Once a week in the spring of 1994 I would bicycle over to a brownstone on West 16th Street to see a man named Sam Chwat in his ground-floor office. He called himself a speech coach, and a large part of his business was to train actors who had been cast as Prospero, say, or Creon, so that they did not sound as if they came from the Bronx or Akron, Ohio. But I was not an actor seeking help with a role. I was seeing Sam for something else, something a bit apart from the other speech-related services he offered. A friend who had sought him out for help with public speaking had recommended him to a lawyer who was representing me in a lawsuit. Ten years earlier I had published a two-part article in The New Yorker about a disturbance in an obscure corner of the psychoanalytic world whose chief subject, a man named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, hadn’t liked his portrayal and claimed that I had libeled him by inventing the quotations on which it was largely based. So he sued me and the magazine and the Knopf publishing company, which had brought out the article as a book called In the Freud Archives.

In an afterword to a subsequent book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), I wrote about the lawsuit, taking a very high tone. I put myself above the fray; I looked at things from a glacial distance. My aim wasn’t to persuade anyone of my innocence. It was to show off what a good writer I was. Reading the piece now, I am full of admiration for its irony and detachment—and appalled by the stupidity of the approach. Of course I should have tried to prove my innocence. But I was part of the culture of The New Yorker of the old days—the days of William Shawn’s editorship—when the world outside the wonderful academy we happy few inhabited existed only for us to delight and instruct, never to stoop to persuade or influence in our favor. As the Masson case wound its way through the courts—dismissed at first, then reinstated, and eventually brought to trial—the press-watching public became increasingly pleased by the spectacle of the arrogant magazine brought low by the behavior of one of its staff writers. While Masson gave over two hundred accusatory interviews, I—in dogged accord with the magazine’s stance of unrelenting hauteur—said nothing in my defense. Nothing at all. Nothing of course produces nothing, except further confirmation of guilt.

But it was at trial that the influence of The New Yorker proved to be most dire. There was a style of self-presentation cultivated at the magazine that most if not all staff writers had adopted and found congenial. The idea was to be reticent, self-deprecating, and, maybe, here and there, funny, but to always keep a low profile, in contrast to the rather high one of the persona in which we wrote. I remember my shock at meeting A.J. Liebling for the first time. I had been reading him for years and imagined him as the suave, handsome, brilliantly articulate man of the world that the “I” of the pieces portrayed. The short, fat, boorishly silent man I met was his opposite. I came to know Liebling and to love him. But it took a while to penetrate the disguise of innate and magazine-induced unpretentiousness in which he made his way through the world as he wrote his wonderful pieces narrated by an impossibly cool narrator.

When I took the stand at the trial in San Francisco in 1993 I could not have done worse than to present myself in the accustomed New Yorker manner. Reticence, self-deprecation, and wit are the last things a jury wants to see in a witness. Charles Morgan, Masson’s clever and experienced lawyer, could hardly believe his good fortune. He made mincemeat of me. I fell into every one of his traps. I came across as arrogant, truculent, and incompetent. I was at once above it all and utterly crushed by it. My lawyer, Gary Bostwick, succeeded in inflicting some damage on Masson—he portrayed him as boastful and sex-crazed—but it was not enough to offset the damage I had helped Morgan inflict on me. The jury agreed with the plaintiff’s accusation that five quotations in my article were false and libelous. A jubilant Masson had only to wait for the jury’s final determination of how many millions of dollars in damages he would collect from me.^* (The New Yorker itself was cleared of the charge of “reckless disregard” required for a finding of libel; Knopf had extricated itself from the case years earlier.)

Then the gods played one of their little reversal-of-fortune pranks. The jurors came back from their deliberations with the news that they were deadlocked. They could not agree on the amount of damages. Some thought Masson should be awarded millions of dollars. Others thought he should collect nothing. One juror thought he should collect one dollar. The judge could not move them and was obliged to declare a mistrial and to schedule a new trial. I had suffered an ignominious defeat, but I had been given a second chance to prove my innocence. Whew!

Not many of us get second chances. When we blow it, our fantasies of how we could have done it right remain fantasies. But the fantasy had become a reality for me, and I was determined not to waste the incredible good fortune that had come my way. My visits to Sam Chwat were part of the half-year of preparation for the second trial, almost like a military campaign, to which Bostwick and I devoted ourselves. Sam was the Professor Higgins who would transform me from the defensive loser I had been in the first trial to the serene winner I would be (and was!) in the second one.

The transformation had two parts. The first was the erasure of the New Yorker image of the writer as a person who does not go around showing off how great and special he or she is. No! A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing. At the first trial I had been scarcely aware of the jury. When Morgan questioned me, I responded to him alone. Sam Chwat immediately corrected my misconception of whom to address: the jury, only the jury. As Morgan had been using me to communicate to the jury, I would need to learn how to use him to do the same.

There were some minor but not unimportant particulars Sam inserted into this new concept of myself as a guileful performer. I would need to dress differently. At the first trial I wore what I normally did when out of my work uniform of blue jeans, namely skirts or trousers and jackets in black or subdued colors, clothes that looked nice but didn’t draw attention to themselves. The idea was to be tasteful. Another No! The idea was to give the jurors the feeling that I wanted to please them, the way you want to please your hosts at a dinner party by dressing up. This would be achieved by a “menu,” as Sam called it, of pastel-colored dresses and suits, silk stockings and high heels, and an array of pretty scarves. The jurors would feel respected as well as aesthetically refreshed, the way they do by women commentators on TV who wear colorful clothes of endless variety. I did as Sam advised, and after the announcement of the verdict, when Bostwick and I went to speak with the jurors, they made a point of commenting on my clothes. They said that each day they looked forward to seeing what I would wear next, especially which scarf I would wear.

There was a seemingly small but all-important technical problem that, for a while, neither Sam nor I could solve. The witness stand was located midway between the interrogating attorney’s lectern on my right and the jury stand on my left. How was I supposed to perform for the jurors when I had to turn my back on them while being questioned? The answer came to me one day in a flash. I would position my chair so that it partially faced the jury. Thus, when Morgan questioned me I could reply over my shoulder, while remaining frontally connected to the jurors.

The second and most crucial part of the second-chance work was to make me faster on my feet under cross-examination, in fulfillment of the fantasy of saying what I should have said in the first trial instead of what I did say. Bostwick assumed that Morgan would repeat the questions that had served him so well, and he and I devised answers to them that brought l’esprit de l’escalier to a new level. At trial, Morgan did not disappoint us. He confidently asked the old questions and didn’t know what hit him when I produced my nimble new formulations. I remember one of the most satisfying moments. At the first trial Morgan had repeatedly tortured and humiliated me with the question: “He didn’t say that at Chez Panisse, did he?” I had wiggled and squirmed. Now I could answer him with crushing confidence.

I need to give the reader some history here. In the early months of the (ten-year-long) lawsuit, Masson claimed that he had said almost none of the things he was quoted as saying in the article. When a transcript of my tape-recorded interviews was made, it showed that he had said just about all the things he denied saying. But five quotations remained that were not on tape. They were:

(1) “Maresfield Gardens would have been a center of scholarship, but it would also have been a place of sex, women, fun.”

(2) “I was like an intellectual gigolo—you get your pleasure from him, but you don’t take him out in public.”

(3) “[Analysts] will want me back, they will say that Masson is a great scholar, a major analyst—after Freud, he’s the greatest analyst who ever lived.”

(4) “I don’t know why I put it in.”

(5) “Well, he had the wrong man.”

I had lost the handwritten notes that would have been enough to prove the genuineness of the first three—the most incendiary—quotations; I had only typewritten versions, which did not meet the standard of proof. Thus, under our nervously accommodating legal system, Masson had the right to a trial by jury. As it turned out, two years after the second trial, the lost notes were found at my country house, in a notebook that my two-year-old granddaughter pulled out of a bookcase, attracted by its bright color. It had all been for nothing.

Meanwhile, however, as Masson’s day in court approached, he and Morgan had a problem to solve: how to fill the time of the trial. The five quotations—fatuous as they may have made Masson appear—were surely not compelling enough to justify making eight men and women sit on hard chairs for four weeks and decide whether or not to award him millions of dollars. A portrait of me as a malevolent woman out to destroy the reputation of a naively trusting man needed to be fleshed out by other crimes than the one of five lines of misquotation. They hit on the crime of “compression” as a leading one.

Their opportunity arose from an incident in 1984, when an article appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal written by a young woman named Joanne Lipman, who had graduated from Yale the year before and was hired by the Journal a few months later. The article was about the liberties that the writer Alastair Reid took in reportage from abroad he had been publishing in The New Yorker since 1951. Reid, born in Scotland, was primarily a poet and translator, notably of Jorge Luis Borges, and also known for having seriously irked Robert Graves by stealing one of his White Goddess girlfriends. Lipman first encountered Reid in her student days at Yale, where she heard him speak at an extracurricular seminar and was struck by the unconventional way he said he practiced journalism. After starting at the Journal, she called Reid and conducted a series of interviews with him in which he unrepentantly elaborated on these practices, which the newspaper considered horrible enough to put on its front page as evidence of the fraud The New Yorker had been perpetrating on readers of its “prestigious pages.”

Reid happily babbled to Lipman about the things he had made up in his reports from Spain. He had pieced together several people he knew into a composite character. He had set a scene in a bar that had closed years earlier. He had invented conversations. As an unacknowledged legislator, he felt bound to go beyond what the non-poet journalists among us do. Lipman wrote, “‘The implication that fact is precious isn’t important,’ Mr. Reid says. ‘Some people (at the New Yorker) write very factually. I don’t write that way…. Facts are only a part of reality.’” Lipman also interviewed Shawn, who tried to say that of course The New Yorker is as factual as it is possible to be while not saying that Reid ought to be drawn and quartered.

Lipman’s story created a scandal in the journalistic world, one that was deeply enjoyable for those who did not work at The New Yorker and mortifying for those who did. I remember feeling mad at Reid for opening his big mouth and talking about what we do in our workshops. I assumed that he strayed further from factuality than the rest of us ever imagined or were even capable of doing, but I also knew that some New Yorker writers—the great Joseph Mitchell, for example—quietly used techniques that resembled some of those that Reid preened himself on using. Mitchell had suffered some embarrassment when a character he called Mr. Flood was outed as a composite.

The Alastair Reid affair fell neatly into Morgan’s hands as a solution to the problem of how to fill the time at his disposal to make me look bad. Although I hardly shared Reid’s contempt for factuality, I had unapologetically, almost unthinkingly, used a literary device in In the Freud Archives that was commonplace at The New Yorker but that outside journalists—in the accusatory atmosphere following the Lipman article—saw as another violation of the reader’s good faith. The device was the uninterrupted monologue in which characters made preposterously long speeches in impossibly good English. Anyone could see that the speech had never taken place as such but was a compilation of what the character had said to the reporter over a period of time. Not everyone liked the convention, but no one thought it was deceptive, since its artificiality was so blatant.

I set my long monologue with Masson at the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, where he and I ate lunch on the first day of my interviews with him. During the lunch he excitedly spoke of the events that had catapulted him from an impressive and well-paid position as director of the Freud Archives to his present condition of jobless humiliation and indignation. He spoke wildly and not always coherently. Over the next six months I spoke with him dozens of times on the phone and a few times in person, and was able to fill in the gaps of his account and, further, to inspire formulations that ever more imaginatively expressed his sense of having been wronged. I then wrote my monologue. It was like making a collage. It never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong by using scraps that had been acquired at different times.

But Morgan’s “He didn’t say that at Chez Panisse, did he?” question, with its implication that the reader was being deceived, was hard to answer. During our period of preparation for the second trial, Bostwick, Chwat, and I spent a great deal of time on it. Finally, an answer evolved from our efforts that I still recall the pleasure of delivering on the stand. It took the form of a long speech about the monologue technique that Morgan kept interrupting but was unable to stop. I went relentlessly on and on. I talked about the difference between the full and compelling account of his rise and fall in the Freud Archives that Masson gives in the article and his wandering incomplete speech in the restaurant. I spoke of the months of interviews out of which, bit by bit, the monologue was formed. I concluded by saying, “I have taken this round-about way of answering your question, Mr. Morgan, because I wanted the jury to know how I work, and what we’re talking about here in talking about this monologue.” “Mrs. Malcolm, you will be given all the chances in the world to tell this jury how you work, so don’t worry about it” was Morgan’s lame riposte. I didn’t worry. I had already gleefully seized my opportunity. When Bostwick and I interviewed the jury after its verdict and asked them what they thought of the monologue technique, they said they saw nothing wrong with it. They said they understood that writers had artistic obligations.

At the second trial Bostwick improved his own performance as Masson’s antagonist. In his best moments, he played him like a matador playing a bull. Under Bostwick’s punishing interrogation, Masson seemed pathetic, as he never was in my article. I almost felt sorry for him.

Sam Chwat died of lymphoma in 2011 at the age of fifty-seven. I was shocked and saddened by the news. I remember my sessions with him with undiminished gratitude and pleasure. He was a straightforward, modest, kind person, with a fine, interesting mind. His unspoken but evident distaste for the New Yorker posture of indifference to what others think and his gentle correction of my self-presentation at trial from unprepossessing sullenness to appealing persuasiveness took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge and knowledge of life. After the trial, I had no further occasion to appear in public and did not seek any. I relapsed into my usual habits of solitary work and private intimacy. Looking back on my life as a writer I don’t regret the trade-off of the openly performative for the less obvious way writers draw attention to themselves. My memories of the time in my life when I went on stage and performed like a trouper seem somewhat unreal now. But my rehearsals with the man who had briefly made me into one remain wonderfully vivid.

The post A Second Chance appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

There is a box in my apartment labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” This is an understatement. Most of the photos are two-and-a-half-inch squares, showing little blurred black-and-white images, taken from too far away of people whose features you can barely make out, standing or sitting alone or in groups, against backgrounds of gray uninterestingness. They are like the barely flickering dreams that dissipate as we awaken, rather than the self-important ones that follow us into the day and seem to be crying out for interpretation. However, as psychoanalysis has taught us, it is the least prepossessing dreams, disguised as such to put us off the scent, that sometimes bear the most important messages from inner life. So too, some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.

A picture of seventeen high school boys and girls, sitting on the grass and mugging at the camera, takes me to a deep blue sky punctuated by the silhouettes of minarets. I have never been to the Middle East. The memory of the minaret-studded sky comes from a movie house called Loew’s 72nd Street, where I saw many movies in my childhood and youth and where one of the boys in the picture, Jimmy Scovotti, worked as an usher on weekends. Before the house darkened and the movie came on, one sat in a kind of Orientalist dream. The interior had been done up as an Arabian Nights palace. I don’t remember being especially thrilled by it—Loew’s 72nd Street was not the only movie house where this sort of entertainment was added to the celluloid entertainment—but I enjoyed it as I enjoyed the other now preposterous-seeming amenities of the 1940s. It was my first encounter with the clichés that Edward Said’s great book held up to view.

I don’t recognize any other boy in the photograph. I only recognize a girl named Natalie Gudkov and myself. I know the picture was taken at an outing to a place in Yonkers called Tibbetts Brook Park, but I remember nothing about the outing itself, or why I was there. I know these were kids I did not have much to do with in high school. None of the boys were the ones I was in love with during those years. As I write the words “in love,” the picture—I was about to say dream—begins to speak, a bit too fast, about the habit of love we form in childhood, the virus of lovesickness that lodges itself within us, for which there is no vaccine. We never rid ourselves of the disease. We move in and out of states of chronic longing. When we look at our lives and notice what we are consistently, helplessly gripped by, what else can we say but “me too”?

In “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), the third in a series of papers on analytic technique that formed a sort of operating manual for analysts in the early days of the profession, Sigmund Freud alerted new practitioners (none of whom were women) to one of its occupational hazards. Women patients, he warned, are going to fall in love with you, but don’t think that this is “to be attributed to the charms of [your] own person” or that it is real love. It is a peculiarity of the treatment, a form of resistance to it. Whatever you do, don’t reciprocate, but see what you can do about persuading the patient to stick out her lovesickness and remain in the analysis, which will eventually cure her of the problems with love that brought her to it in the first place. The analyst

must take care not to steer away from the transference-love, or to repulse it or to make it distasteful to the patient; but he must just as resolutely withhold any response to it. He must keep firm hold of the transference-love, but treat it as something unreal, as a situation which has to be gone through in the treatment and traced back to its unconscious origins and which must assist in bringing all that is most deeply hidden in the patient’s erotic life into her consciousness and therefore under her control.

Freud goes on to spell out the difference between transference-love and “genuine love.” He argues that if the patient were truly in love with the analyst, she would try to help him with the treatment rather than to sabotage it. And “as a second argument against the genuineness of this love we advance the fact that it exhibits not a single new feature arising from the present situation, but is entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including infantile ones.”

Then Freud makes one of the sly rhetorical turns by which his work is marked and that give it its special potency. He anticipates the reader’s objection to what he is saying by agreeing with it: “Can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one?” No, we can’t. “It is true that the love consists of new editions of old traits and that it repeats infantile reactions. But this is the essential character of every state of being in love.” He goes on:

Transference-love has perhaps a degree less of freedom than the love that appears in ordinary life and is called normal; it displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable and capable of modification; but that is all, and not what is essential. [italics mine]

Freud ends the paper by returning to his admonitions. Yes,

sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly.

But the analyst must stand firm against the temptation to return the patient’s love. He adds:

It is not a patient’s crudely sensual desires which constitute the temptation…. It is rather, perhaps, a woman’s subtler and aim-inhibited wishes which bring with them the danger of making a man forget his technique and his medical task for the sake of a fine experience.

A fine experience. If we read “Observations on Transference-Love” with the evenly hovering attention with which the analyst is taught to listen to the patient’s monologues, we are struck with the language that Freud allows into his scientific paper, the language of ordinary life lived in pursuit of erotic experience. It is Freud’s honesty that rises above his ambitions as a scientist and forces him to acknowledge that this thing called transference-love is a pretty wobbly notion, if not a cover-up for the attraction that develops between a man and a woman who meet every day in a small room and talk about intimate things while one of them is lying down. The concept of transference, the idea that we never see each other as we “are” but always through a haze of associations with early family figures, is the matrix of psychoanalytic therapy. The analyst draws the patient’s attention to what he doesn’t notice in regular life, to the stale old drama he feels compelled to play out with every new person. He proposes an alternative script to this comedy of misprision. But Freud acknowledges—and never with more rueful force than in “Observations on Transference-Love”—the enduring injuries of our hapless earliest erotic encounters.

At the time of the Tibbetts Brook Park outing, I had, of course, not read Freud’s paper, and would not read it for many years. But another text on abstinent love was well known to me: a best-selling novel called Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly, first published in 1942, that chronicled the summer romance of a seventeen-year-old girl named Angie Morrow and a boy of the same age named Jack Duluth who lived in the Wisconsin town of Fond du Lac and never did anything more than kiss. Rereading the book years later, I recognized it for what it was—a tract for the repressive sexual ideology of the time, whereby nice girls didn’t “go all the way” and nice boys hardly expected or wanted them to, given their own nervous-making sexual inexperience. But in its day, the book only encouraged underinformed teenaged girls like myself in our longings for sexless romance, and never disturbed the curtain of humorlessness through which so much of postwar American reality was filtered. When Angie recalled her first date with Jack on a boat—“I remember thinking when he was so close how much he smelled like Ivory soap”—we did not laugh. How else should a boy worthy of love smell?

The metaphors of cleanness vs. dirtiness form the book’s understructure, instantiate its opposition of purity vs. corruption. Whenever Jack appears, Angie, who is no slob herself—she is always ironing or changing sheets or drying dishes—immediately and happily notices how much cleaner he is than any other boy. (“His shirts always seemed clean when other fellows’ were warm and wrinkled.”) The dirty act of sex is represented by nature, by the dark, muddy water and slimy weeds of the lake and trees,

bent low, twisting and moaning, wrenching at their trunks and writhing in a strange sympathy with the tormented water. Gray waves rolled crashing toward the shore and thrashed against the wooden pier, slapping like bare hands against the flat rocks. High sprays of foam tossed into the air and the wind was heavy with the damp, suggestive smell of fish.

Lest the reader allow the suggestiveness of the nature passages to lead her, even just in thought, from the sex-fearing straight and narrow, Daly introduces a cautionary subplot involving Lorraine, Angie’s sister, who isn’t beautiful and natural the way Angie is—she is always putting her hair in curlers and covering her face with cold cream—and who, in her desperation to keep him interested in her, succumbs to the demands for sex of a “fast,” unpleasant, older (in his twenties) guy named Martin. We never learn whether the ill-favored Lorraine went all the way with Martin, or just allowed him the liberties then known as “petting” or “heavy petting.” “Things are different now from the way they used to be,” Lorraine defiantly says to Angie during the confessional scene in which we learn of her transgressions. “Now everybody does it and nobody thinks…you know what I mean…” But later she piteously admits, “This isn’t how I meant to grow up. I’ve heard of other girls…but that isn’t how I meant to be.”

Daly’s tale of careful love is still in print. Among the responses to the book on Amazon, my favorite is from a reader in her twenties who just bought a copy for an eleven-year-old and isn’t sure how the gift will be received. “For an 11 year old girl that daydreams about kissing boys, she’d probably like it. For an 11-year-old girl that’s already had sex, the book may seem ‘lame.’”

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

For many years my late husband, Gardner Botsford, kept a small black-and-white snapshot on his desk of a man and woman wearing shorts, walking one behind the other on a tennis court. I didn’t know who the couple were but assumed they were friends from Gardner’s life before our marriage, people he had been close to and fond of. One day I asked him who they were and he laughed and said he had no idea. He had plucked the picture from a pile of rejects on their way to the wastebasket. It had leaped out at him as an example of an outstandingly terrible snapshot, one that had everything the matter with it. The couple had their backs to the camera; the tennis court showed a few white lines; there were undifferentiated shrubs and trees edging one side of the asphalt. That was all. I saw what my husband saw and laughed with him. There was no reason for the existence of this picture. Keeping it was a wonderful exercise in absurdism.

A few years later, in 1980, I had occasion to think of this picture in a new way. I was selecting illustrations for the title essay of Diana and Nikon, a collection of my pieces on photography, which had run unillustrated in The New Yorker. One of the key moments in the essay was a discussion of a new kind of avant-garde photography that took its inspiration—and to all intents and purposes was indistinguishable—from the home snapshot. Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Emmet Gowin, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, and Nancy Rexroth were among the practitioners of this school of deliberately artless photography that had recently been celebrated in a book called The Snapshot published by Aperture. In his introduction, the editor, Jonathan Green, felt impelled to inform the reader that the photographers represented in the book were “not snapshooters but sophisticated photographers.” The most sophisticated among them, perhaps, was Rexroth, who used a $1.50 toy camera called the Diana (thus my title) that also came in a model that squirted water when you pressed the shutter.

In Diana and Nikon I reproduced four pictures from The Snapshot to illustrate the new aesthetic. Except that one of the pictures was not actually from the book, but from Gardner’s desk: the snapshot of the couple on the tennis court. The temptation was too great. The gates stood too wide open. When the book appeared, there on pages 70–71, illustrating the work of The Snapshot’s “sophisticated photographers,” was a spread of four pictures with the captions under them of Joel Meyerowitz, Untitled; Robert Frank, Untitled; Nancy Rexroth, Streaming Window, Washington D.C., 1972; and G. Botsford, Untitled, 1971.

The reader may be wondering how this act of mischief could have gone undetected. Didn’t anyone at David Godine, the book’s publisher, notice? Or was the estimable and amiable Godine in on the mischief? As an A.J. Liebling character once said, “memory grows furtive.” I no longer remember how it was done or whether Godine knew. But I do remember that when Diana and Nikon was published, no one connected to The Snapshot ever wrote an indignant letter, or even a puzzled one. No one noticed at all. Then something occurred that gave me more pleasure than perhaps anything has before or since. A reviewer of my book, one who did not like it and was particularly irked by the “Diana and Nikon” essay, singled out the Botsford picture as a demonstration of my wrongheadedness, my pathetic inability to differentiate a work of art from an artless snapshot. I wish I had kept the review and could quote from it. But its delicious condescension is indelibly etched in my memory.

As if this wasn’t enough wicked joy for a single lifetime, four years later the Botsford picture was reproduced once again, this time in a historical and critical study of snapshots called Say ‘Cheese’! by a collector and critic named Graham King. In the chapter called “Snapshot Chic: How Contemporary Photography Snapped Up the Snapshot,” King covers some of the boggy ground I had covered in Diana and Nikon, and to illustrate the problem of telling real and fake snapshots apart, he offers a quiz in which eight images—among them the Botsford photo—are shown without identification. “Snapshot or imitation?” King writes.

These eight photographs are either anonymous snapshots or professional examples of “Snapshot Chic” photography. Can you guess which is which?…the answers are given on p. 212.

On p. 212 we learn that only three of the images are anonymous snapshots. The others—by William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Tod Papageorge, and Gardner Botsford—are “professional studies which are in important collections or which have been published.” I had built better than I knew. I look forward to the day when the picture of the couple on the tennis court will assume its place in an important collection, and I will take up mine in the annals of horsing around.

The post A Work of Art appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It was almost universally disliked when it came out in 1967. It struck a chord of hostility in the mid-twentieth-century literary world that was out of all proportion to the literary sins it may or may not have committed. The reviews were not just negative, but mean. In what may have been the meanest review of all, Wilfred Sheed, a prominent critic and novelist of the time, wrote:

In this mixture of complacency and agitation, he has written a book of no literary distinction whatever, pockmarked by clichés and little mock modesties and a woefully pedestrian tone…. Mediocrities from coast to coast will no doubt take Making It to their hearts and will use it for their own justification…. In the present condition of our society and the world, I cannot imagine a more feckless, silly book.

Even before the book was published it was an object of derision. Podhoretz’s friends urged him not to publish it, and his publisher shrank from it after reading the manuscript. Another publisher gamely took the book, but his gamble did not pay off. Word had spread throughout literary Manhattan about the god-awfulness of what Podhoretz had wrought. This and the reviews sealed the book’s fate. It was a total humiliating failure.

Making It was reissued last year by New York Review Books as one of its Classics, and the literary world—perhaps because it no longer exists—remained calm. Bookish people didn’t call each other up to exclaim about the scandal. Not many reviews appeared. And yet among those that did were some that in their nastiness might have been written in 1967. James Wolcott’s review in the London Review of Books was the longest and nastiest. It began with a quote from an entry in Alfred Kazin’s journal of 1963, in which Kazin wrote of a party he attended at the offices of Commentary magazine, of which Podhoretz was editor:

Struck by the oafishness of Norman Pod, drunkenly clowning in the entrance to the elevator. That lovely, blond girl (wife of the publisher of the NY Review?) looked really offended, and I couldn’t blame her.

Wolcott’s decision to begin his put-down of Making It with an image of its author as a boorish jerk, taken from a text written years before the book’s publication, may help answer the question of its original outlandish unpopularity. It illustrates a glaring problem of the autobiographical genre, namely its susceptibility to influences outside the text. At the time of the memoir’s first publication Podhoretz was a well-known if not universally well thought of figure in the New York literary establishment. He had been writing for Commentary, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker since the 1950s, when he was still in his twenties, and had become editor of Commentary in 1960 at the age of thirty. He was a kind of magnet for malice. A famous mischievous story going around was what Lauren Bacall was supposed to have said when he introduced himself to her at a cocktail party: “Fuck off, boy.”

What was Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books, thinking when he decided to reprint Making It? Had he seen virtues in the book that the fog of schadenfreude had obscured in 1967? Would a new audience see them, too? In his chapter on serving in the army, Podhoretz recalls that he got along extremely well with uneducated boys from the South. “I was puzzled as to what they saw in me, and my curiosity drove me once to ask one of them why he liked me. ‘Because,’ he answered in a thick Mississippi drawl, ‘you talk so good.’”

Today’s reader of Making It will immediately see that Podhoretz writes no less good than he talks. The 1967 reviewers were simply wrong when they added bad writing to their list of offenses. Writing as lucid and vital as Podhoretz’s is not often encountered and should have been acknowledged. But the original critics were evidently too irked with the boy wonder to give him an inch. Perhaps more to the point, they could not distinguish between the book’s narrator and its author. When we read a novel narrated in the first person we do not make that mistake. We know that Humbert Humbert and Vladimir Nabokov are not the same person. In the case of autobiography, because author and narrator share a name, we are only too prone to forget that the latter is a literary construct.

The “I” of Making It is a character we have never exactly met before. The outlines of his story are familiar: a precocious, poetry-writing boy, the son of poor, Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Brownsville, Brooklyn, rises above his origins and becomes a person to be reckoned with in the larger culture. But the particulars are unusual, a little mysterious. Norman—as I will call him to distinguish him from his creator, Podhoretz—is not the conventional changeling who doesn’t belong with the Muggles he has been set down among. He is content with his lot. He is bookish and precocious, yes, but being the smartest boy in the class doesn’t ruin his life. “By the age of thirteen I had made it into the neighborhood big time, otherwise known as the Cherokees, S.A.C. [social athletic club],” he says with modest pride, and adds:

It had by no means been easy for me, as a mediocre athlete and a notoriously good student, to win acceptance from a gang which prided itself mainly on its masculinity and its contempt for authority, but once this had been accomplished, down the drain went any reason I might earlier have had for thinking that life could be better in any other place.

Once this had been accomplished. Norman doesn’t explain how he negotiated this improbable feat, before which getting published in Partisan Review or becoming editor of Commentary pales. He simply tells us that the gang’s uniform, a red satin jacket with white lettering stitched across the back saying “Cherokee,” was his proudest possession, and that he wore it to school every day.

He was hardly waiting for a Princess Casamassima; but one came to him anyway in the form of a snobbish teacher at his high school named Mrs. K., who made him her pet and proposed to rid him of “the disgusting ways they had taught me at home and on the streets” and thus turn him into a plausible candidate for a Harvard scholarship. Norman’s resistance to her three-year-long attempt to make him over comes to a dramatic head in a scene in which she takes him to de Pinna, a classy clothing store on Fifth Avenue, and tries to buy him a suit to wear to the Harvard interview. “Even at fifteen I understood what a fantastic act of aggression she was planning to commit against my parents and asking me to participate in,” Norman recalls.

Oh no, I said in a panic (suddenly realizing that I wanted her to buy me that suit), I can’t, my mother wouldn’t like it. “You can tell her it’s a birthday present. Or else I will tell her. If I tell her, I’m sure she won’t object.” The idea of Mrs. K. meeting my mother was more than I could bear: my mother, who spoke with a Yiddish accent and of whom, until that sickening moment, I had never known I was ashamed and so ready to betray.

Norman somehow slides away from the betrayal; the suit is not bought. He later reflects:

Looking back now at the story of my relationship with Mrs. K….what strikes me most sharply is the astonishing rudeness of this woman to whom “manners” were of such overriding concern…. Were her “good” manners derived from or conducive to a greater moral sensitivity than the “bad” manners I had learned at home and on the streets of Brownsville? I rather doubt it. The “crude” behavior of my own parents, for example, was then and is still marked by a tactfulness and a delicacy that Mrs. K. simply could not have approached.

That is very handsomely said. But the seeds of class-consciousness that Mrs. K. had planted were well sprouted by the time Norman arrived at college. What she couldn’t achieve with her obnoxious corrections, higher education achieved with its subtler admonishments. (He had received the Harvard scholarship—at the interview he wore a suit handed down from an uncle—but went to Columbia instead because it offered a more generous scholarship; the family could not afford the extra expenses of the Harvard offer.) While at Columbia Norman lived at home, traveling more than two hours by subway daily, and “I was, to all appearances, the same kid I had been before entering Columbia.” Yet

we all knew that things were not the same…. I knew that the neighborhood voices were beginning to sound coarse and raucous; I knew that our apartment was beginning to look tasteless and tawdry; I knew that the girls in quest of whom my friends and I hornily roamed the streets were beginning to strike me as too elaborately made up, too shrill in their laughter, too crude in their dress…. It was the lower-classness of Brownsville to which I was responding with irritation…. What did it matter that I genuinely loved my family and my friends, when not even love had the power to protect them from the ruthless judgments of my newly delicate, oh-so-delicate, sensibilities? What did it matter that I was still naïve enough and cowardly enough and even decent enough to pretend that my conversion to “culture” had nothing to do with class when I had already traveled so far along the road Mrs. K. had predicted I would.

“I should have made him for a dentist,” Norman’s mother murmurs to herself at a moment of special incomprehension of her boy’s new ways.

It was at Columbia that Norman was bitten by the crazy ambitiousness that was to become a sort of signature. For the first time he was not automatically the smartest boy in the class. In his freshman year he had to struggle just to keep up, and then he had to claw his way to being first. He attributes the excesses of his competitiveness to a realization:

My hunger for success as a student, which was great enough in itself but might yet have yielded to discipline, became absolutely uncontrollable when I began to realize that I would never make the grade as a poet…. The truth was that I could not bear the idea of not being great.

Norman won his way to the academic top by being weirdly energized by exams and by an equally uncanny ability to write papers in the styles of the professors for whom they were written. Not only A’s but A+’s poured in as a result of these aptitudes. He was not liked by a lot of his fellow students, but he didn’t care. He cared only that the professors liked him. In his final year he took a course with Lionel Trilling, who was determined not to be taken in by this famous know-it-all. But Trilling was won over by the exceptional quality of Norman’s academic performance. He, too, gave him an A+.

Trilling and his wife, Diana, became friends of Norman’s after his graduation, and Trilling was to provide an important link to the literary world outside the academy by introducing him to Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary. But Norman’s entrance into that world was delayed by another academic triumph. After graduation from Columbia he went to England, as the recipient of the Kellett Fellowship to Clare College at Cambridge University. Getting the coveted Kellett did not further endear Norman to his classmates, as he unrepentantly notes.

He recalls the pleasures of a room of his own, with early morning tea brought by a servant. He notes that this was the first time in his life he had the leisure to read for the sake of the work rather than to show someone how clever he was. In the English system the tutor for whom he wrote a weekly paper had no influence on the outcome of the exam he would take at the end of two years. Sucking up to him served no purpose.

[He] was the best possible antidote I could have found to the frenetic pursuit of “brilliance” to which I had become habituated at Columbia and whose imperatives constituted a more fearful tyranny, being largely internal, than any that could conceivably have been imposed upon me from the outside.

However:

There was, as usual, another side to the story. Worlds apart from the Cambridge of Clare was the Cambridge of Downing College, and if the fires within me were banked at Clare, to Downing I came, burning, burning, even more hotly than before: burning to learn, burning to impress, burning to succeed…. Downing was the college of F.R. Leavis, the greatest critic in England…the editor of the country’s most formidable critical review, the terrifying Scrutiny.

Norman wins the heart of the fanatical Leavis as he had won those of his predecessors at Columbia. He is older (twenty-one) and “no longer so unformed as to be capable of an effortless imitation of the master’s style in the papers I wrote.” But his more subtle fawning succeeds beyond his dreams: Leavis invites him to write for Scrutiny, and prints the piece.

Norman can’t help being Norman. Here as throughout the book Podhoretz writes about his hero with a finely judged mixture of affection and mockery. He knows as well as his critics that Norman’s ambitiousness verges on the insane. But such is the power of Podhoretz’s storytelling that we continue to want to follow the fortunes of his peculiar hero even as our sense of his peculiarity grows.

To complicate matters, Podhoretz has encased the story of Norman’s feverish strivings—the way chocolate encases the soft center of a bonbon—in a rather puzzling polemic about a social problem that not many readers will recognize as such, much less want to carry on about. His idea is that American culture is dominated by a doctrine of “anti-success” that keeps successful people in a perpetual state of nervous guilt over the “corruption of spirit” that underlies their power, riches, and fame. “On the one hand,” he writes, “our culture teaches us to shape our lives in accordance with the hunger for worldly things; on the other hand, it spitefully contrives to make us ashamed of the presence of those hungers in ourselves and to deprive us as far as possible of any pleasure in their satisfaction.”

This said—and how well he says it—Podhoretz goes on to describe his hero’s conquest of literary New York as anything but the angst-ridden experience we would expect it to be, given his thesis. We follow Norman’s campaign to gain acceptance into “the family”—the mostly but by no means exclusively Jewish intellectuals associated with Partisan Review—with the sort of interest we reserve for favorite sports teams. We are rooting for him even as (with Podhoretz’s good-natured permission) we are laughing at him. Commentary gave him his start, assigning him monthly book reviews. “What I wanted was to see my name in print, to be praised, and above all to attract attention.” But

it was the attention of the family I most dreamed of arousing…. There was nothing I loved better than to sit around with [Robert] Warshow or [Clement] Greenberg and listen (my wide-eyed worshipful fascination egging them on) to tales of the patriarchal past: how “Mary” had left “Philip” to marry Edmund Wilson…how “Dwight” had once organized nude swimming parties at the Cape, how “William” had really felt about “Delmore,” and how “Isaac” really felt about “Saul.” Oh to be granted the right to say “William” and “Philip” and “Dwight,” as I could already say “Bob” and “Clem” and “Nat.”

The right was granted in due course. The Partisan Review people began noticing him and soon gave him a book to review: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Norman’s luck held: his dislike of the book, against the prevalent view that it was great, turned out to be the view that a lot of the family secretly held. There is a mordant account of a party at Philip Rahv’s apartment that Norman characterized as the bar mitzvah ceremony that admitted him into the family. He got very drunk. “I remember hearing my voice pronounce an incredulous, ‘You mean Alfred Kazin?’ or ‘You mean Dwight Macdonald?’ or ‘You mean Mary McCarthy?’ as Rahv and a woman who was present treated me to my first horrified experience of true family-style gossip.” After the party Norman stood out on the street violently throwing up. “And yet in the very midst of all that misery, I knew that I had never been so happy in my life.”

A few months later Norman was drafted into the army and didn’t enjoy basic training, but it was only after his release from the army that he became “more unhappy than I had ever been in my life” in a job as an editor at Commentary that had been promised to him by Elliot Cohen before he left for Fort Dix. By the time Norman came to claim the job, Commentary was no longer the place he had known when he had hung out with the editors and heard about Dwight’s nude swimming parties. Cohen had had a nervous collapse and was in a mental institution. All of its former subeditors were gone except for two men who now jointly ran the journal and did not welcome Norman into their midst. They undermined and bullied him.

Podhoretz does not name the men but combines them into a character called “The Boss.” “One of the reasons I was so miserable at Commentary during my time there under The Boss was that it had become practically the only place in the world where the sun still failed to shine on my fortunate young head,” Norman reflects. His book reviews—in Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New Yorker—had made him into what he calls a “minor literary celebrity.” At Commentary, under “The Boss,” he was made to feel like a pathetic incompetent.

Finally he couldn’t take it anymore and quit the job, but not before stopping into the offices of the American Jewish Council—the organization that owned Commentary—and telling the head of its personnel department why he was quitting. The result was a great upheaval that ended the autocratic reign of “The Boss” and allowed Norman to continue in the job as one of three equal editors. Norman asks himself: “In thus committing the prime crime of American boyhood, snitching to the authorities, did I feel guilty? A little, but mostly I felt pleased with myself for having acted so selflessly, so nobly.” Here as elsewhere Norman keeps the reader on his side by telling the story on himself. He has no illusions about the dirtiness of what he did. We helplessly admire his honesty, as the women in his childhood

marveled at my cleverness, quoting my bright sayings to one another and even back to me (“You remember what you said that time when I was here last? Let me hear you say it again.”). They called me adorable, they called me delicious, they called me a genius, and predicted a great future for me: a doctor at the very least I would be.

They probably would not have predicted his politics. Soon after writing Making It Podhoretz veered sharply right (until then he was a regular lefty like most of the rest of the family) and has grown ever more firmly committed to right-wing causes. He has written numerous books about his extreme conservative beliefs. Perhaps more than any other of the leakages from life that give autobiography its wobbly ontological status, Podhoretz’s radical post-publication politics hover over the book he wrote when he was an innocuous liberal. My attempt to seal it off from its author’s later career, and to write as if I didn’t know what I know—and what everyone who hears the name Norman Podhoretz knows—was made in the name of the New Critical ideal of textual fidelity: don’t muddy the waters with stuff surrounding the text. In the case of Making It, however, the mud clinging to the tale of the strange ambitious boy may be crucial to its discreet charm.

The post ‘I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Bob Silvers, my friend and the editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, shortly after completing the April 6 issue. Together with Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, he founded the Review in 1963; for fifty-four years he was either co-editor with Barbara or, after her death in 2006, editor of the Review. Bob worked almost to the very end of his life, which would be no surprise to those who knew him well, including those who have written these brief memoirs.

—Rea Hederman

ELAINE BLAIR

Until I arrived at the Review as an editorial assistant, I had never met anyone who so rarely engaged in idle pleasantries as Bob. His daily language was pared down, accurate, and sincere. I found his example revelatory, and I would ponder his usage and elisions like a giddy college freshman. Bob would never, for instance, wish us a good weekend. Presumably he had no particular investment in the quality of our weekends, and possibly he didn’t even know when his assistants’ weekends were, since we took turns working Saturday and Sunday shifts with him.

But was he also, I wondered, rejecting the implied value of a good weekend? Is the goal of leisure time pleasure? Edification? Novel experience? If we couldn’t settle on criteria, we couldn’t possibly arrive at a valuation, in which case why bother asking on Monday morning how someone’s weekend had been? The rest of us walked around in a fever of sentimentality and superstition, it suddenly seemed to me, sloppily wishing each other good days and good trips and merriment at Christmas. But Bob said only as much as he meant. When I left the office after a night shift of taking dictation, sending out books, going over a manuscript with him, he said, “Thanks a lot!” And it felt like a lot.

Still, it was hard to get used to a professional relationship that was, by design, largely impersonal. There were four of us assistants and we were supposed to be nearly interchangeable extensions of Bob himself, the extra hands he needed to manage so big a job. Usually only Bob communicated directly with contributors, and when we worked on a manuscript he carefully went over every one of our suggestions or marginal notes. We rarely spoke to him about anything that wasn’t directly relevant to Review pieces. This too seemed to me tied up with Bob’s stringent rejection of linguistic and sentimental cliché, including the commonplaces of workplace relationships. Bob did not take us under his wing. He was not our mentor. He did not believe in us. These were impossibilities because the Review’s lexicon did not allow for them. They may not, in any case, be the best measures of a boss’s generosity.

I don’t remember exactly what Bob said when I gave him an essay I had written on spec and asked if he would consider it for the magazine, but I remember that the look on his face suggested that I’d ruined his afternoon. I’m sure that if I hadn’t worked in the office and had simply sent him the piece, he would have rejected it. But I was there, in person, so he gave the piece his attention and a few weeks later handed me something of rare value: an unsparingly marked-up text.

IAN BURUMA

My first communication from Bob arrived by telex in Hong Kong, I think sometime in 1984. It read simply: “When can we expect Keene?” On a visit to New York, I had foolishly blurted out the idea of writing about Donald Keene’s enormous two-volume opus on modern Japanese literature, about which my knowledge was not nearly sufficient to write a serious essay.

But my fit of bluff in Bob’s office had piqued his interest. He had wanted something on Japan. The piece was deemed adequate enough for publication (“very fresh” might have been his scribbled note of encouragement). After that it was “on we go, old boy,” his usual phrase as soon as another piece had been printed. And what a journey it has been.

My life as a writer owes everything to Bob’s editorship. He had too much respect for writers he trusted to wish to change their individual styles. In this respect he was quite different from many editors, especially in the US, who see the words delivered by their contributors as raw material to, as one distinguished editor once put it to me, as though I should be grateful, “get [his] teeth into.”

Bob’s teeth marks never showed. But he had an infallible eye for loose thinking. His brilliance lay in his sense of clarity. He made you think harder. There was no room in his “paper” for fuzziness or vague abstractions. He wanted examples, descriptions, and concrete thoughts. And because he was the ideal reader you most wanted to please, you gradually learned how to express yourself better.

Some people liked to mock Bob’s mid-Atlantic drawl, which owed something to Oxford High Table talk, Plimptonian (as in George) classiness, and Long Island lockjaw. But this was not a mere affectation. Bob was that rare person: an American who loved France as dearly as he loved England, if not more so. The University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and the best of liberal Oxford philosophers shaped his intellectual life. His clarity came from French thinking as well as Anglo-Saxon empiricism. But he remained deeply committed to the country of his birth. And I don’t just mean the Metropolitan Opera or the Ivy League schools. One of his fondest memories, which he would rehearse when he felt most relaxed, was to have been the only white soldier in an all-black military unit being trained somewhere in the American Deep South.

To me, Bob represented the best of a civilization that was rooted in the Enlightenment. But part of that liberal humanist tradition is openness to other civilizations, hence Bob’s thirst for knowledge about China, Japan, the Middle East, or indeed anywhere that was of interest.

Susan Sontag’s definition of an intellectual as someone who is interested in everything is perhaps an exaggeration. No one can be equally interested in everything, but Bob came damned close.

The idea of civilization that Bob personified is now under siege, not least in the countries that he was most closely associated with. We have lost him just when he was most needed. Our tribute must be to defend what he stood for. On we go. We owe it to him.

DAVID COLE

The package came unannounced, via Federal Express, with two books and a handwritten note: “We wondered if you’d be interested in reviewing these books for us. Bob.” That was thirteen years ago. I’ve been contributing frequently to The New York Review of Books ever since. And that means every word I’ve written—on legal subjects spanning terrorism, crime, gay rights, affirmative action, freedom of speech and religion, and the laws of war—has been handled with exquisite care, obsessive attention, and quiet grace by Bob Silvers. I’ve spent my life teaching and litigating these issues; Bob, who went to three semesters of law school in the late 1940s before deciding he wanted to be an editor, understood them as well as or better than I did.

But that was the least of it. Bob did the same with every article in every issue—on subjects as diverse as opera, history, poetry, education, contemporary politics, jazz, psychology, television, religion, film, medicine, the environment, art, fiction, and drama. From 1963 until 2006, he shared the responsibilities with Barbara Epstein. When she died, Bob never replaced her; he just added her writers to his plate.

To attend to every article in even a single issue of the Review would be a stunning achievement. Bob did it for decades (with help from a small group of extremely talented, devoted, and self-effacing editorial assistants and senior editors). If my experience is any guide, each article went through as many as five or six rounds. What this prodigious production meant was that, even in his seventies and eighties, Bob practically lived at the Review. He was seventy-four when I began working with him. He’d call with an urgent and always perceptive thought about a piece, usually at an inconvenient hour; I always took the call. I’m a morning person, but I had many conversations with him well after 11:00 PM on a weekend evening—from his office.

If Bob was willing to work around the clock on every piece he published, how could I say no to a phone call at an odd hour? He’d inevitably raise a question I hadn’t considered or had thought I could finesse. “Well, I just think the reader will want to know…,” he’d say. And he was always right. When the conversation was done, Bob would just hang up. Never a good-bye. The first five or six times, the abruptness took me aback, so out of keeping with his gentle manners and grace in every other respect. But one soon learned that it was nothing personal; he was just too busy. On to the next galley.

Bob was a consummate generalist, conversant in virtually all fields. He eschewed jargon and the language of specialists, and pushed his writers to say things as simply and clearly as possible, without in any way reducing the sophistication of the thought. Most of his writers had spent decades toiling away in the depths of their fields; Bob ensured that we communicated in ways that those not so steeped would understand. He was a master at the art of translation.

Bob was celebrated, justly, for the publication he fashioned. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2013—a man the Review did not hesitate to criticize. But he never seemed to care much about the accolades; to Bob, they were almost a distraction from the work. The only reward he really seemed to prize was the appearance, every two weeks, of the “paper” itself. The New York Review will go on; it will be Bob’s legacy. A week before he died, even as he was confined to his apartment, he e-mailed me with an idea for a new piece. Fittingly, I suppose, he went out without a good-bye, working on the next galley.

MARK DANNER

I began working for Bob Silvers in September 1981, when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college. I was one of three assistants, informally known to contributors as elves and—to us—as slaves. Because of Bob’s astonishing appetite for work, New York Review assistants had two shifts, nine to five and two to ten. I quickly came to prefer the late shift, though this meant in practice that one often worked until eleven or twelve or even later.

The workspace was what is customarily referred to as Dickensian: towering piles of books on his large desk and our much smaller ones, which had a disconcerting habit of toppling over catastrophically at inopportune moments, heaps of manuscripts everywhere, clouds of cigarillo smoke. (Bob at that time was a chain smoker.) As an assistant I would sit behind my small piles of books, place his endless stream of phone calls to writers (“Can you hold for Robert Silvers?”), and listen for the sound of a manuscript or a book or a set of galleys landing in Bob’s outbox. Galleys—this was pre-Internet—had to be sent off by mail, FedEx, or carrier pigeon to wherever in the world the writer was hiding.

Heavily edited manuscripts had to be retyped: a delight for me because it meant deciphering Bob’s handwriting and marveling at the way he transmuted dross into gold, with nary a trace of his own voice trespassing into the piece. He was an arch ventriloquist, able to adopt the tone of any given writer: the artist as editor. The editor as artist. Manuscripts would be worked on, sometimes extensively, retyped, then set in galleys and mailed off to Berkeley, Chicago, Lucca, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge. Even on pieces he had largely rewritten, Bob would scrawl his typical note: “Dear So and So, Great thanks for your strong piece. You’ll see we have made a few small suggestions. Please let’s have changes soon. Best, Bob.” I would marvel that the authors of pieces that had been substantially rewritten would often call and profess themselves astonished that “Bob hasn’t changed a thing!”

During those long evenings Bob had a way of sensing when you were getting ready, however surreptitiously, to slip out the door. He would begin piling material into the outbox: letters to post, galleys to send, books to mail, manuscripts to type. The hours would pass: eleven, midnight, one AM. Again and again the assistant struggling to leave would be forced to shrug off his or her coat and sit back down at the typewriter. Bob fought against being alone—for he knew that soon he inevitably would be.

If one stayed late enough there was a special bonus: at a certain moment he would leap up from his chair and charge into the publisher’s office next door, and in a few minutes one would hear this somewhat gruff and imperious boss chuckling and joking and mumbling endearments. He was calling his lady love, who was just then rising in Lausanne. The sound of his voice at these moments—animated and happy, distracted for once from the piles of manuscripts and the towers of books—was enough to make up for the late hour and the terrors of the brimming outbox. He taught me, beyond editing and writing and so much else, the necessity of devotion.

JOAN DIDION

When I heard that Bob had died, I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my world. I was unprepared for it. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t, because it seemed impossible. People like Bob don’t die; we need them too much.

Bob always shaped how I thought. I had no opinion I did not run by him first. “New York: Sentimental Journeys” (1991), on the Central Park jogger case, was far and away the hardest piece I ever worked on for this reason. Bob from the beginning knew what the piece had to be—he knew before I did—and he pushed me until I got it there. He knew exactly how dangerous the subject was, and his reaction to this danger was to make it more dangerous. His idea from the first was to get it right, to make it perfect, regardless of whatever negative reaction it might elicit in the city at that moment. When I first turned it in to him, it was clearly too long. His solution was to insist I go further. This meant making it longer. If that piece succeeds at all, it succeeds because he gave me permission to finish it.

I loved having dinner with him. We would go to the Knickerbocker Club on 62nd Street and eat Dover sole and sautéed vegetables and talk about what we needed from each other. From me, he needed a willingness to work, and from him, I needed work to do. He understood this as the fair exchange that it was.

After my husband John died, when my daughter Quintana was very sick, Bob grasped my situation, and blessedly kept me writing—on the Bush administration, on euthanasia. He intuited that I would either work or I would die. He was among the few who understood this.

I knew in 1973 how important he was to my work. I didn’t know how important he was to me personally until much later. In the last few years, our friendship was closer than it had ever been, and I thought about him every day. I wished I could have seen him more, but I knew he needed to keep working.

An editorial note from Bob would open up new possibilities both in a piece and in life itself. What could have been an empty place suddenly flooded with light and understanding.

I will always need Bob.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

It was my great and improbable good fortune to work for Bob in two capacities—once as his assistant in around 1973, and decades later as a contributor. One could say I hardly knew him, yet these experiences and the line between them are etched about as deeply as any marks in the person I feel to be myself.

Having several assistants at a time was indispensable to Bob. Tensions ran high and spilled over largely on us, so through the years Bob inevitably had many assistants, of whom I was almost certainly the worst.

I remember magic personalities orbiting the office, electric excitement and glamour. People who encountered Bob only in his later years might be surprised to learn that when my boyfriend first met him, he said, “But he makes Cary Grant look like a knobbly old turnip!” What I don’t remember is what we assistants actually did, other than wade despairingly through a loam of books, papers, and cigarette ash, and rush off to the post office at all hours.

My first day, Bob asked me to take a letter. After what seemed many hours of rhetorical sublimity declaimed in his startlingly patrician accent, Bob said, “All right, read it back, please, uh…”(What was my name?)

I was clutching pages of incomprehensible scrawl. “Gosh,” I said, “that’s the hard part, Bob.”

One’s hair really can stand on end, I learned in the frozen silence. Bob produced a brief, grim chuckle. “That’s the hard part, Bob. That’s the hard part, Bob…” he echoed, apparently in sheer incredulity.

Bob was severe, Bob was exacting, Bob was irascible—oh, why did he not fire me that day, or on any of the following days, during which I demonstrated equal incompetence, often sobbing? To escape I had to quit.

Many years passed. I was out of town, but a large package found me, bearing the familiar return address. Not possible, not possible…I quaked for a few days before opening it to find a book by a favorite writer of mine, Péter Nádas.

I wrote to Bob, saying that I was overextended as it was, and explaining the many reasons I was unqualified to write about the book. Bob wrote back immediately—countering, with immense charm, each of my points.

He remembered my name now! That note, plus irrepressible vanity on my part, equaled the French Horn of Destiny.

Well, that was the only book ever written that could tempt me to write a review, I thought—until a second one arrived, and the process was repeated, almost exactly.

It seems that Bob had an uncanny, almost diabolical, insight into what book would be irresistible to whom. But also irresistible, it turned out, was the prospect of working on another piece for him. His inexhaustible appetite for exploring the wide world was alloyed with a fastidiousness regarding detail. He attuned himself astonishingly to one’s purposes, and his delight in a finished piece was thrilling.

One feels profound gratitude to someone who wants one to accomplish something that’s apparently beyond one’s reach and who makes it possible to do so. And Bob’s conviction that the smallest elements of expression are the foundation of rigorous thought—that rigorous thought lights up the world—permeated the magazine, issue after issue. The world is in crisis; the loss of such intellectual finesse, curiosity, and force, of such wide-ranging vigilance, is a crisis on its own.

JASON EPSTEIN

When Elizabeth Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, Barbara, and I conceived what would become The New York Review of Books during the newspaper strike of 1962–1963, we knew that our dear friend Bob was the only possible editor. Bob, then a brilliant young Harper’s editor, had recently commissioned Lizzie to write an essay on the decline of serious criticism in America, in which she savaged the dismal Sunday book reviews for their “flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself.”

It was with Lizzie’s Harper’s article in mind that the four of us saw the opportunity wordlessly presented by the strike: either create the kind of review that she had envisioned or forever stop complaining. There was no middle ground, no escape, and therefore no discussion. The opportunity—indeed the obligation—had arrived of its own volition. There was no ignoring it. Bob was born to edit the review that Lizzie’s piece demanded. I called him the following day and, to our delight, he immediately accepted. He then called Barbara and asked her to be his co-editor.

That all this came together seems in retrospect to have been a miracle. The first issue achieved just the quality of gravitas and fluency we hoped for. No reader could fail to see the point of our project. What we could not have imagined at the time was the utter greatness of Bob’s achievement over fifty-four years, and the kindness and fairness that accompanied his profound wisdom. Bob was a man for the ages.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

We are just sitting down to Christmas lunch in London when the telephone rings: “It’s Bob. We have a dangling modifier on galley D4.” FedEx packages appeared at the remotest croft, island refuge, or East European enclave. The New York Review would always get through.

Bob Silvers was the greatest editor I have ever worked with, and part of his secret was in that D4. First there was a package, usually containing the proof copy of a book and, folded inside it, the unmistakable double-spaced typewritten letter with its famous “we hope that something might be done.” (I remember Zoë Heller joking that she would try this courtly formula when asking her children to tidy their rooms: “We hope that something might be done.”) You could not plead other commitments, because he would give you all the time you needed. There followed more packages, faxes, and e-mails, full of supporting material. When you sent him the article, on which you had sometimes worked for months, you would receive a swift response, usually containing the locution “great thanks,” and a small selection from his personal sushi tray of adjectives to describe the piece (“strong,” “important”).

But then came the marked-up text, with his characteristic scrawl on the margins of galley proofs. His essential questions were also the simplest: What do you mean? What do you really want to say? These comments were written on successive galley proofs—D4 meaning the fourth page of the fourth or D set of galleys. Loving this attritional improvement, I once got to an F galley.

In my mind’s eye, I see Bob forever picking up, perusing, and then casting aside a set of galleys. That casting aside was important, because when he came back to the D galley for the nth time, he would see something afresh. Along the way, there were wonderful long telephone conversations, drawing on his extraordinary range of knowledge and reference. I look back through the online list of my contributions over thirty-three years, and I can remember our long-distance exchanges on almost every one.

I think too of our many meetings, in Budapest, Oslo, Paris, or London, dinners in the New York apartment, lunches in the Japanese restaurant below the office: Bob always in his dark blue suit, alight with geniality, laughter, enthusiasm, and a glint of quiet steeliness. Yet even at the height of his reputation and powers, he also had an endearing touch of vulnerability.

He was never earnest but always serious. His support for dissident intellectuals everywhere was steadfast: Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Nadine Gordimer, Fang Lizhi, to name but a few. Shaped by his experience in Paris during the early years of the cold war, Bob represented the values of the transatlantic West at its best. His was a self-confident but also a self-critical liberalism. The more the Review criticized the dark sides of American policy (in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and elsewhere), the more it enhanced American soft power. Despite several brave attempts, no one has ever made a successful pan-European literary review, and so The New York Review remains the nearest thing we Europeans have to one—a common intellectual reference point from Lisbon to Tallin, and from Athens to Edinburgh.

When I wrote about fifty years of The New York Review in these pages in 2013, I reflected on how this liberal, transatlantic West was already under challenge from many sides. There is bitter irony in the fact that Bob has died just as an antiliberal counterrevolution, already manifest in Moscow, Beijing, Istanbul, and Budapest, is threatening the three Western heartlands he knew and loved best: Britain, with Brexit, France, with the rise of Marine Le Pen, and the United States, with you-know-who. We need his spirit more than ever, and we shall keep its flame burning.

ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO

When in 1998 John Paul II became the first pope to visit Cuba, Bob immediately agreed that I should go. Of course there was never any money for travel, but he scraped something together. I joined a cheap package tour of Catholic pilgrims at a travel agency in Mexico and happily wrote two stories from that trip: one about the pope’s visit and a later one about Fidel Castro, whose infirmities were just beginning to show (although he would hold on to power for another ten years).

Even as we were closing the pope story Bob was on the phone about another one. Shouldn’t I be doing something about human rights on the island? My back stiffened. I dislike categories in general because they narrow down reality, and “human rights,” I said, was one that in Cuba led readers and writers right back to a useless cold war understanding of a Latin American country.

Bob was having none of that. How could we run two stories on a country that had lived under the systematic repression of thought and expression for decades, and not mention it? I grumbled and fought; the summer heat was approaching, I had no sources, a rumor was going about that everyone’s go-to human rights victim was now suspect, and, ultimately, I hated the very idea. Not knowing of Bob’s ties to that institution, I said the whole thing sounded like something worthy of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well, dearie, Bob said (dearie, unlike kiddo, was in Bobspeak a term not of affection but of annoyance), one’s thoughts go back to those poor men, the writers and the thinkers and those who simply wish to remain apart, held in dark, dank cells for years and years. One’s thoughts go back and linger there with them, and one can’t help wondering, is there something to be done? Are we not obliged to address their situation in some small way?

The argument went on for days. The pope story ran, the Fidel story went into galleys, and Bob wouldn’t give up. In the end, it became a question of being unspeakably rude to him or saying yes, and so I went and reported and wrote the story I should have volunteered for in the first place. Indeed, the situation of dozens of men (men only, at that point) held in prison on absurd charges, in obscene conditions, was intolerable. I was embarrassed for myself and both appalled and fascinated by what I saw. How could we not address, in some small way, the situation of people laboring under such injustice? Bob made his writers better writers by pushing them to think better.

SUE HALPERN

Nine days before she died, I turned in my last piece for Barbara Epstein, which, as one of “Barbara’s writers,” I assumed would be my last for The New York Review. I knew there was little chance she would read it, and even less chance it would be published, but it felt imperative to see through that final collaboration, ignoring the reality at hand and offering up a little normalcy. For months she edited manuscripts while hooked up to the chemo machine, so I could also imagine her, pen in hand, wrestling with words till the very end.

A few weeks later, the phone rang. It was Robert Silvers. “We’ll be sending galleys of your [fill in the blank with an adjective of high praise] article soon.” We talked briefly about the piece, and at length about Barbara, whom we both loved dearly. “What would you like to do next?” Bob asked before we hung up. And with that, I was one of “Bob’s writers,” too.

Packages of books began to arrive unbidden. Tucked inside would be a brief, telegraphic message, something on the order of “see what you can do.” I confess that I was not always happy to find these leaning up against the front door, and I would give them a wide berth for days, knowing that once I tore open the FedEx envelope, I’d be working like mad to master the subject at hand. But I also knew that before long Bob would be calling to wonder if I’d gotten those books, and when I might have something for him. He was wily like that.

I loved talking with Bob. On the phone, for sure, when I could always count on him to leave me with some insight or something to think about, but even more sitting knee-to-knee on the office couch, where somehow, always, we would make each other laugh. The truest thing I know about Bob was expressed in that sound: his delight in the world. If I had to pick a single word to describe him, it would not be brilliant, or driven, or perspicacious, or courtly, or generous, or honest, or curious, or kind, or polymathic, or good—all of which apply—it would be “delighted.” Just look at his eyes in any picture and there it is.

A while ago, a writer with a number of best sellers to her name got in touch after getting her first Review assignment, to ask what she needed to know in order to write for Bob. I was stymied at first, and then realized why: one didn’t write for Bob. One wrote for oneself, and for the reader, and Bob was there to ensure that—to paraphrase (and contradict) T.S. Eliot—every raid on the inarticulate did not end in the general mess of imprecision of feeling. His goal was not to insert himself and his point of view into a piece, but rather to enable the writer to make an argument with clarity and disposition. He trusted his writers to say what they needed to say and they, in turn, trusted him to help them do so. He knew their capacities. Sometimes he knew them better than they did themselves.

“All right, kiddo,” he said, signing off, the last time we spoke. In that conversation he happened to mention that the medications he’d been taking were not working. Honestly, he seemed more concerned about Trump’s immigration policy. He suggested, in his offhand way, that I might read a certain article in Foreign Policy. It was something to think about. So I did.

JENNIFER HOMANS

I always thought of Bob as a brilliant man, all mind. This could be disconcerting, and there was a moment when I thought of him as strangely impersonal and detached. It was 2008 and my late husband Tony Judt had just been diagnosed with ALS and had written to Bob explaining his dire situation. Tony had been writing for Bob for nearly two decades. Before Bob, Tony had been an accomplished historian of Europe. Almost immediately though, Bob pushed him to expand his range and began sending him books on American foreign policy, Primo Levi, Jean Genet, Israel-Palestine, and, later, the Bush years, the Iraq war, and more. He pushed Tony’s writing too. Pre-Bob the writing was academic; post-Bob, there was a sea change and Tony’s prose became lighter, clearer, “strong,” as Bob liked to say.

Bob had become a constant presence in our lives. Which is why I was so shocked when he responded to Tony’s helpless note with a few breezy lines: We’ll be in touch soon! Weeks passed. Then he came for a visit. Tony was feeling low that day, sitting wan and pale in the back room in his corner chair. I felt like I had been living with Bob for years, but in fact he had never been to our apartment. He wafted cheerfully into the room in his suit and scarf, bringing the news of the world with him. After some very British-sounding abstractions about how tough life could be, they immediately switched to politics, and I remember Tony struggling to keep up or care. He was just too sick. It seemed an impossible situation, these two men, all mind, one rapidly losing his body, and neither knowing quite what to say.

What happened next changed my view of Bob, but also of Tony. By then, Tony was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, writing only with the help of an assistant or whoever was there to be his hands at the keyboard. He started composing pieces at night in his head and reciting them in the morning. He sent one to Bob, who immediately published it. They were back in touch. There would be a series, it was a project, and Bob was right there. But these were not the usual pieces on books and politics; they were deeply personal reflections and memories. Soon after, Bob told me the essays made him think of Central European writers and a memoir form he hadn’t seen for some time. He and Tony had found a common language.

When Bob turned eighty in 2009, Tony composed a note, knowing he would die soon:

More seriously, and I know that I have to stand in line to say this, you will always be an extraordinary editor—by far the best I have ever known and, it seems fair to assert, by far the best there is. You surely do not need me to tell you about the place that the NYR holds in the hearts and minds (sorry!) of hundreds of thousands of readers from Berkeley to Beijing. And, of course, above all, you are a legend in your own time zone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work with you and I look forward to many more conversations and galleys….

Affectionately,
Tony

Bob wrote back with his preternatural restraint:

I just read your words here and wanted to tell you how much they meant to me. Every good thing to you both.

My best,
Bob

Tony forwarded me the response with a brief message:

I think this is the closest I have ever seen Bob get to being moved. I am so pleased I wrote it. Love, T

When Tony died, Bob was still there. Upon the publication of Thinking the Twentieth Century, Tony’s last book, written with Tim Snyder, I called Bob: I don’t know if I can do it, but will you help me if I write something? He said yes, please try. When he received my text, Bob focused on certain emotional words, encouraging me to rein in the feeling, take out the fleshy excess, leave only the bones. I fought for the flesh but he called again and again, telling me how much stronger it would be if understated. I was still in grief: it felt horrible, let it be horrible. But he was looking for a kind of poise. Distance and reflection, even in the face of disaster.

Bob had a classical mind, I think. Disciplined, spare, all emotion distilled. In late December when his partner Grace died, I wrote him a note of condolence. He had always said that she was “marvelous,” “quite a gal,” and she was often tucked somewhere into his notes about the work: “I’m in Switzerland with Grace.” “Grace sends love.” When he got my note, he wrote back as he did to so many with a rare show of raw emotion: “I am nowhere without Grace.” It is often said that people die the way they live, and his death made him come clear in my mind. He died with the woman he loved. Without her he was nowhere. It was poetic, understated, a life well lived. His absence is difficult to accept. He was always there and now he is not.

MARK LILLA

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of soul.

—Robert Musil

It’s a romantic dogma, rooted in God knows what gnostic heresy, that the world is divided into those who think and those who feel. The Mirror and the Lamp, the Dynamo and the Virgin. And that this is how it should be. Tell a romantic you understand him and you have pronounced a death sentence. It means his wings have been clipped and his soul has begun its descent. Oh, Lord, please let me be misunderstood. What keeps him airborne is the conviction that those are philistines pounding the pavement below.

Countless little magazines and literary reviews have been conceived as a refuge from the crowd, a perch for Icarus. The New York Review was meant to be different. Frustrated by the lazy gentility of American book reviewing and its detachment from wider intellectual and cultural currents, the editors invented a genre for what they hoped would be a new audience. The digressive review-essay style that became the paper’s trademark presumed that a writer could bring intellect to matters of soul without violating either, and that there was an audience for such writing. From the start, the Review was a democratic, pedagogical project.

This I knew when I began writing for Bob Silvers back in the 1990s. What I didn’t know was that the pedagogy was intended for the author as well. Bob was a teacher, one of the greatest I have ever encountered. Many stories have been told of his legendary interventionism—the late-night calls about an obscure sentence, the flood of packages, faxes, and later e-mails with suggested reading, not always to the point but welcome as signs of his enthusiasm. Profiles by journalists could make him appear an endearing fussbudget. But nothing I have read asks the only pertinent question: Why did he take the trouble? Why bother? After all, people now consume so much “content,” so fast, that they don’t notice. Errors in print can be fixed online instantaneously. And besides, we’re all publishers now, so who needs a superego?

What the journalists missed, but his writers knew, is that the process of endless refinement was the point. Bob at work on a manuscript resembled nothing so much as a Jesuit spiritual adviser, minus the collar, helping the novice refine his raw inner awareness. It was a vocation, in the strict sense, an expression of magnanimity. He was determined to see that a book got the appreciation and criticism it deserved. But even more, it seemed to me, he wanted the writer to understand himself better than he already did. You say this, and you’re on to something, but what does it really mean? What are you trying to say? Bob had a profound abhorrence of vagueness. It was the cardinal sin because it was cowardly, a self-evasion. More than once I wanted to tear the hairshirt off. Icarus, c’est moi. He never permitted it because he was more loyal to me than I was to myself.

In reading the Review, you always learn something. In writing for Bob, you became something. It was a gift none of us really deserved. But what gift ever is? That’s what makes it a gift.

JANET MALCOLM

“What are you working on?”
“I’m writing a piece for Bob.”

This exchange, often heard around the city, will be heard no more. Now we will have to write for an imaginary Bob—though on some level we were always writing for an imaginary Bob. He was our literary conscience. He was the figure looking over our shoulders as we wrote, holding us to a rare standard. When you wrote “for Bob” you felt the pressure of a demand to be interesting. You do not bore a genius. You do as good an impersonation as you can of someone worthy of his attention.

The imaginary Bob appealed to the better parts of our writing natures, to our capacity for audacity and unpredictability; and, of course, he couldn’t always rouse them. But the best pieces in the magazine had a shimmer that came from outside of themselves. As one read them a sense of Bob came into the room.

His actual interventions in the manuscripts I submitted usually had to do with questions of fact. He wanted to know more about something, or he wanted something added that he knew should be there. He was after the truth of things, which begins with the facts of things. He seemed to know more facts than anyone else in the world did and to understand their power. In today’s new order of untruthfulness (do you remember the good old order of mere truthiness?) his legacy has a moral significance beyond description.

FINTAN O’TOOLE

The great editor is a chimerical creature, combining contrary qualities in one mind: assertive and self-effacing, commanding and sensitive, infinitely curious and sharply focused, patient and fearfully demanding, wide-angle and close-up. Robert Silvers was the greatest editor of our time because he managed these contradictions with a seemingly effortless elegance. He was able, somehow, to show his writers only the gentler sides—the civility, the patience, the infinite care for the smallest details of an essay. Their other sides—the unbending standards of excellence, the phenomenal drive, the larger mission of which your own piece was but a tiny part—were never explicitly expressed. They did not have to be: writers—and more importantly readers—could never miss the force of their steadfast presence.

The thing that everyone privileged enough to write for Robert Silvers will remember is the mystery of the Federal Express packet of books that would arrive every so often. Mysterious because you had no idea what you were going to get. Sometimes it would be stuff that you more or less knew about; sometimes not. Bob did not believe in comfort zones. In any other editor this might have been eccentric, even perverse. But with Bob it was a deeply serious act of faith. He believed that there is such a thing as the general reader, that public life depends on the existence of a common space in which ideas can be shared, absorbed, mulled over, kicked around. And if there is the general reader, there must also be the general writer. If you were lucky enough to write for The New York Review, you had to be prepared to share what you knew or thought without arrogance or condescension. Sometimes you had to go further and share what you didn’t know until Bob’s quiet demands sent you off to learn it.

What he was doing in this was holding a crucial middle ground. He understood better than anyone else that the public realm has to fight for its existence against two equally great dangers. One is the culture of self-enclosed, technocratic expertise, the hiving off of intellectual life into increasingly minute specializations and increasingly impenetrable professional dialects. The other is the insistence—so much in the ascendant now—that there is no expertise at all, that scholarship and rigor and evidence are the mere playthings of elitist eggheads. Bob’s great gift to civic life was the living demonstration in every issue of the Review that these impostors could be treated with equal—and magnificent—contempt. He held open the space for that great republican virtue: common curiosity. He made this fierce effort seem so natural that it is only in his absence that we realize how hard it is to do and how much it counts.

I always come back in thinking about Bob to his imperturbable courtesy. His good manners were not mere mannerisms. They said something. They were a constant reminder to the rest of us that we owed readers the same consideration—to think things through as best we could, to avoid shortcuts and lazy assumptions, to write as well as we could manage. And to remember that it all matters, that the life of a great journal is part of the life of democracy itself. We know better than we have ever known how boorishness and vulgarity pollute public life. Robert Silvers showed us better than any other editor how courtesy and care sustain it.

DARRYL PINCKNEY

For the longest time I called him Mr. Silvers. A couple of Elizabeth Hardwick’s other former students were his editorial assistants and I hung around the office while still an undergraduate. After college, I got temporary work in the mailroom of the Review. Then one day a parcel arrived at my apartment, a book and a letter from Robert Silvers. Maybe he used that phrase—to see what can be done. I’d never had a conversation of any kind with him before. I’d been introduced, but after that he lived in his own world in the office. Barbara Epstein in those early years wouldn’t talk to me any more than she had to. When it came time to discuss the piece, he was pleasant, talked easily of Jimmy Baldwin, and knew more about my subject than I expected him to. Professor Hardwick—not yet Lizzie to me—had been through the piece before I walked it in, so there was not too much of a painful nature left to say.

I’d sat down scared out of my head and I stood up still scared stupid and down through the next forty years I never, I mean never, got over being scared of him. James Fenton, my partner, could talk with him at length, but in a social setting, I had to let him turn away after two minutes or so. Mr. Silvers, back when, had among his assistants a smart, poised girl who was sometimes absent for elegant reasons. I became her substitute and so spent some hours with him, listening to him talk to others. One New Year’s Eve about nine o’clock I asked him if it would be OK if I went off. He said yes, but it would also be OK if I wanted to stay.

I also remember his tyranny in the office. It was tiresome for Barbara, because she grew up with a father who yelled. I’d gone from Mr. Silvers’s office to the typesetting studio to sitting outside Barbara’s office door and the hardest thing about being her assistant was learning, firstly, that you could not protect her from him, and, secondly, that she didn’t need anyone’s protection. Their battles were over a writer’s argument, a writer’s prose. The Review’s style emerged from Bob and Barbara’s clashes that, looking back, obscured how similar in sensibility they actually were. For me, it was part of the emotional chaos and intellectual thrill of the place. A cool friend who also worked at the Review had to warn me to chill the Review snob act a bit when we were hanging out downtown. The best thing about the Review was some of the people in the office, the friends you made, young writers whose work you fell for. And, yes, there was the education you got or made up for just by reading it.

There’s the first word and then there’s the last word, but even Edmund Wilson was dumb once, Lizzie said. Bob and Grace really loved her, and that was my bond with Bob, love for Elizabeth Hardwick and her love for The New York Review of Books, which, she said more than once, had saved her life.

YASMINE EL RASHIDI

When Bob took an interest in my world, he quite literally opened the world to me. Our relationship began with the Egyptian uprising of 2011, and in a conversation over those initial weeks that extended across months, into years, I lived and thought through with him the most profound experience of my life.

Bob gave me a sense of value as a writer—in the attention he offered, and in the trust. When he asked if something might be done about the Egyptian presidential election, he delighted in a piece that instead examined the particularities of the Egyptian bureaucracy. He sent clips, books, letters, offering you things to think about—consider—but in the end, he was genuinely interested in what as a writer you came back with, in content, voice, form. The Review quickly became my writing home, and Bob my measure, my guide. There was no other reader. He was the one who mattered most.

Bob cared about his writers—not just the legendary ones. He cared about our well-being, our safety, even our personal lives. After sharing an experience I had with Egyptian security that particularly rattled me, his concern grew, and he often called to ask if I felt safe, if I needed anything. He suggested ways I might tell the story, even perhaps “a short story” for the “paper” instead.

He stood by us, too. One of my last pieces for him, about the violent clashes between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood that followed the fall of President Mohamed Morsi’s government in the summer of 2013, generated an avalanche of controversy. Bob had pushed, respectfully, through a rigorous process of checking facts and statements to verify the position my reporting had led me to take—one that ran contrary to that of almost every major international news organization—and once the piece had gone to press, he was unflinching in his support. I heard of the critical and questioning letters from others, never him. He only ever thanked me for writing it.

Bob always seemed immensely pleased to see you. He made you feel as if there was nothing more thrilling—marvelous—in that moment than your company. He had an energy, enthusiasm, and buoyancy that were infectious, and he was magnanimous in every way. When I suggested that I might need some time away from Cairo, he did everything to support and make that possible, helping my passage to New York. And when I shared with him my struggle to write a nonfiction book on Egypt, he gently prodded, asking questions to coax out of me thoughts on the story I wanted to tell. He was the first to suggest that fiction might be the form for me. This was a measure of his openness—his understanding and care and sense of his writers beyond the scope of what was considered their realm; it was also part of why and how he came to be their friend as well.

Over the past two and a half years, as I worked on a piece for him from and about Cairo, we had lunches and exchanged e-mails and letters and occasionally the phone would ring. I walked the streets of my city thinking about everything with him in mind. He seemed unwavering in his patience and encouragement, still completely engaged and enthusiastic about the project twenty-eight months later. A couple of months before he died, in a letter about a novel he was sending me for review, he added a postscript about my “Notes”—as we had tentatively entitled the piece—suggesting that it “need not be conclusive.” In his absence, I feel a void, a sense of disorientation, the knowledge that my “Notes” will never, without his eyes, feel either conclusive or complete.

NATHANIEL RICH

Sharpening pencils, fetching dry cleaning, taking dictation, dodging sharpened pencils thrown at your head—life as Bob’s editorial assistant was unglamorous and often had little to do with editing. It took time to win his trust. As a new assistant, weeks removed from college graduation, I longed for an editorial assignment, the ultimate test of a staffer’s mettle. Bob only handed over essays that he had grown sick of trying to wrestle into coherence. These forsaken manuscripts sat on a corner of his desk, often buried under books, languishing for months if not years—the pariahs of the editorial roster. Bob rarely gave up on them but the presence of this pile was a constant affront, a black mark on an otherwise undefeated record.

My moment finally arrived several months into the job, when he lifted a manuscript from the pariah pile and called my name—itself a minor milestone in an assistant’s life, the direct address. My excitement curdled to dread when I saw the piece: a British lord’s assessment of a Nobel laureate’s monograph about economic modeling. I could not imagine an essay I was less suited to work on. I had defiantly avoided taking a single economics course in college and could not begin to understand any of the technical words the author used, let alone his argument. Ashamed, I admitted as much to Bob.

“Nonsense!” he said.

He explained that my ignorance of the subject, on the contrary, made me an ideal reader for the piece. He leapt from his chair and scanned the shelves behind his desk, where he kept his reference books. Down tumbled The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, Barron’s Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms, An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics, and a half-dozen other volumes, landing with thuds on his desk. All the definitions I needed could be found in these books, he said, before launching into a brief lecture on growth theory. My job, he explained, was to translate the piece into language that even a person as ignorant of economic theory as I was could understand.

This was my introduction to one of the central tenets of Bob’s editorial philosophy. Good writing is capable of bringing to life even the most arcane subjects. Big ideas demand vivid prose. Academic jargon is fatal, as are stock expressions, terms of art, empty metaphors. Dead language not only obscures the ideas it means to describe. It blocks original thinking. Many writers will say that Bob brought out their best prose. He did more than that. He brought out their highest thoughts.

Clarity of prose leads to clarity of mind. And without clarity of mind, moral clarity is impossible. I forgot what Bob taught me about economics but I’ll never forget that.

INGRID D. ROWLAND

After any phone conversation, Bob Silvers hung up with a distinctive, resonant klunk—he was done, he was satisfied, and it was time to get back to work. He called The New York Review “our little paper.” His was certainly an editorial “we”—and who, among editors, had more right to that regal pronoun?—but more importantly, that “we” reflected his sense that the paper truly belonged to all of us: readers, writers, editors, printers, publishers, the people who run newsstands in Athens and Rome and all the other surprising corners of the world where The New York Review has become part of life. Pondered quietly, hotly argued, it outlives the paper on which it is printed through memories of words, phrases, readings, experiences, through conversations between people who have connected with one another because of its existence.

And Bob, like an orchestra conductor or a theatrical director, could fixate obsessively on the tiniest detail of phrasing or punctuation without ever losing his grasp of the whole enterprise. In many ways, “our little paper” is a fluid, ephemeral enterprise, writ on water, as Keats might say, but what does water do? When drop meets drop, the two merge to create a rivulet, a stream, the Amazon. Water moves forever onward, bound for the sea—except when it leaps, on clouds, straight into the sky. However fleeting an article, an issue, or a reader’s reverie may be in itself, the momentum they create, like the momentum of water, is relentless. Bob’s great gift was the ability to guide that momentum in every direction, into the desert, into the darkness, into the light. He lived, ultimately, for love and beauty, and he followed them into that good night.

ZADIE SMITH

A writer friend asked me: What was it about Bob? The edit? Or the commission? Another writer present—who also wrote for Bob—laughed at the word “commission,” and I realized I found it strange, too. Bob didn’t commission as much as elicit, a word whose Latin root means “to draw out by trickery or magic.” He was an expert eliciter. The very first time I wrote for him was because I made the mistake of saying, during the course of a casual conversation, “Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about Kafka.” Kafka! He said the name back to me as if I had just mentioned the very latest literary sensation. “Well, why don’t we see if something can’t be done about that?”

A fairly recent book about Kafka soon arrived at my door, then several others. Then articles and notes and more books. This was disarming. My experience writing for editors up to that point had been confined to British newspapers where the emphasis was upon speed, topicality, and personal alignment with the subject. There’s nothing a British editor likes more than sending out a recent novel about the Berlin Wall to a writer who only last year wrote a novel about the Berlin Wall.

I wrote on Kafka, it ran, we were off. Many more pieces on even less likely subjects followed. Bob gave a lot of freedom to his writers, but the way he handled pieces was the opposite of a free-for-all. It’s a combination difficult to describe. The things you could get away with at the Review you could never get away with elsewhere: Bob wasn’t a grammar weenie; he didn’t rule out the personal or obscenity. He prized rationality and clarity but not at the expense of passion. He taught you not to speak vaguely of “historical context,” or indeed overuse “vaguely,” or suggest that two things were “inextricably entwined.”

But it was more than that. He valued individual sensibilities, more than any editor I ever knew. Though often accused of relying on too small a circle of contributors, it cannot be said that his paper suffered from a uniformity of tone. To read it cover-to-cover was to experience stylistic whiplash, from the conversational to the drily academic, from aggressive provocation to the intimate or dreamily philosophic. Bob’s “paper” was a very broad church with a narrow entrance marked: if it’s good.

I don’t know if he ever realized how little I’d known or understood in the beginning. Didn’t know my favorite Sontag essays came out of this “paper,” or that Bob had edited Baldwin, or known Lowell intimately, or helped edit the early Paris Review. We’d had lunch quite a few times before I learned he was a Jewish boy from Long Island rather than the Bostonian wasp that—from his fancy suits and frequent references to Lowell—I had somehow imagined he was. But being very stupid about lots of things was not a disqualifying trait in Bob’s mind: like an indulgent parent he focused on your peculiar strengths. He was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least if it came at the price of a readable sentence.

His greatest pleasure was those people who approached his own intellectual ambidexterity: a doctor with a fancy prose style, say, or a president who understood and appreciated poetry. When considering such people he would get a very merry look in his eye—since he is not editing this piece let’s call it a “glint”—and say, “Well, now, he’s really a sort of genius you know, a genius! Ha! Ha!” Always the happy laugh at the end. Other people’s genius aroused no envy in him; it was only ever a source of delight.

About the rest of us he had a clear eye. She’s a bit weak on Iraq but absolutely marvelous on Alexander Pope. He knows everything about the theater but nothing at all about politics. This is presumably what allowed him to decide, very early on, that he wasn’t a writer himself, though I always found it hard to believe: the way he edited was effectively writing. It was like having a second architect appear during construction, suggesting a west wing here or a second floor. You could get a bit petulant about it. Have you considered x? is not always what you want to hear when you’ve just written two thousand words on y. But he was always right.

“Will Bob be there? I owe him a piece.” An anxious query tacked onto many an RSVP for a New York literary party. But even if you didn’t owe him you had to be careful: in company Bob was like a shark in a shoal, trawling for pieces, waiting for unsuspecting writers to drunkenly let slip that they were interested in Sibelius or Croatia or had a theory about Philip Glass. Sometimes the process of eliciting could feel a little like entrapment. Not because he was strict with a deadline, but because to agree to write something for Bob was to know there was no way you’d be phoning it in, you’d be holding yourself to the highest standard—his.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of Bob’s legacy is the generations of editorial assistants he spread abroad. Whenever I am being particularly astutely edited elsewhere it usually turns out that the red pen belongs to an ex-assistant of Bob’s. Thank God—I always need the help. Many of Bob’s writers were Nobel Prize winners, true geniuses, all-rounders of the C.P. Snow variety. They would have written brilliantly anywhere. But there were others, like me, from whom Bob not only elicited work, but helped directly to improve, educate, and form. I loved him for it and I’ll miss writing for him so much.

Additional remembrances of Robert Silvers by more than sixty New York Review contributors and friends can be found at nybooks.com/rbs.

The post Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

To the Editors:

I greatly appreciated and admired the letters of Alice Sedgwick Wohl and Judson Rosengrant. In further, perhaps shaky, support of my reader-friendly argument may I cite the following?

A.N. Wilson’s review of Jean Findlay’s biography Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy, and Translator [TLS, October 29, 2014]:

Scott Moncrieff’s twelve sky-blue volumes…belong to that special category of translations which are themselves literary masterpieces…. It is hard not to feel that—just as Luther was the first translator truly to bring out the essence of St. Paul—Scott Moncrieff is more Proustian than Proust himself. And you can see why proficient linguists such as Joseph Conrad considered Scott Moncrieff actually to be Proust’s superior. It sounds frivolously anglocentric to write such a sentence, but might there not actually be a case for believing this to be true? Might it not be true that Proust, coughing his life away as he failed to finish the masterpiece, actually needed someone else to rewrite it, and make it perfect, in something of the same way that Aristotle, whose writings had long been lost in the mists of antiquity, and which were anyway merely the lecture notes of his pupils, came to the full consciousness of European intellectuals only when he had been translated first into Arabic, then into Latin, and finally filtered through the fertile imagination of St. Thomas Aquinas? “I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust’s creation,” Conrad wrote to Scott Moncrieff. “One has revealed something to me and there is no revelation in the other.”

John Nathan’s review of a new translation of The Tale of Genji by Dennis Washburn [NYR, January 14, 2016]:

Which leaves Arthur Waley. There is no question that the Waley version is problematic: he cut and expurgated with abandon, deleting, among other things, the only example of Genji’s bisexuality. Moreover, his readings are often mistaken, and there are passages that turn out to be, on comparison with the original, his own invention. Even so, Waley, a member of the Bloomsbury group, was a genuine poet and a splendid stylist, and he managed to imbue his Genji with a distinctive sound, a voice that we are pleased and relieved to accept in lieu of Murasaki’s own. One recalls Borges’s “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald”: adjusting the enigma to fit the Genji, we discover a collaboration between a Japanese lady-in-waiting in the eleventh century and an eccentric Englishman in the 1920s that ushered forth a resonant English masterpiece with the heart and soul of ancient Japan. No translation since has come close.

Janet Malcolm
New York City

The post Translation & Revelation appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In Anna Karenina, the day after the fateful ball, resolved to forget Vronsky and resume her peaceful life with her son and husband (“my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual”), Anna settles herself in her compartment in the overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and takes out an uncut English novel, probably one by Trollope judging from references to fox hunting and Parliament. Tolstoy, of course, says nothing about a translation—educated Russians knew English as well as French. In contrast, very few educated English speakers have read the Russian classics in the original and, until recent years, they have largely depended on two translations, one by the Englishwoman Constance Garnett and the other by the English couple Louise and Aylmer Maude, made respectively in 1901 and 1912. The distinguished Slavic scholar and teacher Gary Saul Morson once wrote about the former:

I love Constance Garnett, and wish I had a framed picture of her on my wall, since I have often thought that what I do for a living is teach the Collected Works of Constance Garnett. She has a fine sense of English, and, especially, the sort of English that appears in British fiction of the realist period, which makes her ideal for translating the Russian masterpieces. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were constantly reading and learning from Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and others. Every time someone else redoes one of these works, reviewers say that the new version replaces Garnett; and then another version comes out, which, apparently, replaces Garnett again, and so on. She must have done something right.

Morson wrote these words in 1997,¹ and would recall them bitterly. Since that time a sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations. When you go to a bookstore to buy a work by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Chekhov, most of what you find is in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

In an article in the July/August 2010 issue of Commentary entitled “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature,” Morson used the word “tragedy” to express his sense of the disaster that has befallen Russian literature in English translation since the P&V translations began to appear. To Morson “these are Potemkin translations—apparently definitive but actually flat and fake on closer inspection.” Morson fears that “if students and more-general readers choose P&V…[they] are likely to presume that whatever made so many regard Russian literature with awe has gone stale with time or is lost to them.”

In the summer of 2015 an interview with the rich and happy couple appeared in The Paris Review. The interviewer—referring to a comment Pevear had made to David Remnick in 2005—asked him: “You once said that one of your subliminal aims as a translator was ‘to help energize English itself.’ Can you explain what you mean?” Pevear was glad to do so:

It seemed to me that American fiction had become very bland and mostly self-centered. I thought it needed to break out of that. One thing I love about translating is the possibility it gives me to do things that you might not ordinarily do in English. I think it’s a very important part of translating. The good effect of translating is this cross-pollination of languages. Sometimes we get criticized—this is too literal, this is a Russianism—but I don’t mind that. Let’s have a little Russianism. Let’s use things like inversions. Why should they be eliminated? I guess if you’re a contemporary writer, you’re not supposed to do it, but as a translator I can. I love this freedom of movement between the two languages. I think it’s the most important thing for me—that it should enrich my language, the English language.

This bizarre idea of the translator’s task only strengthens one’s sense of the difficulty teachers of Russian literature in translation face when their students are forced to read the Russian classics in Pevear’s “energized” English. I first heard of P&V in 2007 when I received an e-mail from the writer Anna Shapiro:

I finished the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina a few weeks ago and I’m still more or less stewing about it. It leaves such a bad taste; it’s so wrong, and so oddly wrong, turning nourishment into wood. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I’ve always maintained that Tolstoy was unruinable, because he’s such a simple writer, words piled like bricks, that it couldn’t matter; that he’s a transparent writer, so you can’t really get the flavor wrong, because in many ways he tries to have none. But they have, they’ve added some bad flavor, whereas even when Garnett makes sentences like “Vronsky eschewed farinaceous foods” it does no harm…. I imagine Pevear thinking he’s CORRECTING Tolstoy; that he’s really the much better writer.

When I leafed through the P&V translation of Anna Karenina I understood what Anna Shapiro was stewing about. The contrast to Garnett glared out at me. Garnett’s fine English, her urgent forward-moving sentences, her feeling for words—all this was gone, replaced by writing that is like singing or piano playing by someone who is not musical. For example:

Garnett: All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she confronted with a barrier that he could not penetrate, made up of a sort of amused perplexity.

P&V: To all his attempts at drawing her into an explanation she opposed the impenetrable wall of some cheerful perplexity.

Or:

Garnett: After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and honorable man. She liked him very much, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him.

P&V: After seeing her guests off, Anna began pacing up and down the room without sitting down. Though for the whole evening (lately she had acted the same way towards all young men) she had unconsciously done everything she could to arouse a feeling of love for her in Levin, and though she knew that she had succeeded in it, as far as one could with regard to an honest, married man in one evening, and though she liked him very much (despite the sharp contrast, from a man’s point of view, between Levin and Vronsky, as a woman she saw what they had in common, for which Kitty, too, had loved them both), as soon as he left the room, she stopped thinking about him.

If these examples are not convincing, let me try to demonstrate Garnett’s brilliance as a translator with a passage in chapter 8 of book 3 of Anna Karenina. We are at Dolly Oblonsky’s country estate where she is spending the spring and summer with her six children, while the philandering Stiva remains in Moscow. Dolly is taking the children to the village church for a Sunday mass. During the previous week she had been preoccupied with the making or alteration of the children’s clothes for the service. Now the coach is at the door, the beautifully dressed children are sitting on the steps of the house, but their mother is still inside, primping. After she finally appears, dressed in a white muslin gown, Tolstoy pauses to explain the careworn, self-sacrificing Dolly’s uncharacteristic concern with her appearance. Garnett’s translation of the passage reads:

Darya Aleksandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and excitement. In the old days she had dressed for her own sake to look pretty and be admired. Later on, as she got older, dressing up became more and more distasteful to her. She saw that she was losing her good looks. But now she began to feel pleasure and interest in dressing up again. Now she did not dress for her own sake, not for the sake of her own beauty, but simply so that as the mother of those exquisite creatures she might not spoil the general effect. And looking at herself for the last time in the mirror, she was satisfied with herself. She looked nice. Not nice as she would have wished to look nice in old days at a ball, but nice for the object she now had in view.

Here is P&V:

Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair and dressed with care and excitement. Once she used to dress for herself, to be beautiful and admired; then, the older she became, the more unpleasant it was for her to dress; she saw that she had lost her good looks. But now she again dressed with pleasure and excitement. Now she dressed not for herself, not for her own beauty, but so that, being the mother of these lovely things, she would not spoil the general impression. And taking a last look in the mirror, she remained satisfied with herself. She was pretty. Not as pretty as she had once wanted to be at a ball, but pretty enough for the purpose she now had in mind.

The key Russian words here are krasivaya and khorosha.² Tolstoy uses the first, meaning “beautiful” or “pretty,” in the sentence referring to the old days when Dolly dressed to be admired. He uses the second, meaning “good” or “fine,” in writing of Dolly’s present selfless purpose. Garnett’s “She looked nice” conveys the sense of the passage as no other translator of Anna Karenina into English has conveyed it. Louise and Aylmer Maude (some readers prefer their version of the novel to Garnett’s) write “She looked well,” which is better than P&V’s “She was pretty.” But Garnett’s “She looked nice” is inspired.

There is a popular conception of Garnett as a scatterbrained Edwardian lady who dashed off her translations at a mad pace, making huge mistakes in her haste, and writing in an outdated language that has necessitated the retranslations that have followed. A famous description of her by D.H. Lawrence established the sense of her hurry and carelessness. Lawrence recalled Garnett

sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. The pile would be this high…really almost up to her knees, and all magical.

You can feel the condescension. The garden setting, the impetuous flinging of the “marvelous” and “magical” pages. A serious translator would be indoors working with orderly deliberation. Garnett did make mistakes, but correctable ones, as an excellent revised edition by Leonard Kent and Nina Berberova demonstrates.³ As for the charge that Garnett writes in an outdated language, yes, here and there she uses words and phrases that no one uses today, but not many of them. We find the same sprinkling of outdated words and phrases in the novels of Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot. Should they, too, be rewritten for modern sensibilities? (Would u really want that?)

Another argument for putting Tolstoy into awkward contemporary-sounding English has been advanced by Pevear and Volokhonsky, and, more recently, by Marian Schwartz,⁴ namely that Tolstoy himself wrote in awkward Russian and that when we read Garnett or Maude we are not reading the true Tolstoy. Arguably, Schwartz’s attempt to “re-create Tolstoy’s style in English” surpasses P&V’s in ungainliness. Schwartz actually ruins one of the most moving scenes in the novel—when Kitty, fending off her sister’s attempt to comfort her for Vronsky’s rejection, lashes out and reminds her of her degraded position vis-à-vis the womanizing Stiva. After the outburst the sisters sit in silence. In Garnett’s version:

The silence lasted for a minute or two. Dolly was thinking of herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with a peculiar bitterness when her sister reminded her of it. She had not expected such cruelty from her sister, and she was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the sound of heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms about her neck.

Schwartz writes:

The silence lasted for a couple of minutes. Dolly was thinking about herself. Her humiliation, which was always with her, told especially painfully in her when her sister mentioned it. She had not anticipated such cruelty from her sister, and she was angry with her. Suddenly, however, she heard a dress and instead of the sound of sobs that had been held back too long, someone’s hands embracing her around the neck from below.

Perhaps a slip of the copy editor’s pen created this ungrammatical muddle. The following instance of Schwartz’s obtrusive literalism was clearly deliberate. It occurs in an exchange between Stiva and his servant Matvey about the upset in the Oblonsky household following Dolly’s discovery of his affair with the governess. Stiva wants Matvey’s opinion of whether Dolly will take him back. Garnett writes:

“Eh, Matvey?” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s all right sir; it will work out,” said Matvey.

“Work out?”

“Yes, sir.”

Schwartz writes:

“Eh, Matvei?” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s all right, sir, things will shapify,” said Matvei.

“Shapify?”

“I’m certain of it, sir.”

The neologism “shapify” is Schwartz’s attempt to render Tolstoy’s neologism obrazuetsia (derived from the word obraz, meaning image or form). Tolstoy reintroduces his invention a few pages later. “Stepan Arkadyevich liked a good joke. ‘And perhaps things will shapify! A fine turn of phrase: shapify,’ he thought. ‘I must repeat that one.’” But where the Russian neologism is funny, the English one is merely weird. It stops the reader in his tracks.

No other translator fell into the trap Schwartz fell into. The other translators—including Pevear and Volokhonsky—evidently understanding that the Slavic languages’ capacity for playfulness (or what you could call playing-with-itself-fulness) is not innate to English, made no attempt to create an English neologism. (Rosamund Bartlett and P&V come closest to obrazuetsia with “things will shape up” and “it’ll shape up.”) Sometimes, of course, the attempt has to be made, as in Chekhov’s story “Ionitch,” where a character talks in “his extraordinary language, evolved in the course of prolonged practice in witticism and evidently now become a habit: ‘Badsome,’ ‘Hugeous,’ ‘Thank you most dumbly,’ and so on.” But in the case of Matvey, whose language is not usually extraordinary, an elaborately badsome English neologism is uncalled for.

Or is it? What side are you on? Whose interests should the translator serve? Those of the reader of simple wants, who only asks of a translation that it advance rather than impede his pleasure and understanding? Or those of the more advanced (or masochistic) school who want to know what the original was “like”? I am speaking here of translations of fiction. Poetry and humor are untranslatable in the view of some readers. But surely novels can be successfully translated. The basic myths they transform into stories of their time belong to all cultures and can be retold in any number of languages. Let me give one more example of the point I have been belaboring on behalf of the reader of simple wants.

While the Kent/Berberova edition of Anna Karenina contains thousands of revisions, it essentially remains Garnett’s translation. “That she made errors and that her heritage dictated pruderies which occasionally mute some of Tolstoy is certain,” Kent and Berberova write, “but that her language and syntax almost always faithfully reproduce both the letter and the tone of the original is no less true; indeed, we remain as unconvinced as many others that her translation has ever been superseded.” Kent and Berberova deftly change “he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes” to “he avoided starchy foods and desserts.” They correct a truly serious error in the passage where Vronsky first lays eyes on Anna at the train station. Garnett writes that he “felt he must glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful…,” which seems odd, since Anna’s exceptional beauty is one of the novel’s givens. In the corrected version “not that” becomes “not because,” and all falls into place.

However, there are revisions that subvert, you could almost say Pevearise, the Garnett translation. In book five, chapter 3, Tolstoy writes with delicious malice of the ridiculous young man Vassenka Vesselovsky’s realization that his fancy new hunting outfit is wrong while the tatters Stiva wears are the height of chic. In the original Garnett version Stiva is dressed “in rough leggings and spats, in torn trousers and a short coat. On his head there was a wreck of a hat.” Kent and Berberova properly remove “spats” but substitute some mystifying “linen bands wrapped around his feet.” What are these bands? In their version, the Maudes solve the mystery for the reader: “Oblonsky was wearing raw hide shoes, bands of linen wound round his feet instead of socks, a pair of tattered trousers….” There are no socks in the Tolstoy original. The Maudes just decided to help out the reader. Whether you think they were right or wrong to do so says something about where you stand in the current controversy about the translation of Russian fiction.

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On the day that she found Yeats’s house in Fitzroy Road, she rushed round in a fever of excitement to tell Al [Alvarez]. That evening, she noted in her journal with her usual acerbic wit, they were engaged in a certain activity when the telephone rang. She put her foot over his penis so that, as she phrased it, he was appropriately attired to receive the call.

We assume that Bate is paraphrasing rather than quoting Plath’s entry because of the copyright law prohibiting quotation of unpublished writing without permission of the writer or of his or her estate. As Bate wrote in The Guardian in April 2014, in an angry article entitled “How the Actions of the Ted Hughes Estate Will Change My Biography,” the estate had abruptly withdrawn permission to quote after initially enthusiastically approving “my plan for what I called ‘a literary life.’”

But in fact, the action of the estate was not the reason for Bate’s resort to paraphrase. As readers familiar with the Hughes/Plath legend will realize or have already realized, Bate was paraphrasing words he could not possibly have read since Plath’s last journal was destroyed by Hughes soon after her suicide. (“I did not want her children to have to read it,” Hughes explained when he revealed his act of destruction in the introduction to a volume of Plath’s earlier journals.) What Bate was paraphrasing, he tells us, was Olwyn Hughes’s memory of what she had read in the journal before her brother destroyed it.

In the introduction to his book, Bate—who is a professor of English literature at Oxford and the author of numerous books on Shakespeare, along with a biography of John Clare—offers a “cardinal rule” of literary biography: “The work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical.” And: “The task of the literary biographer is not so much to enumerate all the available facts as to select those outer circumstances and transformative moments that shape the inner life in significant ways.” But these fine words—are just fine words. The revelation, if that’s what it is, of sex between Plath and Alvarez (in his autobiographical writings Alvarez indicated that there had never been any) illuminates neither Hughes’s work nor his inner life. It only makes plain, along with his prurience, Bate’s dislike of Alvarez. “At the time of Sylvia’s death, a contemporary noted that Alvarez had a ‘hangdog adoration of T.H.’ and expressed the opinion that he was ‘stuck in Freudianism like an American teenager,’” Bate writes, and, as if this wasn’t mean enough, adds: “Alvarez could make or break a poet, but his own poetry was thin gruel.” Bate’s malice is the glue that holds his incoherent book together—malice directed at other peripheral characters but chiefly directed at its subject. Bate wants to cut Hughes down to size and does so, interestingly, by blowing him up into a kind of extra-large sex maniac.

He starts the book with a chapter called “The Deposition.” In 1986 a psychiatrist named Jane Anderson, a friend of Plath’s on whom a character in The Bell Jar had been based, sued the makers of a film version of the novel, along with Hughes (who held the copyright of the book), for portraying her as a lesbian. The lawsuit was settled. It was a nuisance and expense for Hughes, but hardly a seminal event that merits the opening chapter of his biography. The purpose of the chapter is to introduce this piece of Anderson’s testimony:

[Sylvia] said that she had met a man who was a poet, with whom she was very much in love. She went on to say that this person, whom she described as a very sadistic man, was someone she cared about a great deal…. She also said that she thought she could manage him, manage his sadistic characteristics.

Q. Was she saying that he was sadistic towards her?

A. My recollection is she described him as someone who was very sadistic.

The stage is now set for the examples of Hughes’s sadism that give Bate’s book the sensational character that caused the estate to withdraw from it in horror. The most shocking of these examples is a scene of sex in a London hotel between Hughes and Assia Wevill, the beautiful woman with whom he began an affair in the last year of his marriage to Plath, and who killed herself and her four-year-old daughter with Hughes (by gas, presumably in imitation of Plath, after living with him intermittently for five years). At the hotel, Bate writes, Hughes’s “lovemaking was ‘so violent and animal’ that he ruptured her.” Bate’s source is a diary kept by Nathaniel Tarn, a poet, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst in whom, unbeknownst to each other, Assia and her husband David Wevill confided.

Tarn would write down what they said to him and his papers, including the diary, found their way to an archive at Stanford University, where anyone can read them. Bate was not the first to do so. The scene of the violent and animal sex appeared in a biography of Assia Wevill, A Lover of Unreason, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev. Bate writes condescendingly of Koren and Negev as “touchingly literalistic” in their interpretation of a poem of Hughes about Assia, but he is not above quoting from their interview with David Wevill in which he told them that Assia told him that Sylvia caught Hughes kissing her in the kitchen of his and Plath’s Devon house during their first visit to the couple.

Like the evidence of Olwyn’s memory, the evidence of Tarn’s diary or of David Wevill’s interview is not evidence of the highest order of trustworthiness. The standing that the blabbings of contemporaries have in biographical narratives is surely one of the genre’s most problematic conventions. People can say anything they want about a dead person. The dead cannot sue. This may be the least of their troubles, but it can be excruciating for spouses and offspring to read what they know to be untrue and not be able to do anything about it except issue complaints that fall upon uninterested ears.

Hughes’s widow Carol recently issued such a complaint, in the form of a press release written by the estate’s lawyer, Damon Parker, citing eighteen factual errors in the sixteen pages of the book she had been able to bring herself to read. The “most offensive” of these errors concerned Bate’s account of the car trip Carol Hughes and Plath and Hughes’s son Nicholas made from London to Devon with the hearse carrying Ted Hughes’s coffin: “The body was returned to Devon, the accompanying party stopping, as Ted the gastronome would have wanted, for a good lunch on the way.” Parker quotes an outraged Carol Hughes: “The idea that Nicholas and I would be enjoying a ‘good lunch’ while Ted lay dead in the hearse outside is a slur suggesting utter disrespect, and one I consider to be in extremely poor taste.”

If poor taste is uncongenial to Mrs. Hughes, she will do well to continue not reading Bate’s biography. Among the specimens of tastelessness lodged in the book like the threepenny coins in a Christmas pudding, none may surpass Bate’s quotation from Erica Jong in her book Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, about meeting Hughes in New York and resisting his advances (“He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish, warlock appeal…. He did the wildman-from-the moors-thing on me full force”), after which “I taxied home to my husband on the West Side, my head full of the hottest fantasies. Of course we f—— our brains out with me imagining Ted.”

But beyond tastelessness there is Bate’s cluelessness about what you can and cannot do if you want to be regarded as an honest and serious writer. Here is what he does with an article in the Daily Mail called “Ted Hughes, My Secret Lover” by a woman from Australia named Jill Barber. Barber wrote: “His first act of love was to hold me tenderly, mopping my brow with a wet flannel as I threw up the cheap champagne into his sink…. He lay me on the bed and tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped me and gazed admiringly at me…. He was rough, passionate and forceful.” Bate writes: “He mopped her brow with a wet flannel as she threw up the cheap champagne into his sink, then he tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped her, gazed admiringly at her body and made forceful love to her.”

In 2000 Bate came to Faber and Faber, which acts as agent for the Ted Hughes estate, proposing to write an authorized biography of Hughes, who was “the obvious choice for my next literary biography after I had done with two of his favourite poets, Shakespeare and John Clare.” He was told that Hughes had left instructions opposing an authorized biography, so that was that. But in 2009, emboldened by Carol Hughes’s sale to the British Library of documents that Hughes had held back when he sold his papers to Emory University in Atlanta, and by the publication of a book of his letters, Bate approached Faber and Faber again and proposed to write not a biography, but a work of literary criticism in which the life would merely figure.¹

This time the estate accepted. In his Guardian piece Bate recalled a delightful initial lunch with an editor from Faber and Faber and Carol (who “expressed herself ‘totally happy with my idea of using the life to illuminate the work’”) at a restaurant “in, of all places, Rugby Street—where Ted first made love to Sylvia Plath. I took this to be my symbolic anointing.” After the deal hideously unraveled, Damon Parker wrote in The Guardian:

At the risk of disillusioning him, there was no significance to the restaurant or the street chosen for a lunch with Mrs. Hughes and the poetry editor. The restaurant just happened to be a favourite haunt of Faber & Faber executives at that time. Nor was there any “symbolic anointing” of him in anyone’s mind other than his own.

The estate and Faber and Faber had begun to smell a rat early on. “The tone and style of a draft article Professor Bate wanted to submit to a respected literary magazine here soon after he was commissioned, based on his initial researches, led to concerns that he seemed to be straying from his agreed remit,” Damon Parker wrote in reply to my inquiry about what had got their wind up. (He could say nothing further about the article.) Also

despite what had been previously agreed Professor Bate then resisted repeated requests to see some of his work in progress, from that time in 2010 right up until the Estate withdrew support for his book in late 2013…. The Estate could no longer cooperate once it seemed increasingly likely that his book would be rather different in tone and content from the work of serious scholarship which he had initially proposed.

Bate and Faber and Faber parted company and HarperCollins became the book’s publisher.

Bate’s claim that withdrawal of permission to quote forced him to write the distasteful book he has written is hard to credit. In “How the Actions of the Ted Hughes Estate Will Change My Biography,” he writes of the “pages and pages of detailed analysis of the multiple drafts of the poems” that will now “have to go,” and of how “the new version will be much more biographical.” What Bate writes about Hughes’s poetry in the HarperCollins text is of staggering superficiality. He tells you what he does and doesn’t like. When he likes a poem he uses terms like “aching beauty” and “achingly sad.” When he dislikes a poem he will talk of Hughes “operating on auto-pilot, writing nature notes instead of penetrating to the forces behind nature and in himself.”

It is odd to read that last awkward phrase. Bate should be the last person to complain about the absence of unseen forces. For the mystical and mythic influences that inform Hughes’s understanding of imaginative literature and shape his poetic practice, Bate has only contempt, writing of his “sometimes bonkers ideas about astrology and the occult; his use of ancient ideas and obscure literary sources as a way of explaining, even justifying, what most reasonable people would simply describe as bad behavior.”

In a letter of 1989 to his friend Lucas Myers, published in Letters of Ted Hughes,² Hughes writes about how “pitifully little” he is producing and goes on to

wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69 [the years of Plath’s and Wevill’s suicides]. I have an idea of those two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors—but I believe big physical changes happen at those times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn’t long enough to wake up from them.

Hughes’s feeling of not writing enough is common among writers, sometimes even among the most prolific. In Hughes’s case it was certainly delusory. The posthumous volume of Hughes’s collected poems is over a thousand pages long and there are five volumes of prose and seven volumes of translations. But without question Hughes suffered blows greater than those it is given to most writers to suffer. His life had been ruined not just once, but twice. It has the character not of actual human existence but of a dark fable about a hero born under a malign star.

That it was Bate of all people who was chosen to write Hughes’s biography only heightens our sense of Hughes’s preternatural unluckiness; though the choice might not have surprised him. Ancient stories about innocents delivered into the hands of enemies disguised as friends were well known to him, as was The Aspern Papers. He emerges from his letters as a man blessed with a brilliant mind and a warm and open nature, who seemed to take a deeper interest in other people’s feelings and wishes than the rest of us are able to do and who never said anything trite or obvious or pious or self-serving. Of course, this is Hughes’s epistolary persona, the persona he created the way novelists create characters. The question of what he was “really” like remains unanswered, as it should. If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self. Biographers, in their pride, think otherwise. Readers, in their curiosity, encourage them in their impertinence. Surely Hughes’s family, if not his shade, deserve better than Bate’s squalid findings about Hughes’s sex life and priggish theories about his psychology.

The post ‘A Very Sadistic Man’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

We do not think of Tolstoy as a comic writer, but his genius permits him to write farce when it suits him. There is a wickedly funny scene in Anna Karenina that directly precedes the painful scenes leading to Anna’s suicide. It takes place in the drawing room of the Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who, almost alone among the novel’s characters, has no good, or even pretty good, qualities. She embodies the kind of hysterical and coldhearted religious piety that Tolstoy was especially allergic to. “As a very young and rhapsodical girl,” he writes, she

had been married to a wealthy man of high rank, a very good-natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of affection he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people knowing the count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the ecstatic Lydia, were at a loss to explain. Though they were not divorced, they lived apart, and whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same venomous irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.

Tolstoy, with his own venomous irony, makes the cause entirely comprehensible to the reader of Anna Karenina, as he shows Lydia Ivanovna fasten herself on Karenin after Anna leaves his house to go abroad with Vronsky, and preside over his degeneration into his worst self. She is an ugly and malevolent creature who coats her spite in a thick ooze of platitudes about Christian love and forgiveness. When Anna was on the verge of death after giving birth to Vronsky’s daughter, Karenin experienced an electrifying spiritual transformation: his feelings of hatred and vengefulness toward Anna and Vronsky abruptly changed into feelings of love and forgiveness, and under the spell of this new “blissful spiritual condition” he offered Anna a divorce and the custody of her son—neither of which she chose to accept. Now, a year later, she wants the divorce, but Karenin is no longer of a mind to give it to her. The blissful spiritual condition has faded away like a rainbow, and Karenin, in thrall to the malignant Lydia Ivanovna, has reassumed his old, supinely rigid, and unfeeling self.

Anna’s brother, Stepan Arkadyevich (Stiva) Oblonsky, has gone to Karenin to intercede for Anna, and Karenin has said he would think the matter over and give his answer in two days’ time, but when the two days pass, instead of an answer, Oblonsky receives an evening invitation to the house of Lydia Ivanovna, where he finds her and Karenin and a French clairvoyant named Landau, who is to be somehow instrumental in Karenin’s decision. The comic scene that follows is filtered through Oblonsky’s consciousness.

By now we know Oblonsky very well. Tolstoy has portrayed him as a person whom it is necessary to condemn—he is another dissipated rake—but impossible to dislike. He radiates affability; when he comes into a room people immediately cheer up. And when he appears on the page, the reader feels a similar delight. In the novel’s moral hierarchy, Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin occupy the lowest rung; they sin against the human spirit, while Stiva only sins against his wife and children and creditors. Through his geniality, Oblonsky has been able to maintain a job in government for which he is in no way qualified, but now, because he needs more money, he is trying to get himself appointed to a higher-paying position in the civil service. Lydia Ivanovna has influence among the appointers, and Oblonsky figures he might as well use the occasion to charm her into helping him. Thus, while listening to Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin’s odious religious palaver, he cravenly—but, he hopes, not too cravenly—hides his atheism:

“Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in our hearts!” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile.

“But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that height,” said Stepan Arkadyevich, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to acknowledge his freethinking views before a person who, by a single word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment.

During all this Landau, “a short, thinnish man, very pale and handsome, with feminine hips, knock-kneed, with fine brilliant eyes and long hair” and a “moist, lifeless” handshake, is sitting apart at a window. Karenin and Lydia Ivanovna look at each other and make cryptic remarks about him. A footman keeps coming into the room with letters for Lydia Ivanovna, to which she rapidly scribbles answers or gives brief spoken answers (“Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say”), before resuming her pieties, to which Karenin adds pieties of his own. Stiva feels increasingly baffled. Lydia Ivanovna suddenly asks him, “Vous comprenez l’anglais?” and when he says yes, she goes to her bookcase and takes down a tract called Safe and Happy, from which she proposes to read aloud. Stiva feels safe and happy at the chance to collect himself and not have to worry about putting a foot wrong. Lydia Ivanovna prefaces her reading with a story about a woman named Marie Sanina who lost her only child, but found God, and now thanks Him for the death of her child—“such is the happiness faith brings!” As he listens to Lydia Ivanovna read Safe and Happy,

aware of the beautiful, artless—or perhaps artful, he could not decide which—eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevich [begins] to be conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.

The most incongruous ideas were running through his mind. “Marie Sanina is glad her child’s dead…How good a smoke would be now!… To be saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s to be done, but Countess Lydia Ivanovna does know…And why is my head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or all this being so strange? Anyway, I think I’ve done nothing objectionable so far. But, even so, it won’t do to ask her now. They say they make one say one’s prayers. I only hope they won’t make me! That’ll be too absurd. And what nonsense she’s reading! But she has a good accent….”

Stiva fights the drowsiness that is overcoming him, but begins to helplessly succumb to it. On the point of snoring, he rouses himself, but too late. “He’s asleep,” he hears the countess saying. He has been caught out. The countess will never help him with the appointment. But no, the countess isn’t talking about him. She is talking about the clairvoyant. He is lying back in his chair with his eyes closed and his hand twitching. He is in the trance Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin have been waiting for him to fall into. She instructs Karenin to give Landau his hand and he obeys, trying to move carefully, but stumbling on a table. Stiva watches the scene, not sure he isn’t dreaming it. “It was all real,” he concludes.

With his eyes closed, the clairvoyant speaks: “Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!” Let the person who was the last to come in, the one who asks questions, let him get out! Let him get out! Stiva, “forgetting the favor he had meant to ask of Lydia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister’s affairs, caring for nothing, but filled with the sole desire to get away as soon as possible, [goes]out on tiptoe and [runs] out into the street as though from a plague-stricken house.” It takes him a long time to regain his equanimity. The next day he receives from Karenin a final refusal of the divorce and understands “that this decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or pretended trance the evening before.”

It was all real. There has been a great deal written about the preternatural realism of Anna Karenina, and about the novel’s special status as a kind of criticism-proof text because of the reader’s feeling that what he is reading is being effortlessly reported rather than laboriously made up. “We are not to take Anna Karénine as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life,” Matthew Arnold wrote in 1887. “The author has not invented and combined it, he has seen it; it has all happened before his inward eye, and it was in this wise that it happened.” In 1946 Philip Rahv elaborated on Arnold’s idea:

In the bracing Tolstoyan air, the critic, however addicted to analysis, cannot help doubting his own task, sensing that there is something presumptuous and even unnatural, which requires an almost artificial deliberateness of intention, in the attempt to dissect an art so wonderfully integrated…. Such is the astonishing immediacy with which he possesses his characters that he can dispense with manipulative techniques, as he dispenses with the belletristic devices of exaggeration, distortion, and dissimulation…. The conception of writing as of something calculated and constructed—…upon which literary culture has become more and more dependent—is entirely foreign to Tolstoy.

Tolstoy—one of literature’s greatest masters of manipulative techniques—would smile at this. The book’s “astonishing immediacy” is nothing if not an object of the exaggeration, distortion, and dissimulation through which each scene is rendered. Rahv calls these devices belletristic but long before anyone wrote belles lettres everyone who dreamed was practiced in their use. If the dream is father to imaginative literature, Tolstoy may be the novelist who most closely hews to its deep structures. As we read Anna Karenina we are under the same illusion of authorlessness we are under as we follow the stories that come to us at night and seem to derive from some ancient hidden reality rather than from our own, so to speak, pens. Tolstoy’s understanding of the sly techniques of dream-creation is at the heart of his novelist’s enterprise. Like the films shown in the movie houses of our sleeping minds, Tolstoy’s waking scenes draw on a vast repertory of collective emotional memory for their urgency.

Take the famous ballroom scene at the beginning of the novel in which Anna and Vronsky fall in love as if forced to do so by a love potion in a room filled with tulle and lace and music and scent. The scene has inscribed itself on our memories as one of the most vividly romantic scenes in literature. Who can forget the sight of Anna in her simple black gown that shows off her beauty rather than its own and sets her apart from all the other women in the room? As Tolstoy describes her—practically caressing her as he does so—we fall in love with her ourselves. How could Vronsky resist her?

But wait. It isn’t Tolstoy who describes Anna—it is through the eyes of Kitty Scherbetskaya that we see her. The scene is written not as a romance but as a nightmare. Kitty, who loves Vronsky, has come to the ball in the happy expectation that he will propose to her. As in our worst nightmares, when a horrified realization of disaster comes upon us and will not let go of us, Kitty’s delight turns to horror as she watches Anna and Vronsky displaying the signs of people falling in love, and grasps the full extent of Vronsky’s indifference to her. Kitty will hate Anna for the rest of her life, but Tolstoy—to render his effect of Anna’s powerful sexual magnetism—captures the moment when Kitty is herself attracted to Anna. Tolstoy places or rather displaces the weight of Kitty’s crushing mortification onto the mazurka that she assumed she would dance with Vronsky and for which she now finds herself without a partner. In writing the scene as an archetypal nightmare of jealousy—in refracting Anna and Vronsky’s passion through the prism of Kitty’s anguish—Tolstoy performs one of the hidden tours de force by which his novel is animated.

The horse race offers another example of Tolstoy’s use of the archetypal nightmare as a literary structure. This time his model is the dream of lateness. In this dream, no matter what we do, no matter how desperately we struggle, we cannot get to the airport, or the play, or the final examination in time. Something holds us back and we struggle against it to no purpose. On the morning of the race Vronsky makes a visit to the mare he is going to ride (and kill). The English trainer asks him where he is planning to go after he leaves the stable, and when Vronsky tells him he is going see a man named Bryansky, the Englishman—evidently not believing him, knowing, as others seem to know, that he is going to visit Anna—says, “The vital thing’s to keep quiet before a race…don’t get disturbed or upset about anything.”

Vronsky drives out to Anna’s summer house and becomes predictably disturbed and upset when she tells him she is pregnant. He leaves for Bryansky’s house to give him some money—he wasn’t lying to the trainer, just not telling the whole truth—and the nightmare proper of lateness begins. Only on the way to Bryansky does he look at his watch and see that it is much later than he thought and that he never should have started out. Should he turn back? No, he decides to keep going. He believes he will just make the race.

At this point, Tolstoy veers away from the classic dream of lateness in which the dreamer never arrives at his destination and allows Vronsky to make the race. But Vronsky is clearly not in the right state of mind. An unpleasant encounter with his brother, who wants him to end the affair with Anna, is another assault on the necessary condition of quiet. When disaster strikes, when Vronky makes the wrong move that breaks the mare’s back, it registers, as these things do when we dream them, as a terrifying inevitability.

All dreams are not nightmares, of course. As we sometimes awaken from a dream in tears, so a number of Tolstoy’s scenes draw on the sentimentality—a sort of basic bathos—that is lodged in the hearts of all but the most high-minded among us. One such scene takes place the day after the ball, when her sister Dolly comes to the humiliated Kitty’s room in her parents’ house and finds her sitting and staring at a piece of rug. Kitty rejects Dolly’s attempts to make her feel better, is cold and unpleasant to her, and finally silences her by spitefully flinging Stiva’s philandering in her face. “I have some pride, and never, never would I do as you’re doing—go back to a man who’s deceived you, who has cared for another woman. I can’t understand it. You may, but I can’t!” Tolstoy continues:

And saying these words, she glanced at her sister, and seeing that Dolly sat silent, her head mournfully bowed, Kitty, instead of running out of the room, as she had meant to do, sat down near the door and hid her face in her handkerchief.

The silence lasted for a minute or two. Dolly was thinking of herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with a peculiar bitterness when her sister reminded her of it. She had not expected such cruelty from her sister, and she was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the sound of heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms about her neck. Kitty was on her knees before her.

“Dolinka, I am so, so wretched!” she whispered penitently. And the sweet face covered with tears hid itself in Darya Aleksandrovna’s skirt.

The novel is filled with such passages (another is the scene in which Dolly comes upon her daughter Tanya and her son Grisha eating cake and crying over Tanya’s kindheartedness in secretly sharing it with him after he had been forbidden dessert as a punishment) that do not advance its plot—almost seem to retard its forward motion—but heighten the sense of piercing reality Arnold and Rahv could find no words to account for.

The novel is also filled with accounts of actual dreams experienced by characters that entirely lack the vividness of the scenes of waking life. They seem, in their various ways, flat, formulaic, even boring. When Anna dreams of sleeping with both Karenin and Vronsky, we get the point—and feel that Tolstoy is not being very subtle. On the morning after Dolly confronts Stiva with the evidence of his affair with a former governess, he awakens in the study to which he has been banished from this uninterestingly incomprehensible dream:

Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables sang Il mio tesoro—not Il mio tesoro, though, but something better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and they were women, too.

“Yes, it was nice, very nice.” Stiva recalls. “There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one’s thoughts once awake.” Tolstoy was obviously well acquainted with the guard who stops us at the border of sleep and awakening and confiscates the brilliant, dangerous spoils of our nighttime creations. The capacity to recreate these fictions in the unprotected light of day may be what we mean by literary genius. As the full realization of the mess he has made of his domestic life comes over Stiva, he reflects that “to forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life.”

In January 1878, a professor of botany named S.A. Rachinsky wrote to Tolstoy about what he felt to be “a basic deficiency in the construction” of Anna Karenina, namely that “the book lacks architectonics.” To which Tolstoy replied,

Your opinion about Anna Karenina seems wrong to me. On the contrary, I take pride in the architectonics. The vaults are thrown up in such a way that one cannot notice where the link is. That is what I tried to do more than anything else. The unity in the structure is created not by action and not by relationships between the characters, but by an inner continuity.

One of these continuities—perhaps the most significant—is Tolstoy’s keen, almost prying, interest in the sexuality of his characters and the hierarchy he has set in place that runs parallel to, though distinct from, his moral hierarchy. At the top he has set his sexually robust characters—Anna, Vronsky, Oblonsky, Levin, Kitty, and Dolly—and to the bottom he has consigned figures like the creepy Landau and Varenka, a sexless young woman Kitty meets at the spa to which she has been sent to cure her broken heart, and whose limp handshake is echoed a hundred pages later by Landau’s flaccid grip. Levin’s bloodless-intellectual half-brother Sergey Ivanovich Koznishev, a kind of double of the bloodless-intellectual Karenin (as Lydia Ivanovna is a double of another dreadful pious woman named Madame Stahl—the novel is filled with doubles and doublenesses), is another member of the league of the sexually underpowered, though his portrait is a mere sketch in comparison to the full-blown case study of impotence that Tolstoy has fashioned out of his complicated cuckold.

He allows us to study Karenin both from the point of view of his sexually unfulfilled wife and, most interestingly, from his own sense of how he doesn’t measure up to other men. At a court event, the flatfooted and wide-hipped Karenin keeps looking at the attractive, powerfully built court functionaries around him and asks himself

whether they felt differently, did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys and Oblonskys…these fat-calved chamberlains…those juicy, vigorous, self-confident men who always and everywhere drew his inquisitive attention in spite of himself.

Anna is the special case of poetical sexual awakening turning into terrifying erotomania that reflects Tolstoy’s own famous craziness about sex, which in some sense is what the novel is “about.” The transformation of the wonderful Anna we first meet at the railway station—“the suppressed eagerness which played over her face…as though her nature was so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile”—into the psychotic who throws herself in front of a train is chronicled over the book’s length, and doesn’t add up.

Standard readings of the novel attribute Anna’s descent into madness to the loss of her son and to her ostracism by society. But in fact, as Tolstoy unambiguously tells us, the situation is of her own making. She did not lose her son—she abandoned him when she left for Italy with Vronsky after her recovery from the puerperal fever that propelled Karenin into his “blissful spirituality.” Under its influence, he was willing to give up his son and give Anna a divorce that would permit her to marry Vronsky and rejoin respectable society as, even in those days, divorced women were able to do. But as the novel goes on and Anna’s life unravels, it is as if this opportunity had never arisen. We experience the novel, as we experience our dreams, undisturbed by its illogic. We accept Anna’s disintegration without questioning it. Only later, when we analyze the work, does its illogic become apparent. But by then it is too late to reverse Tolstoy’s spell.

The post Dreams and Anna Karenina appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In 1942 The New Yorker published Joseph Mitchell’s profile of a homeless man in Greenwich Village named Joe Gould, whose claim to notice—the thing that separated him from other sad misfits—was “a formless, rather mysterious book” he was known to be writing called “An Oral History of Our Time,” begun twenty-six years earlier and already, at nine million words, “eleven times as long as the Bible.” Twenty-two years later, in 1964, the magazine published another piece by Mitchell called “Joe Gould’s Secret” that ran in two parts, and that drew a rather less sympathetic and a good deal more interesting portrait of Gould.

Mitchell revealed what he had kept back in the profile—that Gould was a tiresome bore and cadger who attached himself to Mitchell like a leech, and finally forced upon him the realization that the “Oral History” did not exist. After confronting Gould with this knowledge, the famously kindhearted Mitchell regretted having done so:

I have always deeply disliked seeing anyone shown up or found out or caught in a lie or caught red-handed doing anything, and now, with time to think things over, I began to feel ashamed of myself for the way I had lost my temper and pounced on Gould.

Mitchell went on to make a generous imaginative leap. “He very likely went around believing in some hazy, self-deceiving, self-protecting way that the Oral History did exist…. It might not exactly be down on paper, but he had it all in his head, and any day now he was going to start getting it down.”

“It was easy for me to see how this could be,” Mitchell continued in a remarkable turn, “for it reminded me of a novel that I had once intended to write.” The novel, conceived “under the spell of Joyce’s Ulysses,…was to be ‘about’ New York City” and to chronicle a day and a night in the life of a young reporter from the South who was no longer a believing Baptist but is “still inclined to see things in religious terms” and whose early exposure to fundamentalist evangelists has

left him with a lasting liking for the cryptic and the ambiguous and the incantatory and the disconnected and the extravagant and the oracular and the apocalyptic…. I had thought about this novel for over a year. Whenever I had nothing else to do, I would automatically start writing it in my mind…. But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it.

In fact, however, Mitchell did write—if not a novel exactly—a book about New York City that fully achieved his young self’s large literary ambition. The book is The Bottom of the Harbor, published in 1959, a collection of six pieces that are nothing if not cryptic and ambiguous and incantatory and disconnected and extravagant and oracular and apocalyptic. The book was reprinted in the thick anthology of Mitchell’s writings, Up in the Old Hotel, published in 1992, but it deserves to stand alone. The other books reprinted in the anthology—McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, and Joe Gould’s Secret—are wonderful, but they are to The Bottom of the Harbor what Tom Sawyer and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court are to Huckleberry Finn.

The opening piece, “Up in the Old Hotel” (from which the later anthology took its name), tells a minimal, almost nonexistent story. Mitchell goes for breakfast to Sloppy Louie’s, a seafood restaurant in a decrepit old building on South Street in the Fulton Fish Market, and converses with its owner, Louis Morino, “a contemplative and generous and worldly-wise man in his middle sixties,” a widower and father of two daughters, who emigrated to New York from a fishing village in Italy in 1905 at the age of seventeen, and worked as a waiter in restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn until 1930 when he bought his own restaurant.

Almost imperceptibly, Mitchell turns over the narration of the story to Louie, as he calls Morino, sliding into the long monologue that was once a commonplace of New Yorker nonfiction, and is a signature of Mitchell’s mature work. Occasionally Mitchell breaks in to speak in his own voice, which is slightly different from Louie’s, but in the same register, giving the effect of arias sung by alternating soloists in an oratorio.

Louie dilates on a change that has taken place in the clientele of his restaurant, which used to consist solely of fishmongers and fish buyers. Now, people from the financial district, the insurance district, and the coffee-roasting district are coming in at lunchtime, and on some days the lunch crowd is so great that latecomers have to wait for tables. “This gets on his nerves,” Mitchell says of the too-successful restaurateur, who has reluctantly decided to put tables on the second floor to accommodate the overflow. His reluctance comes from the fact that his building, like the other South Street buildings that stand on filled-in river swamp, has no cellar, and he has to use the second floor to store supplies and equipment and as a changing room for his waiters. “I don’t know what I’ll do without it, only I got to make room someway,” Louie says. “That ought to be easy,” Mitchell says. “You’ve got four empty floors up above.”

But it isn’t easy. To get to the empty floors, whose windows are boarded up, it is necessary to enter a monstrous, uninspected elevator that has to be pulled up by hand, like a dumbwaiter. This is the pivot on which the story’s slender plot turns. During all the twenty-two years he has rented the building, Louie has never dared to enter the elevator. Each time he has peered into it he has felt a primal dread:

I just don’t want to get in that cage by myself. I got a feeling about it, and that’s the fact of the matter. It makes me uneasy—all closed in, and all that furry dust. It makes me think of a coffin, the inside of a coffin. Either that or a cave, the mouth of a cave. If I could get somebody to go along with me, somebody to talk to, just so I wouldn’t be all alone in there, I’d go.

“Louie suddenly leaned forward. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Maybe I could persuade you.’”

Mitchell agrees, but before the trip takes place, Louie launches into another aria in which he explains why he has remained in a building he was never keen on and always intended to move from. “It really doesn’t make much sense. It’s all mixed up with the name of a street in Brooklyn.” The street was Schermerhorn Street near a restaurant Louie waited tables at, Joe’s on Nevins Street, one of the great Brooklyn chophouses, where political bosses ate alongside rich old women of good family of whom Louie says: “They all had some peculiarity, and they all had one foot in the grave, and they all had big appetites.” One of these trencher-women was a widow named Mrs. Frelinghuysen: “She was very old and tiny and delicate, and she ate like a horse…. Everybody liked her, the way she hung on to life.” She liked Louie in turn, and if his tables were filled would defer her meal until he was free to wait on her. While she ate, he observed her closely:

She’d always start off with one dozen oysters in winter or one dozen clams in summer, and she’d gobble them down and go on from there. She could get more out of a lobster than anybody I ever saw. You’d think she’d got everything she possibly could, and then she’d pull the little legs off that most people don’t even bother with, and suck the juice out of them.

During his afternoon break, Louie’s recitative continues, he would go over to Schermerhorn Street, a quiet back street, and sit on a bench under a tree and eat fruit he had bought at a nearby fancy-fruit store. One afternoon, it occurs to him to wonder, “Who the hell was Schermerhorn?” So that night at the restaurant he asks Mrs. Frelinghuysen and she tells him that the Schermerhorns are one of the oldest and best Dutch families in New York, and that she had known many of the descendants of the original seventeenth-century settler Jacob Schermerhorn, among them a girl who had died young and whose grave in Trinity Church cemetery in Washington Heights she had visited and “put some jonquils on.”

Where the hell is this going? As in all of Mitchell’s pieces everything is always going somewhere, though not necessarily so you’d notice. Mitchell is one of the great masters of the device of the plot twist disguised as a digression that seems pointless but that heightens the effect of unforced realism. Louie tells Mitchell of an incident that occurred a few years after he left Joe’s. Mrs. Frelinghuysen had died and Louie had married and bought his restaurant and rented the building it was in. One afternoon a long black limousine pulled up in front of the building and a uniformed chauffeur came into the restaurant and said, “Mrs. Schermerhorn wanted to speak to me, and I looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean—Mrs. Schermerhorn?’ And he said, ‘Mrs. Schermerhorn that owns this building.’” Louie is stunned to hear this. He had assumed the real estate company he paid his rent to was the owner. But no, the beautiful woman who gets out of the limousine, the recently widowed Mrs. Arthur F. Schermerhorn, owns the building. Louie asks her if she knows anything about its history, but she doesn’t—she is just inspecting the properties she has inherited from her husband. She drives off and he never sees her again.

I went back inside and stood there and thought it over, and the effect it had on me, the simple fact my building was an old Schermerhorn building, it may sound foolish, but it pleased me very much. The feeling I had, it connected me with the past. It connected me with Old New York.

Louie pursues city records and after many years and many dead ends learns that his building and the identical one next door had been put up in the 1870s by a descendant of Jacob Schermerhorn and combined to form a hotel called the Fulton Ferry Hotel after the ferry to Brooklyn that stood in front of it. From the mid- to late 1800s the hotel flourished. The ferry passengers crowded its saloon, and out-of-town passengers from the steamships docked in the East River along South Street filled its rooms as they waited for passage.

But then one of those disasters occurred by which the life of the city is punctuated and defined, the disaster of change. The Brooklyn Bridge went up, followed by the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, which ended the ferry traffic that gave the saloon its trade; then “the worst blow of all,” the passenger lines left South Street for docks on the Hudson and the hotel declined into “one of those waterfront hotels that rummies hole up in, and old men on pensions, and old nuts, and sailors on the beach.” What remained finally were two buildings with boarded-up top floors, one of them occupied by Sloppy Louie’s and the other by a saloon no longer in business. Louie concludes his monologue: “Those are the bare bones of the matter. If I could get upstairs just once in that damned old elevator and scratch around in those hotel registers up there and whatever to hell else is stored up there, it might be possible I’d find out a whole lot more.”

As Mitchell and Louie, wearing helmets and carrying flashlights, pull the rope and heave the ancient elevator up to the third floor, the story’s lyrical music gives way to harsh new sounds. Louie is no longer the contemplative and generous and worldly-wise man of the monologues. He has become angry and almost hysterically agitated. In the pitch-dark, dust-laden room the elevator opens onto that had been the hotel’s reading room and is now stacked with hotel furniture, Louie yanks (Mitchell’s word) drawers out of a rolltop desk. “God damn it! I thought I’d find those hotel registers in here. There’s nothing in here, only rusty paper clips.” A mirror-topped bureau yields only a stray hairpin and comb and medicine bottle. Louie opens the medicine bottle and smells the colorless liquid in it and says disgustedly, “It’s gone dead…. It doesn’t smell like anything at all.”

The men move on to the hotel bedrooms at the rear of the floor, all empty except for one with an iron bedstead and a placard tacked to the wall saying “The Wages of Sin is Death; but the Gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Louie has had enough and heads back toward the elevator. Mitchell wants to go up to the other floors but Louie says no. “There’s nothing up there.” In the elevator, Louie

was leaning against the side of the cage, and his shoulders were slumped and his eyes were tired. “I didn’t learn much I didn’t know before,” he said.

“You learned that the wages of sin is death,” I said, trying to say something cheerful.

Louie is not amused. The third floor and the place where there is nothing to look at or read or smell, toward which we are all headed, have evidently become fused in his imagination. He is desperate to get back down to the restaurant. “Come on, pull the rope faster! Pull it faster! Let’s get out of this.” Mitchell has circled back to his opening sentence: “Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market.” The stands heaped with forty to sixty varieties of gleaming fish, “the smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness” give Mitchell a feeling of well-being, even of elation. But they hardly rid him of his existential anguish.

Mitchell often said that his favorite book was Ulysses, but it is another book—Ecclesiastes—that hovers over the pages of The Bottom of the Harbor. Like the preacher/narrator of Ecclesiastes, Mitchell is all over the place. He is at once an absurdist and a moralist and a hedonist. All is vanity, there is nothing new under the sun, eat, drink, and be merry. The rhetorical slyness of verse 9:10—“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest”—is almost uncannily consonant with the legerdemain Mitchell himself performs in The Bottom of the Harbor, as he celebrates, and describes in the most minute and interesting detail, the excellence of the work done by his subjects—a series of men connected in one way or another to the New York waterfront—while helplessly murmuring about the probable pointlessness of it all.

“The Rivermen,” the final and arguably strongest piece in the volume, is its most explicit memento mori. It is set in Edgewater, New Jersey, a small town on the Hudson across from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, first settled in the seventeenth century by Dutch and Huguenot farmers. By the time of Mitchell’s visit in 1950, most of the farms are gone, replaced by factories, which are themselves declining. A ferry between Edgewater and Manhattan had just been discontinued; like the Fulton Ferry it fell victim to its natural enemy the bridge, in this case the George Washington.

As he was with Louis Morino, Mitchell is a little in love with Harry Lyons, a retired fireman who fishes for shad in the polluted waters of the Hudson during the season of their upriver journey to spawn. “He has an old Roman face,” Mitchell writes. “It is strong-jawed and prominent-nosed and bushy-eyebrowed and friendly and reasonable and sagacious and elusively piratical.” As if this wasn’t enough, when Mitchell runs into Lyons on his way to (what else?) a funeral in his Sunday best, “I was surprised at how distinguished he looked; he looked worldly and cultivated and illustrious.”

An ignorant visitor to Lyons’s barge becomes the audience for an exquisitely detailed lecture on the art of shad fishing in the Hudson. And once again Mitchell doesn’t do the telling himself, but allows his central character to hold forth in a monologue that goes on for many pages. But this time it isn’t the main but a secondary character who delivers Mitchell’s message of death and doom. He is Joseph Hewitt, a man in his seventies, a former bookkeeper at the Fulton Fish Market, who has made money from real estate since his retirement, and shouldn’t be complaining, but can’t tear himself away from the handwriting on the wall:

“Things have worked out very well for you, Joe,” I once heard another retired man remark to him one day…“and you ought to look at things a little more cheerful than you do.” “I’m not so sure I have anything to be cheerful about,” Mr. Hewitt replied. “I’m not so sure you have, either. I’m not so sure anybody has.”

At the beginning of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” the best known of the pieces in The Bottom of the Harbor, Mitchell strolls through a cemetery on Staten Island and examines his feelings. “Invariably, for some reason I don’t know and don’t want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful….”

Mitchell isn’t the only one to find a visit to a graveyard a cheering rather than depressing experience. These places produce a kind of homeopathic effect on the visitor. They make him feel better by giving him a whiff—real or imagined—of the worst. The interconnectedness of what we have to feel cheerful about and what we don’t is Mitchell’s great subject. The image of old Mrs. Frelinghuysen sucking the juice out of lobster legs can hardly be surpassed as an emblem of the defiant life force.

In “The Rivermen” Mitchell offers the quieter but no less powerful image of old men who have gathered on the banks of the river to see Harry Lyons bring in his catch and to accept from him the eucharistic gift of a roe shad that they wrap in newspapers and carry home in neatly folded paper bags. In the passage in “Joe Gould’s Secret” about his own unwritten book, Mitchell quotes an old black street preacher that his young hero meets in Harlem:

Like the Baptist preachers the young reporter had listened to and struggled to understand in his childhood, the old man sees meaning behind meanings, or thinks he does, and tries his best to tell what things “stand for.” “Pomegranates are about the size and shape of large oranges or small grapefruits, only their skins are red,” he says…. “They’re filled…with juice as red as blood. When they get ripe, they’re so swollen with those juicy red seeds that they gap open and some of the seeds spill out. And now I’ll tell you what pomegranates stand for. They stand for the resurrection…. All seeds stand for resurrection and all eggs stand for resurrection. The Easter egg stands for resurrection. So do the eggs in the English sparrow’s nest up under the eaves in the “L” station. So does the egg you have for breakfast. So does the caviar the rich people eat. So does shad roe.

Images that “stand for something” recur throughout Mitchell’s writing and reinforce the sense that we are reading a single metaphoric work about the city. That the author was a southerner only heightens its authority. As Robert Frank’s European sensibility permitted him to see things as he traveled around America that had been invisible to the rest of us, so Mitchell’s outsiderness gave him his own X-ray vision.

Thomas Kunkel’s biography adds some telling details to what Mitchell’s readers already know about his childhood as the eldest son of a prosperous cotton and tobacco grower in North Carolina.^* Perhaps the most striking of these is Mitchell’s trouble with arithmetic—he couldn’t add, subtract, or multiply to save his soul—to which handicap we may owe the fact that he became a writer rather than a farmer. As Mitchell recalled late in life:

You know you have to be extremely good at arithmetic. You have to be able to figure, as my father said, to deal with cotton futures, and to buy cotton. You’re in competition with a group of men who will cut your throat at any moment, if they can see the value of a bale of cotton closer than you. I couldn’t do it, so I had to leave.

Mitchell studied at the University of North Carolina without graduating and came to New York in 1929, at the age of twenty-one. Kunkel traces the young exile’s rapid rise from copy boy on the New York World to reporter on the Herald Tribune and feature writer on The World Telegram. In 1933 St. Clair McKelway, the managing editor of the eight-year-old New Yorker, noticed Mitchell’s newspaper work and invited him to write for the magazine; in 1938 the editor, Harold Ross, hired him. In 1931 Mitchell married a lovely woman of Scandinavian background named Therese Jacobson, a fellow reporter, who left journalism to become a fine though largely unknown portrait and street photographer. She and Mitchell lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village and raised two daughters, Nora and Elizabeth. Kunkel’s biography is sympathetic and admiring and discreet. If any of the erotic secrets that frequently turn up in the nets of biographers turned up in Kunkel’s, he does not reveal them. He has other fish to gut.

From reporting notes, journals, and correspondence, and from three interviews Mitchell gave late in life to a professor of journalism named Norman Sims, Kunkel extracts a picture of Mitchell’s journalistic practice that he doesn’t know quite what to do with. On the one hand, he doesn’t regard it as a pretty picture; he uses terms like “license,” “latitude,” “dubious technique,” “tactics,” and “bent journalistic rules” to describe it. On the other, he reveres Mitchell’s writing, and doesn’t want to say anything critical of it even while he is saying it. So a kind of weird embarrassed atmosphere hangs over the passages in which Kunkel reveals Mitchell’s radical departures from factuality.

It is already known that the central character of the book Old Mr. Flood, a ninety-three-year-old man named Hugh G. Flood, who intended to live to the age of 115 by eating only fish and shellfish, did not exist, but was a “composite,” i.e., an invention. Mitchell was forced to characterize him as such after readers of the New Yorker pieces from which the book was derived tried to find the man. “Mr. Flood is not one man,” Mitchell wrote in an author’s note to the book, and went on, “Combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past.” In the Up in the Old Hotel collection he simply reclassified the work as fiction.

Now Kunkel reveals that another Mitchell character—a gypsy king named Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the subject of a New Yorker profile published in 1942—was also an invention. How Kunkel found this out is rather funny. He came upon a letter that Mitchell wrote in 1961 to The New Yorker’s lawyer, Milton Greenstein, asking Greenstein for legal advice on how to stop a writer named Sidney Sheldon from producing a musical about gypsy life based on Mitchell’s profile of Nikanov and a subsequent piece about the scams of gypsy women. Mitchell was himself working on a musical adaptation of his gypsy pieces—it eventually became the show Bajour, named after one of the gypsy women’s cruelest scams, that came to Broadway in 1964 and ran for around six months—and was worried about Sheldon’s competing script.

“Cockeye Johnny Nikanov does not exist in real life, and never did,” Mitchell told Greenstein. Therefore “no matter how true to life Cockeye Johnny happens to be, he is a fictional character, and I invented him, and he is not in ‘the public domain,’ he is mine.” Mitchell’s Gilbertian logic evidently prevailed—Sheldon gave up his musical. But the secret of Johnny Nikanov’s wobbly ontological status—though Greenstein kept quiet about it—had passed out of Mitchell’s possession. It now belonged to tattling posterity, the biographer’s best friend.

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

This and other instances in the reporting notes about Mitchell’s tamperings with actuality cause Kunkel to ask: “Should the reputation of ‘Mr. Hunter’s Grave’ suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He adds primly: “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”

The obvious answer to Kunkel’s question—the one that most journalists, editors, and professors of journalism would give—is yes, of course, the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” should suffer now that we know that Mitchell cheated. He has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

As a former journalist and professor of journalism (he is now president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin), Kunkel might be expected to share these dire views; but as Mitchell’s biographer, he can’t bring himself to express them. He clearly disapproves of Mitchell’s “tactics,” but he venerates Mitchell and hates to show him up as Mitchell hated showing up Joe Gould. His own tactic is to invoke the pieties of journalism. “Of course, today’s New Yorker, or any mainstream publication, would never knowingly permit such liberties with quotation; they would take a dimmer-yet view of composites being billed as ‘non-fiction.’” And: “The dubious technique would not really disappear from the print media’s bag of tricks until the general elevation of journalistic standards several decades later.”

Kunkel magnanimously excuses Mitchell and other of the early New Yorker writers for their subprime practices because they didn’t know any better. Of course, Mitchell and his New Yorker colleagues such as A.J. Liebling knew very well what they were doing. On October 14, 1988, Mitchell told Norman Sims:

My desire is to get the reader, well, first of all to read it. That story [“The Bottom of the Harbor”] was hard to write because I had to wonder how long can I keep developing it before the reader’s going to get tired of this. Here and there, as I think a fiction writer would, I put things that I know—even the remark the tugboat men make, that you could bottle this water and sell it for poison—that are going to keep the reader going. I can lure him or her into the story I want to tell. I can’t tell the story I want to tell until I’ve got you into the pasture and down where the sheep are. Where the shepherd is. He’s going to tell the story, but I’ve got to get you past the ditch and through these bushes.

Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

In the title piece of The Bottom of the Harbor, a short work of great subtlety about the ability of fish and shellfish to survive in polluted water, Mitchell mentions a small area of the New York waterfront where, in contrast to the general foulness, “clean, sparkling, steel-blue water” can be found. This image of purity in the midst of contamination could serve as an emblem of Mitchell’s journalistic exceptionalism. He has filtered out the impurities other journalists helplessly accept as the defining condition of their genre. Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.

Kunkel pauses to shake his head about “a strain of perfectionism” in Mitchell, “an obsession for his writing to be just so.” “Mitchell would patiently cast and recast sentences, sometimes dozens of times, changing just a word or two with each iteration until an entire paragraph came together and seemed right,” Kunkel wonderingly writes, and adds, “All this fussing was exceedingly time-consuming, even for a magazine writer.” Kunkel’s naiveté about writing is evident, but his picture of Mitchell at work only confirms and amplifies our sense of his artistry.

Much has been made of the fact that after “Joe Gould’s Secret” Mitchell published nothing in The New Yorker, though he came to the office regularly, and colleagues passing his door could hear him typing. I was a colleague and friend, and I always assumed that the reason he wasn’t publishing was because he wasn’t satisfied with what he was writing: he had been producing work of increasing beauty and profundity, and now the standard he had set for himself was too high. Mitchell spoke of James Joyce, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ivan Turgenev, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot as writers he read and reread. This was the company he was in behind his closed door. We should respect his inhibiting reverence for literary transcendence and be grateful for the work that got past his censor.

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