“Shit has its own integrity.” The Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table in the MGM commissary used regularly to affirm this axiom for the benefit of us alien integers from the world of Quality Lit. It was plain to him (if not to the front office) that since we had come to Hollywood only to make money, our pictures would entirely lack the one basic homely ingredient that spells boffo world-wide grosses. The Wise Hack was not far wrong. He knew that the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked even though, as he was quick to admit, no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public. He was cynical (so were we); yet he also truly believed that children in jeopardy always hooked an audience, that Lana Turner was convincing when she rejected the advances of Edmund Purdom in The Prodigal “because I’m a priestess of Baal,” and he thought that Irving Thalberg was a genius of Leonardo proportion because he had made such tasteful “products” as The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Marie Antoinette.

The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century. An entire generation has been brought up to admire the product of that era. Like so many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something rich, strange, numinous-golden. For any survivor of the Writers’ Table (alien or indigenous integer), it is astonishing to find young directors like Bertolucci, Bogdanovich, Truffaut reverently repeating or echoing or paying homage to the sort of kitsch we created first time around with a good deal of “help” from our producers and practically none at all from the directors—if one may quickly set aside the myth of the director as auteur. Golden age movies were the work of producer(s) and writer(s).

I think it is necessary to make these remarks about the movies of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties as a preface to the ten bestselling novels under review since most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest old movies that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full circle, film maker) recall past success and respond accordingly. Certainly none of the ten writers (save the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn and the classicist Mary Renault) is in any way rooted in literature. For the eight, storytelling began with The Birth of a Nation. Came to high noon with, well, High Noon and Mrs. Miniver and Rebecca and A Farewell to Arms. Except for the influence of the dead Ian Fleming (whose own work was a curious amalgam of old movies in the Eric Ambler–Hitchcock style with some sadomasochist games added), these books connect not at all with other books. But with the movies…ah, the movies!

Can your average beautiful teen-age Persian eunuch find happiness with your average Greek world conqueror who is also a dish and aged only twenty-six? The answer Mary Renault triumphantly gives us in The Persian Boy is ne! Twenty-five years ago [my novel] The City and the Pillar was considered shocking because it showed what two nubile boys did together on a hot summer afternoon in McLean, Virginia. Worse, one of them went right on doing that sort of thing for the rest of his life. The scandal! The shame! In 1973 the only true love story on the bestseller list is about two homosexuals, and their monstrous aberration (so upsetting to moralists like Mr. Wouk) is apparently taken for granted by those ladies who buy hardcover novels.

At this point I find myself wishing that one had some way of knowing just who buys and who reads what sort of books. I am particularly puzzled (and pleased) by the success of Mary Renault. Americans have always disliked history (of some fifty subjects offered in high school the students recently listed history fiftieth and least popular) and know nothing at all of the classical world. Yet in a dozen popular books Mary Renault has made the classical era alive, forcing even the dullest of bookchat writers to recognize that bisexuality was once our culture’s norm and that Christianity’s perversion of this human fact is the aberration and not the other way around. I cannot think how Miss Renault has managed to do what she has done, but the culture is the better for her work.

I fear that I am not the audience Mr. Dan Jenkins had in mind when he wrote his amiable book Semi-Tough, but I found it pleasant enough, and particularly interesting for what it does not go into. The narrator is a pro football player who has been persuaded “that it might be good for a pro football stud to have a book which might have a healthy influence on kids.” Question: do young people watch football games nowadays? The unfat and the unsoft young must have other diversions. One wonders, too, if they believe that “a man makes himself a man by whatever he does with himself, and in pro football that means busting his ass for his team.” This is pure pre-Watergate Nixon.

Semi-Tough tells of the preparation for the big game. There is one black player who may or may not like boys and the narrator clams up on what is a very delicate subject in jock circles. It is a pity Mary Renault did not write this book. And a pity, come to think of it, that Mr. Jenkins did not write August 1914, a subject suitable for his kind of farce. No movie in Semi-Tough. As the Wise Hack knows all too well, sports movies bomb at the box office. Perhaps the Warhol factory will succeed where the majors have failed. SHOWER ROOM—LONG SHOT. CUT TO: CLOSE SHOT—SOAP.

The number one bestseller is called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is a greeting card bound like a book with a number of photographs of seagulls in flight. The brief text celebrates the desire for excellence of a seagull who does not want simply to fly in order to eat but to fly beautifully for its own sake. He is much disliked for this by his peers; in fact, he is ostracized. Later he is translated to higher and higher spheres where he can spend eternity practicing new flight techniques. It is touching that this little story should be so very popular, because in its way it celebrates art for art’s sake as well as the virtues of nonconformity; and so, paradoxically, it gives pleasure to the artless and the conforming, to the drones who dream of honey-making in their unchanging hive.

There is not much point in generalizing further about these bestsellers. The authors prefer fact or its appearance to actual invention. Reading these ten books one after the other was like being trapped in the “Late Late Show,” staggering from one half-remembered movie scene to another, all the while beginning to suspect with a degree of horror that the Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table will be honored and remembered for his many credits on numerous profitable pix long after Isherwood (adapted “The Gambler” with Gregory Peck), Huxley (adapted Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson), Vidal (adapted Suddenly Last Summer with Elizabeth Taylor) take their humble places below the salt, as it were, for we did not regard with sufficient seriousness the greatest art form of all time, preferring perversely to write books that reflected not the movies we had seen but life itself, not as observed by that sterile machine the camera but as it is netted by the protean fact of our beautiful if diminishing and polluted language. Kind of dumb, all in all. Like Sam, one should’ve played it again.

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—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.

The post Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

While I hesitate to take issue with so eminent a writer, I must point out that Gore Vidal [“Everything Is Yesterday,” NYR, February 28] is mistaken in thinking that New Harmony was founded by Robert Dale Owen. In 1824 Robert Dale’s father, Robert Owen, purchased Harmonie from the Rappists, who had founded it, after moving from Pennsylvania, in 1815. Robert Owen renamed it New Harmony. It really isn’t surprising that neither Owen had taken to heart The Blythedale Romance given that it was first published in 1852.

Intrigued by the command to look up “halcyon” and “avatar” in the dictionary, I did so. The definitions in the Oxford Dictionary agree with what I have always understood the words to mean. If well-paid journalists have been misusing them for years, I have been misunderstanding the intended meaning. I wonder what that could have been?

R. Veness
Hastings, East Sussex
England

Gore Vidal replies:

I must confess that I have never had very much interest in the Owens, father and son, other than their connection with Grace Zaring Stone, a descendant who was much fêted by Italian Communists for her brio as well as ancestral links with American communal living. I am thrilled to learn that Mr. (Miss? Ms?) Veness finds that the definitions in the OED “agree with what I have always understood the words to mean.” Now we need to know what, dear sir or madam, you have always understood.

The post You Can Look It Up appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

That spring my first novel was published as was the memoir, More Was Lost, of a handsome emerald-eyed young woman called Eleanor Perenyi. Paradoxically, glossy fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, where she worked, published only “quality-lit” fiction, as Terry Southern would say, as well as poets like Auden whom The New York Times refused to take on as a columnist in its Sunday book section on the ground that he was sexually degenerate. To be absolutely honest, our golden age was somewhat less than 24-carat.

On a workday, Eleanor wore white gloves and a chic hat, the uniform of the high-fashion magazine ladies when they lunched at the Colony restaurant, now gone along with hat, gloves. But there was nothing uniform about her personality. She was—is—a wit, a learned bluestocking who would eventually write the classic Green Thoughts on gardens as well as a study of Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero, the Hungarian artist as Romantic, a Perenyi theme.

Actually, it was Eleanor’s “Mamma” (or Mother, when Eleanor was in full voice) that I first knew about and came to know. Grace Zaring Stone was a successful writer of best sellers that were often made into movies, starting with The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Frank Capra’s one interesting movie (1933).

Eleanor’s naval officer father was military attaché to the American embassy at Paris when Hitler arrived in 1940, the year that Grace’s latest novel became the movie Escape that so awed one schoolboy by its worldly look at Mitteleuropa with its unreal castles and very real Nazis, all topped by that Byzantine crown of Saint Stephen and its bent cross. In 1937, the very young Eleanor Stone had married a Hungarian nobleman and they lived in a castle that kept moving back and forth between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, two of Hitler’s possessions whose boundaries he liked to redraw. Because Grace felt that her prematurely anti-Nazi book might put Eleanor at risk, she used the pseudonym Ethel Vance.

Eventually, Grace established herself in an old house in Stonington, Connecticut; she also had something of a salon in a Manhattan flat that attracted such Kindly Ones as Mary McCarthy. Ever the polite hostess, Grace once asked a lady writer what she was working on. When the lady writer answered, “Actually, I’m writing about…Evil,” Grace was radiant: “Oh, how I wish,” she said without so much as a caesura of a pause, “I had thought of that!” I think it was the same woman writer with whom Grace went to Moscow in postwar Stalinist times. Grace was a direct descendant of Robert Dale Owen, the Scots-born American socialist who founded New Harmony as an experiment in communal living: plainly, he had not taken to heart The Blithedale Romance. Grace was much feted by the Communists in Moscow despite her tendency to draw attention to this or that shortcoming in the socialist paradise. The lady writer said later that the only Russian words she had learned on the trip were “I do not know this woman.”

Over the years, when both mother and daughter were widows, their exchanges were repeated around Dawn Powell’s “magic island” as so much breaking news from the Delphi oracle (which Eleanor and I once visited when the Pythoness was on her lunch break). “Mother, you are senile!”

“And you, my dear, are fat.” The bleak one-liner was their lingua franca. Each created her own world in which she made the weather. Jointly, they were a double sun casting their rays over Stonington and their good friend James Merrill, a distinguished poet as well as, disturbingly, a multimillionaire, whom Grace often felt compelled to chide for his meanness. Finally, he brought her a present. From Turkey. “Something very special,” he said with his shyest, wealthiest smile. Grace tore at the package. At last! After so many years, the one perfect pearl. Wrapping removed to reveal a string bag. Eleanor was delighted. “As you always say, Mother, it is the thought that matters. And to think he brought it all the way from the market in Istanbul.”

More Was Lost is an ambitious title. At one level what was lost is clear enough: a happy married life that began in 1937 and ended in 1940 when the fall of France was the end of a world and the pregnant Eleanor was persuaded by her husband to go home to America to have her child even though home had become Hungary and life the contented running of an estate with her husband—no gloves, hat.

Zsiga Perenyi had studied with G.D.H. Cole at Oxford. He was what used to be called a liberal or, as Eleanor puts it, “He was the only Hungarian aristocrat I ever met who had learned anything from the revolution they had in 1919. He was toughly realistic, and perhaps the only really unhappy thing about him was that he didn’t believe in anything. I think possibly he has gotten over that.” So she writes as of 1946. Since he was to live until the Sixties nonbelief might have explained his continuing sanity. Eleanor begins as an early Henry James heroine. She is practical, optimistic, American. He is old-world, courtly, cynical. Maggie Verver, without a fortune, marries Prince Massimo, with rundown castle.

Perenyi belongs to the Swiss Family Robinson school of memoirists. She “fixes up” the Perenyi family castle, Szöllös, “at the exact geographical end of the Danubian plain and at the beginning of the Carpathians.” What began as a Hungarian property became Czech; then Ruthenian; it is now a Ukrainian ruin. The Perenyis owned seven hundred acres of farmland, a forest, and a vineyard. Details of growing and preserving food, repairing furniture, discovering frescoes, always fascinate not to mention details of a way of life that, as of 1940, had not much changed since the fifteenth century. There is hardly any money to spend but the place seems to sustain itself. “A young couple,” she writes, “is supposed to be lucky if they can build their own house.” (Recall that 1946 was the zenith of Levittown and the invention of the postwar ranch house.) “It may be so. For me, the theory did not work that way. My favorite idea as a child was what happened in French fairy stories. You were lost in a forest and suddenly you came on a castle, which in some way had been left for you to wander in.”

I suspect that for many of us brought up in the “civilized” pre-war years the whole world had an ad hoc quality, a spaciousness through which one serenely drove until, one day, or so we’ve been assured, history ended because of a Hegelian flat tire. The new Baroness Perenyi was also fortunate in her mother- and father-in-law. The older couple seemed to lead separate lives yet they were often at the castle together or in a Budapest flat. Mother-in-law taught Perenyi Hungarian.

In Swiss Family Robinson stories we only need to pay attention to the family and their ingenuity in creating a home on the island where they were shipwrecked: the story is entirely their story. But the Perenyi story has an oppressive context centered upon Hitler and his almost successful conquest of Europe not to mention attempts at genocide. Even so, looking back from 1946, Eleanor says that she saw few signs of anti-Semitism. “It makes me think I must have been very mistaken.” She did see “that the Jews were looked down on, but only because they engaged in all the things which in other countries are the province of the middle class. No one in Hungary is interested in business, and most Hungarians are certainly not very good at it in any case. After the last war, a good many of the nobility had to go to work. They were fantastically inefficient…. The peasants too looked down on commerce. And as everyone seemed to be either a noble or a peasant, business and the professions were gratefully turned over to the Jews. So, of course, were the arts.”

Of the gentry that Eleanor meets, the men are amiable, athletic, and altogether too rustic for a lady who, assigned to a different century and place, might have been competition to Madame du Deffand. But, in memory at least, she never complains. She had taken on a world for life, little suspecting that she would have to give it all up after the now-proverbial thousand days. It is said—and often written—that the summer of 1914 was uncommonly brilliant. Perenyi’s bright summer of 1939 was peaceful—she gardened and “thought of nothing at all, just being happy….” Of course, “the little drum of fate didn’t stop beating at all. We just stopped hearing it temporarily.” In August, Perenyi left for Paris to join her parents who had settled in the Place du Palais Bourbon. As Zsiga puts her on the Orient Express, “his last words were—’I hope the war doesn’t keep you there, darling.’ ‘I’ll come back,’ I said, ‘war or no war.'”

In Paris, she enjoyed one good week; then her father started coming “home from the Embassy a little later each day.” There was a general mobilization of the French army. “Then it was Saturday, the second of September”: one day after Auden’s famous “September 1, 1939,” later to be renounced by its creator—the poem not the date. Germany had invaded Poland. From the window of their flat, Eleanor and Grace watched the deputies arrive at their chamber where they would, presently, declare war on Germany. At about the same time that day I was standing in front of 10 Downing Street where I watched the pale, somewhat wild-eyed prime minister, Chamberlain, be driven off to Westminster where he would tell Parliament that war had finally come.

Eleanor made her way from Paris back to Zsiga. Poland had surrendered. Polish troops fled through their village. They took some in. For those of us who knew nothing of war but stories of the First World War’s endless slow-motion fighting in the mud and barbed wire, the speed with which whole nations were gobbled up by something called a blitzkrieg was too dizzying to absorb—Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, France all in a matter of months. Eventually, Zsiga was called up by the Hungarian army. “We had no atmosphere for this new war yet,” Perenyi writes. “In Central Europe we were really using the old one for all the natural effects, the stage management. I felt we were just acting out a historical pageant…. With the invasion of Belgium, we felt a restored perspective, the perspective of the familiar.” Home on leave, Zsiga insisted that the pregnant Eleanor go back to America.

“When you leave a place you are never going to see again, you are supposed to have some sort of premonition. I have often been mildly clairvoyant in my life, but not this time. I left as if I expected to be back the following week, straightening one of the little cherubs on each side of the clock, reminding Luci to throw out last month’s New Yorkers on the table by the porcelain stove, leaving the lid of the rosewood piano open…a hasty glance around the garden over which I had worked so hard…. I didn’t pay any farewell calls. I didn’t go to take a last look at my trees in the orchard. I walked out with only one bag, got into the carriage to be driven to the station…and never looked back.”

Thus, Mrs. Robinson goes to her Swiss home alone and, as it turns out, for good.

Husband and wife parted in Budapest. “We had only a few bad moments, the last twelve hours we were together, and I don’t remember how we got through them…. So it is that one passes insensibly from one part of life to another, from the past into the future. It isn’t usually as complete as that, that is the only difference…. For a long time the memory of the past sustains you, and when it no longer does, you are already a different person.” Six weeks after Germany’s surrender, Zsiga writes her. Zsiga is stoically putting up with the Russian occupiers. The castle has been made into a museum.

In 1947 Zsiga, who had survived the Nazis and was now coping with the Russians, spent six months in New York. But as Perenyi writes, “The next five years do not belong to this book…. I went back to America and found another life for myself. It was not altogether easy. I had put down roots in Hungary, and for a long time I dragged them around with me. I grieved, as they say.”

I never met Baron Perenyi. During his time in New York, they arranged for a divorce: he chose to go back and live as best he could in a Communist Hungary while she worked in New York and raised their son, and sparred cheerfully with “Mother.”

At the end of More Was Lost, she sums up a marriage as if she knows that an account—accounting?—will be rendered. “I remembered his liberalism. I remembered his hatred of bigotry and cruelty and prejudice. But I remembered also his hopeless cynicism, his doubts, not of man’s capacity but of his desire to resist evil. He had always had a pessimism born of privation and failure. He had lost a little, living with me, but I had left him.”

So an Ethel Vance story becomes Henry James. At the end each knows. Each escapes—accepts—forgets even though nothing will ever be the same again.

Now let us listen to the great voice of Mitteleuropa in the twentieth century, the Viennese Karl Kraus. In his The Last Days of Mankind (1926), Optimist faces Faultfinder.

Optimist: But all wars have ended with peace.

Faultfinder: Not this one. This one has not taken place on the surface of life…. No, it has raged inside life itself. The front has been extended to the whole country. And there it will stay. And this changed life, if there still is life, will be accompanied by the old spiritual condition. The world is perishing and won’t know it. Everything was yesterday and will be forgotten; no one will see today or be afraid of tomorrow. They will forget that the war was lost, forget they began it, forget they fought it. That is why the war won’t end.

And so here we are. Amnesiacs in time. At war. With more lost.

The post ‘Everything Is Yesterday’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Recently, I touched on this delicate matter in The Golden Age and, currently, R.B. Stinnett, in Day of Deceit, has analyzed FDR’s policy of provocation based on new material, much of it only released in 1995 under the Freedom of Information Act. But as Mr. Stinnett is currently making his case in these pages [Letters, NYR, February 8], I shall only respond to one of Mr. Buruma’s blithe footnotes to the effect that the Japanese war party’s “plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor had been presented to Hirohito already in early November, after he was convinced that war with the US was inevitable. This would suggest that those who continue to believe that Pearl Harbor was really Roosevelt’s doing are barking up the wrong tree.” As this bold non sequitur suggests, Mr. Buruma himself is firmly lodged in the wrong tree. But then many Western journalists who move about the Far East are permanently dazzled if not blinded by the Rising Sun.

I particularly like the notion that Hirohito (for reasons not mentioned) was, somehow, in November 1941, convinced that war with the US was inevitable. Why? Lady Murasaki has, apparently, pledged Mr. Buruma to secrecy. So let’s try to work out what was going on in November that might have convinced the marine biologist atop the Chrysanthemum throne that an “inevitable” war was coming his way not, as Mr. Buruma would have it, from the savage war party in Tokyo but from Freedom’s alabaster home itself. If Hirohito had been studying his in-box, as “a divine priest-king” ought, he might have suspected that the US had been trying to get a rise out of him for many years. On July 16, 1941, Prince Konoye, a would-be peacemaker, became prime minister. On July 26 (as a vote of confidence?) the US froze all Japanese funds in the US and stopped the export of oil. When Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was asked by the Japanese if some compromise might be worked out, Welles said there was not the “slightest ground for any compromise solution.”

Our first provocation against Japan began with FDR’s famous Chicago address (October 5, 1937), asking for a quarantine against aggressor nations. Certainly, Japan in Manchuria and north China qualified as an aggressor just as we had been one when we conquered the Philippines and moved into the Japanese neighborhood at the start of the twentieth century. In December 1937, the Japanese sank the Panay, an American gunboat in Chinese waters, on duty so far from home as the Monroe Doctrine sternly requires. Japan promptly, humbly paid for the damage mistakenly done our ship. Meanwhile, FDR—something of a Sinophile—was aiding and abetting the Chinese warlord Chiang Kai-shek.

Three years later the Western world changed dramatically. France fell to Hitler, an ally of Japan. FDR was looking for some way to help Britain avoid the same fate. Although most bien pensant Americans were eager to stop Hitler, not many fretted about Japan. Also, more to the point—the point—a clear majority of American voters were against going to war a second time in Europe in a single generation. Nevertheless, instead of meeting Konoye, FDR met Winston Churchill aboard a warship off Newfoundland. FDR said that he would do what he could to help England but he was limited by an isolationist Congress, press, and electorate. Later, Churchill, in a speech to Parliament, let part of the cat out of the bag: “The possibility since the Atlantic Conference…that the United States, even if not herself attacked, would come into a war in the Far East, and thus make final victory sure, seemed to allay some of those anxieties….” (The anxieties were FDR’s inability to come to the full aid of England in the war with the Axis.) “As time went on, one had great assurance that if Japan ran amok in the Pacific, we should not fight alone.”

Pointedly, FDR refused to meet Konoye, whose government was then replaced by that of General Hideki Tojo. The military, so feared by Mr. Buruma, were now in power. But though they lusted for the blood of everyone on earth, they more modestly wanted to get on with the conquest of China and Southeast Asia. Certainly, they did not want a simultaneous war with a great continental power thousands of miles away. In November 1941 they made a final attempt at peace. We now know—thanks to our having broken the Japanese diplomatic code—the contents of Hirohito’s in-box. Japan looked for a compromise. We looked for war. The Japanese ambassadors to the US, Kurusu and Nomura, were treated to a series of American ultimatums that concluded, November 26, with the following order: “The government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and Indo-China” as well as renounce the tripartite Axis agreement. It was then, as Lincoln once said on a nobler occasion, the war came. Churchill’s anxieties were at last allayed. On November 29 Germany assured Japan that should they go to war with the US, Germany would join them. In April 1945, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, in a memorial address at Harvard, praised the late President Roosevelt, “while engaged in this series of complicated moves, he so skillfully conducted affairs as to avoid even the appearance of an act of aggression on our part.” There it is.

Question to those in denial about the US as provocateur: Why is it, if we were not on the offensive, that so small and faraway an island as Japan attacked what was so clearly, already, a vast imperial continental power? You have now had over sixty years to come up with a plausible answer. Do tell.

Gore Vidal

Ravello, Italy

Ian Buruma replies:

Mr. Vidal wonders why, by November 1941, Emperor Hirohito was convinced that war with the US was inevitable. Indeed, he finds the notion amusing. Here are a few points by way of comment.

The Imperial Conference, convened on November 2, 1941, was summed up by the Privy Council President Hara Kei as follows:

It is impossible, from the standpoint of our present situation and of our self-preservation, to accept all of the American demands. On the other hand we cannot let the present situation continue. If we miss the present opportunity to go to war, we will have to submit to American dictation. Therefore, I recognize that it is inevitable that we must decide to start a war against the United States.[^1]

What were these American demands? In fact there had been no American demands, until Japanese troops moved into Indochina in July 1941. Washington had lectured the Japanese about their brutal war in China, beginning with a military invasion in 1937, but had done nothing to stop them (and by the way, I wasn’t born in time to “fear” the Japanese military; many Chinese, on the other hand, were and did). The Japanese, however, could not continue to occupy China without more natural resources at their disposal. That is why they invaded Indochina, with plans to expand further into Southeast Asia. And that is why Roosevelt froze Japanese funds in the US and stopped the export of oil.

Some Japanese were willing to retreat, no doubt, but not the Japanese who mattered. General Tojo, who was minister of war in the cabinet of Prince Konoye, the “would-be peacemaker,” stated that there could be “no compromise on the stationing of troops in China. It affects military morale…. If we just acquiesce to the American demand, everything we have achieved in China will be lost.”[^2]

The Japanese navy was on the whole less keen than the army to take on the US, but Naval Chief of Staff Admiral Nagano had suggested war with the US as early as July 1941, because, in his view, Japan was better prepared and would “have a chance of achieving victory” if it acted with sufficient speed.[^3] He said this on July 21, five days before the US decided to impose economic sanctions.

Konoye did indeed offer the US a vague deal in the summer of 1941. He wanted the US and Britain to stay out of China, to give Japan a free hand in much of Southeast Asia, and to lift all economic sanctions. In exchange, Japan promised to leave the Philippines alone and to withdraw from Indochina, but only after the situation in China was resolved to Japanese satisfaction. How this was to be resolved was left unclear. As Mr. Vidal says: “some compromise.” No wonder Secretary of State Cordell Hull was not much interested.

In September, General Tojo took over as prime minister. Prince Takamatsu, the Emperor’s younger brother, wrote in his diary: “We have finally committed to war and now we must do all we can to launch it powerfully.”[^4] The hope was that a knockout blow would, in Admiral Yamamoto’s words, leave the Americans “so dispirited they will not be able to recover.”[^5] This kind of thinking was encouraged by the common idea that Americans were a decadent people. The man who planned the attack on Singapore, Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, later explained that “our candid ideas at the time were that the Americans, being merchants, would not continue for long with an unprofitable war.”[^6]

Right-wing Japanese revisionists still argue that a US ultimatum forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact, it was more like the other way around. The Japanese armed services decided that war was inevitable if Washington did not give in to their demands by October 1941. When the US failed to do so, Admiral Nagano warned his government that the navy was running out of oil. He said: “The government has decided that if there were no war the fate of the nation is sealed…. A nation that does not fight in this plight has lost its spirit and is doomed.”[^7]

I’m not entirely sure what Mr. Vidal means when he states that “Japan looked for a compromise. We looked for a war.” I assume he refers to vague proposals that Japanese troops might be pulled back to the northern part of Indochina once Japan had gained control over the Chinese continent. This was proposed on November 20. If the Americans didn’t agree by midnight November 30, the deal was off. Cordell Hull replied that Japan should withdraw from China (not Manchuria, or Korea), but left room for further negotiation. There was no American ultimatum, only a Japanese deadline. November 30 came and went, and the rest we know.

Mr. Vidal doesn’t have to take my word for any of this, or indeed the words of American historians. Ienaga Saburo, the left-wing Japanese historian who has spent a lifetime fighting conservative Japanese officials, put it succinctly: “…The clash with America stemmed from the invasion of China…. It can hardly be overstressed that aggression against China was at the heart of the fifteen-year-war.”^{[8 ]}By 1942 Japanese forces had, in addition to parts of China, occupied much of the rest of the Pacific region, including Burma, the Philippines, Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies.

One can still go on believing, of course, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was happy to sacrifice much of his navy in the hope that Hitler would join Japan in going to war with the US, something Hitler was under no obligation to do. But to believe that, you either have to be a right-wing Japanese with a political agenda (to revise the “peace constitution,” promote nationalism, and revive the military spirit), or permanently dazzled, if not blinded, by conspiracy theories in Washington, D.C.

The post Pearl Harbor: An Exchange appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

By sixteen, King Otto was crowned Emperor of the West. An intellectual snob, he despised what he called “Saxon rusticity” and he favored what he termed Greek or Byzantine “subtlety.” He even dreamed of sailing to Byzantium to bring together all Christendom under his rule, which was, in turn, under that of God. In this sublime enterprise he was guided by his old tutor, a French scholar named Gerbert.

As a sign of solidarity—not to mention morbidity—Otto even opened up the tomb of Charlemagne and paid his great predecessor a visit. The dead emperor was seated on a throne. According to an eyewitness, only a bit of his nose had fallen off but his fingernails had grown through his gloves and so, reverently, Otto pared them and otherwise tidied him up. Can one imagine Prodi—or even Schroeder—doing as much for the corpse of Monnet?

Now we approach the fateful year 999. Otto is nineteen. He is obsessed with Italy. With Rome. With empire. In that year he sees to it that Gerbert is elected pope, taking the name Sylvester. Now Emperor and Pope move south to the decaying small town of Rome where Otto builds himself a palace on the Aventine—a bad luck hill, as Cicero could have testified.

Together, Otto and Sylvester lavished their love and their ambition upon the Romans, who hated both of them with a passion. In the year that our common millennium properly began, 1001, the Romans drove Emperor and Pope out of the city. Otto died at twenty-two, near Viterbo, of smallpox. A year later, Sylvester was dead, having first, it is said, invented the organ. Thus, the dream of a European Union ended in disaster for the two dreamers.

I will not go so far as to say that the thousand years since Otto’s death have been a total waste of time. Certainly, other dreamers have had similar centripetal dreams. But those centrifugal forces that hold us in permanent thrall invariably undo the various confederacies, leagues, empires, thousand-year reichs that the centripetalists would impose upon us from the top down.

Recently the literary critic Harold Bloom, in the somewhat quixotic course of trying to establish a Western literary canon, divided human history into phases that cyclically repeat. First, he says, there is a theocratic age, next an aristocratic age, followed by a democratic age, which degenerates into chaos out of which some new idea of divinity will emerge to unite us all in a brand-new theocratic age, and the cycle begins again. Bloom rather dreads the coming theocratic age, but since he—and I—will never see it, we can settle comfortably into the current chaos where the meaning of meaning is an endlessly cozy subject and Heisenberg’s principle is undisputed law of the land, at least from where each of us is situated.

I shall not discuss Bloom’s literary canon which, like literature itself, is rapidly responding, if not to chaos, to entropy. But as we ponder the adventures of Otto and Sylvester, we must note the cyclic nature of the way human society evolves as originally posited by Plato in the eighth book of the Republic and further developed by Giovanni Battista Vico in his Scienza Nuova.

Professor Bloom goes straight to Vico, an early-eighteenth-century Neapolitan scholar who became interested in the origins of Roman law. The deeper Vico got into the subject, the further back in time he was obliged to go; specifically, to Greece. Then he got interested in how the human race was able to create an image of itself for itself. At the beginning there appears to have been an animistic belief in the magic of places and in the personification of the elements as gods. To Vico, these legends, rooted in prehistory, were innate wisdom. Plainly, he was something of a Jungian before that cloudy Swissly fact. But then the age of the gods was challenged by the rise of individual men. Suddenly, kings and heroes are on the scene. They, in turn, give birth to oligarchies, to an aristocratic society where patricians battle for first place in the state. In time, the always exciting game of who will be king of the castle creates a tyranny that will inspire the people at large to rebel against the tyrants and establish republics that, thanks to man’s nature, tend to imperial acquisitiveness, and so, in due course, these empire-republics meet their natural terminus in, let us say, the jungles of Vietnam.

What happens next? Vico calls the next stage Chaos, to be followed by a new theocratic age. This process is, of course, pure Hinduism, which was never to stop leaking into Greek thought from Pythagoras to the neoplatonists and even now into the collective consciousness of numerous California surfers and ceramists as well as disciples of the good Allen Ginsberg. Birth, death, chaos, then rebirth and so on and on and on.

But though Vico’s mind was brilliant and intuitive, the history that he had to deal with necessarily left out science as we know it and he did not. Now we must ponder how chaos may yet organize itself through technology as the means of ultimate control over everyone even as it seems, currently, to serve China’s lively millions as a step toward liberation. Chaos—our current condition—may prove to be altogether too interesting to make order of. Will the next god be a computer? In which case, a tyrant god for those of us who dwell in computer-challenged darkness.

A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open for those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. In the case of the United States, the acquisition of new citizens from all the tribes of earth has always been thought to be a very good thing. But, eventually, with so many billions of people on the move, even the great-hearted may well become edgy once we have gobbled up all the computer-proficient immigrants.

As we start the third millennium of what we in our Western section of the globe are amused to call the Christian era, we should be aware, of course, that most of the world’s tribes are, happily for them, not Christian at all. Also, most of us who are classified as Christians and live in nations where this form of monotheism was once all-powerful now live in a secular world. So chaos does have its pleasures. But then as Christian presuppositions do not mean anything to others (as Buddhists reminded the current pope when on holiday in Sri Lanka), so, too, finally, Plato and his perennially interesting worldview don’t make much sense when applied to societies such as ours. I like his conceit of the political progression of societies and a case can be made for it, as Vico did. But Plato, as political thinker, must be taken with Attic salt, which John Jay Chapman brilliantly supplies in an essay recently discovered in his archives; he died in 1933. Although he was America’s greatest essayist after Emerson, he is little known today. This is a pity, but then these are pitiful times, are they not?

Chapman on Plato:

Plato somewhere compares philosophy to a raft on which a shipwrecked sailor may perhaps reach home. Never was a simile more apt. Every man has his raft, which is generally large enough only for one. It is made up of things snatched from his cabin—a life preserver or two of psalm, proverb or fable; some planks held together by the oddest rope-ends of experience; and the whole shaky craft requires constant attention. How absurd, then, is it to think that any formal philosophy is possible—when the rag of old curtain that serves one man for a waistcoat is the next man’s prayer-mat! To try to make a raft for one’s neighbor, or try to get on to someone else’s raft, these seem to be the besetting sins of philosophy and religion.

The raft itself is an illusion. We do not either make or possess our raft. We are not able to seize it or explain it; cannot summon it at will. It comes and goes like a phantom. In other words, one man’s religion or philosophic system can never be another’s—or even his own. Plato’s mouthpiece, Socrates, was plainly no theocrat, and at the dawn of a new era of god-kings centered on Alexander, Socrates was invited to kill himself.

Of Plato, as a voice from somewhere on the far edge of a democratic age, Chapman notes, with quiet pleasure, that:

It has thus become impossible for anyone to read Plato’s dialogues or any other creation of the Greek brain with real sympathy, for those creations speak from a wonderful, cruel, remote, witty age, and represent the amusements of a wonderful, cruel, remote, witty people, who lived for amusement, and for this reason perished. Let us enjoy the playthings of this clever man but let us, so far as in us lies, forebear to cloy them with our explanations.

The dream of Otto and Sylvester, if ever made even partial reality, would hasten a new theocratic age which, thanks to modern technology, could easily become a prison for us all, and with no world elsewhere to escape to.

Great centrifugal forces are now at work in nearly every nation-state, and why resist them? For the centripetally minded—theocratic or imperial or both—the mosaic of different tribes that will occupy Europe, let us say, from homely Bantry to glittering Vladivostok, are eventually bound to come together in the interest of mundane trade. Is not that quite enough? At least in the absence of a new god.

Nevertheless, as the curtain falls on our dismal century and ungraspable millennium, one sees on every side, to the east, west, north, and south of Tiananmen Square, signs of religious revival. Everywhere Theos are rising from their musty tombs, plucking stakes from their black hearts, awful eyes aglitter in every land as they commence their war on that old night and chaos which has given such comforting shelter to shy diversity. One also recalls, in the last century, a speaker of the American House of Representatives who was so reactionary that it was said of him: If he had been consulted by God about creation, he would have voted for chaos. Considering the alternatives, for now at least, who would not?

The post Chaos appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

It was the prissy Orville Prescott who praised me while Mr. Wilson astonished everyone that season with a Pythian ode to a beautiful young woman called Isabel Bolton, whose first book, Do I Wake or Sleep, he hailed as “school of Henry James… the device of the sensitive observer who stands at the center of the action and through the filter of whose consciousness alone the happenings of the story reach us…a voice that combines, in a peculiar way, the lyric with the dry; and is exquisitely perfect in accent; every syllable falls as it should….” A star was born.

A comic legend was also born. Wilson, ravished by the beauty of Bolton’s prose, hoped that its creator was equally beautiful and so…. Well, Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of a beautiful woman was also of intense importance to him. Could the two ever be combined—the ultimate soulmate? Montaigne thought that if women endured the same education and general experience as men they would probably be no different and so intellectual equality might be achieved. But he gave no examples. By Wilson’s time, many women had been similarly educated and luminous feminine minds—chock-a-block with pensées—were very much out there. But what about…well, to be blunt, Beauty? Could Mind as well as Beauty be found in one person?

Wilson’s lifelong quest led him into some strange culs-de-sac. The strangest of all must have been when he discovered that Isabel Bolton—name deliberately reminiscent of Isabel Archer?—was, in reality, a majestic granddame of sixty-three, born Mary Britton Miller in 1883 at New London, Connecticut.

Only five minutes, so legend goes, after my sister. This participation in identical twinship is the most valuable experience of my life…. Both of my parents died of pneumonia and within an hour of each other in the fourth year of my life…. In my fourteenth year my twin sister was drowned. After this there seems to be a kind of blotting out of life—everything became dim, unreal, artificial.

Perfunctory attendance at a boarding school. A well-off family made travels in Europe possible. “Three years in Italy were of profound importance. In 1911 New York became my permanent home.”

As Miller, she published a half-dozen unmemorable works. Then, in 1946, she recreated herself under another name; and entered her kingdom. Wilson’s was the first fanfare for a woman who was to write a half-dozen more novels of which two are as distinguished as her “first” (the three are now collected in New York Mosaic). Bolton died in 1979 at ninety-two, productive almost to the end. As practically nothing is now known of her, editor Doris Grumbach does her best with the odd facts: Bolton came from a “good” family; had two close lady friends; lived in pre-1914 Europe and then Manhattan. Attended the Writers’ Colony at Yaddo. Died in Greenwich Village at 81 Barrow Street, not far from where Wilson’s jolliest muse, Dawn Powell, lived. The rest is, so far, silence, secret—Sapphic?

So little is known of Bolton that one does not know if she and Wilson ever met. But I am fairly certain he saw to it that they did. A meeting only the prose of Henry James could have risen to, unlike the equally great Edith Wharton, who might have fallen upon it with terrible rending eagle’s swoop:

There had been—one wondered not so idly why—no photograph or other rendering of likeness or, even, dis-likeness, on the homely paper “jacket” that embraced the ever, to Wilson, with each passing day, more precious volume, the distilled essence of all feminine beauty and sensibility, quite overpowering in its effect upon his perhaps too febrile adhesive system for which the names so boldly yet, by some magical art, demurely printed on this very same “jacket” convey to him the physical beauty of the divine girl who had “cut to roundness and smoothed to convexity a little crystal of literary form that concentrates the light like a burning glass”—his very own words in his devoir for The New Yorker, written with so much pounding of the heart as, to put it in a plain and vulgar fashion, a cry from that never not susceptible heart—in short, a love letter to the unknown girl—surely, a girl of genius rather than a woman like his handsome, brilliant, but—well, incendiary (literally) wife, Mary McCarthy, who had recently, when he had withdrawn to his study and locked the door, slipped under that same door a single sheet of paper deliberately set aflame in order to smoke him, as it were, from his lair, all the while shouting in a powerful voice, not so much golden as a reverberating cymbal of purest brass, “Fuck you.” The plangent voice resounded even now, unpleasantly, in his mind, as he rang the doorbell to a Greenwich Village residence set in a quarter not too—nor less than—fashionable.

The door opened. “Mr. Wilson.” The voice was neither golden nor bronze but of another quality and substance entirely—honey from Hymettus, collected from blue and white Attic flowers—perhaps those very same asphodels which adorn the hill at Marathon that looks upon the sea, wine-dark sea like the eyes of Isabel Bolton into which he now so intensely gazed that he let fall the cluster of white violets he was holding and they scattered, as offering, at her shapely feet encased in crimson velvet with the sort of high instep that caused his heart to beat even more wildly than before. “Do forgive me,” he said, collecting the fallen blossoms as the divine girl, all willowy with golden hair—no sign of chemical artifice in those massed curls—and the small exquisite poitrine like—what was it? gazelles? He must really get around to learning Hebrew one day.

Wilson’s praise of the perfect book came in bursts of sound between articulated wheezes of emotion as he drank the perfectly made martini—plainly, there was to be no end to her genius—and his heart, that metaphor as well as vulnerable organ, rattled in his bosom like the unfortunate occupant in the fabled ferrous mask. Here, at last, she was. So entirely there, so real—man-brain in girl-shape. She was tantalizingly silent. So must Moira—Fate for the ancient Greeks—have appeared upon first encounter with a mere mortal.

An inner door of the tastefully decorated—all Englishy and yet impeccable—chamber opened, revealing a tall woman, old but majestic, with the creased brow of Juno beneath white hair parted in the middle. As the ancient Norn strode into the room, Wilson rose from his chair, saying to the perfect girl, “This then is your mother?” The powerful old lady smiled and held out her hand.

“No, Mr. Wilson. I am the Isabel Bolton you have lately written so amiably of in the popular press. This…” she indicated the girl of what had been his best dream, ever, “is my ward, Cherry.” With that, Bolton shook Wilson’s hand while her other arm enfolded lovingly, possessively, the narrow waist of the perfect girl.

As Wilson made his all too slow, it seemed to him, descent to the—yes, entirely clear at last, figure in the Persian carpet, he heard, from far-off, Bolton’s voice—could it have been one of brass like Mary’s? “I fear that Mr. Wilson has fainted. But then he is very stout. It is not uncommon at our age. Bring smelling salts.” The last thing he saw were the heavy leather boots of the old lady, with their—what else? fallen insteps.

Needless to say, I have invented Cherry, yet there is often a Sapphic glow to Bolton’s exchanges between women. In Do I Wake or Sleep the relationship between the exquisite Bridget (for whom Wilson fell as Bolton’s surrogate) and the rough-hewn Millicent is loverlike in the teasing French manner rather than today’s klutzy American style where each would have had to wear an auctorial label and, if sympathetic, behave correctly according to rules laid down by the heirs and heiresses of Cotton Mather. Happily, for Bolton, the amatory simply is; and, in general, gaiety (old meaning) rules and no one is assigned a label much less sold off in midseason to a team. In this, she is as alien to us as Ovid, and I suspect only a very few rare spirits ever took to her even when the books first came out in post-Hitler days, a time of stern Julius Caesar rather than her own Midsummer Night’s Dream.

To read Bolton’s three novels in sequence is to relive the three major moments of the American half century as observed by an unusual writer located aboard what Dawn Powell called “the happy island,” Manhattan. The first novel takes place in 1939. War is wending its way toward the United States and the protagonist, the enchanting Bridget St. Dennis, is lunching blithely in the French Pavilion at Flushing Meadow’s World’s Fair. Although the chef, Henri Soulé, would later open what was regarded for many years as New York’s best restaurant, it is a part of Bolton’s magic that not only do you get quite a few good meals in her books but you get subtle distinctions as well. She shared everyone’s delight in Le Pavillon’s transfer from Flushing to Manhattan. But Bolton herself opts for the magical Chambord in Third Avenue where, as the cartoon used to say, the elite meet to eat or, as someone said to an ancient bon viveur who was recently extolling the long-vanished Chambord, “You are living in the past,” to which the old man replied, “Where else can you get a decent meal?”

Bolton belongs to the James-Wharton school of trans-Atlantic fiction or, perhaps, a new category should be invented—of mid-Atlantic literature that flourished, to put arbitrary dates like bookends to its history, from Hawthorne’s Our Old Home (1863) to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, published in 1943. It was a long and lively run and brought out the best in two literatures never destined to be one but each able to complement the other while even those professionally committed to the American side, like Twain and Howells, touched base regularly with their common old home. For a writer born in 1883, with sufficient family money but no Jamesian fortune, Europe would be as much a part of her life as Brookline, Massachusetts, where the last of Bolton’s protagonists hails from: a world of numerous servants, of courses at dinner, of changes of clothes, presumably to give the servants more than enough to do in the pre-1914 world when Bolton was already a grown woman. As it turned out, pre-1914 continued well into the modern age of cocktails and movie stars—one of Edith Wharton’s least-known novels, Twilight Sleep, deals with a Hollywood movie star in a way that must make the Collins sisters, the Bel-Air Brontës, quite nervous at how well the stately Mrs. Wharton depicts the life of one who lives on the screen everywhere on earth but nowhere at all in the flesh at home. Then, with Depression and Second War, the old world expired. Good riddance, the modern thought. Bolton is of two minds. She is conscious of the douceur de la vie of the old time; also of the narrow callow brazen world that that time was rendering all gold, or trying to.

Wilson gets quite right Bolton’s “Jamesian technique in Do I Wake or Sleep: the single consciousness that observes all.” I missed it in the first chapter which is all Bridget, lovingly observed, I thought, by author-god. Then, gradually, one realizes that it is the other woman at the table whose mind we’ve entered.

Plot: Do I Wake or Sleep. Bridget is having lunch at the French Pavilion with a besotted (by her) popular novelist, Percy Jones, equally besotted by martinis, and one Millicent, “a writer of witty articles and famous tales—beloved of Hollywood.” A character perhaps influenced by Dorothy Parker and from whose point of view the story is told.

Bridget enchants at lunch; and her creator convinces us that she does so by what she says, not often quoted, and by the way that she includes everyone in a kind of vital intimacy. But she is unexpectedly evasive on the subject of her child, Beatrice. We learn that Bridget was born Rosenbaum; married Eric von Mandestadt, “an Aryan (she’d used the ridiculous word as though it had been incorporated into all the European tongues).” Percy is very much on the case: Beatrice is in Vienna with her paternal grandmother; the Nazis are there, too. Percy feels that it is urgent that the child be got out but Bridget ignores the subject. The first chapter is a very special example of the storyteller’s art. It seems to be told in standard third person. But, gradually, with an aside here, a parenthesis there, one realizes that the consciousness taking all this in is the near-silent Millicent who, in the next chapter, takes shape and autonomy. It is an elegant trick of narrative.

At lunch, Millicent observes and records Bridget as she hovers like a bright blur-winged hummingbird over many subjects. Wilson and Grumbach find much of James, Woolf, and the Elizabeth Bowen of The Death of the Heart in the prose but Bridget herself finesses that essential trio:

She had been in her brief existence two distinctly different beings, and one of these was the creature she was before and the other she had become after reading the works of Marcel Proust. No, really, she wasn’t joking. From the experience she’d emerged with all manner of extensions, reinforcements, renewals of her entire nervous system—indeed, she might say that she’d been endowed with a perfectly new apparatus for apprehending the vibration of other people’s souls…. We were forced to take about with us wherever we went this extraordinary apparatus, recording accurately a thousand little matters of which we had not formerly been aware, and whether she was glad or sorry to be in possession of so delicate and precise an instrument, she had never been able to determine.

There is something to be said for putting off one’s official first novel until the age of sixty-three. Certainly Bolton is not in the least diffident when it comes to putting the home-grown American product in its place, which is way out yonder in those amber fields of grain:

Did [Percy] really believe that American novelists were ready to accept, to celebrate the same creature, the same human heart? It seemed to her that they were always trying to reshape, to remold the creature according to some pattern they desperately yearned to have it conform to—…would he agree with her that American novels seldom went deep into the realities of character—weren’t they dealing more with circumstances, places—epochs, environments? They came boiling up out of the decades—out of the twenties, out of the thirties—out of Pittsburgh….

Poor novelist Percy is reeling by now. Yes, he is inclined to agree with her that American novelists are moralists but…Henry James, he makes the great name toll over the guinea hen. Bridget counterattacks—Dostoyevsky. “Who could really call Henry James in comparison a good psychologist?… matchless brilliance and probity…innocent, indignant and upright response to the vulgar, the brutal, the material aspects of society…. But if you tried to compare him with Dostoyevsky, he was a child, a holy innocent. [Dostoyevsky] was the traveler in the desert of the soul.”

Fast forward, another restaurant: “I believe,” said the head waiter, benignly, “this is Mr. Michael Korda’s table. There’s been some mistake. I do apologize. He is with,” a conspiratorial whisper, “Mr. Stephen King.”

Yes, to this day, the Four Seasons still echoes with that never-ending literary debate as the waiter shows them to their table in a shallow pool of water. “Mr. Kissinger’s favorite table. But as it’s Tuesday, he’s lunching in Beijing.”

The plot is simply the next day. Lunch again with Percy and Millicent. Percy obsessed by the child as putative victim of the Nazis. Bridget evasive. They meet at the Algonquin. Go on to Chambord. Dover sole newly arrived in brine aboard the Normandie. Later, to a cocktail party—the New York cocktail party of the Forties where the currently celebrated and fashionable mill about, grist for Millicent’s eye and ear ever grinding them all up, finer and finer. Percy, drunk, misbehaves: gets knocked out. Doctor comes. No, he is not dead. The party ends—the denouement is that the child is somehow defective—the word “cretin” is used rather than “challenged” as they now say at the Four Seasons: in fact, a sort of monster. Then we learn that Bridget’s evasiveness is due to the fact that she is currently penniless; even so, she will bring the child home.

What strikes one most is Millicent’s deep-seated passion for America in general and for New York City in particular, understandable in the case of a provincial like Thomas Wolfe come wide-eyed to the web and the rock but odd in a partly Europeanized woman of her age. There has been a definite shift in mood since the generation before her: Mrs. Wharton shuddered at the sound of American voices and Henry James gave a murderously deadpan description of “American City” somewhere or other out there in the flat empty regions where the states are simply drawn on the national map with a ruler, and the buffalo roam.

Millicent contrasts New York with European cities: “Here you walked in a vacuum. There were no echoes, no reverberations.” She looks at the Empire State Building.

It was one of the wonders of the world. Nevertheless she didn’t (and how many people she wondered did) even know the name of its architect. It rose above you, innocent of fame or fable…. What a strange, what a fantastic city: and yet, and yet; there was something here that one experienced nowhere else on earth. Something one loved intensely. What was it? Crossing the streets—standing on the street corners with the crowds: what was it that induced this special climate of the nerves?… There was something—a peculiar sense of intimacy, friendliness, being here with all these people and in this strange place…. They touched your heart with tenderness and you felt yourself a part of the real flight and flutter-searching their faces, speculating about their dooms and destinies.

She has a sudden vision of Apocalypse. War. Towers crashing yet “an unchallenged faith and love and generosity, which…still lay deep-rooted in the American psyche to deliver us from death—remembering the Fair at the Flushing Meadow, the Futurama (sponsored by General Motors and displaying with such naive assurance the chart and prospect of these United States).” There is a kind of patrician Whitman at work here and one wonders does anyone now, nearly sixty years later, feel so intimately about Manhattan, the American fact?

In The Christmas Tree, Bolton has moved on to 1945. Mrs. Danforth wants her six-year-old grandson, Henry, to have a proper old-fashioned Christmas tree while all that he wants is to play with his bomber and fighter planes. She lives in a skyscraper overlooking the East River but a part of her is still anchored in the brownstone world of her youth, “the days when people really believed in their wealth and special privilege…the days of elegance, of arrogance, of ignorance and what a rashly planned security.” Today Christmas is vast and mass-produced on every side unlike the days of her youth. She broods on her son Larry, father to Henry. He lives now in Washington with a male lover while Anne, his ex-wife, is en route to New York for Christmas, accompanied by her new husband, Captain Fletcher, an Army Air Force wing-commander. (Bolton errs on this one: he would have been at least a full colonel if not brigadier general.) Mrs. Danforth admires Anne’s resilience; the coolness with which she accepts the fact that she is often drawn to “the invert, the schizophrene, the artist. Men like that were never normal sexually.”

Mrs. Danforth is sufficiently in the grip of the Freudians of the Forties—never again, happily, to be so ubiquitous or so serenely off-base—to wonder if she had loved her son too much when they lived in Paris and it was quite clear to her that, at fifteen, he was having an affair with a French boy a year or two older. “She’d felt no censure of the boys, she had no inclination to reproach them. She’d only felt an immense love, an overwhelming pity for them. And oh, she questioned passionately, how much could she herself be held responsible for Larry’s inclinations? How much had she been implicated?” This was the era of the Oedipus Complex (something Oedipus himself did not suffer from since he didn’t know that it was Mom he had married after killing what he hadn’t known was Dad); also, of the era of popular books with titles like Generation of Vipers—denouncing the American Mom for castrating her sons. Although Proust must have taught Bolton a lot more than Mrs. Danforth would ever learn, it is probably true to the time that mother would blame herself for her son’s unorthodox sexual appetites.

Grumbach likes this the best of Bolton’s novels. It is certainly the most tightly plotted; it would make a solid old-fashioned drawing-room comedy with a melodramatic twist. Unfortunately, Bolton’s scenes between Larry and his lover are not quite all there on the page and what is there doesn’t have the reverberation that a memory, say, of Mrs. Danforth’s youth sets off in other pages. Bolton also makes the narrative more difficult for herself by shifting points of “view.” Mrs. Danforth gives way to Larry, preparing to break up with a lover while brooding upon his Parisian past; finally, should he join his ex-wife Anne and her new husband beneath his mother’s Christmas tree? We next shift to Anne on her way from Reno with her American husband; she is nostalgic for Larry,

an exceptional human being, she sometimes suspected that he’d given very little to anyone and that, as a matter of fact, he’d taken from others even less. It was in his enormous concern for the general human plight that his affections were the most implicated; his love of humanity in the large impersonal sense was profound…. He was at the mercy of certain tricks and habits of bad behavior—nervous reflexes which apparently he could not control….

There the fatal flaw is named and prepares us for what is to come.

Anne and her manly Captain make up the family scene with the child and Mrs. Danforth. Larry’s presence is a dissonant note made worse by the arrival of his lover. Despite good manners all around, the collision between Larry and the Captain takes place over the child, who tells Larry that he hates him. The child prefers the war hero who has brought him numerous toy planes. The Captain then launches what is currently known as a “homophobic” rage at Larry, who tells him to get out. But instead they go out onto the terrace, sixteen stories above the street. The ladies hear loud voices, terrible epithets; silence. Larry comes back into the room, alone. He says that he has killed the Captain; pushed him over the railing. No, it was not an accident.

The others are willing to perjure themselves to save Larry. But he will not allow it; he rings the police; he confesses. “Au revoir, Maman,” he says, when they come to take him away. Mother and son have now reverted to their earlier happier selves….

With what pride, with what great pride she had watched him go!

There was a flickering, a brightness, somewhere in the room. She turned; she lifted her eyes. The light was smiting the silver angel on top of Henry’s Christmas tree, poised and trembling, with its wings and herald trumpet shining brightly, there it hung above the guttered candles and the general disarray.

“Pardon us our iniquities, forgive us our transgressions—have mercy on the world,” she prayed.

The Christmas Tree was published one year after the Kinsey Report furrowed a peasant nation’s brow. The melodramatic ending meant that Bolton was responding, as so many of us did, to the fierce Zeitgeist. But her general coolness in dealing with the taboo probably accounts for the almost instant obscurity of her work amongst the apple-knockers.

Many Mansions was published when Bolton was close to seventy. She writes of Miss Sylvester who is recreating her own past by reading a memoir-like novel she had written years earlier. It is February 1, 1950, her birthday: she is eighty-four and Harry Truman’s birthday present for her is to give the order to build the hydrogen bomb.

She broods upon her great age:

The life of the aged was a constant maneuvering to appease and assuage the poor decrepit body. Why, most of the time she was nothing more than a nurse attending to its every need. As for the greater part of the night one’s position was positively disreputable, all alone and clothed in ugly withering flesh—fully conscious of the ugliness, the ignominy—having to wait upon oneself with such menial devotion—here now, if you think you’ve got to get up mind you don’t fall, put on the slippers, don’t trip on the rug.

The body is now a perpetual sly nemesis, waiting to strike its mortal blow.

Meanwhile, Miss Sylvester has taken to pursuing lost time, that long ago time when the body was a partner in a grand exercise known as life. She also frets about money. Has she enough if she should live to be ninety? Should she die soon, what about leaving her small fortune to the young Adam Stone whom “she had picked up in a restaurant…the only person in her life for whom she felt genuine concern”? Adam had been in the Second War; emerged bitter; devoured books “ravenously”; was at work upon a novel: “He had cast off his family. He had cast off one girl after another, or very likely one girl after another had cast him off.” Miss Sylvester had spoken to him in an Armenian restaurant on Fourth Avenue. “I see you’re reading Dante,” was her opening gambit. She knows Italian and he does not; this proves to be an icebreaker though hardly a matchmaker.

Now she turns to her long abandoned manuscript. Two families. Great houses. And the old century was still a splendid all-golden present for the rich. Seasons now come back to her. “Summer was that high field on the high shelf above the ocean…the surf strong, the waves breaking. Something pretty terrible about it—getting, in one fell swoop, the fury of the breakers carried back to crack and echo in the dunes…the wild cold smell of the salt spray inducing mania excitement.” One suspects that Bolton is actually writing of her fourteen-year-old twin who drowned but Miss Sylvester, her present alter ego, is single and singular and in wild nature more natural.

As an adolescent she lives among numerous grand relatives; but always set apart. Her father was an “Italian musician,” a “Dago organ-grinder,” she comes to believe, as the subject is unmentionable. Then, on a memorable Sunday Easter dinner, her grandfather makes a toast, “Let us drink to the burial of the feud.” The organ-grinder, her father, Sylvester, is dead in southern Italy. He had been paid by the family to go away, leaving behind his daughter as a sort of boarder in their great houses.

Then, almost idly, she falls in love with a married relative; becomes pregnant. The resourceful family assigns yet another relative to her, Cecilia, who takes her to Europe, to fateful Italy where she is treated as a respectable married woman in an interesting condition. The child, a boy, is born in Fiesole; but she never sees him; her positively Napoleonic family has promptly passed him on to an elegant childless New York couple who whisk him away to a new life, under a name that she will never learn. Cecilia raves about the anonymous couple’s charm; their wealth; the guaranteed happiness of the boy’s life. Grimly, the mother murmurs the phrase “‘tabula rasa,’…as though she’d coined it.” She would now begin again as if nothing had ever happened.

The old lady finished her reading: “If her book should fall into the hands of others addicted as she was to the habitual reading of novels, what exactly would their feelings be?” One wonders—is there such a thing now as a habitual reader of novels? Even the ambitious, the ravenously literary young Adam seems to have a suspicion that he may have got himself into the stained-glass-window trade.

With a sufficient income, Miss Sylvester moves to New York. She becomes involved with another young woman, Mary (they live in a gentle ladies’ pension near Fifth Avenue, presided over by yet another of the multitudinous cousins). “How passionately Mary loved the world and with what eagerness she dedicated herself to reforming it….” The two young women study to be opera singers; but they have no talent. Then Mary involves them in settlement work and organizing women workers—it is the era of the young Eleanor Roosevelt, and Miss Sylvester realizes in old age that “with all the central founts of love—sexual passion and maternity—so disastrously cut off, had not this deep, this steadfast friendship for Mary been the one human relationship where love had never failed to nourish and replenish her?” But she loses Mary to marriage; then to death, which also claims, at Okinawa, Mary’s son.

Miss Sylvester has a long relationship with a Jewish intellectual, Felix; but feels she is too old to marry him; then he announces that he is to marry his secretary, who has been his mistress for ten years: Miss Sylvester’s decade of intimacy. They part fondly, for good.

She takes in, as a boarder, a young novelist. Son of a fashionable boring couple she once knew. Bolton is too elegant a novelist to reveal him as the old lady’s son but sufficiently mischievous to find him, despite great charm, of indifferent character, even flawed.

The book concludes with Miss Sylvester in her flat, collecting some much needed cash for Adam, who is waiting for her at the Armenian restaurant. But even as he is telephoning, she is felled by a stroke. Angrily, Adam leaves the telephone booth “to go back in the dining-room to wait for his old lady, under the impression that she is on her way.”

What then was the figure in the carpet that my highly imagined Edmund Wilson made out on his stately way to the floor? As I emerge from Bolton’s world, I am sure that what he saw was the fourteen-year-old twin sister brought back from full-fathom five—with pearls for eyes—by a great act of will and considerable art to replace the mediocre Mary Britton Miller with a magically alive writer whom she chose to call Isabel Bolton, for our delight.

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Your Excellency,

It has been widely reported, as in The New York Times for Sunday, August 26, 1996 (“Palestine Security Agents Ban Books by Critic of Arafat”), that security services responsible to you have seized books written by Edward W. Said and carried them off from all bookstores in the Palestinian Autonomous Zones in Gaza and the West Bank. Furthermore, that the sale of his books has been forbidden in these same areas and in Palestinian bookstores in East Jerusalem.

This news is especially alarming at a time when those around the world who support the aspirations of the Palestinian people are looking to your Administration for evidence that any emerging Palestinian entity will try to found itself on basic democratic principles and most specifically on the principle of freedom of expression and dissent. This freedom necessarily includes Edward Said’s expressions of difference with some of your current policies.

Edward Said is one of the most prominent, influential, and admired of cultural critics. In particular, his writings about the Palestinian experience have been an essential instrument in shaping opinions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Middle East that are favorably informed about the Palestinian cause. We therefore urge you in your own interests as well as in the interests of people everywhere to reaffirm his right to be heard in the areas where an effort has been made to silence him.

Ronald Harwood
President of International PEN
Anne Hollander
President of PEN American Center
Karen Kennerly
Executive Director of PEN American Center
Adonis
K. Anthony Appiah
Paul Auster
Niels Barfoed
Mahmoud Darwish
Jacques Derrida
Allen Ginsberg
Gamal al-Ghitani
Günter Grass
David Grossman
Naguib Mahfouz
Kenzaburo Oe
Orhan Pamuk
Richard Poirier
Anton Shammas
Susan Sontag
William Styron
Jean Stein
Gore Vidal
Torsten Wiesel
Saadi Youssef

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In the essay entitled “Twain on the Grand Tour” [NYR, May 23] Mr. Gore Vidal refers many times to me and to one of my books, The Man Who Was Mark Twain (Yale University Press, 1991). In a number of places he represents me as having sentiments or beliefs that I do not hold, but what I particularly call to your attention are three passages in which he indicates that I say things which I do not say and which do not appear in the book.

Mr. Vidal writes, p. 25, col. 1, “…an academic critic tells us that Clemens was sexually infantile, burnt-out at fifty (if not before), and given to pederastic reveries about little girls….” Although the passage summarizes what Clemens and others say about impotence, not what I say, what I question is the phrase “given to pederastic reveries about little girls….” That Clemens dreamed of little girls is well known. That his dreams and reveries were pederastic is not said in my book by me or by anyone else.

Mr. Vidal writes, p. 25, col. 1: “…the professor wants to demolish its owner, who, sickeningly, married above his station in order to advance himself socially….” I cannot find that I use the italicized words. (I do not desire to demolish Mark Twain but to suggest revisions in the conventional portraits; and, unless the word station is restricted to mean economic status, I do not say or believe that Twain married above his station.)

Mr. Vidal writes, p. 25, col. 3: “…he also lusted for money (in a ‘banal anal’ way, according to the Freudian emeritus—as opposed to ‘floral oral’?” I discuss possible meanings that money had for the writer, but I cannot find that I or anyone whom I mention uses the words “banal anal.”

Guy Cardwell
Lexington, Massachusetts

Gore Vidal replies:

While writing about Mark Twain’s views on imperialism, I checked some recent “scholarly” works to see how his reputation is bearing up under the great fiery cross of political correctness. We were all astonished, some years ago, when a squad of sharp-eyed textual investigators discovered, to their manifest surprise and horror, that the noblest character in Twain’s fiction was called “Nigger” Jim. There was an understandable outcry from some blacks; there was also a totally incomprehensible howl from a number of fevered white males, many of them professors emeritus and so, to strike the tautological note, career-minded conservatives unused to manning barricades.
In an apparently vain effort at comprehension, I quoted a number of malicious and, worse, foolish things that these silly-billies are writing about Twain. Thanks to an editorial quirk, one hot-head was mentioned by name, for which I apologize. I always try to shield the infamous from their folly in the hope that they may, one day, straighten up and fly right. But a single name was mentioned and now we have its owner’s letter at hand. For serene duplicity and snappy illogic it compares favorably to some of the screeds, I believe they are called, from my pen pals in the Lincoln priesthood.

Although my new pen pal does acknowledge that I am reporting the views of other critics on Twain’s impotence, sexual infantilism, fondness for small girls, he declares mysteriously that this is “not what I say.” But it is what he says and presumably means. The Jesuits like to say: “The wise man never lies.” But in the army of my day, any soldier (or indeed discomfited general) who spent too much time twisting about the language of regulations in his own favor was called a guardhouse lawyer. I now put the case on the evidence at hand, that we have here a compulsive guard-house lawyer or quibbler. Straight sentences must be bent like pretzels to change meanings to score points. But then much of what passes for literary discourse in these states is simply hustling words to get them to mean what they don’t. “That Clemens dreamed of little girls is well known.” Thus Quibbler wrote but now he has—tangential?—second thoughts. Actually who knows what Twain’s dreams were. But let us agree that he doted on the company of Dodsonesque girls and so may well have dreamed… fantasized about them in a sexual way. Why not? But Quibbler is getting a bit edgy. He thinks, too, that I have given him a splendid chance to open the guardhouse door. Now we improvise: “that his dreams and reveries were pederastic is not said in my book by me or by anyone else.” But, of course, that’s what he (and presumably, those whom he adverts to) means in the course of a chapter entitled “Impotence and Pedophilia.”

But Quibbler has leapt at the adjective “pederastic.” Like so many Greekless Americans with pretensions, he thinks that the word means a liking for boys by men with buggery on their mind. But I had gone back to the original root noun, paedo, from which comes pederasty, pedophilia, etc.; and paedo means not boy but child. A quibble can be made that, as vulgar usage associates the word with boys, that’s what I mean but, as context makes clear, it is Lolita-paedo—not Ganymede-paedo—that Twain may be dreaming of. So this quibble is meaningless.

“The idea of impotence excited Clemens’s anxious interest: apparently he suffered from erectile dysfunction at about the age of fifty.” I noted in my review that “so do many men over fifty who drink as much Scotch whisky as Twain did.” Next: “Psychoanalysts have noted many cases in which diminished sexual capacity…has been related to a constellation of psychic problems like those which affected Clemens.” All right. Which psychoanalysts? Did any know him? As for his psychic problems, did he really have a “constellation’s” worth? “Evidence that he became impotent ranges from the filmy to the relatively firm.”—I had some fun in these pages with those two loony adjectives. “Likelihood is high that diminished capacity may be inferred…” All these “apparentlys,” “likelihoods,” “inferreds” as well as filmy to firm “evidence” appear in one short paragraph.

What we have here is not a serious literary—or even, God help us, psychoanalytic—view of Twain’s sex life as imagined by a politically correct school teacher but what I take to be outright character assassination of a great man who happens to be one of the handful—small hand, too—of good writers our flimsy culture has produced. (“Filmy,” of course, may be the mot juste if we count the movies.) At one point, in the midst of a prurient flow of nonsense, the professor suddenly concedes, “We do not know the intimate details of Clemens’s life very well….” I’ll say we don’t, so why go to such imaginative length to turn him into an impotent pederast, or pedophile?

Point two. Here we get the denial-of-meaning quibble based on Absence of Quotation Marks. I remark on Twain’s having, sickeningly, in the professor’s view, “married above his station in order to advance himself socially.” Blandly, the professor quibbles that he never used the italicized words. Yet they are an exact paraphrase of how he interprets Twain’s marriage to Olivia Langdon. Quibbler has reinvented his own text. Actually, it is his view that Twain did not marry above his station in any but the economic sense although, “like the most bourgeois of the bourgeois he delighted in money, and high living, and he fervently wished to become a member of the eastern establishment.” Surely, to get from Hannibal, Missouri, to the Gold Coast of Hartford, was going to take a bit of social climbing which he did by marrying into the Langdon family.

“Clemens was what Freud would call a narcissistic suitor.” Quibbler acts as if he is quoting some sort of authority in these matters. Ward McAllister might have been more to his point on American social climbing. “[Clemens] ardently wished to marry a woman who typified not what he was but what he wished to be—rich and possessed of status, a member of the eastern social order.” So, as I said in a phrase to which Quibbler objects, for no clear reason, “he married above his station.” (I’m surprised he does not make the point that Grand Central Station was not in use that hymenal year.) My use of the adverb “sickeningly” was meant to be ironic, something to which the teaching of school tends to make impervious even the brightest and the best. Anyway, Twain’s hypergamous marriage was a happy one, so what’s the big deal?

A lust for money that is banal anal (as opposed to floral oral) is simply a verbally symmetrical way of setting up Freud’s notion of money as “feces.” How did I happen to get this juxtaposition in my head? At one point, our author suddenly quibbles that Twain didn’t marry Olivia for her money, at least “not in any banal sense of the phrase; but he very much wanted to be rich.” As I read the word “banal,” I knew that Freud’s theory of anality was coming up. I turned the page. There it was. “Freud stresses the anal character of money and equates money and feces: it means power, vitality, potency.” The one good thing about bad writing is that one is never surprised by any turn an argument, much less a cliché, may take.

Let me now indulge in quibbler creativity. Freud would never have characterized Twain as narcissistic—an adjective currently used to describe anyone better-looking than oneself. As performer-writer Twain took by storm Vienna in general and Freud in particular. Freud was also something of a connoisseur of jokes and he enjoyed Mark Twain in person and on the page quite as much as he would have revelled in the letter of Professor Emeritus Guy Cardwell. Ich kann nicht anders, I can hear Sigmund chuckle through his cigar smoke. (c.f. The Strange Case of Dr Luther Adler by an Unknown Actress—op. cit. Just about anywhere.)

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In Gore Vidal’s admirable review of The Diaries of Dawn Powell [NYR, March 21] his references to her dearest friend, Margaret DeSilver, seem to (incorrectly) imply that Margaret’s political views were pro-Communist. There is also an error about the trust fund Margaret established for Dawn and her son, Jojo. This was created in Margaret’s will, not after Dawn’s eviction. Further, Jojo is more correctly characterized as an “idiot savant” than retarded.

As the wife of Margaret’s younger son, George Burnham DeSilver, and a friend and great admirer of both Dawn and Margaret, I can assure you that the implication that they were in any way “at the center of the American Communist world” is the exact opposite of the truth. Both were at the center of the New York intellectual, literary, and artistic world, and Dawn was, as Vidal stated, apolitical. Margaret, a 1913 Vassar graduate, was definitely not apolitical. True to her Quaker heritage, she, as well as her mother, marched in suffrage parades; she was a lifelong supporter of equal rights, civil liberties, and philosophical justice. She had a tolerant, curious, and open mind.

Margaret’s husband, Albert, was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, a graduate of Yale and Columbia University Law School. He was destined to be a conventional Wall Street lawyer, but his concern about humanitarian and civil rights issues was intensified by his Quaker wife. After Albert’s untimely death in a terrible train accident, Margaret sat on the Board of the ACLU for many years, but eventually chose to resign because of Communist influence on the Board. This influence in the ACLU ended nearly fifty years ago.

Vidal’s use of the word “mistress” diminishes the more than ten-year alliance between Margaret and Carlo Tresca, until his murder. More aptly, they were lovers but she was his patron. Carlo was editor of Il Martello, an Italian language anti-fascist and anti-Communist newspaper. (See ‘All the Right Enemies’: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca, by Dorothy Gallagher, Rutgers University Press, 1988.) Neither Albert, Carlo, nor Margaret were ever duped by the Communists, as were so many other intellectuals of the time.

Claire DeSilver
Naples, Florida

Gore Vidal replies:

I confess that most of what I know of DeSilver I got from the notes of the editor of Dawn Powell’s diaries, and he is the one who should profit from these clarifications. I will say that while recently researching the Hiss-Chambers case, the DeSilver name often crops up as—tangential?—to the central John Howard Lawson group. I have never heard Jojo referred to as an “idiot savant.” I prefer the more succinct “wisdom-challenged.” DeSilver not the “mistress” but the “lover” of Tresca? OK by me. “Mistress” is a period word Powell would have used. What about the rumor that they were secretly married? Anyway DeSilver is the angel in the Dawn Powell story.

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