Spring Literary Review 2017

THE JESUIT REVIEW OF FAITH AND CULTURE SPRING 2017 SPRING $6.00

LITERARY Raymond A. Schroth on James Baldwin REVIEW p8 John Matteson on the 2017 Wreckage of World War I p20

Tips for young readers from Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill

p62 2 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG ’

Welcome to America’s biannual literary review

Reading has always been at the heart to our fellow readers. Reading allows retreat or travel to another country of Jesuit education. In the 1940s, En- readers to adopt a sensitivity they can and close the door to be alone with a glish courses at Jesuit high schools apply to other relationships, even to given work. Yet inevitably, authors were built around a four-volume se- mankind at large. like Henry David Thoreau, James ries, “Prose and Poetry,” which in- In this first issue of the Literary Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Joan Didion, Ag- cluded Prose and Poetry for Apprecia- Review, we contemplate the 100th atha Christie, Tom Wolfe and Richard tion, by Elizabeth Ansorge, and Prose anniversary of the entry of the United Ford will pop up in the room and want and Poetry for Enjoyment, by Julian States into World War II. We also re- to talk. L. Maline. Courses featured different member James Baldwin and admire They remind us that reading has categories each year, focusing on En- the documentary film “I Am Not Your always had a social dimension. Until glish and American literature. They Negro,” based on an unfinished text television intruded, friends, husbands included novels, short stories, poems by Baldwin. We recall James Joyce’s and wives would read to one anoth- and Shakespearean plays, includ- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man er, and even today a major role for a ing “The Merchant of Venice” and and the author’s relationship with the parent is sitting down with a pre-kin- “Julius Caesar.” In the 1960s, when Jesuits. We interview Michael Wilson, dergarten child, reading aloud and I was teaching high school, other a popular columnist for The New York further knitting the bonds of love be- standards were All Quiet on the West- Times, who discovers and interprets tween the parent and the wide-eyed ern Front, The Catcher in the Rye, A crimes that challenge our imagination. son or daughter. In college or in a Separate Peace, Dubliners, Mr. Blue Karen Sue Smith’s analysis of the parish book club, where idea-hungry and A Canticle for Leibowitz. When I paintings of Bosch and Brueghel tells students or neighbors gather, John was dean of Holy Cross college in the the story of how Western art in the Hersey’s presence will inevitably dis- early 1980s, we compiled “The Holy 16th century progressed from topics turb. The class or club has read Hiro- Cross 100 Books,” 120 pages of re- of history and religion to spectacular shima and knows the author visited flections on works recommended by depictions of everyday life. Monsi- the scene of the bombing before he members of the faculty. My favorites gnor George Deas’s review of a new wrote the book. They have all read it were Walden and The Autobiography biography of Martin Luther allows us and perhaps have written a one-page of Malcolm X. to see Luther as a great man, though comment, talked about it before gath- Why read? Because books em- not a saint. ering and asked whether it describes a body a civilization, help us to mature Other reviews deal with President “victory,” a “tragedy” or a “war crime.” and give us power. We can nourish the Obama, Cervantes and the history of Through reading, audiences are trans- spirit that opens us to the presence of Fordham University. formed into a community, and maybe the Creator. Above all they allow us to Reading is often described as a even one in which we ask, “What shall share the intimate lives of our fellow private act, although you can still find we do?” men and women. The word is empa- people in the subway reading physical thy. We can feel what a novel’s char- books or e-readers. We may use read- Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is America’s acters are feeling and, in turn, relate ing as an escape and move to a beach books editor.

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 3 THE ISSUE LITERARY NEWS FEATURES REVISITED

6 8 18 Sherlock Holmes returns, again; THE RETURN OF JOYCE AND HIS JESUITS revolutionary literature; Harvey Cox JAMES BALDWIN The Irish modernist had a Thirty years after his death, the sharp complicated history with the critic of America’s racial legacy is priests who taught him. POEMS more important than ever. Ray Cavanaugh Raymond A. Schroth 7 Lear: Act 3, Scene 2 Louis J. Masson 14 BOOKINGS REPORTING NEW YORK CITY, 20 37 Knights of Columbus ONE CRIME AT A TIME Theresa Burns Michael Wilson looks for stories The Vanquished; The World Remade; others may have missed. Bosch & Bruegel; A Consequential 50 Lourdes, 1955 Teresa Donnellan President; Books on the Bible; Steven DeLaney Continental Ambitions; Fordham

4 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG President and Editor in Chief Matt Malone, S.J. Executive Editors Maurice Timothy Reidy Sam Sawyer, S.J. Kerry Weber Jeremy Zipple, S.J. Editor at Large James Martin, S.J. Production Editor Robert C. Collins, S.J. Senior Editors Kevin Clarke Edward W. Schmidt, S.J. Books Editor Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. Poetry Editor Joseph Hoover, S.J. Vatican Correspondent Gerard O’Connell National Correspondent Michael O’Loughlin Associate Editors José Dueño, S.J. Ashley McKinless Olga Segura Robert David Sullivan Eric Sundrup, S.J. Assistant Editors Zachary Davis, Joseph McAuley Producer Eloise Blondiau Creative Director Shawn Tripoli Art Director Sonja Kodiak Wilder Contributing Writers Elizabeth Bruenig Brendan Busse, S.J. Nichole M. Flores Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu Jim McDermott, S.J. Kaya Oakes Nathan Schneider Stephanie Slade Eve Tushnet Contributing Editors Ellen Boegel Patrick Gilger, S.J. Adam Hincks, S.J. Leah Libresco Notre Dame School in De Pere, Wis., Maryann Cusimano Love observed National Library Week in April Paul McNelis, S.J. 2016 by letting students dress up as Regional Correspondents Dean Dettloff (Toronto) Anthony Egan, S.J. (Johannesburg) their favorite book characters. Jan-Albert Hootsen (Mexico City) (CNS photo/Sam Lucero, The Compass) Jim McDermott, S.J. (Los Angeles) Cover: iStockphoto.com/America Timothy Padgett (Miami) Russell Pollitt, S.J. (Johannesburg) David Stewart, S.J. (London) THE ISSUE Rhona Tarrant (Dublin) BOOKS IN REVIEW Judith Valente (Chicago) Verna Yu (Hong Kong) Special Contributors Jake Martin, S.J., Sean Salai, S.J. 44 Editor, The Jesuit Post Daniel Dixon, S.J. Martin Luther; Moscow Nights; The Moderator, Catholic Book Club Kevin Spinale, S.J. O’Hare Fellows Teresa Donnellan Man Who Invented Fiction; Signals; Nicholas Genovese Judas; Lincoln in the Bardo Wyatt Massey Executive V.P. & C.O.O. Ted Nadeau V.P. for Finance and Operations Rosa M. Del Saz V.P. for Advancement Daniel Pawlus LAST WORD Director of Advertising Services Kenneth Arko Director of Special Projects Chris Keller 62 Special Assistant to the President and Editor in Chief Nicholas D. Sawicki ELIZABETH KIRKLAND CAHILL Office Operations Manager Ryan Richardson Editorial Email [email protected] Editorial [email protected] Reprints 1.800.627.9533 Copies Subscriptions and Additional 212.515.0126 [email protected] Advertising How to raise animated, curious and Business Operations Staff Anastasia Buraminskaya, Glenda Castro, engaged readers Ellany Kincross Chairman of the Board William R. Kunkel

APRIL 17, 2017 VOL. 216 NO. 9 WHOLE NO 5160 LITERARY NEWS

More things to read and watch and learn

Sherlock Holmes is back—again. “There are more refugees in the We know from reading “The Fi- world today than at any time nal Problem” (1893) that Holmes since the Second World War, fled to Switzerland following re- and depending on where you ports that Professor Moriarty’s get your news and opinion, this accomplices were determined is either a humanitarian call to to kill him. But the evil profes- arms or a free-floating threat to sor tracked him down at the the political order. Into the lat- spectacular Reichenbach Falls, ter camp fall a growing number which Watson had described of European politicians and as a “fearful place. The torrent, a certain American president swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous who is either unwilling or unable to consider why a person abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a might leave one’s country for reasons unrelated to crimi- burning house.” There Holmes and Moriarty fought till both nality.” She quotes Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: plunged into the falls. But Arthur Conan Doyle had to res- “Refugees are being cast as both victims and villains, liable to urrect Holmes because he needed the money. Now Holmes steal jobs and live off welfare, if not worse. Having given up has been revived by Life magazine in an issue devoted to the their former lives, it is argued, they have nothing left to lose.” Holmes phenomenon, with beautiful photographs and in- The T.L.S. scores again in its special anniversary issue depth analysis. Now read the stories. (2/17) focused on the Russian Revolution of 1917, including The Atlantic for March features a review by James a review of three books about the revolution, a biography of Parker of the new biography of Dorothy Day by her grand- Rasputin and a biography of the last czar, Nicholas II, with daughter, Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will the title Saint and Sinner. A most informative essay, “Writ- Be Saved by Beauty. The reviewer enjoys a scene where ing in the Heat of Crisis,” by Caryl Emerson, reviews 1917, young Dorothy, a cub reporter in a Greenwich Village a compilation of prose and poetry written at the time of the pub, “cool-mannered, tweed-wearing, drinks rye whiskey revolution. She says of the editor, “Boris Dralyuk attempts straight with no discernible effect.” She’s with her buddy a bold thing: to confirm us within the belly of the beast...all Eugene O’Neill in a bar called the Hell Hole. O’Neill, with a the while challenging the received notion that the Russian “bitter mouth,” recites Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Revolution produced little literary art of lasting value in its Heaven”: “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days.” early years.” In one entry, “The Guillotine” (1918), by the In response, Dorothy sings “Frankie and Johnny.” humorist who went by the psuedonym Teffi, a grimly hu- In The Christian Century (2/15), Philip Jenkins de- morous scene shows the upper class out of touch with real- fends the film “Silence” against those who argue that for all ity. A woman drops in on a friend and says: “I only popped their heroism and sacrifice, missionaries like the Jesuits in in to say goodbye. I’m due to be guillotined tomorrow.” Her the film pursued a nearly impossible goal in attempting to friend replies: “What a wonderful coincidence! We’re all introduce a European religion into profoundly Asian cul- scheduled for tomorrow…. We can all go together.” tures. As Kipling said, “East is East and West is West, and Any religious person who lived through the contro- never the twain shall meet.” The Jesuits, Jenkins writes, versies of the 1960s will have read or at least heard about were an exception. They were “phenomenal linguists, and Harvey Cox’s classic, The Secular City. It sold nearly a mil- those skills made them valuable to courts and governments lion copies, put the word secular in a positive light and crit- around the world,” and “at many points, Jesuit influence is icized the restraints of organized religion, encouraging the essential to understanding the history of Asian societies.” faithful to find holiness in the world outside the church. The In The London Times Literary Supplement for March, Nation (1/30) has given four pages to a review of Cox’s two Jessica Loudis reviews together three recent novels on mi- new books, The Market as God and A Harvey Cox Reader. gration, including Viet Thanh Nguyn’s The Refugees, which The reviewer, Elizabeth Bruenig (a contributing writer for America reviewed earlier this year (2/20). She begins: America), calls our attention to the disappearance of Amer-

6 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG ican Christian public intellectu- LEAR: ACT 3, SCENE 2 als. Over the past half-century, she By Louis J. Masson writes, many strains of Christiani- ty have seen a “privatization of re- Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! ligious experience and discourse.” rage blow! Finally, The New York Re- But outside the gentle snow view of Books, in two recent is- fell upon the quad softly sues, takes up subjects also cov- while the radiators clanged us ered in this edition of America’s now and then from our stupor, Spring Literary Review: “Under and still we hardly heard the Spell of James Baldwin” by the old Jesuit reciting from memory, Darryl Pinckney (3/23), which is a review of the documen- Here I stand your slave, tary film “I Am Not Your Negro”; and “Betrayal in Jeru- a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man. salem” by Avishai Margalit , which is a very long review of We slouched almost cruelly indifferent Judas, by Amos Oz. to the kingdoms he bestowed, Pinckney reminds us that Baldwin had disappeared slaves ourselves to our youth from the political-intellectual limelight and that the reviv- and the ever quiet snowfall al of interest in him has been “astonishing.” He is partic- though he raged on, ularly struck by scenes depicting “ordinary white people such bursts of horrid thunder, and their violent resistance to integration in the 1950s jerking up the chalk dusted arms and 1960s. In the course of the film, we see howling young of his worn soutane. white males, some mere boys, carrying signs painted with At that moment, he was swastikas and tracking demonstrators…. The violence has a priest more in word than matter. not been choreographed. It is sudden and raw. The hatred Only a moment though. of black people is out there.” A horrid thunder, then lightning Margalit, like the author Amos Oz, occasionally uses danced obscenely in the gentle snow, the character Judas as a springboard for reflections on something we had never seen, today’s conflicts in Israel. The central character inJudas as if the heavens had been listening in. is Shmuel Ash, who is the novel’s link between 1959, the We were awake, year he enters Jerusalem, and the story of Jesus from the but the old Jesuit closed the scene, first century. This is a novel of ideas that turns on three whispering the last lines as he left the room, people: Ben-Gurion, Judas and Jesus. Hence the themes of leaving us forever the founding of the state of Israel, the idea of betrayal and with Lear and his fool Judaism’s refusal to deal seriously with the challenge of while the storm still raged. Christianity. One of the characters considers the challenge of Christianity to Judaism is in Christianity’s promise of Louis J. Masson, distinguished professor emeritus universal love. It is suggested that he speaks for Oz, who of literature at the University of Portland, is the author of the essay collections Reflections, The Play senses that many Jews resist the very possibility. Christians of Light and Across the Quad. might ask themselves to what extent they believe in the all- encompassing love that Jesus lived and taught.

Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is America’s books editor.

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 7 A discerning critic of the American project has become a prophet for our time. THE RETURN OF JAMES BALDWIN By Raymond A. Schroth

8 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG In the defiant title of the brilliant new documentary “I Am boys stomping a black boy on the sidewalk. At 17, returning Not Your Negro,” James Baldwin, one of great voices in the by bus from a railroad construction job in Alaska, I made a racial debates of the 1960s, is back. But what have the na- stop in New Orleans, where I saw my first “whites only” sign tion’s black and white populations learned since his death on a water fountain. When a white man saw the only emp- in France in 1987, or since the explosive ’60s when Martin ty seat on the bus was next to a black person, he yelled, “I Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were shot dead in public ain’t sittin’ next to no n-----.” Neither my Jesuit prep school because they dared to say what they believed? Will we ever in Philadelphia nor Fordham University in the Bronx had live together and love one another? black studen+ts. My U.S. Army battalion stationed in Ger- On Sunday Feb. 19, 2017, police caught up with Ser- many had one black officer and few black troops. gio Reyes, 18, who, waving a toy pistol, had swiped two Nevertheless, my most profound intellectual and six-packs of beer and headed down the street until police emotional experience—which affected me as a Jesuit, confronted him. Since he was still holding the fake gun, teacher and writer—was my introduction to James Bald- the cops opened fire and shot him 14 times. More than win. I say I met, not just read, him because he presents 250 black people were killed by police in 2016. In 37 cities, himself so frankly, so fearlessly, that the reader feels that black residents are over-represented in homeless shelters. you and he are on your third beer, and now he will listen Twenty-three percent of black families live in poverty. Only to you. That impact is even more pronounced in his un- 42 percent of those who go to college graduate. finished novel, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which Baldwin On the other hand, in 2013 there were over 130,000 wrote just before he died. In a summer course, the Jesuit marriages between white men and black women and theologian Jim Connor suggested I pick an up-and-com- nearly 320,000 between white women and black men. ing writer, read everything he had written, write an essay African-Americans are more prominent in television and on the author and publish it. My article, “James Baldwin’s film; the 2017 Academy Awards were the most diverse in Search,” was published in The Catholic World in 1964. Af- history and set a record for the number of Oscars going to ter the project, I was a different person. I had always been black stars. How radical these changes appear, however, sympathetic to black people, but I had no concept of their depends on which generation is confronting and answer- pain—suffering for which, simply because of my color, I ing these questions. shared responsibility. The first black man I met, when I was 3, was Step Lip- I distinctly remember standing in a subway car looking scomb, the man in charge of the horse stables at the 112th around at all the black faces with a growing conviction that Field Artillery base outside Trenton, N.J. My father, then I should go up to at least one man or women and apologize a retired captain in the National Guard, took the family for what my race had done to theirs. there for polo matches and horseback riding. Our parents In the mid-to-late 1960s, Thurston N. Davis, S.J., the were so determined that we would respect and love our editor in chief of America who had earlier been my dean black neighbors that they introduced us to a black Catho- at Fordham, brought me on as a summer editor and col- lic parish and bought a statue of Blessed Martin de Porres umnist; I wrote about race. In 1967 I was in Chicago to for our house so we could pray to a black saint. They wel- report on Jesuit community organizers working with Saul comed Step and his family into our home and taught us Alinsky and flew to Detroit to witness the race riot there. I there were two words we must never use, the n-word and had seen Watts, Newark and Rochester in the aftermaths “fool.” Years later, Step confided in me that when we first of their purgatories and was weighed down by the growing shook hands, I had examined my hand to see if his color hostility. Led by a local priest into a hard-hit neighborhood, had rubbed off on me. we were suddenly shaken as three more police cars, sirens As I grew older, my racial education included harsh screaming, roared into the intersection. Brakes screeched awakenings. Trenton’s Lincoln Theater still confined black and troopers leaped out, all armed with rifles aimed direct- viewers to the balcony. After a basketball game between ly at us. They ordered black men to “Go home.” The men Trenton Catholic and Trenton High, a mob drifted into replied, “This is my home.” One middle-aged black man

Photo from “I Am Not Your Negro,” courtesy of Magnolia Pictures/All rights reserved. rights Pictures/All of Magnolia courtesy Negro,” “I Am Not Your from Photo downtown and exploded in a riot. I recall a group of white didn’t move fast enough. “Move,” the troopers shouted as

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 9 three of them beat him to the ground and gashed open his could have been murdered, and he had almost committed a head with a rifle butt and another hit him in the kidney. murder. He finally realized that “my real life was in danger, “Sorry about that bad language I used, Father,” the trooper and not from anything other people might do but from the said to my friend. “Forget the language,” my priest friend hatred I carried in my own heart.” snapped back. “There was no need for that. That man was After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School my parishioner.” in 1942, Baldwin worked at odd jobs until 1945, when he Today, with the 30th anniversary of his death at 63 of received a series of foundation grants that financed his cancer of the esophagus in St. Paul de Vence in southern writings for most of his career. In 1948 he moved to Eu- France in 1987, James Baldwin’s influence has returned rope and lived in Paris with other black writers, including just when we need him. Richard Wright, author of Native Son, who told interview- A good place to start reading Baldwin’s essays is “Notes ers in 1946 that he “felt more freedom in one square block of a Native Son,” which opens with: of Paris than there is the entire United States of America.” He also followed the advice of Ralph Ellison, author of In- On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On visible Man, to write about white people, which he did in the same day, a few hours later, his last child was Giovanni’s Room, his novel about homosexuality. born. Over a month before this, while all our ener- In 1958 Baldwin returned to the United States, met gies were concentrated in waiting for these events, with various political leaders, including Robert F. Kennedy, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest and then traveled widely, giving lectures and writing about race riots in the century. A few hours after my fa- civil rights. He mingled with the likes of Malcolm X, Elijah ther’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertak- Muhammad and Martin Luther King Jr. and published a er’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the string of articles and stories, most notably, Nobody Knows morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963) and Another to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed Country (1962), in addition to plays, poems and film criti- plate glass. cism. In 1966 America reviewed the short story collection Going to Meet the Man (1/15/66): The oldest of nine children, Baldwin had not known his father well; he had hardly ever spoken with him. In When James Baldwin first poked his black, accusing fact, James did not know for many years that this man was finger into the white Northern soul, he left a reader not his real father. His children were never glad to see him shattered…. Our culture was used to Negroes who come home. “The weight of white people in his world” had could sing, hit home runs and wield political power. Stapleton Reuters/Shannon Photo: caused the bitterness that had killed his father, and James Baldwin, however, was the first Negro artist to turn feared it might kill him, too. the language of Shakespeare and the Old Testament The year before his father’s death, James had been prophets into a psychological-literary weapon in living in New Jersey, working in defense plants, where he the racial conflict. learned that one is judged simply by the color of his skin. Told that he would not be served a hamburger and cof- In the essay “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin de- fee for that reason, he was all the more determined to be scribed the experience of visiting a small Swiss Catholic served. One night at a diner in Trenton, he placed his order, town where villagers had never seen a black person before. only to get “We don’t serve Negroes here” in response. He If he sat alone in the sun a villager might come and “ginger- wandered in a daze to a more fashionable restaurant. When ly put his fingers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an the waitress approached, he “hated her for her white skin electric shock, or put his hand on my hand, astonished that and frightened eyes.” She repeated, “Don’t serve Negroes the color did not rub off.” There was no suggestion of un- here.” Baldwin picked up a water pitcher and hurled it at kindness, “there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I her with all his strength. It missed and shattered against was simply a living wonder.” Inevitably, his rhetoric moves the mirror behind the bar. Then he ran into the night. He to generalizations about the races:

10 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG The recent documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” centered on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, draws parallels between the civil rights movement of the

Photo: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton Reuters/Shannon Photo: 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement.

At the root of the American Negro problem is of the scandals in its history, his friendship with Malcolm X the necessity of the American white man to find and his rejection of Elijah Muhammad, who preached that a way of living with the Negro in order to be able the white man is the devil and must be totally destroyed. to live with himself. And the history of this prob- If we wish to sum up James Baldwin’s philosophy in lem can be reduced to the means used by Ameri- one word, it would be “unity.” He ends, “If we—and now cans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal ac- I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively ceptance, terrorization and concession—either to conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, come to terms with this necessity or to find a way the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial both these things at once. nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” The long and demanding essay “Down at the Cross” takes us through Baldwin’s two years as a teenage preach- er, his gradual alienation from organized religion because Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is America’s books editor.

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 11 Prose that dazzles and burns Photo: Getty Images/Bettmann Getty Photo:

Notes of a Native Son Down at the Cross She began to cry the moment we entered the room and Some fled on wine or whiskey or the needle and are still on saw him lying there, all shriveled and still, like a little black it. And others, like me, fled into the church. For the wages monkey. The great gleaming apparatus which fed him and of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and would have compelled him to be still even if he had been urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, able to move brought to mind not benevolence, but torture; in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, the tubes entering his arm made me think of pictures I had in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this seen when a child of Gulliver, tied down by the pygmies on danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and that island. My aunt wept and wept, there was a whistling in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, sud- sound in my father’s throat; nothing was said; he could not denly gone mad, the children parceled out here and there; speak. I wanted to take his hand, to say something. But I do an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by not know what I could have said, even if he could have heard a slow agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone’s me. He was not really in that room with us, he had at last bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another really embarked on his journey, and although my aunt told turned robber and carried off to jail. It was a summer of me that he said he was going to meet Jesus, I did not hear dreadful speculations and discoveries, of which these were anything except that whistling in his throat. not the worst.

From: James Baldwin, Collected Essays Edited by Toni Morrison The Library of America, 869p $35

“Crime Scene,” Michael Wilson’s column for The New York Times, recently ended.

MEET THE MAN By Teresa Donnellan WHO TOLD THE STORY OF NEW YORK CITY, ONE CRIME AT A TIME

14 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG On Sept. 11, 2001, a man was killed in son’s father, a graduate of Canisius details that others might overlook. It is New York City. He followed the wrong College, suggested his son apply to a skill that has served him well during directions to a new job, ended up in a Jesuit universities in the southeast. his 15 years with The New York Times. bad neighborhood and was shot in the Loyola New Orleans caught Wilson’s One of his earliest assignments head. Police were stretched too thin to attention, and there he became the with The Times was in Iraq as an em- investigate properly, and the case re- editor of Loyola’s student newspa- bedded reporter with the U.S. Marine mains unsolved. per, The Maroon, and studied under Corps in the spring of 2003. In 2012, a man in Brooklyn killed America’s books editor, Raymond A. “That wouldn’t be something his lifelong neighbor for no apparent Schroth, S.J. I would have volunteered for, but I reason other than a 13-year-old argu- Wilson commends the Jesuit lib- wasn’t going to say no,” he recalled. ment over a slice of pizza. eral arts education for its diverse cur- “And next thing I know I’m in a Jeep In 2015, a man filed a suit against riculum, which “inspires curiosity and surrounded by tanks and rolling into a Manhattan psychic for grand larce- creativity and a way to be conversant Iraq with this Marine unit.” There, he ny. He had paid her $713,975 over time in an array of different topics.” wrote feature pieces profiling some of to be reunited with an old flame. “My work introduces me to pro- the men he met and sharing firsthand Surprising things happen every fessions and fields that I know little or accounts of battles. day in New York City. But nothing cap- nothing about,” he said, “so I love that.” After his assignment in Iraq, Wil- tures the imagination like true crime. son covered various events around For the past six years, Michael Wil- On Assignment New York in addition to crime. He son, a graduate of Loyola University Before landing his first job as a report- was one of the first reporters to the New Orleans, brought readers stories er, Wilson sent out résumés to over 50 scene when Capt. Chelsey Sullenberg- of the unnerving, the outrageous and newspapers across the Southeast. “I er landed his airliner on the Hudson the odd in his column Crime Scene in just got reams of rejection letters—‘No River, and he wrote about the troubles The New York Times. The column was thanks,’ ‘We’re not hiring’—very dis- of New Yorkers as the city recovered retired on Saturday, March 25, but couraging.” He eventually got a job from Hurricane Sandy. Wilson will continue bringing stories reporting for The Montgomery Ad- His talent for picking out inter- to life at The Times. vertiser and was put on the public ed- esting details developed into a gift for When asked about Wilson’s writ- ucation beat—which would not have crafting compelling ledes in Crime ing, Jim Dwyer, a columnist at The been his first choice. Scene and elsewhere. His piece about Times, quoted his wife, Cathy, who “You know, you meet people who the murder on Sept. 11 begins: “Three said, “I always read his to the end.” Said are wonderful political reporters be- deadly weapons struck down their Dwyer, “Greater praise hath no writer.” cause they just live it. They eat and victims in New York City on Sept. 11, By Teresa Donnellan Michael Wilson lives in Brooklyn drink and breathe that subject,” he 2001. Two were hijacked jets. The with his wife, Kinda Serafi (both Jesu- said, recalling his early assignments. third was a .40-caliber pistol on a dark MEET THE MAN it school alums), and their two sons, “And that was not me.” corner of Brooklyn, with just 18 min- Jude, 7, and Gabriel, 4. He has been “It turned out to be a very good utes remaining in that day.” writing for The New York Times for exercise,” he reflected, “looking for “To me, it’s maybe the most im- WHO TOLD THE STORY the past 15 years, and he visited Amer- the interesting and the human and portant part of the entire story,” Wil- ica’s offices to talk about his career as maybe the humorous. The something son says of a story’s first few lines. a new chapter begins. that’s moving in, you know, a school “I put an awful lot of thought into it OF NEW YORK CITY, Wilson got an early start in jour- board meeting agenda.” because I’m not working a story that nalism, working a paper route in his Over the years—which included you have to read. On its face, I’m writ- childhood home of Buffalo, N.Y. His stints reporting in Mobile, Ala., and ing something that has to kind of sell family moved to Tallahassee, Fla., Portland, Ore.—Wilson developed a itself to you, week after week, for six ONE CRIME AT A TIME Heisler Todd by by Photo for his high school years, and Wil- talent for picking out the eye-catching years. You don’t have to read this, but

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 15 A selfie of Wilson I’m going to make you want to with reporting a column that lede.” on turf wars Wilson’s column, which ran week- between ice cream truck drivers ly, was originally devised by Carolyn Ryan, currently an assistant editor at The Times. Marked by strong ledes and memorable last lines, Wilson’s writing engages readers and leaves them pondering a unique aspect of life in New York City. From a brawl at the of Michael Wilson courtesy Photo New York Athletic Club to the daily drug overdose in the bathroom of the “I hope to carry so much forward theft of beer at the Duane Reade in the Red Robin at the Staten Island Mall. that I’ve learned from Crime Scene Port Authority Bus Terminal, Crime “I’d been to that mall to eat and in regards to storytelling. The impor- Scene brought to light a striking spec- hang out. I grew up near a mall,” he ex- tance of hooking a reader’s interest trum of criminal activity. plained. “To me, that was a very crys- early, of economy in writing and the “Right away my thinking was, it tallized way to show how heroin has selection of details and quotes that should look at the whole expanse of permeated the middle class, to have it do their jobs in carrying the story for- crime—from homicide to pickpockets, meet that shiny mall.” ward,” he said. “These are all things I everything in between,” Wilson says When Wilson sat down with the learned at Loyola, but putting them in of the column. “And it should be told deceased man’s family, his mother practice every week for six years was, I by everyone involved, not every week, told him about her trip to the florist hope, beneficial to my writing.” but collectively—police, suspects, to buy flowers for her son’s funeral Wilson is already nostalgic for his people in jail.” service: “She saw a heart-shaped ar- column. “I’m going to look back on it, Wilson’s stories demonstrate a rangement—it’s called a broken heart I know, very fondly,” he said. “It’s go- passion for storytelling, with charac- arrangement, because it’s all white ing to be one of my favorite things I’ve ters conveying important bits of infor- and there’s a jagged line of red ros- ever done.” mation to put the reader in the story, es through the middle of it,” Wilson When asked what he hopes peo- as if they were the ones interviewing a recalled. The arrangement had been ple will remember about Crime Scene, victim’s aunt or visiting the home of an made for another family who had lost Wilson replied: “I hope they remem- accused man’s father. a son to overdose. ber that The Times cared enough Dan Barry, another colleague of “I thought, what an interesting about this city to let a writer loose on Wilson at The Times, notes: “Mike has entrée into this epidemic: The impact the streets for six years to find and made crime writing his own in New on the funeral and florist industries,” share stories that no one else was tell- York City. With shoe-leather report- remembered Wilson. ing, about crimes that were not neces- ing, sharp writing and not an ounce of His story begins: “They are not sarily front-page news or even partic- condescension, he helps us to under- like other mourners. They are raw. ularly newsworthy, but that, in their stand the wonderfully complicated ‘Hysterical crying,’ said Jackie Berger, telling, introduced us all to interesting human condition. Through him, the a florist.” people. At the end of the day, Crime police blotter comes alive.” Scene was secretly a column about When Wilson recalls his stories The Next Story people.” years later, it’s the particulars that After six years of diligently writing stand out to him. For example, when Crime Scene, Wilson is moving on to Teresa Donnellan is a Joseph A. O’Hare, working on a story about the hero- focus on longer, more in-depth projects S.J., fellow at America. in epidemic sweeping Staten Island, at The Times, but he is grateful for the Wilson learned of a man who died of a time he has spent with his column.

16 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 17 REVISITED

James Joyce’s educators responded to his growing notoriety by giving him the silent treatment. Joyce and His Jesuits A maverick alum was never forgiven by some of his former teachers.

By Ray Cavanaugh

The Irish scribe James Joyce spent thousands of hours first chapter of which sees Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Deda- with the Jesuits, who educated him as a youth and who fig- lus, getting his hands lashed with a “pandybat” by Father ure prominently in his debut novel, A Portrait of the Artist Dolan, the punishing prefect of studies, who berates him as a Young Man, which just saw the 100th anniversary of its for malingering when Dedalus claims he cannot do his initial publication on Dec. 29, 1916. Though Portrait wasn’t schoolwork because of his broken eyeglasses. exactly a ringing endorsement of his educators, they per- Feeling that he was punished unfairly, Dedalus visits manently influenced the author, who once remarked to a the Clongowes rector, Father Conmee, to report the inci- friend, “You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of dent. A more benevolent figure, Father Conmee existed precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought under the same name in real life and was an actual family to allude to me as a Jesuit.” friend of the Joyces. Following his tenure at Clongowes, The conflicted relationship between Joyce and his Je- he worked at Dublin’s Jesuit-run Belvedere College and suits began on Aug. 30, 1888, when a 6 1/2-year-old James helped Joyce and his brothers obtain scholarships to the Joyce began his formal education at Clongowes Wood institution after their financially irresponsible father had College, located in County Kildare. Though Clongowes is squandered their tuition money. a prestigious Jesuit school with a longstanding tradition, Joyce, who spent three years at Clongowes, would its main notoriety comes from its portrayal in Portrait, the attend Belvedere for five years. Owing to his high exam

18 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG scores in English composition, he was recruited by two Do- gent and serious priests, athletic and high-spirited pre- minican priests, who visited the Joyce’s home in an effort fects.” And Dedalus’s real-life counterpart credited the to persuade him to transfer to their school. The coveted Jesuits with teaching him how “to arrange things in such a pupil responded by saying that he “began with the Jesuits way that they become easy to survey and to judge.” and [he wants] to end with them,” according to the biogra- Subsequent to Portrait’s success, Joyce’s educators re- pher Richard Ellmann. sponded to his growing notoriety by giving him the silent Though the rector of Belvedere is never given a spe- treatment. Their famous pupil and onetime Jesuit recruit cific name inPortrait , he is a significant character who was becoming known for scandalous apostasy, among oth- initiates a key scene in Chapter 4, when he talks to Deda- er things, as the widely circulated recordings of his “stream lus about becoming a Jesuit. Dedalus listens “in reverent of consciousness” ventured far into the gritty and taboo. silence now to the priest’s appeal and through the words he Though much has been made of his rebellion against heard even more distinctly a voice bidding him approach, Catholicism, “Joyce never fully left the Church,” states offering him secret knowledge and secret power.” The Leo M. Manglaviti, S.J., in an article for the Fall 1999 is- young protagonist admits harboring an attraction to the sue of the James Joyce Quarterly. In the view of his former priesthood, though it may not have been for the purest of schools, however, he had strayed more than far enough. By reasons: “How often had he seen himself as a priest wield- the late 1930s, things had reached the point where Her- ing calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels bert S. Gorman, Joyce’s first biographer, was warned not to and saints stood in reverence!” mention his subject by name if he wanted to get inside of Becoming a Jesuit was a prospect to which Joyce Clongowes to conduct research.

Photo: iStockphoto.com/Angelafoto Photo: “undoubtedly gave serious consideration during his own The school’s magazine, The Clongownian (established schooldays and for rather longer than the novel might sug- four years after Joyce left Clongowes), went the entire first gest,” writes Bruce Bradley, S.J., in an article for The Irish half of the 20th century without mentioning Joyce at all. Times in June 2004. Soon enough, though, Joyce—who Even his death in 1941, reported across the world, went un- graduated from University College Dublin (at that time a mentioned by both The Clongownian and The Belvederian Jesuit-run institution) in 1902—split from the church, as (also established shortly after Joyce graduated). Neither he had chosen individualism and literary creation over re- publication would mention him until the mid-1950s. ligious devotion and the restrictions of the priesthood. In ensuing decades, the Irish Jesuits’ disfavor has di- Father Bradley, himself a former headmaster at minished. And yet acceptance of Joyce has been neither both Belvedere and Clongowes, states in his book James quick nor unanimous. One longtime Jesuit was prone to Joyce's Schooldays that Joyce as a writer “had set out to grumble about “that heretic” whenever he passed the writ- mock and outrage the susceptibilities of his own day. The er’s portrait on the wall at Clongowes, according to Peter Jesuits were bound to feel, at the very least, a keen sense Costello, who wrote a history of the school. of disappointment.” Generally, though, the alma maters have come to ac- When Joyce began writing Portrait in 1904, his broth- cept a maverick alum whose rebellion could never dispel er, Stanislaus, wrote of the new endeavor: “He is putting a those Jesuits who so influenced his formative years, and large number of acquaintances into it, and those Jesuits whom he generally admired—albeit from a distance. whom he has known. I don’t think they will like themselves in it.” Eleven years after the book’s publication, Joyce’s Ray Cavanaugh is a freelance writer who lives in the Boston area. friend and contemporary Aron Ettore Schmitz, a.k.a. “Italo His work has appeared in The Guardian, the National Catholic Svevo,” said that the Jesuit-trained writer “still feels admi- Reporter, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. ration and gratitude for the care of his educators; whilst his sinister Dedalus cannot find time to say so.” But even the “sinister” Dedalus shows some degree of respect, with Joyce writing, “His masters, even when they had not attracted him, had seemed to him always intelli-

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 19 BOOKINGS

A priest celebrates Mass for French soldiers on the Champagne front in eastern France in 1915. Amid the Wreckage of World War I, Avoiding the Impulse to Despair By John Matteson

G. J. Meyer is mad as heck at the winner of the 2016 presi- Once a revered icon of American progressivism, Wilson dential election, and he’s not going to take it anymore. has lately taken fire from both political flanks. Conservatives A common enough sentiment, that, but Meyer’s target in malign him both for his internationalist foreign policy agen- his far-reaching study The World Remade: America in World da and for spurring a massive expansion in federal power. War I is not the current president but rather the victor in The liberal side of the discussion, where Meyers aligns him- 1916, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s administration, of self, has justifiably denounced Wilson’s policies regarding course, marked a critical turning point. Whereas America’s race (he segregated the Civil Service) and First Amendment path toward empire began decades earlier, it was under Wil- freedoms (his efforts to crush and criminalize dissent during son that the United States became an authentic world pow- the war are a stain on our history). Truly, there is much to er. The country’s spectacular wartime mobilization raised criticize in the legacy of our only Ph.D. -holding president. production to unimagined heights, and the United States, Yet Meyer ventures beyond the obligatory Wilson habitually a debtor nation, emerged from the war as a net bashing. The president is, for him, an emotionally brittle creditor and the only major economy left standing after the man—one who, despite being “brilliantly gifted, impecca- European catastrophe. Having also become, virtually over- bly upright and guided by high ideals,” was morbidly in- night, a first-class military power, America stood ready to secure and nursed “a bottomless hunger…for unqualified impress its geopolitical vision upon the world. Yet Meyer’s praise.” In Meyer’s account, as in classic tragedy, his sub- panoramic assessment of America in this period, and partic- ject’s personal flaws contain the germs of a larger disas- ularly its commander in chief, is staunchly negative, and he ter; Wilson’s weaknesses led inexorably to twin debacles: argues his position passionately. the catastrophe of the Versailles Treaty and Wilson’s own

20 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG The Vanquished The World Remade Why the First World War America in World War I Failed to End By G. J. Meyer By Robert Gerwarth Bantam. 672p $18 Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 464p $17

physical collapse immediately after a nationwide tour in speech and incapable of accepting criticism, would un- which he struggled, in vain, to win public support for his doubtedly have felt more persuasive if his readership had proposed League of Nations. not just experienced a few months of the Real McCoy. A Despite admirable research and a remarkably forceful flawed man, Wilson was nonetheless superbly educated presentation, however, Meyer’s vilification of Wilson won’t and impeccably motivated. Though his definitions of jus- quite wash. First, tragedy requires the author to evince some tice have not aged gracefully, he earnestly strove for the sympathy for the fallen hero. Meyer, who calls Wilson “a betterment of the world. To those who concentrate on his past master” of contempt, rivals his subject in this regard. failures, a daily message now emerges from Washington:

CNS photo/courtesy of the Collection Odette Carrez via Reuters Carrez Odette of the Collection CNS photo/courtesy His tone is too often cruelly sarcastic. Surely the defeated “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Wilson, felled by a massive stroke, only intermittently co- Meyer’s work is more troubling still in its sympathy herent and delusionally dreaming of a third term, is as fit with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, which, in his account, was a subject for pity as any figure in our history. Meyer shows dragged unwillingly into the war. He is also quick to palli- none. Meyer, perhaps more than his subject, has a penchant ate Germany’s crimes against neutral Belgium, arguing that for meanness, and it lessens his work. they emerged “not [from] a desire for conquest but pure raw Meyer’s analysis, particularly of Wilson’s shortcomings fear.” In the war’s first days, German armies put scores of at Versailles, ironically commits the same error that under- Belgian towns to the torch and massacred thousands of ci- mined Wilson himself: the belief that a single morally in- vilians. The pure, raw fear of a child who sees her father shot spired man can make all the difference. Wilson, as we know, and her home destroyed seems to weigh little in Meyer’s went to Versailles with the hope of making the postwar moral calculus. Mr. Meyer also elides a sinister truth: Ger- world very close to perfect. His Fourteen Points embody an many’s treatment of civilians early in the war set the mor- ideal vision. The world that emerged from Versailles was far al tone for much that came after. It fostered a mindset that worse than Wilson dreamed. Nevertheless, it is painful when made no distinction between combatants and civilians and, a historian holds the American president chiefly responsi- across Europe for years to come, helped to make sheer mur- ble. Wilson predictably wielded less influence than the two der respectable. Western powers that had borne the brunt of the fighting This mindset and its consequences are explored in im- since 1914; the blood of Britain and France had purchased a pressive, though pessimistic fashion by Robert Gerwarth’s good deal more gravitas than the United States could bring The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. The to the table. Between the unyielding revanchism of Georg- volume would be remarkable for its bibliography alone: its es Clemenceau and the territorial greed of Lloyd George, superb compendium of sources written in more than a half the just, nonpunitive settlement that Wilson desired was dozen languages is a trove for would-be enthusiasts and doomed from the outset. It is far fairer to Wilson to note that scholars. Gerwarth tells a story too seldom told: the break- he did what he could and that the treaty would have been down of governmental authority and the ensuing chaos that more calamitous still if not for his idealistic influence. afflicted the nations defeated in World War I. Spanning from Meyer’s book seems cursed with ill timing. Written be- Germany and Hungary to Bulgaria and Turkey and beyond, fore the advent of the current administration, its portrait the narrative isn’t pretty. The Vanquished is strewn with the of Wilson as an insecure political neophyte, hostile to free darkest of images, from clergymen left to die after their eyes

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 21 had been gouged out and their hands roughly amputated to women forced to dance naked as their husbands watched before being gang raped and cut to pieces. From the The grim nature of the subject matter, coupled with occasional densities in Gerwarth’s prose style, makes The Vanquished a less than easy read. However, it is a book that Monstrous rewards patience and one whose virtues become more apparent when one has arrived at the final page, and perhaps still more a few days later. Gerwarth is scrupulous in his fac- To the tual narration of a series of national tragedies, relating how, one by one, the defeated nations of Europe succumbed to their most dreadful instincts. These stories, though roughly parallel in their trajectories, emerge from a variety of causes: Ordinary the lack of political will in Italy to defend its parliamentary regime against the rise of Mussolini; the blockade-induced By Karen Sue Smith famine in Germany and the marauding soldiers of the country’s Freikorps, who were too habituated to warfare to re- Before 1500, no Western European paintings vert to peaceful existence once the armistice was signed; the focused on ordinary people and their lives, anti-Bolshevist backlash in Hungary; unreasoning ethnic writes Joseph Leo Koerner, a prize-winning loathings in Poland, Turkey and elsewhere. art historian and the Victor S. Thomas Pro- The great value of Gerwarth’s study lies equally in its fessor of the History of Art and Architecture masterful exploration of the psychology of defeat and in its at Harvard University. applicability to our own fraught political moment. In his Genre painting, as such paintings are terse and moving epilogue, Gerwarth warns against the con- known today, lay in the future. Instead, ditions that give rise to the logic of violence. He decries the painters treated religious and historical subjects. Any tendency, so rife after the Great War and so ominously recru- ordinary people in paintings stood anonymously in the descent today, to dehumanize and criminalize the ethnic and background or as bit players in dramas about the gods, religious Other; the refusal to distinguish the dangerous ene- biblical characters and saints, military heroes and royal- my from the abject and innocent refugee; the arrogance and ty. In Northern Europe, however, that practice changed greed of victorious nations that fostered unbearable humili- during the 16th century. How and why is the subject of ation among the defeated and stirred the passions of terrible Bosch & Bruegel, Koerner’s fascinating and lavishly il- revenge. Gerwarth’s tales of suffering and barbarism can and lustrated tome. should be read as the most potent of parables. The author observes, compares and, most import- Meyer and Gerwarth agree that the Great War and its af- ant, contrasts the works of two Netherlander artists, termath sounded the death knell for the belief that the West- Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) and Pieter Bruegel the ern world was on an unshakable path of progress, destined to Elder (1525-69). Koerner’s thesis is that Bruegel, who at rise to ever greater heights of decency and enlightenment. A first imitated Bosch, diverged and ultimately surpassed hundred years after that war, we are all persuaded that prog- him as he developed a new focus for painting. ress is no inevitability. Yet the lessons of these volumes also Decades of scholarship and personal experience in- include the necessity of hope; even a dubious optimism and form this book, based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures that a forlorn faith in one another are preferable to surrender- Koerner delivered in 2008 at the National Gallery of Art ing to distrust and despair. in Washington. Over and over, the author shows readers how to look at art, a demonstration that alone is worth John Matteson is a professor of English at John Jay College of the price of the book. Criminal Justice, CUNY. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his Still, this book takes effort. While historians and biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father. theologians can readily dive into the discussion, general

22 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Hieronymus Bosch directs viewers to his most lurid scenes.

readers may find it demanding. All effort expended will be leads you right to it. Behind the exotic bird atop the African richly rewarded. Readers may wish, as Koerner suggests, king’s gift lurk several enigmatic figures, including an ex- to begin with the thesis in Chapter 4 of the Introduction, posed man draped in red, with a possibly leprous sore on “From Bosch to Bruegel.” I enjoyed returning to the open- his ankle. Atypical in most Epiphany scenes, Bosch’s ene- ing chapters later, as a finale. Part I, “Hieronymus Bosch,” my contaminates the universe. is the longest, most complex and controversial section of Bosch’s most elusive painting, originally untitled but the book. Part II, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” compelling- in this book called “The Garden of Delights,” has per- ly makes the author’s case with one beautiful painting af- plexed centuries of viewers. Koerner examines it in “The ter another. I found it worthwhile to look up many of the Unspeakable Subject.” Contemporary scholars think the paintings online in order to zoom in on the telling details. work was commissioned by one of the counts of Nassau, either Henry or Engelbert II, rather than by any church. BOSCH’S ENEMY According to a diary account by an eyewitness, the paint- To understand Bosch, the concept of “enemy painting” is ing was kept at their palace in a hidden chamber and shown key. It refers to the cosmic warfare that underlies Bosch’s privately for the owner’s amusement. Today, the painting is religious works. Since God and Satan (God’s enemy) battle one of the most popular works on view at the Prado. across time and place, the enemy is pervasive, beginning Bosch gave “The Garden of Delights” a typical triptych in Eden. Bosch adds exotic animals, plants and other men- form, but in place of a biblical scene in the center, he de- acing characters to biblical scenes to show “enemy pres- picts explicit sexual and violent content, frolics in a sexual ence.” Note the perversity of nature in the grotesque fig- theme park, though no one there looks happy. The picture ures of “The Temptation of St. Anthony” and the contorted may have been a risky undertaking, since where and when faces of onlookers in “Christ Carrying the Cross.” Surpris- Bosch worked, masturbation, adultery and same-sex in-

“The Garden of Earthly Delights,” by Hieronymus Bosch. Photo: The Prado in Google Earth The Prado Bosch. Photo: Hieronymus by Delights,” of Earthly “The Garden ingly, the enemy infiltrates “Adoration of the Magi.” Bosch tercourse were offenses punishable by death. Perhaps the

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 23 Bosch & Bruegel reflects a changing mindset relevant today. Readers will From Enemy Painting recognize in Bruegel a view of humanity and of the self that to Everyday Life reflects their own. By Joseph Leo Koerner Many factors influenced Bruegel’s singular shift. First, Princeton University Press. the Christian story of fallen humanity, depicted by Bosch, 412p $65 found competition from the rise of secular humanism, as reflected in Bruegel. Second, Christians were embroiled in an internecine war that made painting religious subjects dangerous. The Protestant Reformation raged on after Martin Luther’s death in 1546, the year Bruegel turned altarpiece design, which could be kept closed, was crafted 21. Two decades later, Calvinist iconoclasts in the Nether- to disguise a secular painting. Or perhaps Bosch’s battle lands stripped churches of their art. In 1567 the third Duke between God and Satan is the subject, the wages of ram- of Alba brought an army from Spain, which controlled the pant sinfulness, making this a religious work. If so, Koerner Netherlands, to crush heresy. Trials were held in the town raises a sticky point about Bosch’s role as an artist. Does where Bruegel lived. An artist friend of his was interrogat- Bosch, in directing viewers right to his most lurid scenes, ed. When the duke had finished, thousands of townspeople cause them (us) to sin by visually taking part as voyeurs in lay dead. Bruegel instructed his wife to destroy some of his humanity’s unbridled flesh-fest? Whatever one thinks of paintings, lest she be held responsible after his death. One Koerner’s point or of Bosch’s image, this particular paint- wonders how “Christ Carrying the Cross” survived: The ing clarifies the distance between Bosch’s worldview and troops wear the red coats of imperial mercenaries. Third, Bruegel’s. advancements in printmaking technology and global mar- kets allowed artists to make multiple copies of a work at BRUEGEL’S PEASANTS affordable prices. Artists no longer had to depend on com- Pieter Bruegel was born nine years after Bosch died. As a missions. young designer of engravings, Bruegel imitated the wildly In sum, Koerner lays out the ironic path from Bosch popular Bosch. But any traces the “enemy” disappear in to Bruegel, the art of ordinary life arising from the art of Bruegel’s work. No enemy is present in “Alpine Landscape the phantasmagoric and monstrous. “Today Bosch is seen,” with a River Descending from the Mountains,” one of the writes Koerner, “as the last great Medieval artist depicting majestic landscape drawings Bruegel made while crossing an absolutist Christian worldview. Bruegel, by contrast, is the Alps. Rather than fantasy, Bruegel paints local scenes, seen as the first artist to put his skepticism into pigment, conveying his own time, place and culture, even situating ushering in a more modern worldview.” biblical stories in the Netherlands. In his “Christ Carrying In his audacious focus on ordinary life, Bruegel stepped the Cross,” a windmill turns atop a distant rock. out of Europe’s medieval past and into modernity. And this Particularly during his last years, Bruegel paints ordi- book, by shining a laser on the 50 years during which Brue- nary people going about their business, revealing his view gel developed genre painting, lets readers peek into the Re- of human nature. Not only is Bruegel’s affection for peas- naissance origins of their own thought world. Seldom has ants palpable, but he makes some of them life-sized, sig- art history seemed so relevant. naling their importance (“The Peasant Dance”). That was new. Fully human, Bruegel’s peasants are far from perfect, Karen Sue Smith, former editorial director of America, now yet none are beset by demons. When Bruegel’s peasants writes freelance. mock their disabled neighbors or make sport of the anorex- ic or obese (“Battle Between Carnival and Lent”) or display indifference toward the infant Christ in their midst (“The Adoration of the Kings in the Snow”), they are not manip- ulated from without but motivated from within. The point

24 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG A Consequential

CNS photo/Rick Wilking, Reuters Wilking, CNS photo/Rick President The Legacy Of Barack Obama Barack Obama By Michael D’Antonio and the Limits of Optimism St. Martin’s Press. 310p $28 By Jason Berry

In 2015 the political writer Michael D’Antonio published well as concessions in pay and benefits from the United Auto Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, Workers. In 2009 automakers posted the lowest sales num- which earned solid reviews for its dispassionate tone, ex- ber in half a century, but as the mega-loans and conditions tensive research and chilling biographical portrait. Trump set in, the turnaround began. An editorial in The Economist gave D’Antonio interview time, and the author became a (no liberal redoubt) in August 2010 declared: “An apology go-to interviewee on TV news during the presidential race. is due Barack Obama: his takeover of G.M. could have gone The book ends by shredding a therapeutic article of horribly wrong, but it has not.... The doomsdayers were faith, which says that narcissism is not a disease but, as one wrong.” By 2016 total auto sales had climbed to “a record psychiatrist says, “an evolutionary strategy that can be in- annual rate of 17.5 million, and the big American companies credibly successful—when it works.” This leaves us to pon- held 45.4 percent of the [global] market.” der the consequences when it does not. Facebook, Twitter The $800 billion stimulus bill that spurred a range of and Instagram allow people “to escape feeling insignifi- energy and infrastructure projects also gets good marks cant,” notes D’Antonio. “Donald Trump is not a man apart. by the author. He cites former U.S. Representative Barney He is, instead, merely one of us writ large.” Frank’s criticism that new banking regulations should have From that cheerful take on American homo sapiens, been stronger in conveying Obama as a pragmatist, who re- D’Antonio plunged into researching one of the great intel- lied on Wall Street insiders to gauge how far he could go. lects and optimists in U.S. history. A Consequential Presi- That assessment will be dissected by historians for a long dent could not be more timely, as President Trump threat- time to come. ens to dismantle the Obama legacy. D’Antonio explores the But you wouldn’t know that classical Keynesian eco- record with copious reporting and a lens trained on how nomics had been vindicated by the automotive package campaign promises fared against results. The short answer: and the stimulus impact, which slowly lifted the country Obama delivered. from the Great Recession, if you go by the rancor of Sarah With diagrams and charts interspersed through the text, Palin and hard-shell Republican critics. D’Antonio revisits the big battles after Obama’s arrival as the The G.O.P.’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act— Bush economy teetered toward Depression. The federal which used former Republican Gov. Mitt Romney’s Massa- bailout of the car industry, for example, imposed stiff con- chusetts health care plan as a template—starred Palin rail- ditions for aid, including cost-cutting by the companies as ing against “death panels,” by which austere bureaucrats

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 25 would deny people coverage, a juicy sound bite without But even cool has its metaphysical limitations. Why factual teeth. As a rebuttal, D’Antonio profiles a woman did Obama lose his congressional majority in 2010? Af- who could not get coverage because of her pre-existing ter his landmark legislative victories on the stimulus, the cancer condition. Under Obamacare she got coverage with auto industry and health care, the Tea Party movement a premium of $320 a month, and a deductible of $2,500. handed him what the president called a “shellacking” She had a mastectomy and chemotherapy “without ruin- in the midterm elections. D’Antonio’s narrative about ing her family’s finances.” And she lived. Obama’s policy achievements occasionally gives cameos Citing Obama’s pledge that “if you like your health to the more unvarnished opponents, but there is little in plan, you’ll be able to keep your health plan,” the author these pages on why he failed to build a Democratic base reports that “2.2 percent of the people who had bought or what he might have done to strengthen the national plans found they could not keep them, mainly because party after his victory in 2008. they didn’t comply with the new regulations. That the law Obama’s greatest mistake may well have been letting actually required better coverage than most of these pol- his highly mobilized digital campaign organization, assist- icies didn’t make a difference to people who felt they had ed by MoveOn.org, simply go dormant. Lighting up con- been misled.” gressional switchboards and websites in favor of a given He cites data from Kaiser Permanente, a major health bill can make a real difference. Perhaps this seemed less care provider, that for every million people newly insured, important to Obama and his advisors in the heady rush of “10,000 premature deaths are prevented.” Indeed, in the the first two years with a House and Senate majority, but five years following the bill’s passage, hospital readmis- the White House allowed a new, powerful communica- sions—a gauge for measuring quality of care—dropped by tions tool to rust away in the shed. roughly 575,000 people. D’Antonio shows a deft hand guiding the reader Yet no amount of data or objective analysis could sway through the complexities of policy and legislation with the Republican majority that captured Congress in 2010 highly readable prose. The good news, he reminds us, is and turned that body into an opposition bunker. While the that Obama saved the United States from economic di- president’s legislative proposals stalled, D’Antonio notes, saster and gave us a stronger international footing. Diplo- “Thirty-two congressional hearings were conducted to ex- macy with China and India on global warming, the Paris amine the 2012 attack on American facilities in Benghazi, climate change treaty and the Iran nuclear agreement— Libya, in which four Americans were killed. (Congress signal feats of the second term—flowed from an agenda at had ten fewer hearings on the 9/11 attack, which left near- home that tried to balance environmental regulation and ly 3,000 people dead.) In the end, Republican lawmakers energy growth as the United States became an oil exporter found no wrongdoing in the Benghazi case and the hear- after years of hefty petroleum imports. ings resulted in no disciplinary actions.” “Obama’s economic policy dovetailed with his ener- D’Antonio gives Obama high marks for his soaring or- gy policy, which enabled his diplomacy and aided his en- atory that comforted families and the nation after mass vironmental agenda,” reports D’Antonio. Here he might shootings, even as Congress was, again, unbending on gun have quoted Pope Francis: “Everything is connected.” But control. (Jim Yardley in a recent New York Times Mag- everything connected can also fall apart. And so we watch azine piece noted that by some estimates “there are now as the national drama in Washington, D.C., turns from the roughly as many guns as people in the United States.”) twilight of the cool to hot lights bathing “merely one of us, Overall, D’Antonio treats Obama’s above-the-fray writ large.” patience as Aristotelian virtue. While the president could uncork charisma as needed on the hustings, more often he was “calm as his public image suggested, and his au- Jason Berry’s books include Render Unto Rome: The Secret thentic cool was what the nation needed in the chaos of Life of Money in the Catholic Church and Last of the Red the Great Recession.” Hot Poppas, a comic novel about Louisiana politics.

26 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 27 By John C. Endres and Jean-François Racine

In this year’s selection, we include several titles that deal Briggs then takes us to the 2011 convention of the Forum with the whole Bible: major issues, themes and reception of Bible Agencies North America, which discussed possible through the centuries. reasons why fewer and fewer people who receive a free Bible read it. After sharing how pastors of various denominations Kenneth A. Briggs. The Invisible cope with low Bible literacy in their ministries, a chapter Bestseller: Searching for the Bible in describes a few sessions of the 2012 annual meetings of the America. Eerdmans, 2016, 239 p. Society of Biblical Literature and of the American Acade- my of Religion. As a result, Briggs is able to comment on the The project of The Invisible Bestseller: gulf between biblical scholarship and what is going on in the Searching for the Bible in America, by pews. More than simply reporting facts, the book reflects on Kenneth A. Briggs, is ambitious: (1) the decline of biblical literacy in relation to social trends in to look for reasons for the decline of the United States, like secularization and digital culture. biblical literacy in the United States, despite the Bible’s increasing avail- Brent A. Strawn. The Old Testament Is Dying: A ability in all sorts of formats, (2) to find where this decline Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment. Baker is occurring and (3) how it makes a difference. The book is Academic, 2017, 336 p. written as a journalistic investigation that takes the reader to various places to see how the Bible is or is not used. As For those concerned about the dwindling influence of the a journalist who has worked for Newsday, The New York Old Testament in their churches and lives, Brent Strawn Times and The National Catholic Reporter, Briggs is in a provides a trenchant diagnosis and a vigorous therapy pro- good position to lead this inquiry. gram in his book The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis The quest begins in U.S. homes, of which 88 percent and Recommended Treatment. This sobering analysis of the have a Bible that is rarely read and is on the way to being illness relies on several kinds of data, particularly some sta- seen as an item of nostalgia, like The Old Farmer’s Almanac. tistics about preaching on the Old Testament and careful

28 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG study of hymnody and the presence of responsorial psalms after Jewish people were forced to speak and write other in the Revised Common Lectionary. languages; but the language survived in written works of Although the diagnoses focus on Protestant churches, the Jewish people. many of them also ring true for the Catholic world. Care- The story concerns Christian reaction to Hebrew ful study of important Protestant hymnals demonstrates through the centuries, including the action of notable schol- the waning of hymnody based on psalms in recent years, ars to learn Hebrew from rabbis, for various motives, from so Strawn can speak of the death of the “little Bible” (a de- improving Christian translations to learning more ways to scription of the Book of Psalms by Martin Luther). Simi- engage in polemical work with Jews. Christian Hebraism lar study of the psalms included in the Revised Common developed during the Renaissance era (1500s) and attract- Lectionary demonstrates how many never appear (51) and ed a number of scholars, some of them arguing that Hebrew how many psalm verses are omitted in the selections, usu- should be given priority among biblical languages. Glinert ally “hard verses,” laments and imprecations. He also pres- tells a lively story that informs the reader about uses and ents statistics about regular omission of the responsorial in misuses of the language, along with a social and cultural his- some churches. These are but examples of the morbidity tory of the Jewish people, all the way to the modern state of of the Old Testament. The analysis includes external evi- Israel and its revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. dence: the New Atheism (Dawkins) in Chapter 4 and Mar- cionites Old and New in Chapter 5, including discussion of Barbara Reid, O. P., Wisdom’s Feast: An Invitation to influence of von Harnack, Delitzsch and the program of the Feminist Interpretation of the Scriptures. Eerdmans, Nazi Christian churches. The rise of the New Plastic Gos- 2016, 154 p.

Photo: iStockphoto/justinkendra Photo: pels and the “Happiologists” evidences further decline of the Old Testament. In recent decades we have witnessed lively and significant The “Path to Recovery” in Part 3 proposes a vigorous publications of feminist biblical criticism. This year’s col- program of formation (not information), which includes lection of titles includes three more, but they are quite dif- “singing the OT” and other paths of regular, repeated use, ferent in content and presentation. With Wisdom’s Feast: none of which will be easy, but all of which are necessary to An Invitation to Feminist Interpretation of the Scriptures, restore the Old Testament to contemporary life. Barbara Reid, O. P., professor of New Testament studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, has written a very Lewis Glinert, The Story of Hebrew. accessible introduction to feminist interpretation of the Princeton University Press, 2017, Bible that takes the reader over a vast amount of ground 264 p. throughout the whole Bible. The book’s Introduction provides an overview of the In The Story of Hebrew, Lewis Glinert history of feminist interpretation, the justification for this discusses the language of the Hebrew in light of the situation of women in our societies, its di- Bible, not in a technical lexicographi- versity and its principles. The remaining chapters visit cal or syntactical way but with a lively the Creation stories and the accounts about the entry of history of the development of Hebrew sin in the world, both in Genesis and then in the Gospels throughout the ages until the present to examine the character of Mary, various women who are time and its flourishing in the state of Israel. either healed or counted among his disciples and a sample Glinert takes the reader on a journey through Hebrew of parables that feature female characters. that begins in Genesis 1 and moves through the various In her consideration of discipleship, Reid also consid- ages of its development, as well as the different geograph- ers the ministry of women in Paul’s letters, focusing, for in- ical locations of Jewish communities and how they influ- stance, on Phoebe, Prisca and Junia, the last being called enced the use of this language. One can learn about transla- an apostle. The volume also questions some common read- tions of the Hebrew Bible into Greek (the Septuagint), uses ings of episodes like those about Mary and Martha and the in various locales and the continuing “life” of the language passion narratives, which have effectively kept women in

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 29 subordinate positions. In all cases, Reid offers rich alter- Marion Ann Taylor and Christiana native interpretations, grounded in the traditions of the deGroot, Women of War, Women of church, that pay attention to the context in which the texts Woe: Joshua and Judges Through came into existence, to the literary context of these epi- the Eyes of Nineteenth-Century sodes and to the context of the various interpreters. All the Female Biblical Interpreters. chapters end with questions that can be used for personal Eerdmans, 2016, 278 p. reflection or to stimulate discussion. Women of War, Women of Woe is a Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, Psalms Books 2-3. collection of writings by 19th-century Wisdom Commentary Volume 21; Linda M. Maloney, women biblical interpreters on wom- volume editor. Liturgical Press, 2016, 410 p. en figures in the books of Joshua and Judges. These characters have long been discussed, usually by employing con- The Wisdom Commentary series on the Bible, from Litur- temporary methods of exegesis and hermeneutics, often in gical Press, has already published several volumes, but a vol- the form of biblical commentary or journal articles. So this ume on Psalms, by Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, piqued our publication, edited by Marion Ann Taylor and Christiana interest. Can another commentary in the field make a signif- de Groot, offers a very different perspective: scores of con- icant contribution? This volume, covering Books 2 and 3 of tributions by women—biblical commentaries, sermons or the Psalter (Psalms 42-89), definitely breaks new ground. poems, biographies, sermon notes for men and a number The author combines comments on psalms (usually con- of other genres—that are not considered “commentary” in sidered “hopelessly masculine”) with “intertexts” from oth- contemporary parlance. er parts of the Hebrew Bible. The results are thought-pro- The writers are mostly British and American writers voking and plausible, as one reads about Hannah, Judith, who wrote in English; most were or had been Christians, Shiphrah, Bathsheba, Tamar and many others and considers and some were Jewish. Their comments vary widely, from their possible connections with psalms. one remarking that biographical writing about women Each psalm receives extensive coverage treating characters intended to show that “WOMAN is God’s ap- form-critical, historical, linguistic and theological issues. pointed agent of morality” to others that raise many ques- The base text is the New Revised Standard Version, and tions. The survey includes many writers who are unknown the author frequently comments on nuances and shades of to us today but also draws from notables like Florence meaning that might be affected by a feminist perspective. Nightingale and Harriet Beecher Stowe. One finds comments on long-disputed questions (e.g., does The eight women characters treated here are: Rahab, Ps 51:5 refer to “original sin?”) along with prudent discus- Achsah (Caleb’s daughter), Deborah, Jael, Jephthah’s sion and suggestions. For each psalm there is a section on daughter, Manoah’s wife, Delilah and the Levite’s concu- contemporary comment (in grey), which proves challenging. bine. In many cases the goal of the writer is “actualiza- This work contains helpful explanations of many top- tion,” that is, application to contemporary issues. Jose- ics—superscriptions, collections of psalms like the Asaph phine Butler, for example, connected her comments on psalms, the general character of different groups of psalms, the Levite’s concubine with her work with prostitutes of issues like the “memory” of God’s deliverances of Israel. her era. This book offers an opportunity to read about Many, if not most issues important to eco-feminist writers characters discussed by women commentators who were find a place in this commentary, but not at the expense of often forgotten, unread or seldom read. The results pro- more classical issues of psalm interpretation. Scholars will vide fascinating reading and fresh insights into the lively rejoice to see Hebrew words discussed, and general read- activity of these interpreters of the Old Testament in the ers will enjoy the accessible style of the commentary. The 19th century. The volume contains indexes of biblical texts volume closes with indexes of biblical citations, and of sub- and important topics and persons. jects and proper names.

30 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG ADVERTORIAL BOOK DIRECTORY

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Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders Random House 368p 978-081299343 Coming soon, the review of the new most-talked-about book by George Saun- ders, Lincoln in the Bardo. It is not a biography of Lincoln, nor is it about the Civil War. We don’t want to tell the whole story now, but it is Lincoln between life and death, both alive and gone. 34 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Francis J. Moloney, S.D.B. Reading John: the importance of the Prologue, the various levels the New Testament in the Church: of the story, the social and historical context in which this A Primer for Pastors, Religious Gospel came into existence, and the type of language used Educators, and Believers. Baker by Jesus. It also contains a chapter on characters like the Academic, 2015, 226 p. beloved disciple, Nicodemus and Peter, the latter serving as an example of the study of a character in a specific Gospel. In Reading the New Testament in the The encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus (Jn 3:1-21) Church: A Primer for Pastors, Religious provides a second example of a close reading of a passage. Educators, and Believers, Francis J. Sidebars supply information about selected aspects of the Moloney acknowledges that despite Gospel, for example how the Gospel cites the Old Tes- the truism about the importance of the word of God among tament, the Jewish feasts mentioned in John and some Catholics, no effective mass program of biblical education features of Second Temple Judaism. Some sidebars also exists. His book will not fill this lacuna, but it does take seri- address common questions about this Gospel, such as the ously Benedict XVI’s exhortation “Verbum Domini,” which evidence of anti-Baptist polemic and the various possible encourages dialogue among pastors, theologians and exe- meanings of the phrase “the Jews” in John. Each chapter getes about the interpretation of Scripture passages. Hence, concludes with questions for reflection, and the whole vol- Moloney takes up the challenge of bringing to life the faith- ume ends with a well-organized list of suggested readings. filled pages of the New Testament for Catholic clergy and All these features contribute to make this volume a great laity, including religious educators. Accordingly, the book resource suitable for many settings. provides short introductions to all the major sections of the New Testament. It also opens with a brisk walk through the Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death history of biblical interpretation from the church fathers un- of Jesus Christ. Eerdmans, 2015, 669 p. til Vatican II, followed by chapters on the historical context of the world in which the New Testament came to existence, This theological study of crucifixion attempts to serve as on the process of formation of the New Testament and on a bridge between scholarship and local congregations. In what can be known of the biography of Jesus of Nazareth. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Even if the treatment of all these subjects is short, Moloney Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopalian priest and a trainer of succeeds each time in providing much information in a few preachers in several theological schools of North America pages. His exposition of Revelation is especially to be com- and the United Kingdom, has produced a vast theologi- mended. The information is up to date and reflects main- cal reflection on Scripture and traditions that aims to ex- stream scholarship. Unlike several introductions to the New pand the discussion of the significance of what happened Testament that mostly provide summaries of scholarly dis- on the cross and to encourage the return of that subject to cussions, Moloney’s clearly explains how these documents the center of Christian proclamation. Rutledge’s intend- originated from the faith of early believers and how they pro- ed audience is, on the one hand, lay Catholics and Protes- vide specific facets of that faith. tants from all denominations and, on the other hand, busy pastors who are nevertheless serious about preaching the Christopher W. Skinner, Reading John. Cascade Gospel. Not a history of doctrine nor a historical investi- Companions series. Cascade Books, 2015, 154 p. gation of the crucifixion, the book reflects on the nature of crucifixion as a mode of execution and on its unique place Reading John, by Christopher W. Skinner, is a welcome in the Christian narrative. It also addresses some major is- addition to the Cascade Companions series that began in sues raised by Jesus’ death on the cross as a criminal like 2006. The series already includes volumes about Jeremi- godlessness, justice and sin. Finally, the book visits a broad ah, Paul, the Letter to the Hebrews and 1 Peter. This new spectrum of biblical motifs used in the New Testament, like volume in the series, which is addressed to nonspecialists, the Passover, the Exodus, blood sacrifice, apocalyptic wars, combines academic rigor with readability. It provides sev- the descent into hell, substitution and the recapitulation. eral interpretive keys for reading the Gospel according to Although the whole book constructs a powerful argument

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 35 about the centrality of the cross in Christianity, most chap- Saul M. Olyan, Friendship in the Hebrew Bible. ters can be read independently with profit. Yale University Press, 2017, 191 p.

Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden. In Friendship in the Hebrew Bible, Saul Olyan presents an Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Per- important concept for contemporary readers, but one that spectives on Procreation and Child- is seldom connected with the Bible. He presents the ma- lessness. Princeton University Press, terial in depth (including Hebrew vocabulary and a fairly 2015, 328 p. exhaustive list of occurrences in the Bible) and includes a great number of questions about the meaning of friendship Readers of Reconceiving Infertility: and how it is presented in the Hebrew Bible. Biblical Perspectives on Procreation He discusses “Friends and Family” in Chapter 1, es- and Childlessness, by Candida Moss pecially differences in expectations between relatives (the and Joel Baden, will find themselves “paradigmatic intimates”) and friends: There are different engaged by this book, which deals with an aspect of human expectations and duties, and it must be decided if the ob- existence that everyone faces some day. The book acknowl- ligation to love holds for both emotional and behavioral edges that in the West, biblical texts perceived either as holy support. Often there is an expectation of “behavioral pari- Scripture or as an ancient library have deeply influenced ty”—that is, that manifestations of loyalty and support will how we view infertility and how we perceive those who are be repaid in the future. Primary obligations of family mem- childless. The assumption that underlies these perceptions bers often include burying the dead and maintaining the is that biblical texts speak with a single voice on this subject, family tomb, with appropriate ancestral rites. heard in the first pages of the Bible: “Be fruitful and multi- “Failed Friendship” is an intriguing topic (Chapter 2), ply!” (Gen 1:22). Reconceiving Infertility challenges this as- and Olyan finds abundant evidence of it, especially in psalms sumption by showing (1) the plurality of perspectives on this of complaint (e.g., Psalms 28, 35, 38, 88 and 109) and also topic and (2) that fertility is not necessarily the default situ- in prophetic texts and Proverbs. Disloyal friends engender ation nor always given as a blessing in the Bible. In fact, one conflict between persons and also lead to social evils. He of the main thrusts of the book is that “childlessness in the concludes the chapter with a review of hostile behaviors, Bible is divinely sanctioned—insofar as the word ‘sanction’ whether by action or inaction. Psalm 109 manifests another means both to endorse and prohibit” (20). obligation: care for a dead man’s orphan children. He con- The book covers much ground, from the first pages of tinues with “Friendship in Narratives” (Chapter 3): Ruth Genesis to some of the church fathers (for example, Irenae- and Naomi, Jonathan and David, Job and his three com- us, Pseudo-Justin and Augustine) by way of the prophets, forters, Jephthah’s daughter and her companions, Amnon the Gospels and Paul’s letters. the unusual circumstances and Jonadab (2 Samuel 13). Here are wider possibilities for of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke, for instance, as well characterization and also data about friendships of women. as his dual patrilineage (God and Joseph) receive atten- A welcome topic, “Friendship in Ben Sira” (Chapter 4), tion. Similarly, Moss and Baden take a close look at the dis- moves beyond the Hebrew Bible, but it is an important book course on chastity and celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7 from the for Catholics and most Orthodox and Eastern churches. perspective of fertility. Overall, the book is remarkably well Olyan examines the specific vocabulary for friends, differ- informed on the discourses on fertility in the Ancient Near ences from the Hebrew canon and particular ideas about East and in the Greco-Roman world and shows well how friendship. Some new ideas appear: that friends may pro- the biblical texts reflect these worlds. vide well-timed guidance to another, that a capable wife is superior to a helpful friend, that mutual generosity marks the relationship. Although biblical students and scholars will appreci- ate the Hebrew references and scholarly sections, readers without such training can read this book, focusing on the

36 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG nontechnical expositions. The work of reading will bear KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS great fruit for this topic, so seldom encountered in regular exposure to the Hebrew Bible. By Theresa Burns

Ken Jackson, Shakespeare & Abraham. University of When my father totaled the white Volvo Notre Dame Press, 2015, 172 p. leaving his own driveway, the airbag bloomed Jem Bloomfield, Words of Power: Reading Shakespeare like a calla lily, sparing him and the Bible. Lutterworth Press, 2016, 168 p. the stares of the gathering neighbors. The sky Prior to the 21st century, few works studying Shakespeare’s was just turning apricot. A downy tapping relation to the Bible ventured beyond noting allusions to on the hide of a dogwood. biblical passages in the Bard’s works. The current century sees a profusion of books on this subject. Two fine ex- He came out to find my mother, he told us. amples are Shakespeare & Abraham, by Ken Jackson, and She could have gone wandering Words of Power: Reading Shakespeare and the Bible, by Jem again, knocking on Bloomfield. Jackson’s book explores Shakespeare’s dramatic fas- strangers’ doors without her teeth, cination with Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac in though she hadn’t walked Genesis 22 by looking at scenes of child-killing or near-kill- the length of the block in years. ing in plays like “Henry VI, Part III,” “King John,” “Rich- ard II,” “Titus Andronicus,” “The Merchant of Venice” and Maybe they quarreled. Maybe he “Timon of Athens.” Beyond such examination, the book threatened something and left, also uses these examples from Shakespeare’s plays to reflect on the role of religion in the modern world. and in the middle of it, forgot what he’d say Bloomfield’s volume compares and contrasts the Bible if he got there. and Shakespeare’s works in several respects. There are, for He woke with a scratch on his chin. example, various views about the lists of books that consti- tute the Bible or the Shakespearean corpus, the difficulty Let him think what he thinks, we know of establishing the text of the Bible and of Shakespeare’s why it happened. works, the diversity of approaches taken to interpret bib- The dinner in his honor that night. Monsignor himself lical texts and Shakespeare’s plays, the contrasts between personal reading and public performance of these texts, would make the toast. O Grand Knight! the ways some institutions identify themselves as author- O steadfast heart! They would bestow the purple itative interpreters of these texts and use them to vali- raiment, heap date their ethos and legitimacy, and the use of these texts unbearable praise on him. beyond religion and literature in political discourses and advertisements. This very accessible book allows the read- Theresa Burns’s poetry, reviews and nonfiction have er to learn a great deal about major issues in biblical and appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner and Shakespearean studies in less than 200 pages. Bellevue Literary Review, among other publications. Her chapbook of poems, Two Train Town, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. John C. Endres, S.J., and Jean-François Racine are professors at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley, Calif.

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 37 Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary, defended Native Americans in the New World, but he was in the minority.

THE COLONIAL BEGINNINGS OF NORTH AMERICAN CATHOLICISM By Thomas J. Shelley

When Pope Leo XIII opened the Vatican archives to re- resemble history with the history left out. searchers in 1881, he quoted with approval the admoni- Almost one half of the book is devoted to the Spanish tion of Cicero that the first duty of an historian is not to contribution to the evangelization of North America. The tell a lie and the second duty is not to be afraid to tell the author pays generous tribute to the heroic sacrifices of truth. The late Kevin Starr, professor of history at the many of the missionaries, and the efforts of Dominican fri- University of Southern California for many years and the ars like Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Ca- author of numerous well-received studies of California sas to defend the Native Americans, but he candidly admits history, follows that advice admirably in his ambitious the complicity of churchmen in the economic, cultural and study of the Spanish, French and English colonial roots even sexual exploitation of the native population. of North American Catholicism. He writes in the grand The often-praised bull of Pope Paul III in 1537 affirm- narrative style of classic American historians like George ing the human dignity of the Indians was eviscerated the Bancroft, Francis Parkman and Herbert Eugene Bolton. following year when the papacy eliminated the penalties in That approach leaves relatively little room for “history the bull at the insistence of the Spanish crown. According from below” but mercifully spares the reader from the te- to Starr, in 18th-century California Indians who continued dious analysis of minutiae that makes some history books their aboriginal way of life in the wilderness had a better

38 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG chance of survival than those who lived in the famed mis- Continental Ambitions sions. It is no wonder that the first Latin American pope Roman Catholics felt compelled to apologize to the indigenous peoples of in North America: the Americas for the mistreatment that their ancestors The Colonial Experience suffered at the hands of their Spanish conquerors, both lay By Kevin Starr and clerical. Starr calls it “their long genocidal agony.” Ignatius Press. 639p $34.95 Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is a centerpiece of Hispanic Catholic devotion to Mary throughout the Amer- icas. The American Vincentian Stafford Poole and other scholars ran the risk of provoking a Catholic fatwa some by priests of the recently founded Society of Saint Sulpice. years ago when they examined critically the apparition Another unusual feature of Catholicism in French narrative because of the lack of contemporary evidence, Canada was the emergence of a new kind of woman reli- but none of these scholars questioned its significance. As gious in North America, not exclusively cloistered nuns, as Starr points out, the Indian-clad Virgin of Guadalupe of- in the Spanish Empire, but “activist” sisters who devoted fered “a bold counterstatement” to Mary as La Conquista- themselves to teaching, nursing and missionary work. In dora. “Beneath the surface of history,” adds Starr percep- future centuries their successors in numerous religious tively, “the Guadalupe devotion represented an apology, a communities of this type throughout Canada and the Unit- request for forgiveness and atonement” on the part of the ed States were to make an incalculable contribution to the descendants of the conquistadors. development of Catholicism in North America. Starr gives well-deserved attention to the history of As related by Starr, some of the more extravagant the short-lived French empire in North America, which features of 17th-century French piety appear to be an ac- survives today as a vibrant but heavily secularized Fran- quired taste that few 21st-century Catholics would care to cophone society in Québec, a French island in an English acquire. A case in point is St. Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, ocean. The story of France in colonial North America has a widow who became an Ursuline nun, leaving her 11-year- forever been connected with the exploits of the Society of old son in the care of an aunt. The boy spent three days Jesus, thanks to their own exhaustive documentation of outside the convent walls begging her to return. Years later, their efforts inThe Jesuit Relations and the compelling from Québec City, where she became an iconic figure, she tribute paid to them by Francis Parkman, a 19th-century told him that her dearest wish was that he should suffer a

“Fray Bartolomé de las Casas” by Felix Parra. Photo: Alejandro Linares Garcia Linares Alejandro Photo: Parra. Felix by de las Casas” Bartolomé “Fray Boston Brahmin, who overcame his innate prejudices to martyr’s death. offer them his grudging admiration. The scope of the mis- More to Starr’s liking than the grim penitential piety sionary endeavors of the Jesuits stretched from Acadia to of Mère Marie de l’Incarnation is the Christian humanist Wisconsin and from Ontario to the Mississippi Valley. Be- spirituality of the 18th-century French Jesuit savant, Père tween 1642 and 1649 no fewer than eight Jesuits died as Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, an explorer, geog- martyrs, five in Canada and three in modern-day New York rapher and historian. Starr calls him a “Jesuit philosophe” State. With pardonable exaggeration, George Bancroft because, in the age of the Enlightenment, he combined claimed that in the history of French Canada, “not a cape deep faith with massive erudition and wrote the first doc- was turned nor a river entered but a Jesuit led the way.” umentary history of Catholicism in French North Ameri- The establishment of Ville-Marie de Montréal (the fu- ca. This ephemeral French empire extended briefly from ture city of Montréal) in 1642 was unique, since the major Acadia to the Gulf of Mexico; but within the confines of the initiative came not from the French crown or hierarchy or present-day United States, most of it was an unsustainable any religious order but from the laity, specifically, the so- paper trail of isolated settlements, except for New Orle- called dévots—pious, wealthy and politically well-connect- ans, the city where Starr concludes his fascinating study of ed French lay men and women in Catholic-Reformation French colonial America and where both France and Spain France who envisioned Ville-Marie as a center for the evan- left a permanent imprint on English North America. gelization of the native population. They were soon joined In his treatment of English Catholic North Ameri-

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 39 ca, Starr graciously acknowledges his dependence on the publications of Robert Emmett Curran, especially his recent Papist Devils: Catholics in British North America, 1574-1783. Like Curran, Starr rightly gives pride of place to Maryland, the heartland of English-speaking Cathol- icism in North America and the only colony founded under Catholic auspices, a mere 14 years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Although Catholics never constituted more than 10 percent of the population, some of the wealthiest landowners were Catholics. As a result, in Maryland “property protected popery” and Catholics were never deprived of the ownership of the estates that were the source of their wealth during the religious persecution they suffered during much of the 18th century. Ironically, the colony where Catholics enjoyed the longest period of sustained religious toleration was not Maryland but Pennsylvania, where the Quakers set new standards of religious toleration, because they not only wanted freedom of conscience for themselves but were willing to grant it to others. Colonial Pennsylvania was also a harbinger of two of the most prominent features of 19th-century American Catholicism. Philadelphia became the first center of an urban American Catholic community, and the influx of German immigrants into southeastern Pennsylvania served as an announcement that American Catholicism was to be a multiethnic community. Starr ap- propriately concludes his book with the return of Father John Carroll from England to Maryland on the eve of the American Revolution, which was to usher in a new era not only in the history of the American people, but also a new era in the life of John Carroll and the history of the Catho- lic Church in North America. Starr’s comprehensive survey of colonial North Ameri- can Catholicism has many strengths, not the least of which is his ability to combine impressive research with meticulous attention to detail and an engaging literary style. Ignatius Press is to be congratulated for producing a strikingly hand- some book that includes numerous maps, dozens of color illustrations and a select bibliography as well as an extensive essay on sources and a comprehensive index. It should have a wide appeal. Kevin Starr was preparing a second volume at the time of his untimely death on Jan. 14, 2017.

Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, is professor emeritus of church history at Fordham University.

40 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG FORDHAM: A NEW YORK STORY By John T. McGreevy

The genre is not a distinguished one. Commissioned by backgammon. Or why some New York Jesuits in the 1930s university leaders to commemorate an anniversary, writ- could not be bothered to read, gulp, America. Or why Pope ten to meet the deadline of said anniversary, marketed Pius XI’s blessing of a seismograph on the Fordham cam- to alumni hazily aware of the anniversary, published by pus remains “one of the lesser tapped selections in the rep- a university press eager to capitalize on a captive alumni ertoire of papal blessings.” audience, scrutinized by aging ex-administrators who be- The story is in its way grand. After a failed beginning gin by searching for their name in the index, obligated to in, of all places, rural Kentucky, a group of Parisian Jesuits touch on each new program and each new president—all exiled from a turbulent and often anticlerical France saw in this works against the writing of a university history an or- the growth of New York City, populated in large part by im- dinary reader would want to, well, read. When I scanned poverished Catholic immigrants, an opportunity. The first the table of contents for Thomas Shelley’s new history of decades after the 1841 founding were inauspicious: feuds Fordham, and saw consecutive chapters on the history of with the overweening local archbishop, John Hughes, dual the law school, the school of social service and the gradu- campuses in lower Manhattan and the Bronx that divided ate school, I sighed. faculty attention and resources, and constant striving for That Shelley overcame these obstacles and produced a financial stability and academic respectability. lucid, coherent history is accomplishment enough. That he Neither stability nor respectability came easily. The did so with wit is even more gratifying. Shelley and I have American educational marketplace in the 19th century never had a conversation of more than two minutes, but I’m rewarded entrepreneurship—the state of Ohio claimed 37 willing to buy a drink for anyone who slyly wonders why colleges in 1900 while the nation of England possessed

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Chriscobar Wikimedia Photo: the first Jesuits at Fordham banned card playing but not four—but was also competitive. Fordham Jesuits, like their

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 41 Fordham few full-time faculty members per student, especially in the A History of the Jesuit professional schools, and even fewer books in the library. University of New York: For a time in the mid-1930s Fordham lost accreditation, 1841-2003 although it seems not to have affected already modest en- By Thomas J. Shelley rollments. Only in the 1940s, when Catholic G.I.s swarmed Fordham University Press. into Fordham and other Catholic colleges at government 536p $39.95 expense and Fordham was able to upgrade facilities and the quality of the faculty, did the accreditation tensions of the interwar period ease. Shelley’s superb research on Fordham’s early years Jesuit contemporaries up and down the Atlantic seaboard, pays significant dividends, but the 150 or so pages he takes strained to at once serve socially ascendant Irish and Ger- to arrive at the 20th century will deter some readers. And man Catholics contemplating sending their sons to Har- too often off-stage is New York City itself. To write the his- vard (as a surprising number did) and a socioeconomic tory of Columbia University for much of the 20th century, base firmly located on the lower rungs of the economic or New York University in the last 40 years, or even City ladder. New York’s most famous Catholic, Gov. Al Smith, University of New York during the 1930s and 1940s, is to whose own formal education ended with graduation from a write a partial history of the metropolis. Posing the ques- Catholic grade school on the Lower East Side, urged Ford- tion in regard to Fordham is no less interesting. How did ham leaders to prevent Catholic higher education from be- Fordham’s status as the city’s leading Catholic university, coming “the privilege of the few.” with a main campus in the Bronx, evolve in the context of Still, what had been a small college during the 19th New York’s unparalleled ethnic diversity? Did it matter century became a proper university in the first decades of that Fordham was located in the city that more than any the 20th century, with professional degrees in pharmacy, other shaped modern culture, from the arts to fashion? Or medicine and law. Even compared with its peers, however, that the campus was a subway ride away from the center of Fordham’s financial vicissitudes were startling. While tiny global finance? Canisius College in Buffalo raised one million dollars in the Hints of Fordham’s role in New York City do peek early 1920s, a “Greater Fordham” campaign totaled only through. Shelley notes, for example, that Jesuits in Rome $197,000 in cash after a year, one tenth of the announced in the 1930s, including the superior general or leader of goal of just under $2 million. One class of 1911 alumnus, a the Society, wanted to fire the dean of Fordham’s pharma- young, ambitious priest and future cardinal named Fran- cy school because it was thought inappropriate to have a cis Spellman, pledged $100 but coughed up only $25. The Jewish dean at a Catholic university. (Most of the students, medical school closed. During the Depression administra- interestingly, were also Jewish.) Fordham Jesuits rallied tors scrambled to avert bankruptcy. to their dean’s defense and described him in impassioned Academic respectability was also elusive. Into the letters as a man who had worked “early and late, night and 1930s administrators at Fordham tangled with regional ac- day” for Fordham’s betterment. In the end, the superior creditors. Some of the conflict was ideological. Accreditors general capitulated and the dean stayed. empowered by national associations of educators did not The episode begs for comment. At a moment when a warm to Fordham Jesuits defending the Ratio Studiorum nationalist anti-Semitism was sweeping through Europe (a prescribed sequence of Latin texts and language train- and infecting some Jesuit communities, Fordham’s Je- ing first developed in the 16th century) as an educational suits pleaded for a Jew to lead one of their colleges. Even ideal or their denigration of the “elective” system and the as the anti-Semitic Rev. Charles E. Coughlin became the conventional arrangement of academic departments. One most popular voice on the American radio airwaves, and an prominent Fordham Jesuit loudly described interest in re- especially popular voice among Irish Catholics, Jews and search as a “fetish.” Catholics seem to have studied together in the Bronx. Some of the conflict was structural. Fordham had too Equally interesting is the history of urban renewal.

42 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Readers familiar with Robert Caro’s monumental, scath- ning in 1974; administrative turmoil, including three Jesuit ing biography of Robert Moses will notice Shelley’s gentle presidents in 10 years; efforts by a newly emboldened state references to New York’s master builder. Moses, Mayor government to make taxpayer-funded scholarship monies Robert Wagner, Cardinal Spellman and Fordham lead- dependent on limiting the influence of “religion”; fierce ers together obtained for the university an extraordinary curricular debates; a belated but still powerful student seven and one-half acres in Midtown Manhattan in the protest movement centered on opposition to the Ameri- 1950s. The entire project, from the clearing of so-called can military presence in Vietnam; the descent of the Bronx slum neighborhoods to dedication ceremonies led by Earl into an emblem of urban devastation; and the cumulative Warren, chief justice of the United States, and Attorney effect of the departure of many Jesuits from the priesthood General Robert F. Kennedy, oozed New York Catholic in- and a dizzying drop in new religious vocations. fluence and a newly found ease in the corridors of power. It’s a wonder the place survived. And yet, buoyed by Moses enjoyed exchanging references to Virgil—in Lat- shrewd leadership and the resurgence in New York City’s in—in correspondence with Laurence McGinley, S.J., then fortunes, the place flourished. Shelley’s narrative ends in Fordham’s president. (McGinley also happily agreed to 2003, avoiding comment on the university’s current and chair the board of the new Center for the Performing Arts longstanding president, Joseph M. McShane, S.J. But to at Lincoln Center.) read the last chapters is to conclude that the academic rep- Shelley’s final chapters retain their verve even as the utation of the university has never been higher. Fordham interpretive task becomes more challenging. By 1960 Ford- remains one of the largest universities in the nation’s largest ham’s undergraduates were competing for the most presti- city, with vibrant undergraduate and professional programs gious national fellowships and the socioeconomic status of on two thriving campuses—the original campus at Rose their parents was improving (although family income lev- Hill in the Bronx, near the New York Botanical Garden and els for Fordham students still lagged below national aver- the Bronx Zoo, and the Manhattan campus containing the ages.) The finances of the university, though, remained un- School of Law and Fordham College at Lincoln Center. stable, with far fewer resources than the most elite private Catholic identity questions endure, encased in the universities (none of them Catholic) or well-funded state struggle of private universities to navigate high, fixed labor university flagships. costs, a necessary slowdown in tuition increases and com- Identity questions also became more pressing. Jesu- petition (demarcated in financial aid dollars) for students. its constituted fully 40 percent of the faculty at Fordham As harrowing as these challenges are for Fordham’s leaders College—the undergraduate liberal arts core—as late as and their peers across the country, reading Shelley’s Ford- 1960, although the percentage in the professional schools ham at least offers the comfort of even more formidable was much smaller. On average, they were better trained challenges overcome. Even the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, than the lay faculty as a generation of Jesuits followed the may offer solace. This defining moment in contemporary Jesuit superior general’s admonition to obtain Ph.D.’s and New York’s history was, sadly, a defining moment for Ford- not succumb to the idea that “they can serve God better by ham as well. A startling 39 Fordham graduates died at the work that seems to be more immediately priestly and ap- World Trade Center. Memorials on both Fordham cam- ostolic.” Still, the question of just what role a Catholic and puses pay tribute to their lives. And even these implicitly Jesuit university should play and whom it might educate recognize, as does Shelley’s history, the university’s cen- seemed less obvious in 1960 than it had during the hard- trality not only to New York’s recent past but to its foresee- scrabble Depression years. able future. The twin revolutions of the Second Vatican Council and the cultural changes of the 1960s made these questions even more pressing. A partial list of the storms weathered John T. McGreevy is the I. A. O’Shaughnessy dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. by a hypothetical Fordham trustee between 1965 and 1980, He is the author, most recently, of American Jesuits and the some only touched on by Shelley, would include: yet an- World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern other financial crisis; a bumpy start to co-education begin- Catholicism Global (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 43 BOOKS IN REVIEW

Theses were, according to the customs of the time, invitations to debate.

Martin Luther: hero, but no saint By George T. Deas

This is a book I have long needed to and from Luther, his sermons, mono- town of Mansfield. Here Martin lived read. Martin Luther is in the top tier graphs, reported “table talk” conver- well in a family of comfortable means. of 16th-century greats whose life, ac- sations and more than 100 of Luther’s His mother was an intelligent, pious tions and works forever changed the collected works. Add to those contem- woman, benign and a tad indulgent landscape of Christianity and, there- porary descriptions, reports and as- toward her eldest surviving son of six fore, all of Western civilization. Yet sessments by friends and enemies. (possibly seven) children. my knowledge of the man himself Roper has painstakingly re-creat- Hans Luther, Martin’s father, was was scant and tainted. In Luther the ed the world in which Martin Luther also religious, but his influence on his Great, Lyndal Roper, Regius Profes- was weaned, nurtured and fundamen- son was different. He was a strong, iras- sor of History at Oxford University, tally formed by love given and love cible, combative man who was clev- has provided a profound, unique and withheld as he grew to full stature as er and ambitious in business. He was intimate understanding of Martin Lu- a man. She enables us to view that also overbearing and exacting in a way ther “by placing him in the social and world with him as he, the principle that colored Martin’s entire life. Roper cultural context that formed him.” actor, becomes both a renegade and claims that this sometimes bitter rela- He has drawn from the wellsprings a prophet. With this approach, Rop- tionship played a very important role of psychoanalytic insights to provide er has set out to understand Luther in his religious and theological devel- a comprehensive embrace of the man himself, because it was his personality opment. She is careful to note that it whose revolutionary theology sprang that “had huge historical effects—for was by no means the total influence. from his very character. good and ill.” Martin was a deeply spiritual Roper uses a prodigious num- Beginning at Eisleben, where young person who felt duty-bound to ber of revealing primary sources and Martin was born to Margarethe and comply with his father’s wishes. Hans her expertise as a cultural historian Hans Luther on Nov. 10, 1483 (and provided a good education for his son, to accomplish this feat. Among those where he died on Feb. 18, 1546), Roper enabling him to achieve a master of sources are revealing letters both to takes us about 10 miles to the mining arts degreed at the University of Erfurt.

44 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Martin Luther Renegade and Prophet By Lyndal Roper Random House. 576p $25

The father wanted his son to become a that it was not his sexuality or concerns lawyer. Roper maintains that his pur- about celibacy that bothered him. It pose was essentially self-interested; he was more a kind of oppressive pater- planned for Martin to protect and pro- nal authority. Eventually, it fueled re- mote his mining enterprises. bellion and the affixing of the famous Divine intervention, so young “Ninety-Five Theses” to the door of the Martin claimed, changed all that. A All Saints Church in Wittenberg. trio of adverse incidents touched the These theses were, according to emerging adult to life-altering effect. the customs of the time, invitations to First, Martin was profoundly sad- debate. Their tenor, however, was ten- dened to the point of melancholy by dentiously heretical. They attacked the the death of a close friend; second, penitential system of the church, with he felt he was cured of a serious acci- particular emphasis on indulgences dental wound by calling on Mary, the and the selling thereof. They implied mother of Jesus, to save him; third, a denunciation of papal authority and, solutely clear and plain. When he ex- and most important, he was res- ultimately, the papacy itself. perienced this insight, he felt free at cued from a violent, menacing thun- As Roper describes him, his de- last, free from external parental con- der-and-lightning storm as he was bating style was charismatic and his straints in all its forms. He was free returning to Erfurt from Mansfield. material substantial; but his manner before God because he came to identi- Roper reminds us that 16th-century of presentation included personal in- fy himself with the Word of God, Jesus Christians strongly believed that the vective, bullying, acerbic, sometimes Christ, by incorporating that Word Devil caused the wild, turbulent con- crude insults and loud recriminations. expressed in the Bible. ditions of these raging storms. Cower- He was a powerful presence. Roper Baptism and the real presence ing with fear, Martin called out to St. carefully avoids taking sides, but she of Jesus in the bread and wine trans- Anna, the mother of Mary and patron greatly admires his clarity of thought formed into the body and blood of of miners, vowing that if she saved his and emphatically his heroic stance of Christ in the celebration of the Lord’s life, he would become a monk. She did speaking truth to power. It was, after Supper were the two sacraments that and he did. all, a power that had the ability and the perdured in Martin’s theology. He Roper contends that in a major act will to burn him at the stake. lamented that many who claimed to of defiance and disobedience, Martin Tracing some of his thought to follow his reformation did not ac- entered the Augustinian order at age St. Augustine, the author takes us to cept the real presence of Christ in the 21. Hans claimed the whole event was a source of his theological belief that bread and wine. He remained stead- a trick of the Devil. Later on, after he human nature was evil and then to his fast in that belief to the end. abjured his vows, Martin suggested theology of salvation by faith alone in Oddly, Roper uses the word mir- this may have been the case. He did, in Jesus Christ and the revealed word of acle in discussing what the celebrant fact, suffer obsessive thoughts about God, the Bible. Human nature by it- does in this celebration. Apart from the Devil all his life. self could do no good, and human rea- the poetical or rhetorical usage, Cath- The rules and demands of mo- son was vain. olics and Catholic theologians do not nastic life weighed heavily on his con- From this vantage point, Rop- consider that most important, indeed, science. From the descriptions we are er explains what Martin meant by momentous sacramental action a mir- given of his practice of consulting his conscience: the individual’s internal acle. Catholics believe it is an every- confessor too frequently, we can infer knowledge of the objective meaning day event effected by the will of Jesus

“Luther’s Theses,” by Ferdinand Pauwels. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Arianus Wikimedia Photo: Pauwels. Ferdinand by Theses,” “Luther’s that he was scrupulous. Roper insists of God’s word, whose meaning is ab- Christ and the instrumentality of the

Spring 2017 AMERICA | 45 priest. The consecration of the bread piano contest also seemed slated for and wine into the body and blood of the desired outcome because many Jesus Christ is not verifiable by any of the compulsory pieces were part of natural means. the standard Soviet repertoire, Soviet Helpful illustrations abound with and East Bloc judges dominated, and explanations in this fine work. Except Soviet expressive preferences were for one short trip to Rome as a young different from those in other parts monk, Luther’s entire life was circum- of the world. Certainly no one ex- scribed by a few cities in Germany. A pected the American pianist Van Cl- map of 16th-century Germany would iburn—a 23-year-old from Texas who have been most helpful. had been a stand-out at the Juilliard Martin Luther was a great man. School but was having some chal- His mind had elements of genius. It lenges in the early years of his profes- was fertile, imaginative, artistic and sional career—to best the Soviets at prolific. He forced a church much in their own somewhat fixed game, and need of reformation ultimately to re- no one could have predicted that his form itself. In doing so, he split Chris- victory would pave the way then and tendom and splintered Christianity, later for bridge-building between so- with effects both good and bad. In spite Moscow Nights cieties and even superpower leaders. of his dour, gloomy and cynical view of The Van Cliburn Story But those expectations missed ways human nature, he had a remarkable How One Man and His Piano in which Cliburn could appeal to and beautiful understanding of sexual Transformed the Cold War Russian national pride and sensibil- love and human sexuality. By Nigel Cliff ities. As Cliff explains in his account Roper considers him a hero and a HarperCollins 434p $28.99 of Soviet media coverage of Cliburn man of many parts. But she declares during the competition: unambiguously he was no saint. His hatred for the pope and the papacy Music key ...increasingly, they down- was vitriolic; and with equal vehe- to a Cold War thaw played his Americanness, mence, he leveled that vile sentiment reminding readers and lis- By Lisa A. Baglione at the Jews. It never abated. He car- teners that his teacher, albeit ried anger with him until he died. Like With the 25th anniversary of the fall an émigré, was Russian and his father, he was irascible, combative, of the Soviet Union approaching and that his mother’s teacher had overbearing and exacting. In a word, the Cold War fading into history, Ni- been Russian, too. To their he was a renegade and a prophet. gel Cliff’s enjoyable book shows how great satisfaction, they dis- In reading this book I have come that rivalry was all-encompassing, covered that Van was really a to understand and know Martin Lu- even reaching to the arts. In 1958, great Russian pianist after all. ther much better. I admire him, and I about a half year after the U.S.S.R.’s From there it was only a step am in awe of his stature in all that has successful launching of Sputnik, the to anointing him their own unfolded from his time. I would like to Soviets established the International Soviet pianist. have been a guest at one of his famous Tchaikovsky Competition to tout the “table talk” dinners, but I don’t think superiority of their pianists and vio- At the height of the Cold War, I would have enjoyed being alone with linists. Given the international rela- awarding the top prize to an American him at breakfast. tions of the time as well as the nature was remarkable. It required political of Soviet politics, everyone expected permission at the highest levels, and The Rev. George T. Deas is a pastor a Soviet to win, and one was victori- the Communist Party leader Nikita emeritus in the Diocese of Brooklyn. ous in the violin competition. The Khrushchev readily embraced Cli-

46 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 47 burn’s talent and the potential for ex- two leaders with very different per- ploiting the young man’s victory as a sonalities and ideologies, Mikhail way to underline fairness in the U.S.S.R Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, as the and a means for promoting Khrush- U.S.-Soviet rivalry was waning. chev’s goals of de-Stalinization. In many ways, Cliburn slipped In Cliff’s telling, Van Cliburn be- quietly away like the Cold War. As the came a darling of the Soviets, a person author himself notes, Cliff was inspired who never fully understood the inten- to write about the pianist after reading sity and pervasiveness of the Cold War. his obituary. Some of Cliff’s final words, His attempts to reach out to citizens written for the book’s “Coda,” are espe- and Communist leaders provoked the cially appropriate today as we try to Central Intelligence Agency, the Fed- understand that conflictual period, Cl- eral Bureau of Investigation and even iburn’s role in it and the lessons the pi- some U.S. presidents. But while con- anist’s victory gives for contemporary servative American officials worried relations with Russia: about his outreach to their enemy and Van Cliburn’s secret was that he his talk about the universal language lovingly played back to Russia the of music, they were happy to have passionate, soul-searching intensity The Man Who Invented Fiction Cliburn as a symbol of achievement, that was its culture’s greatest contri- How Cervantes Ushered in the as well as a bulwark against cultural bution to the world, while embody- Modern World change coming from the likes of Elvis, ing the freedom that most Americans By William Egginton the Beatles and others. took for granted and the Soviets sore- Bloomsbury. 272p $12 What is remarkable about Cli- ly lacked. It was a devastating combi- burn’s story and Cliff’s account of it nation, and so simple that it was al- are the ways in which his career in- most certainly unrepeatable. The literary genius tersected with the ups and downs Relations between the United of Cervantes of the superpower rivalry. For those States and Russia today are at their D. Scott Hendrickson, S.J. not conversant with Soviet politics lowest point since the Cold War. While or Cold War history, Cliff does a good there is no Van Cliburn to be a bridge, The early years of the 17th century were job explaining Soviet leadership con- his story reminds us that mutual re- tumultuous ones for Spain. The nation flicts, constructing his narrative with spect as well as commitment to funda- was still in shock after the staggering the help of archival research and re- mental American values are essential defeat given to its Catholic armada off spected secondary sources. He also for creating a relationship that will the coast of England; entire sectors of digs into Cliburn’s past by not only benefit Americans and Russians alike. the population had been expelled un- consulting major biographies but also der the guise of blood purity; cities fell Lisa A. Baglione is a political science tracking down records at Juilliard and victim to plague and economic ruin; professor at St. Joseph’s University in interviewing competitors. At times, Philadelphia. even the royal court would uproot itself the work reads a bit like a highbrow in a move from Madrid to Valladolid “Forrest Gump” situated at the cen- and back again to Madrid. Meanwhile, ter of the Cold War, with Cliburn political authority in the Iberian Pen- showing up at many major occasions insula and Spanish territories through- of superpower competition. Remark- out Europe began to crumble just as ably, though, Cliburn was there at very quickly as it had been established. important times, for instance when Yet these are the years that culti- Cliburn’s playing helped ease tensions vated Spain’s Golden Age of literary at a December 1987 summit between production, the events that gave shape

48 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 49 to literary genius, the soil that nur- we now understand to be fiction, but new to say about the impact of Don tured what would come to be known it also seizes the paradox by portray- Quixote. Where Egginton succeeds, as the first modern novel:El Ingenio- ing how it happened—at the hand of however, is in the way he weaves de- so Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Man- a spent man—in the “world’s most finitive biographical accounts with the cha. The impact Miguel de Cervantes powerful empire” that was beginning scholarship of historians, literary crit- and his most famous novel have had to wallow in the landscape of its own ics, Hispanists and, more specifically, over four centuries and the histor- decadence and disillusionment. Cervantistas into a compelling and ical moment in which it happened In a note to his readers, Egginton fresh take on the author and his nov- are precisely what William Egginton is careful to mention that his book el. Published in 2016, The Man Who captures so well in The Man Who In- makes “no claim to revealing any- Invented Fiction commemorates the vented Fiction. He begins by stating thing new” about who Cervantes was. fourth centenary of the death of Cer- how “something strange happened in In this sense, it is not a biography but vantes, dovetailing with the year that the winter of 1605,” as Cervantes was an account of how Cervantes came celebrated the fourth centenary of handing the manuscript to the man to be the one who created fiction as Part Two of Don Quixote, in 2015—the who would print it. That “something we know it today. Rightfully, readers same year the lost remains of the au- strange” refers to the birth of what might still question if there is anything thor were identified in the Trinitarias convent in Madrid. In eight well-researched chapters, LOURDES, 1955 Egginton maps the life of Cervantes and shows how it was just as tumul- (Bouts-rimes – after Seamus Heaney) tuous as the political, economic, social and religious climate in which he By Steven DeLaney lived. Egginton explains how throughout his life Cervantes moved from one The details of where they stayed, the places city to another in Spain—from Alcalá Of pilgrimage, petition, the wet touch to Valladolid and on to Madrid, with Of Lourdes soaking to her skin, the hutch stays in Córdoba, Sevilla, Granada Where they waited out the rain, these mysteries and Valencia, and how as a soldier he was based in Naples, fought at Lep- Still possible, still unknown—sixty years ago. anto, was held captive in Algiers and The cancer in her breast felt hard as stone. also considered sailing to the Amer- Outside the shrine, the fields were full of grain, icas. But as he maps the landscape of And he wrote this diary so their sons would know. Cervantes’s life, Egginton pairs it with that of another, the literary landscape On the long trip home they stopped in Glanmore of 17th-century Spain, highlighting Where no miracles are known. Farmers raise both the failures and successes Cer- vantes had in poetry, drama and prose. Sheep white as light, and the old men, like chanters, By pulling together the scarce facts Talk them through the shearing, talking to appease. known about Cervantes, Egginton They stood for a while on the open ground, brings them to life in the literary cul- The sheep, like silent clouds, gathering round. ture of early modern Spain and makes sense of his contribution to it. Steven DeLaney works in parish ministry and lives with his wife and two Chapter Five, “All the World’s a sons in Williamsburg, Va. A teacher and retreat leader, he writes poetry Stage,” portrays the importance the- and is finishing his first novel. Twitter: @TweetOfJustice. ater held in Spanish culture and how Cervantes strove to participate in it

50 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 51 with his own works of drama. At the Quixote, he lays a solid foundation for times we must remember that it was same time, he sheds light on how Cer- his main point, that with his uncannily Cervantes who invented fiction, that so vantes and other playwrights aimed human characters Cervantes was able much of what he wrote was a product of to create believable characters with to engage readers at a whole new level. imaginative genius, Egginton convinc- whom their audiences were meant Egginton’s strong suit is his ability to ingly weaves together the biographical to relate. But Egginton also portrays pull all the sources together and show and literary landscapes of Miguel de how Cervantes went further than his how Cervantes’s other works relate to Cervantes and the Spanish Golden Age contemporaries, how he “pushed the Don Quixote. According to Egginton, to say just that. technique to another level, using the fiction is “a picture of how we, and D. Scott Hendrickson, S.J., assistant very idea of theater to explore the others, picture the world; the truths it professor of Spanish and graduate complexity of social role playing and tells are not the factual ones of histo- program director at Loyola University its effects on the perception of reality.” ry, or the more philosophical ones of Chicago, is the author of Jesuit Polymath Chapter Six, “Of Shepherds, Knights, poetry, but the subjective truths that of Madrid: The Literary Enterprise of and Ladies,” sets both Cervantes and can be revealed only when we suspend Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658). Don Quixote in the wider context of our disbelief and imagine ourselves early modern prose and the idealistic as someone completely different.” He characters portrayed in the pastoral concludes by underscoring how in- romance, but also tells how Cervantes novative Cervantes was, because his again pushed the limits with his own fiction “helped its readers formulate novel of this type: “No longer the stan- the modern idea of reality (what hap- dard cutouts of pastoral convention, pens independent of what we think),” the poets in La Galatea become char- which was to become “central to all acters precisely to the extent that they modern thought, and to all fiction become aware of their conventional written in his wake.” trappings.” Chapter Seven, “A Rogue’s Since relatively little hard data Gallery,” compares the prose of Cer- is known about the life of Cervantes, vantes to the newly popular genre of especially surrounding his education, the picaresque novel, which portrays Egginton faces the challenge of creat- the societal roles people were meant ing a healthy tension between fact and to represent in public and the disillu- conjecture garnered from historical sionment that comes along with the circumstances and the passages Cer- understanding one has of being part of vantes included in his works. For ex- a farce. Here, too, Egginton shows how ample, while it is not known for certain Cervantes gave a deeper dimension to that Cervantes was a student in a co- his characters, “whose startling real- legio of the Society of Jesus, Egginton Signals ism, ironic awareness, and vivid emo- makes light of how “likely” or “plausi- New and Selected Stories tion burst forth.” ble” it was, given the time he spent in By Tim Gautreaux The autobiographical connec- Córdoba and Sevilla as a boy, and his Knopf. 384p $26.95 tions Egginton makes between Cer- mention of Jesuit teachers in the “Ex- vantes the author and Cervantes the emplary Novel” Rinconete y Cortadillo. role player, the idealist and even the Attention is also given to the influence The Samaritan imprisoned rogue in his works are family members may have had on the impulse well founded. By placing emphasis on development of his characters. Re- Cervantes’s literary innovation across garding the plight of jilted women, he By Dennis Vellucci several genres, and how it contributed suggests that “Cervantes may well have “The Reluctant Samaritan” would to the fiction he would create in Don had his own sisters in mind.” While at be an apt alternate title for Tim

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Spring 2017 AMERICA | 53 Gautreaux’s illuminating and enter- surface of things and ignored what was that ever lived?” Amos Oz actually taining collection populated by char- inside,” Gautreaux writes. In these 21 goes beyond pity to make Judas a hero acters who are drawn, often grudging- stories, characters look deeply enough and martyr. A novel of ideas—reli- ly and but ineluctably, into the lives of to recognize the needs and longings gious, philosophical and political—Ju- others. They restore not only antique of acquaintances and strangers. The das is so beautifully and simply told typewriters, sewing machines and connections they make improve their that I wished I could read Hebrew. radios, but also relationships, confi- beneficiaries’ lives even as they enno- With subtle irony and hints of magi- dence and faith. ble the benefactors themselves. cal realism, Judas is also the story of Though the outcome of their in- a young man’s coming of age in a cold tervention is usually salutary, their Dennis Vellucci is an administrator at and rainy Jerusalem in the late winter Archbishop Molloy High School in New doubts keep them humble. Take Mr. of 1959. York City. Todd of “The Furnace Man’s Lament” Three people—and two “ghosts”— who declines a plea to foster an or- live together in an old house on the phaned 15 year old but who takes the outskirts of the city near an abandoned boy under his professional wing as an Arab village. The ancient stone house apprentice and, by example, teaches has a broken front step and a gate that him the invaluable skill of bringing can be neither fully opened nor com- warmth to cold places. Years later, pletely closed, possibly a metaphor for when he learns that his protégé runs a Arab-Israeli relations; the Arabs can- successful heating business abroad, he not be fully welcomed, nor completely feels both pride and regret, wondering shut out. One of the three inhabitants if giving Jack a job when the boy need- is Shmuel Ash, a 20-something uni- ed a home was enough. Haunted by an versity drop-out, shy, asthmatic, easily opportunity lost, he wonders, “How moved to tears, who has left his home far do you have to go” in service to oth- in Haifa with two rolled up posters, one ers. This question resonates through- of Fidel Castro and the other a repro- out the collection. duction of the “Pieta.” The second is Gautreaux’s stories range from Gershon Wald, a garrulous old Zionist broadly comic to deeply tragic. The intellectual to whom Shmuel is a paid southern setting of many of the sto- companion. The third resident, Atalia ries, Gautreaux’s humor and irony, Abravanel, a beautiful woman in her and his adroit narrative structure in- 40s, is Wald’s widowed daughter-in- vite comparison to the work of Flan- Judas law. Her husband, Wald’s son, brutal- nery O’Connor. But his characters A Novel ly killed by Arabs in the 1948 War of are eccentrics, not grotesques, and he By Amos Oz Independence, is one of the “ghosts.” never succumbs to caricature. He’s Translated by Nicholas de Lange The other “ghost,” Atalia’s late father, funny but not mean, and he passes on Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 320p $17 Shealtiel Abravanel, suffered a polit- to the reader his generosity of spirit ical death in 1947 when his rejection towards his imperfect but decent folk. of the Jewish state and his belief in Ar- The snares of loneliness, desperation The first and last ab-Israeli friendship caused Israelis to and stagnation lurk in the corners of label him a “traitor.” Abravanel did not Gautreaux’s universe, but are usually Christian? believe in states. “Let us live here next circumvented by the Samaritan im- By Gail Lumet Buckley to each other and among each other,” pulse. Even domestic life, filled with I confess to having felt the occasion- he said: “Jews and Arabs, Christians disappointment, can be revitalized as al twinge of pity for Judas. He might and Muslims, Druze and Circassians, surely as ancient artifacts. easily have said, “Why me, Lord? Why Greeks and Latins and Armenians.” “Too many people glanced at the did I have to become the worst person “I love Israel, but I don’t like it very

54 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 55 blood like the rest of us. Greater than us, more wonderful than us, immea- I confess to having felt surably deeper than all of us, but flesh and blood.” All that remains is for Ju- das to hang himself from a fig tree. the occasional twinge of Meanwhile, the old man and the young man love to talk. Only the woman, who is mostly silent, has her feet pity for Judas. on the ground. But Wald warns Ash not to fall in love with his daughter-in- law—as all his former paid compan- much” said Amos Oz in an interview mans alike, would climb down from ions have done. Yet Ash is fascinated in 2016 in The Guardian. It would be the cross to announce the kingdom of by Atalia, who either ignores him or easy to love Abravanel’s country: “He heaven—when “love alone would rule treats him with gentle mockery. He loved the mountains of Galilee and the the world.” But Jesus did not come dreams of a love affair, but the most he slopes of the valleys and the Carmel…. down from the cross, and Judas loses can do in his shy clumsiness is mildly He loved Jerusalem and the desert and everything he believed in, as well as amuse her by making paper boats to the little Arab villages on the coastal the will to live. For Ash, Judas is “the sail across the kitchen table. “You’re plain and in the foothills.” It would also first Christian. The last Christian. The not a young man,” she says. “You’re an be easy to dislike the same country, only Christian.” If only the Jews had old child.” When he is totally helpless, described by Abravanel as “given over accepted Jesus, he argues, “the whole his leg in a cast from tripping over the to the worship of militarism, drunk on of history would have been different. broken front step, she finally seduces victory, and consumed by hollow chau- There would never have been a Chris- him—but does not allow him to speak vinistic euphoria.” tian Church. And the whole of Europe and, tellingly, covers her father’s pho- Ash is intrigued by Abravanel might have adopted a milder, purer tograph. She does offer solace, how- because he is obsessed by the idea form of Judaism. And we would have ever: “The city is full of girls…. You’re of treachery. Wald, the atheist who been spared exile, persecutions, po- a tender-hearted generous boy. Girls likes nothing better than arguing on groms, the Inquisition, blood libels, love those qualities because they are the telephone with “old enemies,” re- and even the Holocaust.” so rare in men.” sponds with amused sarcasm as Ash A chapter is devoted to the At the end of the winter rains, expounds on his two passions: a book post-crucifixion Judas, wracked with Ash decides to leave Jerusalem. He he wants to write called “Jewish Views guilt, unable to escape the screams in had no idea where to go, but “felt that of Jesus,” stressing the fact that Jesus, his head of Jesus crying for his moth- the opinions he had held since his always a Jew, never wanted to start a er—not his father. “I murdered him,” youth were fading.” He cannot finish new religion; and the idea that Judas, Judas says to himself. “He did not his “Jewish Views of Jesus,” because who loved Jesus “much more” than want to go to Jerusalem and I dragged there was “no end to that story.” Leav- he loved God, has always been misun- him there.” Although Jesus “knew ing his posters of Fidel and the “Pieta” derstood. If Judas had not betrayed from the outset the limits of his pow- behind but taking his typewriter, he Jesus, Ash argues, there would have ers,” Judas believed that “death could goes south by bus to one of the new been no crucifixion and, therefore, not touch him.” Judas remembers towns to find his future. The land- no Christianity. He even argues that that Jesus had cursed a fig tree for not scape is familiar, between the natural the greatest betrayal of all time was bearing fruit. “Why did he curse the beauty of ancient hills, vineyards and really an effort to prove that Jesus tree? Had he forgotten his own gospel eucalyptus groves and the man-made was the Son of God. Judas was able to and become full of cruelty and loath- ugliness of tract houses, ruined Arab betray, Ash says, because he was sure ing?” Judas should have seen that, “af- villages and barbed wire. He sees a that Jesus, astounding Jews and Ro- ter all, he was no more than flesh and pretty young woman at a window.

56 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 57 He wants to talk to her but, still shy, to read, and it metamorphoses into vous, sweet-natured boy who died far doesn’t know what to say. Ash fac- something oddly shaped and vaguely too young. es the future without the baggage of antique, a necklace discovered at an No one feels this more than his fa- youth. “And he stood wondering,” is antebellum estate sale, rustic pearls ther, nor mourns him harder. The por- the last line of the book. of dialogue and historical baubles trait of the president—acutely aware gracefully strung across 343 pages of that through the war he is visiting on Gail Lumet Buckley is the author of The a sometimes fleshy, violent storyline. hundreds of thousands the almost un- Hornes: An American Family and Blacks And never mind a play: It would have bearable grief he is feeling himself—is in Uniform: From Bunker Hill to Desert Storm. to be a movie. Given the number of so monumentally sorrowful it will levitations, transformations and trans- cause the reader to rest the book on migrations, the special effects would be his or her chest and take a breath. This spectacular. is not because Saunders puts so many But on second thought, or third, sorrowful words into Lincoln’s mouth. perhaps it is a novel. Conventional Rather—and this is true of much of the thinking—though Lincoln in the Bar- book—it is because the constraints of do is anything but conventional—says the antique diction Saunders gives his that characters in a novel have to grow, characters, as well as the overly cau- learn, to experience some kind of epic tious respect that chroniclers afforded realization. And they certainly do. The Lincoln in the contemporaneous his- uncertain souls involved have to come torical excerpts, are not enough to hold to terms with what we readers know back the enormity of feeling Lincoln from the start, and which is no small evoked in those writers who watched matter: They are not “sick,” as they him mourn. The emotion overflows the keep insisting. They are dead. style; the second-person accounts be- The book boasts a Bruegel-esque come more poignant than any first-per- array of characters—refined, vulgar, son testimony could possibly be. saintly, criminal—but the Lincoln of There is a germ of historical truth the title is, no surprise, the 16th presi- that serves as the foundation of the en- dent of the United States. The Bardo— tire novel (O.K., it is a novel). Lincoln’s the term is Tibetan for the place, or colossal mourning became a kind of Lincoln in the Bardo space, between life and its aftermath— mania. In the days following Willie’s A Novel is in this case a Washington, D.C., cem- death—which occurs off-screen, so to By George Saunders Random House. 343p $28 etery circa 1862, occupied by, among speak, and rightly so—Lincoln returned others, Willie Lincoln, the president’s to the graveyard in the night, visiting beloved 11-year-old son, who died of Willie in his crypt, cradling the body in Between heaven typhoid fever not long after his father his arms. In Lincoln in the Bardo, this started waging his Civil War. brings some comfort to the man, less to and hell, a half-lit Willie, as someone recalls (from the boy, who watches, frustrated by his existence among the many chunks of actual his- inability to reach his father. But it thor- torical writing Saunders plucks from oughly amazes the population of the By John Anderson American literature’s ocean of Lin- Bardo: They have never seen this hap- It is unclear at first blush, or even sec- coln-iana, and scatters throughout pen, the living visiting the...well, dead is ond, that George Saunders’s first novel, the book), was the kind of child peo- not a word they use. They swarm Wil- Lincoln in the Bardo, is actually a novel. ple imagine their children will be. The lie upon his father’s departure, trying Flip through the book, and it looks like reader will actively mourn Willie, who to learn something. It has given them a play, or perhaps an epic poem. Start was by all accounts a gentle, mischie- hope, which is an epic cruelty in itself.

58 | AMERICAMAGAZINE.ORG Spring 2017 AMERICA | 59 They are in that quaint place, lim- though he might respond if asked. He his marriage, was interrupted when a bo—though what keeps them there, never is. beam dropped from the ceiling. He de- ironically enough, is their own free will, Among Saunders’s many gifts (his scribes the odd experience of being laid or in some cases obstinacy. Or fear: vaunted short-story collections in- out in the parlor, with no one listening The crimes in their past are sometimes clude Pastoralia and Tenth of Decem- to his pleas. minor, sometimes awful; a half-lit ex- ber) is one for gracefully teasing out They’re kidding themselves. And, istence, they seem to think, might be information in a manner that provides as Saunders might say, aren’t we all? better than the alternatives that lie curiosity and suspense and resolve What Willie, in his youth and naïveté, beyond. The Joycean “matterlight- into revelations. The inhabitants of the provides these hardened veterans of blooming phenomenon” that serves Bardo, like its longtime residents Hans Limbo—and their audience—is a cata- as an overture to a Bardo inhabitant’s Vollman and Roger Bevins III, do not lyzing element that upends a darkened departure from the cemetery inspire reveal more than they want to about corner of the afterlife, and the mind, awe and dread: Where do these souls their painfully interrupted lives—Bev- and slaps self-deluders in the face. In go? Bardo-ites are unsure they lived ins, for instance, who was gay and com- the process, he pulls together a book well, so they refuse to admit their sta- mitted suicide over a lost love, and still that is rich in riotous, terrible, spiri- tus, though they can leave at any time— thinks he is on the floor of his family tually disturbing moments, gathered for Paradise (it seems like Paradise, in home, waiting to be discovered, wor- from both the living and the dead. Saunders’s baroque description) or for ried about the mess his mother will a Hell that would make Dante proud. find. Vollman, a 46-year-old newly- John Anderson is a film critic and God is silent about the alternatives, wed who was about the consummate frequent contributor to America.

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Spring 2017 AMERICA | 61 LAST WORD

The Garden of Learning How to cultivate a love for reading in children

By Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill

Springtime, as 2 Samuel 11 famously taste and see, they touch and they gins to blossom, nourish this growth announces, is “the time when kings hear. Babies respond to books with with more sophisticated language, go out to do battle.” The less pugilis- human faces and vivid pictures, and complex narratives and challenging tic among us may instead take up our they love movement, rhyme and music plots. The Little House on the Prairie pruning hooks and plowshares and at- (there is a reason that nursery rhymes books, Rick Riordan’s Lightning Thief tack our gardens. We cultivate the soil, have staying power). Plant your baby series that draws on Greek mythology, carefully place the seeds or saplings in your lap, for loving and learning Anthony Horowitz’s thrillers—these in the ground and nurture the young are profoundly linked. Whether a are among the many books you can plants along, anticipating the day when toddler perched on a father’s lap or suggest for your increasingly indepen- we will reap a bounteous harvest. a first-grader leaning on a mother’s dent reader. Try to find books marked Helping a child develop a love of shoulder, a child who is read to by peo- by writing that is beautiful and strong, reading and of literature is not so dif- ple he or she loves in a cozy and inti- with wide-ranging vocabulary and ferent from cultivating a garden. And mate reading environment will asso- syntax that has some integrity. so, in the spirit of the upcoming plant- ciate reading with close relationships, Kill the weeds. In 21st-centu- ing season, I offer some tips for grow- and that is all to the good. ry gardens, the riffraff that is most ing strong readers. Feed the young plants. From an likely to threaten your developing Prepare the soil. Read, yourself, early age, children absorb the ethos reader is of an electronic nature. Too early and often. Have books around the of the books they encounter. Nourish much attachment to screens—smart- place. A child born into a house where your growing reader with the bright phones, tablets or televisions—can books are both used and cherished is cheery colors of a Lucy Cousins pic- choke a child’s enthusiasm for books. a child who matures in a fertile envi- ture book about birds, continue with Set firm limits to prevent electronic ronment for producing readers. While the lift-the-flapWhere’s Spot? series overgrowth. In my house, depending the value of reading to a baby in utero and Rosemary Wells’s redoubtable on the stage of life and the particular has not been definitively determined, it Max and Ruby stories, and move on child, we had a screen-time to book- cannot hurt! A caveat, however: I read to the witty rhymes and sympathet- time policy of 1:1 or 1:2. Yeats and Shakespeare aloud repeated- ic characters of Bill Peet or the dy- Enjoy the fruits. With proper soil ly throughout my first pregnancy; that namic duo of Henry and his big dog, preparation, planting techniques, cul- child has grown up to labor in the fields Mudge. As they pore over the pictures tivation and weeding, your garden will of professional baseball, rather than in and match them to the words you are produce children who are animated, the groves of English literature. There reading aloud, your stripling readers curious and engaged readers and lov- are no guarantees! will not only be acquiring language, ers of literature. Spades at the ready? Plant the seeds. Stock a baby’s they will also unconsciously be learn- Let’s get started. starter library with board books, bath ing lessons of empathy, kindness, re- books, books that can be gnawed silience and love for the natural world. Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is an author, on, drooled over, hurled to the floor, Strengthen the plants as they grow: lecturer and biblical scholar. squeezed and loved. Reading for in- As your reader deepens his or her fants is a fully sensory activity: they roots, develops a strong core and be-

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