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In the May 4, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the lives and work of the Brontë sisters on the occasion of Winifred Gérin’s then-new biography of Emily (preceded by Gérin’s biographies of Anne, Branwell, and Charlotte, and followed in 1973 by her group biography The Brontës). In this episode of Private Life, Hardwick’s essay is read by Kathleen Chalfant, an actress who has appeared in television, in film, and in stage productions on and off Broadway. She is currently performing in New York in the Playwrights Horizons production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs, and she recently starred in Sarah Friedland’s film Familiar Touch (2024).

This reading serves as an accompaniment to the Private Life episode featuring Darryl Pinckney discussing his close friendship with Hardwick. You can also read “Working Girls: The Brontës” here on our website.

The post From the Archive: “Working Girls: The Brontës” appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Katherine Anne Porter, from the first appearance of her stories, made her mark, impressed other writers, by the way she wrote. It is not easy to define the purity of style. The writing is not plain and yet it is not especially decorative either; instead it is clear, fluent, almost untroubled, one might say. Everything necessary seems at hand: language and scenery, psychology and memory, and a bright esthetic intelligence that shapes the whole. Sometimes she claimed to have written certain stories at one sitting, but it is known that many were started and abandoned, taken up again and made into something new. She was dilatory perhaps, but the completed work as we now have it does not reveal any deformation of character, and indeed is quite expansive enough in theme and achievement to satisfy the claims of her high reputation. She was very vain as a beauty and just as vain as a writer, and this latter vanity perhaps accounted for a good deal of the waiting and stalling, a stalling filled with romantic diversions.

—Elizabeth Hardwick, 1982

“You didn’t get my note,” he said. “I left it under the door. I was called back suddenly to camp for a lot of inoculations. They kept me longer than I expected, I was late. I called the office and they told me you were not coming in today. I called Miss Hobbe here and she said you were in bed and couldn’t come to the telephone. Did she give you my message?” 

“No,” said Miranda drowsily, “but I think I have been asleep all day. Oh, I do remember. There was a doctor here. Bill sent him. I was at the telephone once, for Bill told me he would send an ambulance and have me taken to the hospital. The doctor tapped my chest and left a prescription and said he would be back, but he hasn’t come.” 

“Where is it, the prescription?” asked Adam. 

“I don’t know. He left it, though, I saw him.” 

Adam moved about searching the tables and the mantelpiece. “Here it is,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I must look for an all-night drug store. It’s after one o’clock. Good-by.” 

Good-by, good-by. Miranda watched the door where he had disappeared for quite a while, then closed her eyes, and thought, When I am not here I cannot remember anything about this room where I have lived for nearly a year, except that the curtains are too thin and there was never any way of shutting out the morning light. Miss Hobbe had promised heavier curtains, but they had never appeared when Miranda in her dressing gown had been at the telephone that morning. Miss Hobbe had passed through, carrying a tray. 

“My dear child,” she said sharply, with a glance at Miranda’s attire, “what is the matter?” 

Miranda, with the receiver to her ear, said, “Influenza, I think.” 

“Horrors,” said Miss Hobbe, in a whisper, and the tray wavered in her hands. “Go back to bed at once… go at once.” 

“I must talk to Bill first,” Miranda had told her, and Miss Hobbe had hurried on and had not returned. Bill had shouted directions at her, promising everything, doctor, nurse, ambulance, hospital, her check every week as usual, everything, but she was to get back to bed and stay there. 

*

“I’ve got your medicine,” said Adam, “and you’re to begin with it this minute.”

“So it’s really as bad as that,” said Miranda. 

“It’s as bad as anything can be,” said Adam, “all the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night—” 

“But not one for me,” said Miranda, feeling hilarious and lightheaded. She sat up and beat her pillow into shape and reached for her robe. “You’re running a risk,” she told him, “don’t you know that?”

“Never mind,” said Adam, “take your medicine,” and offered her two large cherry-colored pills. She swallowed them promptly and instantly vomited them up. “Do excuse me,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I’m so sorry.” Adam without a word and with a very concerned expression washed her face with a wet towel, gave her some cracked ice from one of the packages, and firmly offered her two more pills. 

“This time last night we were dancing,” said Miranda. Her eyes followed him about the room; now and again he would come back, and slipping his hand under her head, would hold a cup or a tumbler to her mouth, and she drank, without a clear notion of what was happening. 

He pulled the covers about her and held her, and said, “Go to sleep, darling, darling—” 

Almost with no warning at all, she floated into the darkness, holding his hand, in sleep that was not sleep but clear evening light in a small green wood, an angry dangerous wood full of inhuman concealed voices singing sharply like the whine of arrows and she saw Adam transfixed by a flight of these singing arrows that struck him in the heart and passed shrilly cutting their path through the leaves. Adam fell straight back before her eyes, and rose again unwounded and alive; another flight of arrows loosed from the invisible bow struck him again and he fell, and yet he was there before her untouched in a perpetual death and resurrection. She threw herself before him, angrily and selfishly she interposed between him and the track of the arrow, crying, No, no, like a child cheated in a game. It’s my turn now, why must you always be the one to die? and the arrows struck her cleanly through the heart and through his body and he lay dead, and she still lived, and the wood whistled and sang and shouted, every branch and leaf and blade of grass had its own terrible accusing voice. 

She ran then, and Adam caught her in the middle of the room, running, and said, “Darling, I must have been asleep too. What happened, you screamed terribly?” 

“I’m going back to that little stand and get us some ice cream and hot coffee,” he told her, “and I’ll be back in five minutes, and you keep quiet. Good-by for five minutes,” he said, holding her chin in the palm of his hand and trying to catch her eye, “and you be very quiet.” 

“Good-by,” she said. “I’m awake again.” But she was not, and the two alert young internes from the County hospital who had arrived to carry her away in a police ambulance, decided that they had better go down and get the stretcher. Their voices roused her, she sat up, got out of bed at once and stood glancing about brightly. “Why, you’re all right,” said the darker and stouter of the two young men. “I’ll just carry you.” He unfolded a white blanket and wrapped it around her. She gathered up the folds and asked, “But where is Adam?” taking hold of the doctor’s arm. 

“Oh, he’ll be back,” the interne told her easily, “he’s just gone round the block to get cigarettes. Don’t worry about Adam. He’s the least of your troubles.” 

*

What is this whiteness and silence but the absence of pain? Miranda lay lifting the nap of her white blanket softly between eased fingers, watching a dance of tall deliberate shadows moving behind a wide screen of sheets spread upon a frame. Miss Tanner stood at the foot of the bed writing something on a chart. 

“Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner. 

“Oh, no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things,” but her eyes closed in spite of her will, and the midnight of her internal torment closed about her. 

Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of gray water turning upon itself for all eternity… eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge was her childhood dream of danger, and she strained back against a reassuring wall of granite at her shoulders, saying desperately, Look, don’t be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity. 

Granite walls, whirlpools, stars are things. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that set itself unaided to resist destruction. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay. 

*

The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re celebrating. It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ’tis of thee…” 

Sitting in a long chair, near a window, it was in itself a melancholy wonder to see the colorless sunlight slanting on the snow, under a sky drained of its blue. “Can this be my face?” Miranda asked her mirror. “Are these my own hands?” she asked Miss Tanner, holding them up to show the yellow tint like melted wax glimmering between the closed fingers. The human faces around her seemed dulled and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes as Miranda remembered radiance; the once white walls of her room were now a soiled gray. 

Closing her eyes she would rest for a moment remembering that bliss which had repaid all the pain of the journey to reach it; opening them again she saw with a new anguish the dull world to which she was condemned, where the light seemed filmed over with cobwebs, all the bright surfaces corroded, the sharp planes melted and formless, all objects and beings meaningless, ah, dead and withered things that believed themselves alive! 

Miss Tanner said, “Read your letters, my dear. I’ll open them for you.” Standing beside the bed, she slit them cleanly with a paper knife. Miranda, cornered, picked and chose until she found a thin one in an unfamiliar handwriting. “Oh, no, now,” said Miss Tanner, “take them as they come. Here, I’ll hand them to you.” 

What a victory, what triumph, what happiness to be alive, sang the letters in a chorus. The names were signed with flourishes like the circles in air of bugle notes, and they were the names of those she had loved best; some of those she had known well and pleasantly; and a few who meant nothing to her, then or now.

The thin letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was from a strange man at the camp where Adam had been, telling her that Adam had died of influenza in the camp hospital. Adam had asked him, in case anything happened, to be sure to let her know. 

If anything happened. To be sure to let her know. If anything happened. “Your friend, Adam Barclay,” wrote the strange man. It had happened—she looked at the date—more than a month ago. 

“I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?” she asked Miss Tanner, who was folding letters and putting them back in their proper envelopes. 

“Oh, quite a while,” said Miss Tanner, “but you’ll be ready to go soon now. But you must be careful of yourself and not overdo, and you should come back now and then and let us look at you, because sometimes the aftereffects are very—” 

Adam, she said, now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here; I wish you had come back, what do you think I came back for, Adam, to be deceived like this? 

At once he was there beside her, invisible but urgently present, a ghost but more alive than she was, the last intolerable cheat of her heart; for knowing it was false she still clung to the lie, the unpardonable lie of her bitter desire. 

Miss Tanner said, “Your taxicab is waiting, my dear,” and there was Mary. Ready to go. 

No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything. 

This story is adapted, with kind permission of the copyright owner, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, from the author’s novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Copyright © 1937, renewed 1965 by Katherine Anne Porter. All rights reserved.

The post ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’: A Story of the 1918 Flu Pandemic appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In the 1979 novel Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, who was my mother, the narrator recalls her youth as a jazz enthusiast in the late 1940s, including a visit to Harlem to see Billie Holiday. Toward the end of the chapter in which that occurs, the narrator, herself named Elizabeth, says:

Goodbye? I have left out my abortion, left out running from the pale, frightened doctors and their sallow, furious wives in the grimy, curtained offices on West End Avenue…

I ended up with a cheerful, never-lost-a-case black practitioner, who smoked a cigar throughout. When it was over, he handed me his card. It was an advertisement for the funeral home he also operated. Can you believe it, darling? he said.

What’s striking is that the abortion is mentioned as if it were an afterthought, a casual-seeming, almost thrown-away memory. My mother wrote this work of experimental fiction some time after her divorce from my father, during the period of what came to be called the second wave of feminism. As I later learned, my mother had had two abortions at that time in her life. 

When my mother was in her seventies and I was in my early thirties, I had my own unwanted pregnancy. I scheduled an abortion, but before the procedure could be performed, I became seriously ill, requiring emergency surgery: the pregnancy turned out to be ectopic. My mother accompanied me to the hospital and spoke to the surgeon. As I subsequently discovered, she had done as much bullying as waiting. “I made him operate,” she told me. “I told him you would die.” I believe she saved my life. 

Recently, I came across this piece my mother wrote for The Morning Call, which will be republished in the forthcoming The Uncollected Elizabeth Hardwick (edited by Alex Andriesse). Composed in August 1996, when the Republican National Convention was debating an anti-abortion plank—though a measure less extreme than those recently passed by Republican-controlled statehouses in Georgia and Alabama and designed to test the Supreme Court’s commitment to Roe v. Wade—her opinion piece might also be casual-seeming, almost thrown-away, in its satirical jabs at men who seek to control women’s bodies. But knowing she must have had in mind her experience and mine, and no doubt that of female friends, I realized just how serious Elizabeth Hardwick was about it.

—Harriet Lowell

As the Republican Convention gathers in San Diego, many middle-aged and more than a few elderly fellows are rousing themselves into a passion about a woman’s right to abortion. Of course, Pat Buchanan, Rep. Henry Hyde, and the Rev. Pat Robertson have never missed a period and yet they have much in mind for young women who have done so and placed themselves and their future in a distressing state.

The legislating men are of interest because of their inexperience in the matter at hand. They seem to believe girls, as some may still be spoken of, have reached their pregnant condition quite alone, out of reprehensible indulgence or folly or criminal impulse, and so must live with the consequences, that is to give birth. A gun went off, you might say, but the hand that pulled the trigger is of no moral, religious, or legal concern. Can it be that the San Diego gentlemen were themselves free of the raging, insistent testosterone of the male in youth and beyond? Or perhaps they feel that when the testosterone bullet hits the girl, the man is acting in a sort of metaphysical self-defense. In any case, he is acquitted and the penalty, if you like, is hers alone.

It would be honorable for the Republican platform to consider the following plank—a heavy piece of wood indeed. In their frequent suggestions for constitutional amendments, as if they were a corner stoplight, they might propose, on behalf of the contested unborn, a command that young men remain celibate until marriage. The Celibacy Amendment deserves the floor.

The nation’s sons are a valuable resource, but if our sons willfully break the Celibacy Law and, to use an inspired phrase of ancient coinage, “knock up” our daughters, the fate will be forced marriage and active fatherhood. For many it will mean leaving high school or college or law school, and perhaps pumping gas to buy the crib, the mashed food in little bottles, and the first refrigerator and rearing the slowly maturing human child, once unborn but now born in partnership with whatever pretty, or passable in the dark, face was in the back seat of the car some time ago.

The lawmakers are not likely to know personal hardship from the Celibacy Amendment. Most are married and too busy even to take time out for an hour or so in a motel. They are in a punishing mood and history is on their side. Unmarried women have inflicted terrible tortures on their own bodies, hoping to undo or to conceal. When that failed, as it usually did, society often gave them abandonment, disgrace and, in some cultures, death.

Men of imagination have understood the appalling dilemma for the woman that may follow a night or two of pastoral young love under a summer sky. It would be a spiritual advancement in San Diego to remember Thomas Hardy’s Tess and Tolstoy’s Resurrection with the peasant girl and the prince visiting his estate. There are profound moral reflections therein about the sweetness and naturalness of love and the sometimes awesome consequences for her.

However, a rich political life does not find time for the wisdom of fiction. And so in the mundane interest of equity, the anti-abortion zealots would honor their obsession by proposing a sort of balancing of the human budget: a Celibacy Before Marriage Amendment to the US Constitution. Let us see how that goes down.

The post A Solution to the Abortion War: The Celibacy Amendment appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Certain frames for her destructiveness have been suggested by critics. Perhaps being born a woman is part of the exceptional rasp of her nature, a woman whose stack of duties was laid over the ground of genius, ambition, and grave mental instability. Or is it the 1950s, when she was going to college, growing up—is there something of that here? Perhaps; but I feel in her a special lack of national and local roots, feel it particularly in her poetry, and this I would trace to her foreign ancestors on both sides. They were given and she accepted them as a burden not as a gift; but there they were, somehow cutting her off from what they weren’t. Her father died when she was eight years old and this was serious, central. Yet this most interesting part of her history is so scorched by resentment and bitterness that it is only the special high burn of the bitterness that allows us to imagine it as a cutoff love.

For all the drama of her biography, there is a peculiar remoteness about Sylvia Plath. A destiny of such violent self-definition does not always bring the real person nearer; it tends, rather, to invite iconography, to freeze our assumptions and responses. She is spoken of as a “legend” or a “myth”—but what does that mean? Sylvia Plath was a luminous talent, self-destroyed at the age of thirty, likely to remain, it seems, one of the most interesting poets in American literature. As an event she stands with Hart Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, and Poe rather than with Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, or Elizabeth Bishop.

The outlines of her nature are odd, especially in her defiant and extensive capabilities, her sense of mastery, the craft and preparation she almost humbly and certainly industriously acquired as the foundation for an overwhelming ambition. She was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Her mother’s parents were Austrian; her father was a German, born in Poland. He was a professor of biology, a specialist, among other interests, in bee-raising. (The ambiguous danger and sweetness of the beehive—totemic, emblematic for the daughter.) Her father died and the family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, to live with their grandparents. The mother became a teacher and the daughter went to public schools and later to Smith College. Sylvia Plath was a thorough success as a student and apparently was driven to try to master everything life offered—study, cooking, horseback riding, writing, being a mother, housekeeping. There seemed to have been no little patch kept for the slump, the incapacity, the refusal….

Sylvia Plath went on a Fulbright to Cambridge University. She met and later married the distinguished poet Ted Hughes, and after a year or so back in America they returned to live in England. Her first book of poems, The Colossus, was published in 1960, the same year her daughter Frieda was born. In 1962, her son Nicholas was born—and then life began to be hard and disturbing, except that she was able to write the poems now being issued under the title Crossing the Water. She was separated from her husband, came back to London with two small children, tried to live and work and survive alone in a bare flat during one of the coldest years in over a century. The Bell Jar was published under a pseudonym just before she died, in February, 1963.

In the last freezing months of her life she was visited, like some waiting stigmatist, by an almost hallucinating creativity…. When she died she was alone, exhausted from writing, miserable—but triumphant too, achieved, defined and defiant.

I don’t see the death as a necessity for the greatness of the work. Quite the opposite. It is the feeling not the action that assaults our senses; the action gives a little shiver, and only that. If anything could have saved Sylvia Plath it would have been that she, in life, might have had the good fortune to be alive and exactly where she is today. She has won the green cloth—no writer ever wanted it more. She leaped onto the mountain. Even The Bell Jar is on the best-seller list. Not only has she confounded her “enemies,” she would have had money, power over her own life, fame, all of it by her own efforts. As it is now, the pathos and irony are too much to think about. Lois Ames, whom she scarcely knew, writing her biography; her books dribbling out; every piece of Mademoiselle and college magazine prose threatened; her own ungenerous nature and unrelenting anger sentimentalized.

Beyond the mesmerizing rhythms and sounds, the flow of brilliant, unforgettable images, the intensity—what does she say to her readers? Is it simple admiration for the daring, for going the whole way? To her fascination with death and pain she brings a sense of combat and brute force new in women writers. She is vulnerable, yes, to father and husband, but that is not the end of it at all. I myself do not think her work comes out of the cold war, the extermination camps, or the anxious doldrums of the Eisenhower years. If anything she seems to have jumped ahead of her dates and to have more in common with the years we have just gone through. Her lack of conventional sentiment, her destructive contempt for her family, the failings in her marriage, the drifting, rootless rage, the peculiar homelessness, the fascination with sensation and the drug of death, the determination to try everything, knowing it would not really stop the suffering—no one went as far as she did in this.

There is nothing of the social revolutionary in her, but she is whirling about in the center of an overcharged, splitting air and she understands especially everything destructive and negative. What she did not share with the youth of the present is her intense and perfect artistry, her belief in it. That religion she seemed to have got from some old Prussian root memory of hard work, rigor, self-command. She is a stranger, an alien. In spite of her sea imagery—and it is not particularly local but rather psychological—she is hard to connect with Massachusetts and New England. There is nothing Yankee in her. So “crossing the water” was easy—she was as alien to nostalgia and sentiment as she was to the country itself. A basic and fundamental displacement played its part.

Long after I had been reading her work I came across the recording of some of her poems she made in England not long before she died. I have never before learned anything from a poetry reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath’s reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “The Applicant,” “Fever 103°”—were “beautifully” read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. “I have done it again!” Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, “Uncover, dogs, and lap!”

The post On Sylvia Plath appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

—Robert Silvers

JOHN ASHBERY

Barbara and I met on the stairs leading to the Widener Library poetry room in the fall of 1945. I forget who introduced us. What I most remember of that meeting is her clothes, which anticipated the late-Fifties thrift-shop look by more than a decade. (This phase of hers didn’t last long.) Also her expression, at once intent and distracted, immediately appealed to me. We soon became close friends, seeing each other almost daily, doing the things that Harvard undergraduates considered chic in that distant era, like afternoon tea with wonderful pastries at the Window Shop on Brattle Street, Brit flicks at the Exeter Theater in Back Bay, BSO concerts at Sanders Theater (we both got weepy hearing Ravel’s Mother Goose for the first time), and late-night beers at Cronin’s, Cambridge’s answer to La Coupole.

In between we talked about poetry. Barbara was my first critic (I hadn’t yet met Kenneth Koch, who later became our friend, along with Frank O’Hara). She had a wonderful way of letting me know if something I’d written was slightly off. Once she quoted me a line from a poem I had published in the Advocate (“I sense the fatal chill”), ostensibly to chide me for not having called her but really, I think, to suggest that I lighten up a little as a poet. As I learned over the years, this would become her own deft, incisive way of criticizing—keen but kind. I miss her terribly.

ELIZABETH HARDWICK

Dr. Johnson wrote or said that in memorial “disquisitions” no man is on his oath. I have in the past elevated the virtues of a virtuous friend—a little gilt on the lily, as it were. With Barbara, my closest friend for many decades, I do not know how to express the qualities that made me and so many others treasure her. I do not have fear of a sentimental tribute to a departed friend, but of a sort of paralysis in facing the complications of a unique being. I see her smiling and saying: Just give it a try, girl.

Barbara was petite, pretty, elegant, and learned, especially in literary culture. She grew up in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, and graduated from Radcliffe College. She did not share the vanity and self-satisfaction of so many students who looked upon admission to the celebrated Cambridge schools as a sort of seat on the Supreme Court. She was devastating on the limitations of some of the grand professors, who in her memory came forth more like W.C. Fields than like Socrates. All this, not as a scold so much as a benign observer of human folly.

At The New York Review, Barbara and Robert Silvers were like train conductors trying to avoid a wreck at the next crossing. A constant alert, this adjective, that sentence, red light and green light challenging the white pages. Prose—a plump monster of possibilities. About an essay on her desk, Barbara might say, quite good but academic. In literary, critical circles, to be academic often signifies knowledgeable, but not written with a gift for vivid language. In her work, Barbara struggled with some pain about her sensitivity to style. Still, I believe she was polite in her revisions and suggestions, clear about the differences between composition and preparation for the press, not to mention the eminence of agents in the peculiar process that ends in that odd item of commerce, a book.

Memorial services, spoken or written tributes, are commonly designed to remember happier days. Amusing contretemps on the tennis court come to mind as a favorite offering. But Barbara, going away so suddenly, leaves for her treasured children, Helen and Jacob, for her colleagues and friends only a sense of betrayal by the forces of nature.

So, dear one, farewell, a sad but also a beautiful word.

DIANE JOHNSON

Everyone mourns Barbara Epstein, the brilliant, principled, and sometimes controversial editor, but my own sharpest grief, like that of other people who knew her, is about the brave, generous, loving friend. Charles McGrath, collecting information for an obituary, told me that although he’d known her slightly, he’d been surprised to learn the number of her friendships, and at the outpouring of love and sorrow that attended her death. He’d been aware of the powerful, public Barbara, the extent of whose intellectual reputation and influence she may herself have been unaware of. The editor is an irreplaceable loss, but she also leaves a terrible void for people who loved the adorable person and wonderful friend.

I was introduced to her in the Sixties by her friend since college Alison Lurie. I no longer remember whether I had already written for her by then, but it’s certain that I had a pre-impression of a scary, exigent editor. One of my first assignments for The New York Review had been a book about Vietnam—C.D.B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire, this at a time when most periodicals only assigned women to write about novels and books by other women, and certainly not on military subjects. I assumed this had been her idea, and took it as an inspiring endorsement of the androgyny of consciousness and a personal challenge I slaved to be worthy of, then and with all the things I wrote for her. When we met, I was unprepared for a small, feminine, wonderfully pretty strawberry blonde, charming and funny and a delightful companion. As Henry James said of Turgenev, she “was natural to an extraordinary degree.” This paradox impressed everyone, and partly explained the affection she inspired, though of course nothing can quite explain something as elusive as charm.

Over the years, because I lived in California, I would stay at her apartment when I was in New York; to be there was to be in the lap of beauty. She had a talent for surrounding herself with wonderful art and objects, and had chosen the smallest porcelain jug or little watercolor with her perfect eye (and could be ruthless, like an editor, about excising something that didn’t “go.” I remember Alison and me once spending an afternoon intensifying with flow-pens the colors of a faded Oriental rug we were afraid had suddenly incurred her displeasure).

One measure of her generosity was that she welcomed waifs and strays from distant places, so that often several of us would be staying with her—it could be Alison, down from Ithaca, or Darryl Pinckney from London, or maybe her Czech son-in-law—you never knew. I usually slept in the little room off the kitchen. Coming from the West Coast, I would still be sleepy when the day began for New Yorkers, but lying there I would be aware of the rituals, first the delicious smell of Murray Kempton’s (Barbara’s companion for seventeen years) bacon and eggs. Whoever was staying upstairs might still be in the bath, someone was bringing in the papers. Only when things calmed down a bit did Barbara herself come down, dressed for work most days, still in her nightie on a Sunday morning (though she was in the office even on Sunday), to scan the papers and gossip. At night there would inevitably be one of her small, convivial dinner parties, often with remarkable combinations of young critics and fabled seniors—the newcomer could merely gape. She would always say her life was not like that every night, but I think it really was—a remarkable life, and too terribly short. I still can’t believe it.

ALISON LURIE

The day we met she was sitting in the Radcliffe College cafeteria, smoking. Her black turtleneck jersey, unstructured hair, and stack of books not on any assigned list instantly marked her as what would presently be called a beatnik. Very soon I was amazed by her low-key but scarily observant comments on these books, and on some other girls nearby, with their tight perms and twinsets, matching lipstick and nail polish, and matching minds. She was a freshman, only sixteen years old, and her name at the time was Bubsey, so how did she know so much? It was a question many people were to ask over the next sixty years.

Barbara’s quiet brilliance was all the more striking because she hadn’t had much backing at home. Her parents’ highest hope for their daughter was that she might become an elementary school teacher. When she moved to New York after college, opportunities for young women who couldn’t type or file and had no family connections were rare. It took Barbara nearly a year to find a full-time job, and only unusual courage and determination kept her looking. This courage was visible again at the end of her life when, exhausted and knowing how ill she was, she continued working until two weeks before her death, and came to the American Academy to accept an award (shared with Bob Silvers) for service to the arts.

It was a well-deserved recognition. The New York Review had changed serious reporting on the arts and politics and science and society, partly by giving writers space and time to say all they wanted to say, and expert help in saying it as well as possible. One result of this was a long list of books (including three of mine) that began as NYR articles, and would perhaps never have existed otherwise. Barbara’s editorial skill and her editorial tact were remarkable. Her first response to a manuscript was always enthusiastic; but when the proofs arrived the margins would be full of questions and suggestions and sometimes embarrassing corrections. Often there would be three or even four sets of proofs.

Because Barbara was so kind, generous, and modest—because she never gave speeches, interrupted anyone, or raised her voice—it was easy to underestimate how much she knew and saw. There seemed to be nothing she hadn’t read, and no one she’d never known or seen—and sometimes seen through. She gave wonderful dinner parties, successfully mixing unmatched guests. She loved a good story, and had a fine sense of the occasionally absurd behavior of the well-known. Now and then I would suggest that she should write her memoirs. Her reply was always, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Just as well, maybe—America and Europe must now be full of people who are not only mourning her loss, but sighing with relief that some comic incident in their lives will never be revealed. Without her the whole world, and especially New York, seems darker, sadder, and most of all less interesting.

LARRY McMURTRY

It may be that my bad spelling, and her tolerance of it, led Barbara Epstein and me to form our attachment. We never managed to meet, we spoke on the telephone only briefly and at long intervals, but I don’t think I’m presuming to call what we had an attachment—first an editorial attachment that grew from our mutual love of good sentences and good sense. In time it became personal.

As soon as I dared, I dedicated a book to Barbara Epstein: Sacagawea’s Nickname, a collection of essays about the American West which she edited for this journal.

In one of our brief phone calls I mentioned that I was reading Edmund Wilson’s diaries. “Oh, they’re his masterpiece—I mean the whole lot of them!” she said, her voice lifting as she said it.

In the Fifties volume of those diaries there is a picture of Barbara, with her then husband Jason Epstein, dining on a terrace in Rome, in 1954. She was a deeply appealing young woman, with a distinctive Smart-Girl-of-the-Fifties air, which led me to wonder if perhaps a thread of nostalgia for that long-ago time played a part in her tolerance of my messy typescripts and frequent misspellings. Neither of us could read the other’s handwriting but Barbara would dig in and gradually my pieces were improved.

My typescripts probably looked like what all typescripts must have looked like when Barbara was a young and sprightly editor about town. Writers were just messier then—not everybody likes neat.

Probably the deepest conviction that Barbara and I shared—a conviction we at once recognized in one another—was the belief, common in the Fifties, that the highest possible aspiration was to somehow connect with literature, and then to live for it, in it, near it.

That conviction has lost none of its potency. One big thing Barbara and I had in common was that we belonged to an age before spell check—this, in itself, makes for a kind of bond.

Barbara Epstein’s death means the loss of a great woman, but also the breaking of a great order—the order that Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein created and sustained at The New York Review of Books. It’s an order, needless to say, that we literates have benefited from and cherished these last forty years.

In March Barbara Epstein sent me a book to review. I had then just survived the three-and-a-half-month awards season in Hollywood. I was too tired to read, much less review, so, with profuse apologies, I sent the book back. Sometimes, if she thought I really ought to review a certain book, she would send it back to me two or three times, and usually I accepted my fate and wrote the review. This book she didn’t send back. Instead I got this letter, dated April 4:

Dear Larry,
I understand. Something lovely will turn up soon, as you deserve.
As ever,
Barbara

Although I didn’t then know Barbara was ill, that note had a different tone. I see it now as a gentle goodbye. How we will miss her.

PANKAJ MISHRA

I first met Barbara Epstein in New Delhi in 1997. She had come to India to give a talk on Edmund Wilson, whom I had idolized since discovering his books in a neglected old library in the North Indian city of Benares. I never expected to meet anyone who had known Wilson; the young Americans I met in India had barely heard of him. Such youthful idealism as mine does not usually survive its encounter with reality. Yet Barbara’s graciousness, wit, and ironical intelligence more than matched my fantasies of the remote American world of Wilson.

Like many writers, I feel I was a special beneficiary of Barbara’s generosity. When I first met her I had published a travel book in India, but I was still struggling to find my subject, voice, and audience. Her startlingly straightforward invitation—“do you have anything for us?”—brought me out of the sterile resentfulness I had drifted into, and introduced me to literary possibilities—reportage, memoir, the long review-essay—that I otherwise would never have fully realized.

For weeks afterward I worked on a small piece of memoir about reading Edmund Wilson in Benares. When Barbara finally published it, several drafts and months later, I felt I could at last call myself a writer. She would later become both an editor and a good friend to me. Looking back, I find it almost impossible to separate the two.

It was while working with her that I learned the most valuable lessons of our friendship. I began to see more clearly how literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; how it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; how it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless.

Barbara was strongly political. But this did not stem from any sense of personal incompleteness, or the related impulse of self-aggrandizement which deludes many intellectuals into ideological crusades. Her concern for justice and her hatred of violence flowed out of her instinctive compassion, and she showed tremendous kindness to strangers as well as colleagues, friends, and relatives.

Committed to a way of writing and an ethic that rejected the self-important and the merely rhetorical, Barbara stood aloof from people who took it upon themselves to magnify American power in the world during and after the cold war. She—with her co-editor Robert Silvers—valued intellectual and ethical clarity about the so-called national interest, which explains partly why this New York–based magazine spoke directly, during the latter half of the American Century, to so many people in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The commitment of the Review to a cosmopolitan liberalism becomes even more bracing as America’s image darkens in the world and many great American institutions appear diminished. I find it hard to imagine a more important legacy than the one Barbara helped to create, even though I know she would never have put it quite like that herself.

EDMUND S. MORGAN

I cannot think about Barbara without thinking selfishly about myself because her death has left such a gaping hole in my life. But my personal loss may reflect what a larger world than mine has suffered in her departure from it. I have lost not only a dearly loved friend but also a guide who led me into that world, her world, a company of men and women engaged in thinking and writing beyond the limits imposed by academic or professional conventions and orthodoxies. My experience may suggest some of Barbara’s capacities for expanding the minds of the people she encountered.

When we met, almost forty years ago, I was a successful academic, four or five books to my name, active in what seemed to me to be the cutting edge of historical research, though it did not actually cut much beyond the walls of academe. By a lucky chance, something I had written caught Barbara’s eye, and she tried me with a couple of book reviews. The way she did it took me by surprise: no request for so many words by such and such a date about a volume to be sent if I agreed to terms. No. A book arrives on my doorstep with a one-sentence note wondering “if the book might interest you.” The implication was that I might wish to write something about it for her. No due date, no length specified, no need to return the book if not interested. I was overwhelmed by the high style of this mode of address, which was not, I think, accidental. It was an invitation to be yourself, to show what you’ve got, no holds barred.

Barbara’s style of editing (and style, in the best sense, is the word I keep coming back to) was of a piece with her invitation. Does this paragraph need something more? Could we have some examples? She seldom suggested changes in wording. The words were up to you: Why would I have asked you to write if they were not? But would you want to explore this idea a little further? Would you want to mention something that seems to be related?

As she continued to surprise me with unannounced books, as we chatted about them on the phone, as we met for lunches and dinners, as we found fun in laughing at ourselves and the things we did—Barbara was always fun—I gradually came to realize that besides giving me a new and wonderful friendship, she was giving me a chance to grow. She knew what my academic specialties were, and she sent me books that neatly fitted them, but she also sent more and more books that would stretch my capacities, move me a little beyond myself. After I had written a review of books about George Washington, she sent me to California to assess an exhibition of artifacts associated with the man. After I reviewed books on Salem witchcraft, she brought me to New York to review Nicholas Hytner’s film of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.

Barbara was moving me into the company of people that she and Bob Silvers had been gathering at The New York Review, people who brought to their writing the imagination and resonance that comes only to those who can think beyond themselves and beyond any particular subject: Garry Wills, who could write with equal daring, erudition, and wit about Saint Augustine or John Wayne; John Updike, who could write best-selling novels or direct his imaginative originality to paintings; Freeman Dyson, who could put together words as artfully and elegantly as he did equations. It was an honor to be placed on the same pages with such people.

But honor was the least of what Barbara brought to me and to everyone who came to know her as I did. Along with her keen insight into what we were and could be, she brought to friendship a loving loyalty that knew no bounds. That truly was her style, the ultimate expression of a humanity that honored not only her friends but the entire race.

DARRYL PINCKNEY

I’d always heard that the phrase “The Love That Won’t Shut Up” had been coined by Barbara Epstein when she was a student known as “Bubsey” among her friends. Barbara went back with many of her friends a long way, to Radcliffe, to her early days in publishing and apartments shared with painters as young as she. Out of Boston, never to live anywhere other than Manhattan, she knew a lot about New York, about its politics and literary culture. She cared about the city as that place of refuge people made their way to. An adolescent in the boondocks reading about Capote’s Black and White Ball in Esquire, I’d heard of her before I knew what The New York Review of Books was. I found out what it was and ever afterward I associated Barbara and Robert Silvers with the courage, brilliance, and glamour of liberalism in America, an image she dismissed as ridiculous and was sure I’d get over once I’d come to work for her in the Review’s offices.

The squalor of the old offices in the Fisk Building on West 57th Street was very much in keeping with a serious and therefore precarious publication on the eve of the Reagan years. And yet books were streaking across the ocean and galleys were zooming in from the West Coast or the East Side, nearly all by messenger, by overnight delivery, because everything was urgent, every contributor was at the center of a drama called his or her “piece.” Incredible battles went on during press week as indescribable things rotted in the office refrigerator. Someone’s laughter in the typesetting studio would provoke to fury someone doing layout next door and the storms, the slammed doors. It was a family. When it was not press week, Barbara could time her departure from the office to sneak into the ballet for the second half, for Suzanne Farrell. The best of a generation of women writers were devoted to Barbara, not to mention those legendary other guys, of the queer persuasion. Her gift for friendship meant that everyone knew where to find her most days of the week—in her office. For years, decades, she sat there, on the phone, then reading, reading, and if either a manuscript or a galley then chances are she wasn’t reading it for the first time when she said she had to hang up and get back to work. The New York Review of Books was a dedication. She gave to it everything she could.

Barbara had an ear of genius. She respected style as the writer’s series of decisions, and understood what her friend Elizabeth Hardwick said of the joys of revision, how personal it was as a process, because a writer’s entire history and culture can be involved in the changing of a word. Barbara could be interesting in her suggestions and questions, because she was on the writer’s side, on the side of bringing out what the writer was trying to say. She had taste and refused to allow what she considered the false note or coarse moment. These were moral as well as aesthetic choices. Writing never lost its connection to life, to society, for Barbara. Her sense of the language, her love of literature and of good writing, went with a faultless moral refinement that guided her philosophy and conduct in all things, big and small. The shits are killing us, she sometimes remembered Paul Goodman saying, and as the political and cultural situation in the US continued to deteriorate, the Review’s purpose became a form of witnessing, though Barbara would not have put it that way. She was a deep anarch. Her humor never let anyone else down.

She did not forget her roots in publishing with Jason Epstein, as the work she did for the Garden Book Club, Readers’ Catalog, and New York Review Books showed. Barbara was a great publisher as well as a great editor. Her imagination, her human sympathy about what artists needed, usually had her doing things for people in secret, unasked, behind the scenes. She had a huge maternal streak, and she dazzled the young writers she brought on, one after another, with the most intelligent care, but she also seemed like a contemporary, no doubt because she was always herself—interested in others, in the intellectual life. Murray Kempton once defined a great beauty as the woman no man was not better for having known. Barbara pretended he’d been referring to the husbands of Elizabeth Taylor. She was fiercely proud of her children, Jacob and Helen, and of the people they married, Susie and Peter. She was embarrassed after she’d done a grandmotherly thing of showing a photograph or reporting a story. She called her grandchildren the last great love of her life.

LUC SANTE

I guess I’ll never know what possessed Barbara Epstein to ask me to be her assistant in 1981, after I had fully demonstrated my indolence over a year of employment in the Review mailroom. I couldn’t type, for one thing, and my phone manner was, at best, wooden; I had never before made a restaurant reservation, let alone chased down reluctant eminences and cajoled them into supplying details to fill out their contributors’ notes. Nevertheless, she took me on, and proceeded to give me an education that put the whole of my previous schooling in the shade. I had long enjoyed playing with language, but she taught me how to write. I had always nursed heated opinions, but she taught me how to think critically. I was ignorant of the world of grown-ups, and resentfully surly about it, but she clued me in.

Her core curriculum, probably not very surprising to faithful readers of this magazine, was largely unknown to me then. She had me read Edmund Wilson, Auden’s essays, Macauley and other canonical stylists, the Puritan divines and the rest of F.O. Matthiessen’s reading list, even—I admit to kicking and screaming—Henry James. She ensured my deep familiarity with the Review’s illustrators emeritus: Grandville, Daumier, Doré, Callot, Bewick, Wilhelm Busch. She taught me that simplicity is always the best bet; that needless complication is usually a sign that something is being concealed; that thoughts and sentences always benefit from unpacking; that “forthcoming” means “available when needed” and by extension “frank”—not “soon to be published.” Barbara made many contributions to my vocabulary, both by addition and by subtraction. One day, opening some pompous invitation or other, she exclaimed, “Oh, forgetski!” Where did she pick that one up? I’ve never heard it said by anyone else, but into the larder went “forgetski.” Later, when I was writing for her, I used the word “ilk” in a piece. She struck it out. When I asked her why, she said, “It always makes me think of milking an elk.” We both recalled W.C. Fields in The Fatal Glass of Beer. Out went “ilk.”

I’ve had many other editors over the years, some of them very good, but Barbara was of a whole other order. Her method ranged from the discreet and microscopic to the radical and wholesale, as needed. She had a gift, something like second sight, for knowing exactly what a piece was missing, and those lines and paragraphs she willed into being turned out more often than not to be the hinges on which the argument turned. The most durable thing I wrote under her guidance achieved that distinction as a result of her simply ordering me to cut the manuscript by two thirds—she could perceive the essence through the flapdoodle. She possessed one of the greatest minds I’ve ever encountered, and she gave all of it to other people’s work. On top of that she was funny, mischievous, infectiously enthusiastic, occasionally prodigal, sometimes incorrigibly teenaged, the best sort of company. The world is a much lonelier place without her.

PATRICIA STORACE

Knowing and working with Barbara was to witness her magically recomposing the world. Somehow her delicate relentlessness, the depth and diversity of her friendships, her delicious malice, and the splendor of her love of literature were all part of a kaleidoscopic whole. Somehow she made the paper’s pursuit of excellence into a festive pilgrimage. The galleys covered with her witty scrawls and affectionate notes were part of such an ancient enterprise—a person with a stylus and words, doing the work of making a world where power is disciplined by integrity, and thought is infused, in the least sentimental way, with the possibility of human love. What I learned through her, at the Review, is the heart of the enterprise.

GORE VIDAL

In a long career I have had almost no serious dealings with editors. That is why it took me some time in working with Barbara on The New York Review to realize when it came to an entire piece, or indeed a sentence, she had a perfect ear for tone that would, as we say in the theater, play. Or not play. Needless to say, we had ferocious rows, particularly when Camelot bewitched, for a short time, the higher bookchat. “Prove,” she would say, “that Bobby Kennedy was ‘ruthless.'” As the decades passed, she agreed with me on that point but struck the practical note that, in the piece we’d disagreed on, the adjective had an ad hominem ring that clashed with my usually cozy style. Ideally, in response to a direct ad hominem attack on oneself she favored simply going around it in such a way as to negate it without resorting to “sez you” (English for tu quoque).

Ultimately, in fact, she could accept almost anything in the way of a point of view if she was convinced that it was expressed in good faith: needless to say, she had a difficult time dealing with the baroque lies of the neocons which have made mephitic the swamps of bookchat. During the last year of her life, despite all sorts of physical debilities, she insisted on reading Point to Point Navigation, my second memoir. A week before she died she rang to say she was mailing me the manuscript with her notes. But before she could do so, as her son Jakie put it to me, she had transferred to whatever is the next stop on the line. Thus, we who knew her best are bereft.

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She was born in New York City, but spent her youth in California. It seems right that she went to Hollywood High, and also to the University of Chicago during its period of intellectually radical experiment. Most useful of all was her time in Paris, since the European literary landscape established, one might say, her eminence as an American essayist. Simone Weil, Camus, Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute, and others were the subjects of her early essays in Partisan Review and in these pages. Indeed, Sontag did not write about Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Faulkner, the heroes of our culture. America for her was the movies and even in that art her subjects were Bresson, Godard, and Resnais. When asked about this, she once said her idea in her essays was to be “useful.” That she accomplished with dazzling brio.

Many of Sontag’s essays are appreciations of the neglected, such as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, “the poetic cinema of shock.” And some are expressions of moral outrage. Under the title “Fascinating Fascism,” the films of Leni Riefenstahl are examined, also in these pages, with a prosecutorial vehemence. After the glories of Triumph of the Will, with its glamorous footage of Hitler’s marching soldiers, Riefenstahl, following World War II, turned to the peaceful Nuba, an African tribe with its ceremonial wrestling matches displaying a primitive ideal of male beauty and strength without a wish to destroy or to humiliate the loser. Sontag’s interpretation of the Nuba photographs finds them yet another celebration of brute strength, of fighting as man’s spiritual mission, in some way Nazi ideals transported to Africa. Riefenstahl’s journey of artistic reclamation does not come out here as she had designed it.

“Notes on Camp” is probably the most widely read literary essay of the last decades. Camp is an elusive idea or mode of behavior, acting or “acting out.” Sontag reads it as an historical phenomenon like the notions or costuming of the Pre-Raphaelites. The gestures, fooling around of young men on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village are not new; instead they are a thrift-shop version of attitudes and posturings that have long been “natural” to some.

“The late seventeenth and eighteenth century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, Walpole, but not Swift; …the rococo churches of Munich; Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of Mozart…. Titus Andronicus and Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp. The public manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure Camp.” Few readers can judge her rampage through history and art to define what is or is not Camp. No matter, the essay is like a sun-splashed trip in a balloon. “Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” Her epigram in the manner of the great Camp wit, Oscar Wilde.

Illness as Metaphor was Sontag’s last collection of essays, although not the last of her writings.[^*] The evasive public language about illness and death is a denial of human suffering. Tuberculosis with its thinness and pallor is a particular temptation to a woefulness somehow romantic. The young woman on her deathbed is at last visited by her inconstant lover and thus dies with an ethereal final breath. Cancer is another matter; it is “unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.” And: “Popular accounts of the psychological aspects of cancer often cite old authorities, starting with Galen, who observed that ‘melancholy women’ are more likely to get breast cancer than ‘sanguine women.'”

The death of Susan Sontag is a loss for the world, for friends, readers, and particularly for her son, David, himself a gifted writer. In the end, nothing is more touching to the emotions than to think of her own loss of evenings at “happenings,” at dance recitals, the opera, movies. Once, after one of those occasions in Town Hall with a panel of writers and the crowd that gathered in the lobby later, a young man came up to her and asked: “What are you noted for?” Her answer: “For the white streak in my black hair.”

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Nathanael West (1903–1940) published four novels, wrote many screenplays, and left strewn about among his papers “Unpublished Writings and Fragments.” West had the masochist’s subtle attachment to his failures, a recognition which is, in its fashion, somehow self-affirming. He reports that the income from his first three novels was $780: if one keeps accounts, woefully true, but, in a stretch, like Byron hobbling about on his lame foot and swimming the Hellespont. In a letter to Edmund Wilson:

I forget the broad sweep, the big canvas, the shot-gun adjectives, the important people, the significant ideas, the lessons to be taught, the epic Thomas Wolfe, the realistic James Farrell…. The proof of all this is that I’ve never had the same publisher twice—once bitten, etc.—because there is nothing to root for in my books and what is even worse, no rooters. Maybe they’re right. My stuff goes from the presses to the drug stores.

Biographical and critical studies appear, important reviews, if not in a flood, an impressive stream of recognition. And yet, it is the practice of critics to lament the neglect of Nathanael West, despite the daunting accumulation. West, sly hypochondriac that he was, puts the critics in the position of a crusading doctor reviving the moribund. It may be that West is not so much neglected as unread while more or less well known, a condition obscure and not subject to arithmetic. High reputation and, as the decades pass, the name honored, but the interest, the readers, the glare fading except for graduate students ever in the stacks seeking a “fresh” topic.

Remember Edward Dahlberg, author of Bottom Dogs, with an introduction by D.H. Lawrence, many other books and in particular Because I Was Flesh, a dazzling autobiography, starring, so to speak, his mother, a lady barber with her chair, her clippers and talc. Perhaps it was Dahlberg’s misfortune to have Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway as contemporaries.

And there is the case of Willa Cather of Nebraska and Ellen Glasgow of Richmond, Virginia. Willa Cather is still a bright, commanding figure; Ellen Glasgow, honored and read in her time, is but dimly flickering now. True, breaking the sod and hustling cattle out west is more riveting than the manners of Richmond with echoes of Henry James, an old pioneer only in matters of nuance. Nathanael West’s “neglect” is not so striking. He is like the boy in the orphanage who, when the lads pass by, will be adopted by the town mayor but, after a time, not quite what was wanted and so returned to the line with his curls and snappy come-backs, there to be “placed” once again.

A letter to Fitzgerald:

My dear Mr. Fitzgerald, You have been kind enough to say that you liked my novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. I am applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship and I need references for it. I wonder if you would be willing to let me use your name as a reference? It would be enormously valuable to me…. I know very few people, almost none whose names would mean anything to the committee…. If you can see your way to do this, it would make me very happy.

Fitzgerald responded, naming West as a “potential leader in the field of prose fiction.” Other supporting letters were written by Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson. The application was rejected. West’s biographer, Robert Emmet Long, tells of him at a boys’ camp in the Adirondacks: “He tried out for baseball, but was the sort of boy who, in fielding a fly, would be struck by the ball on the forehead and fall to the ground, which did, in fact, once happen to him.” There you have it.

His first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, is not designed to please, beginning perhaps with the choice of the peculiar name “Snell” for the central character. Snell somehow finds himself in the ancient city of Troy, where he comes upon the famous wooden horse of the Greeks. The only way to enter the horse for his journey is by way of the alimentary canal. “O Anus Mirabilis!” A work of only some fifty pages, it is a dazzling parade of literary and cultural references written when the author was only twenty-six years old, years spent apparently reading everything in the public library. Balso’s guide in the classical journey through the intestine argues with him about Daudet, Picasso, and Cézanne, “the sage of Aix.” Fleeing the contentious guide, Balso comes upon a man, naked except for a derby with thorns sticking out, who is “attempting to crucify himself with thumb tacks.”

The man is Maloney the Areopagite, who is writing a biography of Saint Puce, a flea who was “born, lived, and died, beneath the arm of our Lord.” Then he meets a young man named John Gilson who calls himself John Raskolnikov Gilson, has a Crime Journal in which he tells of murdering an idiot, a dishwasher at the Hotel Astor, the incident a sort of camp, homely version of Crime and Punishment, since this Raskolnikov is Class 8B, Public School 186. The book ends with the thoughts of a young man imagining the suicide of his girlfriend, Janey, who is pregnant. Her young man says, “Suicide is a charming affectation on the part of a young Russian, but in you, dear Janey, it is absurd.” Janey’s mother, seeing her daughter threatening to jump from a window, says: “Go away from that window—fool! You’ll catch your death-cold or fall out—clumsy!”

The Dream Life of Balso Snell was published by Contact Press, a small, avant-garde group based in Paris. It had been recommended by William Carlos Williams, then an editor at the press. The book is generally thought to be a failure and on first reading one is inclined to agree. However, on a second reading, the book gains in vitality, originality, and perhaps bravado. West’s novels are offered as satires, asking the reader to have knowledge about what is being satirized: here, it is literary criticism, popular culture and its clichés, popular Christianity, and other matters. Along the way, there is a satirical aside about biography. A schoolteacher, Miss McGeeney, is writing a biography of Samuel Perkins, the biographer of E.F. Fitzgerald. Miss McGeeney explains:

And who is Fitzgerald? You are of course familiar with D.B. Hobson’s life of Boswell. Well, E.F. Fitzgerald is the author of a life of Hobson. The subject of my biography, Samuel Perkins, wrote a life of Fitzgerald…. Perkins’ face was dominated by his nose. This fact I have ascertained from a collection of early photographs lent me by a profound admirer of Perkins and a fellow practitioner of his art. I refer to Robert Jones, author of a book called Nosolgie.

She continues: “It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.” This is lighthearted enough, but Balso’s passage through the landscape is a malodorous journey peopled with the misshapen and deformed, described with what might be called inspired relish. The suicidal Janey begins as a pregnant hunchback, carrying her baby in the sack. The novel is a masturbatory dream, written with the cleverness that is sometimes spoken of as too-clever-by-half.

Nathanael West had some difficulty deciding just who he was in the literal sense. He was born Nathan Weinstein, which didn’t quite suit his idea of himself. His first improvement was to change Nathan, not to Nathaniel, as in Hawthorne, but to the curious Nathanael, the alteration giving the common name a mysterious and somehow glamorous ring. When he was asked by Edmund Wilson how Weinstein became West—the answer: “Horace Greeley said, ‘Go west, young man. So I did.'” In any case, he became Nathanael West legally in 1926 when he was twenty-three years old. His maternal family was named Wallenstein and came from what is now Lithuania. His father, Max Weinstein, was also Russian and both families migrated to the United States in the 1880s. The father became a successful New York builder, first of tenements on the Lower East Side and later of more advanced and spacious buildings in upper Manhattan. Their son, the author, was born at 151 East 81st Street.

In a way that was typical of refined and ambitious families, young Nathan was sent to a progressive school, P.S. 81, that stressed “creativity.” He didn’t do well there and transferred to another, later entering the competitive DeWitt Clinton High School, from which he failed to graduate. As a natural con man, he added six credits to his transcript and thus was accepted at Tufts University. There he joined a fraternity and had a good time but failed in all his subjects. Then he happened upon the transcript of another Nathan Weinstein with better marks, which allowed him to transfer to Brown University as a sophomore. There he sometimes went by the name of Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein. At Brown, his friendship with S.J. Perelman began. He wrote for the college paper, made drawings, and even seemed somewhat preppy in his Brooks Brothers suits. He also managed to contract gonorrhea.

West, a sort of genteel con man in his youth, will in his fiction create characters inclined to sly improvements on the limitations of the given. In the memories of his friends, he appears rather shy and reserved and quietly likable. Edmund Wilson, Lillian Hellman, Scott Fitzgerald were lifelong friends. S.J. Perelman married his sister. True, his sense of the main chance was always there to be exploited; when he was manager of the Sutton Club Hotel with its empty rooms, we find Edmund Wilson, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, and others happily in line for free lodgings. Before that, Uncle Saul and Uncle Charles had somehow been prevailed upon to fund a trip to Paris. After his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, he was employed in Hollywood at a respectable salary. His early love affairs had a way of collapsing from inanition on his part. Supposed to meet Beatrice Mathieu, a fashion writer for The New Yorker, in Paris for a confirmation of their engagement, he failed “to show.” Another backed out when she learned he had slept with Lillian Hellman. At last he married Eileen McKenney, the subject of a popular book by her sister, Ruth McKenney. Both were killed when West ran through a stop sign outside El Centro, California. He was thirty-seven years old.

2.

Miss Lonelyhearts, a masterwork, came about when he met a woman who wrote a lovelorn column for the Brooklyn Eagle. She read out some of the letters she had received and West was inspired to create a man, using the name “Miss Lonelyhearts,” for a New York paper. The letters at the beginning of the novel are “stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.”

…I think I will kill myself my kidneys hurt so much. My husband thinks no woman can be a good catholic and not have children irregardless of the pain…. I have 7 children in 12 yrs and ever since the last 2 I have been so sick. I was operated on twice and my husband promised no more children on the doctors advice…. I am going to have a baby…. I am so sick and scared…. I cant have an abortion on account of being a catholic….

Another letter:

I am writing to you for my little sister Gracie because something awfull hapened to her…. Gracie is deaf and dumb and biger than me but not very smart on account of being deaf and dumb…. Mother makes her play on the roof because we dont want her to get run over as she aint very smart. Last week a man came on the roof and did something dirty to her…. I am afraid to tell mother on account of her being lible to beat Gracie up. I am afraid that Gracie is going to have a baby…. If I tell mother she will beat Gracie up awfull…when she tore her dress they locked her in the closet for 2 days…. So please what would you do if the same happened in your family.

Miss Lonelyhearts, he is given no other name, looks like the son of a Baptist minister although he is a “New England puritan” and something of a Christer. Shrike, an editor at the paper, is a voluble, cynical, barroom orator at the speakeasy, Delehanty’s, where the newsmen gather. As Miss Lonelyhearts begins to find the letters neither funny nor stupid, he thinks he should tell the forlorn and miserable to find comfort in Christ. Shrike thinks otherwise:

Miss Lonelyhearts, my friend, I advise you to give your readers stones. When they ask for bread don’t give them crackers as does the Church, and don’t, like the State, tell them to eat cake. Explain that man cannot live by bread alone and give them stones. Teach them to pray each morning: “Give us this day our daily stone.”

Miss Lonelyhearts is not so much complex as complicated. As an educated young man from New England, successful in New York, he is nevertheless carrying a lot of baggage from home: his Christian roots, a certain provincial suspiciousness. In search of experience, he visits Betty, a cheerful, willing girl. Instead of seducing her, he rants about Christ and suffering humanity. As he goes on, Betty will say: “What’s the matter?… Are you sick?” Her final words are: “I felt swell before you came, and now I feel lousy. Go away. Please go away.”

Next, he visits Shrike and his wife, Mary. She wants to go out and Miss Lonelyhearts takes her to a place called El Gaucho. Mary’s theme song, as it were, is: My mother died of breast cancer. She died leaning over a table. Back at the front door of her apartment, he tears at her clothes until she is naked under her fur coat. Unfortunately, the door opens and Shrike is in the corridor. “He had on only the top of his pajamas.”

Miss Lonelyhearts is hopeless as a lover, and the scenes of seduction are always unappetizing, comic perhaps, but withering. West’s talent speeds everything along with a felicitous assurance that is devastating to romance. The hope of appropriate feeling is as futile as the hope for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. His ear for the language, his gift for the landscape of foolishness and deceit are so offhand and accurate they do not alienate. In life, there was that vexatious, crummy family next door and yet you would be alarmed if they weren’t all there on the front porch the next day. West is spoken of as “pessimistic” and perhaps he is. On the other hand, he doesn’t bring to mind attitudes or preconceptions about life. He is wild, imaginative, and for all the mishaps in his pages and the comic drive, he is a reporter covering a fire and then going out for a beer.

At Delehanty’s, Miss Lonelyhearts will meet his final correspondent—Peter Doyle, a cripple whose job is reading meters for the gas company. It turns out Doyle has written Miss Lonelyhearts a letter, unmailed, but now taken out of his pocket. The letter wants to know what it’s all about. Going up and down stairs for $2.50 per. Doctors have told him to rest his leg. He’s always in pain. “It aint the job that I am complaining about but what I want to no is what is the whole stinking business for.”

Miss Lonelyhearts is a novel of defiant originality. West introduces suffering characters and scarcely a one arouses sympathy. They are liars, clumsily crafty, their pose of weakness self-serving. Miss Lonelyhearts goes about his sexual seductions in a cold, unfeeling manner; and, with it all, he is obsessed with Christ. W.H. Auden, in an essay entitled “West’s Disease,” reprinted in Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays, is deeply offended by the novel, experiencing a sort of pedantic frisson. First: self-help newspaper columns are written by people who “give the best advice they can.” Miss Lonelyhearts, with the ivory Christ hanging in his room, is not the sort to apply for a gossip column and if he did, no “editor would hire him.” Shrike is a

Mephisto who spends all his time exposing to his employees the meaninglessness of journalism…. Such a man, surely, would not be a Feature Editor long…. A high percentage of the inhabitants are cripples, and the only kind of personal relation is the sado-masochistic.

And: West is not a satirist.

Satire presupposes conscience and reason as the judges between the true and the false, the moral and immoral, to which it appeals, but for West these faculties are themselves the creators of unreality…. West’s descriptions of Inferno have the authenticity of firsthand experience: he has certainly been there, and the reader has the uncomfortable feeling that his was not a short visit.

Auden, who cannot have read many advice columns, was publicly known as a communicant of the Episcopal Church, a return in his celebrated genius to the church of his English boyhood. The “religiosity” of Miss Lonelyhearts appears to have been an annoyance to him. West, an American Jew, was amused by the Methodists and Baptists who may have been liars and cheats while rooted in their down-home Christianity. He is amazed, amused, and thoughtful about them in a way that was too atheistic, skeptical, and “modern” for Auden. The novel is a triumph of local observation by a keen eye and ear and a rhythmical style. There is nothing quite like it in our literature.

3.

“John D. Rockefeller would give a cool million to have a stomach like yours.”

—Old Saying

Thus the heading of West’s third novel, A Cool Million. It is often read as a satire on the popular Horatio Alger books. Horatio, on his way to make his fortune in the world and save the old homestead, is cheated, mocked, preyed upon, but rises in his youthful American rectitude and perseverance to outwit his persecutors, good boy that he is. West’s hero is persecuted, robbed, lied to, and hideously mutilated from head to foot. His passage through life is indeed painful to read. Scarcely a comedy, if that was the intent, in scene after scene of “dismantmantling.” The novel begins with a masterly tonal memory of the sentimental fiction of the period:

The home of Mrs. Sarah Pitkin, a widow well on in years, was situated on an eminence overlooking the Rat River, near the town of Ottsville in the state of Vermont. It was a humble dwelling much the worse for wear, yet exceedingly dear to her and to her only child, Lemuel. While the house had not been painted for some time…it still had a great deal of charm. An antique collector, had one chanced to pass by, would have been greatly interested in its architecture.

The tale goes along in the rocky way of West’s imagination: Mrs. Pitkin, behind in her mortgage payments of 12 percent interest, is threatened with foreclosure. This came about by way of Asa Goldstein, proprietor of Colonial Exteriors and Interiors, “who planned to take the house apart and set it up again in the window of his Fifth Avenue shop.” Lem goes to see “Shagpoke” Whipple, once president of the United States and now president of the Rat River National Bank. Lem is advised to go out in the world and make money. On the train he is robbed by well-dressed gentlemen, one of whom will accidentally drop a diamond ring in his pocket, causing the bumpkin to be arrested and sent to prison. Once he is free again, Chicago, socialist, anarchist, and fascist groups of the period appear as part of the crowded background. Along the way, if so it is to be expressed, Lem will lose his left hand, a leg is cut off at the knee, an eye removed in prison for fear it might become infected.

Betty, wandering in from the previous novel, is kidnapped by Italians and sold to a Chinaman who runs a whorehouse with girls of all nations, each set up in suites suitable for their native countries. Betty’s rooms are American colonial with ships in bottles, carved whalebone, and hooked rugs. Betty’s first client is a “pockmarked Armenian rug merchant from Malta.” And Lem, bereft of teeth, thumb, leg, scalp, and one eye, is shot through the heart. But in the spirit of Horatio Alger, the final line is: “All hail, the American Boy!”

A wasteful brilliance perhaps, a treacherous revision of classical comedies in which the clown is knocked about, stamped on, but gets up, tips his hat, and walks off the stage, A Cool Million was written in 1933 and published in 1934. It can be read as a Depression novel, set in the time when men on the bread lines were “stripped” of their worldly goods. West took “stripping” with a devastating literalness. The novel did not do well—too many chopped-off body parts for bedside reading. Yet it is an achievement, written in a prose of glittering, unexpected adjectives before the required noun.

Hollywood: The Day of the Locust. In West’s fiction there is landscape, but not of trees, grassy plains, sunsets on the horizon. His landscape is houses, rooms, bars, and their contents. West is like a decorator with a pad—chintz here, solid color there; no, perhaps a bit of tweed. His narrator, Tod Hackett, graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, is brought to Hollywood to learn set and costume designing. His story begins with the streets of the peculiar city:

An army of cavalry and foot was passing. It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat…. Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts…. But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses…Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages…. On the corner of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a little highly colored shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights…. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

There are no screen stars in this Hollywood novel, but the city and the movies inhabit these settlers, as if they were left from the wagon trains that pulled Americans west. The characters are the story just by being who they are, most of them living in the shabby apartment house with Tod—the San Bernardino Arms, known as the San Berdoo.

Faye Greener, the heroine of the novel, when the term means the center of attention. Faye is a bad girl in the sense of small-town gossips; that is, one who “puts out.” She is beautiful, “shiny as a new spoon,” only seventeen, but as experienced as Moll Flanders. In movietown her credits are meager: an extra in a two-reel farce, but she’s hoping for a break. She sings in her pretty voice, “Jeepers Creepers! Where’d you get those peepers?” When drunk, “Dreamed about a reefer five feet long.” Tod pursues her, but when he tries to seduce her, she says she doesn’t want to be messed up. In addition, she can’t see that Tod could further her career.

Faye is, somewhat unaccountably, hooked up with a fellow named Homer Simpson, suggesting “simpleton,” perhaps. Homer, hotel booking clerk, now retired and living in a house across the street from the Berdoo. He is from the Middle West, from a little town near Des Moines, Iowa: a hick, in Faye’s accurate naming, but one who buys her things, takes her to the movies, and is incapable of sex, a convenience, along with his nerdy love of her. “But whether he was happy or not is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.” Homer, after an illness, is told to get some sunshine and so it’s off to California and Hollywood. Homer doesn’t belong in Hollywood. Old as he is, he’s like a child left in a gas station toilet while the parents, thinking him in the back seat, drive away. He’s a stumbling, vivid creation, genuine as a nickel.

Harry Greener, Faye’s father, once in vaudeville, now selling door-to-door Miracle solvent, a furniture polish of his own devising. But Harry is now sick, dying, his death you might call an opportunity for a funeral scene. In his “box,” he’s “wearing a Tuxedo …his eyebrows shaped and plucked and his lips and cheeks rouged. He looked like the interlocutor in a minstrel show.” Faye, looking beautiful in her black dress, “platinum” hair under a black straw sailor. “Every so often, she carried a tiny lace handkerchief to her eyes and made it flutter there for a moment.” Residents of the Berdoo are in attendance and the Gingo family (too?), Eskimos brought to Hollywood for a picture about polar exploration. Unfortunately, an electric organ plays a record of Bach’s chorale, “Come Redeemer, Our Saviour.” That doesn’t go down well with the assembled mourners. There is an invitation to review the remains, not very beckoning except to the Gingos.

Earle Shoop: cowboy from Arizona, occasionally worked in horse operas. Six feet tall, Stetson hat, boots with three-inch heels, always broke, he stages an appalling, murderous cock fight. In the end, Earle and Faye go off to the sunset or to the trailer park.

The final chapter of The Day of the Locust is a painful, dazzling scene of the mob outside a theater, waiting for the celebrities to arrive for the première of an important film. West steps aside for an intrusion of his general thoughts about Americans, some of them, at least:

They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment. All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs…. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?… They get tired of oranges…. They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all…. [Newspapers and movies] fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars…. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates…. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

Tod Hackett, the Yale man, is caught in the mob, his leg painfully injured. He, foolish aesthete from New England, is standing on a rail, trying to sketch the scene for a painting to be called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” What is burning is “a corinthian column that held up a palmleaf roof of a nutburger stand.” The Day of the Locust was published in an edition of 3,000 copies. 1,464 copies sold. That’s the story for a masterpiece.

Nathanael West’s stunning four novels are American tales, rooted in our transmogrifying soil. Morality plays they are, classified as comedies. They are indeed often funny. Funny as a crutch.

The post Funny as a Crutch appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The Golovlyov Family, a novel from the late 1870s by the Russian writer M.E. Saltykov (pen name Shchedrin), is a curiosity of world literature in its relentless assault on the common sentiments of family life. The Golovlyovs, mother, father, three sons, and a daughter, live on their estate in the provinces. They are indeed a family, bound together by fierce competitiveness, suspicion of the motives of one another, and an alert concentration of the mind of each on money. Their world is a desert of greed, sloth, and drunkenness. They do not have visitors, give balls; the landscape, the seasons, the harvests that come to brilliant light in provincial scenes in Russian fiction are only competition for food among the Golovlyovs, who are more like petty accountants in the city than like landowners. The disrepute of the family is extreme and perhaps in that way it exceeds the bounds of realism. And perhaps not. The imag-ination is stirred by the aesthetic challenge of a story without a sympathetic character. How far will Saltykov go? Very far indeed. Without an undamaged, soulful, or generous character, he creates a vengeful fiction of unique savagery.

Perhaps the family suffers from a sort of hereditary, Mendelian blight, coming from the dominating gene of the interesting mother, Arina, a gifted businesswoman. Arina,”too much of a bachelor,” looks upon her children only as a burden. They

did not stir a single chord of her inner being…. Of her eldest son and of her daughter she did not even like to speak; she was more or less indifferent to her youngest son, and only for the second, Porphyry, she had some feeling, though it was more akin to fear than affection.

Her husband is an idle fellow, with pretensions as a versifier, some attention to vodka and the serving girls. He calls his wife of forty years a termagant and a devil; she ignores him as a hopeless appendage, and the old man sickens and dies. Arina, an unusual woman for her time, goes to auctions and by shrewd calculation and cunning buys houses and bankrupt estates, thereby increasing her holdings tenfold.

Arina is a miser by inclination and her accumulations do not bring to the fireside the usual comforts of money to spend. When the harvest from the fields is brought to the house, she has it stored in a huge basement where it piles up and rots. The peasants on the place are always spoken of as “stuffing” themselves, while receiving only leftovers from the table or from the smelly, rotten store. “Those cucumbers are still good, they only look a bit slimy at the top and smell a little; the servants may as well have a treat!”

The novel will follow each of the children in turn as they try to make a life. Porphyry, called “little Judas” and the “bloodsucker,” is the major portrait in the fiction and the triumph of Saltykov’s art. James Wood’s introduction offers a masterly contemplation of the chattering, conniving fictional character—a critical essay that enlivens and enriches the whole of the novel. The other young Golovlyovs and their vivid defeats might well be considered first before giving way to the dismaying triumph of Porphyry-Iudushka.

Stepan, the eldest, is known as Styopka the dolt and Styopka the rascal. He is mischievous and troublesome and his mother screams at him in full voice: “I’ll kill you and won’t have to answer for it! The Tsar wouldn’t punish me for it!” The homestead humiliation has turned the boy into a thoughtless buffoon. After high school, he enters the university in Moscow where he is given just enough money to keep him from starving. His mother is not impressed by his achievement of a diploma. In St. Petersburg he wanders from one post to another, but with his idle mind “such bureaucratic tasks as reports and résumés were too much for him.” Honoring the custom of giving grown children a “sop” or a “piece,” Arina gives the wayward Stepan a house in Moscow for which she paid twelve thousand rubles, the exact amount ever a part of her transactions.

Stepan has no gift for practical life and is indeed a drunkard. He sells the Moscow house for a low price, gambles away the money, and, starving, destitute, returns in a ragged condition to the family estate. Back to darkness and deprivation and the perfervid denunciations of his mother. He is exiled to a miserable room in an adjacent building, left without candles, and given spoiled food. The brothers, Pavel and Porphyry, are called home to discuss what to do with the reprobate Stepan. Pavel is not much interested, having a mountain of grievances of his own, but Porphyry will emerge in his verbose, smarmy shape. The mother takes the occasion to tell of her long struggle to accumulate wealth; tales of taking a cart rather than a coach to the auctions, staying at a third-class inn rather than a comfortable hotel. Pavel, having heard it all before, yawns, but the bloodsucker is moved to tears. They are to consider whether the wastrel should be got out of the way by a second chance, the gift of a small property on his father’s estate. Porphyry:

Mamma!…you are more than generous! You have been treated in…the vilest, meanest way imaginable…and suddenly you forgive and forget all! It’s magnificent! But excuse me…I am afraid for you, dear! I don’t know what you’ll think of me, but if I were you…I wouldn’t do it!… What if my brother with his natural depravity treats your second gift the same as the first?

Arina, in her astuteness, her stark awareness of self-interest, is not beguiled by the flattering son, even though he has his way and Stepan remains in his measly quarters on the estate; nevertheless, she wonders whether her son is so “heartless that he could turn his own brother out into the street.” She recognizes, in Porphyry, the presence of her own relentless calculations and knows that “a noose” is being prepared for herself.

Stepan, in his dirty room with peeling wallpaper, facing the long, dark, frightening nights and his “stifling cough, unendurable attacks of sudden breathlessness and continually increasing pains in the heart,” falls into a death-like state. Only one hope sustains him: “to get drunk and forget.” That he manages with a bit of money given him by the brothers at the family conference. The foreman is induced to fetch liquor and Saltykov describes the broken young man, with his precious bottle before him, in an acutely imaginative passage:

He did not begin on the vodka at once but gradually stole up to it as it were. Everything around him was dead asleep; only mice scratched behind the wall-paper that had become unstuck…. Taking off his dressing-gown, with nothing but his shirt on he scurried up and down the heated room; sometimes he stopped, came up to the table fumbling for the bottle, and then began walking again. He drank the first glasses making traditional drinker’s jokes and voluptuously sipping the burning liquid; but gradually his tongue began babbling something incoherent, his heart beat faster, and his head was on fire. His dulled mind struggled to create images, his deadened memory strove to break through into the realm of the past…. All there was before him was the present in the shape of a tightly locked prison in which the idea of space and time disappeared without a trace…. But as the contents of the bottle diminished…even his limited consciousness of the present became too much for him. His muttering, which at first had some semblance of rational speech, grew utterly meaningless…. It was a dead, endless void…without a single sound of life.

Arina’s thoughts about her son are wild imaginings of the way a drunkard might die: “He’d take a rope, catch it on a branch, twist it round his neck—and that’s the end of him!” Stepan, a weak, ruined carcass, will suffer in a dark, silent void powerfully imagined by Saltykov in pitiable detail: “It was as though a black cloud enveloped him from head to foot…. This mysterious cloud swallowed up the outer and the inner world for him.” In a letter his mother writes: “I am sorry for my son’s death, but I dare not repine, and I don’t advise you to either, my children. For who can tell? We may be repining while his soul is having an enjoyable time on high!” Thus, the first of the children to die, gone but not a tragic loss. A wastrel’s life of vice, foolishness puts him inevitably on the track of an oncoming train, or so the unsentimental Saltykov would seem to view it. The Golovlyovs are a tribe on their ordained reservation: a complex text of sociology.

Pavel, the youngest son: spiritual blankness animated only by his hatred for little Judas. He is apathetic, mutely sullen: “He may have been kind, but he showed no kindness to anyone; he may have had brains, but he never did anything intelligent.” He lives on his decrepit estate, part of his inheritance. There he will be joined by his mother, who has grown old and lost the management of her own acres to the canny manipulations of the greedy Porphyry. She is bereft in her demotion and occupied with the emancipation of the serfs taking place at the time. What could she call them? How could she rebuke free persons from eating one out of house and home? Pavel is much like his brother Stepan, incompetent, idle, shallow; he is preyed upon by a lazy, thieving servant and above all trapped in resentment that his mother allocated a greater part of her estate to his brother rather than to himself. Like Stepan, another drink and yet another bring him to his death. The visiting doctor announces: “This is what Pavel is dying of in the prime of life—this vodka!”—at which point the doctor pours himself another glass of the killer. Vodka and death: Saltykov’s way of removing characters from the plot, like a stage direction saying, exit right. Vodka and Russia bring to mind Comrade Yeltsin and thus we credit the author’s mise-en-scène.

The daughter, Anna, has run away and married without her mother’s consent; married “like dogs,” abandoned by her husband, she dies and leaves twin daughters to Arina’s care. The passage is announced with Grandmamma’s usual vehemence: “Your sister died as shamefully as she lived, throwing two brats on my shoulders.” The brats, Anninka and Lubinka, escape from the boredom of the estate and, with their pretty singing voices, and not much else in the way of talent, end up on the provincial theater circuit, a scene of vivid squalor and degradation. A letter from the girls:

Don’t send us any more fowls and turkeys, grandmamma. Don’t send us any money either…. We have gone on the stage, and in the summer will drive about the fairs…. The manager pays me a hundred rubles a month,…and Lubinka receives seventy-five…. Besides that, we get presents from officers and lawyers. Only, lawyers sometimes give one forged notes, so that one must be careful…. We go for drives, have meals in the best restaurants…. Don’t save up anything…and help yourself to all there is—bread, and chickens, and mushrooms….

Good-bye! Our friends have come—they want us to go for a drive again….

Anninka, prim and cautious, wants to hold on to her “treasure” and manages to do so for a time. Lubinka understands what her treasure is worth, also understands the intentions of the slobbering men hanging about the stage. She leaves the theater and takes up with Lyulkin, a member of the local Rural Board so infatuated with her charms that he is tempted by the possibilities of the public money at hand. Lubinka is installed in a flat, soon the scene of champagne parties from midnight to morning. Her foolish lover will raid the public treasury to buy dresses, jewelry, and lottery tickets. When the deficit is discovered, “Lyulkin went to a window, pulled a revolver out of his pocket and shot himself in the temple.”

Anninka, her provinciality a drag on glamorous hopes, will perform in La Fille de Madame Angot, and “in trying to warm up the audience overacted to such an extent that even the uncritical provincial public was repelled by the indecency of the performance.” Her appearance in Perichole went somewhat better and, back in her room, she found an envelope with a hundred rubles and a note saying: “And in case of anything, as much again. Fancy-draper Kukishev.” The money is returned but the fancy-draper persists; when Anninka, desperate, moves in with her sister, Kukishev, a member of the “salon,” will seduce the nice girl into drinking her first vodka. The successful swain buys the dresses and jewels with public funds, is arrested and sent to Siberia. The country girls are now common prostitutes, their fall melodramatic and perhaps inevitable, given Saltykov’s knowing way about the shabby, second-rate world of the theater. And Anninka is now a Golovlyov, that is, a drunkard.

Lubinka, cold by nature, realistic about the calamitous crash of their lives, decides there is no point in living:

That very day Lubinka broke off the heads of some sulphur matches and prepared two glassfuls of the solution. She drank one and gave the other to her sister. But Anninka instantly lost courage and refused to drink…. That same evening Lubinka’s body was carted out into the fields and buried by the roadside. Anninka remained alive.

2.

Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889) was born in the province of Tula. His family was moderately well-to-do, could claim Peter the Great as a forebear, and left a reputation as a quarrelsome, disagreeable lot, particularly in the matter of the dominating mother. Carl R. Proffer, in his introduction to a previous translation of The Golovlyov Family,[^1] sees the mother as the prototype of Arina and an elder brother as the model for Iudushka. Saltykov early began to write, publishing translations of Byron and Heine, satires, and preparing for his career in various positions in post-tsarist Russia.

As a radical socialist, Saltykov’s publications sent him into exile, owing to the Tsar’s obsessive belief in the power of the printed word. Dostoevsky, in his youth also a radical, was famously sentenced to be executed and was reprieved at the last moment. Both writers spent years in Siberia. Freed, both were to become members of the incendiary literary landscape in St. Petersburg as writers and editors; Dostoevsky and his brother brought out a magazine called Time, and Saltykov was for a period the editor of the important publication The Contemporary. They became bitter enemies, attacking each other in print, directly and by way of disguised but recognizable fictional characters.

The incompatibility of the two writers seems preordained at every point, beyond the great distance separating their talents. Saltykov thought Notes from the Underground “a sick joke” and Dostoevsky retaliated with “Mr. Shchedrin, or, Schism among the Nihilists” and digs in his novels. However, the principal conflict may rest upon the battle between the Russophiles and the Westerners. Saltykov:

Everybody knows that in 1840 Russian literature, and with it all youth, divided into two camps, the Westerners and the Slavophiles…. My spirit was formed in the school of Belinsky, and quite naturally I enrolled in the Westerners’ camp…. I entered a little circle…which turned its glance instinctively toward France…the France of George Sand! Russia, in our eyes, represented a land plunged in a dense fog…. Our enthusiasm was at its height in 1848…. Not one among us exhibited that bovine indifference which had become, under a repressive regime, the distinctive sign of the cultivated class in Russia.

Dostoevsky (here in an assault on Turgenev):

All those trashy little liberals and progressives primarily still of the Belinsky school, who find their greatest pleasure and satisfaction in criticizing Russia…. These people, Belinsky’s offspring, add that they love Russia. But meanwhile not only is everything of the slightest originality in Russia hateful to them, so that they deny it and immediately take enjoyment in turning it to a caricature, but if one really were to present them with a fact that they could not overturn or ruin in a caricature…I think they would be unhappy to the point of torture, to the point of pain, to the point of despair.

Proffer’s introduction also relates Saltykov’s unpleasant encounter in Paris with Turgenev, who was luxuriously established with his fame and family money, which had been an irritant to Dostoevsky, a man of poor roots, as told in Joseph Frank’s prodigious biography of the writer.[^2] Turgenev introduced Saltykov to “Flaubert, Zola and the rest of French literary society” and offered to help him in various literary matters. However, Saltykov in his letters goes from restrained gratitude to outright “hostility.” He calls Turgenev a liar and a hypocrite, but later, at his own request, “would be buried beside Turgenev in St. Petersburg.”

Porphyry-Iudushka, the “bloodsucker,” is the reigning character in The Golovlyov Family and indeed he dominates the scene by his incessant chatter, at once gay, often affectionate, but invariably underlined by a serious intent to secure himself the legacy of his mother and that of the children, all of which he succeeds in accomplishing. His portrait is that of a hypocrite in what may be called the grand style, to which he adds the cadences of religion or religiosity.

A few examples of the chatter: this to his mother before going to the bedside of his dying brother:

As it’s Friday to-day, will you order a Lenten dinner for me…a little salt fish and a few mushrooms and a bit of cabbage. I don’t want much, you know. And meanwhile I’ll do my duty as a brother and go upstairs to the invalid. Who knows …I may do something for his soul if not for his body. The body can be mended with tonics and compresses, mamma, but the soul needs a more serious remedy.

And again:

God is everything to us, mamma, he gives us firewood for warmth and lovely provisions for food—it’s all His doing…I should love to have an orange now… eat one myself and treat dear friend mamma to one, and give one to everybody… But God says, “Whoa!”

The Golovlyov estate is a scrappy domain and the family does not appear rich enough for the pleasures of rural life, and yet, not poor enough to forget the possibility of rescue when in need of a bailout. The children of the family are linked by competition for the family acres and for money, getting it and withholding it. Nature: it rains or it doesn’t. That’s it for the house-bound little group in the vast skies and fields of Russia. Porphyry astonishes even his parsimonious mother when, going over the accounts of the estate, he includes the amount of berries collected from the bushes, those used for jam, “sold to the peasants as a treat, or rotted for lack of customers.” The daily routine of the somnolent estate is thus enlivened by attention to numbers like that of a bank teller at the end of the day. Numbers, rubles, infect the challenge of human beings. Porphyry has two sons by a dead wife: Volodya and Petenka. Volodya marries without his father’s consent and finds himself destitute when his father promptly cuts off his allowance, thereby leading to his suicide. Gone—as if a spell of drought had thinned the wheat crop.

In the second generation, the household worship of money does not lead to a like stinginess, but to disastrous extravagance. Petenka, the youngest son, has stolen his regiment’s money and gambled it away. Desperate, facing Siberia, Petenka visits his father and asks for help, saying he will repay it with interest and so on. Porphyry’s answer about the stolen money is: “Well, send it back!” and more words as ever. When Petenka reminds his father that he is the only son left, there is the expected wind of chatter. The miserable son will at last face his father and say, “Murderer!” referring to his brother’s suicide.

Little Judas debates the accusation, but soon survives his distress. Arina, the mother, has heard all that passed:

And suddenly, at the very moment when Petenka broke into hysterical sobs, she rose heavily from her easy chair, stretched out her arm towards Iudushka, and a loud cry broke from her: “I cu-u-r-rse you!”

Fresh horses and a nice lunch basket for Petenka’s journey back to the city—and that’s it with murders and curses. Petenka sickens and dies on the way to Siberia.

Porphyry, hypocrite and miser, is also an indifferent and rather mechanical seducer. His housekeeper becomes pregnant, refuses to “do something,” has the baby, who, to her grief, is sent off to an orphanage, a place of raging deprivation at the time. Porphyry can always call upon his imperviousness, the guardian of his contentment as he goes about from breakfast to dinner, hours in his study with his infernal bookkeeping. Saltykov, perhaps mindful of the unrelieved selfishness of his cast, offers a brief reshuffling of the black deck at the end. Iudushka, going to mass every day and ever praying before the icon, has the consolation of the communicant, however perfunctory the obeisance to what he calls God’s will may be. As he grows old, and with the example of Anninka, who has returned to the estate, he will find further consolation in the bottle.

In the dark nights, the past casts its shadows and brings thoughts of Christ’s forgiveness of those who gave him vinegar and gall to drink. Somehow Porphyry believes he must go to mamma’s grave and ask her forgiveness. His larceny, arctic maneuvers, have not been events so much as manifestations of character, being, and thus he is haunted at last by himself:

A wind was howling outside and a March snow-storm blinded the eyes with whirling masses of sleet. But Porphyry Vladimiritch walked along the road, stepping in the puddles, noticing neither the wind nor the snow…. Early next morning a messenger on horseback galloped up from the village…and said that Porphyry Vladimiritch’s frozen corpse had been found within a few steps of the road. They rushed to Anninka, but she lay in bed unconscious, with all the symptoms of a brain-fever.

James Wood, in his complex and original introduction to the present translation of the novel, writes of Porphyry as a hypocrite:

His vivacity as a character proceeds, in part, from a paradox, which is that he is interesting in proportion to his banality. Traditionally, the great fictional hypocrites are generally interesting as liars are interesting. But Porphyry does not really lie to himself, since the truth is nowhere to be found in his world… Porphyry uses religious platitudes to protect himself from anything that would threaten his survival; religious hypocrisy is his moral camouflage…. Porphyry is a modernist prototype, the character who lacks an audience, an alienated actor.

The daunting figure of the blood-sucker inhabits the novel like an infectious disease in the air which kills off the family one by one. Saltykov gives his characters a trait or two and that is it; they are what they are without much fictional complication. His mastery is to place the fixed characters in vivid incidents where they react against each other, since they have no larger world in which to reveal themselves. The author finds a rich variety in a single dilemma: the need at the moment for money. Money is the universality in this back-country Russian landscape. The reader will, from his own experience, validate the reality of this family story.

3.

The Golovlyov Family is Saltykov’s dour masterpiece, but his slashing fury at the miseries of his native sod, the holy fatherland, seemed to have come to him, as it were, with his mother’s sour milk. His first important novel, Sketches of Provincial Life, published in the 1850s, offered as reflections issuing from a retired member of the civil service some years back, is a wild assault on the petty official’s talent for bribery by way of tips. In his fictions, Saltykov proceeds like a journalist investigating a “problem” in the manner of what we would call a muckraker. But his great talent is to personalize his themes in individual portraits, novelettes rich in the details of public and private life, and status, since the bureaucrats, the “tchinovnicks,” have ratings that go up and down.

There they are, these rogues and villains who appear like wasps in the summer air when one’s passport is to be examined, when a shipment of oysters arrives that would lie about and spoil were they not to alert one of their arrival. A certain “enlightened” member of the group strolls the Nevsky Prospekt in “prodigious galoshes” and applauds “violently” at the opera; he decorates his conversation with bits of French, such as: “If you think that we have anything to do with this dirt, avec cette canaille, you are very much mistaken.” And the Princess Anna Lovana, over thirty and not pretty, who falls for a bureaucrat whose interest in her is a recommendation for “a vacant place” she might know about. And there is a modest clerk’s “dinner for Your Honor” which might, in its homely way, bring to mind the longings in a fiction by Booth Tarkington of Indiana.

The History of a Town, which Saltykov began publishing in 1869, is said to be still popular in Russia, part of the education of a literate person. Susan Brownsberger, the translator and editor, gives the town the name of Foolov, although Samuel Cioran speaks of it as “Stupidville.” The novel is a mock history supposedly based upon an old chronicle: the follies and injustices of the past are to remind of the conditions of the present. Turgenev admired the fiction, but thought it could not be translated for readers without a rich knowledge of Russian history. In English, the work is easy enough to read, but the splendid background notes by Susan Brownsberger indicate that a good deal of the satire may have been missed.

For instance, the portrait of a tonsorial artist is based upon the barber of Paul I, “a captive Turkish boy who eventually became a count, while continuing to shave the czar.” Saltykov’s orderly who died of a “surfeit” is actually Potemkin, who died of eating a whole goose. Iraida in the novel, “a widow of inflexible character and masculine build,” resembles the Empress Anne. Stockfisch, a stout blond German, resembles the dumpy Catherine the Great. The caricatures of real persons are perhaps most outrageous when we know that the imaginary du Chariot would, to the cultivated, remind them of a certain French vicomte who “liked to dress up in women’s clothes and treat himself to frogs. Upon inspection he proved to be a girl.” The History of a Town, in its willful, learned obscurity, will remain a treat for the Russians and something of a chore for the rest of the world.

The Pompadours: A Satire on the Art of Government, published in the 1870s, tells of provincial governors serving by appointment, but subject to arbitrary dismissal at any time. “Here today and gone tomorrow was the motto engraved on the pompadour’s crest”—words from David Magarshack’s superbly knowing introduction to the translation. We meet the officeholders strutting about in self-satisfaction and then again downcast about the fragility of their claim to a favorable position in society. We are told that the word “pompadour” is still used in Russia for vainglorious, absurd persons. The petty grandees are happiest when condescending to an inferior, the unfortunate result sadly creating a terrible obsequiousness in the snubbed object. Among the scenes is a dinner for an old, retiring governor. The speeches of unforgiving length will begin: “I’m not a public speaker, but I feel impelled to say a few words….” A councilor of the treasury will spill red wine on the tablecloth, pour salt over it to make it “easy for a laundry woman to take out the stains.” Magarshack writes:

What mattered to Saltykov was not what the rulers of different provinces did or did not do, but what a man with certain individual characteristics would do if he were given certain powers over his fellow-men. His satire is therefore a satire on humanity at large, or rather on that section of it which is obsessed by the lust for power.

Saltykov himself had been a vice-governor and held high public office for a number of years. From his vigorous and greatly gifted writings we can say: unlucky the fellow who occupied a desk next to his. He may find his feathers plucked like a squab on its way to the roasting pit.

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The city is, as it must be, a nest of enclaves in the surrounding smother. The Unpossessed looks with a subversive eye on a disorderly, self-appointed group: intellectuals, critical of society’s arrangements and very critical of each other. It is the 1930s and the reign, you might call it, of the left; of well-to-do Greenwich Village supporters of the workers striking in Detroit and of the woebegone, cotton-picking sharecroppers in the South. Above all, the echoes from the “classless” society in Russia, the proles sending the feckless aristocrats to Paris, aroused in intellectual circles here a sort of conversational communism.

The Unpossessed is a kindly act of intellectual friendship written by a sensibility formed by the period and yet almost helplessly alert to the follies of a programmatic “free love” and the knots and tangles of parlor radicalism. Tess Slesinger, the author, was born in New York, the daughter of a nonpracticing Jewish family. Her father, Hungarian by birth, attended City College but after marriage went into the garment business owned by his wife’s family, the Singers. The garment business seems to be almost fore-ordained in the history of Jews in the city and not more on the dot than the fact of the author’s mother, early education interrupted to work in the family business, ending up, after night classes and a spell with Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, as a lay analyst and along the way taking part in the beginning of the New School for Social Research.

Tess Slesinger attended the progressive school Ethical Culture, Swarthmore College, and the Columbia School of Journalism. She married Herbert Solow, a man about town in intellectual circles, who was on the staff of the Menorah Journal and, much later, like the progression of so many radicals, on the staff of Fortune magazine. By way of the Menorah Journal, it was the world of Elliot Cohen, Clifton Fadiman, and Lionel Trilling that this young woman, at the age of twenty-three more gifted than any in the group except Trilling, inhabited in her fashion. She published short stories, and, in 1934, her only novel, The Unpossessed; was divorced from Solow, and went to Hollywood. There she married Frank Davis, a producer, had two children, a son and a daughter, worked on successful screenplays, and died at the age of thirty-nine. A crowded life indeed and far more than a footnote in American literature.

The Unpossessed is overflowing with “characters”: grocers, cabbies, waiters passing through the landscape briefly, but each there in his own singular skin. And of course the characters of fiction with their wives, their money or lack of it, their careers, their presentation of themselves in battle with the self they fear from knowing it far too well. Miles Flinders, a New Englander surviving the terrible trips to the woodshed for punishment by Uncle Dan and yet masochistically suffering from his own knowledge that his sins were greater than those Uncle Dan was thrashing. His “balmy” wife, Margaret, kind, intelligent, wishing to please, and for that reason somewhat a burden to Miles.

Jeffrey Blake, a second-rate novelist and master fornicator, is first seen expertly mixing cocktails in the kitchen with the help of Margaret Flinders while Miles, from his unhappy childhood a believer in economic determinism, is in the next room with Jeffrey’s wife, Norah, explaining that economic conditions control all, even marriage. Meanwhile, Jeffrey is flinging himself, as if obliged to do so, against Margaret and saying, “…Are you never going to throw away your bourgeois notions, are we always condemned to sin against ourselves and our desire….”

Bruno Leonard, of German Jewish origin, had been in college with Jeffrey Blake and Miles Flinders, and now in New York they are planning, somewhat murkily, to put out a magazine. Throughout the drunken pages, the floating ship of private life sails in the waters of the historical moment: the Depression, apple sellers in the street, the Scottsboro boys on trial, Walter Damrosch concerts, the plays of Eugene O’Neill, about which Miles says, “My Uncle Daniel would have sneered at ‘Beyond the Horizon’; even my father would have walked out on it—staggered out, to the nearest saloon.”

The Magazine, instrument of arcane propaganda and personal identity for the little band of pinkos, figures in the hopes like a valuable visitor one hasn’t the money to entertain with a suitable feast. Jeffrey has somehow learned of a certain Comrade Fisher who might have his hand in the pocket of the Party. Comrade Fisher turns out to be a bulky woman, whose name is Ruthie. Ruthie is a sloganeering geyser who, nevertheless, has some poignant items on her résumé. She has actually spent a night in jail, has been the lover of one Comrade Turner, a mill worker who led a famous strike. Jeffrey, seeking his own claim as a revolutionary fit for international celebrity, will end up in bed with Comrade Ruthie, homely as she is, and through her tired flesh experience a sort of mystical transformation:

He lay and listened peacefully to the revolutionary bed-time story, his hands at rest on her head as though her story, her former loves, the spirit of Comrade Turner, the spirit of the strike itself, passed through her and into his fingers…. He was Comrade Turner lying with Comrade Fisher in his arms. …He was the raw-boned mill worker who led the strike. He was the many mill-hands singing the International…. Gratitude toward Comrade Fisher overwhelmed him like love. He threw off the hot counterpane and made love to Comrade Fisher, Comrade Turner’s Comrade Fisher, under Comrade Lenin’s sightless eyes.

There is indeed no financial advantage to Ruthie, who has after an uncomfortable trip to the Soviet Union become a Trotskyite. But there is money, big money, elsewhere in the Middleton family, parents of one of Bruno’s students at the university where he teaches in a lackadaisical manner that enchants the young with their own revolt against the unholy powers of the school administration and the capitalist tyranny of the society they live in.

Mrs. Middleton, along the way seduced by the importunate Jeffrey, will give an evening party, a fund-raiser for the Hunger March gathering in Washington and for the Magazine. It’s a profligate celebration: radicals, rich friends, antiques mostly of “old New York” society, the butler, the band, the buffet table laden with ham, turkey, sturgeon, caviar, and from a celestial bakery a pastry in the shape of the Capitol in Washington. Conversation is picked up, lost, returned to once more; syllables of comment, private matters between old acquaintances resurrected and cast into the party din.

The band leader is a melancholy, failed classical composer doomed to ballads and fox trots and oldies for a tone-deaf audience. The poor man, remembering his ambitious days, chooses to play the Allegro (Spring) from his rejected “Symphony of the Seasons.”

“Beethoven, isn’t it?” said a Miss Hobson. Around her, there is talk of horses, one named Minerva. “You liked that blind-in-one-eye, spavined, consumptive creature with a rotten gallop like a Ford, wh-why!” Mrs. Stanhope whinnied in her horror. “You know it’s possible it’s Brahms,” said Mr. Terrill suddenly. The bandleader is requested to leave off and play “After the Ball Was Over.” “Thank God for that,” Mr. Terrill whispered. “I never really cared for Debussy anyhow.” The bits of musical and horse appreciation are scattered over many pages, drifting in and out in the crowded rooms.

There is comment in a similar cacophony about a modest Negro gentleman, Graham Hatcher, invited in a period of one for every party to liven things up. It is felt he must “represent” something: “in musical comedy perhaps.” “I wonder,” said Ruthie Fisher, “if he might not be the communist candidate for vice-president; he must be somebody.” Mr. Hatcher wearily smiles and says he doesn’t represent anything, but a guest will be heard saying he might be the house detective. The host, Mr. Middleton, name of Al, makes club-man, Wall Street jokes throughout the evening and decides that the courteous black gentleman might have “some pullman porter blood.” Or, from another part of the room: “Ooooh, I wonder could he be Paul Robeson.” At last, Mr. Hatcher, standing about dressed in his singular complexion: “I am not the entertainment,” he exploded. “God damn it, I am Vice President of the CFSUS—The Colored Folks’ Social Uplift Society.” To a Mr. Ballister who could hear and to Miss Ballister who couldn’t it is explained that must be some little magazine the colored folks are starting.

In the moil, a Mrs. Fancher enters to be identified for the unknowing outsiders by the knowing Al: “Lady entering in pearls is our first prison-widow. Husband embezzled. Got five years. Damn shame. Best card player I ever knew.” The staccato brilliance of the party scene in which more than two dozen voices and human shapes appear in a raucous mingling; they are not anonymous names on a list but creations distinct and placed in the social order. Miss Bee Powell, a Daughter of the Confederacy with “violet eyes framed in Junior League eyelashes”; Mrs. Stanhope, the horsewoman who never leaves the paddock; Mr. Crawford, “who fell short of being an English lord only by birth and a monocle,” will say “jolly, jolly” at every turn; the butler, of uncertain lineage, has by his station transmogrified into a Republican who would “feed beggars at the backdoor and throw away the rag with which he wiped their crumbs.” The pages have the reckless exuberance of the open bar, the dance floor, the plentiful harvest of the buffet table, the tribal company, each in its vanity, language, armor, and folly.

Bruno will be called upon to give a fund-raising speech for the Magazine and, dead-drunk, will fall into a long, self-destructive rant of misplaced irony that only an intellectual could excavate from his rattled brain:

“Are we as intellectuals going to remain sitting on the fence, watching Christian Science fight with Freud? are we going to twiddle our thumbs and stew in our juices while the world is on the breadlines, the redlines, the deadlines? …” He tottered, swayed…. He recovered and straightened, bowed with a homosexual Tammany smile…. “The answer is: ‘WE ARE.'” The laugh broke out, relieved, the merry cocktail laugh, the self-indulgent, self-effulgent upper-class champagne laugh….

“But comrades! need I tell you…we must have competent defeatist leadership…in short we are bastards, foundlings, phonys, the unpossessed and unpossessing of the world, the real minority….”

The final chapter shifts to Margaret and Miles Flinders and to the Greenway Maternity Home where Margaret has gone for an abortion or for treatment after having had one. Miles, when the time came, could not face the diapers drying on the radiator, the convulsive change a baby would make in their lives, although he phrased the drastic moment as fear of going “soft” and “bourgeois.” It’s a downward slide, this last chapter, a haunting return to private life. And again composed in a tornado of broken dialogue among the women having babies, one born dead and another having her fifth, a girl, when what was wanted was a boy after four girls.

The composition will center on a huge basket of fruit, now scarcely touched, which Margaret will forlornly offer to her ward companions and to the cab driver taking her home. Missis Butter, won’t you? No, Missis Butter has plenty of fruit of her own. Missis Wiggam, wouldn’t you? No, can’t hold acids after a baby. To the cab driver: You must have a peach; but Mr. Strite never cared for peaches; the skin got in his teeth. And no, he wouldn’t have an apple, must be getting on uptown. Mr. Strite at last accepts a pear, “‘For luck,’ he said, managing an excellent American smile.” In an unexpected, deftly managed change of tone, the rejected basket of fruit becomes the rejected baby—a symbol, if you like.

The Unpossessed, noticeable indeed, was widely noticed when it appeared. The reviews were more benign in the traditional press than in The New Masses and especially in The Daily Worker. Subversives are ever alert to traitors in the own ranks; traitors by way of style are a subtle threat to content, as even the uncultivated Stalin understood. It has been suggested that Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield may have been models for Tess Slesinger. Perhaps, but their art is more serene and controlled than the fractured eloquence of the polyphonic pages of The Unpossessed, interestingly dedicated: to my contemporaries.

The post On ‘The Unpossessed’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Sinclair Lewis, with a crumpled face, red hair, manic zest, and manic writing, came forth from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the year of his birth, 1885. His father was a doctor and after the death of his mother he had a kind, ambitious, ever-onward stepmother. The young man was not a hick, although he could pose as one when it suited him; nevertheless his gift for the language and the posturings of a country boy lead one to speculate that the tangled roots of provincialism still sprouted within him. On the other hand, he was as mobile as a hardy cormorant who by gluttonous study and preparation made his way to Yale and then off in the blue. After college, he will alight in Greenwich Village; Carmel, California; Washington; and Long Island; later, with his marriage to the famous columnist Dorothy Thompson, he more or less hitched a ride with her to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow.

From the days of his youth, Lewis seems to have been writing, writing in a fevered marathon race. Mark Schorer, in his large, suitably so, biography (1961), prints a checklist that begins with many publications in the Yale Courant and rolls down the page to stories everywhere, especially in The Saturday Evening Post, the editor urging more and more, until later there was a break or a breach apparently owing to Lewis’s intrepid radicalism.

Along with the tornado of short works, the rampaging Sinclair Lewis published six novels before 1921, widely reviewed with the usual mixture of response, but none quite a commercial success. Among the forgotten titles: Trail of the Hawk, The Job, Free Air, and so on. Lewis was early on a professional writer; it was what he did, what he lived on, and with the worldwide success of his first major novel, Main Street, more novels, and some continuing hack work, Sinclair Lewis was famous and rich. He showed a similar energy in spending, buying a handsome old house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, staying in the best hotels in America and Europe, leasing the grandiose Mussolini-style Villa la Costa in Florence, taking on another fascist-period marble and gold flat in Rome, and dying there in a clinic at the age of sixty-six. Perhaps he had a good time and perhaps not since he died of the complications of alcohol, delirium tremens, a bad heart, and bronchial pneumonia. It’s a pilgrim’s progress with many deceivers on the way.

Main Street, for all its popularity, was a strain on Lewis’s rambunctious, aggressive imagination because the figure to be dissected with his knives of disappointment is an airy, misplaced woman, Carol Kennicott, to be dropped down in a Midwestern village bearing the name of Gopher Prairie. A gopher is a large rodent to be found in our western states and the name alone is an affront to Carol’s demure aestheticism. With her bad luck, she is first seen as a student in Blodgett College, a denominational school somewhat raw-boned as a setting for her “thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingénue eyes, black hair.” But as ever in the most benighted schools there will be a teacher to beam the lights of “general culture” which will give Carol her badge of identity. She goes on to Chicago for a degree in library science and to a position in St. Paul, Minnesota. There she will meet and marry Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, a downright medical practitioner, strong, plausible as a decent, laid-back, conventional fellow without much “taste” and a professional concern with the unpaid bills on his desk.

Gopher Prairie—best to keep going straight on by:

The fields swept up to it, past it. It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness…. The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills, or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungaloes with concrete foundations imitating stone…the Seventh-Day Adventist Church—a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford delivery wagon had been stranded.

Carol, whose theme, in the manner of Lewis’s fiction, will be to “turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungaloes,” inspects the streets and business places. The drug- store offers “pawed over heaps of toothbrushes and combs…noxious mixtures of opium and alcohol”; the grocery has “black, overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping”; a clothing store is displaying “ox-blood shade Oxfords with bull-dog toes”; at the general store there are “canvas shoes designed for women with bulging ankles, steel and red glass buttons upon cards with broken edges, a cottony blanket, a granite-wear frying pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse.”

Carol is “sweet” and friendly to the town folk and agreeable at evening parties where a lady recites her specialty, “Old Sweetheart of Mine,” and the men tell Jewish and Irish jokes. When she tries to elevate the conversation by asking businessmen what they think of unions and profit sharing, one gentleman says they ought to hang the agitators and Dr. Kennicott agrees. It’s not quite serious, just men-talk, and the author knows all about it including what’s on the table. Perhaps he is not altogether secure in the refinements of Carol’s redecoration of her husband’s old prairie home: but he lines up the “appointments” as a rebuke to sagging chintz sofas and ottomans for sore feet.

The partition between the front and back parlor is torn out, making a long room

on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff aquamarine tissue, which she hung on a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands…a square cabinet on which was a squat blue jar between yellow candles.

She gives an evening party in which the locals take off their shoes and put on sheets of paper with designs of lotus blossoms and dragons: “real Chinese masques…from an importing shop in Minnesota. You are to put them on…and turn into mandarins and coolies….” For dinner, “blue bowls of chow mein, with lichee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup.” A divertissement to replace fun evenings of Musical Chairs and Spin the Bottle.

Lewis’s picture of Gopher Prairie and all American small towns:

The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails…standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable…the contentment of the quiet dead…. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.

Carol Kennicott is not a scourge; she wishes to get along, joins the clubs, learns to play bridge badly, but her local uplift is rebuffed at every turn, especially by her enlightened friends. The city hall with “piles of folding chairs” and skeletons of “Fourth of July floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white, and blue bunting” she imagines transformed into a “Georgian city hall: with warm brick walls, with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair.” On her way about town, like a petitioner for the Red Cross, she meets laughter, scorn, and the vivid claims of practicality. Indeed, it’s a misfortune that Carol did not live to read of the pleasures of the “shanty aesthetic.”

Her home life, her marriage: it is love, off and on, good days swimming in the lake, times when the rude expanse of the prairie is filled with golden light, “red-winged blackbirds chasing a crow.” The landscape is not the murmuring pines she longs for, but she takes heart from “dipping rolling fields bright with wheat.” Will Kennicott and his wife have richly convincing arguments of the Who do you think you are? sort on his side and I’m just a person trying my best on her part. She complains about one man or another smoking a filthy cigar and spitting on her carpet and Will insists he’s the best fellow on earth and I won’t have you snubbing him.

As the novel goes on, for some readers the sympathy will shift to husband Will. He goes out in the dead of night to deliver babies, to save a life by hacking off a bleeding smashed arm; sometimes the snow is so deep and fierce a motorcar can’t get through and the horse and buggy has to be hitched up for him to make a call in the darkness. When Carol mourns the ugliness and mediocrity of Gopher Prairie, Will thinks he’d better go and look after the storm windows.

The novel offers more illustrations, one might call them, of the point; the complacency, the fatuity, the narrow views and general lumpiness of the villagers. Carol: “Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould’s is enough beauty and strangeness?” In the end there is a speed-up, a crash of defiant activity like that of Ibsen’s Nora, except that Carol does not abandon little Hugh, the son who has entered the Kennicott family. She packs up and settles in Washington, the capital, a company town with the sacred monuments splitting the sky like the grain elevators of the Middle West. Carol takes a position with the Bureau of War Risk Insurance; some tedium, but a routine more worthy than “the putative feminine virtues of domesticity, that cooking and cleaning,” which she had done little of with her girl from the country on hand. In Washington’s clean-swept bright streets there is pleasure; there are concerts and museums and the bold activities of the suffragettes. But flee it as she will, Gopher Prairie pursues her still. Southern girls in the office are in no way free from the tyranny of hairdos, boyfriends, inspirational beliefs in the next step, marriage.

Carol is in Washington for almost two years, an unusual abandonment of her husband honored as due cause in divorce cases. But Lewis has in a way abandoned the manly, realistic Will Kennicott, who sends money to his family but seems to fall into a lonely yearning for reconciliation without believing in his claims. Shyly, apologetically, he visits Carol in Washington, fearing to be an imposition. Carol will return to Gopher Prairie, her rather grave independence and refinement defeated. And Dr. Kennicott, bolting wife back in the parlor, can visit his patients, chat on the front porch with his old friends, and polish his fishing rods. Carol’s last thoughts:

But I have won in this. I’ve never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith.

Carol Kennicott, trapped in her sentiments, her “aspirations,” is a frail vessel for the muscular, pugilistic talents of Sinclair Lewis. Nevertheless, Main Street was a wild, raging success here and abroad. From England letters of appreciation by: Compton MacKenzie, Hugh Walpole, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Galsworthy, and others. In America, outrage here and there, letters from women who saw themselves like Carol Kennicott a victim of provincial bashing, a sort of opinion policing of the high-minded. More interesting is the aesthetic struggle with Lewis’s fame and ubiquity by his fellow American writers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: eleven years younger than Lewis, published This Side of Paradise in the same year that Main Street appeared. The younger writer was also a success if by way of a more flamboyant, jazz-age flair than the earnest fictions of Lewis had in mind. On the publication of Main Street he wrote the author:

I want to tell you that Main Street has displaced Theron Ware in my favor as the best American novel. The amount of sheer data in it is amazing! As a writer and a Minnesotan let me swell the chorus—after a third reading.

In 1925, the year of the publication of The Great Gatsby and of the novel Arrowsmith, Fitzgerald wrote to John Peale Bishop: “Is Lewis’s book [Arrowsmith] any good. I imagine that mine [Gatsby] is better.”

With his fame, sales, and productivity, Lewis seemed to take up all the air in the literary landscape. Theodore Dreiser, fourteen years older, had published Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911) before An American Tragedy in 1925, the same year as The Great Gatsby and Arrowsmith. Dreiser had also published type or situation fictions, somewhat on the order of Lewis’s novels if differing in execution: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The ‘Genius’ (1915). He was a celebrated novelist and a sore- head not soothed by Lewis’s consistent praise and promotion of his talent. Indeed, Lewis could not, as a writer, imagine the mind and spirit that produced Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Nevertheless, when the two were the finalists for the first Nobel Prize to go to an American for literature, it was Sinclair Lewis who won the ultimate medal and for Dreiser there was to be what is lightly known as bitter disappointment.

Lewis, chirpy, friendly, too often a “card” in his antics, was everywhere, like the useful A&P turning up on every corner, big, popular, easy. Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson had looked at the lonely and hurt men and women in small towns and unenlightened byways in a mood of tristesse, personal failure. Lewis’s orating reactionaries denying Carol Kennicott are hearty citizens of a different order. What did the millions of readers of Main Street find? Perhaps the thrill of the novel was the detail, the street, the store, the courthouse, the rest room for women in town of a Saturday for the family shopping, moral struggles over “babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach.” And, perhaps, for the sophisticated here and abroad there was a certain snobbery in enjoying the relentless foolishness and predictability of the response to every challenge to the American way. Dickens and Mrs. Trollope had been there before, never missing a spittoon.

2.

Mark Schorer published his biography of Sinclair Lewis in 1961—800 pages; a new one by Richard Lingeman has just appeared, 2002—659 pages. A biographer might wish for a well-documented life to assess and yet find the mountain of material at hand a threatening climb. Lewis kept a diary in his youth and throughout his life appeared to save every letter; the letters he wrote were saved by the recipient. His actual encounters with publishers, wives, children are remembered by them; many as his fame rose wrote of the impression he made. Later he seemed to have kept a guest book and thus there is a record of the luncheons, visits, the remembrance by a rather shady caretaker that as he was dying he called the doctor “father.” In Austria in 1932, at the Villa Sauerbrunn, we can learn there were many guests, “the Adolphe Menjous among them.” A wisp in the rushing winds of this life.

Schorer, in an athletic audacity, faces the documentation with sacrificial gallantry. It’s an accomplishment as graceful and absorbing as the material allows. Lewis does live, day to day as it were, and also as a whole, an odd American littérateur of surpassing energy, grit, uncertainty, acclaim, and not much solace from his human relationships.

Richard Lingeman’s biography, long as it is, manages a sort of condensation of Schorer’s book. It is readable, sensitive to nuance, and also sensitive to a sort of cost-accounting question of the necessity for a replacement, challenge, revisionary labor in the face of Mark Schorer’s pharaonic memorial:

It remained for Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography to finish him [Lewis] off in eight-hundred plus pages. Not that Schorer did a shoddy or dishonorable job: To the contrary, his book is devotedly and massively researched and written with literary distinction (and invaluable to biographers). Yet it is pervaded by such a tone of disapproval that it left the impression with many readers that Schorer disdained both Lewis himself and his work.

Schorer’ s thoughts:

Brought up in an environment that deplored art and adored success, he managed, in that America, to make a success of “art.” Often and increasingly it was bad art, and the success in many ways was vicious and corrosive…. He loved what he deplored; in his life, he was happiest with the kind of people who might have been models for his own caricatures…. He was one of the worst writers in modern American literature, but without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves…. He gave us a vigorous, perhaps a unique thrust into the imagination of ourselves.

Richard Lingeman’s biography rests upon his view of the permanent value of the fictions created by the rather florid man ever on the run, or so it seems. He will find, for instance, that the catalog of objects in the books are not more dated than objects in Vermeer and Chardin. The frugal artists are not to the point, but it is true that the debris of our common life is rescued with curatorial brio. Decor here, which includes attitude, politics, speech, is fate, hope, and anxiety. Your brown hat and vote for Warren G. Harding are what you are. Lingeman’s last line about Lewis: He really cared. A warm tribute to the quarrelsome, interesting iconoclast, cold offstage, at home.

The life, about which so much remains in the carefully preserving cloisters of our libraries, is a swamp of remembered incident. In any case, Lewis married Grace Hegger in 1914 at the Society for Ethical Culture, a nondenominational escape from a pastor or a clerk in City Hall. She was almost two years younger, a well-born New Yorker, child of a British mother and a German father who once had an art gallery on Fifth Avenue but did not prosper. At the time of the marriage, Grace was an editor at Vogue and her husband was furiously writing for a few dollars here and there and not much from his early novel Our Mr. Wrenn. They moved about and every step left its tracks. A son was born, named Wells for the British author; a successful child who went to Exeter and graduated with honors from Harvard, only to be killed in World War II. By that time, Lewis had left Grace for Dorothy Thompson and Grace was now a Mrs. Casanova. Lewis showed only a casual interest in Grace’s son and that born to Dorothy Thompson, Michael Lewis. The marriage to the notable political and social commentator lasted some fourteen years and when the legal dissolution came about Lewis said he thought of naming Hitler as the co-respondent. Thus the bare bones of a fat life.

George Babbitt, a monochrome monologuist, commands an expressiveness that would drown another figure of the period, the spare, taciturn Henry Ford, even as they shared a boiling detestation of the unions. Babbitt is forty-six and wakes up, looking for his BVDs, in the middle-sized Midwestern city of Zenith. The town has two country clubs, several movie houses, a residential landscape big enough and small enough to define who you are and thereby create a fog of status anxiety, a pitiful subplot to Babbitt’s bluster. He is more or less successful as the owner of Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company, has a wife, Myra, three children, tends to overeat, wears on his gray suit lapel the Boosters’ Club button, an emblem of importance to him: “his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa key.” So, from the first poor Babbitt is a buffoon, human enough to be calculating without the numbers of his existence quite adding up.

The details, details, the minutiae—Babbitt is the supreme example of the author’s genius for the particular: the wounded street, the gloss of hope, the dinner party with the salad in hollowed apples, the evangelists circuit and in Babbitt, houses and their furniture. Babbitt’s own house in Floral Park, right out of “Cheerful Modern Houses for Moderate Incomes,” with plugs, noted, for lamps, electric percolator, and electric toaster. He nervously prepares a speech for a local group and his orotund effusions give him a reputation as a public speaker and he becomes the creator of what is still known as “Babbittry”: grandiose self and local promoting of Zenith. He’s sharp in trades with nervous clients, resents a long-established, quieter firm, growls sentiments on every occasion with his imposing cigar-resonant voice. Babbitt, ever speechifying to the world and to the inner man, reaches his apotheosis at a dinner for the Zenith Real Estate Board. Pages and pages are given to the weighty articulation—the man of ideas, complete, as it were:

“In rising to address you, with my impromptu speech carefully tucked into my vest pocket…let the waves of good fellowship waft them up to the flowery slopes of amity…. I wouldn’t trade a high-class Zenith acreage development for the whole length and breadth of Broadway or State Street…. It’s evident to any one with a head for facts that Zenith is the finest example of American life and prosperity to be found anywhere…. The ideal of American manhood and culture isn’t a lot of cranks sitting around chewing the rag with their Rights and their Wrongs, but a God-fearing, hustling, successful, two-fisted Regular Guy,…who…belongs to the Boosters or the Rotarians or the Kiwanis, to the Elks or Moose or Red Men or Knights of Columbus…. Get out and root for Uncle Samuel, USA!”

Amusing, yes, captured, impaled, by Lewis’s rhythmic assurance, but poor Babbitt brings to mind—laugh, clown, laugh, although your heart is breaking. He’s not a happy fellow but given to lacrimal envy; about his golf club, inevitably not the “first-class” Tonawanda, he clouds his thoughts with “Why, I wouldn’t join the Tonawanda even if—I wouldn’t join it on a bet!” His best friend is a moody fellow with a screeching, nagging wife he is driven to shoot and Babbitt is a faithful jailhouse visitor. Indeed, he himself longs for a girlfriend on the side, the occasion that had brought forth the shooting. Babbitt likes his own mild wife well enough but his efforts for a consoling addition come to nothing; he’s too fat and needy. He is seen throughout the portrayal from the outside, ever gross, exaggerated, the victim, perhaps, of the author’s devotion to types who, met on the street, nodding off to sleep, seldom articulate otherwise than in the language of their obsessive shape.

Babbitt, intimations of mortality upon him, questions his life, but, with a sigh, there it is. In a reunion with his son, whom he has aggressively criticized, he says: “Don’t be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I’ve been….” And, arm and arm, the two Babbitt men join the family. George Babbitt is singular, not a plausible portrait of the American businessman, if that is what was intended. Still, the unrelenting caricature lives on, not as a fiction, but as a mythical native son, like Johnny Appleseed.

Elmer Gantry was drunk: our introduction to a scurrilous portrait of an evangelical preacher, the sort still sanctifying, still ranting and passing the collection plate today. Elmer, known as Hell-cat, is a football player at Terwillinger College, a Baptist institution in Gritzmacher Springs, Kansas. He’s a brawler, dumb, brought up by a patient Christian mother. When he thinks about the faith, he lazily decides there must be something to it with so many going on about it. For himself, he’s not about to go into the ministry, the aim of the college; he’s not thinking to give up chasing girls, drinking and smoking and not making any money from some tightwad, whistle-stop congregation. He grouses about all the Christers nagging at him, little pipsqueaks like one Eddie Fislinger in particular. So Elmer’s inner life goes on in growls and grunts and general cussedness.

Fate, or God, put Elmer, far from sober, on the street one night when the detested Eddie was preaching and saving souls. A heckler came after Eddie, and Elmer, seeing the opportunity for a fight, knocked him down, going to the defense, as it were, of his fellow divinity student. In that way, Elmer became a new kind of celebrity, off the football field and now a candidate for salvation.

Lewis, in his fiction, gives his dominating figures a counter-figure as a friend. As Babbitt had the moody, violin-playing college friend who was in desperation led to shoot his wife, Elmer Gantry has one true friendship in his life, an unlikely one. Jim Lefferts, agnostic, intelligent, learned, has found himself in the denominational college because it was cheap and his father, a doctor, practiced in the next village. The father also thought it interesting to put his son in a position to “stir up the fretful complacency of the saints.” Jim is aware that Elmer is not a spirit informed by Darwinism, German biblical criticism, or even a temptation to reflection beyond the mundane bothers of the moment. In addition, Elmer is a creature bred on Sunday School, baby Jesus in the manger, baptism by immersion more than once, and his own baritone singing: “Draw me nearer, blessed Lord, to Thy precious bleeding side.” And now that he has defended Eddie, Elmer is seen throughout the school as a candidate for salvation yet another time at the Annual College YMCA Week of Prayer.

He goes to the event, his imposing, football-star bulk noticeable as he takes a seat down front and sees that his mother has come for the special service. To be saved, converted, by the pleading of the visiting preacher, Judson Roberts, who had been a football player at the University of Chicago, known as the Praying Fullback—it’s too much for Elmer and he confesses his sinful soul and with the congregation saying, “Thank God!” and “Praise the Lord!” Elmer takes the first step on the road to stardom, with many pitfalls and reverses, as the great preacher who will make “the United States a moral nation!”

Elmer is not thoughtful enough to doubt or to believe. He’s a Christian in the same way he’s six foot one, “handsome as a Great Dane” and, it must be said, horny. Elmer, football star, brawny protector of the street preacher, is a trump card for the faith and urged to give a speech. Compositional anxiety and fretting, but on stage he turns out to have the volume and resonance of a fire truck. On to the Mizpah Theological Seminary to get a Doctor of Divinity degree in the Baptist faith. In his senior year he is expelled for drinking, but remains an ordained Baptist minister, if not a Doctor of Divinity.

Elmer can at last give up drinking and smoking, but he cannot give up sex, the snake in the valley for clerics from Henry Ward Beecher to Jimmy Swaggart and to some of the boy-smitten Catholic priesthood. Elmer, defrocked as it were, is two years on the road as a salesman for the Pequot Farm Implement Company. Out west he will encounter the evangelist Sharon Falconer, a performing phenomenon on the order of Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Sunday.

This interlude, a set piece perhaps, is vivid, emotionally complicated, rich in the usual documentation, but here useful as a fictional ornamentation of character and drama. After a bedazzled evening with the ethereal Sharon in her white and gold robes, Elmer manages to trap her on the way out and to announce himself as a Baptist preacher, at present without a church. Sharon says: “What’s the trouble this time? Booze or women?” and passes on.

Sharon is an astute businesswoman with a large staff, a choir, pianist, violinist, children’s preacher, press agent, travel agent, sharp attention to pledges and collections. Elmer presses his case as a preacher, helper, assistant and Sharon takes him on because he’s “so completely brazen, so completely unscrupulous and so beautifully ignorant.” Much is to follow: making love to Sharon, building a spectacular new temple, a detour into faith healing, a specialty with its own catechism. Elmer’s energy, his commanding braying at the altar will overcome the flock and the shrewd Sharon; he rolls over her life like a plow in an open field. The ambitious temple and the gifted salvation entrepreneur, the famous lady evangelist, are destroyed in a fire. Elmer escapes the conflagration, only to face the threats to his professional standing ignited by one Hettie Dowler and her husband, who set him up for an alienation of affections lawsuit that will cost him a considerable amount of money. Elmer is not run out of town in a barrel, but free to trudge on in the gospel trip and to become the first preacher to have his own radio show.

Elmer Gantry offended the clergy, was banned in Boston, was selected by the Book-of-the-Month-Club, and sold well in Kansas. As a character, Elmer Gantry has the consistency of his unremitting disrepute; examples ever at hand by way of the author’s inclination to repetition and padding. It’s an infidel story, hostile not only to religious scoundrels but to the claims of Christianity itself, or at least to Protestantism, high and low. A lot of crazy, unbelievable things happen in the Scriptures, a compendium Lewis knows well and can present as troubling some of his characters. Elmer Gantry is the dark side of Babbitt, two Americans with something to sell.

Arrowsmith, a more traditional novel, appeared after Babbitt and before Elmer Gantry. Here Lewis, with his inclination to think of fiction as a topic, ventured into medical science, abandoning labor as a topic with Eugene V. Debs as the hero. With Martin Arrowsmith to end his journey looking at a strain of Bacillus lepisepticus under his microscope the author will need a lot of help. And there is Dr. Max Gottlieb, a German Jew and renowned bacteriologist by unkind fate landing in the medical school of a Midwestern university, Arrowsmith’s idol and mentor—a difficult case. In Dr. Paul de Kruif, to publish the popular Microbe Hunters a year after Arrowsmith, Lewis indeed found a “collaborator” curiously like himself in many ways, the cloning to be a bit comic and finally troublesome. The alliance is told in both the Lingeman and Schorer biographies.

De Kruif, with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in bacteriology, worked in research at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, found it not to his liking except for the vision and example of the dedicated professor of physiology Jacques Loeb. The director of the institute, Dr. Simon Flexner, and the institute were denounced as a fraud, ever seeking publicity and money by pushing discoveries into the market without adequate testing. The anonymous article was traced to de Kruif and he was fired. De Kruif agreed to work with Lewis and a contract was drawn up with Lewis to get 75 percent and de Kruif 25 percent. They spent two months together in the Caribbean observing outbreaks of infection and then on to England, Lewis all the while writing the novel, drinking heavily with the doctor going along in a convivial manner moderately, at least by comparison with the novelist, now his student in the matter of medicine.

On the publication of Arrowsmith, Doctor de Kruif thought he should be rightly acknowledged as coauthor, or if not that, have acknowledgment as collaborator. The settlement was an acknowledgment, more specific than thanks to “my agent” or “to my wife, without whom this book could not have been written.” Lewis wrote: “I am indebted not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his suggestions in the planning of the fable itself—for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist.” And there the matter and the friendship ended.

Martin Arrowsmith, an attractive son of an unlikely place called Elk Mills, starts his distinguished life in the office of a drunken country doctor who keeps his first appendectomy preserved in a bottle. Martin is fourteen then and is somehow inspired to prepare for medical school at the state university of Winnemac, where the cranky, celebrated Max Gottlieb (de Kruif’s Jacob Loeb?) is a professor, the light from his laboratory shining on after midnight. Martin tries to enter his lab but is turned away as too young and so he goes on with his courses, frat life, falling for a girl named Madeline, a summer job installing telephone poles in Montana. The hero’s true love is the dedication of Max Gottlieb, but he is established as an American young man, not too different from others except in his early attraction to laboratory science. Madeline, a sleek girl with the soul of a debutante even in the unpromising hinterland, rejects him and the Martin Arrowsmith history unfolds as it will in fiction’s capsule. He is accepted in Gottlieb’s laboratory, does his internship in Zenith Hospital, and marries a young nurse named Leora.

Arrowsmith finds the field of medicine and many of the doctors practicing the art of healing a rich soil for frauds, “tonsil-snatchers,” fools, opportunities for a cool, white masquerade of competence. And again for oratory on “The Art and Science of Furnishing the Doctor’s Office”:

And from a scientific standpoint, don’t overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerative competence which you make on a patient is of just as much importance,…as the drugs you get into him or the operations he lets you get away with…. Have your potted palms and handsome pictures—to the practical physician they are as necessary a part of his working equipment as a sterilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as possible have everything in sanitary-looking white—and think of the color-schemes you can evolve, or the good wife for you…. Rich golden or red cushions, in a Morris chair enameled in the purest white…. Recent and unspotted numbers of expensive magazines, with art covers, lying on a white table!

Laboratory science, slow, lonely, prone to the disappointment of false leads, is the heroic endeavor in this somewhat strange novel, itself heroically researched by Sinclair Lewis. And money is the demon. Arrowsmith practices medicine out west to be with his wife as she nurses her ailing mother. This is seen as honorable enough, but not following the gleam. At the famous institute in New York, poor Max Gottlieb gets in trouble for denouncing the staff and will end up ignominiously working for a pharmaceutical company ever anxious to bring “discovery” to market. Martin Arrowsmith will discover the bacterial cause in certain illnesses, hesitate, with Gottlieb’s insistent command, and when at last ready to submit his paper for publication will find that French scientists have just come out with a similar discovery. Don’t despair, Gottlieb tells him, write a paper of corroboration. And so the arcane field with its treacheries and glories is the topic of Arrowsmith.

Martin Arrowsmith has lost his amiable, practical, and devoted wife, Leora, to the bubonic plague her husband was studying in the Caribbean. His remarriage and the fame of his discovery bring an interlude the novelist might have foregone. The new wife is seriously rich and so it’s to be mansions, butlers, a luxe trip to Europe which the shaggy, quiet, obsessed scientist must suffer until there is a separation. Martin retreats with a fellow scientist to a lab in the Vermont woods, there to be himself and contented. The idealism of Martin Arrowsmith is served by his plainness, crankiness, short temper at times, and by the boyish remnant of a lad born in Elk Mills. He is not a fixed point like the admirable Max Gottlieb; there is still something in him of the prairie, the son of the owner of that village’s New York Clothing Bazaar, his father.

Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize. Great acclaim and publicity, not for the choice, but for Sinclair Lewis’s refusal of the award. His letter, mulled over, questioned the phrase in the prize that mentioned that the honored novel should “present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” He also doubted the judges’ claim to authority in the matter of literature.

Mark Schorer’s biography somewhat cattily observes that Main Street had previously been under consideration and passed over for Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. And if that footnote were not sufficient for subterranean motive in an artistic rejection, bibliographical leavings indicate that Sinclair Lewis had his thoughts elsewhere—in Stockholm.

No matter. Arrowsmith is Sinclair Lewis’s most careful and thoughtful novel. The pages are filled with cranks and jackals and clowns, like the memorable Dr. Pickerbaugh who writes execrable jingles performed by his daughters, known as the Healthette Octet. The scheme, the theme, is freely unfair to doctors making their rounds and fateful decisions in order to elevate the laboratory. And yet, like the hero’s conquest of what is called the X principle, Arrowsmith is a sort of gold star for a steady workman.

Dodsworth is Sinclair Lewis afloat, all over the place as he indeed was. The biographies are dizzy with his travels, his houses, his visits to country homes, his vast acquaintance. Around the time his publishers were bringing out Elmer Gantry, “he telephoned Lady Sybil Colefax who invited them to tea.” Grace Hegger Lewis was still about then. Hemingway and his then wife Martha Gellhorn met Lewis in Key West and they went on to share a woodcock dinner, shot by the sportsman. Some years later the two writers are at the Gritti Palace in Venice and in the stifling documentation we can learn that Mary Hemingway dined with Lewis at Harry’s Bar. Pleasant enough, until Hemingway’s correspondence with Maxwell Perkins uncovers the muddy side of the welcome mat. “The poor Baedeker peering bastard…defiling Venice with his pock marked curiosity and lack of understanding.” Snippets in a cyclonic international whirl of restlessness, celebrity, and, strangely, not one bit of the debris lost to history.

Sam Dodsworth is a man of business, but he is not Babbitt scanning the for-sale ads in the morning paper. Dodsworth, in Zenith, has designed a cheap, practical motorcar, named the Revekation, which “became the sensation for a season and one of its best-selling cars for a score of years.” At the age of fifty, his company is sold out and his share of the stock makes him a rich man. He is also married to Fran, daughter of a prominent, well-to-do local family, children grown, and so it’s time for a vacation in Europe where Fran as a girl has been to school. However, her theme in life and in the manner of Lewis’s fictional bricks of character is given straight off and never to be forsaken:

She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with one quick, innocent-sounding phrase. By the most careless comment on his bulky new overcoat she could make him feel like a lout in it…. She could make him feel so unintelligent that he would be silent all evening. The easy self-confidence which weeks of industrial triumphs had built up in him she could flatten in five seconds. She was, in fact, a genius at planting in him an assurance of his inferiority.

That is the novel Dodsworth, Sam and Fran in London, Paris, Madrid, Florence, Venice, Vienna, and, at last, Berlin. They quarrel, somehow meet as many lords and ladies and duchesses and crass, ignorant American tourists as Lewis himself certainly ran into. Fran is very pretty, flirtatious with all men except her husband, whom she continues to torment in a strong, villainous expertise, rather more like a boxer than the frail, elegant, still young in her forties, little American wife would call to mind.

Sam Dodsworth himself is a manly, credible husband of a virago with considerable perfumed charm. He’s not a supine victim, but she’s his wife and they are not in Zenith, but in Europe, with the great cities a challenge to his ways and experience. Lewis is not subtle; Fran, who has superficial culture, a bit of French, is shown to be incurious, dead to the beauties of the ancient cities, awkwardly sluttish in a provincial way. Dodsworth will not become a connoisseur of art, but is sensitive to the byways, the shops, the working people, the sidewalk cafés, the interesting “foreignness” of it all. He remains a robust American, a defender, as it were, since throughout the travels his country and its people are the objects of ridicule, not least by Fran who cringes at the sight of an “American tourist” running around with guidebooks and awful accents.

There’s a sentimental roundup in the frantic corral of trains and hotels and alliances formed in restaurants and by letters of introduction. The Dodsworths separate; Fran is to be married to a Viennese fellow with a von in his name but his mother intervenes and Fran is abandoned to slink back to Zenith in bad shape. Sam marries a fine widow, American, who since her husband’s death had lived in Venice, but is happy to go back home with her nice new husband and help him build some sensible, well-designed houses in a new development. The book is a clot, a swelling of tourism, stop by weary stop. But old Dodsworth, a husband, survives and fights the indignities of marriage with the patient attention of a man who had struggled with wheels and axles.

Sinclair Lewis is a prodigy, something like a local star who can play cadenzas faster than anyone else. But, as a writer, the rousing creator is also lazy. His gift is not for drama; his inspiration is variations on a theme. Babbitt cannot walk down the street without expressing his babbittry in disquisitions short and very long. Elmer Gantry, once in the groove, would preach in the grocery store while buying altar candles. Doctors in the basement cafeteria chat about fees; Fran Dodsworth, packing or worrying about the rate of exchange, will ever dismiss her husband for delinquencies and tackiness.

Repetition, padding, and insistence are the enemies of the author’s original inspiration in creating the vivid characters still standing over the American landscape like the Statue of Liberty. The country itself is a dour spread, a conspiracy of dollar worship, mediocrity, vapid conformity. Idealism is isolating; individuality, difference, and dissent are the mark of losers—for all except the extraordinary Sinclair Lewis himself.

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