. Jesse Fox: ma- They learned about bulls and bears. They roon bomber jacket, Nike hat, small hoop heard of botched Valentine’s Days and earring, stubble. Simon Lyshon: button- carpal-tunnel conditions, of spreadsheets down shirt, black jeans, ten-day beard. and peanut butter eaten with a fork. Both have day jobs. Fox used to sell wills “We started thinking about money over the telephone; now he babysits. Ly- and possessions as a defense against mor- shon works as an usher at the Barbican. tality,” Fox said. “Having money can cre- ast week, the German newspaper It was thus surprising to a hardened older ate feelings of omnipotence. But we’re L Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Interna- person that they’d been so moved by the all born with a debt, and that debt is that tional Consortium of Investigative Jour- story of Erhardt, and by the moral plight we’re going to die.” nalists published the Panama Papers, im- of their higher-earning contemporaries. Fox and Lyshon studied alchemy, the plicating thousands of people in a global Lyshon said, “We grew up during the winner efect, psychology (“money as a scheme to conceal wealth and evade taxes, financial crisis and the expenses scan- substitute for the breast”), the neurosci- among them Presidents, kings, Prime Min- dal”—the incident in which British law- ence of greed. They came to believe that isters, race-car drivers, drug traickers, and makers were found to have billed the the financiers of their generation are a Caroline, Lawrence, Ana, and Tim. The public for items such as a two-thou- somewhat chastened breed. Young bank- last four are interns in the commodities sand-dollar floating duck island. “The ers see themselves, Fox said, as wanting department of an unnamed investment response of Hollywood and mainstream the same things their parents had but bank. They are the leading characters of storytellers has been to go to the top of having to earn more to get them. They “Run,” a small but sparkling play that just the pyramid, and we’d never heard any- are conflicted about the social value of finished a residence at the New Diorama thing about people our age. We were their work. Like young aspirants in the Theatre, in London. “Developed in con- wondering what their perception was. theatre, he explained, they work punish- versation with the freshest financial minds Has anything changed since 2008?” ing hours, “have a willingness to submit and inspired by the true story of Moritz To research the topic, Fox and Ly- themselves to an industry that seems Erhardt, a twenty-one-year-old intern who shon drew on their peer networks. “Si- completely indiferent to them,” and “get died at his London flat after reportedly mon’s friend Fred’s friend works in kicked around a lot.” A few lines from working seventy-two hours straight,” finance,” Fox said. “And he’s twenty-three. their interviews made it verbatim into according to a press release, “RUN is a And he’s bought a beautiful flat. He’s the play, rendering it a sort of micro oral blackly comic and tragic tale of ambition barely ever there.” history of the lowest tranche of the finan- and personal sacrifice.” The combined age They interviewed employees of Mor- cial industry, circa 2016: of its two co-writers is fifty-one. gan Stanley and Lloyds, Barclays and If I want to buy nice shoes or buy nice bags, The other evening, they were huddled R.B.S., probing moguls-in-the-making I think I deserve it.

18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 Maybe I’ll work here for two years, ive years, ten years. Work here and then, er . . . go and, you know, do what I actually wanna do. I do want a house one day. I do want a family. At the end of the internship, two of the four characters, Ana and Tim, accept full-time ofers from the firm. Lawrence leaves his work BlackBerry in a pub and sufers a breakdown. Caroline dies of a heart condition that may or may not have been exacerbated by overwork. Until last week, Lawrence might have considered sending his résumé to •• Mossack Fonseca, in Panama City. The firm had cultivated a notably friendly mutual airmation—pause here to check to go into “night-life stuf,” until, at the atmosphere for young people, running the number of likes on your most recent age of twenty-two, he had an epiphany— an internship program that recruited selfie—why let a little thing like death he wanted to help people. He founded at high schools. “I have millennials on stand in the way? a nonprofit that gets children with dis- my team, and you have to know how In Brooklyn, Horn, who wore a fe- abilities involved in sports, then started to manage them,” Katia Solano, the dora and an enormous gray scarf, launched a sort of Craigslist for the disabled. He firm’s director of H.R., told the Huing- into the origin story of Tribute, a “living met Agrawal on a Summit Series cruise. ton Post last year. “We keep them in- eulogy” video-compilation service that (“It’s like a modern-day Davos for young terested and motivated by ofering them he co-founded last year. (The company’s creatives,” Horn said.) Four years ago, at attractive benefits, continuous training slogan: “The most meaningful gift on Burning Man, they were married, by the and education, and the opportunity earth.”) When Horn turned twenty-seven, Reverend Funk Pocket, on the Bridge to move laterally (to work in a diferent his girlfriend, Miki Agrawal—the C.E.O. to Nowhere. He met Rory Petty, a soft- department) and up, depending on the of Thinx period underwear—asked his ware engineer and Tribute’s co-founder, individual’s skill set and our company friends and relatives to send her one-min- in the gym of the condo building in Wil- needs. Another advantage of M.F. is ute clips explaining why they loved the liamsburg where they both live. “Andrew our multicultural and international en- birthday boy. She screened them at a sur- is the wild yin to my let’s-just-stay-on- vironment, where they can work and prise party. “I’m sitting there and I see the-couch-and-watch-Netflix yang,” interact with our colleagues and clients my mom telling me how proud of me Petty said, at Tribute’s oice. He wore a all over the world.” she is,” Horn, who is now twenty-nine, sweater with elbow patches. —Lauren Collins said. “And I remember wanting to cry? More than thirteen thousand people 1 And holding it back at first. And then I have made Tribute videos. Users tend to I LOVE YOU, MAN was, like, just let it go.” He bawled for be female (sixty per cent), and between HALLMARK 2.0 twenty minutes. the ages of eighteen and forty. To watch Tribute’s precursors include the roast a number of the videos back to back is and the Festschrift. Its Web site ofers a to get the sense that the world sufers variety of ways to put together a video from a glut of best dads; that humans montage: for twenty-five dollars, you have yet to comprehend that their most can make one yourself; for a hundred flattering angle is not from below; and and twenty-five dollars, a “concierge” will that everyone’s apartment is furnished he other day, Andrew Horn sat e-mail friends a list of prompts (“What with at least one item from IKEA. T on a red exercise ball in his startup’s do you admire about Jerry?”), teach them From “Steve’s 60th Birthday”: “You Williamsburg oice, a tricked-out for- how to film themselves, and edit the love- are sixty years of vintage awesomeness mer garage, and explained why he was fest for you. For even more money, Trib- and goodness.” From “Who Loves Dr. trying to sell people on the idea of cre- ute will bring in professional producers Nandi?”: “He truly, truly just wants to ating eulogies for the living. “I spoke at and editors. The initial funding (more make the world a better place by en- the Burning Man TEDx two years ago, than eight hundred thousand dollars) came couraging everyone to be their own and the talk was called ‘We Got the Eu- from Kickstarter and angel investors. Horn health hero.” From “Coach Lucy Tribute”: logy Wrong,’ ” he said. In a video of the hopes that Tribute will become the “Hall- “Thank you for teaching me, um, how to address, he can be seen wearing gold mark of video messaging”—an industry skate backwards faster and shoot better.” shorts and a Sgt. Pepper jacket, saying, that he estimates will be worth twenty- From “College Graduation Tribute”: “I “If we look at the word ‘eulogy,’ it comes seven billion dollars by 2022. (Tribute’s miss having our little dance parties! I’m from the ancient Greek word eulogia, and competitors include ThankView video so lonely! Don’t leave me! Just kidding.” eulogia simply means ‘praise.’ ” The de- cards and Ditty, which converts text mes- The final product can be delivered digi- sire to be present at one’s own funeral is sages into music videos.) tally or on a bamboo thumb drive. nothing new. In an era of near-constant Horn grew up in Hawaii, and planned Petty said, “We’ve had people do

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 19 virtual baby showers from Australia. cried. “My granddad once caught a con- We’ve had virtual bachelor and bache- ger eel in a lobster pot, and we ate it. It lorette parties.” They’ve done corpo- was disgusting.” rate-recognition videos and a video for “You have to boil it, because the blood a guy who was going to prison for finan- is actually poisonous.” cial malfeasance. At least one Tribute “That would explain it.” When the video has been a eulogy in the traditional eel appeared, the actor admired its pre- sense. This was for Dan Fredinburg, an sentation: “We just had great wagon- early investor in the company who wheel chunks of it, which we gave to the worked at Google X. Last year, Fredin- cat.” He nimbly whisked wasabi into burg died while climbing Mt. Everest, his soy sauce. “Who lived.” and hours of footage poured in, which Dancy had recently returned from the the team cut down to a highlight reel. show’s première, in Los Angeles, where Will Correa-Munoz, a Tribute em- he was treated rather like a cult leader. ployee, popped out an earbud and told “People seemed to expect me to be com- the story of a video he’d made for a friend’s manding, but I distrust certainty, and I college graduation. He recalled, “Hon- don’t particularly want anyone to follow estly, our type of relationship is, like, Hugh Dancy me,” he said. “It was challenging that the ‘bro’—you know, we make fun of each very first line I had to speak on camera other and stuf. But when he put the In “The Path,” a drama that débuted was”—his voice thrummed with assur- U.S.B. in his computer he just started on Hulu last month, Dancy plays Cal ance—“ ‘Ma’am, we’re going to take care crying. He was hugging me!” Roberts, the leader of a cult called the of your baby.’ ” When he read the pilot Tribute tracks what Horn and Petty Meyerist Movement. Its devotees are script and saw that Cal was “written as call the “T.O.J. statistic”—“eighty per vegetarians who drive blue Priuses, use quote-unquote charismatic, that made cent of people reported crying tears of ayahuasca, and plan to live on as pure the flags go up,” he went on. “Because it’s joy,” Horn said. “I can show you the light after the coming apocalypse. “Cal one of the ways writers signal executives SurveyMonkey right now.” is someone you side with against your that the leading man will fit their defi- —Emma Allen better judgment,” Dancy explained. “An nition of a star. With a woman, it’s ‘She’s 1 alcoholic who’s probably been essentially this and this and that—and she’s really FOLLOW THE LEADER celibate for a decade, someone with se- rockin’ that dress.’ With a man, it’s cha- CHARISMA rious control issues, an awful black hole risma. Or he has ‘a wry grin’—he can’t of a person. He is not ‘Netflix and chill’— be too open, he can’t have a wide grin, or, I should say, ‘Hulu and chill.’ ” Seeth- but he’s seen it all—or there’s a squint ing, lustful, and lonely, Cal lies and involved, which evokes a heroic cynicism. schemes to foster the movement, because, The idea is actually to blunt reactions, to since he was five, it’s fostered him. say, ‘Don’t worry, this guy will be fairly Meyerists reprogram themselves using comatose—a blank canvas that people s he shed his tweed jacket, Hugh electrical devices and advance through can project their ideas of cool onto.’ ” A Dancy looked around Sushi Azabu, increasingly secretive levels of initiation. Dancy ordered more nigiri. “But,” he a basement nook in Tribeca, and said, “It They shun apostates, even their own chil- continued, “it was clear that Cal actually feels like a railway car—if you can imag- dren. Cal’s global ambitions for Meyer- thinks about what it means to be a char- ine Humphrey Bogart eating sushi, it’d ism, which he took over from its founder, ismatic leader—he listens to self-help be here.” He laughed. “I actually can’t Steven Meyer, make it further reminis- tapes, he’s taking Charisma 101—and imagine him eating sushi, though. Maybe cent of Scientology, which David Mis- that, because he has internalized Meyer- he’d use some for a black eye: ‘If there’s cavige transformed after he inherited it ism, he speaks with natural conviction. no steak available, give me the halibut.’ ” from L. Ron Hubbard. Dancy resists the Jessica Goldberg, the show’s creator, wrote Dancy, the lithe and elfin forty-year- comparison, saying, “One person’s cult is me a letter making it plain that she wanted old English actor, is particularly keen on another person’s religion.” He observed to do the good version of the show. For uni, the sea urchin’s gonads. Dabbing that “every religion that expanded from her, more important than all the televi- chopsticks into a pink curl of them, a niche movement grew because its sion meshugaas that’s in there—the F.B.I. Dancy said, “My three-year-old son”— founder was followed by a leader who was investigation, the power struggle, the love from his marriage to Claire Danes—“has pragmatic and understood how to spread triangle—is the fascinating question of a fascination with germs, because, he the word. In Christianity, it was St. Paul; faith. So you can go with that, rather than says, ‘they’re disgusting and beautiful.’ I in Mormonism, it was Brigham Young.” feeling you have to lather on a layer of suppose the same is true of me and uni.” After the actor had polished of an personal charisma you’ve had in reserve.” He held up a morsel of the unctuous assembly line of mackerel, tuna, and shad, The baby yellowtail arrived, and Dancy goo. “They look like the tongues of de- praising their various mouthfeels, the raised his chopsticks in delight: “Carry- hydrated infants. So eating them is a waiter suggested a few exotic specialties, ing on the theme of eating children!” faith-based decision.” including conger eel. “Conger eel!” Dancy —Tad Friend

20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 THE FINANCIAL PAGE tism, with its sense that government is the problem and its SYSTEM OVERLOAD aversion to government spending, has created a Republi- can Party that’s much more skeptical of big infrastructure projects than it was,” Steven Erie, a professor of political science and an expert on development at U.C. San Diego, told me. There’s also a deeper, bureaucratic issue. Over the years, the process of getting infrastructure projects approved n example for the Nation” is how President Lyndon has become riddled with what political scientists call “veto “A Johnson imagined Washington’s Metro, in a letter that points.” There are more environmental regulations and more he wrote fifty years ago to an oicial involved in planning it. requirements for community input. There are often multi- And so it was. When the Metro opened, ten years later, in ple governing bodies for new projects, each of which has 1976, it was acclaimed as a farsighted fusion of design and to give its approval. Many of these veto points were put in utility, a system generations ahead of those in other cities. place for good reason. But they make it harder to under- Today, the Metro is in such a state that fixing it may require take big projects. In 2010, Chris Christie was able to can- shutting whole lines for months at a time. It’s yet again an ex- cel a new tunnel under the Hudson River more or less sin- ample for the nation, but now it’s an example of how under- gle-handed, even though more than a billion dollars had investment and political dysfunction have left America with already been spent on it. infrastructure that’s failing and often downright dangerous. Even more egregious than the lack of new investment is From the crumbling bridges of Cal- our failure to maintain existing infra- ifornia to the overflowing sewage drains structure. You have to spend more on of Houston and the rusting railroad tracks maintenance as infrastructure ages, but in the Northeast Corridor, decaying in- we’ve been spending slightly less than frastructure is all around us, and the con- we once did. The results are easy to see. sequences are so familiar that we barely In 2013, the Federal Transit Adminis- notice them—like urban traic conges- tration estimated that there’s an eighty- tion, slow-moving trains, and flights that six-billion-dollar backlog in deferred are often disrupted, thanks to an out- maintenance on the nation’s rail and bus dated air-traic-control system. The costs lines. The American Society of Civil En- are significant, once you reckon wasted gineers, which gives America’s over-all time, lost productivity, poor public- infrastructure a grade of D-plus, has said health outcomes, and increased carbon that we would need to spend $3.6 tril- emissions. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter, lion by 2020 to bring it up to snuf. a Harvard Business School professor Again, there are political reasons that and the author of “Move,” a recent book maintenance gets scanted. It’s handled on the subject, told me, “Infrastruc- mainly by state and local communities, ture is such a dull word. But it’s really which, because many of them can’t run an issue that touches almost everything.” fiscal deficits, operate under budgetary Infrastructure was once at the heart of American public pressures. Term limits mean that a politician who cuts main- policy. Works such as the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Hoover tenance spending may not be around when things go wrong. Dam, and the Interstate Highway System transformed the There’s also what Erie calls the “edifice complex”: what pol- economy. Today, we spend significantly less, as a share of itician doesn’t like opening something new and having a nice G.D.P., on infrastructure than we did fifty years ago—less, press op at the ribbon-cutting? But no one ever writes arti- even, than fifteen years ago. As the economist Larry Sum- cles saying, “Region’s highways are still about as good as they mers has pointed out, once you adjust for depreciation, the were last year.” U.S. makes no net investment in public infrastructure. Yet It takes a crisis like the Metro’s to shock us out of our com- polls show that infrastructure spending is popular with a placency. As Kanter puts it, “It’s only when things get bad that majority of voters across the income spectrum. Historically, infrastructure issues get real public attention.” This is the heart it enjoyed bipartisan support from politicians, too. If it’s so of our problem: infrastructure policy has become a matter of popular, why doesn’t it happen? lurching from crisis to crisis, solving problems after the fact One clear reason is politics. While both parties remain rather than preventing them from happening. As Erie says, rhetorically committed to infrastructure spending, in prac- “We’ve turned into short-term-fix addicts.” The U.S. needs to tice Republicans have been less willing to support it, espe- approach infrastructure the way it does national defense: come cially when it goes toward things like public transit. This up with a long-term strategy, make sure it gets the money it is partly because of the nature of the Republican base: pub- needs, and hold the government accountable for making that lic transit is hardly a priority for suburban and rural voters strategy work. Infrastructure is the ultimate public good. It in the South and in much of the West. But ideology has would be nice if ours was actually good for the public. played a key role as well. “The rise of modern conserva- —James Surowiecki NISHANT CHOKSI

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 21 reefs was growing grimmer. Climate ANNALS OF SCIENCE change was pushing ocean temperatures beyond many species’ tolerance. In 1998, a so-called “bleaching event,” caused by UNNATURAL SELECTION very warm water, killed more than fifteen per cent of corals worldwide. Compound- What will it take to save the world’s reefs and forests? ing the problem of rising temperatures were changes in ocean chemistry. Cor- BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT als thrive in alkaline waters, but fossil-fuel emissions are making the seas more acidic. uth Gates fell in love with the ment was possible. “I couldn’t quite get One team of researchers calculated that R ocean while watching TV. When my head around the idea,” she said. In just a few more decades of emissions she was in elementary school, she would 1985, she moved to Jamaica to study would lead coral reefs to “stop growing sit in front of “The Undersea World of the relationship between corals and and begin dissolving.” Another group Jacques Cousteau,” mesmerized. The their symbionts. predicted that, by midcentury, visitors to colors, the shapes, the diversity of sur- It was an exciting moment to be places like the Great Barrier Reef will vival strategies—life beneath the sur- doing such work. New techniques in find nothing more than “rapidly erod- face of the water seemed to her more molecular biology were making it pos- ing rubble banks.” Gates couldn’t even spectacular than life above it. Without sible to look at life at its most intimate bring herself to go back to Jamaica; so

Researchers are hoping to “assist” evolution in order to produce hardier corals and tougher trees. knowing much beyond what she’d level. But it was also a disturbing time. much of what she loved about the place learned from the series, she decided that Reefs in the Caribbean were dying. had been lost. she would become a marine biologist. Some were being done in by develop- But Gates, by her own description, “Even though Cousteau was com- ment, others by overfishing or pollu- is a “glass half full” sort of person. She ing through the television, he unveiled tion. Two of the region’s dominant reef noticed that some reefs that had been the oceans in a way that nobody else builders—staghorn coral and elkhorn given up for dead were bouncing back. had been able to,” she told me. coral—were being devastated by an These included reefs she knew inti- Gates, who is English, ended up ailment that became known as white- mately, in Hawaii. Even if only a frac- studying at Newcastle University, where band disease. (Both are now classified as tion of the coral colonies survived, there marine-science classes are taught against critically endangered.) Over the course seemed to be a chance for recovery. the backdrop of the North Sea. She took of the nineteen-eighties, something In 2013, a foundation run by Mi- a course on corals and, once again, was like half of the Caribbean’s coral cover crosoft’s co-founder Paul Allen an- dazzled. Her professor explained that disappeared. nounced a contest called the Ocean corals, which are tiny animals, had even Gates continued her research at Challenge. Researchers were asked for tinier plants living inside their cells. U.C.L.A. and then at the University of plans to counter the efects of rapid Gates wondered how such an arrange- Hawaii. All the while, the outlook for change. Gates thought about the corals

22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL she’d seen perish and the ones she’d institute’s boatman, provided he is ex- all around us. Dogs, cats, cows, chick- seen pull through. What if the quali- pecting them, will motor over. “Gilli- ens, pigs—these are all the products of ties that made some corals hardier than gan” fans will be disappointed to learn generations of careful propagation. But others could be identified? Perhaps this that the journey takes about a minute the super-coral project pushes into new information could be used to produce and a half. territory. Already there’s a term for this tougher varieties. Humans might, in this The first time I made the trip, it was sort of efort: assisted evolution. way, design reefs capable of withstand- a beautiful morning. I found Gates in “In the food supply, in our pets, you ing human influence. a lab building that, from the outside, name it—everywhere you turn, selec- Gates laid out her thoughts in a two- looks like a budget motel. She is fifty- tively bred stuf appears,” Gates ob- thousand-word essay. The prize for the four, with a round face, short brown hair, served. “For some reason, in the frame- contest was ten thousand dollars—barely and a cheerfully blunt manner. Her oice work of conservation—or an ecosystem enough to keep a research lab in pipette is spare and white; the only splash of that would be preserved by conserva- tips. But after Gates won she was in- color comes from a single painting—a tion—it seems like a radical idea. But vited to submit a more detailed plan. seascape done on a piece of corrugated it’s not like we’ve invented something Last summer, the foundation awarded metal—that is the work of her partner, new. It’s hilarious, really, when you think her and a collaborator in Australia, Mad- an artist and designer. The oice looks about it.” eleine van Oppen, four million dollars out over the bay and, beyond it, to a dusty to pursue the idea. In news stories about brown military base—Marine Corps oral reefs are found in a band the award, the project was described Base Hawaii. (The base was bombed C that circles the globe like a cum- as an attempt to create a “super coral.” by the Japanese minutes before the merbund. The band stretches from the Gates and her graduate students em- attack on Pearl Harbor.) Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Cap- braced the term; one of the students Gates explained that Kaneohe Bay ricorn, though there are occasional reefs drew, as a sort of logo for the efort, was the inspiration for the “super coral” at higher latitudes—near Bermuda, for a coral colony with a red “S” on what project. For much of the twentieth cen- instance. The world’s largest reef, or might, anthropocentrically, be called its tury, it was used as a dump for sewage. really reef system, is the Great Barrier chest. Around the time the award was By the nineteen-seventies, a majority Reef, along the east coast of Australia. announced, Gates was named the di- of its reefs had collapsed. A sewage- Reefs can be hundreds of feet tall and rector of the Hawaii Institute of Ma- diversion program led to a temporary thousands of acres in area. Unlike the rine Biology. recovery, but then invasive algae took Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier “A lot of people want to go back to over and the water turned into a murky Reef, which extends more than four- something,” she told me at one point. soup. teen hundred miles, actually is visible “They think, If we just stop doing things, In 2005, the state teamed up with from space. maybe the reef will come back to what the Nature Conservancy and the Univer- The architects of these vast struc- it was.” sity of Hawaii to devise a contraption— tures are diicult to see with the naked “Really, what I am is a futurist,” she basically, a barge equipped with giant eye. Known infelicitously as polyps, said at another. “Our project is acknowl- vacuum hoses—to suck algae of the individual corals are generally no more edging that a future is coming where seabed. Gradually, the reefs revived. than a tenth of an inch or so across. nature is no longer fully natural.” There are now more than fifty so-called They consist of a set of tentacles—ei- “patch reefs” in the bay. ther six or a multiple of six—arrayed he Hawaii Institute of Marine “Kaneohe Bay is a great example of around a central mouth. Corals can, in T Biology occupies its own tiny is- a highly disturbed setting where indi- efect, clone themselves, so a typical land, known as Moku o Lo‘e, or, alter- viduals persisted,” Gates said. “If you polyp is surrounded by—and also at- natively, Coconut Island. In the nine- think about the coral that survived, those tached to—thousands of other polyps teen-thirties, Moku o Lo‘e was bought are the most robust genotypes. So that that are genetically identical to it. Many by an eccentric millionaire who fash- means what doesn’t kill you makes you are also hermaphrodites; they produce ioned it into an insular Xanadu. He in- stronger.” both eggs and sperm, which they re- stalled a shark pond, a bowling alley, In one set of experiments planned lease once a year, in the summertime and a shooting gallery, and threw elab- for the super-coral project, corals from after a full moon. The polyps live in a orate parties with guests like Shirley Kaneohe Bay will be raised under the thin layer at the surface of a reef; the Temple and Amelia Earhart. After sorts of conditions marine creatures rest of the structure is essentially a bone- falling into decline, Moku o Lo‘e was can expect to confront later this cen- yard, composed of the exoskeletons of rediscovered by Hollywood in the tury. Some colonies will be bathed in countless coral generations. nineteen- sixties. TV producers used it warm water, others in water that’s been One day, when I was hanging around in the opening sequence of “Gilligan’s acidified, and still others in water that’s Moku o Lo‘e, Gates ofered to show Island.” both warm and acidified. Those which me some polyps close up, through a There’s no public transportation to do best will then be bred with one an- state-of-the-art machine known as a Moku o Lo‘e, which sits of the wind- other, to see if the resulting ofspring laser scanning confocal microscope. The ward coast of Oahu, in Kaneohe Bay. can do even better. confocal is so elaborate that its many Visitors just show up at a dock, and the The power of selective breeding is lenses and screens and beam splitters

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 23 take up an entire room, and it’s so com- said. “I try not to think about that.” It was a beautiful Hawaiian morn- plicated that Gates had to call in a col- Although corals can’t travel, they ing, but the bay, in midwinter, was cool league—a molecular biologist named practice a highly efective version of enough that Gates recommended bor- Amy Eggers—to run the thing. hunting and gathering. Their nemato- rowing a wetsuit. The only suit in my We decided to look at one of Kane- cysts contain minute poisonous barbs; size was an extra-thick one; getting into ohe Bay’s most common species, Po- these they use to spear tiny planktonic it made me empathize with any animal cillopora damicornis, colloquially known prey, which they then stuf into their that’s ever been eaten alive by a boa. I as cauliflower coral. Eggers went to mouths. (Some corals also deploy nets finally managed to zip it, and Gates and fetch a walnut-size chunk from a col- made of mucus to nab their victims.) I and two of her students set of in a ony that was growing in a tank and Meanwhile, their symbionts are pro- fibreglass boat. placed it in a dish of water. It looked ducing sugars, via photosynthesis. The Our first stop was a reef nicknamed like a dimpled pebble. She put the dish symbionts allow the bulk of these sug- the Fringe. “Wow, there’s a lot of mor- on the scope, and the pebble came ars to leak into the corals, an arrange- tality,” Gates said as we anchored nearby. alive. The shock of being moved had ment that, in human hunter-gatherer We put on masks and plopped into the prompted most of the polyps to retract terms, might be compared to finding water. When she got right up to the their tentacles, but after a minute or a tree that harvests and delivers its reef, Gates brightened. so they began to extend them and gen- own fruit. “Wherever it’s still brown, it’s living tly wave them around. I found the scene The eiciency of the symbiotic re- tissue,” she told me. She pointed to a enchanting, as if I’d happened upon a lationship is what makes reefs possible: large colony of Montipora capitata, or fairy ball. the sugars released by their symbionts rice coral, that was sporting a plastic “It’s a very dynamic little world,” power the corals’ massive building proj- tag. Much of it was covered with olive- Eggers observed. She upped the mag- ects. These projects, in turn, foster many colored algae, which looked like ratty nification, and I could make out the other relationships—far more than ma- shag carpet. But there were also lots of nematocysts, or stinging cells, at the rine biologists have been able to under- clumps of beige. tip of each tentacle. I could also see stand, or even catalogue. “It’s really heartening to see these the corals’ minute plant symbionts. reefs be so resilient,” Gates said. Under the laser, these showed up as wing to Gates’s many adminis- We swam along. It was hard for me bright-red dots, so that the polyps O trative duties—in addition to run- to tell what represented a sign of resil- seemed to be glowing from within. As ning the marine-biology institute and ience and what didn’t, since I wasn’t en- the polyps grew more active, I found her own lab, she’s the president of the tirely sure what I was looking at. Rib- myself investing them with little ge- International Society for Reef Studies— bons of bright orange, which I took latinous personalities. One was wav- she spends a lot of her time in meet- to be a show of health, turned out to ing particularly vigorously, as if trying ings. Whenever she has a chance, though, be the opposite—a species of invasive to attract attention. she jumps into the water. Another day sponge, introduced from Australia. “You can imagine what happens when I was hanging around the island, What struck me most about the reef when people step on them,” Eggers Gates ofered to take me with her. was what was absent. Aside from an occasional—and spectacular—yellow tang, there were almost no fish. When I asked Gates about this, she said that it was the legacy of decades of overfish- ing. This was yet another problem for the corals, which depend on herbivores to keep down the algae that compete with them for space. We pulled ourselves back onto the boat and motored on. We were in the flight path of the Marine base, and every few minutes a plane either landing or taking of screamed above us, trailing a cloud of black smoke. The next stop was a reef called the Keyhole, where Gates and her students were monitoring three rice-coral col- onies. The three were neighbors and probably closely related, yet they had responded very diferently to rising water temperatures. One was ghostly white and, it seemed, dead. Another was pale, “Once, in a moment of weakness, I started several other families.” and probably partly dead. The third was an earthy brown and was thriving. Or perhaps the diference was epigen- The colors of a healthy reef are a etic. Epigenetics is to genes what punc- sign of harmony. Polyps are transpar- tuation is to prose; epigenetic changes ent; it’s the microscopic plants living alter the way genes are expressed but inside them that give them their ruddy leave the underlying code unafected. hue. In very warm water, these tiny Or the fault may lie not in the corals plants, which belong to the genus Sym- themselves but in their symbionts. biodinium, go into what might be de- There are dozens of strains of Symbi- scribed as photosynthetic overdrive. At odinium, and diferent ones seem to a certain point, they produce be associated with difer- so much oxygen that they ent levels of heat tolerance. threaten their hosts. To de- Gates is hoping to ex- fend themselves, the polyps plore all these possibilities. spit out (or slough of ) their The aim of her project is symbionts and turn white— not just to create a super hence the term bleaching. coral but also to investigate In the summer of 2014, whether corals that aren’t unusually high water tem- super can be trained, as it peratures in the Pacific were, to do better. She be- caused widespread bleach- lieves that it may be possi- ing around Oahu. Reefs in Kaneohe ble to coax young corals to take up new Bay were particularly hard hit; an un- symbionts, not unlike the way parents derwater video shot in the bay in Oc- encourage children to make new friends. tober, 2014, shows colony after colony She also believes that exposure to mod- of stark white coral. erately high temperatures induces epi- In the summer of 2015, water tem- genetic changes that can help corals peratures in Kaneohe Bay spiked again, withstand very high temperatures. If so, by almost four degrees Fahrenheit. then she thinks it might be possible to This time, the event was linked to a “condition” reefs by dousing them with huge shape-shifting pool of warm hot water. “Yes, it might be logistically water that became known as the Blob. quite diicult to do,” she told me. “But Some of the bay’s corals hadn’t recov- an engineer would be able to solve that ered from the first bleaching; many of problem in a heartbeat.” those which had been rallying were once again laid low. oral reefs are often compared “At the height of the bleaching events C to cities, an analogy that captures in 2014 and 2015, we all went into the both the variety and the density of life water and said, ‘Shit!’ ” Gates told me. they support. The number of species “Two bleaching events in a row—that’s that can be found on a small patch of outrageous.” healthy reef is probably greater than can Though Gates certainly hadn’t be encountered in a similar amount of planned on back-to-back bleaching ep- space anywhere else on Earth, includ- isodes when she proposed the super- ing the Amazon rain forest. Research- coral project, in a perverse sort of way ers who once picked apart a single coral they turned out to be godsends. She colony counted more than eight thou- wouldn’t have to design a test to find sand burrowing creatures belonging to the toughest corals; the bay had per- more than two hundred species. Using formed that task for her, separating col- more sophisticated genetic-sequencing onies that could withstand repeated techniques, scientists recently looked bleaching from those which couldn’t. to see how many species of crustaceans In the bit of reef we were looking alone they could find. In one square at in the Keyhole, this sorting process metre at the northern end of the Great had played out with peculiar vividness. Barrier Reef, they came up with more The three colonies, right next to one than two hundred species—mostly another, had been subject to the same crabs and shrimp—and in a similar-size water temperatures. What had distin- stretch, at the southern end, they iden- guished the quick from the dead? Per- tified almost two hundred and thirty haps the colonies were, in some small species. Extrapolating beyond crusta- but critical way, genetically distinct. ceans to fish and snails and sponges and

once did a study of conventional coral- restoration projects, which involve rais- ing coral colonies in tanks and trans- planting them onto damaged reefs. “I scoured the literature for any ex- amples I could find,” he told me. He found some two hundred and fifty proj- ects, which collectively cost a quarter of a billion dollars. The total area that was covered by the projects was just two and a half acres, or roughly two football fields. “So we can call that the ‘restored area,’ though there are issues around that, because often the corals in these projects die,” Hughes went on. “When you consider just the Great Barrier Reef, which is a tiny fraction of the world’s reefs, it has the area of Finland. So going from a test tube or an aquarium to mil- lions of football fields is hugely expen- sive, obviously.” The sort of scaling up that would be required would mean “According to our waiting-room security cam, you’re corals could no longer be transplanted; fidgety and have a constant head itch.” they’d have to be dispersed in another way, perhaps as embryos. (Coral em- bryos form larvae that drift around for •• a while before settling.) “If you put corals—super corals— octopuses and squid and sea squirts and just “rapidly eroding rubble.” Accord- out in Kaneohe Bay, it would take prob- on through the phyla, scientists esti- ing to Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at ably thousands of years for them to mate that reefs are home to at least a Australia National University, if reefs spread naturally from Hawaii, which is million and possibly as many as nine were to disappear, the seas would look an isolated archipelago,” Hughes said. million species. much as they did in Precambrian times, “So you’d have to have some mecha- This diversity is even more remark- before fish had evolved. “It will be slimy,” nism—aerial spraying from helicopters able in light of what might, to extend he has observed. Worldwide, some five or something—to spread them around the urban metaphor, be called reefs’ en- hundred million people rely on reefs the Pacific. I don’t know how you would virons. Tropical seas tend to be low in for food, protection, income, or a com- get to that next step.” At the time I nutrients like nitrogen and phospho- bination of all three. Attaching a mon- spoke to Hughes, it was late summer rus. Since most forms of life require ni- etary value to these goods and services in Australia, and the northern part of trogen and phosphorus, tropical seas is diicult—some entire nations are the Great Barrier Reef was sufering also tend to be barren; this explains why composed of reefs—but estimates run from the worst bleaching that observers they’re often so marvellously clear. Ever as high as three hundred and seventy- had ever seen. since Darwin, scientists have been puz- five billion dollars a year. Ken Caldeira is a researcher at the zled by how reefs support such rich- Because so much is at stake, Gates Carnegie Institution for Science, at ness under nutrient-poor conditions. argues, the super-coral project is im- Stanford University, who studies ocean The best explanation anyone has come perative. “I don’t really care about the acidification. He noted that reef-build- up with is that on reefs—and here the ‘me’ in this,” she said one day over lunch ing corals, from the order Scleractinia, metropolitan analogy starts to break in a strip mall in Kaneohe, the town have been around at least since the down—all the residents enthusiasti- closest to Moku o Lo‘e. “I care about mid-Triassic. Yet reefs remain confined cally recycle. what happens to corals. If I can do some- to those relatively few spots on the “In the coral city there is no waste,” thing that will help preserve them and planet where conditions suit them just Richard C. Murphy, a marine biologist perpetuate them into the future, I’m right. who worked with Jacques Cousteau, going to do everything I can.” “I find it implausible that we’re go- has written. “The byproduct of every But scale is also what makes many ing to succeed in doing in a couple of organism is a resource for another.” Cor- other researchers leery of the project. years what evolution hasn’t succeeded als are not only the architects of the sys- Terry Hughes, the director of the Aus- at over the past few hundred million tem, they’re also the repairmen; with- tralian Research Council’s Centre of years,” Caldeira observed. “There’s this out their ceaseless maintenance, there’s Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, idea that there should be some easy

26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 techno-fix, if only we could be creative identified as a fungus, which had been could hardly be said to be reviving it. enough to find it. I guess I just don’t imported from Asia, probably on Japa- Powell attended graduate school in think that’s true.” nese chestnut trees, Castanea crenata. the nineteen-eighties, around the same ( Japanese chestnuts, which co-evolved time as Gates, and, like her, he was fas- alf a hemisphere away from with the fungus, find it only a minor ir- cinated by molecular biology. When he H Moku o Lo‘e, the American Chest- ritant.) By the nineteen-forties, some got a job at the forestry school, in 1990, nut Research and Restoration Project four billion American chestnut trees had he started thinking about how new mo- operates out of several labs and a green- been wiped out. American chestnuts lecular techniques could be used to help house in Syracuse, New York. It, too, can resprout from the root collar; today, the chestnut. Powell had studied how might be described as an efort at as- pretty much the only examples that still the fungus attacked the tree, and he sisted evolution, only with a much more exist in the woods are small, spindly knew that its key weapon was oxalic radical assist. The project’s aim is not trees that have sprung up in this way. acid. (Many foods contain oxalic acid— to breed up a tougher tree but to create “They will grow for a while and then it’s what gives spinach its bitter taste— one through genetic engineering. get killed down to the ground again,” but in high doses it’s also fatal to hu- William Powell, a professor at the Powell told me. “So they’re kind of in mans.) One day, he was leafing through State University of New York’s Col- what I call a Sisyphean cycle.” (The trees abstracts of recent scientific papers when lege of Environmental Science and known as horse chestnuts, which can be a finding popped out at him. Someone Forestry, founded the chestnut project found in many parks and gardens, are had inserted into a tomato plant a gene with a colleague, Charles Maynard, not, technically, chestnuts at all; they are that produces oxalate oxidase, or OxO, and now they co-direct it. Powell is members of a diferent family.) an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid. fifty-nine, with gray hair, dark eye- Eforts to save Castanea dentata be- “I thought, Wow, that would disarm brows, and a boyish earnestness. gan almost as soon as the blight swept the fungus,” he recalled. “I love trees,” he told me recently. through. The first attempts involved Years of experimentation ensued. The We were sitting in his oice, which is hybridizing American chestnuts with gene can be found in many grain crops; decorated with a pair of street signs on other chestnut species. Then came zap- Powell and his research team chose a a metal pole. One sign says “Chestnut ping chestnuts with gamma radiation, version from wheat. First they inserted Lane,” the other “Elm Street.” Powell’s in the hopes of producing a beneficial the wheat gene into poplar trees, be- wife gave him the signs as a birthday mutation. Next was a scheme to weaken cause poplars are easy to work with. gift, because he likes to point out that the fungus by using a virus. These eforts Then they had to figure out how to work practically every town in America has produced thousands upon thousands with chestnut tissue, because no one had roads named for the two trees. Since of trees, all of which either succumbed really done that before. Meanwhile, the there’s nothing to anchor the pole to, it to the blight or were so diferent gene couldn’t just be inserted on its own; lists to one side, as if hit by a truck. from the American chestnut that they it needed a “promoter,” which is a sort Until about a century ago, the Amer- ican chestnut, Castanea dentata, domi- nated the forests of the eastern United States; in some parts of the country, one in four trees was a chestnut, in some parts even more. Many chestnuts were enormous—ten feet wide and a hun- dred feet high—and their wood, which is rot-resistant, was used for everything from furniture and shingles to railroad ties and utility poles. “Not only was baby’s crib likely made of chestnut, but chances were, so was the old man’s coin,” a plant patholo- gist named George Hepting wrote. Then, in 1904, the chief forester at the New York Zoological Park—now the Bronx Zoo—noticed that some of the chestnut trees in the park were ail- ing. The following year, so many trees were turning brown that the forester appealed for help to the U.S. Depart- ment of Agriculture and the New York Botanical Garden. Within five years, chestnut trees from Maryland to Con- necticut were dying. The culprit was “Let’s go, boys—those Christians aren’t going to devour themselves.” of genetic on-of switch. The first pro- per cent of the chestnuts that grew in method but you can’t do that method.’ moter Powell tried didn’t work. The America before the blight. “You have emerald ash borer going trees—really tiny seedlings—didn’t pro- “This is a century-long project,” Pow- through right now,” he went on. (The duce enough OxO to fight of the fun- ell said. “That’s why I tell people, ‘You’ve borer, another import from Asia, is kill- gus. “They just died more slowly,” Pow- got to get your children, you’ve got to get ing ash trees from Colorado to New ell told me. The second promoter was your grandchildren involved in this.’ ” Hampshire.) “Should we just leave the also a dud. Finally, after two and a half ash trees and say, O.K., they’re gone? decades, Powell succeeded in getting all s the world warms, and the Woolly adelgid is killing the hemlocks. the pieces in place. The result is a chest- A oceans acidify, and species are re- If we lose all the hemlocks, do we just nut that is blight-resistant and—except shuled from one continent to another, say, O.K., that’s gone? There’s what’s for the presence of one wheat gene and it’s increasingly diicult to say what called thousand-cankers disease that’s one so-called “marker gene”—identical would count as conservation. In his spreading on walnuts right now. Is that to the original Castanea dentata. most recent book, “Half-Earth,” the bi- the kind of attitude we should have? We “I always say that it’s 99.9997-per- ologist E. O. Wilson argues that the have all these challenges out there, and cent American chestnut,” he said. best hope for the planet’s remaining the question is: Should we just let the Powell took me to see his and May- species lies in leaving them alone. Even trees die out? And to me that’s not an nard’s labs, where thousands of two- today, there are vast regions where, Wil- option.” inch tall transgenic chestnuts were grow- son writes, “natural processes unfold in When I was in Hawaii, I found my- ing in plastic boxes. Instead of dirt, the the absence of deliberate human inter- self wavering. I would listen to Gates boxes contained a clear, gooey growing vention.” (The Amazon Basin is one and agree with her: there’s no going medium that looked like hair gel. Then such region; the Serengeti is another.) back. Then I would get on the little we drove over to an experimental gar- We ought to allow these processes to ferry and try to picture the super-coral den about five miles from campus. In continue, Wilson argues. To this end, project moving forward. My head would one plot, there were scraggly, unmodified he recommends setting aside fifty per start to ache. Corals are slow to reach chestnuts. The trees were encircled by cent of the planet’s surface as reserves. sexual maturity, and, when they do, most stumps—the remains of earlier eforts “Give the rest of Earth’s life a chance,” spawn only once a year. Crossbreeding to resprout—and their trunks were he pleads. requires many generations, and in that ringed with gashes, as if someone had Those scientists who recommend time—however long it may be—the been trying to slit them open. this sort of hands-of approach—and seas will have grown that much warmer In another plot, surrounded by an there are many of them—stress the lim- and more acidified. Well over a thou- eight-foot fence, were a few dozen trans- its of what science can accomplish. Just sand species of Scleractinia have been genic trees. These had smooth, un- because you can break an egg doesn’t identified, and probably lots more await blemished bark, which reminded me of mean you can put it back together. They discovery. To save reefs is a project akin snakeskin. The tallest was about ten feet argue that even the best-intentioned to saving forests; one species of super high and about six inches in diameter. intervention can do more harm than coral wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to It was a chilly day in March, and all the good. People may read about a project breed hundreds of them. And, even if branches were bare. Powell explained like Gates’s or Powell’s and take exactly this could be accomplished, how would that the fence was mostly to keep out the wrong lesson from it. you get billions and billions of polyps deer, but also to discourage anti-G.M.O. “There’s a lot of psychology here,” settled in the ocean? protesters. He told me that I ought to Terry Hughes told me. “There is a dan- Gates acknowledges the long odds. come back in late spring, when the trees ger of thinking we’ve found the tech- “It is daunting,” she told me. “But I’m would be in bloom. Chestnuts produce nological solution, so therefore we can a realist. I cannot continue to hope that streamer-like catkins, covered in tiny keep damaging reefs, because we can our planet is not going to change rad- white flowers. “People used to say it was always fix them in the future. ically. It already is changed. like snow in June,” he said. “In terms of protecting ecosystems “There are many, many unknowns,” Before any transgenic trees can be like coral reefs or rain forests, preven- she went on. “And people are very quick planted outside an experimental plot, they tion is always better than cure,” he added. to criticize based on ‘But what happens have to be approved by three federal agen- Advocates for techniques like as- if this doesn’t work and what happens cies: the Department of Agriculture, the sisted evolution and genetic engineer- if this doesn’t work?’ And I say, ‘Well, I Food and Drug Administration, and the ing argue that the moment for being don’t know now, but I know I’ll know Environmental Protection Agency. Pow- hands of has passed. Humans have al- more when I get there.’ And I feel that ell is planning to request approval later ready so violently altered the world that we’re at this point where we need to this year. This will initiate a review pro- without “deliberate intervention” the fu- throw caution to the wind and just try.”  cess that could take up to five years. Once ture holds only loss and more loss. approval is granted—assuming that it “There’s just too many people right 1 Remarks we doubt ever got made is—Powell wants to produce ten thou- now,” Powell told me. “I always say, ‘We sand trees that can be made available to need a full toolbox of methods to keep Headline in the Washington Post. the public. If all these trees get planted our forests healthy.’ And we shouldn’t MAYOR WAS TOO QUIET AFTER DEATH, and survive, they will represent .00025 limit it by saying, ‘Well, you can do this SOME SAY

28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 of “Best,” you are clearly in the mid- SHOUTS & MURMURS dle of an intensely legitimate corre- spondence. You and the recipient both have classy paperweights, substantial WHAT “XOXO” REALLY MEANS fountain pens, and completely illegible yet very sophisticated signatures; you’re BY EMMA RATHBONE probably both “scary good” at oral sex and are open to everything, but have also mastered the art of saying “no.” A guide to interpreting e-mail give you a haunted music box at the sign-ofs: oice holiday-gift exchange. “Yours”: No one knows what the hell this means. A tremendous amount oxo”: Contrary to popular be- “XXX”: This is more or less the same of research has been done, but it’s still “X lief, this does not mean “hugs thing as “XX,” except a thousand times not clear if the person who signs of and kisses.” If anything, it’s intended to worse. If the person who signed of this with this really thinks, or wants to in- convey light afection, like a pat on the way were playing a rousing game of dicate, that she is “yours,” nor is it clear butt from a Texan aunt. You shouldn’t Taboo with you and your friends, instead whether “Yours” is romantic or simply take it as anything more. of playing the game she would punch you. congenial. Tread lightly with this per-

“XOX”: This indicates full, throb- “All the best”: When a person signs son. Anything could mean anything at bing, sexual desire. The person who of this way, she truly wants the best this point. You’re basically in a virtual- signs of this way is hoping that you’ll for you. Not only that, but she is tal- reality maze where question marks are picture her naked silhouette playing ented, graceful, and tolerant, and knows bouncing through the air amid wacky the saxophone in some mist. exactly how to do everything from par- fart sounds. allel parking to “processing” a squash. “XO”: This is like when you lean in “Thanks”: This is completely sarcastic. to kiss your Texan aunt on the cheek “All best”: This person has gone but you both turn the wrong way and completely of the rails. You should be “Sincerely”: This is the way Abra- kiss on the mouth. very nice to her, because she is obvi- ham Lincoln always signed of, so take ously having a personal problem. If that for what it’s worth. “X”: This is a simple, respectful nod, you saw her at home, she would be indicating that everything is going ab- grimly bouncing on an exercise ball, “Peace out!”: This person probably solutely fine. muttering, “All best, all best, all best, has an earring in the shape of a turtle, all best” and wondering whom to say and tries to get everyone to notice it. “XX”: This indicates strong profes- it to next. sional hostility. People who sign of “Kramer vs. Kramer”: This is self- with “XX” wish you the worst, can’t stand “Best”: This indicates the highest explanatory. the way you move through the world, level of efortless elegance and agility

TIM LAHAN and if they had their way they would in business afairs. If you are signing “Love”: This person loves you. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 29 Harry’s 2001 film, “By Hook or By LIFE AND LETTERS Crook,” as neither male nor female but “a special—a two for one.” Sara Marcus, in an elegant and con- IMMEDIATE FAMILY cise review of “The Argonauts,” for the Los Angeles Times, notes the way Maggie Nelson’s life in words. that Nelson circles “away and back again to central questions about devi- BY HILTON ALS ance and normalcy, family- making and love.” What Nelson is asking, through- out the book, Marcus says, is “How does anyone decide what’s normal and what’s radical? What kinds of ex- perience do we close ourselves of to when we think we already know?” Last month, the book won the 2015 Na- tional Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, but long before that it was passed around and praised by any num- ber of readers who knew nothing, or next to nothing, about Nelson’s inter- est in queerness, let alone lives like the ones her memoir grew out of and em- bodies. What those fans responded to most viscerally, perhaps, was the fact that it’s a book about becoming, both mentally and physically—about what it takes to shape a self, in all its com- pleteness and disarray. In “The Argonauts,” at the time that Harry is taking testosterone and having a double mastectomy, Maggie is pregnant with their son, Iggy, who is now four. It’s one of the rare mo- ments in modern literature where the pregnant woman does not stand alone, wondering what will become of her or her child; Papa’s going through some fairly significant shit, too. But before the reader can settle into any kind of cozy acceptance of all that, Nelson shifts course again, asking what family can mean when the body is no longer a body but dust and then a memory. Is It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves that makes her readers feel hopeful. memory the tie that binds? Is love? When Harry talks about his life— ay 5, 2015: that was when Mag- vivid instances of both the familiar as he did, with great afability, one M gie Nelson’s ninth book, “The and the strange. Central to “The Ar- evening last August, at a corner table Argonauts,” came out. Published two gonauts” is the story of Nelson’s great in a dark Los Angeles restaurant— months after the author turned forty- love for Harry Dodge, a West Coast the diminutive, auburn-haired Nel- two, the slim, intense volume, which sculptor, writer, and video artist who son listens with quiet seriousness. Her tells the philosophical, sometimes is fluidly gendered. As Nelson em- pale face turns nearly as red as her hair comic tale of Nelson’s ever-developing barks on her intellectual and emo- when Harry says something about consciousness, combines—like a num- tional journey, Harry also goes on var- their connection, or when she inter- ber of other masterpieces of Ameri- ious excursions in order to become rupts him to interject an idea or a de- can autobiography—memoir, literary the person he is now, whom Nelson tail about his own life which he may analysis, humor, and reporting with describes, quoting a character from have forgotten. Afterward, Nelson

30 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 PHOTOGRAPH BY GRAEME MITCHELL may blush again or quickly smooth analyzing a world saturated with por- Maggie arrived in 2005, when she down her hair or say, even more quickly, nography and torture. “Maggie’s voice was ofered a teaching position at the “Right, right, right,” as a way of mark- had a certain level of doubt and a California Institute of the Arts. (She’d ing time, before continuing on with, self-reflective vibe that made me trust taught at Wesleyan, her alma mater, or going deeper into, whatever she her, even when she was criticizing stuf for a year before that.) L.A., as she was talking about. that I really love.” wrote in “The Red Parts,” seemed “as Speaking freely but thoughtfully is It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many good a place as any other.” By the time important to Nelson, in part because selves—the poet who writes prose; the they met, Harry, who was making as a kid she was teased for being a memoirist who considers the truth video pieces and other work that ex- “Chatty Cathy,” and in part because specious; the essayist whose books amined marginalism and capitalism, she finds ideas irrepressible and ex- amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which had come to love L.A., but Maggie citing to explore. Not surprisingly, the protagonist goes from darkness to was lonely and disoriented there. Nelson has a very precise relationship light, and then falls in love with a sin- Of their first meeting, Harry told to language—and to the vicissitudes gular knight—that makes her readers me, “She was just open-faced. Big of personal history, including the feel hopeful. Her universe is “queer,” strong smile, firm handshake, and self-mythologizing that goes into fluid, as is Harry’s (tattooed on the then—whoosh—blushing.” A few making a transformed self. She has fingers of his left and right hands, re- months later, he e-mailed her to ask published four volumes of accom- spectively, are the words “flow” and if she’d like to take a walk. He rea- plished verse, but it’s her prose works, “form”), but this sense of flux has lit- soned that “walking is good, because which cover an array of intellectual tle to do with the kind of sentimen- if you’re really nervous you can get the and social issues, that have brought tal hippiedom that emerged, say, in jitters out.” Before seeing her again, her a wider readership: the devastat- the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of Harry read several of Nelson’s books, ing “The Red Parts” (published in Maggie and Harry’s home town in the including “The Red Parts” and her 2007 and reissued this month, by sixties. Nelson is just as critical of the verse exploration of the same subject, Graywolf), for instance, focusses on politics of inclusion as of exclusion. “Jane: A Murder” (2005). He admired the aftermath of the 1969 murder of What you find in her writing, rather, the structure of “The Red Parts,” Nelson’s aunt and the trial, thirty-six is a certain ruefulness—an understand- which Nelson had wanted to have a years later, of a suspect in the case; in ing that life is a crapshoot that’s been “documentarian” feel. (While work- “The Art of Cruelty” (2011), Nelson rigged, but to whose advantage? ing on it, she read Peter Handke’s explores the role of the body in an age classic about his mother’s suicide, of extremity; and in “The Argonauts” aggie met Harry in April, “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,” another she questions what it means to be a M 2007, the year that “The Red record of a silent, lost woman.) For lover, a parent, someone’s child—“het- Parts” came out. The occasion was a Harry, the book’s many narrative eronormative” roles—when you don’t joint book party in celebration of “The strands, interrupted by or leading to feel heteronormative, let alone com- Red Parts” and of a new poetry col- other strands, indicated Maggie’s un- fortable with such traditional labels lection by Eileen Myles, at the Ma- derstanding of how in real life tales as “gay,” “straight,” “female,” and “male.” chine Project, a Los Angeles art space. don’t always add up. They met at the In all of her books, Nelson picks at The two had settled in L.A. at dif- Silver Lake Reservoirs and walked the underbelly of certainty and finds ferent times. Back in the early nine- and talked and talked. scabs—the white-male-patriarchy scab, ties, in San Francisco, Harry had co- In “The Argonauts,” Nelson writes the smug-female-thinker scab, the ac- founded Red Dora’s Bearded Lady, a about the first days of the love afair: ademic scab—and yet she gives these community-based performance space, October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are voices a place in her work, because, as and staged a number of solo pieces shredding the bark of the eucalyptus trees her friend the novelist Rachel Kush- around the city, before joining Sister in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the ner put it, “she knows exactly what Spit, the now legendary spoken-word widowmakers by having lunch outside, during kind of language, at this moment, what and performance-art collective—for which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles as a reminder kind of views, are important, but she a time, they were signed to Mr. Lady of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words also understands that people are vul- Records—which also featured Myles, I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in nerable and they get things wrong, not for what he describes as a “weird dyke an incantation the irst time you fuck me in through malicious intent. Sometimes tour roving around the country.” Priced the ass, my face smashed against the cement loor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. it’s just a misstep, or they’re too far out of San Francisco by 1999, Harry You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack from the other person’s subjectivity.” joined his partner at the time, the of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does Matthew Barney, an artist known video artist Stanya Kahn, in New York. it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you for his high-risk, epic exploration of Two years later, they moved to L.A., asked, then stuck around for an answer. American masculinity, told me that, where they had a son, whom they still At the restaurant in L.A. in August, for him, “The Art of Cruelty” was “the co-parent, though their relationship Maggie excused herself to use the rest- missing piece of a puzzle,” in terms of dissolved in early 2007. room, and I took the opportunity to

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 31 ask Harry what it felt like to be writ- people, I was very concerned about Maggie, blushing a bit and look- ten about so intimately. (When the how I’m represented, and how peo- ing down, said, “Oh, that kind of book was first published, the pair gave ple respond to me.” book chat.” a joint interview in which Harry ad- I said, “Sure. You’re human.” mitted that, several years into their “Yeah, exactly. And so, I am capa- etting someone into your life relationship, he was “still getting used ble of staying away from a kind of L involves letting someone into your to being with someone who writes stream of feedback. And, in a way, complications. “And then, just like ‘personally.’ ” He went on, “I’ve been that’s what I’ve done. So, to answer your that, I was folding your son’s laundry,” a very private person. Kind of a pub- question, it hasn’t been that strange. Nelson writes in “The Argonauts.” lic person as an artist in some sense, I don’t know what you asked. What “He had just turned three. Such little but very private in most ways. And so did you ask?” socks! Such little underwear! I mar- I said at some point, sort of earlier in We laughed: I was already being veled at them.” Throughout Nelson’s our relationship, that being with her “blurred.” books there is an undeniable desire to was like an epileptic being married to Maggie, returning to the table, belong to a family, including the one a strobe-light artist.”) He smiled. He asked what we’d been talking about. she was born into. said that he tried to keep the responses I said, “Book chat.” Raised in Marin County, Califor- to Nelson’s work “a little blurry, be- Harry said, “He asked how has nia, Maggie was the second child of cause specifics might be too much it been with the response to ‘The Bruce and Barbara Nelson, both of for me to know, or to bear. Like most Argonauts.’ ” whom loved words. Barb, as she was called, had written a dissertation on Virginia Woolf, at San Francisco State University, while pregnant with her first child, Emily. Bruce was a law- yer—and a great talker, Maggie says— who travelled a lot during the early years of their marriage, leaving his wife home alone with two children. When Maggie was seven, Barb fell in love with a man who’d painted the Nelson house. She and Bruce divorced the following year, and after that Maggie and Emily split their time between their father’s place and the home their mother shared with her new husband. Maggie’s father encouraged her to be whatever she wanted to be. He left out clippings of articles on subjects that interested her—dance, theatre— and in those words Nelson saw pos- sibilities. In the early evening of Jan- uary 28, 1984, when Maggie was ten, Barbara received a phone call from a friend of Bruce’s; the friend had been supposed to meet Bruce that after- noon but he hadn’t shown up. In “The Red Parts,” she describes, with calm horror, the rest of that evening: Barb and the girls getting in the car and driving over to Bruce’s house; one of the girls asking that the car radio be turned down, because “its manic chirp- ing sounded all wrong”; Barb telling the girls to stay upstairs while she went downstairs to her ex-husband’s bedroom to investigate, then order- ing them outside; the paramedics ar- riving. Bruce had died, of a heart at- tack, at forty. “I think when he died and people were trying to find the reason for why he died—it was the era when everyone talked about being Type A,” Maggie told me. “And I began to feel like I was maybe Type A as well.” She laughed. “I didn’t have to worry about any partic- ular trait being terminal. Life would do me in no matter what my traits.” Often children find it easier to blame death or divorce on the parent who stays. Emily thought their father had died of a bro- ken heart, and for years Maggie resented her mother for not having let her go into the bedroom where she found the body—maybe there were clues as to what had killed him which only Mag- gie could have spotted. The close-knit trio of Barb, Emily, and Maggie unrav- elled, for a time. Maggie reacted nega- tively, at first, to Barb’s new husband. In “The Red Parts,” Nelson says of that unnamed man:

With a kind of measured sadism whose roots “Pictographs or it didn’t happen.” continue to elude me, each Christmas my step- father would wrap up the Chinese Yellow Pages (which my mother couldn’t read) and blank •• VHS tapes (which she had no use for) to give to her as gifts, as if to remind her that he hated the holidays, hated gift-giving, and . . . that he about their bodies and their relation- from certain internalized academic ex- was committed to performing these hatreds each year with a Dadaesque spirit of invention. ship to death. In 1998, Nelson enrolled pectations. She said, “I remember when But there was a trick: one year he planted a in the graduate program in English at I first met Wayne he told me, ‘Don’t pair of real pearl earrings at the bottom of this the City University of New York. She get bogged down by the heavyweights.’ pile of wrapped Wal-Mart garbage, so in sub- waitressed to support herself and lived It sounds so simple, but it was very sequent years our mother never knew if a trea- in a series of decrepit apartments that freeing advice. A sense of permission.” sure were coming. It never did, but the tension remained high; her disappointment, acute. she didn’t bother to fix up. When one At CUNY, Nelson wrote a disserta- fell apart, she’d move into another, tion, which was published by the Uni- Emily acted out, hanging with a maybe putting a couple of beers in the versity of Iowa Press, in 2007, as rough crowd. Maggie forced herself fridge, but for the most part her life “Women, the New York School, and to be the responsible daughter, the was not what you’d call domestic. Other True Abstractions.” In it, she good girl who did well at school and Despite the unsteadiness and drift, explores the flip side of macho nine- avoided trouble, behaving at times like there was the life of the mind—the teen-fifties and sixties New York Ab- a kind of emotional spousal equiva- order and disorder one could chart stract Expressionist painting and po- lent for her mother. It would take Mag- and articulate through language. “She etry; she looks at the spaces that gie years to figure out that what life found a friendship with her instabil- fiercely independent female artists, breaks sometimes has to stay broken. ities and turned it immediately into like Joan Mitchell, and gay male poets, In 1990, she moved east, to attend questions that are dazzled, rather than like James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara, Wesleyan, where she studied English. narcotized,” the writer Wayne Koesten- built, friend by friend and complica- Post-structuralism was not only in the baum, with whom Nelson studied at tion by complication—a family united air, it was becoming central to the cur- CUNY, told me. “The language of crit- in its diference. The book traics in riculum. This meant that the dead white icism fit her like a glove. She already a fair amount of academic language, men were being questioned and held had the whole personality and she was but Nelson perverts the staid stuf to account for what they’d got wrong. much more fluent than I am, or any- with an intimate tone that intertwines The thinking empire was dead. Long one I know—with just putting to- quotations, close readings of the work, live Gayatri Spivak! Maggie studied gether a paragraph so that it flows and plain old feeling. writing with Annie Dillard, eventually and pursues an argument in a non- Before grad school, Nelson had producing a thesis on Anne Sexton and pedestrian way. A quality of being on furthered her education in other ways. Sylvia Plath (with some Foucault)— fire with questions.” Koestenbaum’s In the mid-nineties, Eileen Myles outsiders who made noise by talking work and guidance released Nelson would put up flyers in the East Village

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 33 she wants to get closer to by breaking down her feelings in language. One reason she enjoyed writing poetry in those years, she told me, was the way it allowed her to avoid gender refer- ences. “I barely ever had third-person pronouns in poetry,” she said. “It was always such a pleasure that it could all just be a ‘you.’ Pronouns are, you know, so bossy and noisy.” The “you” in “1999” may be the same man Nelson writes about in “Bluets” (2009), a short prose work about the color blue and feeling blue, in which absence in general and the “you” ’s ab- sence in particular drive the story:

116. One of the last times you came to see me, you were wearing a pale-blue button-down shirt, short-sleeved. I wrote this for you, you said. We fucked for six hours straight that afternoon, which does not seem precisely possible but that is what the clock said. We killed the time. You were on your way to a seaside town, a town of much blue, where you would be spending a week with the other woman you were in love with, the woman you are with now. I’m in love with you both in completely dierent ways, you said. It seemed unwise to contemplate this statement any further. . . . Not long after that afternoon I came across a photograph of you with this woman. You were wearing the shirt. Nelson told me that “Bluets” was, to some extent, “a formal experiment,” a marrying of “the emotional content to this kind of faux-Wittgensteinian •• form.” Balancing pathos with philos- ophy, she created a new kind of clas- sicism, queer in content but elegant, and hold poetry workshops for a nom- like an angry joke, but, then again, almost cool in shape. inal fee. Maggie took some classes, most jokers are angry: “Bluets” wasn’t Nelson’s first exper- and the two women became close— iment with form. “Jane: A Murder” so close that Nelson is now Myles’s In my dream last night (2005), her breakthrough work, tells I had a boob job literary executor. Despite that bond, and my nipples were the story, in poetry, of her mother’s Myles has always marvelled at Nel- pointing of in two younger sister, Jane Louise Mixer. In son’s “formal” quality, which may have diferent directions. 1969, Jane, a smart, political twenty- something to do with the diference It was disorienting three-year-old student at the Univer- between what she’s willing to reveal and the photographer sity of Michigan, posted a note on a was disappointed. in life and what she reveals on the But later he turned into college bulletin board, looking for a page. Many of Nelson’s early poems the best lay of my life ride to Muskegon. She was going home involve the body—wanting to escape He was so huge for spring break. The next time her its limitations or to connect more to get inside me. . . . family saw her, she was dead—stran- deeply to the pleasure it can give oth- Upon penetration gled and shot by an unknown assail- everything exploded— ers. In her 2003 collection, “The Lat- he exploded, I exploded ant. (A man was convicted of the crime est Winter,” she describes “the poetry the dream exploded in 2005.) A book of verse, “Jane: A Mur- of the future”: “it’s got to come from I didn’t even remember it der” is not strictly poetical: Nelson drops at least three brains: the brain in the until you grabbed my breasts in crime reports, newspaper stories, head, the gut-brain, and the brain in and other “news” about Mixer’s hid- the ovaries. it will wax red and rise In “1999,” as in much of Nelson’s eous death, alongside monologues, bone-white.” In “1999,” from the same verse, there is a “you” she’s trying to poems, letters, and diary entries that try collection, the body can start to seem communicate with, a lover or a friend to return Jane to herself, unmangled.

34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 Writing about Jane and Barb, Nelson they’re trying to make sense of things could easily have been writing about that are just a flow. And they’re doing herself and her own sister: it a disservice.” Two sisters, ifteen years apart, sharing a A year or so after they started dat- yellow room. ing, Maggie and Harry got mar- They divided it in two; it drove Barb nuts ried. Maggie writes about it in “The that Jane’s closet was on Barb’s side of the Argonauts”: room. We hadn’t been planning on getting married All the myths have been juggled about, so per se. But when we woke up on the morning it’s hard now to igure out of November 3, 2008, and listened to the ra- dio’s day-before-the-election polling as we made who was messy, who was neat our hot drinks, it suddenly seemed as though who awkward, who popular. Prop 8 was going to pass. We were surprised at our shock, as it revealed a passive, naïve trust Sisters, twinning and not, male that the arc of the moral universe, however long, power and violence, Nelson’s identifi- tends toward justice. But really justice has no cation with Jane’s intellectualism and coordinates, no teleology. We Googled “how to political interests are all rendered in get married in Los Angeles” and set out for Nor- walk City Hall, where the oracle promised the the book with a watchful intensity deed could be done. . . . As we approached Nor- that takes the reader into Jane’s lost walk—where the hell are we?—we passed several and reimagined body and Maggie’s churches with variations of “one man + one living and inventing mind. “It added woman: how God wants it” on their mar- quees. . . . Poor marriage! Of we went to kill it a certain heat to the text” to use Jane’s (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable). own voice, culled from her diaries, Nelson told me. And, in a way, the Last month, Harry did the work of book was the end of a particular kind a spouse when he got on a plane in L.A. of recognizable verse for her; no stanza and flew to New York for a day to hold could contain it. Myles told me that Maggie’s hand while she sat in the great “Jane: A Murder” was “like the band hall at the New School for Social Re- that suddenly becomes the Beatles. . . . search for the National Book Critics’ A chemical thing happens and magic Circle Awards. Resplendent in a blue occurs in art-making, and for Mag- shirt and black jacket and stroking his gie it was when she found Jane. All beard, Harry listened with interest as the her tricks, all her talents, all her pow- winners were announced. When Mag- ers came forward.” gie’s name was read out, he kissed her. Maggie stood near the stage as the critic t was with “Jane: A Murder” that Walton Muyumba read the citation, con- I Nelson went from being cluding, “She lends critical a versifier to being a writer theory something that it fre- who plays with prose and quently lacks, namely, exam- remakes the genre. It was ples drawn from real life, real to that person that Harry art-making, and real bodies.” found himself drawn in As he read, Maggie loosened 2007, during their after- her hair and then smoothed noon at the Silver Lake it down. Taking the stage, she Reservoirs. Maggie, he said, thanked various people in her helped him get over the professional life. Looking skepticism that he was feel- up, she added: ing about language as “this If you read “The Argonauts,” thing that misses all the time.” She you’ll know that this book—it literally stands on showed him, he explained, how “it ac- the shoulders of . . . the wild revolutionary work tually can be quite precise and very of so many feminist, queer, and anti-racist think- ers, writers, activists, and artists. . . . I called specific.” Maggie’s work helped change those people in my book “the many-gendered Harry, and it’s hard not to notice how mothers of my heart,” which is a phrase I steal her tendency to defy categorization from the poet Dana Ward, but I do have a speciic as a writer parallels his resistance to mother, who’s also here tonight—Mom, I love being classi fied as a person. “I’m not you. . . . And, last but not least, thank you, Harry Dodge . . . who so generously allowed me to interested in categories,” he told me. write about our conjoined life to make this book, “People put too much pressure on the and it is beyond lucky that you stand by me to- world and smash it into boxes, and night and every day. ♦

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 35 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE ASSAD FILES Capturing the top-secret documents that tie the Syrian regime to mass torture and killings.

BY BEN TAUB

he investigator in Syria had in a nondescript oice building in war-crimes investigation completed by made the drive perhaps a hun- Western Europe, sometimes under an independent agency like the CIJA, T dred times, always in the same diplomatic cover. There, each page is funded by governments but without a battered truck, never with any cargo. It scanned, assigned a bar code and a court mandate. The organization’s was forty miles to the border, through number, and stored underground. A founder, Bill Wiley, a Canadian war- eleven rebel checkpoints, where the sol- dehumidifier hums inside the evidence crimes investigator who has worked on diers had come to think of him as a room; just outside, a small box dis- several high-profile international tri- local, a lawyer whose wartime misfor- penses rat poison. bunals, had grown frustrated with the tunes included a commute on their sec- Upstairs, in a room secured by a geopolitical red tape that often shapes tion of the road. Sometimes he brought metal door, detailed maps of Syrian the pursuit of justice. Because the pro- them snacks or water, and he made sure villages cover the walls, and the roles cess of collecting evidence and orga- to thank them for protecting civilians of various suspects in the Syrian gov- nizing it into cases is purely opera- like himself. Now, on a summer after- ernment are listed on a whiteboard. tional, he reasoned that it could be done noon, he loaded the truck with more Witness statements and translated doc- before the political will exists to pros- than a hundred thousand captured Syr- uments fill dozens of binders, which ecute the case. ian government documents, which had are locked in a fireproof safe at night. Only the U.N. Security Council can been buried in pits and hidden in caves Engels, who is forty-one, bald and ath- refer the crisis in Syria to the Interna- and abandoned homes. letic, with a precise, discreet manner, tional Criminal Court; in May, 2014, He set out at sunset. To the fighters oversees the operation; analysts and Russia and China blocked a draft reso- manning the checkpoints, it was as if translators report directly to him. lution that would have granted the court he were invisible. Three reconnais- The commission’s work recently cul- jurisdiction over war crimes committed sance vehicles had driven ahead, and minated in a four-hundred-page legal by all sides of the conflict. Nevertheless, one confirmed by radio what the in- brief that links the systematic torture Wiley told me, the commission has also vestigator hoped to hear: no new and murder of tens of thousands of identified a number of “quite serious checkpoints. Typically, the border was Syrians to a written policy approved perpetrators, drawn from the security- sealed, but soldiers from the neigh- by President Bashar al-Assad, coördi- intelligence services,” who have entered boring country waved him through. nated among his security-intelligence Europe. “The CIJA is very much com- He drove until he reached a Western agencies, and implemented by regime mitted to assisting domestic authorities embassy, where he dropped of the operatives, who reported the successes with prosecutions.” cargo for secure transfer to Chris En- of their campaign to their superiors Counting Syria’s dead has become gels, an American lawyer. Engels ex- in Damascus. The brief narrates daily nearly impossible—the U.N. stopped pected the papers to include evidence events in Syria through the eyes of trying more than two years ago— linking high-level Syrian oicials to Assad and his associates and their vic- but groups monitoring the conflict mass atrocities. After a decade spent tims, and ofers a record of state-spon- have estimated the number to be al- training international criminal-justice sored torture that is almost unimag- most half a million, with the pace practitioners in the Balkans, Afghan- inable in its scope and its cruelty. Such of killing accelerating each year. The istan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads acts had been reported by survivors in war has emptied out the country, with the regime-crimes unit of the Com- Syria before, but they had never been some five million Syrians escaping to mission for International Justice and traced back to signed orders. Stephen neighboring countries and to Europe, Accountability, an independent inves- Rapp, who led prosecution teams at straining the capacities of even those tigative body founded in 2012, in re- the international criminal tribunals in countries which are willing to provide sponse to the Syrian war. Rwanda and Sierra Leone before serv- asylum and humanitarian aid. The In the past four years, people work- ing for six years as the United States chaos has also played a fundamental ing for the organization have smug- Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes role in the rise of ISIS, the bloodiest of gled more than six hundred thousand Issues, told me that the CIJA’s docu- the jihadi groups that have used Syria government documents out of Syria, mentation “is much richer than any- as a staging ground to expand the reach many of them from top-secret intel- thing I’ve seen, and anything I’ve pros- of terrorism. ligence facilities. The documents are ecuted in this area.” Last fall, Wiley invited me to ex- brought to the group’s headquarters, The case is the first international amine the commission’s case at its

36 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 Some half a million people have been killed in Syria’s civil war. An additional five million have fled, emptying the country.

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 37 headquarters, on the condition that I had kept his family in power since 1971. ing it and do not are part of it.” He not reveal the oice’s location, the gov- Other autocrats in the region placed emphasized, “There is no compromise ernments assisting with document ex- similar trust in their own security forces. or middle way in this.” traction, or, with few exceptions, the Then Egypt’s dictatorship collapsed, Two days later, protests across the names of his staf. and the U.N. Security Council voted country grew larger. Assad had already to refer the situation in Libya, where formed a secret security committee, THE INSURRECTION Muammar Qaddafi had ruled for forty- called the Central Crisis Management two years, to the International Crim- Cell, to coördinate a crackdown. Its n December, 2010, a twenty-six- inal Court. In March, NATO forces chairman was Mohammad Said Bek- I year-old fruit seller in rural Tunisia, launched a bombing campaign in Libya. heitan, the highest-ranking oicial in fed up with a life of harassment and In Syria, people began calling for con- the ruling Baath Party, after Assad; the extortion by venal government oi- cessions by the government—timidly, other members—who were all Assad- cials, doused himself in paint thin- at first. The country had spent forty- dynasty confidants—were routinely ner, struck a match, and unwittingly eight years under martial law, and the shuled among the top positions in the ignited the Arab Spring. Hundreds of notion of public demonstration was military, the ministries, and the security- thousands of citizens in the Middle unfamiliar. The protests were met with intelligence apparatus. East and in North Africa, sharing his tear gas and bullets, but were soon at- Every night, the Crisis Cell met in rage and despair, rose up against an tracting tens of thousands of people. a drab oice on the first floor of the assortment of autocrats and kings. They On March 30, 2011, Assad addressed Baath Party Regional Command, in demanded democratic reforms, eco- the nation from the rotunda of the central Damascus, and discussed strat- nomic opportunities, and an end to cor- Syrian parliament building. He had egies for crushing dissent. This re- ruption. In late January, 2011, Bashar just sacked his cabinet, and many peo- quired detailed information about each al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal, ple expected him to announce liberal- protest, so the cell requested reports “What you have been seeing in this izing reforms. Instead, he declared his from security committees and intelli- region is a kind of disease.” Syria re- intention to suppress dissent in the gence agents in the most rebellious mained stable, a fact that Assad at- brutal tradition of his father, Hafez provinces. The group decided to hire tributed to his attention to the “beliefs al-Assad. “Syria is facing a great con- someone to process all the paperwork. of the people.” He added, “This is the spiracy, whose tentacles extend” to for- One of the applicants was Abdel- core issue. When there is divergence eign powers that were plotting to de- majid Barakat, a twenty-four-year-old between your policy and the people’s stroy the country, he said. “There is no with slicked-back hair. Barakat, who beliefs and interests, you will have this conspiracy theory,” he added. “There had recently finished a master’s degree vacuum that creates disturbance.” is a conspiracy.” He closed with an om- in international relations, was work- In fact, Assad’s confidence was likely inous directive: “Burying sedition is a ing for the education ministry. At his rooted in the proficiency of Syria’s national, moral, and religious duty, and interview, in April, a high-level oi- security-intelligence apparatus, which all those who can contribute to bury- cial named Salaheddine al-Naimi ex- amined his résumé and asked whether he could use a computer. Next, Naimi asked how he would resolve the de- veloping crisis. Barakat replied that, in order to avoid an armed response, the government should make some con- cessions and enact moderate reforms. Barakat was surprised to be hired. In college, he had been questioned by military-intelligence agents about suspicions that he and his friends were involved in anti-government political activities. Early in the unrest, he had joined one of Syria’s first organized revolutionary bodies. Now, in the re- gime’s haste to make the Crisis Cell more eicient, it was employing a member of the opposition to pro- cess confidential security memos from all over the country. On most days, more than a hundred and fifty pages ar- rived at Barakat’s desk, cataloguing “I’m putting you on speaker—it’s essential for the minutiae of perceived threats to everyone to hear our conversation.” Assad’s rule—graiti, Facebook posts, protests—and, eventually, actual threats, crisis in Syria spiralled into civil war, often alicted by upper-management like the existence of armed groups. it was looking for someone to train “incompetence.” Since its launch, in Barakat read everything and drafted activists to document human-rights 2002, the I.C.C. has opened nine in- summaries, which Naimi delivered to violations. Wiley told the caller that vestigations, spent more than a bil- the members of the Crisis Cell to guide plenty of groups were already cat- lion dollars, and secured convictions each meeting. aloguing the abuses. But he had a against three men: two warlords and Barakat was never allowed into the counter-proposal: he could train Syr- a former politician, all from Congo. meeting room, but he saw the mem- ians to collect the type of evidence After two years, Wiley became disil- bers walk in, and Naimi kept detailed that would better serve a prosecution, lusioned, and he applied to become a minutes on Baath Party letterhead. tracing criminal culpability up as high human-rights monitor for the United Occasional guests of the group in- as it went. It was a novel approach— Nations, in Iraq. cluded high-ranking Baathist oicials, instead of raising awareness of crimes, On October 19, 2005, Wiley sat in Syria’s Vice-President, and Assad’s a hangar at a military base in Amman, younger brother, Maher, a short-tem- Jordan, awaiting transport to Bagh- pered military commander, whom the dad. A television showed Saddam European Union identified in a sanc- Hussein in a heated exchange with a tions list as the “principal overseer of judge, insisting that he was still the violence against demonstrators.” President of Iraq. It was the former At the end of each meeting, the Cri- dictator’s first day on trial. “I paid no sis Cell agreed on a plan for every se- attention to it whatsoever,” Wiley re- curity issue. Then Bekheitan, the chair- called. The multinational coalition had man, signed the minutes, and a courier established a special tribunal, stafed delivered them to Assad at the Presi- he intended to pin them on state ac- by Iraqi judges and prosecutors, to dential palace. Barakat learned that tors, whether or not the international hold legal proceedings in accordance Assad reviewed the proposals, signed community sanctioned the investiga- with international standards. But the them, and returned them to the Crisis tion. The British government approved Iraqi government replaced judges who Cell for implementation. Sometimes of the idea. seemed sympathetic to the defense, he made revisions, crossing out direc- Wiley’s career had intersected with and, days after Saddam’s lawyers ap- tives and adding new ones. He also a resurgence of the field of interna- peared in news broadcasts, two of them issued decrees without consulting the tional criminal law; since the Nurem- were assassinated. Crisis Cell. Barakat was certain that no berg and Tokyo trials, there had been In early 2006, the coalition hired security decision, no matter how small, no major international investigations Wiley to advise Saddam’s lawyers, was made without Assad’s approval. until the atrocities in the Balkans, in whose principal argument was that Shortly after Barakat began working the nineteen-nineties, led to the Yu- the court itself was illegal. They reg- for the Crisis Cell, he started leaking goslavia tribunal. Wiley, who had ularly boycotted proceedings, leaving documents. Though the regime publicly completed a Ph.D. in international Iraq and watching the hearings on claimed that it was allowing peaceful criminal law at York University while television. To Wiley, the trial was “not demonstrations, security memos showed serving in the Canadian Army—he about Saddam, per se,” but “about send- that intelligence agents were targeting wrote his dissertation on war crimes ing a signal to a conflict-afected so- protesters and media activists, and shoot- and the evolution of international hu- ciety that, from here on out, this na- ing at them indiscriminately. Barakat manitarian law—became an analyst tion will be governed on the basis of photographed the memos in the bath- at the tribunal. In 2002, he travelled the rule of law.” He urged the lawyers room, and sent the pictures to contacts to Kigali to investigate war crimes in to come back to Baghdad and defend in the Syrian opposition, who forwarded Rwanda, and the following year he their client. them to Arabic news organizations. His moved to the eastern region of the Eventually, Saddam’s defense team plan was to steal as much information Democratic Republic of the Congo, returned to court, but shortly be- as possible and then leave the country. where he was the first investigator re- fore the hearings concluded a third But each leak heightened suspicion tained by the International Criminal lawyer was kidnapped; his bullet-rid- within the oice, increasing the chances Court. dled corpse was found the next day. that, sooner or later, the regime would Wiley, who considers himself “a field The remaining members of the team discover that he was the mole. guy, not an oice guy,” is tall, with red- blamed the Iraqi government and did dish-blond hair, and handles the con- not show up for the closing arguments. THE INVESTIGATORS siderable stress of his profession with Wiley drafted Saddam’s defense, and Cuban cigarillos, gallows humor, and a court-appointed Iraqi lawyer read ne day in October, 2011, while exercise. (At the age of fifty-two, he it out in court. Saddam protested, de- O Bill Wiley was visiting a Libyan bench-presses more than three hun- claring, “A Canadian wrote this clos- exile in Niger, he received a phone dred and fifty pounds.) While work- ing argument. I know he’s a spy.” It was call from a friend, relaying a request ing for the I.C.C., he came to believe clear that the court would convict from the British government: as the that the international court system was Saddam, but Wiley argued that his

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 39 life should be spared. Instead, seven grenades from giant slingshots. The European Union. After that, Germany, weeks later, at a military base called Syrian Army bombarded what little Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and Camp Justice, Saddam was hanged while territory these rebels controlled. Sev- Canada also pledged consistent funding. Shiite guards taunted him. His body eral of the activists attending the train- was delivered to the Prime Minister’s ing session in Istanbul lived in besieged CAPTURING THE DOCUMENTS residence for display at a party. areas; Wiley and his colleagues taught Wiley stayed in Baghdad for an- them to photograph and measure ar- he war was going poorly for Assad. other two years, filing defense mo- tillery craters, assess angles of impact, T In 2012, the number of high-level tions for former members of Sad- collect shell fragments, identify the defections from the military and from dam’s regime. An American justice types of weapon used, and calculate civilian ministries rose dramatically. oicial told me that Wiley’s eforts launching points. But, he said, “the big The defectors joined the Free Syrian to bring due process to the tribunal thing we wanted them to focus on was Army, a loose organization of rebel were “practically heroic.” When Wiley documentation generated by the re- groups. They hoped to transform Syria left Iraq, in 2008, he launched a pri- gime,” which he called “the king or into a democracy, but jihadis started vate consultancy, called Tsamota, queen of evidence in international appearing on the battlefields, too. Gen- which assists Western governments criminal proceedings.” erally, they proved to be more capable and U.N. agencies in preventing war After the first few training sessions, in combat than the Free Syrian Army. crimes in troubled countries by train- Wiley invited Stephen Rapp, at that Various insurgents captured key cross- ing police, as well as members of the time the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large ing points into Turkey, and pushed gov- military, security, and intelligence ser- for War Crimes Issues, to speak to the ernment troops out of much of north- vices, to act in accordance with inter- Syrians, who now numbered in the ern Syria, including parts of Idlib and national law. dozens. The two men had met a de- Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. cade earlier, while working for the By that February, the head of the n November, 2011, Wiley travelled Rwanda tribunal. Over drinks in Is- Central Crisis Management Cell had I to Istanbul with two Tsamota col- tanbul, Wiley and Rapp discussed the questioned Barakat about the leaks. leagues to train Syrians to collect ev- prospect of creating a hub to house Another employee of the Crisis Cell idence that would be useful in war- captured documents that could one told Barakat that his secretary was spy- crimes prosecutions. A security day be used in trials. The United Na- ing on him. Barakat decided to escape consultant whom he knew had se- tions had set up a commission of in- the country, but not before securing lected some young Syrian activists and quiry to investigate human-rights the minutes of the meetings, which lawyers, who were invited to recruit abuses in Syria, but its mandate didn’t were stored in the members’ oices. trusted friends. Wiley was impressed extend to prosecutions, and, rather He also planned to steal correspon- by their bravery, but he thought that than dealing with documents, the U.N. dence between the Crisis Cell and the their methods were inefective. “Their relied mostly on witness interviews Presidential oice, the Prime Minis- tendency, in those days, was to run conducted in refugee camps and by ter, and the minister of the interior. around with cameras, video cameras, Skype. “Almost all the evidence that On a day of, Barakat ransacked the smartphones, and photograph regime they’re collecting won’t be available oices, taking as many documents as attacks in urban areas, and then put for prosecution,” Rapp told me, be- he could, before driving some two hun- this stuf on YouTube,” he told me. cause the U.N. promised witnesses dred and fifty miles north from Da- “One of the first things we did was indefinite confidentiality, and trials mascus, to the Turkish border. explain to them that, as criminal evi- are public. Syrian troops controlled the cross- dence, it’s basically useless” without When the activists and the law- ing point. But, with more than a thou- corroboration. “You’re running tre- yers—now investigators—returned to sand pages taped to his body, Barakat mendous risks—and, indeed, a lot of Syria, Wiley drafted a plan to create managed to slip through and check young people were getting killed and the Commission for International Jus- into a hotel under a false name before wounded generating video or visual tice and Accountability, and drew up anyone in Damascus realized that he images—really to no end.” Filming an a budget. Although Britain continued was gone. The next month, once his air strike on a hospital, for example, its support, finding other donors proved mother had safely left Syria, Barakat ofers no evidence that the attack was challenging. Western governments allot went public. He told Al Jazeera that planned by the kinds of high-level hundreds of millions of dollars to he wanted the documents to go to the oicials who draw the interest of the human-rights projects each year, but International Criminal Court. international justice system. “One Wiley told me that their typical re- Shortly after Barakat fled, the Cri- needs to establish their individual sponse to his requests for funding was sis Cell moved its meetings from the criminal culpability,” Wiley said. “What you’re proposing to do is some- Baath Party Regional Command to the Thousands of Syrian government thing that governments do, or the heavily guarded premises of the Na- troops had defected by then, joining United Nations does, and the Inter- tional Security Bureau. In July, amid ru- ragtag brigades of local farmers, stu- national Criminal Court does.” Even- mors of an impending coup, a blast in- dents, and hairdressers. Some fighters tually, with Rapp’s backing, the cija side the meeting room killed the made their own explosives and launched secured three million euros from the chairman of the Crisis Cell; the head

40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 of the National Security Bureau; the would loot the place, looking for weap- tigator, a Syrian, told me. Water pipes minister of defense; and Assad’s broth- ons and ammunition, because that’s would explode, destroying hundreds er-in-law Assef Shawkat, who had re- what they needed. And then they would of thousands of pages before he and cently taken over as the deputy minis- set the place on fire.” All potential ev- his colleagues could enter. Sometimes ter of defense. (At least two rebel factions idence would be destroyed. armed groups would call them to come claimed credit for the attack, but they Wiley says that the commission told and collect the files after a firefight ofered wildly inconsistent accounts of the rebels, “Take the documents first, ended. “Chain of custody is important, the logistics behind it.) The next day, a and set them aside until they can be but it’s not a deal breaker,” Wiley said. headline in the Times read, “Washing- moved out of the country. And make “It’s not worth getting— Well, people ton Begins to Plan for Collapse of a note—a very simple note—of where have been killed and wounded mov- Syrian Government.” Then Assad’s the documents were acquired and on ing this stuf.” Prime Minister defected to the oppo- what date. Box them up. Seal the boxes The first casualty was a courier, shot

Chris Engels and Bill Wiley inside the evidence room of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

sition. So did the spokesman for the to the best of your ability with Saran and wounded in 2012 as he ran toward Foreign Ministry. Even the top general wrap, or something like that—what- a smuggling route out of Syria with a responsible for preventing defections ever’s at hand. And then, as those ma- suitcase full of documents. Since then, accused the military of “carrying out terials move, chart that movement. But two others have been injured during massacres against our innocent civilian don’t tamper with or rifle through the extractions, and one—the brother of population,” and announced, “I am join- materials,” because in court a defense the commission’s deputy chief inves- ing the people’s revolution.” lawyer could argue that exculpatory tigator—was killed in an ambush by The commission’s Syrian investiga- evidence had been discarded. Syrian troops. Also in 2012, a courier tors forged alliances with key Free Syr- Often, Syrian investigators accom- and his wife came to an unexpected ian Army brigades as they gained ter- panied moderate rebel groups as they checkpoint outside Aleppo. It was ritory. The rebels initially “had no attacked security-intelligence build- manned by fighters belonging to Jabhat interest in the documentation,” Wiley ings, but government forces attempted al-Nusra, a jihadi group that later re- said. “They would go in, capture a re- to destroy any files that they couldn’t vealed its ailiation with Al Qaeda. gime facility. The smartphones would bring with them. In the days after a The militants discovered the couri- come out. There would be great joy and retreat, “there would be relentless shell- er’s documents in the back of his car.

BEN TAUB shouting and firing in the air. They ing” at key sites, the cija’s chief inves- They let his wife go, but took him

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 41 ings in otherwise sealed borders, so cap- tured documents can remain hidden for months. On one occasion, several thousand pages of evidence were left with an old woman in a remote farm- house in southern Syria, but the inves- tigator didn’t explain the significance of the files. When winter came, Wiley said, “in fairness, she was cold, so she burned the whole lot of it as fuel.” The commission’s chief investigator told me that in exceptionally hostile areas he and his colleagues hide boxes in caves or bury them in the ground, log the lo- cation, and hope to retrieve them months or years from now—whenever the kill- ing stops. Wiley said, “We have enor- mous quantities of material still in Syria that we’re not moving,” because it’s too dangerous. “Probably up to half a million pages.”

s the Syrians collected docu- A ments, Wiley hired military and “I was diferent people then!” political analysts, investigators, transla- tors, and lawyers in Europe. By 2015, the cija’s budget had grown to eight •• million dollars a year, and its staf to around a hundred and fifty, includ- into custody. “They were threatening national borders is by far the most ing employees at the headquarters and to put him on trial and execute him as dangerous step in the cija’s operation. at a video-analysis oice elsewhere in a regime spy,” Wiley told me. “We Paper is heavy and incriminating for Europe, in addition to the investigators worked out a deal where he was con- the carrier; on the other hand, pho- in the Middle East. The CIJA employs victed of something by the Sharia court tographs, while more portable, can be about as many investigators as the In- and the fine was five thousand dollars. diicult to authenticate in court. Bun- ternational Criminal Court has work- So we paid the fine.” dles of up to fifty pounds typically ar- ing on all its cases combined. Several CIJA investigators have been rive “in a dizzying array of crappy suit- Many of the documents have come kidnapped by jihadi groups, but all of cases” smuggled across borders, Wiley from security-intelligence facilities far them are free today. Radical Islamists told me, while large loads demand from the capital. These pages often pose as great a threat to their work as more intricate planning. “Think in refer to decisions made by the Cen- the regime does. These groups regard terms of a box of paper that sits next tral Crisis Management Cell, but to Western ailiations, as well as the often to the photocopier,” he explained. complete the chain of command the unfamiliar concept of international jus- “That box has five bricks, each with commission needed notes from those tice, with deep suspicion. And yet, in five hundred pages in it,” weighing a meetings. Barakat, who now lives in the pursuit of documents, many inves- total of about twenty pounds. “And Istanbul, told me that in 2014 Chris tigators made their mission known to that’s only twenty-five hundred pages. Engels and an analyst visited him to rebel commanders with murky con- We’ve extracted from Syria approxi- examine his documents from the Cri- nections. “Our people are extremely mately six hundred thousand pages”— sis Cell. (The CIJA, which doesn’t pub- well trained on what to do if they’re several tons. “So you need vehicles. licly identify witnesses, refused to ac- captured,” Wiley told me. “The equip- Those vehicles need to get through knowledge this.) “They spent three ment they have is encrypted and checkpoints. You need to do recon- days here, asking me in very great de- suiciently sophisticated that anyone naissance. You need to know what tail about the work I did, details about going through it would not find any kind of checkpoints you’re going to how the meetings would go,” he said. evidence of the work they’re doing.” run into.” The commission pays rebel They also photographed the smuggled Only one investigator, a Syrian woman, groups and couriers for logistical sup- papers, and Barakat promised them who was captured more than two years port. “We burn enormous sums of that he’d supply the originals if the ago, is currently detained by the Syr- money moving this stuf,” he said. case went to trial. ian regime. Large extractions often depend on As Barakat and I spoke through a Moving documents to the inter- friendly countries to negotiate open- video feed, he lifted up a heap of files,

42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 which are usually kept in a secure fa- will remain secret unless they are called 2011, the head of Deir Ezzor’s military- cility. “These are the meeting minutes to testify—ofers an opportunity to intelligence branch, Brigadier Gen- for the Central Crisis Management trace the specific efects of the Syrian eral Jameh Jameh, sent instructions Cell,” he said. He pulled out a page regime’s policies on the citizens that to all of his subordinates to “prepare and pointed to the embossed emblem it was trying desperately to subdue. cameras . . . in order to film the par- at the top. “As you can see—that lit- Hamada was born in 1977, the ticipants and instigators so they can tle gold hawk? These are the original youngest of seventeen children in an be identified and held accountable in documents, and they’re signed in educated, middle-class family in the the future.” (cija investigators later re- green.” The commission began sifting eastern city of Deir Ezzor. His sib- trieved this order, among many others through Barakat’s files, analyzing con- lings grew up to be pharmacists, teach- related to the crackdown, from the nections between the Crisis Cell’s de- ers, and lawyers, and he became a field military-intelligence headquarters in cisions and the criminal behavior of specialist at Schlumberger, the inter- Deir Ezzor, after it was abandoned.) security agents in distant provinces. national oil-services company, which Deir Ezzor’s security agents carried The task of tracking down former operated in the rich oil fields around out even the most trivial orders from regime agents who were willing to ex- Deir Ezzor. Members of Hamada’s their superiors. On February 4th, the plain their roles in the system was sim- family were outspoken critics of the head of the National Security Bureau, plified by the fact that so many had government, and even before the rev- in Damascus, signed a directive “to in- defected from the government. Ana- olution they were routinely followed vestigate, search for, and arrest” who- lysts for the cija found wealthy de- and periodically arrested. They were ever had written “Down with Bashar” fectors in the Gulf states, Turkey, and especially outraged by the govern- on a ten-inch water pipe along a re- Europe. They also took witness state- ment’s failure to do anything about mote stretch of highway near Deir ments in southern Turkey, in a heav- the widening gap between the rich Ezzor. The head of political security ily guarded refugee camp called Apay- and the poor. “It was all organized to for the province spent a month inves- dın, which is wholly populated by benefit the élites,” Hamada told me. tigating the incident, then replied, “We former regime oicers and their fam- In 2011, the head of the National Se- did not have any information about ilies. (None of them are listed as sus- curity Bureau wrote a secret memo to the perpetrators.” pects in the case, which focusses on the chairman of the Crisis Cell, at- On March 18th, there was a soc- higher-level oicials.) tributing the scarcity of patriotism in cer match in Deir Ezzor between the Wiley said of the witnesses, “If I Deir Ezzor to “the corrupt judicial home team, Al Foutoua, and Tishreen, could use a rather cold metaphor— system, long delays in adjudicating from Latakia, the team Assad favored. they’re a dime a dozen.” The CIJA pre- lawsuits, nepotism, and the resort to Hamada lived next to the stadium, ferred to interview victims who re- bribery to restore rights.” and could hear the noise from the mained in Syria and had never spoken The security-intelligence agencies spectators. “People in the crowd started to reporters, human-rights groups, or in the district were competent, and chanting for reforms, against the re- the U.N. commission of inquiry. (A de- loyal to Assad. Beginning with the gime,” he recalled. Assad’s team won. fense lawyer could suggest that, inside earliest hints of unrest, in February, The crowd was upset, but Hamada crowded refugee camps, testimonies might unfairly converge on a damning narrative.) So the CIJA’s Syrian inves- tigators interviewed roughly two hun- dred and fifty victims across several provinces, to secure “pattern evidence” showing that crimes had been perpe- trated in a systematic manner, in ac- cordance with evidence in the docu- ments. The goal was to draw strong links, through regime documents and testimony by witnesses and victims, be- tween Syrian government policies and their efects on individuals.

THE ACTIVIST

ne afternoon this winter, in a O hotel room near Amsterdam, I met a gaunt thirty-eight-year-old Syr- ian activist named Mazen al-Hamada. The story of Hamada, who is not a CIJA witness—those people’s identities “The Pigeon King grows tired of your career advice, Mother.” just laughed. He figured that the match inside the neighborhood mosque, the security committee, “We should nom- was fixed. “As soon as the referee blew Othman bin Afan, to organize pro- inate Internet experts among our com- the whistle to stop the game, every- tests that would take place after Fri- rades to deal with hostile Web sites body came out to the streets,” he said. day prayers. “It was a logistical issue,” spitting out their venom in the coun- It was the first substantial protest in he told me. “Everyone went to the try, such as Facebook.” Even as the Deir Ezzor. All soccer matches were mosque on a Friday, everyone came committee discussed the importance cancelled for the rest of the season. out.” He laughed, and added, “If we of showing restraint, the violence es- Through most of March, security- could have come out of churches, we calated. Jameh said that protesters intelligence oicials in Deir Ezzor de- would have come out of churches!” were courting “bloodshed, in prepa- scribed the unrest in straightforward According to captured minutes ration for summoning a foreign mil- terms. In a cable to his subordinates from the Deir Ezzor security com- itary intervention,” an outcome that throughout the province, Brigadier Gen- mittee, its members decided to infil- he said he desperately wanted to avoid. eral Jameh explained that the protests trate the mosques with Baath Party Early the next morning, he sent a in Syria were influenced by “some Arab loyalists, “an average of two hundred one-sentence cable to all military-in- countries witnessing youth revolutions comrades per mosque, to deal with telligence sections in the province: calling for change, democracy, freedoms, any case that incites sedition.” The “You are requested to instruct your and reforms aimed at creating job op- committee divided each group into agents to strictly refrain from open- portunities for young men, improving three teams: one inside the mosque, ing fire indiscriminately and killing living standards, and fighting corrup- one doing “reconnaissance” just out- people.” tion.” But by the end of the month the side, and the third on standby. But In May, security in the province provincial security chiefs had adopted the plan backfired: the following week, rapidly deteriorated. Men armed with the language of conspiracy which em- the governor of Deir Ezzor informed bats, pistols, and incendiary bombs anated from Damascus. Hours after the committee that “most of the men burned two police stations, four police Assad gave his televised speech at the who were arrested by the security ap- cars, and six police motorcycles. Intel- parliament building, on March 30th, paratus were Baathist comrades” who ligence agents learned that someone the members of the Deir Ezzor secu- had abandoned the Party to join the had tried to recruit volunteers to det- rity committee agreed to consider it “a protesters. onate a car bomb outside Jameh’s house. reference and a pillar in our work,” and Hamada often videotaped protests The head of the Deir Ezzor political- most of the group’s future discussions as well as the security response. The security branch warned, “There may were infused with anxiety over treach- regime had cut of the Internet in be a wave of assassinations.” ery, sedition, foreign infiltration, and his neighborhood, so he uploaded Hamada, who was briefly detained “the Zionist American project.” the videos to YouTube at a relative’s twice, continued to organize protests, Hamada and his friends were ex- workplace. Some of them ended up in but he started spending nights in safe cited by the prospect of revolution, and Arabic news broadcasts. To counter houses with other activists. One of his every Wednesday they began meeting such activities, the governor told the brothers had been arrested and hadn’t been released. In a meeting with the security committee, Jameh warned that the detentions could be “a double-edged sword,” increasing the number of angry people demanding their family mem- bers’ release. In late May, Jameh sent several cables expressing his outrage that interrogators were giving detain- ees electric shocks, putting out ciga- rettes on their flesh, beating them “on all parts of the body, in a disgusting manner,” and sodomizing them by forc- ing them to sit on soda bottles. He said that his jail would “refuse to take custody” of torture victims “unless there is a written report about the detain- ee’s health condition . . . that includes the names of those responsible for beat- ing him.” Jameh’s scruples apparently waned in the summer of 2011. Evidence ob- tained by the CIJA shows that detainees at his military-intelligence branch “Just a glass of wine with breakfast, ocer.” were beaten with fists, cables, and sticks until they were unconscious, their bones were broken, and their teeth fell out; stufed into car tires and beaten until their feet bled; given elec- tric shocks after having water poured on them; abused until they urinated blood; and beaten to death. Jameh personally participated in many of the interrogations.

THE ORDERS

n the evening of August 5, 2011, O the Central Crisis Management Cell held its usual meeting at the Baath Party Regional Command. In five months of revolution, the protests had spread to several more provinces, which members of the committee attributed to “the laxness in handling the crisis,” according to documents captured by “What are you wearing?” the cija. They blamed “weak coördi- nation and coöperation among secu- rity bodies.” That evening, they de- •• vised a plan to target specific categories of people. province’s security committee, with evolved.” The Crisis Cell even de- First, all security branches were to additional orders to “implement what manded lists of all arrestees. Some launch daily raids against protest or- is requested of you, so as to speed up members of the provincial security ganizers and “those who tarnish the putting an end to the crisis.” The heads committees took preëmptive steps to image of Syria in foreign media.” Next, of the four security-intelligence agen- satisfy their superiors. A copy of the “once each sector has been cleansed cies—military intelligence, Air Force Crisis Cell’s instructions was found in of wanted people,” security agents intelligence, political security, and Raqqa with a handwritten note: “We would coördinate with Baathist loyal- the general-intelligence directorate— did that a long time ago.” ists, neighborhood militias, and com- sent the instructions to the provin- Under international law, govern- munity leaders to insure that opposi- cial and regional branch heads, who ments are obligated to investigate re- tion activists could not return to those passed them on to local security ports of human-rights abuses. In Sep- areas. Third, they would “establish a agents. Members of the Crisis Cell tember, the public attorney in Deir joint investigation committee at the travelled to problematic provinces to Ezzor sent three faxes—later retrieved province level,” made up of represen- oversee the formation of joint inves- by the cija’s investigators—to the gov- tatives from all of the security branches, tigation committees. For the CIJA, ernor, the Syrian minister of justice, which would interrogate detainees. identifying suspects was easy, Wiley and the head of the province’s joint The results “shall be sent to all secu- said, because “their names are all over investigation committee, urging them rity branches, so that they can be used those documents.” to stop violating Syrian law. In one, he in the identification of new targets that “If those are orders that are sent wrote, “Parents and relatives of the ar- need to be prosecuted.” down, but no one acts on them, then rested persons are asking daily about This policy became the linchpin it doesn’t really tell us much,” Chris the fates of sons, fathers, and broth- of the cija’s case against oicials in Engels told me. “So it was equally im- ers. You ought to listen to what they the Syrian regime. Between Barakat’s portant for us to see reports coming have to say. The hospital refrigerator documents from Damascus and the back up the chain of command,” con- is full of unidentified corpses that have commission’s own six hundred thou- firming that those categories of peo- disintegrated, since they have been sand pages, retrieved from all over the ple had been targeted for detention there for a long period of time.” country, analysts in Europe were able and interrogation, and that the lead- to trace the dissemination of these ership in Damascus remained informed DETENTION orders down multiple parallel chains of the abuses in detention facilities. “A of command from the Crisis Cell. consistent failure to control one’s sub- azen al-Hamada’s name soon Hisham Ikhtyar, the head of the Na- ordinates who are behaving in a crim- M appeared on an arrest list in Deir tional Security Bureau, sent the in- inal manner will be prosecuted,” Wiley Ezzor. Two of his brothers were also structions to regional secretaries of said. “The law of command and supe- wanted, as was one of his brothers- the Baath Party, who chaired each rior responsibility is extremely well in-law. One day in March, 2012, a

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 45 doctor asked Hamada if he would asked for information about other op- ening it.” Hamada recalled Suhail ask- smuggle baby formula to a woman in position activists he had met in Da- ing, “Are you going to admit it, or shall Darayya, a rebellious suburb of Da- mascus, Hamada hesitated. The tor- I cut it of?” Hamada agreed that he mascus. He and his nephews gath- ture began. “At the beginning, they had carried a Kalashnikov, so Suhail ered fifty-five packages of formula, were using cigarettes,” he said. “They released the clamp and asked how many hid them under their clothes, and trav- would stub them out on my legs.” He clips of ammunition Hamada had car- elled to meet her at a café. As soon rolled up his jeans to the knee and ried. “How many clips do you want as Hamada handed over the bags, se- showed me four round scars on his left me to have?” Hamada asked. Suhail curity agents handcufed him and his leg, five on his right. There were burns reminded him that he had to con- nephews, pulled their shirts over their on his thighs, too. They also poured fess on his own, so Hamada said, “I heads, and shoved them into an S.U.V. water on him, and shocked him with had five bullets.” That wasn’t good “I had no idea where we were going,” wires and prods. To end the abuse, enough, Suhail told him: “I need two Hamada said. “The whole way, they Hamada gave up the names of friends magazines.” The torture escalated un- were telling us, ‘We’re going to exe- who had already been killed in Deir til Hamada confessed to everything cute you.’ ” Ezzor. they asked. After they were stripped to their The names were only the begin- underwear, beaten, and thrown in a ning. “How many people from the n hundreds of witness interviews, holding cell, about twelve feet square, Syrian Arab Army did you murder?” I the CIJA found consistent patterns in with some forty other detainees, they Suhail asked. Hamada had already interrogation practices across all branches learned that they were in the Air confessed to organizing protests, up- of the security agencies. People were Force-intelligence branch at al- Mez- loading videos, and speaking to the detained following the Crisis Cell’s pol- zeh Military Airport, one of the most foreign press. “The challenge here is: icy. Besides identifying “new targets,” notorious detention facilities in the how do you make up a story that you the results of these interrogations were country. killed these people?” he said. His shared among the agencies. Detainees Two weeks later, the prisoners were hands were cufed to a pipe near the were routinely kept in inhumane con- put in a small hangar, a little more than ceiling. “My feet were sixteen inches ditions for months or years without en- forty feet long and twenty feet wide. above the ground, so all of the weight tering the judicial system. A hundred and seventy people were was on my wrists,” he said. “I felt like Coerced confessions served no ap- packed inside, their arms wrapped the handcufs were sawing my hands parent intelligence-gathering purposes, around their legs, chins on their knees. of. I stayed for more than half an but they did lend a legalistic veneer to “You’re rotting,” Hamada told me. hour, and then started screaming. Be- the detention process. After confess- “There’s no air, there’s no sunlight. cause I kept screaming, they shoved ing to violent crimes, anti-government Your nails are really long, because you a military boot in my mouth and said, activists could face serious charges, and, can’t cut them. So when you scratch ‘Bite on this so you don’t scream.’ ” if convicted, be kept in detention for yourself you tear your skin of.” The This method of torture was used in years. The confessions also perpetu- prisoners weren’t able to wash them- most Syrian security-intelligence de- ated the illusion of a vast conspiracy selves or to change their underwear. tention facilities, with creative varia- against Syria, as detainees admitted to The sores of scabies and other skin tions. Many detainees had their wrists engaging in sedition or treason. ailments covered their bound behind their backs The brutality took a toll on many bodies. Throughout the before being strung up by interrogators, too. In at least one case, country, detainees rou- them; some were left hang- an interrogator begged a detainee to tinely drank water out of ing for days, others until admit to a crime so that he could stop toilets and died from star- they stopped breathing. hurting him. “They were very much vation, sufocation, and dis- Suhail’s assistants told of the opinion that they had to pro- ease. “People went crazy,” Hamada that if he admit- duce results,” Chris Engels told me. Hamada said. “People would ted to carrying weapons he “The ramifications of not doing their lose their memories, peo- would be released. He didn’t job well were real, and there’s evidence ple would lose their minds.” confess, so they cracked four of what happened to people who did Eventually, he was trans- of his ribs. At that point, not.” The final line of the Crisis Cell’s ferred to a solitary- confinement cell, he agreed that he had been armed with targeting policy ordered the heads of which he shared with ten people. a hunting rifle, and they let him down. security branches to “periodically sup- One day, Hamada was blindfolded But, to better suit terrorism charges, ply the National Security Bureau with and dragged to another room for ques- Suhail wanted the confession to in- the names of security agents who are tioning. The lead interrogator, whom clude a Kalashnikov. Hamada refused, irresolute or unenthusiastic.” Some of Hamada knew as Suhail, began by es- so, he said, “they stripped me out of them ended up in Hamada’s cell. tablishing Hamada’s identity. (Some my underwear and brought a plumb- Several months after first being tor- people were detained and tortured by ing clamp,” of the kind typically used tured, Hamada stood in line with his accident; their names were similar to to moderate pressure in hoses. “They nephew Fahad to ink their fingerprints those on wanted lists.) When Suhail put it on my penis, and started tight- onto their reports. Hamada assumed

46 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 that his included his confession; he didn’t know, because reading the re- port was not an option. A seventeen- year-old boy stood in line behind Ha- mada and Fahad. When the guards learned that he was from Darayya, the suburb of Damascus, they knocked him to the ground. One fetched a weld- ing torch and burned the boy “from here to here,” Hamada said, tracing a finger along his jawline. “And then he turned him around and he burned his neck and his entire back. . . . His face—I mean, it was fire. It was melting.” Recalling the event, Hamada’s eyes grew damp and red. His voice faltered, and he sobbed desperately. For two days, he and other prisoners in the hangar tried to soothe the boy’s inju- ries as he was dying. When the guards came to retrieve the corpse, Hamada yelled at them. In response, they hung •• him by his wrists for several hours. He told me, “You want them to kill you all over Syria taunted detainees by them bellowed, “Who wants medi- anyway, so you can be done with this. calling this weapon Lakhdar Brahimi, cine?” Several detainees lifted their You’re sick of the torture. You’re sick who was then the U.N. special envoy hands. The doctors hadn’t given of the sleeping, and waking up, and for Syria. Hamada any drugs—only a mostly living every single day.” In the hospital corridor, male and empty bag of intravenous fluid—but female nurses started hitting Hamada one of his bedmates, who had been in HOSPITAL 601 with their shoes and calling him a ter- the ward for several days, warned him rorist. When he got to the ward, he not to volunteer. The soldier selected n early 2013, after nearly a year of was tied to a bed with two other pris- an eager prisoner. With the inmate I detention, Hamada lay on the floor oners. A nurse asked him about his kneeling at his feet, head facing the of the hangar. He had been interro- symptoms, then beat him with a stick. floor, the soldier grabbed a sharp gated and tortured seven or eight times. A U.N. report from later that year weapon and started hacking at the An infection in his eye was dripping notes, “Some medical professionals base of his skull, severing the spinal pus. The skin on his legs was gangre- have been co-opted into the maltreat- cord from the head. Then he ordered nous. Prisoners were supposed to stand ment” of detainees at Hospital 601. another patient to drag the body to when a guard entered the cell, but on Hamada was in disbelief as much as the bathroom. The U.N. report says this day Hamada didn’t. “I’m urinat- he was in pain. of Hospital 601, “Many patients have ing blood,” he said. The next day, the That night, Hamada woke up need- been tortured to death in this facility.” head of interrogation came to the ing to use the bathroom. A guard hit The soldier called himself Azrael, after cell and informed Hamada that he him all the way to the toilets, but he the archangel of death; other survi- was being sent to Hospital 601, a mil- went in alone. When he opened the vors recall him murdering patients in itary hospital that sits at the base of first stall, he saw a pile of corpses, bat- similarly horrifying ways. Mt. Mezzeh; the Presidential palace tered and blue. He found two more “When I saw this, I swear—that’s is perched at the top. The head of in- in the second stall, emaciated and when I thought this was my fate,” terrogation also told Hamada to for- missing their eyes. There was another Hamada told me. “I would die here.” get his own name: “Your name is 1858.” body by the sink. Hamada came out On the second day, he begged a doc- Hamada had heard of Hospital in panic, but the guard sent him back tor to send him back to the Air Force- 601. Several other detainees had been in and told him, “Pee on top of the intelligence branch. The doctor noted sent there, and the few who had bodies.” He couldn’t. He started to that Hamada was still sick. “No, no, returned, Hamada said, had cau- feel that he was losing his grip on re- no, I am totally cured,” he said. On tioned, “This is not a hospital—this ality. According to the U.N. inquiry, the fifth day, he was escorted out of is a slaughterhouse.” Despite Hama- dead detainees were “kept in the toi- Hospital 601 by the same guards who da’s condition, guards hit him during lets” at multiple security branches in had deposited him there. “You animal, the drive to the hospital. One used a Damascus. you son of a bitch,” they said. “You green pipe; in Arabic, al-akhdar re- Later that night, two drunk sol- still didn’t die.” They hit him all the fers to a green object, so security agents diers walked into the ward. One of way back to the branch, then strung

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 47 him up by his wrists for four hours. gressional approval, but, he continued, room. To each charge, the judge said, In June, 2013, Hamada’s case was “what message will we send if a dic- “Not guilty.” referred to the judiciary. He was trans- tator can gas hundreds of children to Before Hamada was freed, he was ferred to Adra Prison, in Damascus, death, in plain sight, and pay no price?” interrogated by agents from the polit- where he filed an application for proof Shortly after the chemical attack, ical-security department. They asked of the charges against him. (Syrian Hamada and many other prisoners him about protests he had attended prisons are nominally subject to ju- were transported to al-Mezzeh, with- two years earlier. He immediately con- dicial oversight; the security agencies out explanation. Agents moved the de- fessed: “I said, ‘Yes, I was at protests. are not.) The written reply said that tainees to a large, empty hangar on the I called the President an asshole!’ ” He he had been arrested “for the crime base. At least one of the sarin-gas rock- added, “I had been through hell al- of terrorism and has been deprived ets is believed to have been launched ready. If it’s this, I’ll admit to every- of his liberty since June 5, 2013”— from the base at al-Mezzeh—it was a thing.” When the agents brought the same date that the charges were logical target for an American strike. Hamada back to the courtroom, the filed. Oicially, his fifteen months Inside the hangar, guards jeered at the judge recognized him and immedi- in the Air Force-intelligence branch detainees. They said that when the ately dismissed his case. at al-Mezzeh Military Airport didn’t Americans bombed Syria all of them exist. would be killed. amada returned to Deir Ezzor, In early September, the United H which he described as “a ghost n the early hours of August 21st, States backed away from the prospect city.” Two years of intense combat and I the Syrian government launched of a military campaign, and Hamada air strikes had destroyed many of the rockets carrying sarin gas into densely was returned to the terrorism court in buildings. The minaret of the Othman populated neighborhoods in Damas- Damascus, where his case was finally mosque had been shelled. His two cus, killing more than fourteen hun- heard. The judge noted that he had nephews were still detained in the Air dred people. In response, President confessed to attacking checkpoints and Force-intelligence branch in Damas- Obama, who had earlier committed to killing soldiers. Hamada rolled up his cus. Other family members had dis- a “red line” should Assad use chemi- pants and showed the judge the ciga- appeared in security facilities. cal weapons, announced, “I have de- rette burns. He held up his wrists, re- During Hamada’s detention, the cided the United States should take vealing deep purple scars. He showed revolution had become a sectarian war. military action against Syrian regime the black-and-blue welts on his torso. Jabhat al-Nusra had established itself targets.” He said he would wait for con- It was a familiar scene inside the court- as a powerful force, eclipsed in bru- tality only by ISIS. Moderate rebel groups still existed but were often led by corrupt warlords, and lost fighters to more competent jihadi factions. Many of the revolutionaries who once fought for freedom had been radical- ized or killed. Pro-Assad militias ar- rived in Syria from Iraq, Lebanon, Af- ghanistan, and Iran. ISIS had a signi- ficant presence in Deir Ezzor. Hamada said, “They were killing all of the media activists and the democratic activists, and every time they did it in a difer- ent Hollywood way.” He fled to Turkey, boarded a smug- gler’s raft to Greece, and travelled more than seventeen hundred miles to the Netherlands, where his sister had moved before the war. He recalled the migration with a shrug, in a single sen- tence, as if it were nothing. Hamada’s account of atrocities at Hospital 601 was later corroborated by approximately fifty-five thousand photographs, smuggled out of Syria by a military-police oicer known by the name Caesar, an alias. Before the “If it wasn’t for goldfish he wins at carnivals, war, Caesar and his colleagues had we wouldn’t have any goldfish at all.” documented crime scenes and traic accidents involving military personnel dred and thirty victims have been iden- quiry, Syria’s permanent mission to the in Damascus. He uploaded pictures to tified. Hamada recognized several of U.N. wrote a letter citing Syria’s con- government computers, then printed his cellmates in the files. stitution and domestic laws as evidence them and stapled them to oicial death that allegations of arbitrary detention reports. Beginning in 2011, however, ENDGAME and torture are “no longer plausible.” the bodies were those of detainees, col- The letter continued, “We have no de- lected each day from security branches etween Caesar’s photographs tainees unlawfully arrested with re- and delivered to military hospitals. B and the cija’s case, Stephen Rapp gards to peaceful demonstrations. If At Hospital 601, Caesar’s team pho- told me, “when the day of justice ar- your question concerns individuals who tographed bodies in the morgue and rives, we’ll have much better evidence have used weapons or terrorist acts in a garage bay. Each corpse that was than we’ve had anywhere since Nurem- against the state, it is an entirely difer- photographed had a unique number, berg.” Wiley and Engels believe that, ent matter.” A few months later, Assad usually four digits—like Hamada’s told Barbara Walters that Syria’s par- 1858—scrawled on paper, tape, the ticipation in the United Nations was chest, or the forehead with a thick “a game we play. It doesn’t mean you marker. Another number signified the believe in it.” intelligence branch in which the pa- This week, a new round of nego- tient had been killed. There were about tiations between the Syrian govern- eleven thousand bodies. Caesar’s team ment and the opposition is set to begin sometimes catalogued more than fifty in Geneva, where U.N. oicials will corpses a day—emaciated, mutilated, shuttle between delegations that still cut, burned, shot, beaten, strangled, refuse to meet in person. In advance broken, melted. should the case go to court, the cija of the negotiations, Barakat, the for- According to a U.N. report, after has suicient evidence to convict Assad mer mole in Damascus, told me that Caesar’s team had finished their doc- and his associates on several charges of the opposition delegation asked him umentation a doctor at the hospital crimes against humanity, including mur- for copies of the documents he stole usually wrote “heart attack” on the der, torture, and other inhumane acts. from Assad’s government; the dele- death certificate. Then the bodies were Last year, when Assad was asked gation failed, however, to arrange a loaded onto trucks and hauled away. about the Caesar photographs during pickup. In rare cases, family members have an interview with Foreign Afairs, he In the past few months, as the Syr- been able to retrieve a body, but the said, “Who said this is done by the gov- ian Army has regained territory it had report noted that in each known in- ernment, not by the rebels? Who said lost to rebel forces, it has come to seem stance it “bore marks of extensive tor- this is a Syrian victim, not someone increasingly unlikely that Assad will ture.” The report continued, “Some else?” In 2011, the U.N. commission of step down. His foreign minister, Walid bodies were returned from hospital inquiry alleged that a thirteen-year-old al-Muallem, recently announced, “We morgues to their family only after the boy named Hamza al-Khateeb had been will not talk with anyone who wants family agreed to sign a statement tortured to death in detention. In re- to discuss the Presidency.” Wiley and confirming that the deceased had been sponse, a Syrian investigation concluded the cija staf avoid comment on re- killed by ‘terrorists.’ ” that, shortly after the boy died, a “fo- gime change. He told me, “We don’t Caesar fled Syria in August, 2013, rensic photographer” took “six colored get too caught up in the policy agony” with flash drives hidden in his socks. photos” of the corpse. “We attributed of the eforts to end the Syrian war. The photographs remained a secret the number twenty-three to it.” The “We’re simply confident—and I don’t until after he had spoken to a team of Syrians determined that the pictures think it’s hubris—that our work will international prosecutors and foren- showed “no beating marks, no traces see the light of day, in court, in rela- sic experts, the following January. of torture,” and that the boy had been tively short order.” Without a key connecting detainee killed by gunfire, “most probably by In the Netherlands, Hamada attends names to the corpse numbers, identi- his fellow-terrorists.” The investiga- physical-therapy sessions to rehabili- fying the dead is diicult. Many of the tion also found that a doctor who had tate his scarred limbs. He studies Dutch faces were thoroughly destroyed, or reported that the boy’s penis had been and organizes anti-Assad protests in the eyes were gouged out. Syrian ac- cut of “had misjudged the situation public squares, though attendance is tivists close to Caesar published sev- in an earlier examination.” Caesar’s sparse. He wonders about his nephews, eral thousand pictures online, allow- collection contains six images of Hamza his brother, his brother-in-law, and ing family members to search for al-Khateeb’s body. His eyes are swol- many missing friends. “Where are they?” missing loved ones. The photographs len shut, and his head is a deep pur- he cried. “Are they alive? Are they dead?” also circulated in refugee camps. Some ple, from being beaten. His penis is His sister in Syria asks the military po- families discovered that they had been missing. In every picture, there is a lice for death certificates, to no avail. paying bribes to insure decent treat- bloodstained note card bearing the Every day is “misery,” Hamada said. ment for relatives who had been killed number twenty-three. “It’s misery. It’s misery. It’s death. It’s long before. So far, about seven hun- In a formal response to a U.N. in- a life of death.” 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 49 The artist Niki de Saint Phalle intended the Tarot Garden, a fourteen-acre sculpture park built atop Etruscan ruins, to serve as

50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 LETTER FROM ITALY BEAUTIFUL MONSTERS Art and obsession in Tuscany.

BY ARIEL LEVY

both “a sort of joyland” and a demonstration that “a woman can work on a monumental scale.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER GRANSER n the Italian village of Capal- zling or deranged, transcendent or den that would, in turn, heal others. It bio, in the late nineteen-seventies, tawdry, depending on whom you ask. would be in the fanciful style of An- I two peculiar things happened: the Amid peaceful olive groves and ochre toni Gaudí’s Park Güell, in Barcelona, mail started arriving late, and people fields grazed by horses and sheep but each structure would represent a began whispering about the “monsters” sits a house-size sculpture of a sphinx, mystical figure from the tarot deck. She rising up in the hills nearby. At first, with mirrored blue hair and a bright- would create an alternate reality—“a the monsters looked like massive, mis- red crown, a flower blooming on one sort of joyland,” she once said, “where shapen iron cages emerging from the of her breasts and a lavender heart on you could have a new kind of life that Tuscan countryside. Then they went the nipple of the other. The interior would just be free.” white. Plaster was spread over the metal, is covered in shards of mirror, as if a In the decades after her recovery, and the monsters became looming, colossal disco ball had been turned Saint Phalle became a star. In the six- creamy ghosts. Finally, they started inside out. (During the two decades ties, she caused a sensation with her turning colors: blue, orange, shock- that Saint Phalle worked on the gar- “shooting paintings.” She would fire a ing pink. den, her bedroom was inside one rifle at assemblages of knives, scissors, Although no one suspected it, there breast, her kitchen in the other.) A eggbeaters, and baby-doll arms—the was a connection between these two sprawling, fantastical castle, with a detritus of domesticity—which she had occurrences. The postman, Ugo Cel- rainbow mosaic tower, sits near a blue embedded in plaster, along with bags letti, had been helping to create the head some fifty feet high, sprouting of paint and the occasional tomato. monsters—tremendous sculptures a second, mirrored head crowned When the bullets hit, the art started growing on the grounds of a local es- by a huge hand. Downhill, the Devil “bleeding.” Jane Fonda attended a tate. He’d discovered a passion for mo- stands amid some shrubs, a rainbow- shooting in Malibu; Robert Rauschen- saic work, and as he applied slivers of winged hermaphrodite with a sweet berg bought one of the paintings. mirrored glass to the monsters he some- face, womanly hips, and three gold In certain respects, Saint Phalle’s times forgot about his postal route. penises. It is as if a psychedelic bomb career was as much like Fonda’s as it Like many other people in the area, had exploded in the most picturesque was like Rauschenberg’s, built at the Celletti had his life altered by the part of Tuscany. juncture of art, personal charisma, and mother of the monsters, who came to When Saint Phalle entered the asy- political gesture. Her signature creation Italy to build a sculpture garden that lum, in the early nineteen-fifties, she was the Nanas—big, bright female she had envisioned in a dream, decades was a twenty-two-year-old wife, mother, dancers with small heads and huge hips earlier, when she was locked in an asy- erstwhile fashion model, and lapsed and breasts. In the later decades of her lum: the artist Niki de Saint Phalle. French aristocrat. Art, she believed, re- life, she devoted herself to public works, What Saint Phalle, who died in turned her to sanity, and she wanted installing pieces in California, Ger- 2002, left behind in Tuscany is daz- to make a monumental sculpture gar- many, and Israel. Outside the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, her work is on permanent display in the giddy “Stravinsky Fountain”: a group of her sculptures—red lips, rainbow-colored birds, mermaids—facing of with the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s kinetic iron machines, all spewing water at one other. But she considered the Tarot Gar- den, in Tuscany, to be her life’s work. “I’m following a course that was cho- sen for me, following a pressing need to show that a woman can work on a monumental scale,” she wrote, in one of the scores of letters preserved in her archive, in San Diego. Before there was a women’s movement, before she was on the cover of Life or had love afairs with royalty, before she poured a glass of beer on Saul Steinberg’s head when they were out with Giacometti, even before she did the “very worst thing a woman can do” and abandoned her children to pursue an artist’s life, Niki de Saint Phalle was captivated by lib- “What kind of moviemaking do we want to reinforce?” eration. “Men’s roles seem to give them boarding school outside Baltimore, where “there were horses and fences, IN WONDER and rolling hills.” It was there, she wrote, that “I started noticing that I had quite I cursed someone or something a bit of success with men. I enjoyed the Tossing and turning all night— power of turning them on.” Or so I was told, though I had no memory She was spotted by an agent at a Who it could be, so I stared dance in Manhattan when she was sev- At the world out there in wonder. enteen, and within a few years she had The frost on the bushes lay pretty appeared on the covers of Life and Like tinsel over a Christmas tree French Vogue. Her look was at once When a limo as black as a hearse aristocratic and mystical: she had del- Crept into view, stopping at each icate features and huge, haunted pale- Mailbox as if in search of a name, blue eyes. “She was one of the most And not finding it sped away, beautiful women in the world—in fact Its tires squealing like a piglet she went on being one for a long, long Lifted into the air by a butcher. time,” the writer Harry Mathews, who met Saint Phalle when he was twelve —Charles Simic and she was eleven, told me. “We were fringe members of the pre-débutante league, and I used to see Niki at dances,” a great deal more freedom,” she wrote Metropolitan Museum on Sundays, he continued. “She had a terrible crush to a friend, “and I WAS RESOLVED THAT and to the ice-skating rink at Rocke- on me, but I was interested in seven- FREEDOM WOULD BE MINE.” feller Center in the winter. They sum- teen-year-old girls—women I could mered in rented houses on Long Is- conceivably get somewhere with.” atherine Marie-Agn s Fal de land or in Connecticut. Several years later, Mathews remem- C Saint Phalle—Niki—was born on Despite her cosseted childhood, Niki bers, he was on a train leaving from October 29, 1930. It was a year after was “scared of everything.” When she New York, sitting in the dining car the stock-market crash known as Black and her brother played in the attics of with two of his “half-girlfriends,” eat- Tuesday initiated the French wing of the summer houses, Hitler figured ing trout at a table set with white linen: the Great Depression, and a few months prominently in their games; John pen- “This young woman walked past, and before her father’s finance company cilled on a mustache, and they painted she turned around and looked at me.” closed. The Saint Phalles were well swastikas on the walls. “There was ter- It was Niki, who had become “an ab- connected in Paris—they were the thir- rible trouble when we left a Nazi attic solute goddess,” he said. “She smiled teenth-oldest family in France—but in the house Mother had rented,” she at me and said, ‘Hello, Harry.’ That was Niki’s parents thought they would fare wrote. “The owners discovered what it for me.” better in the United States. They took we had been doing there, and thought They were married when she was their eldest child, John, with them; that mother had a Nazi spy ring. I can’t eighteen. “Her parents were O.K.,” Niki, then a few months old, was sent remember the punishment, but it must Mathews said. “They found out that my to her grandparents’ château, in Nièvre. have been awful.” Their mother had a grandfather had a vast amount of money. It was the first of many abandonments. vicious, unpredictable temper, and often My family was horrified, which I thought When Niki was three, she was beat Niki’s younger sister, Elizabeth, was rather funny—that a not highly dis- brought to live with the rest of the fam- “with the prickly side of a hairbrush.” tinguished New York couple should dis- ily, which settled on the Upper East Saint Phalle recalled that her little approve of titled members of the French Side of Manhattan. Her father, André, brother, Richard, “still can’t eat fish be- aristocracy.” But the Saint Phalles were had established himself as a banker, cause Mother sometimes would spend Catholic, which did not sit well with and the Saint Phalles lived well, if not hours forcing him to finish everything Mathews’s patrician Protestant family. as grandly as their ancestors. “Father on the plate. Our sister Elizabeth told They all but cut him of financially, and arranged to finance what became the me she was once served her vomit back the newlyweds got in the habit of shop- most famous restaurant of its time in by Nana the governess, who was fol- lifting books and luxurious foods that New York: Le Pavilion,” she wrote, in lowing Mother’s orders.” Both Eliza- they could no longer aford. one of three illustrated memoirs. “I still beth and Richard de Saint Phalle com- They stopped stealing when their remember how good the food was.” mitted suicide in adulthood. daughter, Laura, was born, in 1951. By Her mother, Jacqueline Harper, had Niki was always in trouble at school. then, Mathews had enrolled at Harvard, been born in America and brought up She was expelled from Brearley, for after a brief stint in the Navy. His young in France, in a château with gardens putting red paint on the fig leaves of wife did not take to housekeeping. “I by Le Nôtre, who also designed the the school’s Greek statues, and then took our dirty clothes and hid them grounds of Versailles. In New York, from a convent school in Sufern. She under our bed, where they slowly accu- Jacqueline took her children to the finally graduated from Oldfields, a mulated,” she wrote. When Mathews

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 53 complained that he had nothing to “It’s sort of overpoweringly erotic. The robe and drinking white Burgundy at wear, she explained that she couldn’t do blue sea, the weather—everything seems the kitchen table, whose top was a laundry: “It’s just too boring.” She was to be encouraging sex.” Mathews began cobalt-blue Saint Phalle mosaic with besotted with the baby but ill- prepared an afair with the French wife of an two dancing Nanas. Chaix had roasted for motherhood. “It simply didn’t occur English lord. Saint Phalle retaliated by a chicken for dinner, and she set it down to us that there was anything wrong having an afair with the lord, who was in front of Mathews to carve, but he with leaving our daughter peacefully twice her age and shell-shocked from found he was in too much pain. “My sleeping in her crib while we went out the Second World War. He talked con- back,” he said, sadly. His wife patted for a few hours,” she wrote. Mathews stantly of suicide, which she found in- his shoulder and said, “It’s because you told me that they used to leave pieces spirational: she started fantasizing about are talking about Niki.” of salami along the edge of the crib, so drifting out to sea on a rubber float with After Saint Phalle left the asylum, that when Laura awoke she would have a “large safety pin in hand.” She also she was never again content to live as a snack to keep her busy. began hoarding razors, knives, and scis- a wife and mother. The family moved The efects of their naïveté ranged sors under her mattress. to Majorca, to a house with no plumb- from laughable to life-threatening. One One night, Mathews’s mistress came ing, where they drew their drinking night, they returned home and found to their home, and Saint Phalle at- water from a rain cistern. Mathews Laura gone and a terrible smell of gas; tacked her. Then she swallowed a bot- worked on a novel, and they enter- neighbors had noticed the fumes and tle of sleeping pills, but, she recalled, tained an accomplished set of friends, rushed in to rescue the baby. Several she was so manic that they had no efect. including Robert Graves, who nick- years later, they had a second child, a Soon afterward, Mathews discovered named Saint Phalle the White God- son named Philip. He was born pre- Saint Phalle’s arsenal of sharp objects, dess. (Mathews had his own sobriquet maturely and kept in an over-oxygen- and took her to a mental clinic in Nice. for Graves: “an ass hound of the high- ated incubator, which left him with “There were bars on the window,” she est order.”) impaired vision. His parents didn’t re- wrote. “I pointed to them asking Harry, Even in these surroundings, Saint alize there was a problem. “They al- ‘What’s that for?’ And he responded Phalle felt stifled. She wanted to de- ways used to leave me alone with my solemnly, ‘To catch butterflies.’ Some- vote herself completely to her work, sister,” he told me. When he was two how this remark reassured me.” and she resented the assumption that and a half, they left the children at a Saint Phalle underwent ten rounds the children were more her duty than farm while they went out of town, and of electroshock therapy at the clinic, their father’s. During a vacation of the Philip was run over by the wheel of an and doctors said that her treatment coast of Brittany, the artist Joan Mitch- oxcart. “I was two, three weeks in a could take five years. When she was ell called her “one of those writer’s wives coma,” he said. He sufered mysterious allowed to walk in the garden, she col- that paint,” and Saint Phalle felt “as convulsions for years. lected twigs and leaves, and started pro- though an arrow pierced a sensitive “My parents, they were hopeless,” ducing collages. Freed of domestic du- part of my soul.” She made a decision: their daughter, Laura Gabriela-Duke, ties, she became consumed with “If I didn’t want to be a second-class told me. “But I got a lot of things in making art, and she began to feel bet- citizen, I would have to go out into the my childhood that you don’t usually ter. Saint Phalle was released after just world and fight to impose myself as get.” When Mathews inherited money, six weeks. She feared for her sanity the an artist.” he used it to take his young rest of her life, but she saw The family moved back to Paris, family on a steamer to Paris. the experience as redemp- and Saint Phalle took a studio in Mont- They lived for the next de- tive: “My mental breakdown parnasse, at L’Impasse Ronsin, a clus- cade as itinerant bohemi- was good in the long run, ter of “wooden shacks with tarpaper ans in Europe, bouncing because I left the clinic a roofs,” where, she wrote, “everyone stole among picturesque places painter.” their coal from the hospital next door.” and prominent groups of It was a vibrant artistic community— creative friends. At their first few months ago, I Brancusi had a studio there, and Saint stop, in Saint-Germain-des- A visited Mathews in the Phalle visited him regularly, until she Prés, they befriended the elegant apartment in Paris tired of drinking “bad Italian cham- poets John Ashbery and where he lives with his sec- pagne in the middle of the day.” At Kenneth Koch, and Mathews started ond wife, the French writer Marie Chaix, L’Impasse Ronsin, she also met Jean a literary magazine with them. Saint amid a collection of Saint Phalle’s art. Tinguely, an intense-looking young Phalle recalled “celebrities sitting at In the living room, there was a sculp- man who was always dressed in blue cafés . . . Sartre sipping his cofee or ture of a face that bursts into a tree work coveralls, dirty from welding Juliette Gréco looking very sexy.” with candy-striped limbs. Across the sculptures. “I immediately fell in love They followed some musician friends room was a small black-and-white ren- with your work,” she wrote to him of theirs to a small town outside Nice, dering of an erection. years later; his pieces were like ma- where things turned darker. “It was as Mathews, a tall, bald, handsome man chines that he had imbued with their if we had been possessed by the demons of eighty-six, was sufering from a her- own ungovernable agendas. She was of the Mediterranean,” Mathews said. niated disk. He was wearing a bath- also taken by his physicality: “You

54 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 walked like a panther.” Tinguely was married, but he had a steady stream of girlfriends, and his wife had a teen-age lover who lived with them—an ar- rangement that impressed Saint Phalle as enticingly creative. Mathews, too, was captivated by Tinguely. “He was this dashing per- son—a kind of model of what an avant- garde artist should be,” Mathews re- called. “He was essentially rebellious, against any kind of school.” The two became friends and often went to car races together. “Niki told me, when we were both still in our seemingly lion- hearted promiscuous period, ‘If there’s anybody you don’t want me to have an afair with, let me know.’ ” Mathews smiled ruefully. He asked her not to sleep with Tinguely, because, he said, “if she got involved with him, I knew she would make sure it wasn’t just a passing afair.” Saint Phalle and Mathews separated in the summer of 1960, while the fam- ily was on a trip to the United States. “I didn’t want to worry about him,” she wrote, “the children . . . or any other responsibilities.” Within months, she had taken up with Tinguely. There was never any discussion with Laura and Philip, who were then nine and five years old. “When I came back to Paris,” Gabriela-Duke told me, “my mother wasn’t there anymore.” Saint Phalle was known for paintings made by firing a rifle at a prepared canvas. y the time Saint Phalle picked B up a gun to shoot her paintings, in Herald-Tribune, and attended the shoot- in which she appears young and gor- 1961, she wanted to blow up her iden- ings, recalled that “thumbing your nose geous and hysterical. “Nothing can be tity as wife, mother, and daughter—all at the art establishment was just gath- as beautiful to me as when the shoot- the dutiful aspects of womanhood. In ering steam.” Pierre Restany, the founder ing takes place and all the bags burst,” her work, she took on a diferent role, of the New Realists, a group of artists she exclaims. “I mean, it isn’t as beau- the femme fatale. “The more success- that included Yves Klein, Tinguely, and tiful as war, it isn’t as beautiful as see- ful—and threatening—she becomes, Christo, came to one of Saint Phalle’s ing someone killed or the atom bomb, the sexier she acts,” the art historian events. Afterward, he asked her to join but it’s the most that I can do!” Brink- Catherine Dossin wrote about her. the group. ley, at his desk, soberly told American Saint Phalle wore a tight white jump- France was in a moment of brutal viewers, “The artists say they are only suit when she shot, and she invited flux, as the Algerian war raged and ter- mirroring the time they live in.” friends like Rauschenberg and Jasper rorists set of bombs throughout Paris. Tinguely had recently shocked the Johns to participate. “Performance art Around the time that Saint Phalle made art world with a piece at the Museum did not yet exist, but this was a perfor- her first shooting painting, French po- of Modern Art called “Homage to New mance,” she wrote. “Here I was, an at- lice killed dozens of protesters demon- York,” a giant “suicide machine” that he tractive girl (if I had been ugly, they strating on behalf of the Algerian Na- had engineered to slowly self-destruct, would have said I had a complex and tional Liberation Front, shooting some ultimately bursting into flames. His not paid any attention), screaming on the spot and drowning others in the shared project with Saint Phalle was to against men in my interviews and shoot- Seine. Corpses washed up on the riv- explode everything: monogamy, mo- ing.” Her extravagant nihilism fit the erbanks for weeks afterward. During notony, art, propriety. A French docu- sensibility of the times. John Ashbery, this period, the newscaster David mentary about Tinguely and Saint

HANS NAMUTH, “NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE” (1962)/ © HANS NAMUTH © HANS NAMUTH HANS NAMUTH, “NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE” (1962)/ ARIZONA PHOTOGRAPHY, CREATIVE CENTER FOR COURTESY ESTATE/ who was then writing about art for the Brink l ey did a segment on Saint Phalle, Phalle called them “the Bonnie and

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 55 Clyde of Art.” “She told me she fell in slides for children to play on. There was topped by one of her magnificent wide- love with Jean when he put out his cig- also “Le Cyclop,” a project of Tingue- brimmed hats, with a handmade clay arette in a fancy dish of butter, to kind ly’s, which they worked on for more maquette of the Tarot Garden,” Agnel li of tell her to fuck of,” Saint Phalle’s than two decades: a three-hundred- recalled in a memoir, “The Last Swan.” granddaughter Bloum Cardenas said. and-fifty-ton mirrored head in a forest “It looked tiny and totally harmless.” Saint Phalle was often photographed near Fontainebleau, with a toboggan By the end of their meeting, the Carac- for magazines with Tinguely, standing for a tongue and a brain made of cars. ciolo brothers had given her a sizable amid the rubble of L’Impasse Ron- “The only thing they used a crane for piece of their property. “She conquered sin—a vivid repudiation of her privi- was a train wagon that’s twenty-two all the men in my family,” Nicola’s leged upbringing. “They were dirt-poor,” metres up in the air,” Cardenas, who daughter, Marella Caracciolo Chia, re- Gabriela-Duke told me. “No hot water, visited them often, said. “Everything calls. “They just kept on saying yes.” toilet outside. I mean, it really did look else they made like Egyptians: with On a fourteen-acre site, Saint Phalle like a slum.” rope and their muscles.” planned to represent the twenty-two While Saint Phalle worked, the chil- There is footage of the two from figures of the Tarot’s major arcana. dren stayed with their father in the Sev- 1962, on a trip to Las Vegas, where they Tinguely and a team of assistants came enth Arrondissement; they lived with drove to junk yards, scavenging for dis- to weld the iron armatures. Saint Phalle an au pair in a downstairs apartment, carded toys and furniture to use in a recalled the making of the Sphinx, and he lived upstairs. Gabriela-Duke piece called “Study for an End of the where she was to live, as nearly mirac- found the neighborhood stultifying World, No. 2”: a series of sculptures ulous: “It appeared almost overnight after her gypsy childhood. “It was lots that Tinguely built and exploded in like a huge mushroom rising after a of embassies and nuns,” she said. One the Nevada desert. Saint Phalle looks good rain, the iron frame a much larger day, Saint Phalle and Tinguely came to glamorous in a fur-collared coat, sit- duplicate of my model. Jean had taken visit, and Gabriela-Duke, then thirteen, ting in a pickup truck as Tinguely dis- no measurements—he built with his made lamb chops for dinner. Trying to plays a mangled baby doll picked from eye only.” She hired locals with little adopt their bohemian manners, she a junk heap. “Niki, look,” he says. “The experience to help her cover the struc- served the food casually. “Maybe they end of the world!” tures with plaster and, eventually, mo- were not at a table or something,” she Saint Phalle ofers a mysterious smile saic. Marco Iacotonio was a nineteen- recalled. As she stood in the kitchen, and shouts, “Boom!” year-old mason with a reputation in “I see this lamb chop pass by me and town as a troublemaker when he met fall in the sink.” Tinguely had flung it o Saint Phalle, the Tarot Gar- Saint Phalle. She asked if he had any at her in protest: he was the son of a T den was to be an Eden of art and experience with ceramics, and he said factory worker, and vigilant against any magic. To the local gentry, the garden he did: he was good at making mari- perceived signs of aristocratic conde- was an act of vandalism. But there was juana pipes out of clay. scension. “It became a big explosion,” little they could do besides carp about At first, Iacotonio was struck by Saint Gabriela-Duke said. “Niki gets on her the “madwoman and her monsters,” Phalle’s beauty. “She really knew how high horse, and then he walks out. And because Saint Phalle was under the to move in front of a man,” he told me. at this point I was happy: she’s scream- protection of Italian nobility. But to the people who worked with her, ing out the window, and he’s in the She was brought to Tuscany, in 1977, he said, Saint Phalle invariably became street insulting her, and at last there by Marella Agnelli, a friend from her a “second mother.” It was a role she took was a little action in this uptight, snotty modelling days. Agnelli had since mar- on deliberately. In footage taken during neighborhood.” ried the president of Fiat and sailed the making of the garden, she serves Usually, though, Gabriela-Duke the Mediterranean on their yacht with lunch to workers in undershirts, who hated their fighting. “They were ex- John and Jacqueline Kennedy and Tru- sit at her dining table inside the Sphinx, tremely violent,” she said. “For them to man Capote. When Saint Phalle told under a chandelier made of a cow’s skull. do what they did, they needed that en- her about the idea for the garden, one She wrote to Harry Mathews, who re- ergy; they knew how to, you could say, afternoon in St. Moritz, she suggested mained a lifelong friend, “This famil- arouse each other. You could see it sex- that she knew the right place for it: an iar gesture to all these handsome, very ually, but also energetically—violent.” estate that her brothers owned, on top young Italian machos—who before were Tinguely and Saint Phalle worked of an Etruscan ruin by the sea. really just country boys, farmers . . . constantly, and often collaboratively. Agnelli belonged to the Caracciolo helped me to assume a psychological They brought an installation of their family, one of the oldest Neapolitan dy- power. It was easy for them to take or- sculptures, called “Le Paradis Fan- nasties. One brother, Nicola, was an es- ders from La Mama, they do their whole tastique,” to Central Park; the mayor, teemed environmentalist; the other, life, as long as I respected the very thin John Lindsay, said, “They lift me right Carlo, had co-founded the newspaper façade of their maleness.” of the ground.” In Jerusalem, in a mixed La Repubblica. They were staid intel- Venera Finocchiaro, a ceramicist neighborhood of Jews and Palestinians, lectuals, and Saint Phalle seemed to who taught in Rome, came to instruct they collaborated on a piece called “The them like a bright exotic bird descend- the local women, who helped produce Golem,” a black-and-white monster ing on the sedate countryside. She ar- the elaborate tilework that now cov- with three protruding red tongues— rived “all dressed up in a colorful robe, ers the sculptures in every imaginable

56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 SKETCHBOOK BY BARRY BLITT style: crackled glazes, Murano glass, millefiori details, red protrusions like devil’s horns or chili peppers. A seg- ment of the Sphinx is decorated with the lacy designs of the women’s mar- riage quilts, which they brought to the garden’s workshop and pressed against unbaked clay tiles to leave their im- prints. As the team grew to dozens, Saint Phalle took lessons in Italian so that she could communicate. “These women who were from very simple backgrounds—suddenly just by work- ing for her and being part of this proj- ect—started walking diferently, wear- ing diferent clothes,” Ca rac ciolo Chia said. “This girl who came in with her family, because she needed a job, and everybody expected she was going to get married soon—I remember see- ing her start to wear jeans and makeup and cut her hair really short. You could see this flowering.” Saint Phalle invited friends from abroad to her encampment on the Caracciolo estate, where they worked alongside the villagers, altering the com- plexion of local life. There were artists from Argentina, Scotland, Holland, France; there were hippies and homo- sexuals. “Many things change, because now you live not in Capalbio but in the world,” Iacotonio said. “You have your mind set out into the world.”

f American radical feminism of I the time was about rewriting the rules of society, Saint Phalle had a diferent notion: she felt that the rules simply did not apply to her. And while she had little interest in the domestic aspects of womanhood—the drudgery “Whether or not people think it’s art doesn’t matter to me,” Saint Phalle said. that was alicting American women with Betty Friedan’s “problem with no her a drawing of his pregnant wife, made ever-larger Nanas. Three of the name”—she exalted her own vision of Clarice. Saint Phalle’s first large-scale biggest, on the bank of the Leine River, the feminine mystique. Even as she piece was a huge, hollow Nana called in Hanover, Germany, inspired a de- spurned child care, she was obsessed the “Hon”—“she,” in Swedish—who bate over the propriety of public art. “I with the primal power of the mother lay with legs spread at a museum in think that I made them so large so that and with the erotic power that made Stockholm, where visitors lined up to men would look very small next to mothers out of women in the first place. enter through her door-size vagina. them,” Saint Phalle told an interviewer. The Nanas play many roles through- (Inside, they found a twelve-seat cin- In the late sixties, she scandalized out the garden; one serves as the figure ema in an arm, a milk bar inside a breast, the art world by producing inflatable of Justice, and others recline in foun- and a brain built by Tinguely, with mov- Nanas to sell as pool toys. “Whether tains, spouting water from their mouths ing mechanical parts. “A Stockholm or not people think it’s art—or whether and Technicolor nipples. But they are psychiatrist wrote in the newspaper or not it is art—doesn’t matter to me,” all ultimately buoyant, funny fertility that the Hon would change people’s she exclaims in footage that her friend goddesses. Saint Phalle had been in- dreams for years to come,” Saint Phalle François de Menil took of her, sur- spired to make the first one in 1964, boasted in a letter to Clarice Rivers.) rounded by hot-pink Nanas with green

after the painter Larry Rivers showed As her career developed, Saint Phalle hearts on their nipples. She was selling THE NEW YORKER PETER GRANSER FOR BY PHOTOGRAPH

58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 the floating Nanas, she explained, “to his wife, Sophie. He was a sixteen-year- she described as “the summer of snakes.” become a millionaire,” which was nec- old aspiring photographer when he A week after she was released from the essary in order to fund her monumen- met Saint Phalle, and her garden was mental hospital, she received a letter tal projects. his first subject. “She wanted to have from her father that began, “I’m sure you This, too, she framed as a feminist a court photographer,” he said. “She remember when you were eleven and I initiative (though she eschewed the didn’t pay me, but she bought me some tried to make you my mistress.” She term itself, and refused to appear in ex- good equipment.” wrote in her book “Mon Secret” about hibitions of exclusively women artists). “You see? What a good way to en- the experience, when “my father, this “To be my own benefactor had many courage him,” Marella Caracciolo Chia, banker, this aristocrat put his sex in my advantages,” she wrote in a letter to who was seated across the table, said. mouth.” Her father’s assault, she wrote, Marella Agnelli. “I didn’t have to cater “The way she encouraged all of us to “had broken my faith in humankind.” to patrons. I could work at my pace, in follow our passions!” The shooting paintings were her my way, which wasn’t always logical.” Pietromiarchi shook his head. “But first revenge: Saint Phalle gloried in She admitted, though, to being envi- then she took all the equipment back!” associating the family name with vio- ous of Gaudí, who had a duke to sup- he said, and laughed. “She asked me to lent rebellion. “I had a big rage in my- port his work. stop, and she gave it all to her son-in- self,” she told an audience at the Uni- The Tarot Garden cost more than law, who needed a job. But I couldn’t versity of California San Diego in 1996, five million dollars—about eleven mil- stop. I loved looking at it growing and when she was sixty-six. “I would have lion in today’s money. Saint Phalle often growing. I was jumping over the fence probably been in prison, or still in a had only enough for another month of to take pictures on Sundays, when no- psychiatric hospital, if it hadn’t been operating costs, but she never told the body was there.” He did that for more that art helped me to get out all of my workers. To raise funds, she created a than a decade, whenever he was home. very deeply aggressive feeling toward perfume, sold in a cobalt-blue bottle By the time the garden was ready to my parents, toward society.” with intertwined snakes for a stopper. open, in 1998, Saint Phalle had had a But, after Saint Phalle left her chil- Andy Warhol attended the launch party, falling out with her son-in-law, and she dren, she never stopped believing that and the perfume ended up providing a was distraught that there was no real she had done “something unpardon- third of the funding for the garden. But record of the progress. Pietromiarchi went able.” If making art was her salvation, she also turned to the men in her life. to see her, and showed her slides for it was also a form of self-flagellation. Tinguely would show up at the garden hours. “She was in tears,” he said with She developed severe lung problems, with “suitcases full of cash,” Philip satisfaction. “She bought all my archives.” after years of inhaling fumes from the Mathews recalled, and his father, Harry, Pietromiarchi is now a professional polystyrene that she used to sculpt sent money to pay a shrubbery bill. For photographer; Sophie, who some- Nanas. Her time in the unheated shacks a while, Saint Phalle had an English times helped in the garden when she at L’Impasse Ronsin—and, later, in the boyfriend half her age. “We all thought started dating him, is an illustrator. “He cold belly of the Sphinx—exacerbated he was her boy toy,” Caracciolo Chia bloomed in his art because of Niki,” a case of rheumatoid arthritis, which said, “but he owned half of Charlotte she said. “When you were with her, grew so bad that at times she couldn’t Street.” He was the Fifth Marquess of there was a completely thrilling atmo- walk. Laura Gabriela-Duke believes Normanby, and, as Saint Phalle’s friend sphere—a need to create.” that some of her mother’s agony was Contessa Giuppi Pietromiarchi told an expression of wrenching remorse: me, “He saved her financially.” alk downhill along the path “The sufering was momentous, tre- Pietromiarchi is a well-known gar- W that leads away from the Sphinx, mendous.” Often, when they had plans den designer who lives in a grand villa and you are confronted by a voluptuous to see each other, Saint Phalle became down the road from the Tarot Garden. golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue particularly ill. “I would be very happy On a wet winter day, I went to lunch horse over a mirrored green sea, from I would see my mother,” Gabriela-Duke at the villa, which is decorated with sou- which disembodied arms stretch up to said. “Then she would get sick, because venirs from Count Pietromiarchi’s time cling to the world of the living. Saint she felt so guilty—so then it felt like I as Italy’s Ambassador to Egypt and Mo- Phalle’s longtime assistant Ricardo made my mother sick.” rocco. “We spent every Christmas here Menon died of AIDS while they were Saint Phalle became weaker as the at this table with Niki,” the Contessa, working on the garden, and she placed Tarot Garden progressed. “I lose twenty who is seventy-six, and wore proper a photograph of him inside a round pounds. I become the transparent shadow country plaids and a rhinoceros brooch chapel on the edge of the garden—a of myself,” she wrote. “My hands start that Saint Phalle made for her, said. A snug, dark womb. Perhaps the eeriest becoming deformed. I couldn’t sculpt white-gloved servant distributed pro- figure is the Oracle, a hollow-eyed, anymore. Jean cries when he looks at sciutto and melon. Then she whispered, golden-faced creature, who stands alone my hands.” But she did not consider “Niki told me that when you look at a and ominous in a clearing, covered with abandoning the garden. It was the apo- man you have to look at him exactly the snakes, one almost swallowing her head. theosis of her work, and the culmina- way you want to go to bed with him.” There are snakes everywhere in the tion of her decades-long collaboration We were joined at lunch by Giulio park, and in Saint Phalle’s other work— with Tinguely. His contributions are Pietromiarchi, the Contessa’s son, and emblems of a childhood episode that everywhere: in feats of engineering like

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 59 a tall silver tower whose top, sawed al- by truck drivers, with a dozen bedrooms was a flirt. Niki, too—and they’re both most of, hangs perilously over the tree- for customers upstairs. Tinguely was in beautiful. And then it became a com- tops; in the creaking, kinetic metal- his element there, with space to decon- petition.” At one of Saint Phalle’s big- work that punctuates Saint Phalle’s struct racecars and to invent new ma- gest shows, at the Hanover Gallery, in hallucinatory landscape. As Marco Ia- chines. The courtyard was a cross be- London, she drew a huge crowd. “It cotonio put it, “The garden was their tween a playground for giant Nanas and was such a success,” Cardenas recalled. child.” a scrap yard. “You could not have met “Jean said that he would never come Saint Phalle and Tinguely were col- two people who were more well-suited to one of her openings again without laborators before they were lovers, and as collaborative spirits,” François de a bimbo on his arm.” it was that aspect of their relationship Menil, who often visited Soisy, said. Several years into the relation- that proved most enduring. She relied Tinguely brought Saint Phalle break- ship, Tinguely took up with a woman on him to execute her vision from her fast in bed every morning. When he named Micheline Gygax, in Switzer- very first sculpture: he welded a tree to travelled without her, he sent elaborate land. Soon, he began living with her adorn her children’s bedroom while she love letters that unfolded into paper half the time. Saint Phalle had her was still living with Mathews. sculptures. own lovers, male and female. She and Once Tinguely and Saint Phalle be- “I think at the beginning it was a Tinguely occasionally hosted orgies came successful, they bought a ram- really passionate, completely monoga- at Soisy, and left photographs of them shackle house in Soisy-sur-École, out- mous relationship,” Cardenas told me. around the house as mementos. (Once, side Paris: a former brothel, frequented “And then it wasn’t. It’s the sixties. Jean Philip remembered, Saint Phalle sug- gested that he could turn a profit by selling pictures of high-profile guests to a newspaper.) Even Tinguely’s afair with Gygax was subsumed to the cre- ative process. The two women even- tually became friends, and Saint Phalle asked Gygax to translate a children’s book that she wanted to illustrate. One would call to warn the other when Tinguely left town: get ready, he’s com- ing your way. In 1971, after ten years of intense ar- tistic collaboration and intermittent cohabitation, Tinguely and Saint Phalle got married. Gabriela-Duke saw it as “formalizing an unbreakable bond” for the sake of their art: “For both of them, their No. 1 priority was their creative legacy.” Who better to decide what be- came of your work than the person you had worked with most? Philip Mathews thinks that the motive was purely pe- cuniary. Saint Phalle became a Swiss citizen when they married, and could thus avoid paying taxes to the French government. Whatever the reason, the wedding seemed to make their relationship even less like a traditional marriage. “The day that they got married, she was expect- ing to go out and have a wonderful eve- ning,” Clarice Rivers said. “Instead, they went right back to Soisy. He got back in his blue overalls and went of to work. She was really upset about that.” Soon afterward, Gygax became pregnant and Tinguely moved to Switzerland full time. His relationship with Saint Phalle “never really ended,” Iacotonio told me. But they never lived together again. In a letter that Saint Phalle wrote to Tinguely decades later, she spoke of their early encounters, when they were both married to other people. “You liked my paintings, which you took se- riously, and also my badly drawn proj- ects on little bits of paper,” she wrote. They had discussed Gaudí and Ferdi- nand Cheval—a French postman who worked for decades to build an unin- habitable castle, covered in mythical statues. But mostly, Saint Phalle re- membered, they talked about “the beauty of man alone in his folly.” In the Tarot Garden, there are signs that Saint Phalle was not always happy in solitude. On my first visit, I was struck by a sculpture of the Tree of Life, with snakes for branches, and the story of a love afair told on tiles set along the trunk. “Where shall we make love?” one “You can hear this?” of the first tiles asks, in Saint Phalle’s loopy cursive. “In a bathtub?” The illus- •• tration shows a naked Nana with a heart for a vagina, held in the arms of a figure with a pink erection. “Under the stars? and their children were with her at Making the Tarot Garden cost Saint In the jungle with lions and crocodiles?” the hospital when she died. “She had Phalle a great deal: her health, decades The crocodile looks like a smiling car- our little family reunited,” Gabriela- of her life, millions of dollars. But, in toon sperm with feet and eyes. Duke has written, in a “circle of the process, she managed to mother The tiles near the beginning of the forgiveness.” an entire community. “I used to have story capture the abject devotion of It didn’t last. Philip Mathews and these panic attacks, and nobody really early love. “What do you like the most his wife, who live in a town house in knew what to do with them,” Marella about me?” one asks. “My lips? My the West Village that Saint Phalle Caracciolo Chia, who was thirteen breasts? My funny nose?” On another, bought for them, do not speak to his years old when Saint Phalle arrived, Saint Phalle writes, “I would like to father, his sister, or his niece, Bloum said. “Her garden was the place where give you everything,” and an inventory Cardenas. They feel that the Niki I wouldn’t have them, so I would go of precious things follows: a heart, a Charitable Art Foundation, estab- there very often and sit at her table thousand-dollar bill, a clock, a plate of lished to promote her legacy, is doing inside the Sphinx and doodle. I found food, and the words “my mouth my a bad job. Further, they accuse Saint in Niki a place where I could really money my imagination my breast my Phalle and the rest of the family of be myself.” time my terrific cooking my every- failing to fully embrace their two sons. Ugo Celletti, the postman who thing.” But after tiles depicting rain At the root of this bad feeling, per- loved mosaic work, helped maintain and stars and “our house,” which looks haps, is Philip Mathews’s sense that the garden for many years. Now two like a bright, curvy castle, comes a sad he was always competing with “a court of his nephews work there as care- ending. “What shall I do now that of nobodies,” as he put it, for his moth- takers, along with Marco Iacotonio, you’ve left me? Will I cry a million er’s attention. who lives on the grounds with his tears? Will I die? Will I take to drink? Gabriela-Duke, who lives in a wife and children, in a house that Take a trip? Will I consult the stars rental apartment in Oakland, seems Saint Phalle had built for him. Sev- and a crystal ball on how to win you reconciled with her mother’s choices. enty-five thousand people visit every back? Will we stay friends?” As I stood “There was no other way,” she told year, most of them families with chil- there looking at Saint Phalle’s child- me. “It was a question of survival: she dren, who scramble over the statues, like drawings, I was surprised to find couldn’t put me in the picture.” She dazzled by their size and their wild- myself bawling. thought for a moment and then smiled ness. They feel, perhaps, the way that a little. “Really—and it’s something I Saint Phalle wanted to feel in the inguely died in Switzerland, wish my brother would get—we were garden. “I lost all notion of time and T in 1991. Saint Phalle died in loved. The thing is, with love, it’s one the limitations of normal life were California, on May 21, 2002—though thing to love and then it’s another to abolished,” she wrote. “I felt com- in Europe it was already May 22nd, know how to love, and maybe we take forted and transported. Here every- Tinguely’s birthday. Harry Mathews a lifetime to learn.” thing was possible.” 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 61 FICTION

62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY REBECCA MOCK obby Tallis possessed the of the numerous pickup sites honey- tas sweated up by his customers. To- drainpipe physique, knee-length combing this side of the city—with ward those most recherché of deviants, B mackintosh, and winsomely a grin he registered the dangling lobe Bobby felt something close to poi- dissolute demeanor of a poet, or so he of a used condom snagged on the gnancy. As he absorbed their anguish- believed, as he pursued a lavishly way- branch of a bush like a dismal festive edly detailed requests, he realized that ward course across the mangy munic- decoration. He stopped at a McDon- the purest perverts longed for a spe- ipal parks, median strips, and depressed ald’s drive-through, inhaled three one- cies of the poetic, for the incarnation residential quadrangles of his quarter euro hamburgers and a fries and a of the impossible. of the city on another blustery Octo- Coke, and took a spumous dump in And perverts were willing to pay ber afternoon. One hand broodingly a toilet cubicle bathed in the pur- the most. By this point, from the car- ensconced within a pocket, Bobby ple-blue glow of UV lighting installed toon porn, Bobby was making some- smoked as he walked and made rapid, to prevent junkies from finding the thing perilously close to a living for a furtive motions with his lips, as if hav- veins in their arms. man of his rudimentary predilections. ing an intense, collusive conversation In the bathroom mirror Bobby stud- The money came into his bank ac- with himself, which is exactly what ied himself. count, and then came in again, like a he was doing: Bobby was a poet. With his cheeks flocked with old tide. He withdrew only the minimum He lived in a dilapidated apartment acne scars, the sebum gleam to his mac- necessary. A healthy surplus was build- block on the south-side inner city, a rocephalic forehead, his long, exqui- ing and it unnerved him. He did not block so populated with retirees and sitely dented aquiline nose (his favor- want to believe in it yet felt a swell of pensioners that visitors—of which ite feature), inexpiably seedy smile, and relief each time he thought of it. Enough Bobby had absolutely none—often hair an untamable squall of dark curls, money meant you did not have to think mistook it for a state retirement home. Bobby, at twenty-nine, resembled a not about money. Bobby was certain he was the only res- unhandsome but grotesquely ancient Then there were the poems. Bobby ident under the age of sixty. The block’s teen-ager, a physical template he hap- had been writing and rewriting and corridors—the sour-cream walls lit by pened to consider the Platonic ideal refining and re-refining the manuscript low-wattage sconces downy with dust, for a poet. Adolescence was the stage of his début collection for more than the furred, blue, perpetually damp car- of human development at which nos- eight years now. The collection was peting in which shoe-print impres- talgia (that is, the awareness of mor- currently entitled “Anhedonia, Here I sions dolefully lingered—evoked for tality) first becomes fatally possible, Come.” He regularly read from this Bobby a budget version of the after- and was the reft, the fracture, out of endless work in progress at open-mike life. It was, at least, a peaceful place, which poetry grows. The greatest poets, nights, had even had a few of the poems no noise but the late-night dysphagic so Bobby believed, lived and died with- published in double-digit-circulation groans of the elevator’s recurringly out losing the furious unreason, self- pamphlets and once reputable, now jammed doors. consuming nerviness, and malign posthumous journals. The poems, he Bobby walked six miles every day. naïveté of teen-agerhood. suspected, were not good enough. They He did so because a lengthy walk helped He washed his hands with pink exhibited decent technical efects but oxygenate the creative capacities as well chemical soap and resumed his walk. were in some obscure way insubstan- as preëmptively dispel the oppressive He wanted to be a poet but sufered tial or evasive. He agonized over the sense of cabin fever that would con- from a day job, or at least a source of accuracy of his inner ear, was not in sume him if he did not regularly re- regular income, that was at this stage fact certain he even possessed one. In move himself from the tiny tomb of a discipline almost as interesting: he terms of theme, he could not get be- his one-bedroom apartment. Also, there was a popular house artist on the on- yond what he was convinced was a fun- was a shopping-center parking lot three line-community site AllFreeekArt, damentally spurious obsession with miles from his apartment block where confecting pornographic cartoons ac- suicidal ideation, but simultaneously he bought weed from a schoolgirl on cording to the punctilious specifica- he felt that every other poetic topic or a near-daily basis. tions of a zealously loyal and steadily concern was an obfuscation, an es- The city was bound on this side expanding client base. He drew Dis- chewal, or a bald retreat from this by a canal, and Bobby’s peregrina- ney princesses, anthropomorphized theme. tions tended to bring him, as now, ponies, superheroes, video-game pro- He’d been smitten with the con- into intermittent contact with this tagonists, and cartoon versions of ce- cept of suicidal ideation since he was body of water. He noted the tarry lebrities in endless combinations of a teen-ager, but the problem, he figured, density of its bilious murk, the tide- graphic congress. His clients craved was that he had never truly wished to mark of phosphorescent scum beard- every iteration of the conventionally kill himself. Bobby liked being alive. ing the centuries-old brickwork as erotically depictable, but the medium Being alive was, if not the best thing, the canal subsided toward the stark of animation also permitted the real- then at least an O.K. thing, an end- quays and the notional sea beyond. ization of dimensions, stylizations, and lessly O.K. thing. And his life was Bobby traversed the back lane of a acts not available to reality, and Bobby what many would consider a good housing estate and detoured through enjoyed the challenge of actualizing life, or at least a serviceable version of a brushy interval that served as one the more outlandish of the carnal vis- what was probably the best available

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 63 in human history: he was white, male, feeling good. You wanted to kill your- vanished into the crumbling base of a not rich but not, now, that poor, liv- self, Bobby suspected, only when the low stone wall. ing in a First World Western city in access to any feeling at all, whether The other person was a man with the early twenty-first century. In ad- good or bad, was completely eroded, a baby strapped like a bomb to his dition, Bobby was cursed, it seemed, when you found yourself, as many poor chest in an impressive-looking har- with an uncapsizable psycho-chemi- souls did, mired upon an undiferen- ness. Becky’s camán-wielding cohort cal equilibrium, and no matter how tiatedly flat and horizonless plane of lounged on a nearby wall, observing much squalor and degradation he en- Unfeeling, bereft of access to any av- with studied wrath. Bobby held up be- countered, no matter how many ter- enue of actual or potential emotional tween a couple of cars. He watched rible people he initiated relationships excitation. It was not Feeling that killed the transaction. Becky giggled, dis- with, and no matter how many drugs but the final and irremediable with- creetly palmed the man a baggie as he crammed into his system, he could drawal of it. Bobby had read the lit- she emphatically patted the baby on not jar himself into a genuine spiral. erature. This state, he knew, was called the head. The harnessed baby’s loose Not being able to feel crushingly ter- anhedonia. limbs waggled and its head bobbled rible made him feel terrible, but even disinterestedly around. Bobby thought this second order of terribleness had, oving through the molting of a trussed crab unaware that it is to his inquisitive mind, a compelling M trees, Bobby saw the beige-col- about to be boiled alive. He picked his textural quality that made him wish ored brutalist slab of the shopping cen- nose, unseated a gratifyingly intact only to experience more of it: his mind ter climb into the skyline. His dealer clump of dried matter, palpated it be- found any sensation or state induced he knew only by her first name, Becky. tween his fingers, and flicked it away. by it fascinating, which was an indi- She was a convent schoolgirl and camo- The man—youngish, with shaved rect way of admitting that his mind gie player. She often brought her stick blond hair—walked across the park- found itself fascinating, which was to and gear bag with her and sold little ing lot and placed first the child and say that he, Bobby Tallis, found every ten spots of reliably mediocre weed in then himself into a gleaming hyper- facet of his own disgustingly mundane a corner of the parking lot most after- trophied Land Rover such as a pro- self and life fascinating. Bobby’s psy- noons. A small coven of teammates fessional wrestler or a Central Amer- chic sturdiness was, he feared, a man- tended to tag along, hanging back and ican dictator might drive. Bobby now ifestation of a submerged but profound muttering supercilious commentary approached. and pullulating narcissism. in the direction of the customers—or “All right, Becky.” Still, duty bound as a poet, Bobby Bobby, anyway. Becky grimaced and flexed the wings diligently wondered about mortality He pounded across the parking lot of her nose. “The usual, Bob?” and the volitional ending of a life: and instantly discerned Becky in her “Becky, can I ask—” specifically your own. He figured that green uniform, another person with “No.” you did not want to kill yourself be- her. Empty plastic bags stirred in the “Can I ask what your actual name cause you felt bad, because if you felt breeze. They lifted and settled, flinched is? I don’t buy Becky, you see.” bad you perforce retained access to a like dying nerves as Bobby tramped on “Oh, do one, Bob. Do you want spectrum of emotional feeling on them: the sky itself was the color of a something or what?” which was located the possibility of shopping bag. A rat, a sliver of dark “You seem savvy enough to operate one day again, however provisionally, muscle, darted across the concrete and under a nom de guerre, as it were.” “ ‘Nom-the-fucking-gurr,’ he says.” “Do you know what that is?” She sighed. “Becky’s the name you’re getting, Bob. Stop being predatory.” “Predatory?” “You’re initiating predatory behav- ior. Don’t think I won’t pepper-spray your haggard ass.” “I’m not—” She turned to her crew on the wall. “Guess what, lads!” she shouted. “This fucking sick fuck wants to des- ecrate my puss!” “Aaaaay.” The others cheered derisively. “O.K., O.K., Jesus, Becky. Can I just get my stuf.” “The usual?” “The usual.” “I’m starting to prefer the ones who don’t believe in me.” “Big spender,” she said as she palmed him the ten spot. “This is it, I think, Bob. This is the last time I’m serving you.” “Listen, if it’s about asking your real name, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” She jerked her shoulder, indicated the lumpy appurtenance of her camo- gie bag. Her helmet, with its white dome and ribbed face guard, rocked against her hip. It looked like the skull of a vanquished opponent she had taken as a war trophy. “Imelda’s, that’s the school, we’ve got to the county quarters for the first time in twelve years or some bull- shit. We’re doubling down on training sessions for the foreseeable future. And anyway. I been doing this”—she indi- cated the parking lot—“like, two years now. It has a built-in life span, Bob. Might be time to get out of the game.” “Won’t . . . won’t you miss the “No, I don’t think Tina Fey and Amy Poehler would want money?” Bobby asked. you to be a part of what they’ve got going.” “I don’t do it for the money, Bob. My scumbag parents are rich as fuck. I do it because it’s interesting. But •• now it’s time to, I dunno, grow up or whatever.” main street. Feeling woozily, torren- paste-ad hue. He appeared to be noth- Now Bobby grimaced. “Don’t do tially fifteen himself, Bobby stood ing more than a nondescriptly hand- that, Becky.” there with the ten spot crushed in his some wodge of heteronormative gene - She looked at him again. She had hot grip and a corona of flush difus- rica, tidily styleless in a sweater and a broad frame and dimpled knees, a ing across his pocked cheeks as he chinos, but his dopily enthused expres- clearwater complexion, and streaked, waited to see if the girl he’d known sion was so innocuous it was unnerv- tawny-brown hair. Bobby considered as Becky would at least look back. ing. And Bobby felt, unmistakably, an her—considered her in a rigorously emanation, the old encoded carnal pang. pater nalistic way—very beautiful. For he Land Rover nearly struck him Was Johnny-fucking-Ikea here actu- the first time he could recall, some- T as he wafted toward the shop- ally trying to pick him up? Bobby up- thing in her expression softened as she ping-center exit. He stood in place in tilted his nose to signify skepticism, looked at him. order to let the monstrosity eke by, but and also because he believed this angle “There’s Mike Logan? You know instead it eased to a halt and the pas- resolved the geometrics of his face into him? Got a tattoo of a stripper with, senger window slid down. As Bobby their most attractive configuration. like, giant titties on his arm?” looked in, he caught the man hastily “A lot of people come to those things. “Now, he sounds like a character,” sucking in his gut before leaning across Actually, that’s not true. Barely anyone Bobby said. the latte-colored leather of the passen- comes. But yeah, if you say you were “That he is,” Becky replied. “He ger seat. there. Well. Good for you.” hangs out in the Ladbrokes on Hyde “I thought I recognized you.” “It’s an interesting scene,” the guy Street, Bob. He can sort you out from “Huh?” Bobby said. said. now on. I’m happy to vouch as to the “I’m not talking about from back “It’s just a bunch of attention-starved quality of his merchandise. And I can there,” the man said tersely. “I was ac- nerds who think they can write, getting vouch on your behalf to him.” tually at the reading night in, uh, the up there and shiteing on. Anyone can “Don’t take this the wrong way, Andromeda bar, like a month ago. I do it.” Becky, but it’s you I’ll miss.” saw you read. I liked it.” When Bobby “But it’s impressive.” “You are all the same,” she said with did not respond the guy lowered his “Anyone,” Bobby repeated. The baby an unexpected weariness. “Goodbye, eyes and said, with the grave empha- in her baby seat in the rear of the Bob. If you see me again, cross the fuck- sis of a bad actor, “I mean—you wouldn’t Land Rover made a noise. “That your ing street, right.” have known I was there. Not that it baby?” “Goodbye, Becky,” he said. matters if you did.” The man shifted in his seat. “Oh, She turned and went to her friends. Then he looked up and smiled. uh. Oh no.” They unsaddled themselves from the Bobby stared at his teeth, which were “That’s a disconcerting answer.” wall and the group headed toward the neatly aligned and all the same, tooth- The man’s grin broke. He reached

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 65 into the back and grasped the baby’s foot. “I look after the kid. It’s my job, sort of. I guess I’m sort of the nanny.” TWO LIVES “A nanny. Manny. Nanny.” “This is my half sister, actually, In my other life the B-17 my father is piloting Saoirse.” Is shot down over Normandy “Saoirse get high with you or what, And my mother raises her sons alone then?” On her widow’s pension and on what she earns “Well—” The man blushed. “No, As a nurse at the local hospital, a sum but she’s a good accomplice, ha-ha.” That pays for a third-floor walkup He actually said “ha-ha.” “Keeps quiet In a neighborhood that’s seen better days. about me dropping on over here on I play stickball after school in the lot these little runs.” Behind the laundry. I come home bruised “Good one,” Bobby said. Another From fistfights and snowball fights moment passed. A palsied silence With boys who live in the tenement on the corner. settled between the two men. If one Not once do I play with the boy I am of them did not ofer something in In this life, whose father, too old for the draft, the next few seconds, the conversation, Starts a paint company in a rented basement such as it was, would die. Bobby sty- Which almost goes under after a year mied an inner disgust, sighed, and said And then is saved, as the war continues, his four least favorite words in the By a steady flow of government contracts world. That allows my mother to retire from nursing “So, do you write?” And devote herself to work with the poor. Bobby saw it straight away: the I find our quiet neighborhood of handsome houses reflexive flinch and bristle. And shady streets crushingly uneventful. “Uh, I mean, I’m trying,” the man No surprise I spend hours each day turning the pages admitted. “I mean, I’m not any good.” Of stories about trolls, wizards, giants, “You’d fit right in then,” Bobby said. Wandering knights, and captive princesses. “At the Andromeda.” In my other life, I have to leave high school “No, man, you’re on another level to To bolster the family income as lab boy what I’m doing.” In the building attached to the factory that in this life Bobby shrugged. “There’s always My father owns. I clean test tubes and beakers, more levels.” He removed his hand With a break for stacking cans on the loading dock from his pocket, the baggie dangling Or driving the truck to make deliveries. between his fingers. “Now, if you’ll In this life it takes only one summer excuse me. I need to go get lightly Of work at the oice, addressing announcements spaced.” Of a coating tougher than any made by competitors, The guy lunged at the passenger To decide that the real world, so called, door, pushed it open. “Look, I detained you enough to ofer you a lift at least, if you want.” sisted he would not do anything with ing about his originary trauma or he guy’s head came swimming a baby watching. Now the guy brought whatever. T up out of Bobby’s lap after a long the partition back down. A nursery-pop “He’ll throw me out on the street minute of sudsy, ungainly fellatio. He jingle was burbling gently from the again if he finds out I did something blinked like a man who has just been rear speakers. The baby had taken hold like this—in his car—with Saoirse right jarred from a deep dream, eyes blood- of one of her legs and was trying to fucking there! Jesus! Jesus!” shot and tear-filmed. He put his fore- guide her fat foot into her mouth, an Bobby glanced at his phone as he arm up to his humid mouth, seemed activity she now suspended in order arranged his pants. Two texts and two to sink his teeth into his flesh, and made to smile very prettily at her half sib- missed calls. an anguished noise. ling’s blotchy face. “Listen, I got to go.” “It’s O.K.,” Bobby said. “It was kind of freaking me out, too,” “My fucking father, man,” the guy “I’m just too worried about Saoirse.” Bobby admitted. said. “I’m sorry to drag you into this.” “Yeah . . . ” Bobby turned his head “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This is all very “You’re not dragging me into any- and saw a flesh-toned distortion of his weird for me,” the guy said. “This wasn’t thing,” Bobby assured him. They were own face in the partition of tinted glass premeditated at all.” parked in an alley. Bobby quickly tried segregating the back of the vehicle’s “You’re all right,” Bobby said, sud- the passenger door handle. The vehi- interior from the front. The guy had denly wary. The key now was to get cle was centrally locked. “I do have to deployed it reluctantly, but Bobby in- out before the guy started unload- go, though.”

66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 “I can’t help you, man.” “You can, you can.” Is overrated, compared to the world of novels, The guy dipped, ran another dab Where every incident is freighted with implications of whatever was in the baggie around For distinguishing apparent success from actual. his mouth. He was, Bobby had to No wonder I’m leaning toward a profession admit, an intriguing mess. He had Where people can earn a living by talking no doubt the guy would send him In class about books they love. Meanwhile, his stuf, and he had no doubt it would In my other life, after helping to bring the union be magisterially self-pitying (and not To a non-union shop, I rise in the ranks in the good, Robert Lowell kind To become shop steward, and then, of way). The guy insisted on shak- Helped by a union scholarship, ing hands before allowing Bobby to I earn a degree in labor law. walk of. I bring home casebooks on weekends As he walked out of the mouth of To the very block where I happen to live the alley, Bobby checked his messages. Ensconced in this life, here in a gray-green house Then he realized he was abandoning With dark-brown trim. If I don’t answer the bell an infant to a vehicle under the oper- On weekends in summer, I’m in the garden, ation of a man kneading tinctures of a Strolling the shady path beneath the maples, patently illicit substance into his face. Musing on the diference between a life Bobby turned and looked back and Deficient in incident and a life uncluttered. waited to see if there was anything ob- Seated at my patio table, I write a letter vious he could do. The vehicle began Asking a friend what book has he read to move. He watched it complete a spas- In the last few months that has opened his eyes modic reverse and trundle toward the On a subject that’s likely to interest me. far opening of the alley. Then it was Meanwhile, across the street, in the garden gone. Of my other life, I can often be found Hoeing the rutabaga and beans and cabbage ormally, Bobby would have ig- That I plan to share with neighbors in the hope of planting N nored or evaded Fiachra Calhoun’s The seeds of communal feelings more hardy midweek-afternoon overtures, but right Than any known to sprout here before. now he needed a drink. Fiachra Cal- It won’t be long till I knock at the door of the house houn was in his customary nook at the Where in this life I’m at my desk preparing a class rear of the Andromeda, which at this On solitude in the novels of the Romantics. hour was near empty. Jess Tombes was Do I say to myself it’s one more stranger with him. Eager to sell me something or make a convert, Fiachra’s resting expression was Or do I go down to see who’s there? raked-in and solemn, like the heap of cinders left after a fire has gone —Carl Dennis out. Bobby knew Fiachra took on this appearance of incinerated introver- sion only when he was absolutely The guy sighed again. “Fuckit.” He work. Could you do that? Could you blitzed. Sober, or moderately soused, reached across Bobby and popped the look at it for me?” he was an animate, wryly handsome glove compartment. He took out a He held up his phone. “Can I just fifty-two-year-old poet, essayist, and small wallet and removed from that a get, like, your e-mail or a Twitter workshop leader, and the senior edi- baggie of powder. Nipped it open, handle?” tor at, in Bobby’s opinion, the coun- licked and dipped a finger, ran the “I only read hard copy,” Bobby said. try’s sole remotely respectable poetry finger round his gums. Then he eyed “I’ll print it of and send it to you,” publishing house. Hammered, he Bobby again. “Want a bump?” he said he said, holding Bobby’s eye with a looked two hundred. He raised his in a choked tone. kind of ruthless helplessness. ashen lids and grinned wobblingly at “I’m absolutely good. Let me out. Bobby felt the warmth of burden- Bobby. Please.” hood settle on him as he spelled out “How is the man?” he said. The guy looked confused, even in- his address. “Well,” Bobby said. jured, for a moment. Then he pressed “Poems?” Bobby asked. “Hey,” Jess said. the relevant button. The guy shook his head. “Some. Jess had a straight fringe and feral “Wait, wait, wait,” he said as Bobby There’s a screenplay, some stories, too. blue eyes. She was in college and served stepped with relief into the alley. “I It’s the language, though. I just want as a kind of all-purpose intern- slash- know I’ve fucked this up. But I wanted to know if it’s doing something inter- assistant to Fiachra. She was writing to see if I could show you some of my esting or not.” poems, of course. She was sitting with

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 67 Good that we could rely on at least one layabout to answer the call to quietly celebrate,” Fiachra said. For the next ten minutes or so, Bobby interacted. He choked out questions, smiled, and nodded meaningfully at re- plies. He was trying to interpret Fia- chra’s tone—whether it contained a buried note of contrition or at least an awareness of his having, from Bobby’s perspective, rejected him for Jess. There was the gruesome possibility that Fia- chra simply expected Bobby to take de- velopments at face value, and be happy for Tombes. Bobby excused himself. In the toilet he closed his fist, hyperven- tilated, and punched the metal hand- dryer. He looked at his hand. He was pretty convinced he had broken some- thing in his middle finger, through which a steady and piercing voltage of pain now vibrantly coursed. Bobby went back out and drank five pints. Fiachra, with a significant head start but still in- “I don’t like the way women are portrayed in the constellations.” tent on trying to keep up, rapidly be- came unintelligible, then unconscious. Jess ordered during each round, bought •• her own, yet seemed to sit before the same glass of wine drained to the same one leg tucked under her on a battered scientious, patient, and kind with any- unvarying depth all night long. leather chair and appeared to be stone one she encountered. She formed “Do you feel good?” Bobby asked sober. rapports easily, and—a rarity in the for what felt like the hundredth time, “What’s happening, Fiachra?” Scene—Bobby had yet to encounter though it may have been the first time “Ach, we’re celebrating.” someone willing to say a bad word he had actually said it out loud to her. “Just the two of you?” about her. She was writing, but had Jess took her time before answering, “Well, there’s three of us now,” been purportedly reluctant to show as she took her time before answering Jess said. the poems to others. (Bobby had any question. She was looking at him. “What are we celebrating?” ofered to critique them, more than She had the vigilance, the remorseless “It’s a dismal Wednesday afternoon, once.) He’d heard her read a couple patience of the endemically ambitious; yet we have warmth, seats, wine, and of them one night. They’d been pretty there she sat, twenty- one or twenty-two friends,’’ Fiachra said. “And someone’s good, actually, maybe, he thought now. and wreathed in all her untradable sur- wrote a book.” Bobby’s head swam, tritely. It wasn’t plus time, watching not just Bobby and “Everyone’s wrote a book,” Bobby even a question of whether or not she Fiachra but also somehow herself, in- said, but as he did his heart spasmed was objectively better than him, it’s sinuated within yet in some way already fretfully in its chamber. that Fiachra had thought so, and soon beyond—already extricated from—this “Congratulate Miss Tombes,” Fia- others would, too. Fiachra had pub- scene, this moment. Bobby could see, chra said. “We’re putting her out next lished a number of individual pieces now, the abiding apartness in her look. spring.” by Bobby over the years in various It had always been there. And within Jess looked abashedly down into journals and anthologies, had put him him rose again the habitual suspicion, her drink. Bobby had an immediate in every live-reading lineup going. the deep intestinal hunch: his work was urge to punch both of them in the face. Not that he thought he’d be Fiachra’s shit. So, essentially, was Fiachra’s, and “That’s. So. Great. That’s. So. Great,” next guy, necessarily—he just wished everybody else’s. But Tombes’s, what- Bobby heard himself incontinently now that it was anyone other than ever it was, was not. Jess Tombes was reiterate. the baby-faced Tombes. (Though he going to last, and Bobby could feel Jess Tombes. Jess Tombes. Who knew that this qualification, too, was himself, in her spectral, incipiently ca- and what, exactly, was Jess Tombes? a lie. He would envy and despise all nonical gaze, being transubstantiated, Bobby logged what he knew of her: who were not he, if he was not the one.) molecule by molecule, into obscurity. a student, a kid, she was an unfail- “We signed of on the contracts in Whether she knew it or not—and Bobby ingly polite and pleasant human, con- the oice at noon. Been here since. hazarded she probably did not—she

68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 was killing them all so that she could his key and went to open the door into pected grass, a specialized or custom- go on, so that she could make it. This the foyer. ized blend. But, then, he was drunk, was how the machine worked. “The gas company said to stay out his faculties impaired. Maybe it was “I do,” she said in a voice so low it of the building!” the young man said. gas, and not some aging stoners clan- sounded as if it emanated from inside “No unlocking doors and no naked destinely toking away in their apart- Bobby’s own skull. flames inside or in the vicinity of the ment. Bobby went carefully up the He looked at his phone. It was get- building.” stairs. He tried to recall the things you ting late. The bar had filled up. He “The Fire Department is on the were meant to do and not to do in wanted to cry. He put his hand on Jess’s way,” the young woman said. order to avoid conflagrating yourself. knee. She looked at his hand. Bobby absorbed this information Ventilate space where possible, no “What is that?” she asked. and blinked heavily. It was not infor- naked flames, and be careful touching “I don’t know,” Bobby said. He mation he required. things lest friction prompt a spark of withdrew the still aching hand, “Look. Lads. I’m bone tired and static electricity. Something along those yawned, closed his eyes, and pinched substantially cut. I just want to get into lines. tears from his lashes. He was very, my apartment that I pay the rent on He unlocked his door and went into very drunk. “I am very, very drunk,” and am allowed into whenever I like his apartment. He opened a window. he announced. and go to bed.” He booted up his laptop, began pre- Fiachra was snoring, head back “Sir,” the young man said, his face paring a joint with Becky’s weed. He against his seat. The insensate son of wholesomely indignant. “You don’t checked his mail. One of his oldest a bitch was always right, which meant understand. This is an emergency sit- and most reliable clients, PussySplit- that he was right about this, too. uation. We came over to visit my ter112, was back with a new request. Jess picked up a beer mat, and grand-aunt May and were greeted “Good old PussySplitter,” Bobby Bobby watched her place it down in with an incredibly heady smell of what muttered. almost but not quite the same spot. we are convinced is leaking gas in the PussySplitter112 had gone to the The discrepancy, or adjustment, was second-story hall. We went from door efort of typing up the commission deliberate. Everything she did was to door to advise people to get out.” as a Word doc, and when Bobby deliberate and precise. She was cu- “As instructed by the Fire Depart- opened it he saw it was almost five rating this moment, as if it were al- ment,” the young woman vouched. thousand words long. He skim-read: ready an old, old memory. And Bobby “Ah, well,” Bobby said. “I’m on the elvish princesses, fisting, a dash of felt like an incidental fixture within third floor anyways.” coprophagia, an extensive and almost that memory, wavering and thinning “The whole building’s potentially clinically dry segue hypothesizing and becoming increasingly indistinct, unsafe!” the young woman said. how best to depict a dragon’s hard-on. mnemonic collateral on the cusp of She was also in a denim shirt—pink The usual. Bobby was considering disintegration. to the young man’s baby blue—her upping his rates. He would start the He stood up. “I’m so glad for you,” expression as sincerely vexed as his. job tonight, he figured, if he could he managed, and he walked right out. They were dressed like an unironic just take the edge of his drunken- country- and-Western duo. ness with a bit of a smoke. irst he saw the pale humps, then “Do you fuckers sing?” He went over to the win- F he saw what they were. Old peo- Bobby asked. dow. Out front of the build- ple, huddled on the pavement and “W-what?” the young ing he could see the ap- some seated or even lying on the grassy man responded. paritions of his elderly embankment outside the apartment Bobby seized on their neighbors, the blankets block. Some were in pajamas, some confusion to insert his key swaddling their hunched in overcoats, some with their blankets in the lock and deftly open frames making them look draped over their shoulders. A young the door. He squeezed into like poorly pitched tents. man and a young woman were mov- the brief gap, then held He put the joint in his ing alertly from person to person, the door fast behind him as mouth and brought the talking to them, placing a reassuring the young man tried to pull it open. lighter to it. Friction: he looked out hand on a shoulder. “What the hell!” the girl shouted. across the city sky and flicked the As Bobby staggered up to the build- “I’m of to bed and don’t try and lighter’s wheel, prepared for the night ing entrance, the young man jogged stop me,” Bobby said. “If the place goes to go up all around him, but the night, over. He had a denim shirt on with the up, tell everybody I went in willingly.” as the night was wont to do, rolled sleeves rolled capably up. impersonally on. After a while, Bobby “What’s up?” Bobby asked mildly. here was indeed an incredibly began to hear the Dopplered gulling “Gas leak.’’ T heady smell of what may well have of the sirens as the fire trucks made “Extremely potentially danger- been gas in the building, though to their approach.  ous!” the young woman, joining him, Bobby’s cultivated faculties there was exclaimed. a faint but unmistakably herby back- NEWYORKER.COM Bobby ignored them. He took out note to the atmosphere. Bobby sus- Colin Barrett on “Anhedonia, Here I Come.”

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 69 THE CRITICS

A CRITIC AT LARGE THRONES OF BLOOD Binge-watching the most addictive show on television.

BY CLIVE JAMES

inge-watching is a night out, an impact. Saved from the unnerving erence. In view of this possibility, it be- B even when you spend the whole blood-count plunge that set in when comes a positive likelihood that for the day in. It’s a way of being. We begin my lurking ailment came out of remis- next generation they will be the only to esteem this way of being at its true sion, I was back to having time to burn. frame of reference. It’s a new, perva- worth when we realize that the cre- Though I haven’t really got a chance, sive, and irresistible vocabulary of the ators of the brain food that we’re I haven’t got an end date, either. imagination. Familiar with it, one gets wolfing down are at least as involved In the five years before the latest caught up in conversations in which in it, at the level of imagination, as we crisis, I used up a lot of my blessed sup- properties of screen stories have the are. From Homer until now, and on- ply of extra time by reading. But I was common currency once held by stories ward to wherever the creaking fleet of also viewing, and I mean viewing ev- from the page. In Renaissance times, “Battlestar Galactica” may go in the fu- erything. The advent of the critically the bright young people knew what ture, there never was, and never will credentialled TV epic, and of the boxed they were talking about when they made be, a successful entertainment fuelled set, amplified my TV habit, already a glancing references to Ovid’s Meta- by pure cynicism. And, when we click long-term addiction, into a form of morphoses. Now the bright young peo- on Play All and settle back to watch brain-scrambling suicide. My younger ple, although they are perhaps already every season of “The Wire” all over daughter, Lucinda, was my partner in turning into bright early-middle-aged again, we should try to find a moment, this enterprise. We had been in it to- people, know what they are talking in the midst of such complete absorp- gether—the entire family had—since about when they say that two of their tion, to reflect that the imagined world “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing” friends are like Josh Lyman and Donna being revealed to us for our delight re- introduced us all to the dizzy new plea- Moss, or that another friend is a Zoe ally is an astounding achievement, even sure of watching more than one epi- Barnes in the making, and could end though we will always feel that we need sode of the same show in a single eve- up getting pushed under a train. an excuse for doing nothing else ex- ning. But surely three episodes was the cept watch it. maximum possible. Serious people had ll the same, like anybody both For the past six years, I have had the to retire for the night. It was Lucinda A adult and sane, I had no intention perfect excuse—ever since a polite but and I who pushed it all the way to four of watching “Game of Thrones,” even insidious form of leukemia was diag- and even five; and now, every Saturday though the whole world was already nosed, in early 2010. It has been more in the tiny parlor of my house of books, talking about it. For one thing, it had often dormant than not. Early on, a we binge-watch at that heady rate. We swords; and I had already seen enough program of chemo sent it into remis- may well be the only people in the world swords being wielded by Conan and sion for five years. Not long ago it came who have ever watched five episodes Red Sonja. Though I share the movie back, to be faced by a medical oppo- of “The Following” in succession with- heritage of my generation in retaining nent that might not have existed had out succumbing to catatonia. Would a soft spot for the intricate fencing it been smart enough to come back Kevin Bacon ever meet a character who matches in the Errol Flynn “Robin earlier. Now it is being held in check was not a serial killer? That question Hood” and the Stewart Granger “Scar- by a powerful new chemo drug called kept us awake rather than putting us amouche,” that fondness rather de- ibrutinib. The drug’s muscular name to sleep. pends on those lightweight swords (“I, Brutinib. You, Olanzapine”) sounds A TV habit on this scale starts to making a little hole instead of chopping like the hero of one of those post- permeate every corner of your mind. of a limb. Usually, an onscreen sword “Conan the Barbarian” movies starring The new mythology gets into the old fight is just a stretch of choreography, some stack of sculpted tofu who will mythology, as if classic literature had dull even when frenzied; or else it gets never be Arnold Schwarzenegger. But faded into the mind’s background and you into abattoir territory, like that you won’t find me disrespecting the images encountered on the screen had scene in the first season of “Rome,” package when the contents have such become one’s first frame of cultural ref- when Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson, SCARABOTTOLO GUIDO ABOVE:

70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 By conjuring a world in which the law has not yet formed, “Game of Thrones” lowers us into the pit of the human brain.

ILLUSTRATION BY JILLIAN TAMAKI THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 71 pioneering the buzz cut) converts seven self. “You’re sick, and time is short!” him helpless with desire. She is Kun- gladiators into ten times as many body Lucinda showed no inclination to help dry and Lilith, Lulu and Carmen. She parts. So there is a sound reason for me fight my way through the shrink- is Proust’s mother, who tormented him not starting to watch any epic with wrap. We were still binge-watching so much by neglecting to climb the swords in it. And to read such an epic “The Following.” But, one afternoon stairs to kiss him good night that he is not much better. Not even Dorothy when I was alone, I found myself tak- spent his entire life writing a long novel Dunnett, who can write, can write an ing a peep. Almost the first thing I saw in revenge. Superbly equipped by the interesting sword; and George R. R. was Sean Bean gritting his entire face, cold edges of her classically sculpted Martin, the author of the books on and then there was a blond princess looks to incarnate the concept of the which “Game of Thrones” is based, caressing a trio of dragon eggs. Yet I femme fatale, Lena Headey beams Cer- writes the kind of prose that might de- kept on watching, even as I vowed to sei’s radiant malevolence at such a depth scribe a sword hand-forged from a me- stop when the eggs hatched. What was into the viewer’s mind that she reawak- teorite and make it less thrilling than the immediate appeal? ens a formative disturbance: did my a can opener. I knew this because I Undoubtedly, it was the appeal of mother look after me because she loved picked up one of his books and fell raw realism. Superficially bristling with me, or was she doing all that only be- down shortly afterward, and I wasn’t every property of fantasy fiction up to cause she had to? even ill that day. and including clif-crowning castles Plotwise, Cersei can thus raise a For another thing, “Game of with pointed turrets, the show plunges long-running question: Must she be- Thrones” had dragons, and I place a you into a state where there is no state have dreadfully in order to protect her total embargo on dragons. I would except the lawless interplay of violent dreadful son Jofrey, the heir to the almost rather have zombies. Bol- power. The binding political symbol is throne, or is she just dreadful anyway? stered by these and other relevant prej- brilliant: the Iron Throne, a chair of Would we, in the same position, be udices, I managed to ward of “Game metal spikes that looks like hell to sit suiciently dreadful to protect our of Thrones” for months. Then a box on. (It was forged from molten swords ofspring from a richly deserved obliv- of the first season somehow got into by a dragon’s breath, but skip all that.) ion? Tussling with such conundrums, the house. It lay there unopened on the It is instantly established that nobody we are obviously a long way below the parlor table while I thought of fur- in King’s Landing or anywhere else in level of the law; and indeed the whole ther objections. For yet another thing, the Seven Kingdoms can relax for a thrust of the show is to give us a world “Game of Thrones” had Sean Bean as minute—especially not the person on in which the law has not yet formed, a hero, when everybody knows that the Iron Throne. a Jurassic Park that has not yet given Sean Bean is meant to be a heavy, one As for the top woman of the realm, birth to its keepers. Once this princi- who flexes his teeth and grits his jaw the queen Cersei Lannister, she is a ple is grasped, the dragons almost fit, before being eliminated by Christian beautiful expression of arbitrary terror, although, personally, I could have done Bale in “Equilibrium” or Harrison Ford combining shapely grace with limit- without them. Lucinda, when I finally in “Patriot Games.” less evil in just the right measure to forced her to start watching, correctly “Leave that box alone!” I told my- scare a man to death while rendering told me to stop bitching about the drag- ons: they were part of the deal, the price of voluntarily lowering oneself into the pit of the brain.

he dragons hatch and grow up T in the rocky, sandy realm of Essos, in my view the second-dullest region of the show’s world-girdling range of locations. Sand is almost as boring as ice, anyway, and when the sand is being trampled by an army of fearless geld- ing warriors it induces sleep. Not that the Dothraki chieftain, Khal Drogo ( Jason Momoa), is a gelding: au con- traire, he looks like a pumped-up clone of the young Burt Reynolds, with the shoulders of an armored personnel car- rier. He is lover and spouse to Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), she who would rule as many as possible of the Seven Kingdoms. (The Seven King- doms are divided into nine regions, “If you’re willing to wait, the soup is always better on the second day.” with a logic that will be familiar to all fans of fantasy, and even to a few nor- forever defending a prop wall against ented enough to be anything—helps mal people.) With her at his side, Drogo an infinitude of implacable digital efects the writers invest the character with a is unbeatable, and unbeatability is al- with no letup in the lack of interest. terrifying range of virulent psychopa- ways a formula for tedium. That same At the risk of a spoiler, let it be said thy. (They’ve killed him too quickly, I formula is at the heart of the currently that the showrunners took a chance thought when the little swine finally most pervasive of all bad cinematic when they left it ambiguous whether got his, and I was all too aware that genres, the action movie without real Jon Snow had been written out at the the script had reached me successfully action: where contending forces are end of Season 5. Nobody might have in its clear intention to tap the view- invincible, there can be no plausible cared. His only accomplishment for er’s animal emotions, some of which conflict, only choreography. several years had been to look glumly can have a disturbing connection with At the side of the inconceivably determined, even when the the way it takes so long for butch Drogo—taming him by convinc- feisty wildling Ygritte (Rose an orca to kill a seal.) But, ing him that his abrupt sex drive will Leslie) called him Jon Snore for the viewer who can yield even more satisfactory results if and shot him full of arrows. stand back a bit from the he extends the duration of the act of His in-depth moroseness is kid’s perverted smile, it’s love to the full ten seconds—Daenerys amusingly celebrated in a standard stuf. John Hurt can’t lose. After all, she has dragons for Seth Meyers spoof video as Caligula in “I, Claudius” an air force. She also has access to the that has him sitting at a din- ate the baby from his sis- only reliable supply of artificial fabrics ner party in New York and ter’s womb, whereas all in the realm, and on her form a sheer throwing a damper on the Jofrey does is shoot a pros- negligee drapes wrinkle-free, like Ban- conversation, but really, there titute with his crossbow. Lon on a Barbie doll: the Hollywood is no criticism to be made of the char- The real shock is not in what Jofrey’s concept of feminine allure always did acter in either concept or performance, evil streak can accomplish but in what depend on a certain insouciance about because the North of the show is sim- Ned Stark’s virtue fails to prevent. He wearing nightwear by day. For all her ply like that: it leaves nothing to be said. is a good, thoughtful man with a sense putative capacity to drive strong men All the action that matters takes of justice, and it avails him nothing. It mad with longing, however, she is even- place in the intermediate regions, es- avails us nothing, either, who have come tually obliged to look on helplessly as pecially in King’s Landing, where the to depend on him. Drogo wastes away and dies, perhaps show truly begins and to which it must from boredom. If I sound dismissive, always return, if it has any sense. Luck- or popular art, for any level of it’s just because I’m still looking for all ily, it usually does, and we know that F art, this is a rare step toward the the reasons it would have been right we’ll get back to it even when we’re natural condition of the world. The not to watch the show, before I get to stuck in the countryside somewhere, rarity might be multiplied by the un- the more diicult task of specifying the with the towering Brienne of Tarth usual profligacy of sacrificing a star, but reasons that not watching would have (Gwendoline Christie) endlessly es- even that expensive boldness has been been a loss. corting the tiny Arya Stark (Maisie not unfamiliar since Hitchcock pio- Another reason not to watch the se- Williams) from danger to safety, or neered it in “Psycho”; as he told Trufaut, ries would have been what happens in from safety to danger, or whatever. the shock value of Janet Leigh’s early the North. There is icy cold instead of King’s Landing is Hamlet’s Elsinore, departure in the shower scene depended sandy heat, but still the level of tedium Julio-Claudian Rome, “Deadwood,” on the audience’s expectation that a is very high, for two main reasons: the “The West Wing,” and Tony Sopra- headline name would stay alive. But character of Jon Snow (Kit Harington) no’s New Jersey all rolled into one. The Sean Bean, though he might be ad- and the excessive number of C.G.I. other centers of events exist only to mired, has never counted among the zombies. The latter component you can give us a rest from it, and the rest had much loved, and the shock value of his get in a bad movie. Continually assem- better not be too long. This is where departure from “Game of Thrones” de- bling their forces to smash through the Sean Bean as Eddard (Ned) Stark, War- pended on the size of the investment Wall and wreak who knows what havoc den of the North, newly appointed to that the creators had put into building in the balmier regions of Westeros, be the King’s Hand, graduates from up his part of the story until it looked the inexorably oncoming undead vio- his established condition of dispens- like the armature of the whole deal. late my ad-hoc rule of never caring ability to the same indispensability that For them, it was a key play in a delib- about any character that I can partly he enjoyed in “Sharpe,” and then, while erate campaign to get their show be- see through: I was brought up to be the old King slowly dies, goes on to a yond the reach of movie cliché, and scared of people in one piece, not walk- postgraduate degree as the wise man, even beyond the reach of show busi- ing around in bits. But the real prob- the unwobbling pivot of the plot. And ness itself. Show business usually de- lem is that Jon Snow is no more ex- then what? He gets his head cut of at pends on fulfilling our wishes. In King’s pressive than the zombies. In this, I the mere whim of Cersei’s frightful Landing, however, our wishes might think, the casting has given us an ideal son, the boy king Jofrey. run out of luck. representative; for we, too, would be In his performance as Jofrey, Jack Cersei, for example, won’t be climb- facially immobile at the prospect of Gleeson—angelic to look at but tal- ing the stairs to kiss you good night,

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 73 unless you happen to be her brother. pair of eyes—he can pop them at will— tion, except to illustrate the show’s cul- She is more likely to consign you to but Allen also looks like someone you tural influence.) Though economy is al- sudden death. Since her every sardonic would want to keep your eye on if he ways the watchword, there are miles of smile is a reign of terror, the script got behind you. In neither case can the dialogue, and nearly all of it is good. It’s scarcely needs to spell out the secret of actor be blamed for the face God gave the reason there was never a show harder her political strength, but it’s at its best him, but the whole dreary concentra- to switch of once it had hooked you. when it does. At the start of Season 2, tion on the sadistic delights of the dun- You never knew, for example, what Tywin the suave and sinister palace tactician geon was certainly the fault of the show- Lannister, the malevolent patriarch of Lord Baelish (Aidan Gillen), walking runners, whom we might have punished the clan, would say next. in a courtyard with Cersei and her by ceasing to watch their show, if only For the deliciously long time that guards, for once pushes his flattering we could have done so. Lannister survived, Charles Dance, the manner into the range of overfamiliar- I can swear on a stack of Faith of actor who played him, never once chor- ity. Quietly boasting about his trea- the Seven sacred texts that it wasn’t the tled before he spoke, but he might well sury of secrets, he says, “Knowledge is sex scenes that kept me tuned in. In my have, for he was surely aware that his power.” Cersei orders her guards to decrepit condition, I didn’t find their lines were giving him the summation seize him and cut his throat. They are number and nature anything to be hor- of his career in a single sweep. The all set to do so when she orders them rified about, but they were nothing to overlord Tywin Lannister is not only to release him. Then she tells him, be excited about, either. The “Game of the best role of its kind that Dance has “Power is power.” There are only a few Thrones” revue-bar circuit has perhaps ever had; it is the best role of its kind scraps of dialogue in the forty seconds too many bare breasts and certainly too that anyone has ever had. (Rex Har- of the sequence, but it speaks volumes. many Brazilian wax jobs, but there are rison got something just about as This couldn’t be done on the page with no penises in sight: an indication that good in “Cleopatra,” but it didn’t last the same force, because you need the primitive times, like ancient times, ad- a tenth as long.) The role gave Dance closeups, especially of the fractured here to Hollywood rules even when the the delectable opportunity to play to light in Baelish’s eyes when he realizes starting gun fires for an all-out orgy. his natural bent as an upmarket au- that his own cleverness might have There is also the consideration that, thority figure for four solid seasons, condemned him to death. The moment with so much compulsory removal of thereby stamping his image into the is a lesson in writing for the screen, female clothes, an additional dignity is global public consciousness to a depth and in “Game of Thrones” there are conferred on those females highborn that his previous career had barely sug- hundreds of moments like it. (To be enough to keep their clothes on, al- gested. Typecast as a smooth tof by fair to George R. R. Martin and his though this privilege, as always in show his stature, looks, and finely cultivated Dan Brownish prose, the showrunners, business, is given mainly to those who voice, he had been perfectly at home David Beniof and D. B. Weiss, have have graduated from the feature list to in “The Jewel in the Crown,” “White kept him close throughout the enter- star billing. Even when Cersei is tum- Mischief,” and “Gosford Park,” but you prise.) The show’s long-range carbon bling in the upper tower with her were always wanting more of him. In arc burns between the extreme sim- brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), “Game of Thrones” you get enough of plicity of primitive emotions and the in the very first episode, we don’t see him, and it still isn’t enough. extreme technical sophistication with her naked. The scene is therefore chiefly His role as Tywin has a polarity that which they are expressed. memorable not for her body laid bare he fits both ways. Tywin is a figure of but for the body of young Bran Stark authority, and that’s just the ticket for n atmosphere in which a char- (Isaac Hempstead Wright) plummet- an actor who elsewhere features in A acter as highly placed and clever ing after Jaime pushes him backward the video game “The Witcher 3: Wild as Baelish can talk himself to the brink out of a window. When Cersei does Hunt” as the voice of Emhyr var Em- of extinction with a single phrase re- appear naked, during a public shaming reis, Emperor of Nilfgaard. But Tywin ally didn’t need explicit scenes of sex at the end of Season 5, she is either a is also a philosopher of the subject of and torture as well, but the showrun- symbol of her own fall from power or power, with his every precept learned ners piled them on. Personally, I could else she is Lena Headey’s body double. first from experience and then refined have done without the torture alto- The ongoing scholarly dispute seems by his understanding. And that’s where gether. A scream from the other side to be plumping for the latter. Dance’s greatest strength comes in: his of a closed door is usually enough to But if “Game of Thrones” actually credibility as a thinker, a man of reflec- convince me. There is also the consid- depended on its torture festivals and its tion. There was never a more persua- eration that, in a now famous torture showrooms of naked pulchritude, it sively thoughtful transmitter of bitterly scene, in the sixth episode of the third would have been “Caligula.” The show’s cured wisdom; in speech after speech, season, the actor doing the cutting up real spine is in the daring of its analyt- he gets hours to do what Sean Con- (Iwan Rheon, in the role of Ramsay ical psychology, much of it revealed nery gets only a few minutes to do in Snow) and the actor being cut up (Alfie through talk, which goes on even when all those guru roles from “The Un- Allen, in the role of Theon Greyjoy) the clothes have come of. (The word touchables” through “The Hunt for could, for my money, just as easily have “sexposition” has entered the language—a Red October” and “Entrapment.” Tywin swapped places. Rheon has the scarier clumsy coinage that I would never men- is wise from his mistakes, ruthless in

74 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 his realism, an armed prophet after Machiavelli’s own heart. He’s a char- acter who reaches deep into the psy- che: we may not forgive him his cru- elties, but we find it hard to question his right to rule. Look at the evidence. Nothing can stop him.

othing, that is, except the dwarf N who shoots him with a crossbow while he is sitting in the privy. The dwarf in question is his son Tyrion, whom he has despised since the day the malformed boy was born, an in- stant reaction that finally turns out to have been Tywin’s only long-term mis- take. Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, from his first episodes in the show, had such an impact that he suddenly made all the other male actors in the world look too tall. It was a deserved success: his face is a remarkable instrument of ex- pression over which he has complete professional control, and his voice is a •• thing of rare beauty, as rich as Chali- apin singing Boris Godunov. None of the camp follower Shae, touchingly seasons of being protected like a caged his scenes really need to be cited in played by Sibel Kekilli. But he can’t save nightingale from the casual rapacious- proof; everybody knows all of them too her from harm, so even his best qual- ness of the dreaded Jofrey, had been well. But, if I measure his moments by ity, his natural tenderness, becomes his not only raped but killed, just as, in real my feelings, I have to recall his reac- enemy. Tyrion is the embodiment, in a life, some daughter, equally precious, tions when he is on trial for his life, in small body, of the show’s prepolitical is raped and killed every day of the Season 4, Episode 6. His situation is psychological range. A perpetual vic- week. Besides, to put it as compassion- as desperate as when he had to sleep tim of injustice, he yet has a sense of ately as I can, the dramatis personae in a cell whose fourth wall opened onto justice: circumstances can’t destroy his contain plenty of characters we wouldn’t a killing void, but here the threat to his inner certainty that there are such things have minded seeing the back of. life is all in the words of others, and as fairness, love, and truth. Those cir- Of those we come to love, there are his resigned desperation, if there can cumstances might lead him to despair, many, but we have been ready to see be such a thing, is conveyed not by the but he takes their measure by his in- them go. Young Arya, for example, little he is allowed to say—his sum- stincts. To raise, for an uninstructed au- braves so many fatal hazards with so ming-up speech is the only stretch of dience, the question of what comes first, tiny a sword that it would not have eloquence Dinklage has been assigned a civilized society or an instinctive wish been surprising to see her pinned by in the whole trial—but by the way he for civilization, can’t be a bad efect for her own toothpick like a cocktail sau- looks when he listens. an entertainment to have; although we sage. Clearly, the main thing keep- Debarred by fate from military prow- might have to be part of an instructed ing her alive was the showrunners’ de- ess, Tyrion has never been able to in- audience ourselves in order to find that termination to fascinate us with the fluence events except with his brain, efect good, and we had better be pro- process of her maturation, but from and his trial is the show’s clearest proof tected by the police and an army from our own lives we know that the wish that, in an unreasonable society, to have anyone who finds it trivial. to see someone grow and thrive can be reasoning power guarantees nothing Philosophical conundrums aside, thwarted by chance. Everyone in the except the additional mental sufering there is the matter of Tyrion’s indis- show is dispensable, as in the real world. that accrues when circumstances re- pensability; and here, surely, we finally But without Tyrion Lannister you would mind you that you are powerless. Your come down to a certainty that there is have to start the show again, because only privilege, even as the son of a noble one character the show can’t do with- he is the epitome of the story’s moral house, is to understand the fix you are out. We felt shock when Ned Stark scope. His big head is the symbol of in, and to express yourself neatly when was decapitated, and when Tywin Lan- his comprehension, and his little body neatness can avail you nothing. Tyrion nister was killed. But we could survive the symbol of his incapacity to act upon has enough influence to secure for him- those shocks, and might even have been it. Tyrion Lannister is us, bright enough self, among his outsized supply of paid able to bear it if Ned’s darling daugh- to see the world’s evil but not strong mistresses, a woman he genuinely loves: ter Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), after enough to change it. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 75 formidable. “It was terrifying to watch BOOKS the uncanny ability of the Moorish in- fantry to exploit the slightest fold in the ground which could be used for LOST ILLUSIONS cover, and to make themselves invisi- ble,”a volunteer later recalled. “It is an The Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. art that only comes to a man after a life- time spent with a rifle in his hand.” BY CALEB CRAIN Most of the Americans, meanwhile, had fired a rifle for the first time less than two weeks earlier. Some had ar- rived at the war zone only a day or two before, still wearing street clothes and Keds, and had never fired a gun at all. Like the various luminaries who vis- ited the front—Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, and others— many of the volunteers had a literary bent. An American ambulance driver named James Neugass worried in his diary about joining the “here-to-be- revolted-by-the-horror-of-war, later- to-write-a-book” tradition. A British volunteer, passing through a field where soldiers had lightened their packs, mar- velled at the books they had left be- hind: “the works of Nietzsche, and Spi- noza, Spanish language textbooks, Rhys David’s ‘Early Buddhism’ and every kind of taste in poetry.” The commander of the American battalion was Robert Hale Merriman, a lumberjack’s son from California who was a graduate student in economics. He was six feet two, and in photographs his round horn-rimmed glasses make him look a bit like the silent-movie star Harold Lloyd. In “Spain in Our Hearts” New York University students in the Lincoln battalion, in April, 1938. (Houghton Milin Harcourt), a vivid and level-headed new history of Amer- n the morning of February 27, and freedom that transcended national ican participation in the Spanish Civil O 1937, which began cold and gray, boundaries. The fight felt almost holy— War, Adam Hochschild quotes a diary a few hundred Americans waited to “like the feeling you expected to have entry of Neugass’s that nicely captures storm a hill southeast of Madrid, near and did not have when you made your Merriman’s charisma: “He has a way of the Jarama River. They were volunteer first communion,” Ernest Hemingway infecting the entire brigade with his al- soldiers, drawn to Spain by a noble wrote, in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” most too boyish enthusiasm.” cause. Germany belonged to Hitler, The Americans had been brought to Merriman’s superior oicers assured and Italy to Mussolini, but there was Spain by Comintern, the worldwide him that his troops wouldn’t be facing still a chance that the Spanish Repub- Communist organization, but, to dis- the Moors alone; at 7 a.m., he could lic—governed by an unstable coalition guise their allegiance, the troops had expect support from artillery, planes, of liberals, socialists, and anarchists— been given an irreproachably non-Com- tanks, cavalry, armored cars, and, on his could fight of a cabal of right-wing munist name: the Abraham Lincoln right flank, a Spanish battalion. But generals who called themselves Na- battalion. everything went wrong. The artillery tionalists. The previous year, the Na- Entrenched at the top of the hill, fire landed three hours late and in the tionalists had tried to take over the behind a shot-up olive grove, were wrong place. The soldiers in the Span- country, touching of a civil war. Left- Moorish troops, flown in from Spain’s ish battalion advanced fifteen metres ist volunteers from around the world protectorate in Morocco in planes fur- but then retreated to their trenches. flocked to the Republican side, seeing nished by Hitler and Mussolini. The Neither tanks nor horses materialized.

the war as a struggle between tyranny Moors were known to be especially Two armored cars showed up but didn’t AP

76 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 fight. There was no sign of the planes, turned out to be representative. Again The result, Hochschild writes, was and, when Merriman checked with and again, high-level commanders or- simultaneously “both a right-wing mil- headquarters about them, he was faulted dered Lincolns into attacks that oicers itary coup and a left-wing social rev- for not having set out an aviation sig- in the field warned would be suicidal. olution.” In territory conquered by the nal to direct the pilots’ fire. It was the The Lincolns’ sacrifices rarely won the generals, Nationalists restored the tra- first he had heard of such a signal, but Republic any tactical advantage, and, ditional, virtually feudal authority of he ordered his soldiers to stitch one as Hochschild reports, foreign volun- the Church and the landowners, banned together, out of underwear and shirts. teers in Spain were “killed at nearly the regional languages of the Basques Two soldiers carried it from the trenches three times the rate of the rest of the and the Catalans, and inveighed against and, since it was by then broad day- Republican Army.” Jews, Freemasons, and Reds. In Re- light, were killed by machine-gun fire Whereas Spain’s right united within publican territory, workers took over as they laid it down. In a phone call just a few months around a single leader— factories, churches became refugee cen- before noon, a short-tempered Yugo- the cunning, ruthless Francisco Franco, ters, and fighting bulls were slaugh- slav colonel told Merriman that the who went on to rule as a dictator for tered to give peasants their first taste Spanish troops were far ahead, wait- three and a half decades—the left tore of beef. Hochschild writes that when, ing for him. Merriman could see that itself apart with squabbling and para- in September, Lois and Charles Orr, they were still in their trenches. “Don’t noia. Veterans came to feel that the ide- leftist American newlyweds, arrived contradict me!” the Yugoslav, who had alism of the cause had been exploited, in Barcelona they found day-care cen- higher rank, yelled. He ordered Mer- and many resented being policed by ters, adult-literacy classes, collectivized riman to attack “at all costs.” Hochs- shadowy Communist enforcers. Not all restaurants, and quotes from Bakunin child glosses the implicit threat here: were embittered by the experience, how- on the sides of street-cleaning trucks. a commander who hesitated during an ever. “We were naïve,” one American “I recognized it immediately as a state ofensive in Córdoba two months ear- recalled, years later, “but it’s the kind of afairs worth fighting for,” George lier had been shot as a Fascist spy. of naïveté that the world needs.” Orwell, who came to Barcelona in De- After three Republican planes flew cember, wrote. “Human beings were by, more or less harmlessly—as much ntil well into the twentieth trying to behave as human beings and support as the troops would receive— U century, Spain’s economy remained not as cogs in the capitalist machine.” Merriman felt that he had no choice largely agricultural, and its great land- Orwell’s wife took a job as Charles but to obey. He stepped out of the owners were accustomed to a near- Orr’s secretary at an English-language trenches, signalling to his men to fol- monopoly on political power, shored newspaper published by POUM, a group low, and was shot in the left shoulder. up by the authority of the Roman Cath- of anti-Stalinist Communists, and Or- His men advanced into what one later olic Church. This started to change well enlisted in POUM’s militia. recalled as “an impenetrable steel wall” quickly with the establishment of the In the early days of the rebellion, the of bullets. Some sheltered for a while Second Republic, in 1931. Parliament Spanish Navy remained mostly loyal to behind the thin olive trees. Hochschild legalized divorce, cut government the Republican government, isolating reports that an estimated hundred and subsidies to the Church, and laid the the Moors and legionnaires in Africa. twenty men were killed and a hundred groundwork for the redistribution of Franco, in search of planes, sent emis- and seventy-five wounded. Snipers shot land. In February, 1936, after an alli- saries to Hitler. Fresh from a perfor- first-aid workers who were trying to ance of centrist and leftist parties won mance of Wagner’s “Siegfried,” Hitler fetch the fallen. In the afternoon, it a parliamentary election, peasants seized was willing to sell even more aircraft began to rain, and the mud-coated land, and mobs burned churches and than Franco was asking for, and the corpses stranded in no man’s land took stormed prisons, releasing political pris- opera inspired him to name the pro- on “a curious ruled look,” like dead oners. A circle of generals, deciding that gram Operation Magic Fire. The planes birds, a survivor recalled. In 1967, when things had gone far enough, planned a should go to Franco alone, Hitler de- the historian Cecil D. Eby visited, he coup d’état. It began on July 17, 1936, cided, a stipulation that, along with the found a cairn of rocks, bones, skulls, in Morocco, home of Spain’s army of convenient, accidental deaths of a cou- and helmets that had been made by Moors and foreign legionnaires. ple of rivals, insured that Franco became the Lincolns a few days after the fight- The coup was welcomed in the the Nationalists’ supreme leader. Mus- ing, when they burned their dead, who Roman Catholic heartland, but it fal- solini, too, provided planes, and within were too numerous to bury. The con- tered in the larger cities and the north- weeks more than ten thousand troops sensus among historians, including ern industrial centers. Trade unions in were flown across the Mediterranean— Hochschild, is that as a military oper- Madrid were eager to defend the Re- the first major airlift in history. ation the attack achieved nothing. publican government; the government, The world woke up to the Fascists’ “You can say that the battalion was wary of the unions’ radicalism, hesi- support a couple of weeks later, after named after Abraham Lincoln because tated for two days but then gave them two Italian planes crash-landed in he, too, was assassinated,” a survivor guns. In Barcelona, where anarchism French North Africa. Fellow-democ- told a reporter. Jarama was the first had long been a powerful movement, racies did not rush to the Republic’s major engagement fought by Ameri- workers simply seized armories and side, however. France’s Prime Minis- cans in the Spanish Civil War, and it took up the city’s defense. ter wanted to, but Britain still hoped

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 77 to dodge a fight with Hitler, and was sand signed up, from more than fifty was probably better at of-the-cuf per- alarmed by the Republican govern- countries. The catch was that Stalin suasive rhetoric than most command- ment’s support of militant labor unions, didn’t actually like Spain’s revolution, ers. In Hochschild’s view, the move to- given that British companies had ex- which he feared could spook Britain ward a centralized command probably tensive mining interests in the coun- and France into siding with Hitler in did improve the Republic’s admittedly try. The British Foreign Secretary urged a future conflict between Germany and slim chances. France to be prudent. In America, Con- the Soviet Union. “Act in the guise of Oddly, Spain’s experiments with gress, disconcerted by the spectacle of defending the Republic,” a Comintern anarchist governance didn’t get much armed labor leaders taking up politics, leader told the Party’s followers. press at the time. Here, too, Orwell outlawed sales of military equipment There were moderates in the Re- thought he saw a hidden intent at work. to either side. It has long been known publican government who didn’t want “Since the revolution had got to be that Torkild Rieber, the chief execu- a revolution any more than the Com- crushed, it greatly simplified things to tive of Texaco, violated this embargo munists did, and, even for many who pretend that no revolution had hap- by selling oil to the Nationalists on did want revolution, it made sense to pened,” he wrote. The idea that the credit, but Hochschild relays a star- “First Win the War!” as one propa- past was as susceptible to political con- tling discovery by the Spanish histo- ganda poster put it. War or revolution trol as the present later formed the rian Guillem Martínez Molinos: Rie- struck Orwell as a false choice, how- kernel of “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” ber also directed Texaco employees ever, and in “Homage to Catalonia” he Hochs child demurs, ofering the mild around the world to monitor oil being dismissed it as a pretext under cover but not wholly convincing suggestion shipped to the Republic by rival com- of which the Communists were grad- that nothing more pernicious than panies. Texaco sent the Nationalists ually consolidating power. In Septem- herd behavior on the part of journal- more than fifty messages about these ber, 1936, the government declared that ists was to blame: they didn’t see one shipments, many containing intelli- it was dissolving all independent mi- another writing about the revolution, gence that could be used for target- litias and merging them into a single so they concluded that it must not be ing them. military force. Orwell preferred the an- worth writing about. But he acknowl- Only two of the Republic’s allies archists’ way of doing things: “If a man edges that it was a rather large story came through. Mexico sent twenty disliked an order he would step out of to miss. thousand rifles as a gift. The Soviet the ranks and argue fiercely with the Union, more cannily, traded arms, oicer.” He maintained that, however wenty-eight hundred Ameri- planes, and tanks for Spain’s sizable maddening such insubordination might T can volunteers travelled to Spain gold reserves, the transfer of which be, “it does ‘work’ in the long run”: the with the Lincoln battalion. Before en- crashed the value of the peseta. When discussion enabled oicer and soldier listing, three-quarters of them had be- the Soviets directed Comintern to ap- to understand one another’s position. longed to either America’s Commu- peal for volunteers around the world Still, Orwell, who served as a corporal nist Party or the Party’s youth league. to fight in Spain, more than thirty thou- and then, briefly, as an acting lieutenant, A third of the Lincolns came from the New York City area, and an even larger proportion were Jewish. In “The Od- yssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (1994), the historian Peter N. Carroll quotes a letter from a volunteer named Hyman Katz to his mother: if he didn’t go to Spain and if the Fascists did even- tually reach America, Katz wrote, “all I could do then would be to curse my- self and say, ‘Why didn’t I wake up when the alarm-clock rang?’ ” There were more than eighty Af- rican-Americans in the battalion, and one became the first of his race to lead white American soldiers into battle. Though a number of women signed up as medical staf, only one seems to have served in the Lincoln bat- talion proper—Robert Merriman’s wife, Marion. After he summoned her by telegram (“WOUNDED. COME AT ONCE”), she took a clerical job at bri- gade headquarters, in Madrid. The “No point going to sleep now.” typical volunteer was single and in his late twenties. Most were working-class, but the range of careers was broad: longshoreman, schoolteacher, miner, vaudeville acrobat, rabbi, and at least one New Yorker fact-checker. The last surviving Lincoln veteran, Delmer Berg, died in February, at the age of a hundred; before signing up, he was a dishwasher. The first batch of recruits drilled in the Ukrainian Hall, on East Third Street in Manhattan. The Party bought each of them a black cardboard suit- case with a yellow strap and, in a good- bye ceremony at the Yiddish Theatre, on Second Avenue, handed out razors, instant cofee, Lucky Strikes, and cakes of soap. The volunteers were warned to keep their destination a secret while in transit—recruitment into a foreign army was and still is illegal for Amer- icans—but on the steamer to France their matching suitcases and general implausibility as tourists gave them away. French customs oicials greeted “My husband will be home at any moment—quick, take the accordion!” them with the cry “Vive la République!” In France, a train nicknamed the Red •• Express carried them to the Spanish border, which they crossed in buses. France soon closed the border, and later sky believed that revolution should be unleashed an anarchist, populist en- volunteers had to choose between hik- fostered in all countries, and Stalin thusiasm for its defense. Militias of ing over the frigid Pyrenees at night loathed him—and few were more para- barbers and of graphic artists sprang or risking a boat that might be torpe- noid than Marty. “There is no doubt up, reinforced by the first influx of So- doed by Franco’s Italian-made subma- that he was quite literally mad at this viet munitions and international vol- rines. When the new troops got to Bar- time,” Jason Gurney, an English sculp- unteers. Fighting at close quarters in celona, they startled the American tor who served with the Lincolns, re- university buildings, French volunteers consul by singing “The Star-Spangled called, in “Crusade in Spain,” a sharp- fired from behind volumes of Kant and Banner” under his window. He alerted eyed, melancholy memoir. After the Voltaire, while British ones, behind a Washington, which instructed oicials war, Marty admitted to ordering the barricade of Encyclopædia Britanni- in France to begin stamping U.S. pass- execution of as many as five hundred cas, determined that it took three hun- ports “Not Valid for Travel to Spain.” volunteers, though the number is dis- dred and fifty pages to stop a bullet. The Lincolns headed to a training puted. Lincolns were invited to hand The city did not fall until the very end base in Albacete, where bloodstained over their passports, purportedly for of the war. For two and a half years, it walls testified to the recent summary safekeeping, but a number of them managed to continue life under siege. execution of a group of defeated Na- went mysteriously missing at the end Though some Lincolns were al- tionalist oicers. (It was a dirty war: of the war—probably passed along to lowed to enjoy Madrid on twenty-four- Hochschild accepts the historian Paul Soviet intelligence. The Stalin agent hour furloughs, the American expats Preston’s estimates of a hundred and who assassinated Trotsky, in Mexico who made the most of it were journal- fifty thousand civilians and prisoners in 1940, was travelling on a Canadian ists. Hochs child can’t resist quoting of war killed by the Nationalists and passport that had been surrendered liberally from the memoir of Virginia forty-nine thousand by the Repub- this way. Cowles, a reporter for the Hearst news- licans.) The Lincolns drilled with By early October, 1936, the Nation- papers and a former débutante said to broomsticks and canes in lieu of rifles, alists were so close to Madrid that one look like Lauren Bacall. In a Madrid which were scarce, and were harangued of their generals, in a radio broadcast, hospital, Cowles notices that the nurses by André Marty, the chief organizer bragged that he would soon be drink- are “peroxide blondes with dirty hands of the international forces, about the ing a cup of cofee on the Gran Vía. and nails painted vermilion,” prosti- danger of Trotskyists in their midst. In November, the Republic’s Prime tutes having replaced the nuns who Paranoia about Trotskyism was then Minister and cabinet fled, a desertion traditionally did such work. In a gal- endemic among Communists—Trot- that, instead of demoralizing the city, lery, she sees a caption next to a hole

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 79 in the ceiling: “Art as practiced by Gen- too, if he hadn’t avoided returning to gether.” One night, a fleeing Lincoln, eral Franco.” Like John Dos Passos, his wife’s hotel room, sleeping instead as he walked through an encampment, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and many in a ruined church and then an aban- was startled to see a pup tent, a piece other writers, she stayed at the Hotel doned lot. After the collapse of the So- of equipment unknown in the Repub- Florida, where Hemingway held court, viet Union, a file was discovered in a lican Army; he realized that the men playing Chopin records, loaning his Comintern archive in Moscow iden- asleep all around him must be Nation- bathtub to soldiers, and sharing ham, tifying Orwell and his wife as “pro- alists. He ran and survived, but Mer- cheese, caviar, whiskey, and pâté. Hem- nounced Trotskyites.” riman, too, made the mistake of stum- ingway—“a huge, red man, in hairy News of the internecine clash dis- bling into a Nationalist camp in the speckled tweeds,” an Englishwoman illusioned some Lincolns. “I was pre- dark, and was never heard from again. working in the Republic’s press oice pared to be killed fighting to achieve France allowed Soviet arms to be recalled—had been hired by a news- a form of social justice for Spain,” Jason shipped across its border with Spain paper syndicate to write dispatches for Gurney later recalled, “but not to in the spring of 1938, but only for a a thousand dollars apiece, while he achieve a talking point for the Com- few months. Stalin, meanwhile, was gathered material for his fiction. One munist Party.” Morale was already low. losing interest. He began withdraw- day, he took Cowles with him to watch The Soviet-supplied arms were often ing Soviet advisers, many of whom he a battle from a house he had found on balky—some of the rifles dated from took the precaution of shooting when the outskirts of the city, which had an the eighteen-sixties—and the Lincolns he got them home, in case they had excellent view, because its front had were kept in their trenches at Jarama brought back the wrong ideas. The been ripped of by a bomb. War, he so long that they gave them roofs and Lincolns’ final battle was launched in told her, is “the nastiest thing human New York City street names. July, when eighty thousand Republi- beings can do to each other . . . but the When the Lincolns at last left Ja- can troops crossed the Ebro River in most exciting.” rama, in mid-June, their war turned rowboats and on pontoon bridges. The even worse. Half of those who fought attack surprised the enemy but then y The spring of 1937, the revolu- at Brunete, in July, were wounded, cap- crumbled, like many earlier Republi- B tionary spirit was weakening. In tured, or killed. In Aragón, in August, can ofensives, for lack of equipment. Barcelona, Lois Orr noticed that neck- the Lincolns took the town of Quinto, In September, the Republic’s Prime ties were returning, and Orwell heard a small victory that was compromised Minister announced to the League of the revival of such respectful forms of by the shooting of a few Nationalist Nations that Spain was sending home address as Señor and Usted. Barcelona’s prisoners afterward. In early Septem- all its foreign volunteers. It was a peace telephone exchange had been in anar- ber, after a thirteen-day siege, they took gesture. Franco, however, refused to chists’ hands since the civil war broke the town of Belchite, losing more men negotiate. He wanted to be free to out, but on May 3, 1937, the govern- and equipment than it was worth and punish the defeated harshly, as he laid ment raided it. It turned out that a Re- again shooting prisoners. In January, the foundation for his dictatorship, publican cabinet minister who was try- 1938, they were brought in to defend which lasted until his death, in 1975, ing to call Catalonia’s government had the walled mountain town of Teruel, when he was eighty-two. It’s estimated been told by an operator that it didn’t where the temperature sometimes that, in the war’s aftermath, Franco exist—as, according to anarchist prin- dropped as low as −18°. James Neugass had twenty thousand people killed and ciples, it shouldn’t have. wrote in his diary of watching a doc- sent more than four hundred thou- The attack on the telephone ex- tor take a blood “donation” from dead sand to prison. change sparked a civil war within the soldiers and of feeling gratitude if, at civil war, and street fighting spread the end of a day, the stretcher that he he Republic threw a farewell across Barcelona. Orwell, armed with chose to sleep in lay next to corpses, T parade for the Lincolns and other a rifle, spent three days guarding the who would be quiet. In February, the international volunteers in Barcelona, POUM building from a roof across the Lincolns were ordered to leave Teruel, in October, 1938, when the fall of the street, passing the time by reading Pen- which fell a few weeks later. Republic was still five months of. “You guin paperbacks. “There was a ten- In March, Nationalists shattered the can go proudly,” the Communist par- dency to regard the whole afair as a Republican lines in Aragón and pushed liamentary deputy known as La Pa- joke,” he later recalled. “If this was his- east toward the sea, intending to cut sionaria told the soldiers, by way of tory it did not feel like it.” Still, more what remained of the Republic in two. thanking them. “You are history. You than two hundred died, and the anar- It became a rout; the Lincolns retreated are legend.” Her words are still stir- chists stood down. (Hochs child ex- seventy-five miles in six days. In a camp ring, and go some way toward doing plains that they couldn’t have done that Americans had abandoned, a young justice to the nobility of the volunteers’ otherwise without withdrawing troops Englishman serving with the Nation- sacrifice. from the front.) The Communists in- alists picked up a letter that a volun- Was the sacrifice betrayed? To win sisted on making a scapegoat of POUM, teer had received from his Brooklyn a war requires capital and labor— and its leader was tortured and exe- girlfriend: “They are playing the Sev- money to buy guns, tanks, and air- cuted. The Orrs were arrested, and Or- enth Symphony,” she had written. “You planes, and people to shoot, drive, and well almost certainly would have been, know how that music brings us to- fly them. When a war is fought over

80 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 the proper balance between capital and labor, as it was in Spain, a painful par- adox comes into view: the forces of BRIEFLY NOTED wealth are capable of buying relative safety for those they send into battle, Paradise Now, by Chris Jennings (Random House). In this his- and a government rich in little but peo- tory of America’s nineteenth-century utopian communities, ple’s love may have no choice except Jennings examines how they upended conventions of prop- to ask people to die in greater num- erty, family, and gender roles. The villages of the celibate bers. While Spain’s gold should have Shakers became models for social organization, while a col- saved it from such an extremity, its ony of free-love devotees in Oneida, New York, drew scores fellow-democracies, fearing Hitler, of visitors. Other plans were too audacious, or slightly mad: refused to trade weapons for the gold. a group of French Communists were driven from the wilds As a result, the Spanish Civil War, of Texas by ineptitude and dysentery. Although Jennings is which claimed around half a million skeptical and, at times, gently mocking of these radical proj- lives, wasn’t merely a battle between ects, he sees in them a boldness missing from our current capital and labor. It was a battle be- age—what he calls “a sense of actively transforming the world, tween capital munificently abetted by of living on the cusp of an incandescent future.” Fascism, and labor misled by the poi- sonous internal politics of the Soviet The End of Karma, by Somini Sengupta (Norton). When Nar- Union and deserted by its natural al- endra Modi became India’s Prime Minister, he tweeted, “Good lies, the moderate, liberal nations like days are ahead.” This book interrogates that promised fu- France, Great Britain, and the United ture—in a country where the vast majority of the population States. The leaders of the Western de- is under the age of thirty-five—through profiles of seven young mocracies thought they could post- men and women. Sengupta finds that universal schooling, mi- pone a confrontation with Fascism in- gration to cities, and economic liberalization have led to a definitely. Although the volunteers from “psychic shift”: even the unprivileged, who previously often those countries who went to Spain are accepted their lot as a matter of caste-determined karma, be- usually thought of as more idealistic lieve that their destiny is in their own hands. The author mar- than their leaders, perhaps in a way vels at the resulting ambition and ingenuity, while also ob- they were more clear-eyed. serving the power of residual caste and gender prejudices. They fought, in any case, without the protection and support that their The Book of Memory, by Petina Gappah (Farrar, Straus & leaders could have provided. More than Giroux). This début novel is narrated from a Zimbabwean one out of four Lincolns died during prison, where an albino black woman has been sentenced the Spanish Civil War—a fatality rate to death for the murder of the white man she lived with. more than five times as great as that Protesting her innocence to an American journalist, she sufered by surviving Lincolns who tells her story, saying that, while still a child, she was sold went on to fight in the Second World to the man by her parents. The plot has some creaky ele- War. “We are shock troops,” Neugass ments—a duplicitous international art star and an estate heard a wounded American volunteer named Summer Madness play important roles—but Gap- say, with resignation, from a hospital pah creates memorable characters, and illuminates Zimba- bed. “The Republic had to push some bwe’s society and politics in fascinating ways, especially in meat out there in front, and we were her depictions of prison life, and in her retellings of the har- elected.” Not that Spaniards who fought rowing stories that landed the inmates there. for the Republic were spared. In “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Hemingway The Merman, by Carl-Johan Vallgren, translated from the imagined an American volunteer in Swedish by Ellen Flynn (Pegasus). In this enigmatic novel, command of a group of Spanish guer- set in a town on the Swedish coast, a merman transforms rillas and beset with doubt once he the lives of a young brother and sister. The siblings are trou- starts to care for them, and to fall in bled by their criminal father, by his alcoholic wife, and by love with at least one of them. He’s a school bully, whose one-dimensional evilness provides the supposed to send them into battle, de- book’s first inkling of the supernatural. An encounter with spite knowing that many of them will the sea creature, in a friend’s fishing hut, provides distrac- die. “So now he was compelled to use tion and enchantment: “The creature asked questions, ques- these people whom he liked as you tions that went beyond themselves, or were hidden in them- should use troops toward whom you selves, were both questions and answers, as if they were have no feeling at all,” the man reflects. inextricably linked like pearls inside oysters.” The novel is That was the tragedy that America’s much the same, ofering fairy-tale-like scenes of bewilder- volunteers signed up for.  ment and horror.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 81 American avant-garde writers which BOOKS originates with Gertrude Stein and passes through the work of Louis Zukofsky, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, the prose MIND THE GAP writer Lydia Davis, and Waldrop’s hus- band and frequent collaborator, Keith The poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop. Waldrop. Most of them have worked as translators; they track the nanotech of BY DAN CHIASSON language, the little words that bind the big concepts. They’ve grappled with the inexpressible, the untranslatable, the ar- bitrariness of word shapes as they are deployed across blankness. Waldrop writes passionately of the deadfalls that syntax can set. A recent poem, “Inter- lude: Thought Provoking Matter,” sug- gests the almost minatory allure of gram- matical tangles:

Middle English gramarye, grammar, or book-learning, came to mean occult or magi- cal lore, and through one Scottish dialect form has emerged in our present English as “glamor.” Spell cast by women.

From Dickinson to Stein to Susan Howe, American women’s disruptions of syntactical order have been a form of sex- ual power. Waldrop’s feminism, expressed in lacunae and “gaps,” implicitly mocks the need for accuracy and literal expres- sion, here imagined as essentially male. We all know about men and their fixa- tions with measurement: “I put a ruler in my handbag,” Waldrop writes, in “Lawn of Excluded Middle,” “having heard men talk about their sex.” The little “ruler” she totes along with her is the sort you find in a pencil case and the sort you find on a throne. Waldrop’s poems are not for the nerdy- flirty name-tagged poststructuralists at he poet, translator, and pub- the gaps, possibly into more gaps. The the M.L.A. bar. Her poems decant nicely T lisher Rosmarie Waldrop, who phrase makes us think hard about the into theory, but their indeterminacies are turned eighty last year, has condensed way language works, and about how an extension of her temperament, as well her nearly twenty books of verse into a words catalyze reality, rather than tran- as the by-product of a remarkable mar- volume of selected poems, “Gap Gar- scribe it. In nature, nothing can come riage in which each party scrutinizes the dening” (New Directions). The title is from nothing, but in language it hap- other’s language, sometimes as a form of classic Waldrop, a phrase that asserts its pens all the time. flirtation, often as a demonstration of meaning by undoing itself. The “gaps” Waldrop was born in Bavaria in 1935 power. In “Feverish Propositions,” the man between words (“gap” and “gardening,” and came to America in her twenties. has the thermometer, the woman has the for example) are, for Waldrop, the fruit- Her formative years coincided with the fever: he takes her temperature, which, ful regions, the zones of transformation rise of Hitler; her father was an active she says, she “had thought to save for a and possibility. Depending on how we member of the Nazi Party. A distrust of more diicult day.” These old lovers are take the phrase, the “gap” is either the totalizing systems and a deep skepticism still bickering over the meaning of words ground that poets “garden” in or the crop toward language in its institutional forms like “take”: the man accuses the woman that they eventually reap. The action of are the bases of her art. She is an exper- of “stealing” his pencil, as though in re- a poem (its “gardening”) is to transform imentalist by any measure, in a line of venge for his theft of her temperature, then holds his head in his hands, since, In “Gap Gardening,” language is most beautiful when it slips or falters. she informs us, “it could not be contained

82 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY PIERRE MORNET in itself,” and its contents are useless with- But, as she has aged, she is at least as out that pencil to write them down. I don’t often in colloquy with herself, her mem- know a smarter or more moving glimpse ories, the nagging binds of conscience. into the sexual politics of a marriage be- She has inside her the trace of a trau- tween writers, the control of language— matic past that few people living remem- even the language of this poem—yanked ber at first hand; this is no small thing. back and forth between fearsome equals. Language was “a way of getting out of The man’s tantrums and come-ons are all myself,” Waldrop writes, while remain- reported by the woman. He is given the ing “irredeemably between cultures” (her last word. But, in this little parable of mar- native German, the American idiom of ital give-and-take, the last word is very her artistic maturity) and words: the gaps much hers to give. that await gardening. Conflict is a necessary phase of col- In the recent work, grammar blos- laboration. The Waldrops have, for de- soms into extraordinary, jagged memo- cades, operated Burning Deck Press, one ries, as in a lyric sequence, “Split Infinites.” of the most important publishers of ex- The title suggests the grammatical no-no perimental poetry in the history of the that every educated young person takes United States. Until the mid-eighties, pride in avoiding, before she learns that the two of them hand-set text on an old avoiding it at all costs is an embarrass- letterpress, a laborious process that en- ing overcorrection. Infinitives are time- courages caution and thrift. This is hand- less and tenseless, “infinite” until human work, the happy collision of ink and paper. action temporizes and personalizes them. It circumvents the ear and the voice, those They have to be split for us to know ancient conditions of poetry, and makes where, in time, we dwell. On one side, a the material page an end in itself. family in Bavaria, Waldrop’s “first school- Waldrop’s poems aren’t “visual” in the day” and also “a cool day.” The self is sense that paintings are visual, but they founded on these earliest impressions of feel as though they had been applied to order and authority, the sense data un- paper, not simply written down, and they ranked and unprocessed. But the benign reward the kind of scrutiny we give to regime of the classroom is here sup- discrete visual surfaces. In a section from planted by history: “Hölderlin Hybrids”: My irst schoolday, September 19"1, a cool Monet writes a friend he’s painting “the day. Time did not pass, but was conducted to the instant.” Succession stopped at success. A light brain. I was taught. The Nazi salute, the lute. How his palette gives of. And color subdivided into irmly entrenched, the ancient theories. Already into. On the retinal surface. Ground so ine. using paper, pen and ink. Yes, I said, I’m here. In each ray of light. Move motes of dust. I was six or seven dwarfs, the snow was white, the prince at war. Hitler on the radio, followed by Léhar. Senses impinged on. Blackouts, si- The passage is slyly mimetic of the paint- rens, mattress on the loor, furtive visitor or er’s process, his “succession” of brush- ghost. strokes suspended, like the word “suc- cession,” when he reaches “success.” The You can find your own way through halting sentence fragments are like syn- this maze of associations; to straighten aptic flashes as the image passes from them into a narrative is to risk succumb- “palette” to “color,” from color transformed ing to the power they scramble and defy. (“into” this or “into” that) to the eye and But Waldrop, who “was taught,” is first then to the gallery, where, aeons later, and foremost a teacher. What she teaches dust motes intervene. Waldrop is one of is never to discount the little words those poets—Frank O’Hara is another— shimmed between the big concepts. Hit- whose ostensible reverence for painting ler is “on” the radio; senses (sense impres- acts as a covert boast about writing, em- sions, but also meanings) are impinged bedding “the instant” in a feedback loop “on”; a mattress lies “on” the floor. The of composition and response. self at the center of these relations is the What I love about Waldrop are the sum of these relations, relations she did enigmas and paradoxes on every page, not choose. “Sentences enclosing and the belief that language is most beauti- opening out,” Waldrop writes, in “Delta ful when it slips or falters, and the sense Waves.” “Perspective changing endlessly that these linguistic short circuits most around the interloper.” Reader: the in- often happen in urgent verbal exchange. terloper is you. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 83 giving the impression of someone try- POP MUSIC ing to tame the ebb of time. Yancey wres- tled with a tiny fragment of a sample until he had wrung all the soul from it. LIFECHANGER The last track looped a few words about becoming “a better man,” from “When A posthumous release complicates J Dilla’s legacy. I Die,” a 1969 hit by the rock band Moth- erlode. “Donuts” seemed to be Yancey’s BY HUA HSU final stand against an inevitable fate. Yancey also left behind hundreds of hours of unreleased music. For fans, these unheard beats have great impor- tance, giving insight into their hero’s creative process. But for his family and his former collaborators the trove has posed practical questions. There have been contentious battles not only over the material but over the legal rights to use the Dilla name. In the decade since his death, Yancey has become even more renowned. To meet the growing de- mand of fans—and to stanch the flow of bootleggers—there has been a steady stream of posthumous releases, some of which promise little more than deluxe packaging. Portions of Yancey’s record collection were sold on eBay, accompa- nied by certificates of authenticity signed by his mother. Every year, his birthday is marked by “Dilla Day” celebrations around the world, featuring doughnuts. A consensus has formed around Yan- cey’s exalted place in the hip-hop pan- theon, thanks largely to an international fan base that holds him up as a symbol of purity, consciousness, and craft. You can now buy your own version of Deck- starr’s shirt from any number of Dilla- themed Web sites. Within this archive of unreleased music, the holy grail has always been a n December, 2005, the Detroit pro- Düsseldorf. He had been waiting years solo album that Yancey recorded in the I ducer and rapper James Yancey played for the chance to see Yancey live and early two-thousands for the major label a series of shows in Europe. Yancey, who wanted to express his gratitude, so he MCA. This week, his estate will finally went by the names Jay Dee and, in later had a T-shirt made that read “J Dilla release a version of the album, with the years, J Dilla, had been battling a rare Changed My Life.” title “The Diary.” The story of “The blood disease, and was repeatedly forced The Düsseldorf show was one of Diary” is a microcosm of Yancey’s en- to postpone the tour. He had lost an un- Yancey’s final performances. The follow- tire career, and a metaphor for his un- settling amount of weight, and fans on ing February, on his thirty-second birth- usual sense of timing. Born in Detroit message boards described him as look- day, he released “Donuts,” a patchwork in 1974, Yancey grew up in a family of ing emaciated and weak, requiring as- of short, bewitching instrumental sketches musicians and record collectors. He ap- sistance to move about, and rapping built on familiar soul samples. Three days prenticed with Joseph (Amp) Fiddler, a while seated in a wheelchair. Some later, he died, of cardiac arrest. The co- legendary local funk musician who in- commenters questioned the wisdom of incidence cast a spooky aura over “Do- spired him to master the art of sampling. his playing the shows at all. A German nuts,” which was reinforced by the al- While Yancey was influenced by the re- d.j. called Deckstarr read these threads bum’s restless, desperate energy. Songs sounding symmetry of nineteen-nine- as he prepared to open for Yancey in changed speeds for no apparent reason, ties East Coast hip-hop, everything he produced sounded a little of. He Among J Dilla’s unreleased music, “The Diary” has always been the holy grail. would chop up a sturdy bass line until

84 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY WESLEY ALLSBROOK it became gummy and woozy; his snares West’s early work. (West, who once lik- and kick drums came in a fraction of a ened Yancey’s death to that of Steve Jobs, second later than you expected. But actually contributed to an early version rhythm could be found elsewhere: the of “The Diary.”) The best moment is on speckle and dust of old vinyl, a hypnot- “Fuck the Police,” as Yancey, fed up with ically looped doo-wop refrain, even an being stopped and frisked, sprints across occasional hit of silence. It’s a tipsy style a martial drumbeat, drawing a sense of that demanded a willingness, on the part desperate rebellion out of a seesawing of the rappers he worked with, to sound early-seventies violin sample. slightly ofbeat themselves. Overseen and, in the case of some Yancey’s minimalist approach was songs, completed by Yancey’s family and initially divisive. But in the mid-nine- the revived Pay Jay label, “The Diary” ties, at the behest of Fiddler, the m.c. adds texture to the musician’s sensibil- Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest, be- ity. Yancey has long been celebrated as came a mentor to Yancey. It felt like an a symbol of bygone values—as a purist anointment, not just of Yancey but of victim of hip-hop’s drift toward crass his group, Slum Village. Fellow-pro- materialism. But the ethical division be- ducers found his style invigorating, but tween a valiant underground and the his influence on such beloved groups as bad, old mainstream was always exag- Tribe and the Pharcyde confused many gerated, and “The Diary” depicts a man of their longtime fans. In the late nine- who was as comfortable fantasizing ties, a Yancey beat was like a litmus test: about strippers and ice as he was losing you either got it or you wondered where himself in his basement full of old rec- the rest of it was. After leaving Slum ords. Put another way: Yancey heard the Village, Yancey eventually built a suc- world diferently. cessful career as a freelance producer, MCA eventually released him from making tracks and remixes for artists his contract, and Yancey moved to Los like Janet Jackson, Busta Rhymes, and Angeles. Despite spending a significant Daft Punk. He also became a central portion of his final years in the hospi- figure in the earthy late-nineties scene tal, undergoing treatment for kidney known as the Soulquarians, which re- failure, he never stopped working. He volved around the Roots, D’Angelo, set up a sampler next to his hospital Common, and Erykah Badu. bed and dispatched his mother to buy records for him at a nearby store. Friends t’s not hard to imagine why MCA who were on his European tour say that I shelved “The Diary.” Known for his Yancey was so weak that he received production work with artists who seemed dialysis between gigs. Otherwise, he earnest and socially conscious, Yancey was in his hotel room, making beats. had made an album that featured his Maybe the quality we admire most brash, fantastical raps over other people’s in Yancey is his single-mindedness, his beats. “Born and raised in the D and absorption in making music. We want hold big fuckin’ warrior balls,” he boasts to believe that if we were facing immi- on “The Introduction,” lagging a hair nent death we, too, could disappear into behind the producer House Shoes’ sin- the grooves of a record. That’s what I’d ister synth pattern. Throughout the rec- like to think those T-shirts mean, and ord, Yancey seems bent on defying ex- why the longest part of Yancey’s Wiki- pectations. “Trucks” ranks among rap’s pedia page is the list of posthumous great songs about aggressively showy tributes, which range from Drake to a cars, while on “The Shining Pt. 2” he sixty-piece orchestra. We want to un- rifs of an old N.W.A. lyric, rapping, derstand what Yancey heard. Anyone “It’s plain to see / You can’t change who’s bashed away at a sampler trying me / Cause I’mma be this nigga with ice.” to make a beat knows that it’s fairly Compared with the understated elegance easy to find a fragment that might sound of his work with the Soulquarians, the good as a continuous loop. But hear- beats on “The Diary” are grimy and ad- ing the possibilities in mere haze and venturous, from the funk thrash of “Drive static? Hearing a future when you don’t Me Wild” to the spacey wobble of “Gang- have one yourself? For Yancey, every sta Boogie.” The speeded-up vocal sam- song was an anagram, old words wait- ple of “So Far” seems to anticipate Kanye ing to be rewritten into new myths. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 85 ing his feelings sideways into brute THE CURRENT CINEMA force. The loss is all the harder to define because, as he now admits, he never really knew his wife that well. Need- THE BEREAVED less to say, if you want someone to show these crunchings and compressions of “Demolition” and “Louder Than Bombs.” the spirit, Gyllenhaal is your man, not least because the body that houses them BY ANTHONY LANE is in such rosy fettle. So clean-cut does he seem as an actor, with that steady jaw and the disconcerting directness of his gaze, that when anything truly messy or emotionally dishevelled comes along we know for sure that battle will be joined. This all-American fellow, schooled in resolve, keeps fighting the enemy within. It happened in “Night- crawler,” in 2014, when his character’s unfeedable craving for success left him looking like a famine victim, and it happens again in “Demolition,” as his cheeks darken with stubble and his eyes shine with the voracity of the mad. Davis reaches out from his bereave- ment, though not for sex. When he does meet someone new, his desire is not to sleep with her but to register a com- plaint. Nettled by his inability to buy Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man struggling with grief in Jean-Marc Vallée’s movie. M&M’s at the hospital, on the day his wife dies, he enters into correspondence here is a fine moment in “Dem- his colleagues, who, like most of us, with the vending-machine company, T olition,” when Davis Mitchell (Jake are unskilled in the art of consolation, treating it the way a sinner treats the Gyllenhaal) begins to weep. He stands speak in low and halting tones, star- confessional. A woman named Karen in front of a mirror, black-suited, and ing at Davis as if he were somehow (Naomi Watts), from customer service, his features crumple and crack. We un- disfigured. When he returns, alone, to calls him back at two in the morning. derstand why: not long ago, we saw his well- ap pointed house in the sub- Soon, they are circling and stalking each him lose his wife, Julia (Heather Lind), urbs, he resembles any other tired com- other, in a trance of neediness. Davis in a car crash. Now he’s at a gathering muter coming home. finds himself slipping into her life as if after the funeral, and mourners are Yet something is awry. In Davis’s through a side door and befriending her murmuring in the next room. Just as mind, the wrongness lies deep in the teen-age son, Chris ( Judah Lewis), who our hearts go out to Davis, however, he machinery of the world, which cries has troubles of his own. The two males stops. The cracks are instantly mended, out to be fixed. There’s a leak in the bond as only males can, by smashing his face goes blank, and we realize that fridge, and he pulls the whole unit to stuf. They also go into a forest, where he is practicing—trying out tears, as if the floor. One of the toilet doors at Davis wants to test a bulletproof vest. they were not coming as they should. work has a squeak, so he takes the stall Chris is in charge of the gun. Our hearts pull back, and we wonder apart and lays it out, piece by piece, in All this is fairly weird. But is it weird what sort of person he might be. Is he the men’s room. The computer on his enough? The movie was written by an ice man, a con man, or a creep? Or, desk sufers a similar doom. And so to Bryan Sipe and directed by Jean-Marc to be fair, could the poor guy still be the rest of his house, with Davis swing- Vallée, a filmmaker of considerable in shock? ing a sledgehammer and then, frus- cunning, who takes predicaments that Davis works in Manhattan, at an trated by such modest damage, upgrad- should by rights deflate the heart— investment bank that handles six bil- ing to a bulldozer. (“You can buy almost an H.I.V. diagnosis in “Dallas Buyers lion dollars. (“I never thought I’d be anything on eBay.”) Devastation brings Club” (2013), a psychological debacle one of those people who carried a a savage joy. in “Wild” (2014)—and turns them briefcase.”) He and Julia had no chil- We get what’s going on, partly be- into nimble entertainments. What he dren, and the rhythm of his existence, cause Davis explains it. In a voice-over, has created in “Demolition” is the in the wake of her death, barely skips he says that “everything has become a ultimate proof of that knack: an up- a beat. He soon heads back to the metaphor.” Thanks for that. He is in beat film about grief. It’s not a black oice as though nothing has occurred; denial, blocking out his loss and shunt- comedy, for Vallée prefers to paint his

86 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY dramas in brighter hues. Davis bops Whereas the hero of Nanni Moretti’s and engage in conversation the air is along the sunlit avenues of New York, “The Son’s Room” (2001) went to a more fouled than cleared. “Am I really in headphones and shades, as if star- shuddering funfair on the night of his that diicult to talk to?” Conrad asks. ring in his own private musical. There’s child’s death, as if to beat himself up Nothing is sadder than his dislocation also a great conversation in a hard- or to stun himself back into conscious- from his father, who loves him dearly; ware store between Davis and Chris, ness, the carrousels in Vallée’s movie like many kids, Conrad cleaves to his who is mildly concerned that he might are nothing but vessels of delight, and bedroom, playing turbulent computer be gay. Thanks to the frisky telling of we are even obliged to watch Phil, of games, and so a desperate Gene con- the tale, nothing is harped upon or all people, swaying along on a tootling structs his own avatar, in the hope of mooned over, and the one person who merry-go-round. He wears a terrible meeting his son in the virtual world. breaks that rule—Julia’s father, Phil fixed grin, like a sufering soul who (When he finally does, Conrad fells (Chris Cooper), a founding partner at would rather not join in the revels, and him with a single blow.) True and the firm that employs Davis—appears you can hardly blame him. “Demoli- trustable selves, it would seem, are ever to be moving slowly, in a slough of tion” is right to suggest that lives can scarcer in a multi-platform age. Con- lamentation, through a diferent movie fall apart at a traumatizing speed. But rad writes an account of his fraught feel- altogether. His highlight is a red-eyed are they so easily restored? ings and gives it to a girl at school, who diatribe against the meagre status of asks him, in all innocence, “Did you, his sorrow: “Man loses his wife, he’s y a grim coincidence, “Louder like, find it online or something?” a widower. Child loses a parent, he’s B Than Bombs,” like “Demolition,” “Louder Than Bombs” is a smaller an orphan. But losing a child: there’s shows a wife being killed in a car crash. film than “Demolition,” and twice as no word for that.” Let us pray that this does not herald a woebegone, though the shrewdness of For the most part, “Demolition” is trend. The victim is Isabelle Joubert the editing, snipping of scenes in their unpersuaded by such agony. There is Reed (Isabelle Huppert), a well-known prime, fends of any hint of a slump. much to savor here, especially the un- war photographer, and an awful un- Some details I didn’t quite believe: Jonah, forced performance of Judah Lewis— certainty hangs over her death. Her a new father, not only fails to mention one more recruit to the terrific roster younger son, Conrad (Devin Druid), the fact to an old flame but hardly spares of younger actors who are streaming as we learn from his startling day- the baby—or his wife, Amy (Megan into the movies. Yet the film lacks the dreams, believes that she fell asleep at Ketch)—a passing thought, so coiled courage of its aliction. When, in Mi- the wheel, but his older brother, Jonah is he in his own stress. But Byrne, who chael Haneke’s “The Seventh Conti- ( Jesse Eisenberg), and her husband, has lacked good movie roles of late, is nent” (1989), a father led his family Gene (Gabriel Byrne), know better, or marvellously grave, and parents every- in the Davis-like destruction of their worse. The reality, which her colleague where will smile at Gene’s proclivity— home, you knew that there could be Richard Weissman (David Strathairn) dumb but forgivable—for spying on his only one conclusion. Davis, on the intends to reveal in the Times, on the son, in public, as if checking up on his other hand, is gradually diverted from occasion of a retrospective of her work, happiness. “I’m kind of busy right now,” his boorish task. At a certain point—I is that Isabelle willed her own demise. Conrad says, when he takes a phone would nominate the scene in which he The movie—the first English- call. But he isn’t. He is sitting alone on comes upon a disused fairground, in language feature from the Norwegian a bench and, one imagines, musing on need of repair—it becomes clear that director Joachim Trier—makes far less the mother that he lost.  the film is one long act of therapy, and noise than its title. Most of the char- that, more galling still, it is heading acters are immured in their own dis- NEWYORKER.COM remorselessly toward a happy ending. quiet, and even when they break out Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2016 87 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three inalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by P. C. Vey, must be received by Sunday, April 17th. The inalists in the April 4th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the inalists in this week’s contest, in the May 2nd issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“I told my ex I’ll take her back if she drops some weight.” Tyler Stradling, Mesa, Ariz.

“Duck? No, I ordered roast beef.” “Head for the carrousel! It’s our only chance!” John Dasto, Wilmette, Ill. Norm Tabler, Indianapolis, Ind.

“Could you explain the ‘act of God’ clause again?” Jake Yocham, Irvine, Calif.